Jack Du Brul - River of Ruin

His hand tightened on the binoculars and began to tremble. “Sun’s on that ship.”

“Who? The torturer?”

“Yes.”

“Well, goddamn.”

“Harry, we can’t let them get away.”

“I’m working on it, pal, I’m working on it.”

Although she was barely moving under her own power, the current rushing down the canal was enough to keep the Rose charging at the Korvald . The range dropped to a hundred yards, then eighty. Armed men suddenly appeared at the rail of the Chinese ship. They opened fire, sporadically at first, and then more sustained and concentrated. For the third time, bullets ricocheted around the bridge. Harry and Mercer dropped to the deck to find cover.

“Shit!”

“What is it?” Mercer asked over the din, fearing Harry had been hit.

“I need to see which way the Korvald ’s going to turn. She could back around and head straight for open water or she could cut inside us and circle the harbor to get out behind us.”

“How can you tell which way she’ll go?” A round blew the stuffing out of the chair Lauren had been using.

“I need to see the wash from her bow thruster and how her rudder’s cocked.”

Lauren shouted from the protection of the offside wing. “Get out here, you two. You’re going to get yourselves killed.”

“It isn’t worth it,” Foch added.

Mercer ignored them and tried his radio. “Heaven, come in. This is Angel Two. Where’s that chopper?”

No sooner had he asked than the beating rotors of an SH- 60 Seahawk filled the bridge with noise as it thundered twenty feet over their heads. The downblast whipped a brutal wind through the shattered windows. The chopper had come in low, using the drifting hulk of the Englander Rose as cover, popping into view at the last moment. It pirouetted to get an angle for a door gunner to rake the missile ship with his M-60.

Hitting only two of the Chinese soldiers, he still managed to clear the railing as the others dove for cover.

Mercer helped Harry to his feet. There was a frothing patch of water near the Korvald ’s bow. Using the powerful athwartship thruster she was beginning her turn, hoping to beat the Rose by swinging herself to shoot directly down the canal.

Harry spotted it immediately. “We’ve got them.” He cranked the wheel toward the big reefer ship.

Maneuvering her bow so that it was perpendicular to the dry dock but still pointed toward shore, Captain Wong had hoped to beat the derelict by dancing inside her. Had he known what Harry White knew, he would have spun out the other way and easily outflanked the sinking ship.

With twenty yards separating the ships, and both directed more or less downstream, Harry cranked the throttles one last time. Ever so slightly she built up headway, forcing more water into her holds. She started to capsize.

Mercer scrambled up the deck to the safety of the flying bridge and helped the others draw Harry up to them. They pressed themselves to the deck, holding fast against the bulkhead that would soon become the floor.

The dynamic angle of the keel and rudder shot the ship toward the Korvald . With water pouring over her rail, the Englander Rose nosed into the refrigerator ship just hard enough to tear a large gash in her hull. With her momentum expended, the Rose settled over even more, fountains of air and water exploding from ventilators and leaky hatch covers as her interior spaces were drowned.

When her bow struck the bottom her keel bent in an agonized scream of wrenching metal. She settled deeper, rolling ever so slowly. Her forward cranes were smashed like matchsticks when they slammed the Korvald ’s deck. The upper edge of the superstructure crashed into the other ship’s wheelhouse in an explosion of broken glass and men too slow to get out of the way. The funnel snapped off when it struck, and rolled like an enormous pipe onto the deck. It caught two gunmen and crushed them flat.

Wave action from the collision separated the two vessels for a moment before they struck again, harder, opening another hole in the Korvald ’s hull. As the Rose continued to settle on the shallow bottom, torn plates, tangles of rope and other debris locked the two vessels together. The Chinese ship was pulled downward by the Rose ’s dead weight. She ended up with a ten-degree list when at last the tramp freighter stopped sinking. But with water rushing through her torn hull, the Korvald also began to go down.

The Rose lay as though dead, with more than half of her bulk underwater and waves lapping just five feet below where her crew huddled.

Rabidoux was the first to recover. “I think they are going to come after us for what Harry did to their ship.”

Lauren disentangled her legs from under Foch, struggling to find her orientation on this world turned sideways. Looking down through the bridge door she saw nothing but water. She grabbed her weapon. “He’s right. We can’t stay here. They’re going to cut us down.”

Mercer fingered the knot on the back of his head. He’d hit it against the wall during the final plunge. “Let’s give it a minute.”

“What?” they all shouted at once.

Mercer twisted his wrist so they could see his borrowed watch. It was 11:00. “We’ll make our move when the Change lights off. The chopper can provide cover.” He radioed his plan to the McCampbell , who would pass it on to the pilot of the Seahawk, swirling out of reach of small-arms fire from the Korvald .

“According to my watch,” Lauren said, her free hand gripping her M-16, “it should come in four, three, two, one. .”

Nothing.

“It’s that Rolex you wear,” Foch teased. “Too accurate. They’re using a cheap Chinese knockoff.”

Harry was about to crack a joke when a dazzling flash arced across the underside of the low-lying clouds, a blinding display that left his jaw slack and his eyes stinging.

Twelve miles up the canal, seven thousand tons of explosives detonated. It wasn’t so much an explosion as a hurricane of fire that shredded the sky as it bloomed and billowed into a towering column of flame. The Robert T. Change ceased to exist, wiped from the earth in the first milliseconds of the blast. Slapped as if by a giant fist, the Mario diCastorelli was lifted from the water and tossed nearly a half mile, while chunks of her hull sailed even farther. The billion gallons of vaporized water added to the overpressure that hammered the surrounding rock. In an instant, the soil below the canal turned into a slurry no stiffer than Jell-O and the fractured mountains began to collapse, tumbling and grinding and filling the crater gouged by the explosion. Clouds of dust rose around the blast scene like the banks of ash that pour from a volcanic eruption.

The shock wave traveling through the earth made the surface of the canal near the Rose come alive. They could see the growing fireball climbing over the horizon but could hear nothing yet as jittering waves topped ten feet and washed over their tight group. The pressure wave hit a second later, and then came the rumbling thunder of the detonation, a roar like a thousand jet aircraft.

In the cut, tens of thousands of cubic yards of rock and debris tumbled from the mountainside in an endless cascade. On the opposite bank was a gently sloping field nearly four acres square. The structural shifts in topography caused the top ten feet of dirt covering the field to slide like a conveyor belt into the canal. The avalanches fell unabated for several minutes, and slides would continue for days as the landscape resettled itself.

For the first time since October 10, 1913, when a telegraphed signal from Woodrow Wilson in the White House detonated the dike separating the Gaillard Cut from Lake Gatun, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were no longer joined. The most vital sealane in the history of maritime commerce had been severed. Below the churning dust and dissipating flames, angry water lapped at both sides of an earthen plug that stretched from bank to bank.