An American Spy by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788636278
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2019-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

She’d never been good with heights and this was no exception. Jane Todd stood on the bridge abutment and looked out over the valley of the Tweed, trying not to think of how she’d gotten herself into this mess. Here she was in a country you could fit three or four times into the state of New York and she might as well be with John Carter on the sands of Mars. She wasn’t quite sure how such a small place could look so desolate and empty.

And high.

The slope was a good seventy-five degrees, not quite a cliff but close enough not to make any difference to her. Her stomach flip-flopped like one of Aunt Jemima’s flapjacks when she got close enough to look over and she backed up, head swimming after one brief glimpse. Even with her eyes shut she could see the long fall of bare, stony ground and bits of vegetation barely clinging to the earth and the grey-black outcroppings of stone ready to smash her skull like an eggshell if she were dumb enough to come too close and fall over. It was still too dark to see very well but Jane was pretty sure she could make out the river glinting a good three or four hundred feet below.

She bent her head into the collar of the overcoat and lit her second to last cigarette. She’d been walking steadily along the tracks for the past hour and so far she hadn’t seen a single fence, village, building or path. Except for the call of the occasional night bird and the sighing of the wind there had only been the heavy silence of the empty moor. It was as though McSeveney’s Halt had been the end of the world and she’d just stepped off it. Except for the railway track unravelling in the inky dark there wasn’t the slightest sign that civilisation had ever thought of coming this way.

‘Hadrian’s Wall,’ she muttered to herself, remembering a shred of poetry from somewhere in her past. Something about a lost legion of Roman soldiers. She drew deeply on the cigarette and stepped a little closer to the edge of the concrete bridge mooring. Lost legion was right. If the Germans ever decided to invade they’d be wise to stay away from this godforsaken place, too.

The bridge itself wasn’t much better than the edge of the cliff; one track, with perhaps three feet of clearance on either side and no handrail, stretching into the distance – at least five hundred yards to the other side and solid ground. In the gloom she could make out a complex web of old iron girders that looked as though they dated back to Queen Victoria’s time and didn’t look strong enough to support any kind of weight at all, let alone a heavily loaded passenger train. She edged a little closer and swallowed hard, her mouth gone dry. The track wasn’t even on some kind of solid foundation; looking downward she could see the rust-blighted support girders making shadow patterns between the sleepers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.