by John Benteen
Meanwhile, nearby, switch-engines chugged and steamed, simulating the routine of regular work, creating spurious activity.
Fargo thrust a cigarette between his teeth. He and Withers had planned it carefully and Withers had carried out the plan to a tee. The dynamite charges Kane had placed had been located—and then they had been moved to new locations behind the Cut. Two charges of a hundred sticks each—that was a lot of dyno, Fargo thought. It was going to make a commotion when it went off—a hell of a commotion. But it would not cause any real damage, now that it was no longer planted on the fault lines ...
He hoped. His mouth curved wryly as he looked at the plunger on the detonator box. Even at a thousand yards, a charge like that was too close for comfort. He hoped the engineers hadn’t miscalculated. He’d hate to have to ride this ridge crest on which he lay all the way down to the bottom of the Cut, three hundred feet down.
Well, that was why he lay up here by himself. Even if he went, there were still fifty men hidden around the pay car, in the brush of the hillside, within a boxcar on the siding . . . Fifty combat-seasoned soldiers and Marines under Fargo’s command. It should be, he thought, a nice little fire-fight, if everything went according to Hoyle. He would hate to miss it on account of being buried at the bottom of Culebra Cut..
Besides, he wanted Buckner.
It was strange, he thought, how much he hated the man. Usually an opponent was just that: you fought and killed him because you were paid to, not because you had anything personal against him. But Buckner’s cruelty, Buckner’s readiness to destroy the immense grandeur of this great construction job, which had somehow captured Fargo’s imagination, turned Fargo’s stomach. It was time the world was rid of Buckner. He would take pleasure in doing it himself.
He thumbed out his watch. The second hand ticked away the last minute before twelve-thirty. Everybody should be in place, now. Fargo watched the little hand go around the dial, and his fingers closed on the plunger of the detonator. He supposed Buckner and his men were in place, too. Ten seconds, eight, five, four, three, two ... Then Fargo slammed down the plunger.
The dynamite went.
Fargo plastered himself to the earth, as it shook beneath him. A thousand yards away, and another thousand beyond that, the world erupted. A shock wave slammed against him like a mighty hand; the sky darkened; twin geysers of dirt, smoke, and flying rock climbed high, blotting out the sun. Dust and gravel rained down on Fargo, and the whole unstable structure of the enormous hill seemed to turn to jelly beneath him as the secondary vibrations came.
With light gravel still pattering on him, two huge plumes of dust pasted against the sky like giant feathers, Fargo sprang to his feet, ran to a wall-eyed, frightened horse. Even as he spurred the galloping animal down the railroad line, between the two tracks that ran all the way from Colon to Panama City, he heard the alarm whistles go off.
They had been used before, to warn the men in Culebra Cut of slides. Buckner and his men, who must have already infiltrated into the Zone, would be listening for them too.
The railroad track led Fargo down the slope of Gold Hill toward the little settlement of offices and construction shacks and locomotive water towers and coal storage that was the works headquarters. He galloped past the parked pay car, its walls blank, its doors sealed, its guards, carefully coached, in apparent panic. He kept to the shelter of a short string of boxcars parked on another siding; they were full of soldiers and horses, ready to pursue when the time came. Then, having crossed that cleared area, he dodged back into the jungle, on a narrow trail, and climbed another hill to where the rest of his men lay in ambush. All up and down the line, now, whistles were blowing and sirens howling: the air rang with their weird blatting and screeching. It sounded, Fargo thought happily, as if the whole Panama Canal had fallen in and every worker were being summoned to the disaster.
He dismounted, turned the horse over to an orderly, ran to the crest of the hill, and flopped on his stomach beside a lieutenant named Carter who, while nominally in charge, had been instructed to take orders from Fargo. Carter’s face was beaded with sweat, but he looked pleased. “Man, what a blast that was,” he whispered. “You think they’ll come now?”
“Not right away. Soon.”
“We’re ready for ’em.”
Fargo didn’t answer. He only swept his eyes to the right and left, where tough Marines were sprawled in the underbrush with their Springfields. In the distance, the wind still whipped dust around the crest of Gold Hill. Beyond the clearing, the jungle simmered in the noonday heat. On a siding near the pay car, a locomotive chugged, steam up, a train of empty Lidgerwood cars, designed for dirt-hauling, behind it. But it did not move; it was as if it had been balked from entering the siding into Culebra Cut by some unexpected circumstance. As ordered, its engineer blew his whistle over and over again.
