The Amtrak Wars: Blood River

by Patrick Tilley

  Morita asked for an explanation of how the five ‘travellers’ had fallen into the hands of the Kojak. This was no problem. Claiming to have been one of the search party, Cadillac gave him an edited version of the real events, omitting the ‘Skyhawk incident’, the blasting of the wagon-train, and the fact they had been collected in two instalments.

  He went on to recount how one of the five – a man – had been badly injured. Unwilling to abandon their colleague, the group had opted to stay together and take advantage of the hospitality offered by the clan. It had taken all winter for the injured man’s bones to join together. Thanks to the skill of the healing-women he was now on his feet but not yet able to undertake a long, arduous trek.

  Did they, inquired Morita, know the place to which the ‘travellers’ planned to return? Cadillac replied they did not. He and his companion were just simple fishermen. Perhaps Carnegie-Hall knew of these things. The wordsmith had spent many days and nights talking to their guests about strange matters and devices using words which he, Cadillac and his companion ‘Motor-Head’, did not understand.

  Morita then enquired when they had last seen the ‘travellers’. Cadillac told him, via the samurai, that it had been on the day before they had set sail.

  Steve cursed silently and Morita, who could obviously speak Basic, was equally quick to spot the blunder. Set sail? What did the Kojak know about ‘sailing’ and who had taught them this word?

  Cadillac hurriedly extricated himself by explaining that the term ‘to set sail’ meant to begin a journey across the water. The word, like everything else they knew, had come from the mouth of Carnegie-Hall. Steve, who’d been registering every word sensed they were heading into trouble. It was like being trapped on a raft drifting downstream and knowing that round the next bend there was a stretch of killer rapids.

  ‘So,’ said the samurai, translating for Morita, ‘the Kojak hold three males and two females.’

  Cadillac, who’d imparted this information earlier, confirmed this was so.

  ‘Describe them,’ said Morita. ‘In detail.’

  This was the moment Steve had been dreading. He glanced sideways at Cadillac. He must have known this question was coming but from the expression on his face it was clear he’d been hoping it wouldn’t be asked. How much did the Iron Masters really know? Who, exactly, were they looking for? Four long-dogs and one Mute – as they had appeared to be at the Heron Pool? Four Mute slaves and one courtesan – their owner – who had travelled from Ari-bani on one of the Yama-Shita wheelboats? Or the five ‘Mutes’ who had disappeared from the slave-merchant’s compound at Bu-faro?

  Cadillac realized that they had played it wrong from the first moment they had landed. What had been required was low, animal cunning, not an articulate intelligence. His gifts as a wordsmith and his overweening conceit had led him to believe he could out-think his adversaries when he should have been acting dumb. Had they done so from the beginning, they could have avoided answering potentially dangerous questions by claiming they – like their fellow Mutes – were unable to remember. How ironic that he, of all people, should have forgotten that! And now it was too late …

  As it happened, Morita was now aware of all three combinations. The full story had not been available when the first messages had been exchanged by Wantanabe and the palace at Sara-kusa but during the winter, further inquiries had established that the assassins had been given an ‘assisted passage’ out of the country.

  Their journey from the Uda-sona river port of Ari-bani through the canal to the slave-merchant’s compound at Bufaro had now been reconstructed. Their subsequent ‘escape’ from the compound – duly reported to the authorities – had coincided with the disappearance of the Mute overseer from the wheelboat which had carried them to Bu-faro. The two events were clearly linked, and the overseer’s disappearance was proof that the Yama-Shita’s enemies had managed to plant their agents amongst the crews of vessels which, up to now, the family had believed to be totally secure.

  The slave-merchant’s activities had come under scrutiny from time to time but the investigations had been concerned with the possible non-payment of taxes. In all other respects his conduct had been unremarkable. None of the informers employed by the Yama-Shita had ever filed a report that gave the family cause to suspect he might be a secret agent of the Toh-Yota. All the information gathered in Bu-faro after the event, had come from two of his shipping clerks who had been pressured with the help of bribes into revealing the circumstances surrounding the arrival and departure of the assassins. It was only then that the family had discovered one of the outlanders spoke fluent, upper-class Japanese and had had the effrontery to impersonate a courtesan!

