River of Ruin m-5

by Jack Du Brul

  The pilot originally assigned to guide the Mario diCastorelli on her doomed transit was a Panamanian named Ernesto Garcia. Shaken by the Green Berets’ surprise assault, he’d readily turned the helm over to Roddy when he learned what was about to happen. Now he broke himself from his fearful silence. “If we slow, there will be nothing to stop the sub from grounding us. We must speed up and hope we can shake it loose.”

  “I don’t want to stop her, Ernie, I want to kedge her.”

  “Kedge?” Captain Chaufleus asked. “What is this kedge?”

  “The sub’s pulling us to port. I want to drop the starboard anchor, let her hook on bottom and then play out some chain. Once we’ve unspooled a hundred feet or so, we’re going to haul the bow around using the anchor winches. I don’t care what’s powering that son of a bitch, she won’t be able to fight the winches. No way.”

  “Ah,” said the captain. “Yes. I see. It work no problem.” He ordered one of his officers to stand by the controls that could remotely drop either of her seven-ton anchors.

  “Make sure he knows to let the flukes snag before letting out more chain,” Roddy warned. “Otherwise the anchor will just drag when we reel her back in.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand,” the officer said, obviously a better English speaker than his captain.

  The freighter was well outside her lane now, and under other circumstances Roddy would have been fired for letting a ship get away from him like this. Hell, he thought, I was fired for it once. Her bows were less than two hundred feet from hitting the shore and at the speed they were traveling, the impact would tear open her forward compartments as if they were made of aluminum foil. It wouldn’t take long for the wind to swing her stern across the waterway and block the channel to all traffic. Then, at least one of the bomb ships would heave-to, and the crew would go overboard to be picked up by the sub for transport back to Pedro Miguel or maybe under the crippled freighter to Gamboa.

  After that. .

  “Drop the starboard anchor.”

  The officer pressed a button on his console and three hundred feet forward of the wheelhouse the big capstan began to unwind. The anchor vanished under the surface to plunge forty feet to the bottom of the canal.

  Because there was a constant stream of water feeding the great locks, the canal was scoured clean constantly. There was little mud or debris for the anchor’s flukes to skip against. Almost as soon as it hit the bottom, the anchor fell sideways and the hardened steel dug into the rock.

  The ship shuddered as she fought the anchor before the officer slowly allowed more chain to drop through the fairleads, keeping tension on the anchor so it wouldn’t lose its grip.

  “Good. Good,” Roddy whispered softly, feeling the ship return to its tug-of-war with the sub. The Chinese crew down there would never know what was coming.

  He raced for the starboard wing bridge to watch the chain disappear into the green water far below. He could also look across to port and see the shore coming up alarmingly fast.

  He had to give it just a few more-“Now! Bring up the anchor!”

  Like a dog snapped back on a leash, the Mario diCastorelli came up hard against her anchor when the capstan was reversed. The violent action sent Roddy staggering into a railing and sent two of the American commandos watching on the bridge to their knees.

  Two things happened at once. The anchor chain’s weakest link, deep under the water near the anchor itself, failed under the enormous strain. Like a whip, the chain came flying out of the water at a hundred miles per hour and snapped back at the ship. The forward cargo hatch was quarter-inch steel. The chain tore a twenty-foot gash across its surface with little more difficulty than a knife cuts paper. The impact blew the links apart, spraying the superstructure with chunks of shrapnel the size of a human head. One struck the superstructure’s forward window and embedded itself in a bulkhead at the rear of the bridge, narrowly missing two Green Berets.

  The second thing that occurred was that the electromagnetic clamps that held the Chinese submersible to the freighter’s hull let go.

  Free from its monstrous burden, the truck-sized submersible accelerated away from the ship, driving at full speed toward the shoreline before its two-man crew could stop it. It hit the canal’s edge like a torpedo strike, a burst of water and froth that lofted twenty feet before splashing back to earth. It surfaced seconds later, an oxide-red tube resembling a ship’s boiler with an integrated impeller fan at least fifteen feet across.

