looking out for the signal, and had no reason to suspect anything might be
But there can be such a thing as overfamiliarity with a route, particularly in country where the terrain rolls along with a dulling sameness, one stretch of track bleeding into the next. Anybody who regularly drives to work in a rural area knows this; after taking the same roads day in and day out for several months or years, you begin to ignore the scenery and depend on a general sense of your bearings rather than its specific features, until coming to a sign or stoplight that marks a necessary turn. The building, brook, farmyard, radio tower, or cherry ’63 Mustang in someone’s driveway that once caught the eye on every trip will be passed unnoticed along the way. You feel free to straddle the speed limit, and perhaps even slightly exceed it without risking a traffic stop, knowing the police will in most instances tolerate a person going, say, sixty-eight or seventy in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour speed zone.
Salles had been driving railroad trains for three decades, and made the Sao Paulo-Rio run over five hundred times in the two years since it had been assigned to him. Never in his career had he come close to having a mishap. The night of the derailment, he was watching in anticipation of a signal that had ceased to function, and relying on equipment that no one had thought to harden against the sort of destructive black technology with which it was targeted. He was performing his job in compliance with the rules, and his response to the first indications of a problem was rapid. If blame had been apportioned by a judge possessing complete, objective knowledge of the facts, Salles’s slice of it would have been truly inappreciable. Moreover, his public and courtroom accounts of the incident were, from his available perspective, a hundred percent candid and faithful to the truth.
This is how he recalled it in deposition:
His train was proceeding normally along a series of climbs and dips in the large, undulating hills that are crossed by the Sao-Paulo-to-Rio intercity railway. The forested countryside east of Taubate being exceptionally dark and repetitive in its features, Salles had always relied on his instruments and track signals rather than terrain landmarks as visual aids. On his descent along the slope where the derailment took place, he had approximated that he was about five miles west of a blind curve that required the train to slow to between eight and ten miles per hour, his discretional latitude based upon factors such as weather conditions or the presence of another train on the opposing track. His usual practice was to begin gradually applying his brakes
In the pitch darkness, the curve seemed to come up out of nowhere. Salles had spotted it in the arc of his headlamps from a distance of perhaps thirty yards and immediately glanced at his Doppler indicator for a speed check, but its digital readout was flashing double zeros and an error code. This first sign of a problem with the electronic systems whose reliability Salles would later challenge was accompanied by a peripheral awareness of the lights in his cab brightening as if with a sudden flood of voltage. Forced to guess his speed, Salles decided he was moving at about fifty-five miles per hour, and immediately took emergency measures to decelerate and warn any oncoming train of his approach, sounding the air horn and attempting to initiate his brakes. But the high-tech braking system — which used a network of sensors and microprocessors to emulate the function of conventional pneumatic control valves, and had been retrofitted into the train a year earlier — didn’t engage. Like the Doppler speedometer, the flat-screen display of its head-end control unit was flashing an error condition.
Salles was not only racing toward the curve at break-neck speed, but nearing it with his electronic brakes out of commission.
He knew right away that things were going to be very bad. The fail-safe mechanism designed to automatically vent the brake cylinder in the event of a power loss or hardware crash would deprive him of any ability to graduate the release of air pressure and smooth the stop. And at his accelerated rate of motion, descending from the summit of a large and rugged hill on a sharp bend, the hard, shaky jerks that would result from the train coming to a dead stop would make derailment a certainty. It was the worst circumstance imaginable and he was helpless to avert it. He was at the helm of a runaway train that was about to turn into a slaughterhouse.
It was just as Salles was reaching for the public-address switch to warn his passengers of the impending derailment that the train reached the curve. The fail-safe penalty stop initiated at that same instant. Before his hand could find the switch there was a sudden, rough jolt that threw him off his seat. He slammed into the window in front of him like a projectile fired from a giant slingshot. His last memory of what happened that night was his painful impact with that window, and the sound of glass shattering around him.
Upon regaining consciousness some hours afterward, Salles would learn the forward momentum that had propelled him into the window was also what had saved his life, for it had been powerful enough to plunge him through the window and onto the brow of the hill, with relatively minor physical injuries as the result — a concussion, a fractured wrist, a patchwork of bruises and lacerations. These would be easily detected and treated by his doctors.
Not so, however, the psychological wounds that would drive him to suicide two years later.
The rest of the crew and passengers were less fortunate than Salles. As their wheels locked up and derailed, the cars in which they were riding smashed into each other in a pileup that turned three of them into compacted wreckage even before they plunged off the tracks to go tumbling end-over-end into the valley hundreds of feet below. One of the coaches broke apart into several sections that were strewn across the slope to intermingle with a grisly litter of human bodies and body parts. Bursting into flame as its fuel lines ruptured and ignited, the locomotive slammed into the dining car to engulf it in an explosion that incinerated every living soul aboard.
Other than Salles, only two of the 194 people who had been riding the train survived the catastrophe — an attendant named Maria Lunes, who suffered a severed spine and was left paralyzed from the neck down, and a ten-year-old girl, Daniella Costas, whose two sisters and nanny perished in the tragedy, and was herself found miraculously unharmed, wrapped in the arms of a young Australian fashion model identified as Alyssa Harding.
According to the child’s subsequent testimony, Harding had sprung from her seat two rows in front of the girl moments after the train hurtled from the track, and shielded Daniella from the collapsing roof of their car with her own body as it rolled down the hillside.
It was an act of selfless, spontaneous heroism that had eliminated any chance Harding would have had at survival.
FOURTEEN
The open fiberglass skiff left the pier just before 7:00 A.M., Ricci amidship on the bench, Dex at the stern after having started up the Mercury outboard with a couple of hard pulls. The oxygen tanks and portable compressor were in the well near his feet.
“Gonna be a honey of a day, looks like to me,” he said, and yawned. His eyes were slightly puffed. “We ought to do all right, don’t you think?”
Ricci was gazing out past the bow, his gear bags on the deck in front of him.
“Depends whether we get lucky,” he said.
Dex worked the tiller handle, guiding the boat into the channel. A tall, rangy man in his mid-thirties with a full reddish-blond beard, he wore a navy blue watch cap over his shoulder-length hair, a plaid mackinaw, heavy dungarees, and rubber waders. He had a fair complexion that was typical of his French-Canadian bloodstock, and the parts of his face and neck not covered by the beard were chafed from repeated exposure to the biting salt air.
“Don’t see what luck’s got to do with it,” he said. “You told me yourself there were plenty of urchins left down deep after that last haul, and it ain’t as if they do anythin’ but stick to whatever they’re stuck to till somebody comes along and plucks ’em off.” He made a chuckling sound. “Regular as you are about where an’ when you dive, the buggers should have you figured by now. Plan on movin’ to a safer neighborhood, or leastways makin’
