lovenovelstory Chapter 121 Ambush on the 9th Infantry Regiment
Chapter 121 Ambush on the 9th Infantry Regiment
Chapter 121 Ambush on the 9th Infantry Regiment
The reason why Dutch and Hosea suddenly started shorting major railroad companies was very simple: support in San Francisco had decreased.
Once the war started, huge sums of money were spent.
However, both Ponzi schemes and stock price manipulation are extremely cash-intensive operations. In order to maintain the existence of these two bubbles, they have no choice but to plan ahead.
Central Railroad New York and Central Railroad Michigan were initially just watching from the sidelines, and even secretly intervened a few times to suppress Erie Railroad's stock price.
But soon, as several of the two companies' railway bridges were also blown up, their stock prices plummeted, and they began to panic.
175 Broadway, Erie Railroad headquarters.
Inside the conference room on the third floor sat the company's leaders. They had rushed from all over New York, and their expressions were far from pleasant.
President Homer Ramsdale spoke first: "Since the damage to the Starr Viaduct and Falls Viaduct two days ago, our stock price has fallen from $75 to $52, and it is still falling."
"Gentlemen, it is obvious that this is absolutely not a normal phenomenon!"
At the other end of the long table, Daniel Drew scoffed upon hearing this: "Bullshit, Homer, do you even need to tell me? I could figure it out with my ass. Someone's definitely shorting us out."
Homer's expression remained unchanged; he was already used to the vulgar remarks of his board members.
"As Mr. Drew said, a number of Wall Street figures, led by Vanderbilt and Jacob Little, launched a short-selling attack on our company, and other railroad companies also took advantage of our misfortune."
Although there is no concrete evidence, it is highly likely that one of them was responsible for the damage to the two bridges.
The director on the left side of the long table impatiently slammed his hand on the table and said, "Homer, we don't need your explanation; what we need now is a solution!"
"Every word of nonsense you utter now causes our stock price to drop by another dollar. And you, Homer, are one step closer to being kicked out!"
"Understood, Mr. Morgan."
Homer rang the bell on the table, and soon the secretary waiting outside brought in documents and placed them on the table in front of everyone.
"We have already devised three countermeasures."
With the sound of papers turning, he said in a deep voice, "The first countermeasure is to announce that the company will dispatch several engineering teams to quickly repair the bridge, and it is expected to be repaired within four months, to boost confidence."
"Four months? The company will be bankrupt by then." Drew rolled his eyes and said, "Let's change the time to one month and keep those idiots calm for now."
"Drew, that's a stone arch bridge, they can only lay the foundation in a month!" one of the directors frowned.
"When the time comes, just say that there are unforeseen circumstances requiring an extension."
Drew said nonchalantly, "Those idiots can't think for themselves anyway; they just believe whatever people say."
Homer proposed a second solution: "Secondly, we will repurchase a portion of the outstanding shares ourselves to support the share price."
"A useless countermeasure!"
Drew rejected the idea without hesitation: "A total of 250,000 shares are outstanding. At what price do you plan to buy them? Fifty dollars a share? Or forty dollars?"
"Taking on only a portion is useless; taking on too much will completely drain our cash flow, and we'll die even faster!"
Another director chimed in, "Exactly. If you ask me, we should just contact that Vanderbilt guy and sell him some of our shares. It's just a matter of having one more director."
Upon hearing this, the board members began to discuss it.
"That's one way to go; one less enemy, one more friend."
"This way, we can concentrate our forces to retaliate against that bastard Jacob Little and make him suffer a huge loss!"
The next few days.
Wall Street and even the entire East Coast were thrown into turmoil by Erie Railroad's stock price.
First, Erie Railroad's stock price plummeted to $47, then the railroad announced that it would repair two bridges within a month, and the stock price rebounded to $52.
Then, an anonymous, enthusiastic engineer sent photos of the two bridges after they were bombed to major newspapers, stating that it was absolutely impossible to repair them within a month. The stock price plummeted again, this time to a mere thirty-two dollars.
It wasn't until Vanderbilt issued a statement saying that he had become one of the directors of the Erie Railroad and would use horse-drawn carriages and snowmobiles to transport goods across the broken bridge to ensure smooth logistics that things continued to move.