  Roddy saw immediately why Liu had never tried to divert one of the big PANAMAX ships. The size of the submersible meant she had to attach herself under shallow draft vessels, and even then the unusual craft would have been dangerously close to being crushed against the bottom.

  The sub remained surfaced with water gushing into its shattered nose. Air trapped in the hull seethed and made the water look like it was boiling. A moment later, the struggling figure of a crewman emerged from the battered hulk. The submariner was injured; he fought the roiling waves using only one arm while the other floated uselessly next to him.

  Well versed at the dynamics of these large ships, Roddy knew that his quick thinking and decisive action wouldn’t be enough to save the Mario diCastorelli. He glanced into the wheelhouse to see Captain Chaufleus frantically working rudder and throttle in a desperate attempt to swing her bows away from the shore. Even he knew it wasn’t in the cards.

  Roddy turned back to see the Chinese sub’s surviving crewman look up at the massive wall of steel bearing down on him. Roddy couldn’t hear his scream but watched his mouth open, a round black hole in his round white face.

  The ship bowled over the sub, crushing it flat, and struck the bank with an impact ten times worse than the jolt when the anchor caught the bottom. The rending of steel on rock shook the massive vessel like an earthquake. Even those who’d prepared themselves for the collision by grabbing for handholds were thrown to the floor or propelled into bulkheads. Roddy was almost tossed over the railing as the bows crumpled inward and then lifted up onto the bank, pushed onward by the momentum of her own engines and that of the submarine.

  The bow pushed twenty feet into the rain-soaked earth, piling before it an oozing mound of mud that almost reached to her main deck. Grounded so firmly that she didn’t list more than a degree or two, her stern had been driven deep by her unnatural angle.

  Automatic watertight doors slammed throughout the vessel, echoing shots that were as jarring as they were useless. The Mario diCastorelli was in no danger of sinking. With her stern jutting out into the canal, and her bows hard into the shore, she wouldn’t be going anywhere without a fleet of salvage ships and tugboats.

  Still determined to save his vessel, Captain Chaufleus called for full reverse on both shafts, driving her engines far beyond their tolerances. He cranked the rudder from lock to lock, hoping to get the vessel to rock, and break the hold of the clinging mud. Apart from the churn of her screws kicking water into a white cauldron, his actions were futile.

  Roddy sagged, wiping a mixture of rain and sweat from his face. They had failed. He reached for his miniature radio. “Mercer, it’s Roddy. The sub’s been destroyed, but we’re grounded. The captain’s trying to break free, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m sorry.”

  Before Mercer could respond, Jim Patke broke in on the connection. Roddy had sent him to the fantail to watch the bomb ship through a pair of the ship’s powerful binoculars. “This is Devil One. There’s activity on the Change. They’re turning the vessel to block the rest of the canal and I think they’re prepping the lifeboats to abandon ship. They must have seen what happened to the sub. We should go get them.”

  “Negative.” It was Mercer. “You don’t have the time to worry about them or save the Mario. The Robert T. Change is going to blow in forty-five minutes.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Patke asked.

  “That’s when our ship goes up. According to Foch there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Get y
ourselves to shore and run as fast as you can.”

  “Mercer, you won’t be able to get the Englander Rose past us,” Roddy cried. “You’ll be stuck at the lock!”

  “We knew there was a real chance this could happen.” Mercer paused. “We’ll have to go with our second option and pray the VGAS cannon on the McCampbell is as accurate as they claim.”

  The Englander Rose Panama Canal, Panama

  Shortly before the Mario diCastorelli grounded, Mercer stood on the bridge of the Rose. He could guess why Roddy had cut him off on the radio. The pilot had enough on his hands trying to stop the Chinese from burying his freighter in the mud. And Mercer had plenty to keep him busy on his own ship.

  “Are you okay?” Lauren asked, striding past the ruined chart table, her M-16 trailing a wisp of smoke from her single shot.

  Mercer bent to massage his foot. “Now that the shooting’s stopped I realize I hurt my ankle when I jumped to the flying bridge.”