  Prior to the death of Lord Yama-Shita, the merchant would have been arrested and forced, under torture, to reveal the extent of his complicity, but in the present hostile political climate with the family no longer the unchallenged master of its own house this would have been counter-productive. It was far better to leave him in place and hope to turn him into a double-agent …

  Cadillac’s fear that they might be recognized was not without foundation. Samurai-Major ‘Tenzan’ Morita had watched the ground trials and the proving flights of the rocket-powered glider conducted by its long-dog designer and builder and his Mute protege. And the more he looked at the two grass-monkeys kneeling in front of him, the more he was convinced he’d seen them somewhere before. But where? At the Heron Pool? The attack upon the assembled dignitaries and the installations had been conducted with breathtaking audacity but even so … Would anyone be so bold as to …?

  Morita dismissed the idea. It was inconceivable. Yet there was something about the voice of the one answering his questions …

  ‘We are waiting,’ said the samurai.

  Cadillac moistened his dry lips. Reasoning it out, as Steve had done, he had come to the conclusion that it was safer to stick to the last known permutation of five ‘Mutes’ since such a group was more likely to be offered – and accept – hospitality from another clan.

  The Japs appeared to know exactly who they were looking for and he knew from Carnegie-Hall that they’d found the two Skyriders. Should he throw them off the scent by describing five Kojaks picked at random? Would that stop them sailing to She-Kargo or would they press on regardless? On the other hand, if the Japs called the raid off because his descriptions didn’t match the people on their hit list, what would happen to him and Steve? If they were released – and it was a big IF – how were they going to get back? They would have to walk, unarmed, the long way round and that could prove as dangerous as sailing across on the wheelboat.

  His dilemma seemed to have resolved itself. They needed to hitch a ride back across the lake and they needed the Iron Masters’ horses when they got to the other side. That meant telling the man on the dais who’d been asking the questions what he was waiting to hear. It was an interesting problem because sooner or later, he was going to have to supply descriptions of Steve and himself!

  He began by detailing Kelso and Jodi, then moved on to Clearwater. None of the Japs who’d gotten close to her at the Heron Pool had survived but his interrogator might have obtained a more-detailed description from Lord Min-Orota. Cadillac, of course, did not know he and the Yama-Shita were no longer on speaking terms. In the wake of the Heron Pool disaster and the ensuing revelations about their joint plans to conjure up the Dark Light, Min-Orota had promptly switched sides, leaving his former allies to take the full heat.

  As Cadillac began to describe Clearwater’s face, and its most noteworthy feature, her blue eyes, he came up with a genial solution to his remaining problem – how to describe himself and Steve without being recognized. He would mix up their physical characteristics and make two new composites which would match parts of the ‘wanted’ portrait the Iron Masters had composed but would not – and this was the risky bit – describe the two people kneeling in front of them. The chances of pulling it off were slim but there was no time to come up with a
better idea. Cadillac took a deep breath and went for it.

  When Steve understood what Cadillac was trying to do, he mentally took his hat off. It was a wild gamble, but what the hell? They’d already stretched their luck to breaking point. Even if, by some miracle, they emerged from this session with their heads on their shoulders, they still had to find a way to blow up the boat!

  Morita listened intently as the samurai relayed Cadillac’s descriptions of the last two travellers, and after a whispered exchange with his armoured colleage, pronounced himself satisfied. He gave orders for Steve and Cadillac to be taken out of the room.

  ‘Congratulations,’ muttered Steve, as they took their place between the red-stripes standing in the corridor outside. ‘You did a terrific job.’

  ‘Noh-spikk!’ snapped the nearest red-stripe.

  The doors slid shut with Wantanabe and his wife still inside. As they stood in their stockinged feet, Cadillac tried to hear what was being said inside the room but the voices remained tantalizingly indistinct. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes later – it was hard to tell, the doors slid open. The folding screen was back across the centre of the room and the people on the near side of it were still in place.

