River of Ruin (61 page)

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 each 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
.

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.”