  “Quit your bellyaching,” Harry growled. He’d unscrewed the handle from his sword-cane and handed it to Mercer. He then nudged aside the helmsman’s body and took his position at the wheel.

  The silver handle that doubled as a flask had been refilled with Jack Daniel’s. Mercer took a pull and offered it to Lauren, who declined with a knowing smile. “Still the best birthday present I ever gave you,” he said to Harry.

  “Okay, let’s see what we have here.” With an expert glance, Harry noted compass heading, speed, wind direction and velocity, temperature and the readings on a dozen other gauges. “Lauren, honey, do me a favor. There should be a plaque somewhere around here that gives the ship’s dead weight and some engine information. I need to know what this old girl’s made of before we get going.”

  She started her search, saying, “Anyone but you call me honey like that and you can get yourself a good sexual harassment lawyer.”

  Rabidoux continued to talk with Foch over their radio net as he dragged the corpses to the captain’s cramped office. “Oui. . Oui. . d’accord, mon lieutenant.” He sought out Mercer, who had gone to the port wing bridge to watch the ship slow as Harry reduced her speed. “Lieutenant Foch needs to see you right away.”

  Mercer heard alarm in the young soldier’s voice. “What is it?”

  “The bomb’s timer has already been activated. The lieutenant is in the aft hold.”

  Mercer turned away without a word. He handed back the radio Captain Patke had given Lauren. “I’m going below. Foch thinks the bomb’s already primed.” Her face blanched. He wanted to assure her that everything was going to be all right, but she would have seen through the lie. “Coordinate whatever Harry needs with the McCampbell, just in case.”

  She overcame her momentary flash of fear. Her color returned and she managed a weak joke. “Funny to think of Harry giving orders to the crew of an American missile cruiser.”

  “I hope you mean funny as in bizarre and not funny ha-ha.”

  Running hard, it took him five minutes to find the hatchway that led to the rear hold. The metal door was open and he could see the waving beam of a flashlight Foch must have found nearby. The dim lightbulbs placed high on the ceiling cast no more than a weak glow, accentuating shadow more than providing light.

  He stepped over the coaming. His nose began to burn and his eyes water. Above the rust smell and the oily stench of fouled bilges was a chemical odor so sharp and so overpowering that even breathing through a flap of cloth from his sleeve couldn’t dull its reeking presence.

  The hold was fifty feet deep, forty wide, and nearly twenty tall. The rush of water against her cold hull plates sounded like a steady escape of steam. The cargo wasn’t laid out in orderly stacks, as he’d anticipated. Instead it had been placed in precarious pyramids and triangular projections along the hull, secured in place with heavy chain or thick canvas belts. Higher up, what looked like thick pipes running the length of the hold revealed themselves to be tubes of a puttylike substance that had been stuck to the steel.

  Having never heard of cargo being arranged in such an odd fashion, but knowing that there was no other explanation, Mercer gaped as he understood what lengths Liu had gone to to ensure the Panama Canal would be sealed for years to come.

  Foch strode over with another trooper, who trained his light on various features in the nightmarish space. “Oui, mon ami,” Foch said. “It is what you think. The devious son of a bitch has turned the entire ship into one enormous shaped charge. The way he has placed the explosives guarantees that every bit of energy will be properly directed. It looks like she’ll blow downward first and then an instant later the outer charges go.”

  Mercer said nothing, unwilling to believe what he was seeing. With the bomb ship tucked hard against one of the overshadowing hills in the Gaillard Cut, the detonative force would hollow out the seabed under the ship, probably fifty or even a hundred feet deep. The secondary charges, the thick tubes of plastic explosives running the length of the vessel, would then burrow into the rock underpinning the mountain. Add the synchronized explosion on the other ship, and the whole floor of the canal would be so fractured that the weight of the adjacent hills would deform the geology to the point where everything would fall in on itself.

  He’d worked enough shots in his career as a mining engineer to understand what would happen. Especially when he took into account how the rain-saturated ground would transmit shock with little energy dissipation. Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill would receive two enormous pressure waves an instant after the soils supporting them had been either removed or had surrendered to the phenomena of liquefaction.