  Steve and Cadillac returned to their mats and endeavoured to look suitably humble. They heard people moving around on the other side; the clack of armour plates and the swishing sound of heavy silk cloth. Probably the top brass returning after their tea-break.

  The screen was taken away, revealing the masked figures of Morita and Kawanishi seated on the dais, as before, with their aides. What, in Mo-Town’s name are they going to ask us now? wondered Cadillac. He and Steve put their noses to the floor as everybody bowed in greeting.

  Morita’s samurai-interpreter stood up and summoned two of his lower ranking colleagues from the back of the room. They came up behind Cadillac and before he knew what was happening, they seized him by the arms and swiftly looped a stick through the chain attached to the iron cuffs round his wrists. The stick was passed behind his neck and in front of both wrists to form a yoke to which his hands were pinned at shoulder height. This brought the middle portion of the chain tight across his throat.

  A second later, Cadillac saw the tips of the samurai’s razor-sharp short swords poised on either side of his head. The blades were just a hair’s breadth away from his skin. His stomach froze as his mind pictured the hideous wounds the swords could inflict on his face.

  ‘We think you have not been telling us the truth,’ said the interpreter. ‘You must therefore be punished.’ The blades were withdrawn as the two samurai behind Cadillac each took hold of an ear.

  Keeping his eyes on the helpless Mute, Samurai-Major Morita leaned towards Captain Kawanishi and asked in Japanese. ‘Which one shall we cut off first?’

  ‘The right one.’

  Morita signalled for it to be done and as he did so, Cadillac flinched in anticipation of the blow, drawing his head to the left.

  But there was no cut. No searing pain. It was a trick. And his lack of nerve at the crucial moment had given him away.

  Morita slapped his thighs and laughed heartily as he nudged Kawanishi. ‘What did I tell you? He understands every word! Isn’t that incredible? I knew I’d seen this dog before.’ He pointed to Steve. ‘And I wager that one with the blue eyes was at the Heron Pool too!’ He called out to the interpreter. ‘Look closely at his hair and tell me what you see!’

  Steve couldn’t understand what Morita was saying but when the samurai walked over and made a close study of his head he didn’t need a translation. They’d blown it…

  Given the maelstrom of death and destruction they had unleashed at the Heron Pool Steve expected, at the very least, to be savagely beaten as a prelude to something infinitely nastier, but to his surprise they were conducted from the room with their skins intact. They were not even roughed up by their escort – something that defaulters in the Federation could look forward to from the moment they fell into the hands of the Provos.

  On reaching the foredeck, where Sergeant Kurabashi had been catching up on the latest happenings back home, the ankle chains and neckboards were replaced. One of the red-stripes congratulated the sergeant for his part in spotting that the two Mutes might be ‘wrong-un’s’.

  Steve found it hard to read Jap faces but Kurabashi gazed at them with what appeared to be a mixture of grudging admiration and regret. ‘Ah-rong-dogs brave but ah-so very-ah foo-rish.’ He smiled and drew a finger quickly across his throat.

  The red-stripes took them below, down two sets of step-ladders and locked them in a small, darkened cabin whose door opened onto the forward passage to the engine room. The only light came through a latticed hatch in the main deck above the ladder-way at the end of the passage to their right. Very little of it reached their temporary cell but Steve didn’t need bright lights to examine their surroundings. The wheel-boat was built to the same pattern as the vessel he’d stowed away on, and the cabin matched the one on the other side of the narrow corridor where he’d lain hidden in the long-box under Side-Winder’s bunk for the greater part of the voyage.

  He was also familiar with the layout of the engine-room at the far end of the passageway; the logs stacked eight feet high against the forward bulkhead and both sides of the hull. The huge boiler in the middle with its ever-hungry furnace, framed by iron platforms and catwalks, its gleaming brass valves, pumps, the maze of copper pipes, and the huge steel pistons whose driving force, transmitted along two massive wooden, iron-strapped beams turned the stern-mounted paddle-wheel – twenty feet in diameter and over thirty feet across.

