by Night Probe!
"I can find it, thank you," said Shaw.
"Would you like a cup of coffee? I can make some upstairs in the office. Only take a couple of minutes."
"You're a civilized man, Mr. Rheingold. Coffee sounds fine."
Rheingold nodded and walked back down the aisle. He paused and turned when he came to the doorway. Shaw was sitting at the table studying the faded and yellowing maps.
When he returned with the coffee, the portfolio was neatly tied and replaced in its proper niche on the shelf. "Mr. Shaw?" There was no answer. The library room was empty.
Pitt felt inspired and determined, even exhilarated.
A deep sense of knowing he had opened a door that had been overlooked for generations acted on him like a stimulant. With an optimism that was not there before, he stood in a small, empty pasture and waited for the two-engine jet to float in for a landing.
Under normal procedures the feat would have been impossible: the field was pockmarked by old tree stumps and riddled with dry gullies. The longest flat spot ran no more than fifty feet before ending at a moss-covered rock wall. Pitt had expected a helicopter and he began to wonder if the pilot had a death wish or had brought the wrong aircraft.
Then he watched in fascination as the wings and engines began to slowly tilt upward while the fuselage and tail remained horizontal. When they reached ninety degrees and were facing skyward the plane stopped its forward motion and began to settle to the uneven ground.
Soon after the wheels touched the grass, Pitt walked up to the cockpit door and opened it. A boyish face with freckles and red hair broke into a cheery grin. "Morning. You Pitt?"
"That's right."
"Climb in."
Pitt climbed in, secured the door and sat in the copilot's seat. "This is a VTOL, isn't it?"
"Yeah," the pilot replied. "Vertical takeoff and landing, made in Italy, Scinletti 440. Nice little flier, finicky at times. But I sing Verdi to it and it's putty in my hands."
"You don't use a helicopter?"
"Too much vibration. Besides, vertical photography works best from a high-speed airplane." He paused. "By the way, the name's Jack Westler." He didn't offer to shake hands. Instead, he eased the throttles toward their stops, and the Scinletti began to rise.
At about two hundred feet, Pitt twisted in his seat and stared back at the wings as they turned horizontal again. The craft began increasing its forward speed and soon returned to level flight.
"What area would you like to photo-map?" asked Westler.
"The old railroad bed along the west bank of the Hudson as far as Albany."
"Not much left."
"You're familiar with it?"
"I've lived in the Hudson River valley all my life. Ever hear of the phantom train?"
"Spare me," Pitt replied in a weary tone.
"Oh…... okay," Westler dropped the subject. "Where do you want to begin rolling the film?"
"Start at the Magee place." Pitt looked around the rear cabin. It was void of equipment. "Speaking of film, Where is the camera and its operator?"
"You mean cameras, plural. We use two, their lenses set at different angles for a binocular effect. They're mounted in pods under the fuselage. I operate them from here in the cockpit."
"What altitude will you fly?"
"Depends on the focal lenses. Altitude is computed mathematically and optically. We're set to make our run at ten thousand feet."
The view of the valley from above was heady. The landscape unfurled and spread to the horizons, crisp and green, crowned by spring clouds. From five thousand feet the river took on the shape of a huge python crawling through the hills, with low islands sometimes dotting the channel like stepping-stones in a small stream. A vineyard country here, and an orchard land, broken by an occasional dairy farm.
When the altimeter read ten thousand, Westler made a sweeping turn to slightly west of north. The De Soto crept beneath, looking like a tiny model in a diorama.
"Cameras are rolling," Westler announced.
"You make it sound like a movie production," said Pitt.
"Almost. Each picture overlaps the next by sixty percent. That way, one particular object will show up twice at slightly different angles with varied highlights. You can detect things that are invisible from ground level, remnants of man-made disturbances hundreds or even thousands of years old."
Pitt could see very clearly the scar of the track bed. Then it abruptly stopped and vanished into a field of alfalfa. He pointed downward.
