TC81

When they were buffered against the cold as well as they could be Ariel and Jael bowed to Mr. Kaneko once more. They were deeply grateful to him and one day Ariel would see to it he was rewarded far beyond what his little help merited.

The gap remaining in the new fence lay along the west side of the camp well away from the train platform. It was guarded by two towers with high-power searchlights while seven lesser-equipped towers guarded the rest. Ariel told Jael timing was all-important now and told him to wait with har out of sight before they should begin their attempt to escape. When Jael asked har why sha said a train was involved. Ariel then spent the next threequarters of an hour rehearsing a hair-brained plot in the ears of har brother and making sure hy knew it by heart.

When Ariel gave the nod to move they headed for the fence along the tracks and chose a section well away from the guard towers. They were soon spotted by the military police, of course, but none of the guards opened fire because they knew the fence was intact at that location.

Jael touched a lamp post. The light overhead went out as though hy had somehow reached up there and pulled the wires. Then Jael touched a fence post and it snapped it off at the base. The fence dangled suspended by the two nearest intact posts. This allowed hym and Ariel to just roll right under it. At that point the guards did fire but none of them scored any hits since the area was now very dark. The kids ran for the tracks. The guards couldn’t leave their posts so they reported the breakout by phone.

Jael found the manual turnout switch the used to move trains onto the siding where new internees disembarked. He broke the metal left/right sign, again with just a touch. With the reflective sign no longer indicating the position of the switch he moved a stiff lever to divert traffic to the siding just before the next train arrived.

“Just before the next train arrived,” Jael said. “The coincidences just keep on coming, don’t they?”

The train under consideration came along a few minutes later and veered onto the side track, precisely as Ariel had planned. The engineer realized something was wrong and brought the train to a stop as quickly as he could. He knew the siding was very short. This caused an empty gondola car to end up right in front of the Zinter kids just long enough for them to climb inside and get out of sight. Then the train went into reverse.

When he was entirely on the main line once more the engineer climbed down and manually moved the shunt to where it was supposed to be. After that the train resumed its passage north and east before anyone running the internment camp even realized it had stopped.

This freight run between Cody and Billings was not scheduled to make a stop in Powell but the engineer did so anyway to phone in the broken indicator back at Heart Mountain. That gave the Shybear kids and their father a very short window of time to save them.

The train was a half mile long and Dory did not know exactly which car her friends had chosen to stow away in, because Ariel and Jael didn’t know either. And now after the run to Powell the Zinter kids were both unconscious from exposure. But the last report Dory received from Ariel was brown rolling stock with an open top, about half the height of a box car.

Jashen drove beside the motionless train for a quarter mile before reaching the first run of gondola cars. Everyone got out of the station wagon and began calling Ariel and Jael by name but no heads poked up over the sides.