Jack Du Brul - River of Ruin

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-