"Suppose the target is completely obliterated?"
Westler peered through the windshield and nodded. "Okay, there's a case in point. When the land over the area of interest was used for agriculture, the vegetation will assume a subtle color difference due to elements foreign to the native soil composition. The change might be missed by the human eye, but the camera optics and enhanced color tone in the film will exaggerate features in the earth beyond reality."
In no time at all, it seemed to Pitt, they were approaching the southern outskirts of New York State's capital. He gazed down at the oceangoing cargo ships docked at the port of Albany. Acres of railroad tracks fanned out from the storage warehouses like a giant spider's web. Here the old railbed disappeared for good under the heavy foot of modern development. "Let's make another run," said Pitt.
"Coming around," acknowledged Westler.
Five more times they swept the fading New York Quebec Northern tracks, but the faint, fragile line through the countryside still looked solitary, undivided by discernible offshoots.
Unless the cameras spotted something he couldn't detect, the only hope he had of finding the Manhattan Limited was Heidi Milligan.
The maps had vanished from the portfolio in the railroad museum, and Heidi had no doubt who had stolen them.
Shaw had returned to the hotel later that night, and they had made fluid and gentle love until early morning. But when she awoke, he was gone. Too late she realized that he had listened in on her conversation with Admiral Sandecker. More than once, during their lovemaking, she had thought of Pitt. It was very different with him. Pitt's style was consuming and savage and impelled her to respond with savage intensity. Their time in bed had been a competition, a tournament that she never won. Pitt had drowned her, left her floating in a haze of exhausted defeat. Deep down it galled her independent ego and her mind refused to accept his superiority, and yet her body hungered for it with sinful abandon.
With Shaw the act was tender and almost respectful, and she could control her responses. Together they nurtured each other; apart they were like two gladiators circling, scheming for an opening to defeat the other. Pitt always left her spent and with a feeling she'd been used. Shaw was using her too, only for a different purpose, but strangely it didn't seem to matter. She longed to come back to him like someone returning from a stormy voyage.
She sat back in a chair in the library room of the museum and closed her eyes. Shaw thought he had forced her into a dead end by stripping the records. But there were other sources of railroad lore, other archives, private collections or historical societies. Shaw knew she could not afford the time-consuming journeys to check them out. So now she had to think of another avenue to explore. And what Shaw couldn't know, couldn't project in his scheming mind, was that she wasn't trapped at all.
"Okay, Mr. Smart-Ass," she muttered to the silent bookshelves, "here's where you get yours."
She called over the yawning curator, who was still grumbling about inconsiderate FBI agents.
"I'd like to see your old dispatch records and logbooks."
He nodded cordially. "We have cataloged samplings of old dispatch material. Don't have them all, of course. Too voluminous to store. Just tell me what you want and I'll be happy to search it out for you."
Heidi told him, and by lunchtime she had found what she was looking for.
Heidi stepped off the plane at the Albany airport at four o'clock in the afternoon. Giordino was there waiting for her. She brushed
off an offer of a wheelchair and insisted on walking on her crutches to the car.
"How are things going?" she asked as Giordino pulled the car into traffic and turned south.
"Doesn't look encouraging. Pitt was poring over aerial photographs when I left the boat. No trace of a branch track showed up anywhere."
"I think I've found something."
"We could damn well use a piece of luck, for a change," Giordino muttered.
"You don't sound enthusiastic."
"My school spirit has been bled out of me."
"Things that bad?"
"Figure it out. The President goes before the Canadian Parliament tomorrow afternoon. We're dead. No way in hell we'll come up with a treaty by then…... even if one exists, which I doubt."
"What does Pitt think?" she asked. "About the train being someplace else besides buried in the river, I mean?"
"He's convinced it never reached the bridge."
"What do you believe?"
Giordino gazed expressionless down the road. Then he smiled. "I believe it's a waste of breath to argue with Pitt."