This finally stabilized the stock price, allowing it to slowly recover.
However, these things are no longer relevant to Dutch and his group.
"Thank you, our dear Mr. Jeremiah."
Inside his office in the Broadway building, Dutch raised a glass in a distant toast to Cornelius Jeremiah.
"If he hadn't mentioned that someone from Yili was in contact with his father when he came over, we really wouldn't have been able to repurchase the shares at the lowest point of the stock price and complete the transaction."
Strauss and Hosea also raised their glasses: "We really have to thank him; we almost lost over a hundred thousand dollars."
"What do you mean, thank you? What happened to me during this time?"
A travel-worn Arthur pushed open the door and entered. Seeing the three people clinking glasses and exchanging toasts, he plopped down on the sofa and groaned.
"I feel much better. My butt was sore from riding horses all day."
Dutch tossed a bottle of liquor to Arthur and asked, "How's the investigation going?"
Arthur stretched out his arm, caught the bottle precisely, twisted off the cap, and took a sip: "I've figured it out."
"The two regiments being transferred to San Francisco are newly formed this year: the 9th Infantry Regiment in Virginia and the 10th Infantry Regiment in Pennsylvania. They will depart from their barracks in three days and board the train to New York."
"Pennsylvania? What a coincidence!"
Dutch raised an eyebrow and laughed loudly: "Hosea sent men to blow up the railway bridge in the Allegheny Mountains five days ago. It seems that the 10th Infantry Regiment will not be able to come to New York anytime soon."
Strauss said, "Then we just need to eliminate the Ninth Infantry Regiment first."
Hosea got up, took a map of the eastern United States from the bookshelf next to him, and then hung it on the wall.
"Arthur, please continue."
Arthur looked at the map and said, "According to that guy from the War Department, the Ninth Infantry Regiment will first cross the Chesapeake Bay by boat and arrive at Baltimore, Maryland."
Then they boarded a train in Baltimore, passing through cities such as Philadelphia and Trenton, and finally arrived in New York.
"If we want to intercept them, there are two good locations."
He got up from the sofa, walked to the map, and pointed to one of the locations, saying, "First is Baltimore Port. When the 9th Infantry Regiment disembarked, their personnel and supplies were in a chaotic state of unloading, inventorying, and loading. Launching an attack at this time could cause great casualties."
The downside is that the docks are heavily defended; once an attack is launched, American troops and militia stationed nearby will continuously arrive.
"Secondly, there's the rural area between Philadelphia and New York, such as the forested areas of central New Jersey. By sabotaging that section of the railway, a train could be derailed, allowing for a more leisurely attack."
There's a problem too: a regiment of nearly a thousand infantrymen requires at least six troop transport trains. If one train derails, the others behind will certainly be alerted.
Dutch pondered for a moment and said, "Let's set up an ambush in the forests of central New Jersey."
"So what if they're on guard? It's the middle of nowhere; what can they do even if they're on guard?"
Forest region in central New Jersey.
At noon, the sun was scorching, but fortunately, the dense shade of the trees blocked most of the sunlight.
Three hundred people hid behind tree trunks or in bushes on both sides of the railway, listening to the sounds coming from afar.
They had dug out a section of the roadbed beneath the tracks, and several meters of gravel and soil on one side had been removed.
On the surface, the rails are still in place, but as soon as the weight of the locomotive is put on it, the roadbed on that side will immediately collapse, the rails will lift up, and the entire train carriage will tumble down the slope.
"What time is it?" one of the assassins asked his companion.
His companion pulled out a pocket watch from his pocket and glanced at it: "12:30. The 9th Infantry Regiment departed from Baltimore at 6:00 AM, so they should be here soon."
No sooner had he finished speaking than a long, drawn-out whistle rang out in the distance.
Almost everyone's body tensed up at the same time.
The rails began to vibrate, emitting a low hum, and the gravel bounced slightly beneath the sleepers.
Soon, the train came into view.
This is a standard military troop transport train, with thick black smoke billowing from its chimney.
Eight carriages were attached to the back of the locomotive. The wooden carriages had several small ventilation windows, and it was easy to tell that they were converted from freight cars.
Inside the carriage, the soldiers of the 9th Infantry Regiment were all doing their own things.
