Jack Du Brul - River of Ruin

The canal pilot standing next to him was Chinese, no doubt one of the Hatcherly employees that Liu Yousheng had been infiltrating into the Canal Authority. He dove for cover behind the control console. Rabidoux didn’t wait to see if he was armed, putting two rounds into the back of his neck before ducking through the ruined wing door. Mercer shifted so he could see the aft section of the wheelhouse as two men jumped behind the wooden chart table. Another figure ran farther aft, trying to reach the locked hatch where Lauren and Harry waited.

A shot came from behind the chart table, aimed where Mercer had been standing an instant before. The bullet pinged off the ship’s metal hide. Mercer was on his belly, crawling aft to get an angle on the two while Rabidoux maneuvered himself to the center of the bridge, which allowed him to cover both sides of the enclosed table.

Mercer studied the construction of the cabinet, saw it was made of wood and knew it was unlikely to deflect the high-velocity rounds from his M-16. He fired a savage burst into the table. White splinters exploded from the varnished oak as the bullets bored through.

One of the men sprang to his feet, swinging his type-87 assault rifle in a wild spread of fire, a lance of flame jetting from the barrel. His chest oozed from numerous hits, and a shard of wood had been rammed into his arm. And still he fought. Rabidoux put him down just before the arc of fire would have cut him in half.

Mercer chanced looking past the table. The crewman who’d fled the wheelhouse was just undogging the door. He got it open only an inch or so when Lauren blew him back with a single shot to the face. Rabidoux moved closer to the chart table, edging forward with his FAMAS at the ready. The fifth man lay in a pool of purple blood that spread as slowly as jelly, his eyes wide and sightless.

Covering each other as they explored the rest of the wheelhouse, they made certain that was the last of them. No one was hiding in the small radio shack or in an office belonging to the captain.

“Okay, Lauren,” Mercer called aft. “We’re clear.”

Looking forward past the crane and the vessel’s peaked bow, he saw the Robert T. Change moving steadily up the narrow canal, her wake like a lazy vortex of churned water. He couldn’t see anything to indicate her captain was altering their original plan. Good. This takes care of the easy part.

Because the Legionnaires used their own radios, Mercer asked Rabidoux to get a report from Lieutenant Foch. He lifted his mike back in position to talk to Roddy.

“It’s Mercer. What’s your situation?”

A half mile ahead of the Englander Rose , Roddy Herrara was fighting his ship with everything he had. He’d been expecting the moment when the sub attached to the diCastorelli would try to shove the big freighter off course. He even had lookouts watching the water for propwash, but still couldn’t believe the force the submersible exerted.

The Mario diCastorelli weighed probably twenty-five thousand tons and yet her bow continued to swing inexorably toward shore no matter how he worked the rudder and applied reverse thrust to her offside shaft. The remoralike sub was doubtlessly designed to act as an underwater tug, but even a powerful tugboat couldn’t move a freighter if she didn’t want to go.

The parasite submarine had to be equipped with some kind of new technology, Roddy thought, something designed for the military, for their newest torpedoes maybe. Peroxide-powered hydrojets, or something even more exotic. Whatever it was, it moved the freighter’s bow a few points on the compass every minute and all Roddy could do was stall the inevitable.

“Not now,” he answered and ignored whatever else Mercer asked.

The great ship moved relentlessly toward the left bank no matter how he tried to keep her at her head. The entire vessel shuddered with the strain of fighting the diverter under her hull. They were deep in the mountains now, towering stone monoliths that loomed over the waterway like the sides of the Grand Canyon Roddy had seen on a family vacation to el Norte .

Behind them, he knew, the Robert T. Change continued on her mission to destroy the canal. Roddy could almost feel her presence, something ghostly and evil. Something he was powerless to stop.

The captain of the ship, a lanky Greek with the mouth-twisting name of Leonidaes Chaufleus, waited at the wheel for Roddy’s next instruction, one bony hand on the wheel, the other ready to massage the throttle levers.

Roddy paced from one side of the bridge to the other, studying the canal and looking at the swirl of boiling water near the bow where the unseen submarine labored to ram the ship into the land. With each circuit of the bridge he had to step over the two trussed-up Panamanian guards who’d unknowingly been assigned to a ship destined to be destroyed. Wisely forgoing machismo for survival, they hadn’t put up a fight when the Green Berets stormed the vessel. Their instructions had been to defend against thieves, not an American assault force that moved with the fluidity of quicksilver.

“Captain,” Roddy said as he was struck by a sudden inspiration. “Can you drop anchors from here?”

“Is possible,” the Greek said.

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.