"Why, because he's stubborn?"
"No," Giordino answered. "Because he's usually right."
For hours Pitt had stared through binocular glasses at the photo blowups, his brain interpreting the detail in three dimension.
The zigzag rail fences separating pastures from bordering woodlands, the automobiles and houses, a red-and-yellow hot-air balloon that made a colorful splash against the green landscape-they were all revealed in amazing clarity. Even an occasional railroad tie could be distinguished on the weed strewn track bed.
Time after time he retraced the almost arrow-straight line between the destroyed bridge and the outskirts of Albany's industrial section, his eyes straining to pick out a minute detail, the tiniest suggestion of an abandoned rail spur.
The secret stayed kept.
He finally gave in and was leaning back in a chair resting his eyes when Heidi and Giordino entered the De Soto's chartroom. Pitt stood tiredly and embraced her. "How's the leg?" he asked.
"On the mend, thank you."
They helped her to a chair. Giordino took her crutches and leaned them against a bulkhead. Then he set her briefcase on the deck beside her. "Al tells me you've drawn a blank," she said.
Pitt nodded. "Looks that way."
"I have some more bad news for you." He said nothing, waiting. "Brian Shaw knows everything," she said simply.
Pitt read the embarrassment in her eyes. "Everything covers a lot of territory."
She shook her head in frustration. "He stole the maps of the old rail line from the museum before I had a chance to study them."
"Do him damned little good unless he'd got a clue to their value."
"I think he's guessed," Heidi said softly.
Pitt sat thoughtful for a moment, rejecting any attempt at cross-examining Heidi. The damage was done. How Shaw came to lay his hands on the key to the enigma no longer mattered. Incredibly, he felt a tinge of jealousy. And he couldn't help wondering what Heidi saw in the older man. "Then he's in the area."
"Probably sneaking around the countryside this minute," added Giordino.
Pitt looked at Heidi. "The maps may be worthless to him. Nothing resembling a rail spur shows on the aerial photos."
She picked up the briefcase, set it in her lap and opened the locks. "But there was a rail spur," she said. "It used to cut off the main line at a place called Mondragon Hook Junction." The atmosphere in the chartroom suddenly galvanized.
Pitt said, "Where is that?"
"I can't pinpoint it exactly without an old map."
Giordino quickly glanced through several topographical maps of the valley. "Nothing here, but these surveys only go back to nineteen sixty-five."
"How did you discover this Mondragon Hook?" asked Pitt.
"Elementary reasoning," Heidi shrugged. "I asked myself where I would hide a locomotive and seven Pullman cars where no one could find them for a lifetime. The only answer was underground. So I began working backward and checked old Albany dispatch records before nineteen fourteen. I hit pay dirt and found eight different freight trains that hauled ore cars loaded with limestone."
"Limestone?"
"Yes, the shipments originated from ajunction called Mondragon Hook and were destined for a cement plant in New Jersey."
"When?"
"In the eighteen nineties."
Giordino looked skeptical. "This Mondragon Hook could have been hundreds of miles from here."
"It had to be below Albany," said Heidi.
"How can you be sure?"
"New York Quebec Northern records don't list ore cars carrying limestone on any freight trains that passed through Albany. But I did run across a mention of them in a dispatch log from the Germantown rail yard where there was a switch of locomotives."
"Germantown," said Pitt. "That's fifteen miles downriver."
"My next step was to search through old geological maps," Heidi continued. She paused and slipped one from her briefcase and flattened it on the table. "The only underground limestone quarry between Albany and Germantown lay here." She made a mark with a pencil. "About nine miles north of the DeauvilleHudson bridge and three-quarters of a mile west."
Pitt put the binocular glasses to his eyes and began scanning the aerial photos. "Here, due east of the quarry site, is a dairy farm. The house and barnyard have erased all remains of the junction."
"Yes, I see it," Heidi said excitedly. "And there's a paved road that runs toward the New York State Thruway."
