Maximum Credible Accident [antikvár]

Steel coffins by a fiat clean sea, and behind them the circle of hills on whose ridges the sun had already risen. The watching binoculars were hidden on wooded slopes across the bay, the diesel just audible four miles away as it backed off the main line through the perimeter fence and the first of two padlocked gates. The locomotive and trucks were outlined at the edge of the sea as they came together, the guard's breath clearly visible in the cold morning air when he climbed from the cab to couple up one of the coffins: a one-hundred-ton flask shaped like a stubby Christmas cracker and clamped in a pivoted black iron cradle to a ninety-foot-long eight-axle fiatról. Two empty goods wagons acted as barrier vans on either side of the coffin and an out-dated brake-coach waited to be coupled up beyond the gates, its complement of five armed men climbing on board. 'The Death Train,' said graffiti on the town walls. Eight men and a girl were moving down the bank of a steep railway cutting, dark, half-visible shapes in waist-high bracken, five of them carrying heavy toolbags. The girl stopped above the tracks in a clump of silver birch from where she could see the road at the head of the valley. Below her seven of the men spread out in the scrub near a signal gantry, the eighth man walking back half a mile along the twisting track to the preceding signal. On the far side of the hills 'Binoculars' was now out of hiding, walking with knapsack and cameras like an innocent ornithologist to his parked car. He drove round the bay and up the pass over the watershed into the sun. A few bends down on the eastern side and back in shadow under the moor, he flashed his