The PuppetMaster (46 page)

“Yes Sahib, the very best from Assam and Manipur. All roasted twice and not ground until I woke this very morning before the sunrise.”

Knowledge of coffees was a hobby, so as he ladled three steaming portions--creamed and sweetened--into unglazed earthenware cups, we discussed beans. “Bah,” he spat. “The Nilgiri Hills in the south have their reputation, but the smart buyer knows where the number one beans come from.” A finger pointed towards the sun on the eastern horizon. “Right there, in the mountains of The Seven Sisters, and the sweetest of the sisters is Nagaland.” Agreeing wholeheartedly with his assessment, I paid and tipped him and hustled back. Our train would be rolling across the bridge in ten minutes, then make the long westerly curve towards Delhi.

****

I almost dropped the cups coming into the car. Crowds were jostling back into second-class compartments, and a small boy trying to catch up to his father ran across my foot, tripped, and nearly sent us both sprawling. I just managed to keep the front cup from dropping and exploding on the platform.

Then the heat from the liquid began to seep through the clay and sear my fingers. Ignoring the pain, I mounted the lowest of the steps and turned to look over my shoulder. Vendors, hoping for a final sale before the train’s departure, hawked goods below the windows. Cloth merchants fanned silks and cottons for women to appraise. Brass-smiths rang small bells and held up engraved candlesticks. A jeweler, with a flat box suspended from his neck, lifted gems and necklaces that flashed like mirrors in the morning light. I looked beyond the crowd. The field was like splintered emeralds, and further on, the river moved like dark tea through the gorge. I remembered then why I loved Bareilly at sunrise so much.

Inside, Jitka had just finished breakfast and sat on her bunk contentedly reading a recipe book. Uli had taken a few bites of iddly cake and was waiting for my return.

“Take these please before they completely melt my fingers.” Uli took two of the cups and I set the last one down with a groan. Shaking the sting from my fingers, I said, “Well, I can safely say they haven’t cooled much . . . probably a bad idea to carry them barehanded.”

Uli began soothing the ends of my fingers with her lips and tongue, stopping long enough to say, “Bad is never good until worse happens.” She smiled at my questioning look. “Another of those Danish proverbs, My Sweet.”

“Sounds too ominous,” I replied. She was still kissing my fingers as if they were covered with almond kheer, and I really didn’t want to move, but beyond the window I saw the last item on my small list, a newspaper. A gnome-like man was pushing his cart of periodicals toward the station overhang. I wanted to finish breakfast, sip Nagaland coffee, and read about the entrails of Imperial Holding being torn out. “Keep the cups and those lips warm, Ms. Hadersen,” I grinned, “I’ll be right back.” I scrambled from the car and bolted across the platform just as a long blast signaled three minutes to departure.

The newspaper cart and its pocket-sized owner had rounded the station corner on the north side. Second-class passengers were still pressing aboard cars in the rear. A knot of people formed unexpectedly in front of me, and I needed to wade through them and sprint across. Rounding the corner of the station-house at full speed I nearly tumbled over the cart. It was parked at a peculiar angle, abandoned while its weak-bladdered owner scurried off in the direction of the men’s latrine.

I scanned the selections and snatched up a copy of The Times of India, then dug through my pockets for some rupees to place on the cart. Overhead a small flock of white herons swooped in a low arc as they descended towards the river. I watched their flight, momentarily hypnotized by the grace and fluidity of their movement. They rose into an unseen draft, winged across the breadth of the ravine and settled into the pasture on the far bank. And there, beyond the flock, in the shade of a wide acacia tree, beside a tin-roofed warehouse, was a sight that chilled every fiber of my heart. A black Mercedes Benz CLS crouched motionless like a lioness. Its hood ornament faced the bridge and a lone silhouette sat in the driver’s seat. For a full breath my mind tumbled impotently and my feet wouldn’t move. I stood frozen. Then every harbinger and warning of the past days flashed through my mind. Mein Gott, Bhim, what if he’s timing them to match the shipments? The shipment wasn’t meant to leave the mining compound yesterday, it was meant for today. Flame and death at dawn. Steel and water. Flame and death at dawn. Who Bhim? The Sutradharak. With a far-off pressing of cell phone buttons, The PuppetMaster was going to destroy the bridge at Bareilly and plunge the train with thousands of caged passengers into the swollen waters of the Ramganga river--murder on an unthinkable scale.

