Jasmine continued. ‘Unfortunately, the bodies drew vermin, which attracted disease, which killed Romanians. Not a brilliant tactic.’
Cobb let them babble for a while. It was a good way to let off tension. But he ordered them to stop when he heard Dobrev calling his name. Cobb hustled over to where Dobrev was pointing. It was a spot just in front of him.
‘He says to check there,’ Jasmine said.
All Cobb saw was what appeared to be heavy foliage, dwarfed by fang-like trees. He took a step further and peered closer to see that there was a heavy batch of coralroot, but it was coralroot wrapped around a skeleton of metal bones.
It was a long-forgotten switch — or at least part of one.
‘We’re going to have to rig something to move it,’ Dobrev said through his translator. Then the two of them disappeared into the train. A minute later, Dobrev emerged with a pick and heavy rope while Jasmine took her spot in the engine.
From the roof, McNutt stared at her through the engine window. ‘What in the hell are you doing in there?’
‘I’m going to drive us back if he needs me to.’
Sarah chimed in. ‘You never know when we might be attacked by vampires.’
McNutt held his weapon a little tighter. He wasn’t sure what scared him more: hordes of Cossacks, flocks of vampire bats, or Jasmine driving the train.
With Dobrev’s help, Cobb cleared away the foliage near the base of the switch. It had been sawed, he could see, close to the bracket that fixed it to the base. Holding the head of the pickaxe, Cobb dug the sharper of the two ends into the remaining wood to scoop it out. Then he stuck the iron point into the empty socket.
‘Is this what you had in mind?’ Cobb asked.
‘
They tied the rope around the pick handle to form a loop. Slipping it over his chest, Cobb faced away from the switch.
‘You want a yoke-mate?’ McNutt asked.
‘I’ll let you know,’ Cobb said.
Gathering his energy, Cobb gripped the side lever and pulled, expecting quite a struggle. To his surprise, the switch moved easily, as if it had been oiled earlier in the day. Puffs of rust rose like pollen as he pulled. He saw what looked like tree roots shift over and the telltale glint of dull metal amongst them. It was track that hadn’t been exposed to the elements for decades.
Then there was a solid-sounding click.
He heard Dobrev cheer quietly as the old man turned and hurried back into the cab. Cobb slipped off the noose, grabbed the pickaxe, and followed him.
The train began to rumble as Cobb swung onboard then trotted back toward the command center, waving at McNutt to do the same. The two met at Cobb’s desk.
‘Impressive,’ Sarah said. ‘Brains and brawn.’
Cobb flashed her a smile as he took his seat. ‘Get ready, everybody. We’re entering terra incognita.’
‘I’ll say,’ Garcia added.
‘What do you mean?’ McNutt asked, slinging the MP7 across his back.
‘This route goes into the woods and up the mountain. It’s dressed to look like an old mine track.’ Garcia switched to a spectroscopic analysis of the satellite image. It was the kind of technology that the Department of Defense used to search for lead containers in ordinary rail and seagoing cargo, capable of distinguishing variations in density and creating what looked like a negative image of the surrounding area. ‘There are mining tools, hats, abandoned carts, and lanterns amidst the rocks and shrubs.’
‘How do you know it wasn’t a mine, once?’ Sarah asked.
‘The rails are the wrong gauge for those carts,’ he said, pointing to a mine cart site on the Internet. He looked to the group for praise, but none was forthcoming.
The air was thick with expectation as the train poked ahead for a half-hour. It did not move steadily but in stops and starts, as Dobrev studied the condition of the tracks.
‘Speaks well for Russkie construction,’ McNutt said as they gathered behind Garcia, watching the nose- cam.
‘We’re in Romania,’ Sarah reminded him.
‘You know what I mean. All those old-timers. They did things right.’
‘Except for revolution,’ Sarah said, repeating her mantra about impotent men.
‘Actually, women had a hand in this one,’ Jasmine explained. ‘They marched against the tsar, and it was Alexandra who invited Rasputin into-’
The train lurched, then stopped. Dobrev mumbled something.
‘He says we’re close,’ Jasmine told the others.
‘How does he know?’
Jasmine said, ‘The slopes ahead are too steep for most trains, especially fast ones.’
Cobb studied the charts on his desk. ‘I’m not surprised. Since we left the junction, the line hasn’t been on any map.’ He looked over at Garcia. ‘Find us, Hector.’
The hacker’s fingers flew across his keyboard, then he looked up at a screen with a glowing blue dot on it. ‘There we are.’
Sarah leaned over him, looking closer. The dot glowed and moved as they moved, but the background was blank. ‘Okay, so where’s “there”?’
Garcia stared at the screen intently, trying to bring some geographical grid into play. ‘Tough to say.’
‘Explain,’ Cobb barked.
‘GPS says we are in Chioar,’ Garcia said slowly, enunciating carefully, eyes darting. ‘But the maps say we could be in Lapus … or Cavnic … or even Campia Transilvaniei. Truth be told, we’re actually in some sort of border null-space between those places.’
‘Hold on,’ McNutt said. ‘How can the GPS be wrong?’
‘It isn’t,’ Garcia said. ‘But the regions have been redrawn over the last century, sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially by people with ethnic interests. Depending on what maps we use, all of those regions apply.’
He screen-grabbed an image and sent it over to Cobb.
Cobb looked closer himself and compared it to his charts. Sure enough, the Romanian ethnographic regions were denoted with different colored blobs. But there were relatively wide white borders between them with no name or denomination. The glowing, pulsing blue dot representing their train was smack dab in the middle of one of the largest white spaces, between four colored splotches.
‘Taking every map into consideration,’ Garcia said, ‘only one thing is certain.’
‘And that is?’ Sarah asked.
‘We’re
46
Cobb stood and marched to the end of the car. He hit a recessed button on the wall, waited for the door to slide up, then stepped through to the flatbed.
The view was spectacular. The train was slowly rising up the last of the track, climbing a steady incline as if they were in a scenic tram. McNutt appeared behind him and looked over the side of the five-foot lip that encircled the flatbed. The track seemed part of the earth.
‘Holy mackerel,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Cobb agreed.
Though it was chipped and faded by whatever sunlight had blazed through, the track had been painted brown to appear as if it were roots or the ground itself.
