train can barely reach here.” His finger slid along the string, then stopped above the “pass” that ran north to south through the mountains.
He swung his arm around the plain at the stone gatherers. “We need to buy time to finish this work. The mountains are impassable. If we overturn this ice train in the pass, we’ll force Forty-fifth Division to dismount their train and advance toward the pass on foot. A small force using the sledges and engine as breastworks can hold the pass even against a division.”
I asked Celline and Jude, “Assuming volunteers, how many can you spare from gathering and still meet the deadline?”
They looked at each other. Jude shrugged. “We planned on a thousand pickers. Could you manage with two hundred?”
“There were three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae,” I said. But there were eighty thousand Persians on the other side.
Celline frowned. She knew Thermopylae like I knew how to stir trilobite bisque. But she said, “We’ll manage with a hundred less, then.”
I didn’t tell her that the three hundred had been the finest troops in their world, maybe in any world, not starved, frostbitten shopkeepers. I also didn’t tell her that the Spartans lost. Big.
There was another similarity to Thermopylae. I shaded my eyes with my hand as I pointed at the eastern shoulder of the distant mountain pass. “The Spooks mapped this. There’s a way around the canyon. A ledge a goat could walk, eight hundred feet above the canyon floor, along the east wall. It’s a long way ’round, but once the Persians outflanked the Spartans the battle was lost. If the Quicksilver Division can move a battalion over that goat track, it can swing in behind the bottleneck in a day.”
Aud shook his head. “I know the Forty-fifth. But I also know the commander who succeeded me. Folz is deliberate. Unimaginative. He’ll pound away at the pass frontally for days before he resorts to maneuver. But you’re right. Eventually…”
I pointed at the “shoulder” of the pass on Aud’s sand table map. “They widened the main route through the canyon with dynamite when they built the railroad. There’s still one case left in the machine shop, even after the GIs played with it. It’s not enough to close the main pass, but it might be enough to drop a narrow spot on that ledge, cut that path. Your old troops are good, Aud. But they can’t fly.”
Aud shook his head again. “We’ll just have to take our chances. I can’t spare a man. And none of these people can handle dynamite.”
I said, “I can.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
“ON THREE!” Aud and I, in line with twenty others, strained against a cable spooled through a block and tackle stripped from the camp machine shop, tied to an eyelet on an ice sledge. The sledge’s runners squealed, then groaned as the great iron box crashed onto its side like a dying mammoth. The echoes died against the canyon’s stone-cold walls, even as other cars toppled by others of the three hundred volunteer shopkeepers fell into place.
We were overturning sledges so that their iron floors became parapets that blocked the canyon bottleneck from vertical stone wall to vertical stone wall. Aud set the first line of our barricade six hundred yards up the canyon, near its crest, where the thousand-foot-high walls bottle-necked down to a twenty-yard width.
That way the front line of an entire division of attacking troops, even shoulder to shoulder, could never amount to much more than sixty soldiers. And those sixty would be advancing uphill, unprotected, for six hundred yards. Meanwhile, our guys, even if they weren’t marksmen, would hunker behind cover and mow their attackers down, then mow down the ranks behind them, until we ran out of ammunition or the attackers ran out of enthusiasm.
There’s a schoolyard simplicity to infantry tactics once you remove air power from the equation.
The last sledge toppled across the canyon like a beached whale as Aud stepped alongside me, batting dust off his long coat with mittened hands. He craned his neck, up along the canyon’s east wall, where the narrow ledge overlooked both us and the plain to the south from which the attack would come. He sighed. “There’s no point in placing marksmen above. We have no marksmen but you.”
“I’m taking a rifle and a hundred rounds up on the ledge with me.”
Aud shook his head. “Your most vital job is to destroy the flanking route, not to play at target practice. Just set the charges, light the fuses, and run. Live to fight another day.”
I looked around. Men stacked rocks on the parapets. Others cleaned weapons or unboxed cartridges. Each shopkeeper busied himself to avoid the reality that they would die in this canyon. “Nobody else seems to have an exit strategy.”
I knelt, then swung up the pack with the dynamite. Aud grasped the pack’s handle, centered the load on my back. “Jason, I know you. You intend to return from the pass, then rejoin us here. You return to the camp. If the stones aren’t delivered, this sacrifice will count for nothing. Honor me, and these men, by making sure we all died for something. Promise me that.” He laid a hand on my shoulder.
I laid my hand over his, stared up at the late afternoon sky. “I better go. The only thing I hate worse than heights is climbing them in the dark.”
It might once have taken me a few hours to make my way back north along the canyon, then east to the steep, narrow route that switched back and forth toward the ledge that overlooked the canyon, then up the trail that climbed a fifth of a mile.
By the time I not only made it to the trailhead, then climbed to the ledge, my skinned knees and elbows trembled beneath my coat’s sweaty bulk, and the cotton that had once been saliva crusted my lips, and it was midnight, according to the Tressen pocket watch I carried. The only Spooknet-capable ’Puter the Spooks would allow us I had left behind with Jude, so that he could call for pickup of the Cavorite in case I didn’t make it back.
I lay on the ledge in the dark, too exhausted to fear the sheer drop that began inches from the blisters inside my boots.
I had no heated armor to keep my fingers and toes from going numb, no helmet water nipple, no padding when I slipped and fell, and no optics to keep the dark from blinding me. I huddled in a crevasse, snugged my clothes up to keep as warm as I could, and dozed.
I woke at four a.m.
The moonless Tressel night was frigid, black, and still.
Except for a faint glow on the southern horizon that shifted position back and forth. Like a train winding north.
FIFTY-NINE
WITHOUT NIGHT-VISION EQUIPMENT, I had to wait for dawn to begin my work. I was in no hurry. Among the things that had terrified me since childhood were heights and explosives.
My hands shook as I stuffed black-powder-cored fuse lengths into dynamite sticks. I had to take off my long coat and mittens to scramble down the rock face below the narrow ledge, wedge the old dynamite into cracks and joints in the granite, then pay out fuse to the place from which I would light it.
If I had done it right, a fifty-foot section of the ledge should shear away, so no infantry could either slip behind or get an angle to fire down on Aud’s unlikely Spartans.
By the time I finished, I couldn’t feel my fingertips.
I sat rubbing back the circulation while I stared toward the horizon, where the train’s glow had shone in the early-morning darkness. I focused on the quivering image of a tiny black worm against a white sea. The troop
