by Jack Du Brul
Mercer noted that Harry had gotten back on his feet and was once again working the ship. The old man nudged the Rose on her axis using the bow thruster and expert hands on her rudder and throttle. “Did they even have bow thrusters when you were a captain?” he asked.
“Nope,” Harry answered laconically. “But it’s the same as having a well-tended tug at the bow. I’ll have her pointed back at the lock in another minute.”
Much of the windscreen had been riddled by bullets and shrapnel. What pieces that hadn’t fallen away completely were starred and cracked and nearly impossible to see through. Lauren and Foch hammered away at the remaining panes with the butts of their weapons to improve Harry’s visibility.
Like he was parking a car, Harry spun the freighter in a tight circle, coming out early and backing the ship at an angle so he wouldn’t waste space when they moved forward again. He had a mastery over the vessel and her quirks as if he’d been at her wheel for years.
By the time he got her completely turned to face the lock he’d pushed her up the canal so a hundred yards separated the bow from the thousand-foot-long seawall extension that divided the two chambers. Harry looked to Mercer. “I’m ready.” His hands were relaxed on the wheel, ready to coax the great vessel rather than fight her.
“Okay,” Mercer replied. “Let’s do it. Foch, call Rabidoux and Munz. Tell them we’re going through.”
“Oui.”
“Heaven, Angel Two. Any time you’re ready.”
Harry eased the throttles to Ahead Full. The lock chamber was still flooded and her upper doors had remained open following the Englander Rose’s passage through. The lower doors, almost a half mile away, were closed, making the concrete-lined basin look like an enormous dead-end chute. Not for long, he thought. He could just see the top couple of feet of the lower doors rising above the level of water in the chamber. The steel doors, each weighing nearly seven hundred tons, were seven feet thick and sixty-five feet wide. They were all that prevented the untold billions of tons of water trapped in Lake Gatun from flooding the lower, and smaller, Miraflores Lake and the rest of the canal below.
Because the Rose was thirty feet above Miraflores Lake, he spotted the superstructure and funnel of a ship waiting for her turn to come up. In a minute, he knew she wouldn’t be there any longer.
“Firing now,” Mercer heard over his radio.
“Goddamnit!” Harry shouted at the same moment.
Mercer’s guts clenched. “What?”
“I have to take a piss.”
“Jesus, Harry, cross your legs or something.” He snatched up a pair of binoculars and focused on the tops of the lower doors, counting back seconds in his head.
Everything looked so normal. In the adjacent lock chamber, a container ship was slowly being raised to the level of the Gaillard Cut. Beyond her, several more vessels slowly made their way across Miraflores Lake. Workers were going about their duties along the locks, although a few had stopped to see what had exploded around the Englander Rose, and they were no doubt wondering why the ship had turned around and was pointed at them again.
Lauren too was counting the seconds. “Four, three, two, one.”
Mercer tightened his grip on the binoculars.
The first shell hit the two-story control house that sat between the locks and blew away its red-tile roof. Mercer barely had time to acknowledge the miss and the scatter of panicked workers when explosive rounds began to find their mark.
Exposed on the lower side of the lock, the doors looked like thirty-foot slabs of steel, rust-streaked but still amazingly sound after a century of use. They were designed to act as swivel dams that could be opened or closed to allow ships to move past them. They were never meant to withstand a naval bombardment.
The shots hit and exploded in a steady string that bit and tore at the metal like some enraged animal. Shrapnel exploded in all directions. It took just a few seconds before one of the doors broke off its huge hinges and fell flat into the lake. It floated away on the boil of water as more shells destroyed its twin.
That door also succumbed to the sustained hits so remnants hung off the remaining hinges like tattered pieces of skin. This alone wasn’t enough to give the water an unimpeded path from Lake Gatun through the cut and out. The canal’s builders had doubled up the most vulnerable doors, those on the downstream sides of the lock, in case one was ever broached by a ship slamming into them. The second set of identical doors, just a few feet from the ruins of the first, felt the strain of the lake pressing against them. Had they not been placed at a slight angle to each other, the pressure would have burst them apart.