  “You have to hand it to him,” Foch said. “Ingenious.”

  “Screw him,” Mercer snapped, hating that he did feel a grudging respect for Liu Yousheng. “You said the timer’s already running?”

  “This way.” Foch turned and retreated deeper into the shadowy hold, the handheld light seeming puny in the presence of so much deadly force.

  The men who’d set these charges, back in China most likely, hadn’t taken any precautions to hide the suitcase-sized timing and detonating mechanism. It sat openly on the deck next to one of the towering mounds of explosives. The wires running from it were thick, heavily insulated, and vanished to all points in the hold. Mercer looked at the digital timer set in a plastic panel on the otherwise blank case. They had fifty-one minutes exactly, and with each second he stared at the glowing numbers their window shrank that one second more.

  Mercer didn’t know anything about this type of equipment. He assumed it was military and asked Foch the only logical question that came to mind. “Can’t we just cut the wires?”

  “Possibly,” the soldier with Foch said. He was a German named Munz. “And it is possible that doing so will set off the charges.”

  “Munz is our explosives man,” Foch explained. “If any of us has a chance defusing the ship he’s it.”

  The German-born Legionnaire had already taken out some tools. They lay next to the evil-looking device like surgical instruments. And he showed the false quietude of a surgeon who hides that he’s not sure he can save the patient.

  “Do you need anything else?” Mercer asked.

  “I just called Rabidoux down to help,” Foch answered for the demolition man. “They work as a team.”

  “What I need,” Munz said in his precise English, “is for you to assume that I will not be able to disable this device. You must do what needs to be done, thinking I cannot stop it.”

  Mercer was shocked by the man’s pessimism. “Do you really think you can’t do it?”

  “Sir, I approach all bombs thinking I will fail because there will be a time when I am right.” He bent to his task and Foch and Mercer started back for the bridge.

  Once into the corridor beyond the hold, Foch elaborated on what Munz was saying. “It is the way it is done. We must never plan for a bomb to be defused. It is-” he searched for the appropriate English idiom-“wishful thinking. No one can guarantee they can take ou
t a device so we must be prepared for it going off.”

  “I think I understand,” Mercer replied. “It’s putting all your eggs in one basket. If that’s the case, let’s hope Roddy stopped the Mario from blocking the canal so we can sail this bitch into Lake Gatun where she can blow up without hurting anything.”

  “Do you have another option if somehow Monsieur Herrara doesn’t succeed?”

  Mercer closed his eyes, blocking the mental picture of what would have to be done in the event they couldn’t get the bomb ship to an isolated spot on the upper lake. “Oh, I got a plan all right,” he said without much enthusiasm. “Actually, the comm officer on the McCampbell thought it up.”

  “Yes?”

  “If we can’t go forward, then we’ll just have to take the Rose back through the Pedro Miguel Lock.”

  Lieutenant Foch stared at him. “How? The Chinese guards will never open the gates for us.”

  “No, but the United States Navy will.”

  They entered the bridge just as Roddy made his call to announce the Mario diCastorelli had been grounded. Lauren handed Mercer the radio.

  That was it, then, Mercer thought as he listened to Captain Patke’s report about the Robert T. Change being evacuated. They had no choice. He told them about the timing sequence and called for everyone on the radio link to switch over so they could hear him speaking to the USS McCampbell. “Heaven, Heaven, this is Angel, ah, Two.”

  “Go ahead, Angel. We’ve been monitoring, and know your current situation.”

  “Then you know what you have to do?”

  “Roger that. Information from the spotter aircraft has already been fed into the targeting computers. We’re awaiting your order to go. Be advised that there will be no shots for ranging. All rounds are fired for effect.”

  Mercer took that to mean that the first rocket-assisted rounds out of the six-inch semiautomatic VGAS cannon would land exactly where the computers said they would. “Roger that, Heaven. Please stand by.” He looked around the bridge.