We hit the rusted iron rungs at the end of the tunnel three minutes later.
Lin climbed first, easing the square pump house cover aside with her shoulder. The raw freezing air hit us like a slap, carrying the sharp, chemical stench of burning diesel and the low, rhythmic thrum of an idling six-cylinder generator.
We dragged ourselves up into the pump shed and looked through the cracked wire-glass window.
We were fifty yards from Rail Siding Nine.
The sleet had turned to driving needles of ice, coating the gravel bed in a white, glassy crust. Sitting on the spur under the glare of two portable halogen light towers were the six refrigerated railcars Lin had described. They were painted a dull industrial white, devoid of military markings, their sides streaked with soot and road grime.
Standing on the cat-walk of the lead car, illuminated by the blinding halogen glare, was General Hale.
He wasn't wearing his service coat. He wore a dark, heavy foul-weather parka, but his posture was unmistakable. He stood beside the car’s secondary access door, holding a clipboard in his left hand, watching two men in civilian raincoats work a cutting torch against the heavy locking bar of the third reefer.
And standing beside him on the gravel ballast, his wrists handcuffed behind his back and a heavy canvas sandbag tied around his boots, was Corporal Aris.
The boy was alive.
His face was bruised purple along the cheekbone, his uniform stripped of rank and insignia, shivering so violently under the sleet that his knees buckled against the steel rail. A single federal guard held the collar of his shirt, keeping him upright.
"They didn't kill him," Lin whispered, her fingernails biting into the wooden sill of the pump house window. "They couldn't move him off the base while the perimeter alert was active without a transport chit."
"Look at the locomotive," I said.
At the far end of the spur, hooked to the front of the reefers, was a black, unmarked switcher engine. Its exhaust was barking into the night sky, its headlights dark, waiting for the derailer to be opened so it could shove the train through the eastern gate.
Hale wasn't waiting for morning. He was moving the cars now, under cover of the locker sweep he had ordered in the mess hall.
"He’s using Aris as the manifest sign-off," I realized, the pieces locking together with sickening clarity. "If the cars are intercepted downline with stolen medical plasma, Aris’s signature will be on the manual departure slip. The deserter who stole the train. The rogue sentry who cleared the gate and vanished into Nebraska."
"Not while I have this key," Lin said.
She pulled the heavy brass derailer tool from her vest. The metal was eight inches long, notched like a church key, worn smooth by decades of trackmen.
"If we drop the derailer lock from the pump house switch panel, the wedge engages mechanically," Lin said, pointing to the rusted iron lever bolted to the wall beside the water pump. "It drops a four-hundred-pound steel shoe onto the left rail thirty yards ahead of the engine. That train won't move ten feet without tearing the lead truck off the axle."
"And as soon as that wedge drops, Hale’s guards will riddle this shed with lead," I said.