The shriek of the final whistle jolted me like a starter’s pistol, and a single thought flashed into my mind--the train could not reach the bridge, it must be stopped. I pictured Uli waiting patiently to have coffee with me, Jitka finishing breakfast, and a thousand others resettled in their places, and I jumped.

The locomotives, coupled back to back, were a hundred and fifty meters from the edge of the divide and nearly the same distance from me. It was an angled race between a hundred thousand tons of steel and me—speed versus mass. I had to alert the engineers before the train began moving too fast to brake.

Impatient milliseconds later and my feet were churning across earth and grass. Twenty yards into my sprint the driving wheels of the engines lurched forward with a mechanical hiss. I waved an arm, frantically screaming in English, “Stop! Stop the train. There’s a bomb!” The wheels jerked forward a second time with sluggish but obstinate force. No engineer’s face appeared at the window. I screamed in Hindi this time.

To my left, along the line of the tracks, I saw three figures, a conductor with a rolled up signal flag swinging into the doorframe between two cars, and further down, two members of the RPF, the Railway Protection Force, walking with all casualness in the same direction as the departing train. One of the officers either heard my screams or saw me running insanely toward the locomotives. He motioned to his partner, and they both began jogging towards me, their rifles swinging in bouncing motions from behind their shoulders around to the front. I was forty meters from the front engine when a rifle shot cracked across the field. I looked left, without slowing. The policeman closest to the train had fired a warning round above my head.

Instantly, I understood, and in that same fractioned second, knew I had a choice. The policeman, in ironic misconception, had decided I was attacking the train, now thirty meters from my pounding legs. Perhaps he had heard the word ‘bomb’ above the rumbling of the machinery and had reacted the only way he knew how, reflexively with his rifle. My decision was instantaneous. I didn’t stop. I kept running directly toward the locomotives, jabbing my fingers toward the river. I screamed in Hindi again, “There’s a bomb on the bridge.” In my peripheral vision I saw the policeman lowering the muzzle of his rifle, but only enough to aim directly at my chest.

I crouched, sheered right, and anticipated the bullet smashing into some place in my torso. Then, with a whisk of breeze, I felt it pass by me, a nugget of lead inches from my waist. The delayed sound cracked a second later. With a turn of my eyes I saw both rifle barrels now taking a bead on me. The engines and cars were gaining momentum, no longer jerking spasmodically. I was eight meters from the front engine, with nothing between me and two trained riflemen.

My mind didn’t process. There was no decision, no deliberation, only reaction that comes from hours and weeks and years of training. I dove forward into a low summersault, head and right arm tucking loosely into my chest. Two shots, so close together they sounded as one, ripped the air above the back of my neck. My right shoulder and upper back hit the ground lightly as I tucked and rolled forward and up onto my feet in single, oiled motion. I took a step and a half and leapt up to the curve of a handle on the cab door. It represented every commonplace object I had ever caught in the casual games of my life—a Frisbee, softball, a hoop, a tossed orange. My right arm stretched out, and out further, muscles, tendons, every sinew seeking the centimeters of steel. Then, my fingers wrapped around it like a gymnast’s ring, and at the same time my left side smashed sharply against the side of the door.

My feet peddled across the empty air above the gravel of the tracks until one of them kicked onto the top step below the half door of the cab. The window had been lowered into the frame to let the cool air in, and inside the cab two engineers stood in distracted concentration, unaware of anything but pressure dials and the rhythm of the engines. Sucking a lungful of air, and thrusting my chin toward the bridge, I screamed four words, “brake, there’s a bomb.”

The train was less than sixty meters from the incline and the foot of the bridge and it was now rolling at mid speed. Both engineers stood like statues, startled by the monkey-ferenghi hanging outside the engine compartment screaming like a lunatic. I dove through the window, fell onto the metal plates of the cab floor, and pulled myself to my knees. The man closest to me was readying to throw punches or kick at me, when I yelled in gasps, “The bridge is wired. Sutradharak, the PuppetMaster.” I pointed to the sinister looking Mercedes parked beneath the acacia on the opposite side of the river. That got their attention. They knew the name well, and what came with it. One of them instantly yanked back on two long handles rising up from the floor. A mass of engines, cars, and people jerked and shuddered in deceleration, wheels screeched desperately on the rails. But even I could tell it wasn’t enough. The engines, forced by the tons of weight behind them, were sliding helplessly onto the bridge. How many passenger cars would follow? It was anyone’s guess.

