River of Ruin (41 page)

The surge hit so strongly that it nearly stripped her mask over her head. In an instant she lost her forward momentum and was being drawn backward. The two Chinese were only a couple of feet ahead of her and they too were caught in the pull. The mechanical gates that controlled flow had cracked open. The current was already stronger than any Lauren had faced.

She couldn’t help looking back at the intake tunnel that was sucking her in like some horrible mouth. For a couple of seconds Lauren futilely resisted the force with her arms and legs. She swam faster than the Chinese divers and in a moment all three came abreast of each other. Yet it was a race to remain stationary. The gates opened farther and the current doubled, then doubled again. There was no way to resist it. They were caught, like flotsam in a whirlpool, and no amount of struggling could fight the pull. One of the frogmen dumped his weight belt in hopes he could float free. The second it took to slap at the buckle cost him several feet.

Lauren knew what she had to do.

They were twenty feet from the opening, accelerating toward it each second. There was no way she could prevent herself from going in. She could only hope to survive the ride. She committed herself by breaking her swim rhythm and grabbed for the diver next to her. Her grip slowed the beat of his leg. An instant of panic caused him to stop swimming altogether. Lauren torqued her body, bringing them broadside to the surge with him closer to the lock. Like a pair of kites caught in a sudden updraft they lost all control, flailing, pulled backward even faster than before. They smashed into the slower diver and all three tumbled in the jet of water. Lauren maintained her position behind them by holding on as tight as she could.

The rush of water sounded like a liquid hurricane. Lauren pressed her mask against the shoulder of the man in front of her and clamped her jaw on her mouthpiece.

Their target was eighteen feet in diameter but luck would have it that they were just to the right of the opening so they were drawn in at an angle. Lauren ducked her head as they were swept inside and felt the jolt as the first diver in line had his skull split open by the impact with the pipe’s concrete lip. The fountain of blood caught in the dive lights swirled in countless back-eddies.

Just one scrape against the lining of the tunnel would be enough to peel flesh down to the bone so Lauren fought the men, not the current, always keeping her body protected as they scuffed along the conduit. It was like holding on to a mattress while falling down a cliff. Disoriented by the endless tumble, she lost all sense of direction. The bubbles from her regulator danced like dervishes.

A light swept ahead and Lauren saw that amid the wild flurry of motion the draw of water being sucked down into the cross-culverts was pulling them across the tunnel. They’d already passed at least half of the fourteen inlets. It was only a matter of time before one of them pulled them in.

Like an animal working at a piece of meat, the torrent tossed them wildly and still Lauren managed to keep the two Chinese in front of her. Either the one in the middle, who she could feel was still breathing, didn’t understand her intentions or was too paralyzed by fear to resist. A roar like a subway rushing through the darkness filled her head. As they flipped again, the wrist light showed they careened scant inches from the left side of the pipe. Lauren had two seconds to brace herself. One of the ten-foot cross-culverts was just ahead and she knew this one was going to grab them.

When they hit the rim of the ninety-degree angle, the staggering collision blew her mouthpiece from her lips, her lungs emptying in a gust of pain. The corpse of the partially decapitated diver took most of the impact, the pressure of two people behind forcing the last of his blood to erupt from the ruin of his skull. The middle diver absorbed the rest of the blow, his rib cage shattering like glass.

Pressure held them to the concrete wall for an instant before the current yanked them in again. They dropped a short distance in a wrenching swoop as Lauren’s lungs ached to breathe. She couldn’t feel her mouthpiece but knew it was waving around her like a tentacle. The tunnel leveled out and an instant later they flashed beneath the first of the stem valves that fed water into the bottom of the lock chamber.

One of the bodies was pulled from her grip and forced up through the opening.

The water had lost part of its force, giving Lauren the courage to let go of the second corpse with one hand to snag her regulator. Her lungs were on fire. She could see the mouthpiece curling in front of her, but couldn’t coordinate her movements to grab it.