Some were dozing against the carriage wall, some were smoking on their backpacks, and some had opened the door a crack to look at the scenery outside.
"Hampshire, you lost again."
Several soldiers who were playing cards were laughing and joking when they suddenly felt their bodies sink down.
The driver was the first to notice something was wrong, and he instinctively reached for the brake lever. But before he could do so, the entire motorcycle suddenly tilted to the right.
The moment the train passed by, the traps dug by the assassins began to take effect.
Boom!
The locomotive's iron wheels derailed and slammed heavily onto the ground with a sharp scraping sound. The carriages attached to the back also derailed, and the entire train tumbled and rolled on the ground.
boom!
The intense heat generated by friction ignited the ammunition being transported in the carriages. Orange-red flames shot out from one of the carriages, and the explosion was deafening.
"Those fireworks were really loud!"
The assassins covered their ears as a gust of hot wind carrying sand pelted their faces, but none of them seemed to care.
The explosion ignited and destroyed several nearby carriages. The lead suicide squad member glanced at them and shouted, "Fifty men, go and finish them off inside the carriages. The rest of you, follow me forward and set up positions a kilometer ahead!"
The crowd roared in agreement, and after leaving fifty people behind, the rest began to run.
The trains run every fifteen minutes.
The first train is gone now; the flames from the boiler explosion can be seen from miles away. The drivers of subsequent trains will surely be alerted by the flames and begin to slow down.
The moment the train stops, it becomes their target!
The sound of a ship's horn grew louder as it approached from afar.
The driver of the second troop transport train did see the fire ahead and chose to slow down.
"Is it another forest fire?"
The driver frowned. Having driven this railway for several years, he knew all too well how prone it was to catch fire.
Late May and early June in New Jersey are warm, dry, and windy, and the railway is lined with dense North American resin pines, which produce abundant and highly flammable resin.
With just a spark, the forest here would be completely ablaze.
"Hopefully the fire zone is far from the railway tracks, otherwise we'll have to reverse back."
As he was thinking this, he suddenly saw the train ahead that had derailed and was burning.
The second train braked suddenly and stopped one kilometer away from the accident site.
Before the soldiers inside could react, they heard someone shouting in an unfamiliar language, "Fire!"
In the woods west of the railway, the crank handle of a machine gun began to turn.
"Da da da! Da da da! Da da da!"
The machine gun's ten barrels spun, spitting fire in turn, and bullets poured into the train carriages at a rate of four hundred rounds per minute.
Then the second Gatling gun went off.
Its position was about 100 meters south of the east side of the railway, forming an angle of about 60 degrees with the first machine gun.
The two bullets intersected at a deadly acute angle, sweeping from the front to the rear of the vehicle, the storm of metal instantly annihilating most of the living creatures inside.
"Grenade!"
Hundreds of grenades flew out of the woods on both sides of the railway at the same time.
Those wooden-handled, iron-tipped contraptions tumbled through the air, tracing hundreds of parabolic arcs before landing inside the carriage.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
A series of explosions rang out, and the metal shell shattered into dozens of irregular fragments, which scattered in all directions from the point of explosion.
The soldiers who had miraculously survived were swallowed up by the torrential downpour of metal as soon as they tried to get up.
When the grenade explosions finally ceased, the second troop transport train had become a long, burning wreckage. The wooden carriages were riddled with holes, and orange flames licked out from the cracks in the planks.
Meanwhile, at the third train station.
The train stopped on a straight track about three miles from the ambush point. Colonel George Wright, commander of the 9th Infantry Regiment, raised his monocular binoculars and looked at the smoke in the sky with a grim expression.
A lieutenant saluted him and said, "Reporting to the colonel, we have spotted fire and thick smoke ahead, about three miles away. We have already sent men on foot to investigate."
"Order all the soldiers on the vehicle to disembark."
Colonel Wright said slowly, "At the same time, send people to the back to issue an emergency stop signal to the trains behind, so that several trains don't collide."
","yes!"
The adjutant approached, saluted, and said, "Colonel, it's just a plume of smoke; it might just be a wildfire."
Wright said, "It's better to be safe than sorry. Let's wait for them to come back before taking any action!"
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