Fargo waited, eyes fixed on the clearing, the headquarters, the pay car. When they came, they would come quickly, and some of them would be carrying dynamite. Others would be using the French Chauchat guns, the automatic machine rifles. Fargo knew how tough, how well-trained Buckner’s men were. It was not going to be any ice-cream sociable, this upcoming fight. And if Buckner managed to get through, blast even one lock, he would, to some extent, have earned his pay.
In the heat, minutes droned by. Withers had put his best men at the locks; Fargo did not think Buckner would get through. But— Damn it, would they never come? The whistles still blasted, for fifty miles now, Fargo guessed, along the Isthmus, from Gatun to Balboa. And as if that were a defensive line in a battle, soldiers lay in wait here. Now, if the ruse had only worked, if Buckner had not shied away because of Fargo’s escape ...
Then they were there.
Fargo saw them first. Gold Hill’s slope formed one side of a valley, the hill on which Fargo lay the other. The headquarters and pay car were on the valley floor. The head of the valley, away from the Canal, merged into jungle. It was there that Fargo caught sight of them.
At first, it was just a faint movement of brush in the distance, silent; it could have been breeze-caused, if there had been any breeze. But the air was still and dead. Fargo tapped Carter on the shoulder, pointed. Experienced at this kind of warfare, Carter saw that movement, too, and nodded. He grinned a grin that yielded nothing to that of Fargo in wolfishness and worked the bolt of his Springfield, quickly but silently.
Then the first skirmishers broke from the brush, in a long, coherent line, as Fargo had taught them, not bunched up. They ran quickly down the valley toward the pay car, and now others were coming after them. Ten men, twenty, thirty, and more following ... forty, fifty ... that should be nearly all, now. The guards around the pay car followed orders; they ran for cover. So far, not a shot had been fired. Then Fargo stared. Men were still coming; the valley floor swarmed with them, all in the khaki uniforms of Buckner’s army! And more were pouring from the brush. And suddenly Fargo knew that something was wrong, something was terribly wrong. Already his defense detail was outnumbered, and if this was happening all along the line— Damn it, where had Buckner got all those men? There was a hundred of them down there!
Then Fargo knew they could wait no longer. Buckner had doubled his force somehow, and done it overnight. There was no time to worry about how he’d done it. Fargo tapped Carter on the shoulder. Carter yelled: “Commence firing!”
Fargo was the first to pull the trigger. Then the battle for the Panama Canal began.
The jungle in which the Marines were hidden erupted with rifle fire. In the valley below, men staggered, fell. Then Fargo saw a mounted man gallop from the jungle at a dead run; he waved an ivory-butted Colt. Something leaped in Fargo, as Buckner’s cry came to him even above the roar of gunfire. “Take cover! Return their fire. Up there!” He pointed toward the jungle with his Colt, then reined behind the shelter of a building just as Fargo was about to squeeze the trigger.
Buckner’s men obeyed; they spread out, dodged behind the trains, the buildin
gs. And then they began to shoot back, and now the air was ripped with the harsh dry chatter of the Chauchat guns, and all at once the hillside on which Fargo and the Marines lay was a deadly place to be. Lead sang all around Fargo, like a swarm of the wild, jungle bees, and Carter made a sound in his throat, then slumped, shot through the head. Another man screamed, and there were other cries up and down Fargo’s line as the machine rifles raked the hill with a hosing of lead the bolt-action Springfields could not match.
Then the Marines in the parked boxcars could wait no longer. They jerked open the doors, began to fire on Buckner’s raiders from the flank. Somebody turned a Chauchat on them, riddled the boxcars, but the diversion gave Fargo the moment he needed. All at once he was on his feet, running for his horse. He hit the saddle without touching stirrup. He knew now what was happening, and he knew how much danger the whole Canal was in; this was not the operation planned, a quick strike for sabotage and robbery. This was a reinforced, dismayingly strong attempt to take the whole Canal by military strength and keep it long enough to ruin it totally, maybe even blow out Gatun dam. Every strong point along the line must have been hit by such an unexpectedly heavy force, and if all those forces linked up, they could hold their ground long enough for a thorough job of destruction to be done. Fargo’s horse leaped over the dead body of Lieutenant Carter, broke through the jungle into the clear, as Fargo bellowed the order: “Charge!”