The end of her flipper hit the top of a lifter valve sunk partially into the floor of the tunnel and was torn off her foot. The hit sent a bolt of agony from her ankle. The last reserve of air she’d managed to hoard escaped in a silent scream. They streamed by another valve. Lauren could feel the counterforce of water entering the culvert from the second feeder tunnel located in the seawall dividing the two locks. Her forward progress slowed further. She lunged for the regulator again, forgetting all about her scuba training and the proper technique for retrieving a lost mouthpiece.

She needed air. The darkness spreading across her vision was in her head, not the surrounding water. Her lungs convulsed, a sharp draw that felt like her diaphragm had torn. She was about to drown.

One last desperate reach and she found the regulator. Gripping it tight, she shoved it past her greedy lips. The first taste of air almost made her cough. The second was like heaven.

Then the body, which had drifted below her, smashed into the third valve and the regulator was jerked from her mouth. She hadn’t realized she’d been drawing breath from the frogman’s tank. His body, and its life-giving regulator, vanished behind her and again she found her lungs nearly empty. The current pushed her closer to the tunnel’s ceiling.

She reached the center valve, banged hard against the edge of the opening with her air tank, and was suddenly floating in water that seemed as tranquil as a pond. She’d made it! She was inside one of the great lock chambers, eight hundred feet down its length from where she’d entered. Above she could see the silvery reflection of high-intensity lamps mounted above the facility. She just wanted to lay there and watch the dance of light on the underside of the water. Her back ached, her ankle screamed and she was so dizzy she could no longer think. Just lay here for a minute.

Like a warning from a friend who knew she’d forgotten something, her lungs convulsed again, a mild jolt that reminded her she hadn’t taken a breath in almost a minute. Without conscious thought, she stuck her arm straight behind her back, swept it forward and felt the air hose tickle along the inside of her arm. In a second she had the regulator in place and oxygen in her lungs.

It took her another minute to clear her head enough to check the level of air in her tanks. Amazingly she still had fifteen minutes. While it felt like hours, just eleven minutes had elapsed since she’d first spotted the Chinese divers. While the forty-five-minute deadline she’d given Mercer was upon her, she knew he’d be waiting for her for at least another twenty or twenty-five minutes despite his assurance he’d heed her order.

All she needed to do was swim up to the surface next to the ship she could sense looming above her, wait there until the lock doors swung open, and then swim back to Juan Aranjo’s little Wellcraft.

Simple.

She checked her depth. Thirty-eight feet. She had been working at a greater depth but took a guess that she’d purged the excess nitrogen from her blood by fighting the Chinese and slaloming through the culverts.

She began climbing upward, using her one remaining fin to maintain an easy pace, her mouth somewhat slack to allow the expanding air in her lungs to escape. There was a ten-foot gap between the side of the lock and the scaly hull of the ship going up the waterway. She held close to the cement, fearful of the spiky barnacles coating the ship like a jagged veneer of thorns. The vessel had probably languished in the Bahia de Panama for weeks or even months, accumulating such a thick skin of marine life, while its owner pulled together the money to pay for the transit. A not uncommon occurrence.

She had just passed the ship’s keel when she drew a breath that didn’t fill her lungs. She inhaled again and was left with a deep hollowness in her chest. Lauren knew what was wrong. Her tanks didn’t have fifteen minutes. They were empty; the gauge had stuck. She pushed harder for the surface, remaining calm, remembering her training.

As the sun set across the isthmus, the wind picked up in a sudden gust that slapped against the tired freighter in the lock. The ship’s pilot, on just his second solo run through the canal, hadn’t anticipated the dusk wind shears and the vessel got away from him, drifting closer and closer to the lock wall.

Lauren saw the gap of murky light closing as she swam for the surface. From ten feet it had shrunk to five in seconds and continued to dwindle. She was caught between the drifting freighter and a solid wall of concrete. She would reach the surface only to be pulped by the inevitable collision. She had one chance.

The air in her buoyancy compensator continued to haul her upward even as she stopped pistoning for the surface. Despite having empty lungs and tank, she had to sink below the ship if she was going to survive for a few moments more. The gap between ship and wall was down to four feet when she spilled the air from her vest. The change in buoyancy was immediate and she began to plummet, pulled downward by her weight belt and heavy dive gear.

