"Yeah, I guess so," Makstutis admitted, "but that Blackie's a hot shot and so are Pak and his boys. I'll bet they make hash outa that joint."
"They'd better or they'll be in the stew themselves," I said, in a weak attempt at levity.
He gave me an anguished frown and then, his face suddenly grim, shushed for silence. Faintly I thought I heard an engine straining up the grade. Makstutis crawled over and put his head to the rail.
"It's on the way," he said. "Better take cover." He stood up and signalled the alert.
Lim and I were crouching behind a big rock outcropping halfway down into the gorge. A faint trail led from there to the bottom—perhaps a relic of the construction days when the bridge was being built. It was far enough away to be safe when the bridge blew up but from there we could reach the bottom in a hurry. My heart was hammering fast, partly from excitement and partly from weakness. My knees were wobbly and I could hear the blood rush past my ears. I tried to swallow but I was too dry. Now the train was around the bend and I could hear the slow chuff-chuff-chuff as it crawled up the track. The sound suddenly sharpened as the engine, a big American style steam cylinder, shoved its nose past the cutting and out on to the bridge, travelling at a walking pace. A movement at the other end caught my attention and, for a moment, a great tightness clamped down on my chest. Kim was standing at the edge of the cutting, calmly waving to the engine driver.
"The damn fool," I raged inside. "What in Hell is he doing?" And then I realized and almost wept in admiration and pride. Afraid that the enemy, already on the alert, would notice the lack of guards and stop in time, he was calmly risking his life, pretending to be one of them and enticing the Reds on to destruction. By now the engine was almost up to him. He waved again and moved casually up the embankment into the bush.
Behind the coal tender came a passenger coach full of soldiers, two flat cars and then the five tank cars. At the end, as the train clawed over the bridge, came two more flat cars, another guard coach and a sort of caboose. The bridge itself was exactly six car lengths from bank to bank. To be sure that all the tank cars would be caught, Makstutis had to let the first passenger coach get into the cutting on our side and the other one remain on the far approach. He threw the switch.
For a moment in time the bridge buckled upwards under the last tank car. Then, like a slow motion close-up, it started to bend downwards in a vee, moving faster and faster as the law of gravity took over. The rear tank car dropped into the vee, pulling the flat cars down with it. The crash of the explosion was rolling away down the canyon and now the screech of tearing metal sounded. The rear flat cars fell off to the side and the passenger coach behind them twisted over and wedged itself crossways between the main concrete buttresses and the far bank. By a miracle of bad luck it did not go down with the other cars and even as I turned away the guards came tumbling out of windows and doors unhurt. I looked towards our end. Three tanks had gone down with the bridge and lay twisted among the steel girders in the foaming river. Of the other two, one hung crazily over the angle between the steel and the bank. I could not see the leading tank car but I learned later it had remained upright but derailed. The couplings had broken just ahead of it, leaving the engine, the first guard car and the two flat cars free. That engineer was a smart man. Realizing that they hadn't much chance pinned down in the depths of the cutting, he pulled the throttle wide open and went for the open country as fast as the train would accelerate. With the wheels screeching and sparking on the tortured rails the engine bellowed up the grade like a charging bull trying to escape from the stockyards.