With fixed bayonets, the Marines were on their feet; yelling, they hurtled down the hill behind him, firing as they went. The raiders shot back with their automatic weapons, and Marines fell, but they kept on coming. Then Fargo’s horse had carried him out ahead of the line; he’d sheathed the carbine and unslung the shotgun. With it in his left hand, his pistol in his right, he zigzagged the animal down the slope at a dead run.
A man with a Chauchat saw him coming, loosed a burst at him. Fargo heard them rip past him in a swarm. He fired the pistol twice; the second shot caught the man in the head; the hollow-point exploded, and, headless, the man rolled aside. There was no time for Fargo to halt and scoop up the machine gun, much as he wanted it; the horse was unstoppable. Now Fargo was on the valley floor, and the Marines from the hill were close behind him and those left from the boxcars were charging, too. The air seemed to vibrate with lead. A raider stepped out from a running horse at close range, and the nine buckshot spread out, caught not only that rifleman, but one who jumped up behind him at the wrong moment.
Now it was hand-to-hand, close-quarters combat. The Marines, what was left of them, closed with their bayonets. Fargo, his horse’s reins between his teeth, used his Colt with one hand, the shotgun with the other. When the Colt was empty, he holstered it, concentrated on the double-barrel, using his free hand to thumb rounds out of the bandolier. He fired and fired again, broke, reloaded and fired once more with amazing speed born of long practice. Everything was a blur; dynamite went off, somewhere, as the bearer of a charge designed to blow up the pay car caught a bullet. The Chauchat guns ground on and on, furiously. Fargo killed men, and more than once was nearly killed himself; but the whole time he was working through that melee and looking for one man in particular.
Then he saw him: Buckner spurred his horse out from behind a storage shed. He had an ivory-butted Colt in each hand, his reins in his teeth, like Fargo. He was firing left and right.
Fifty yards and a swarm of men separated him from Fargo. He saw Fargo in the same moment that Fargo saw him; the range was too far for either man’s weapons. Fargo cursed, fired the shotgun like a madman, plunging through the fight, mowing down a path for himself.
Then somebody shot his horse. The animal grunted, went down hard, and Fargo hit the ground with jarring impact. A face loomed over him, swarthy, part Spanish, part Indian. He saw the muzzle of a Krag come to bear on him as he rolled over. Instinctively, the shotgun came up and he jerked both triggers. Only one barrel was loaded, but the man disappeared in a spray of blood.
Fargo jumped to his feet, cursing. He swung the shotgun like a club as another raider leaped at him. It knocked up the man’s rifle and Fargo put out a booted foot, kicked the man in the groin. The fellow went down, Fargo kicked him in the head; then Fargo was tackled from behind, an arm locked around his throat. A knee in his back nearly broke his spine. There was a ticking sound as a knife-blade slid off the cartridges in his bandolier. Fargo flailed-wildly behind him with the shotgun; the grip eased a little and Fargo wrenched loose, just as the second stab came. The knife-blade missed and Fargo, whirling, caught the attacker under the chin with the shotgun stock. The man grunted and went down.
Then, miraculously, there was a lull. It was only a second or two, not more, but enough for him to get rounds into the shotgun, shake the sweat from his eyes, look around. What he saw brought that wolf’s grin to his face, unconsciously. At least two Marines had captured Chauchats and were doing deadly work with them. The raiders were thinning out, beginning to break, surge back.
Then Fargo heard a yell. It jerked him around; there was Buckner, riding him down on a lathered horse. Fargo got a glimpse of Buckner’s contorted face, the lined Colt. He fired the shotgun and the horse screamed, went down. Buckner was free. Fargo saw him scrambling to his feet. Then another raider dodged across his vision; Fargo had to shoot him,
It was a second before he caught sight of Buckner again. The man dodged behind the front of the parked locomotive, just as Fargo unloosed a shotgun blast at him. The pellets rang on the boiler harmlessly. Then, as if he understood that it was Fargo’s last round until he could reload, Buckner jumped into the open again. He shot at Fargo, missed. Fargo had two more rounds into the shotgun with the flash of his hand. Buckner saw the deadly weapon come up; he ran, made a leap for the locomotive cab, fell inside its shelter just as Fargo fired the right barrel.
