Exile Hunter (47 page)

“If I look down
between the ties, would I see rushing water beneath me?” Linder
inquired hesitantly.

“Absolutely not.
Think of it like any other bridge. It’s a solid platform all the
way across, only with ties and rails laid on top,” Rhee assured
him. “All you have to do is follow me, keep looking a couple steps
ahead and say a mantra or something to keep you from thinking too
much.”

“All right, I guess I
have no other choice here,” Linder conceded, feeling the blood
drain from his face and his cold hands sweat inside his gloves.
“Can’t be any worse than being back at the mine, I suppose,” he
added with a nervous laugh. “But let’s get a move on before I
change my mind.”

They marched rapidly
along the edge of the tree line toward the riverbank and hid near the
bridge abutment to watch and listen for approaching trains. Seeing
none, Rhee mounted the abutment and led the way across the first
span. Though scarcely wider than a one-lane road, the flat wooden
deck held two sets of railroad tracks laid side by side with a narrow
margin to either side, bounded by a flimsy-looking wooden handrail.
In places, the ties had rotted, and Linder blanched at the thought
that these might be the original ties dating back to the railway’s
construction some seventy years before.

Rhee advanced between
the rails of the left-hand set of tracks, with Linder following close
behind him, his eyes fixed on the rhythmic movement of Rhee’s boot
heels. So long as his mind concentrated on those feet, Linder was
able to contain his fear by shutting out all other thought. But after
about fifty paces, he tripped on a tie and fell forward, crashing a
knee heavily into the wood. Despite the pain, he rose quickly to his
feet and limped forward, but by now Rhee’s boots were too distant
to claim his full attention, and his body grew rigid from a rising
sense of panic.

They were slightly past
the midpoint of the bridge when Linder spotted the headlamp of a
train approaching from the far side of the river and felt his heart
stop.

“Looks like we have
company,” Rhee called back over his shoulder without breaking
stride. “Keep going as fast as you can but don’t run. As soon as
we see which track it’s on, we’ll move to the other one. Lie face
down on the outer shelf, hold on tight, and pray that nobody on the
train sees us.”

In the orange-yellow
glow of the setting sun, Linder saw that the train was approaching on
the track to the right. Both men stepped onto the margin beyond the
left set of rails, removed their backpacks, and lay perfectly flat
while gripping the crossties with hands and feet. To Linder’s
alarm, a clump of wood broke off in his hand and he found the ties
above and below it just as rotten.

The moment the engine
mounted the first span, Linder noticed a faint trembling beneath his
feet. Now he felt the tremors intensify the closer the engine drew.
His breathing quickened and his grip grew tighter by the second until
the train was directly upon him. The instant the headlight moved
past, he looked up and to his relief saw that the train consisted
almost entirely of flatcars bearing heavy equipment. Thus the only
witnesses aboard the train to report them would be the engine crew,
and even they seemed unlikely to have noticed a couple of gray lumps
in the glancing light of the engine’s halogen beams.

Once the final freight
car went by, Linder felt his pulse rate slow and he made a conscious
effort to relax his convulsive grip on the crossties beneath him. But
when he raised his head and saw how close he was to the edge, he was
overcome by a fresh bout of vertigo. So, instead of attempting to
rise, he watched Rhee lift himself slowly onto hands and knees, pull
his rucksack onto his shoulders, and climb unsteadily to his feet,
holding the wooden handrail for safety.

And in that moment,
Linder heard a dull crack of rotting wood giving way and watched Rhee
teeter on the brink where the guardrail had apparently given way.

“Damn!” Rhee
exclaimed as he reached for a crosstie and missed. Then the man
pitched sidelong over the side and cartwheeled silently into the
river below. He fell for what seemed like an eternity until at last
his head struck a floating slab of ice and his legs jackknifed
awkwardly into the churning water. Linder watched for Rhee’s head
to surface but it never did.