The Englander Rose had steamed past the seawall extension and her bow was just entering the lock chamber. At her current speed, she’d hit the remaining gates in one minute. Men raced along the length of the seawall in a desperate attempt to get away from the explosions. A few stared incredulously at the old tramp freighter that was driving toward the smoke and burning metal erupting at the far end of the lock.
No ship in the history of the canal had ever moved faster through a lock. It was as if the vessel wanted to die by crushing her bow against the unyielding doors. For even at this speed, the gates would absorb her headlong charge the way a brick wall shatters a fist that dares to punch it.
Harry couldn’t resist. He gave the horn a long pull, adding the ship’s voice to the storm and explosions and frenzy of screaming men. He gave a demonic laugh. Mercer knew the crazy old bastard was loving this.
With another two hundred feet before the front of the ship hit the doors, the next barrage from the distant destroyer reached their target. The shots were surgically precise, targeting the lower hinge points. They hit concrete and steel, gouging through both, weakening the attachment points so that the gates slipped and a jet of water more powerful than a fire hose shot from a tiny gap near their base.
That was all the urging that gravity needed. Behind the gates was a thirty-foot-tall water column that was backed up for miles and miles. How many tons of water were pressing against the doors Mercer didn’t know, but he and the others certainly did feel it.
The burst came an instant later when the doors were ripped bodily from their sockets. The lock chamber drained in a fraction of a second. One instant the Englander Rose raced hard for the gates and the next she had dropped thirty feet and accelerated to forty knots as the torrent catapulted her down the chamber. There was no time for anyone to react. It was faster than any white-water raft ride, and twice as rough.
When she careened past the ruined stumps of the first doors, fingers of steel ripped along her outer hull, peeling back her plating with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. Fortunately none of the tears were below the waterline.
The ship that had been waiting to enter the lock was pushed aside by the rush of water sluicing through the open lock. She grounded against a shoal almost immediately, forced out of the double shipping lanes dug into the earth before Miraflores Lake was created.
Harry hit the horn again, a long blast that beat against the bottom of the storm clouds and echoed back. Like a raging river meeting a floodplain, the power of the rushing water slowly dissipated as it encountered the sluggish lake. The Englander Rose streaked past the grounded freighter before she finally began to slow. Once again Harry had a measure of throttle control. He kept her pegged, pushing the big marine engines far beyond their maximum because the race was far from over.
In a nearly straight line running from the Pedro Miguel Lock down to the Miraflores Locks, the lake was deep enough to accommodate the big ships, but outside that lane there wasn’t enough water to float a vessel the size of the Rose. They had to carry on past the five ships, including the luxury liner Rylander Sea and a pair of tankers, if they were to prevent a massive loss of life. Once across the lake, there was still one obstacle to face—Miraflores.
Unlike what they’d just survived, where there was only one lock to negotiate, these were double chambers, like two enormous steps eac
h a thousand feet long. This is why Harry had come along. He alone could keep the ship centered as they went sucking through the locks like a leaf caught in a gutter.
Foch listened to his headset and reported that Munz and Rabidoux were all right and to make sure they were warned when they went through the next locks.
“Got it,” Mercer said. He looked at the others on the bridge. “Everyone okay?”
“I would feel better,” Bruneseau replied wearily, “if your friend wasn’t smiling.”
If anything, Harry’s grin deepened. His feet were braced wide on the deck and he’d placed much of his weight on his toes. Like a surfer feeling his board, he maneuvered the ship through touch as well as sight. “Hell of a ride,” was all he said around a cigarette that he must have lit an instant before the ship plunged through the lock.
“Lauren, are you all right?”
She rewarded Mercer with a thumbs-up. “I’m just trying not to think about what comes next.”