  Steve knew it was possible to get out through the engine room by crawling up one of the shafts housing the drive beams onto the rear deck. But when he’d made the journey in the reverse direction the beam hadn’t been moving. They could go up the ladder-way onto the through-deck above them where the samurai’s horses were stabled and get out through one of the square ports. But they weren’t going anywhere so long as they were weighed down with chains and neckboards.

  The ring holding the keys to their chains, boards and cell had been hung on the wall outside but it was only possible to push a finger through the stout lattice in the padlocked door. To reach the keys they would first have to smash the lattice, and even if they found some way of doing that, it could not be attempted while there was a guard stationed at each end of the passageway. By putting his face as close as he could to the lattice Steve could just see bits of the right arm and leg of the guard standing by the forward ladder. The Jap by the engine room was beyond his angle of sight but Cadillac had heard him being ordered to his post. Since when, like all soldiers on guard duty, he’d been exchanging the occasional word with his companion to relieve the boredom.

  Steve turned his back on the problem. ‘Not good, still … could be worse.’

  Cadillac sat dejectedly on the large, wooden bunk in the semi-darkness. ‘What’s that gloo-gloo-slop-slop noise?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll get used to that. This cabin’s below the water-line.’

  ‘Wish I hadn’t asked.’ Cadillac tried to stretch out on the bunk but the board round his neck made it impossible. He found the only comfortable position was to sit against a wall with the front of the board resting on top of his knees.

  ‘I’m sorry. It was stupid to get caught out like that.’

  ‘Could have happened to anyone,’ said Steve. ‘If I’d been answering those questions I couldn’t have kept the ball in the air for as long as you did.’

  ‘Yeah. But you wouldn’t have flinched when the Jap told them to cut off your right ear.’

  ‘I would if I’d known what was coming,’ laughed Steve. ‘What d’you want me to say? “You blew it”?’ He dismissed the question with a shrug. ‘We gambled on being able to outsmart these guys and we lost. That’s all there is to it.’

  Cadillac nodded gloomily. ‘I’m surprised they …’ He left the sentence unfinished. ‘Better not to talk about it. Might bring bad luck.
’

  ‘Yeah, well, if it’s any comfort I think we’re all right for a while. The way I see it, the number one task for these guys is to collar the rest of us. The pain comes later …’

  ‘What’s going to happen now there’s no chance of sinking the wheelboat?’

  ‘You tell me …’

  ‘Do you think Clearwater will …?’

  ‘… be able to get us out of this jam? She might,’ said Steve. ‘It depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On quite a lot of things. Such as whether ‘Bull and Death-Wish got back safely with the message and whether she understood it. And then there’s Carnegie-Hall. Is he still backing her up like he promised or is he just making the right noises while getting ready to dump us if things go the wrong way?’

  Cadillac’s spirits rallied. ‘No. That won’t happen. He’s too scared of what she might do.’ He adjusted the neckboard and stood up. ‘She’ll get us out of this, I know she will.’

  ‘I wish it were that simple,’ said Steve. ‘I’ve as much faith in her as you have but –’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘It’s not going to work!’ cried Steve. He grabbed Cadillac’s arm. ‘Hear me out – and for crissakes keep your voice down!’ He forced the Mute to sit on the bunk beside him. ‘To begin with, she doesn’t know we’re in this mess. Let’s assume she’s waiting where Wantanabe landed at the end of November and that the guys above us on the bridge have managed to aim for exactly the same stretch of beach –’

  ‘Okay–’

  ‘So it’s dark. As arranged. They stop the engines. Fine. But suppose they don’t drop anchor and wait till dawn like everyone’s expecting? Suppose they let the forward momentum of the boat carry her forward? Before Clearwater and the others realise that it’s not gonna explode, they could have the bow of this boat halfway up the beach!’

  ‘But that wasn’t the plan!’ hissed Cadillac. ‘You heard what Carnegie said. ‘They were going to arrive under cover of darkness, heave to offshore and exchange signals! Red and green rockets!’