From the Pulpit, Chapter 34

Chapter 34

Ronald Henderson was a train engineer extraordinaire.

“Most people think that being a train engineer is easy.” He often told his wife, “Because they think that hey, you know, there’s tracks laid down, and all you gotta do is control the speed, there is no steering or anything like that. But they only think that because they don’t know all of the mechanics and science involved.”

He would go on endlessly about the physics of pulling a two mile long vehicle that weighed hundreds of thousands of tons carrying any number of different goods and services. And always, he would end the conversation with his trademark phrase.

“You know, without trains, this country could starve in only a couple of days.”

To which she almost always replied, “You sure do have an important job, honey.”

Ronald’s world revolved completely around trains. And not just in the sense that he loved his job, which he did, but he truly was one of the best in the business of driving trains. He was certified to drive almost every kind of engine built since the 1930’s. He was also certified to deliver every kind of cargo that crossed this continent, including, in spite of his known capacity to talk, top secret military and industrial loads.

And that is what he found himself hauling this mid-autumn Friday night. He had driven a trainload of iron and steel sheets from A&B Millworks in Pennsylvania to the Lima Tank Works, in Lima Ohio. He was well known at the military factory that had been manufacturing tanks since 1942, including the Sherman of that era and the modern M1-Abrams and it’s progeny.

Upon arrival his crew was to disconnect the cars of steel and he would move the engine through the rail yard to engine barn 3B. There he would link up to a single railcar that he would take with on the next leg of the trip to a quiet location in eastern Tennessee where he would turn it over to the authorities there.

While Engineer Ronald Henderson knew what he was carrying, and the heavily armed guards that rode with him knew, no one else in this part of the country would know due to the fact that they did not know about the other product manufactured at the Lima Tank Works since the fifties.

Deep beneath the edifice of the brick and iron structures that stood on 3000 acres of sprawling mid-western land was a maze of tunnels and offices that descended a full three hundred feet into the earth. In this massive underground complex was built and stored some of the purest and most refined nuclear fission material made on this planet. For under the active factory buildings of LTW was the operating base of Project Fire Phoenix, one of the nations few remaining weapons grade nuclear materials processing plants. Their primary function since the end of the Cold War was to decommission nuclear warheads and transfer the fissile material to down blending plants such as the Atomic & Nuclear Services Corporation in eastern Tennessee where it would be reduced to energy grade nuclear fuel used in power generation throughout the Midwest.

Ronald had been making these runs once or twice a month for almost twenty years since becoming certified to transport nuclear waste materials by the US Government and being granted a top-secret clearance by the Defense Department.

If anyone had tried to use social engineering techniques to get any information out of his wife as to what her husband did for a living they would have gotten absolutely nothing, because she had no idea that this is what he did. She also had idea that her husband was at all capable of keeping a secret, especially from her.

At shortly after four in the morning Ronald and two Secret Service agents stood in the compartment of Engine 426863 as it pulled out with a only a lone triple-armored container and a small caboose containing four more Secret Service Agents rolled on the tracks out of the factory rail yard.

They would be skirting downtown Columbus, taking a circuitous route until they hooked up with the main south east line again in Picktown at about eleven am and from there head straight down to the down grading plant where they would offload fissile material from ten fifteen megaton warheads.

The container the material traveled in was very well protected. It would take nothing less than a nuclear explosion could possibly rupture the container. No aircraft could get close enough to hit the train itself with a missile. Nor could a rocket be fired from seaborne craft that could reach this far inland. And there was no way that an enemy could get close enough on land to detonate a device.

There was nothing to be worried about, Ronald thought to himself as he rolled out of the rail yard. He would be home in time for dinner.

Expected arrival of the train and its payload was two pm Saturday.

From the Pulpit

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