Then Buckner aimed a shot at Fargo. Fargo saw the Colt ease around the side of the cab wall; he crouched and dodged, but the gun never went off; it was empty. With a round left in his gun, Fargo ran for the engine.
Buckner saw him coming. There was no time for Buckner to reload. Instead, he hit the throttle bar; Fargo halted, staring, as the train began to roll. The body of its engineer, the corpse of its fireman, both dead, spilled from the cab then.
All around Fargo, the fighting was ebbing. The train picked up speed. Fargo ran after it, cursing, fired his second barrel. It splattered off the flank of the tender. Now the locomotive had outdistanced him, the Lidgerwood dirt cars behind it were rattling past.
Fargo cursed and made a jump for one of them. He caught a ladder rung with one hand; his arm was nearly jerked from its socket; he was almost thrown under the wheels. With the shotgun sling looped around his arm, he managed to get a grip with his other hand. He scrambled up over the high sideboard, dropped down onto the bed of the car, as the train swayed and rattled, rocketing now.
The Lidgerwoods were flatcars, with a sideboard on one side and nothing at all on the other. There was a hinged sheet of steel at the front which bridged the gap between that car and the car ahead of it, so that a Lidgerwood train was, in effect, a single flatcar eight hundred feet long, from which a dragline could scrape the load in a single long, smooth haul. So what Fargo saw as he scrambled to his feet, was a long, swaying corridor, and, two hundred feet ahead, the back of the coal tender.
He braced his feet, leaned against the sideboard for a moment, reloaded both shotgun and Colt. Then, with a weapon in each hand, he ran down that bucking, swaying surface toward the engine. Now they were rocketing, heading straight downhill. Fargo caught a glimpse of high banks on the open side of the car. All at once, he understood: they were hurtling down into Culebra Cut. And at this speed, they couldn’t hold the tracks long. Buckner must have jammed the throttle wide open.
Then, even above the roar and rattle of the train, he heard the whine of a bullet. He dodged back against a sideboard. Then he saw Buckner, atop the coal tender. Buckner had reloaded the Colts, and now he was sending lead down that corridor
toward Fargo, who had no cover, like a bowler sending a ball down an alley. Only the sway of the train threw off his aim, prevented Fargo from being a helpless, easy target.
The range was great for the sawed-off, but Fargo raised it. Buckner saw it come up; he feared it, dropped down behind the coal. Fargo took that interval to run forward, and when Buckner raised his head again, fired, but Buckner had dropped again, and the shot sprayed harmlessly around him. He came up again and Fargo fired the other barrel, but once more Buckner took advantage of his cover. Meanwhile, Fargo ran toward the tender as hard as he could. When Buckner reared up above the coal pile this time, they were only fifty feet apart. Fargo clearly saw the smile of triumph on Buckner’s face as the man leveled both .45’s. Fargo raised his own Colt, was about to fire when Buckner fired. Buckner’s bullet was aimed at Fargo’s chest, but it went wild. Instead, it spanged with terrific force against the pistol Fargo held and tore it from his grasp. He saw it go spinning off into the dirt of the cut. Suddenly he knew he was finished; Buckner had won. His hand was numb, bleeding, even as he reached for the bandolier to try to get out shotgun rounds. His fingers fumbled uselessly with the heavy ten-gauge shells. Buckner laughed, showing those snaggled teeth, took deliberate aim. They were deep in the cut, now, its canyon like walls towering over them.
Time almost seemed to stop, then, for Fargo. Even with the train swaying, rushing like a cannonball in flight, Buckner could not miss at that range with two Colts. He saw the light in Buckner’s eyes, he saw the black barrels of the guns.
Buckner was taking his time. He even glanced quickly over his shoulder. Then his face changed. As Fargo stood braced for the death shot, Buckner suddenly disappeared from the top of the pile of coal.
Fargo’s brain, ready for death, could not for an instant accept this miracle. Then he got a shell out, was cramming it into the gun. But suddenly the train jerked; he was thrown off his feet, slammed hard into the oaken floor of the car. When he scrambled up, the train was slowing. There was a screech of iron against iron as brakes grabbed desperately, and showers of sparks flew up and past as the locomotive and its eight hundred feet of cars slid and skidded along iron rails, wheels locked.