I pulled on the door handle, but it didn’t budge. The man next to me, with total panic in his eyes, leaned across to push the latch forward and lift the handle. Below us, wheels slid in a long, rabid shriek down the tracks toward the bridge. It felt like skiing on crystal ice. I stepped onto the outer tread and leapt from the cab, my momentum pitching me into a sideways roll that twisted my ankle as soon as my foot touched the dirt. The first engineer tumbled half on top of me as he fell. The second managed to land running and remain on his feet.

Then, at that very instant, the center of the bridge erupted in a volcanic cone, its spine curling skyward like a bristling cat. The explosion thundered across the plateau, shattering glass in the station windows. Three-fourths of the span lifted upward, hung as if held by strings, and then dropped in a single heap of bolts, girders, rail, and planking into the churning water below.

My ankle was sprained, but not badly enough to keep me from running desperately toward the first class compartments. Uli and Jitka, I hoped with all hope, had gotten to the door and were getting out. I ran alongside the engines, and two freight cars, toward one of the policemen who had moments earlier been trying to blow part of my body into the dirt. This time he heard every word I screamed. “Get the people off!” He turned and jogged along the containers of human cargo, smacking the barred windows with the butt of his gun. Used to giving orders, he wasted no breath on words. “Out, now,’ he shouted, and inside, the cry was taken up like a litany by the passengers. Ever sort of rider, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs began jumping in pressed trousers, saris, and loongis from the only available exits, the doors between the cars. It all moved like a sluggish dream.

The train was slowing, but the front engine was still being pushed liked a reluctant child toward the severed end of the bridge. With a horrific crunch it broke through the girders and rail twisted like a turnstile above the river. There was a grinding, screeching of metal on jagged metal and for an eerie second it grew quiet.

Down the line people were leaping frantically from doorways. A few canvass bags and suitcases flew out, but mostly a frenzied stream of bodies tumbled onto the seedlings of the newly planted field. Mothers yelled for children, husbands for wives, and then an explosion of water erupted like a geyser behind me. Echoes rumbled through the ravine. The lead engine and its companion had dropped like enormous toys and jack-knifed into the water. But they weren’t toys, they were masses of iron and alloy with a single purpose—to pull themselves and the humans behind them smoothly along the track, and as if that was a fixed task, a mission they couldn’t ignore, they tugged just enough in their fall for the two baggage cars to come to the edge . . . and tumble into the gorge. But like rigid sticks, the freight cars didn’t drop onto the engines now filling with river water; they dropped into the mud at the edge of the current. Fortune, or fate, or maybe one of Sahr’s constellations, snapped the coupling between the freight cars and the first-class passenger cars. They were tumbling in twos. The momentum drew the first-class cars past me and out onto the bridge. In an act of futile instinct, I reached out a hand to try to stop thousands of tons of steel. Inside the second car I saw figures piled in the rear—human silhouettes against the windows. Then Jitka rolled out the door with her backpack onto the field. Uli will be next, I thought with relief. But she wasn’t. A Hindu in black slacks and blue shirt stepped of the top step and fell like a sack of rice. The cars slid past me like unstoppable beasts.

She must have jumped out the opposite door. I ran to Jitka and lifted to her feet by the frame of her pack. She was shaking visibly.

“Where is she?” I screamed.

“I don’t know, Bhim.” She slumped to her knees. “She didn’t come back.”

I started to ask what she meant, but the front compartment rolled persistently to the edge, and with a deafening screech, the front wheels clicked off the tracks into empty space. For an instant, I thought it would come to rest on that flimsy fulcrum. Inside the compartment someone screamed, and as if the mere vibration of that sound tilted the weight, the box twisted slowly and dropped over the precipice. The shift jerked the second car and the entire length of the train slid forward again. Uli! My mind screamed frantically. It was our first-class compartment, and it slid across the jagged edge, twisted on the same slow axis, and snapped away from the others with a crack of splintered steel. It fell forty feet, slid down the embankment to crush the corner of one of the cars below. It spun a hundred and eighty degrees and came to rest in the water at the river’s edge. The current swirled angrily through the barred windows of the lower half.