第18节

. Given the time of year, it proved imprudently

optimistic but although Ryder bore the brunt of CINC-TRAIN's subsequent

displeasure, he could hardly be blamed for getting it wrong. No

wagon-train had ever ventured beyond the snow-line before.

From Trinidad, Colorado, to the banks of the Missouri, everything went

according to plan. Travelling round the clock on what Trail-Blazer

crews termed a three-shift roll The Lady logged an average of 18 mph

over the first 620 miles of her journey, arriving at Kansas City in the

late afternoon of the 13th.

Although the night air and ground temperatures were plunging with the

onset of winter they had not encountered a drop of rain or a flake of

snow, despite the cloudy, threatening skies. That left The Lady

rolling over a dry-bed - the optimum conditions for a long haul over

the crumbling, grass and weed-infested foundations of the pre-Holocaust

highway system.

The bridges spanning rivers and gorges had vanished long ago. Shallow,

slow-running rivers could be negotiated by simply driving across at the

marked fording points; the deeper, wider ones - like the Missouri could

only be crossed with the aid of special ferrying equipment.

Rivers with precipitous banks or rock-strewn rapids formed impassable

barriers that had to be circumnavigated.

Where possible, the Federation's wagon-trains also followed the gentle

curves and gradients fashioned by the predecessors of Amtrak, the

company that had inherited the shrunken remains of the American railway

network - the giant, epoch-making enterprise which had tamed and

transformed a savage continent.

The width of the wagon-trains meant they could only travel along lines

where, in the distant past, two or more sets of tracks had been laid

and because of their height, the tunnels - many of which, in any case,

had fallen in on themselves - were as impassable as river gorges.

One of the tasks the First Family intended to dedicate itself to after

the conquest of the Blue-Sky World, was the restoration of the American

railroad system. The Founding Father, George Washington Jefferson the

First had been one of the dedicated visionaries who had helped to

create the MX missile trains that had ridden the rails before the

Holocaust and it was to honour his memory that the historic lines were

to be rebuilt. Not only rebuilt. History was to be recreated. The

new rolling stock would not be overground versions of the Trans-Am

shuttle with its high-speed linear induction motor, they would be

lovingly-constructed replicas of the giant 4-6-4 Union Pacific locos

from the glorious era of steam when brains and brawn formed an enduring

and unequalled partnership that could - and quite literally did - move

mountains.

Disguised as ordinary freight trains, the MX launch vehicles and

command modules circulated around the Amtrak system from coast to

coast. The concrete ICBM silos buried beneath the prairies had been

targeted by the enemy for decades, but the MX trains - the Pentagon's

best-kept secret of the last years of the 20th century - remained

safely hidden from the prying camera lenses of hostile reconnaissance

satellites: impossible to find, fix and strike.

Some perished through random targeting - being in the wrong place at

the wrong time during the first strike but many more survived, their

crews protected in their sealed, radiation-proof environments. It was

from these trains, as America was turned into a giant funeral pyre,

that the second devastating strike had been launched the strike that

utterly destroyed the enemies of freedom but which also triggered the

detonation of their orbiting Doomsday weapons, bringing about the end

of what the Mutes called The Old Time.

The knowledge of that particular piece of history was confined to the

very top echelons of the First Family. As far as the rest of the

Federation was concerned, the history archives that could be accessed

by courtesy of COLUMBUS left the viewer in no doubt as to who was

responsible for the Holocaust: the Mutes.