"Small wonder you lost the trail," Giordino said. "The county laid asphalt over it."
"If you look closely," said Pitt, "you can pick out a section of old rail ballast as it curves from the road for a hundred yards and ends at the foot of a steep hill, or mountain as the natives would label it."
Heidi peered through the binoculars. "Surprising how clear everything becomes when you know what to search for."
"Did you happen to turn up any information on the quarry" Giordino asked her.
"That part was easy," Heidi nodded. "The property and the track right-of-way were owned by the Forbes Excavation Company, which operated the quarry from eighteen eighty-two until nineteen ten, when they encountered flooding. All operations were halted, and the land was sold to neighboring farmers."
"I hate to be a wet blanket," said Giordino. "But suppose the quarry was an open pit?"
Heidi gave him a considering look. "I see what you mean. Unless the Forbes Company mined the limestone from inside the mountain, there'd be no place to hide a train." She scanned the photo again. "Too much growth to tell for sure, but the terrain appears unbroken."
"I think we should scout it out," Pitt said.
"All right," Giordino agreed. "I'll drive you."
"No, I'll go alone. In the meantime, call Moon and get some more bodies up here-a platoon of marines, in case Shaw brings in reinforcements. And tell him to send us a mining engineer, a good one. Round up any old-timers around the countryside who might remember any strange goings-on at the quarry. Heidi, if you feel up to it, kick the local publishers out of bed and dig through old papers for any relevant news items that were pushed to the back pages by the Deauville-Hudson bridge collapse. I'll know better where we stand when I inspect the quarry."
"Not much time left," Giordino said gloomily. "The President makes his speech in nineteen hours."
"I don't have to be reminded." Pitt reached for his coat. "All that's left for us now is to get inside that mountain."
The sun had set and was replaced by a quarter moon. The evening air was crisp and sharp. From his vantage point high above the old quarry entrance Shaw could see the lights of villages and farms miles away. It was a fair and picturesque land, he thought idly.
The sound of a piston-engined plane intruded on the silent countryside. Shaw twisted around and looked skyward, but could see nothing. The plane was flying without navigation lights. He judged by the sou
nd of the engines that it was circling at only a few hundred feet above the hill. Here and there the light of a star was blotted by what Shaw knew were parachutes.
Fifteen minutes later, two shadows moved out of the trees below and climbed toward him. One of the men was Burton Angus The other was stockily built. In the darkness he could have passed for a huge rolling rock. His name was Eric Caldweiler, and he was former superintendent of a coal mine in Wales.
"How did it go?" Shaw asked.
"A perfect jump, I'd say," Burton-Angus replied. "They practically landed on top of my signal beam. The officer in command is a Lieutenant Macklin."
Shaw ignored one of the cardinal rules of undercover night operations and lit a cigarette. The Americans would know of their presence soon enough, he reasoned. "Did you find the quarry entrance?"
"You can forget about it," said Caldweiler. "Half the hillside slipped away."
"It's buried?"
"Aye, deeper than a Scotsman's whiskey cellar. The overburden is thicker than I care to think about."
Shaw said, "Any chance of digging through?"
Caldweder shook his head. "Even if we had a giant dragline, you're talking two or three days."
"No good. The Americans could show up at any time."
"Might gain entry through the portals," said Caldweiler, stoking up a curved briar pipe. "Providing we can find them in the dark."
Shaw looked at him. "What portals?"
"Any heavily worked commercial mine requires two additional openings: an escape way in case the main entrance is damaged, and an air ventilation shaft."
"Where do we start searching?" Shaw asked anxiously.
Caldweder was not to be rushed. "Well, let's see. I judge this to be a drift mine-a tunnel in the side of the hill where the outcropping broke the surface. From there the shaft probably followed the limestone bed on a down% yard slope. That would put the escape way somewhere around the base of the hill. The ventilator? Higher up, facing the north."