Her hand scraped against the side of the ship, opening ragged cuts in four fingers before she could draw them back. Her lungs screamed for air. She could barely detect the difference in the darkness below her where she would clear the underside of the freighter’s keel. It seemed a thousand feet below her. Her tank bumped the wall, pushing her forward, and her hands brushed the hull again. More blood clouded the water.

The instant her feet sank under the bottom of the ship, she angled her body like a gymnast to get out of the way. The vessel slapped the lock two feet over her head. The metallic impact echoed in her skull like a great bronze bell, a sound that shook her bones and assaulted her hearing. Disoriented by the concussion, she continued to fall. She needed air, but she was too tired and too starved for oxygen to remember that she had to swim under the ship to reach the surface on its far side. Her backside hit the concrete floor and she fell back, her spine arched over her tank. Her vision became a kaleidoscope of swirling color as her brain slowly suffocated.

One point of light remained sharp amid the torrent of colors and she reached out for it, knowing in the back of her mind that she was grasping at nothing but a phantom. The brilliance faded, her brain unable to produce anything but monochrome. Her lungs pumped, but there was nothing there. Her chest and the air cylinder strapped to her back had equalized at empty.

“You were right about the submersible, Mercer,” she tried to say around her mouthpiece, letting in the first taste of the water that would kill her.

In her last seconds, the darkness that had filled her brain exploded into a dazzling incandescence before she could no longer stop her mouth from going slack and her lungs inflating.

 

It was a struggle to maintain the persona of a photographer. Mercer found himself increasingly looking at the watch and not pretending to shoot pictures of the locks at sunset. Ships continued to parade by. Juan Aranjo had settled himself on the stern bench seat, pulling his stained baseball cap low over his eyes. Though he didn’t have Mercer’s emotional investment, he kept shifting his position as if the nervous energy radiating off his passenger was a physical distraction.

Mercer drank through two liters of water in the first forty minutes out of sheer nervousness. Floodlights all along the lock chambers came on, bathing the area in a glow that flattened perspective. The water beyond the pools of illumination had grown inky.

As they waited, a group of men gathered at the end of the seawall dividing the two locks. The distance and the noise from the nearby ships made it impossible to hear what they shouted to the pleasure boat, but when Mercer turned the camera on them, their gestures made it clear. They wanted Mercer and Juan to clear out.

Ignoring their growing agitation, Mercer threw a wave and continued to pretend to take pictures of the ships. Lauren’s deadline passed. Mercer’s palms had gone slick and his throat dry. Another man joined the group. Unlike the workers in their overalls and hard hats, he was dressed in a shirt and tie. He carried a megaphone and his amplified voice boomed in Spanish.

Mercer touched his ear and shouted back. “
No hablo
.”

“You are no longer permitted in this area,” the man said in English. “Leave immediately.”

Mercer waited a minute before moving to the driver’s seat. He twisted the boat’s key in the ignition but didn’t turn on the fuel pump. The motor caught, ran for a few seconds, then sputtered to silence. He tried it three more times with the same result and threw up his hands in frustration. He turned to face the men on the seawall and shrugged his shoulders.

A rust-streaked grain carrier suddenly slammed against the cement seawall when the pilot misjudged a wind gust. The sound was like a cannon blast.

“We will send a pilot boat to tow you to Gamboa,” the canal worker shouted. He pulled the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.

“Shit.” Mercer searched the calm water for any sign of the divers. Nothing.

It would take ten minutes for a launch to reach them and already Lauren and Vic were overdue. As a soldier, Lauren lived by the clock and had given a maximum time. He checked her watch. They’d been down for fifty-seven minutes. She’d made it clear that their absolute limit would pass in three more. Mercer’s heart began to race.

Nothing looked amiss at the locks, nothing to indicate that they’d been captured. The mules had tugged the errant freighter back to the center of the lock chamber. Lauren and Vic must be swimming back. If they ran out of air, all they had to do was surface. He studied the water in the fading light. There were no telltale trails of bubbles, no disturbances on the silky surface.