Now Linder’s limbs
and spine went completely rigid with fear. He could not get up. Yet
he knew that, if he did not leave the bridge, other trains were sure
to follow. Only by extraordinary mental effort did he manage to calm
his breathing and relax his muscles, put hands and feet under him,
and crawl back onto the tracks. There, regaining his balance, he
stood erect and set one foot stiffly before the other with his eyes
fixed on the dark landmass ahead. As he passed Rhee’s abandoned
backpack, he absently scooped it up, more from a base instinct to
cover his trail than from any conscious thought for his dead comrade
or the pack’s contents.

Once across the bridge,
Linder scrambled down the embankment holding the extra pack to his
chest and ran toward the tree line with all the strength and speed
that surging adrenalin could deliver. He ran until he was out of
breath and could run no more.

As he knelt on the damp
forest floor under the dim light of the crescent moon, Linder shook
with fear and rage from the effects of the stress hormones coursing
through his body and pummeled the soft earth furiously with both
fists. At that moment, he felt more alone than ever before, even more
than during his solitary confinement. At the same time, he realized
that he must guard against his natural tendency to withdraw into
himself. To survive, he must focus on the present. What must I do
right now, he asked himself again and again. But he had no answer.
Instead, his thoughts traveled around in circles until at last he
closed his eyes and found release in sleep.

With lies, one can only move forward; there is no going back.
Russian
Proverb

MID-APRIL, WEDNESDAY, WEST OF EDMONTON, ALBERTA

Linder awoke with a
start. Looking up, he could see from the moon’s position above the
horizon that he could not have slept more than an hour or two. He
rose, took a drink from his water bottle, and sorted through the
contents of Rhee’s backpack, stuffing anything useable into his
own, and returning the rest to Rhee’s. Then he walked back to the
river, added a few rocks to the Korean’s pack and tossed it into
the surging river.

Now would be the time,
Linder realized, to honor Rhee’s death with a prayer or a moment of
silent remembrance. But all he felt was confusion. What was the
purpose of their being chainmates on the Canol Road, their falling
out at Camp N-320, and their being thrown together again as fugitives
if it only came to this? And what did it mean that he was now the
last of the six fugitives left alive? Was it wrong for him to feel no
survivor’s guilt upon Rhee’s death? And what was he to do with
himself now that he was alone?

Linder watched Rhee’s
pack bob and sink in the raging current and suddenly felt very small
and insignificant. He did not know the answers to these questions and
could not answer them on his own. He would require help.

“Okay, spirit guides,
or God, or whoever you are” Linder said aloud, raising his eyes to
the star-filled sky. “If you’re out there, how about giving me
some guidance, the way you did for Scotty?” He felt the weight of
his backpack on his shoulders and added, “I’ve got a couple
hundred bucks and an I.D. that may or may not be any good and not a
bite of food. Now, do I find a town and try to hole up for a while or
do I catch the first train for the border? I could be caught by
nightfall either way. So which will it be?”

Linder closed his eyes
and waited for an answer. At that moment, an icy north wind gusting
across the river struck him full in the face, reminding him of the
terrible night the team had spent exposed on a mountainside above the
Nahanni River before Scotty had discovered the ranger’s cabin. Then
he remembered the final descent to that cabin, when, near exhaustion,
he had seen a vision of Patricia Kendall with her daughter, somewhere
in Utah. Now the image of Patricia’s face appeared to Linder again,
and he remembered his promise to Roger Kendall and to Charlie Yost
that, if he survived, he would go to Utah and do what he could to
help her. If he were recaptured along the way, so be it. But he would
not quit. And that, he realized, was the guidance he had sought.

With a renewed sense of
purpose, Linder refilled his water bottle from the river, drank till
his growling belly was full, and set off once again toward the rail
line. An hour later, he caught sight of a small marshaling yard about
a quarter of a mile from a brightly lit drilling camp.

Linder waited just
outside the yard in the pre-dawn darkness and watched men with
flashlights and lanterns signal the departure of a southbound train
consisting of half a dozen boxcars and about two dozen flatcars. He
waited until the men left the boxcars, and then tested the doors
until he found one that would not close fully owing to a broken
latch. He climbed in and rolled the door shut as far as it would go.
After fifteen or twenty anxiety-filled minutes, the train lurched
forward and rolled jerkily down the tracks before gaining speed and
rolling south.

