Jack of Harts

The Last Ride on the Asia Express started as a thought experiment. Raconteur Press had an open call out for alternate history World War II short stories. I wanted to write one, but couldn’t come up with a good idea for it. So I went onto facebook and asked my friends what they would be interested in reading. Alternate history WWII. I got a bunch of suggestions. The two that really caught my attention were the Marine Raiders and the Unit up in Japanese Manchuria that made biological weapons. I think someone mentioned the Japanese submarine I-401 as well, but I couldn’t map that into a story at the time.

I ended up doing some deep dives into the history of both the Marine Raiders and the biological Unit in Harbin. I happened to run into the Asia Express by accident because the line ended in Harbin, and I thought it would be cool to have a story built on it. But how to mix biological weapons and Marine Raiders on an Asia Express that had already been shut down?

Because I’m a glutten for historical research, and ended up going down a rabbit hole on I-401 and her sisters as well, and something popped out to me. One of her missions, had it been chosen, would have been to deploy biological weapons against the West Coast of America. The mission was shot down, because even the Japanese admiralty knew there were some lines they really shouldn’t cross with America. And then I realized that in April of 1945, I-401 docked in Dairen to stock up on enough fuel to sail around the world. A thought came to mind. What if someone decided to do it anyways?

They would need a fast train to get the weapons from Harbin to Dairen. And it wasn’t like they stopped USING the locomotives and train cars of the Asian Express. They were just spread around to do military cargo transport. Maybe someone needing a fast train would assemble them for one last ride to Dairen. But that would take some planning. And plans leak out. So what if someone told the Americans that a really important shipment from Harbin to Dairen was about to go down? Who would the Americans send? The Marine Raiders. But the Marine Raiders didn’t exist anymore. But if the son of the President, who had pushed for the creation of the Marine Raiders in the first place, walked up to the Marines that USED to be Marine Raiders, and said he had one last job for the Marine Raiders. What Marine Raider would turn that mission down?

So then I did research on how hobos jumped onto trains. I researched the weapons. Spent hours on Youtube watching people fire the weapons so I could have a good feel for what they sounded like. Yes, trap shooters really did stand watch for grenades with shotguns. And baseball pitchers were deadly when it came to throwing grenades. That particular shotgun really was fired by pulling the trigger and THEN pumping the action. I researched everything in the story, including the slang, to make certain I had it right and period. I actually had it TOO period in the end, and had to pull some of it back out for modern sensibilities and so we wouldn’t get caught on the wrong end of certain algorithms.

I probably did more research for this story than any story I’ve ever written. And most of the research didn’t even make it onto the page. In the end, the story was a product of bringing together a half dozen or more different real life threads, plans, contingencies, existing and no longer existing groups, and other things gleaned from sad corners of the Internet into meeting at the Sekika platform of the Asia Express in Japanese Manchuria in a way they never did in real life. In the end, for an alternate history anthology, it had to be an alternate history battle, but I wanted it to be something rooted in enough history that it truly COULD have happened… and maybe even did and we just don’t know it…

This is one of the stories I’m most proud of. It was the first alternate history story I’ve ever written, and it was absolutely a blast to research and write. I love it. The amazing art featuring the Pashina locomotive in action was created by Cedar Sanderson. Do not blame Cedar for the title and name marring it. That’s all on me. 😉

Last Ride on the Asia Express at Jackofharts substack