They had thirty-eight minutes before the bomb went off. While the ship continued to feel the effect of water flooding through the Pedro Miguel Lock, their ride stabilized as they drove farther from the facility. The engines strained and her deck shook.
“Roddy, can you still read me?” Mercer called into the radio.
“I’m here,” the Panamanian panted.
“What’s happening at your end?”
“We’re all off the ship and are running like hell. I can see a current in the canal as water from Lake Gatun flows by. If that broken lock isn’t sealed, you know that Miraflores is going to flood.”
“If my calculations are right, the first bomb ship will take down enough earth to stem the tide when she blows.”
“Calculations? What calculations?”
“Okay, I’m guessing,” Mercer admitted. “But I think it’ll work. The explosion on the Robert T. Change should create enough of an avalanche to seal the cut. We’ll lose water between her and the lock, but not what’s stored in Gatun.”
“I hope to God you’re right.”
“Me too. Call me when you’re clear.”
The ships on Miraflores Lake parted as the Englander Rose raced by, her horn blaring like an insane motorist speeding the wrong way up a one-way street. It was hard to tell if any of them had grounded, but every time they left one in their wake, Mercer felt a measure of relief.
Coming abreast of the Rylander Sea, Mercer told Foch to have his men suspend their disarming work. He was unwilling to take the risk of a slip immolating the thousands of people standing at the rail of the beautiful cruise ship. Had the Rose’s radios not been smashed by her crew, he would have called the luxury liner’s captain and told him to get his passengers below. All he could do was step to the wing bridge with Lauren and wave weakly at the throng shouting and waving back at them.
“If they only knew,” she remarked.
“Let’s make sure they never do.” He clicked on his radio and dialed in the USS McCampbell. “Heaven, this is Angel Two, over.”
“Go ahead, Two.”
“How do we look for the next set of locks?”
“Targeted and awaiting your order. The lane to your left will be clear by the time you reach it.”
Mercer shouted to Harry, “You want them blown apart the same way as before?”
Harry said no. “Hit them before we get there, say five hundred yards. That’ll give the water some time to settle down as it flows through.”
Mercer relayed the information to the guided-missile destroyer.
When the Rylander Sea was a hundred yards behind them, Foch ordered his demolition men back to work. The Rose was passing an eight-hundred-foot tanker that could be loaded with fifty thousand tons of oil or gasoline, but they couldn’t lose any more time. If they went up now and the tanker went with them, at least some on the cruise ship would be spared.
The entrance to the Miraflores Locks was a third of a mile ahead. The bomb’s timer touched zero in twenty-one minutes. Harry White had shaved an amazing amount of time by ignoring the speed rules and willing his ship on with sweet cajoling and blistering strings of profanity.
Coming up on their port side was the concrete crest of a power-generating dam that also helped control flooding. In the minutes since the upper lock had been broached, the lake level had risen enough for the dam to overtop and water to begin pouring over the floodgates. Though he couldn’t see it, Mercer knew the structure’s downstream face would resemble Niagara Falls.
He shifted his gaze a little to the right, trying to see details on the long seawall dividing the two sets of locks. With the driving rain hampering his view it was hard to be certain if the moving shapes were workers or armed Chinese trying to prevent the ship from repeating its earlier trick. It would be just their luck, he thought darkly, to be stopped by some soldier armed with a rocket launcher—
“Incoming!” he screamed as a streaking trail of smoke seemed to grow from the tip of the seawall, a twisting, probing tentacle that raced for the Englander Rose.
Hatcherly Consolidated Terminal Balboa, Panama
The news reached Liu Yousheng in fits and starts and the more he learned, the more confused and bizarre the reports became. He’d arrived at the Hatcherly container port at eight in the morning, his usual time, and spent two hours in his office pretending that this wasn’t the most important day of his life. He had found himself reading and rereading the same document pages several times and even then he gained only the barest impression of what they’d said.