Three or four hours
later Linder heard the engineer blow his air horn. Peering through
the crack in the open door, Linder saw a series of commercial
buildings along the tracks. The air horn blew again after ten minutes
or so, and with increasing frequency as the train entered the suburbs
of Edmonton and reduced its speed through numerous level crossings.
Each time the train slowed, Linder’s heart raced, anxious that the
train not stop and leave him stranded in the city. To his immense
relief, the train passed through Edmonton without interruption and
drove on toward Calgary. Linder used the time to sort through the
contents of his backpack. His spirits soared on finding a crushed
chocolate bar and a small bag of raw pine nuts among Rhee’s
effects. He alternated between eating the nuts and the chocolate
fragments, savoring them one at a time.

The air horn blew more
frequently again as the train approached Calgary another three hours
later. Once more, it snaked through the metro area and entered the
final stretch toward the city of Lethbridge and the U.S. border. Two
more hours elapsed, and Linder began to reconsider whether it would
be such a good idea to cross the border aboard a freight train. After
consulting his map, he decided to hop off at Lethbridge, just north
of the U.S. border, and approach Montana on foot from the mountainous
region to the east of Glacier National Park.

Before reaching
Lethbridge, the train pulled onto a siding late in the afternoon at a
Canadian Pacific rail yard where the north-south line crossed the
CPR’s east-west trunk road. As soon as the car slowed sufficiently
for Linder to jump off, he rolled open the door, sat on the edge, and
leapt to the ground holding his backpack in front of him to break his
fall. And fall he did, but not badly enough to hurt himself beyond a
few scratches from the coarse gravel. Yet no sooner did he pick
himself up than he spotted a team of railroad workers approaching the
train from the rear of the yard, cutting off his retreat. One of them
saw Linder and gave chase.

Detecting no other
avenue of escape, Linder fled in the direction the train was moving,
caught up with his old boxcar, and climbed back in. Though it took
all his strength to open the door on the opposite side of the train,
in time it gave way and Linder lowered himself once again to the
gravel roadbed. Seeing no workers or yard bulls on this side of the
train, he scuttled under a waiting tank car on the next track, then
under a flatcar on the track beyond. Out of sight from his pursuers
now, he ran in the opposite direction from the moving train and took
cover behind some shrubbery to catch his breath.

Linder remained hidden
until the sun went down, feeling like a hunted animal determined to
evade capture. His mind desperately sought assurance that he would
prevail, recalling various tight spots he had faced while working
undercover, as well as Scotty’s prediction soon after they met that
Linder would someday be free.

When darkness fell, he
steeled his nerves to leave his hiding place, crept out of the rail
yard and crossed the dimly lit tracks headed southwest toward the
Montana border. Though desperately hungry, he rejected the idea of
spending any of his Canadian dollars to buy food before entering the
U.S. He did this not only out of concern for his untested identity
documents, but also for fear that the Mounties might have been
alerted to two suspicious-looking men with backpacks along the rail
line north of Edmonton. If so, they might have connected that
sighting to his flight from the Lethbridge rail yard and pick up
their search from the latter.

Accordingly, Linder
suppressed his hunger pangs as he had done so many times before. He
was so close to the border now that he imagined he could smell it in
the air. Once over the border in the U.S., his Montana identity card
would draw far less scrutiny than in Canada. After all, who would
suspect a Montana resident of entering the state illegally? And he
could spend his Canadian dollars with little worry because hard
currency was in high demand on the American side.

Linder walked half the
night through the hills, navigating by the stars and by the tiny
compass that Scotty had given him at the camp infirmary. He slept
without a campfire and rose to continue walking at daybreak the next
day. About an hour into his hike on that second day since Rhee’s
death, he observed a distant road that led southeast toward Glacier
National Park.