The tension taxed his legendary concentration, making him irritable with his secretaries and the two junior executives who’d come to him with problems. None of them knew what had so distracted their boss, but all understood not to ask.
At ten, he couldn’t take it anymore. He grabbed his raincoat and told the secretary that he would be out for several hours. He ignored his car and chauffeur and chose to stride through the rain to the enclosed dry dock on the far side of the terminal. He cut a severe figure in his dark coat that even the enormity of what he’d built in Panama couldn’t dwarf. The cranes and stacks of containers looked like they scraped the roiling storm clouds; the gantry lights cast shadows as strong as the sun. The huge ships tied to the quay were like steel mountains that he had brought to the jungle. The expanse of asphalt was like an artist’s canvas that he alone could paint upon. The men, local and Chinese alike, were his too, and they felt his presence as he stalked across train tracks and around rows of shipping crates. A few of the longshoremen called respectful greetings and a forklift operator offered him a ride.
Today he would cement his domain by risking it all. When it was over, he would not only control the container port, but all of Panama, including the mighty canal. At the same time he was giving his homeland the leverage it needed to finally rein in the rogue province of Taiwan. It was a momentous day and he didn’t blame himself for allowing no other thoughts but this to concern him.
The loose ends—Maria Barber, Philip Mercer, and the soldiers helping him—had been relegated to the back of his mind. They were distractions really, nothing more than nuisances he would deal with over the next few days. President Quintero would be grateful to help him hunt them down for another percentage or two of the Inca treasure his men were sure to find.
His cell phone rang as he reached the huge building that hid the Korvald. He let the phone ring a second time so he could step out of the driving rain. The ship loomed over him, its funnel no more than fifteen feet from the arched roof. The rain beat against the metal building and made the drafty interior vibrate.
He shook water off his coat and unfolded his phone. “Yes.”
“Mr. Liu, this is Captain Chen. I’m at the Pedro Miguel Lock. Something is wrong.”
Liu’s voice cracked. “What?”
“The captain of the Englander Rose—”
“Use the code name, damnit!”
“Ah, Gemini Two. He reported that he heard gunshots and then he went off the air.”
<
br /> “Gunshots? Where?”
“On his ship, sir.” The military commander paused, unsure how to proceed, for he could feel Liu’s anger over the phone. “And now it appears the ship is sitting just above the lock.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know, sir. Ah, hold on, please. I’m getting another report.”
Much to Liu’s irritation the connection was cut. What was that all about? He looked up to the rafters and noted that one of the big overhead cranes was in position to remove the DF-31 missiles from the Korvald. The rockets were going to be loaded directly on the eight erector/launcher trucks that lined the dock on one side of the refrigerator ship, their bright paintwork an odd juxtaposition to their deadly purpose.
The phone rang again and he answered before the chime stopped. “Talk.”
“The captain of Gemini One is reporting a problem on the Mario diCastorelli. He says that it just grounded in the Gaillard Cut, but not in its exact target spot and that the submarine was crushed when she hit.”
“An accident?”
“He couldn’t tell. He’s evacuating his own ship using its lifeboats.”
“Is he in position to detonate the Change?” Liu asked sharply, ignoring his own rule about code names.
“Pretty close, sir. His men will make their way to shore and run for Gamboa and the boat that will carry them to the Atlantic side of the canal.”
“What’s happening on Gemini Two?”
“Nothing. It’s just sitting there. I’m about to order some men onto a pilot boat to see what the problem is. I’ll call you back when I have a report.”
“Good.” Liu snapped off his phone and walked calmly toward the gangplank. He relaxed his shoulders and returned his face to neutral. He wanted nothing to disrupt his plans and he realized how the Korvald’s captain, Wong Hui, seemed to want a reason to bolt with the eight rockets still in the ship’s hold.
Captain Wong, Sergeant Huai and Mr. Sun met him as he climbed up the steep set of stairs and stepped onto the old ship’s deck. “Gentlemen,” Liu greeted warmly. “I trust we are set to go this morning.”
