by Jack Du Brul
She waited for two heartbeats before moving forward. Once she could see around the corner that had hidden the guard, she called back, “All clear.”
The sudden attack had robbed their element of surprise so they mounted the stairs at a run, Mercer and Rabidoux moving side by side, step in step. Lauren and Harry remained a half flight below them as they corkscrewed up the decks. They reached the bridge level without incident, and when they saw the solid door blocking their progress, they understood why. Whatever crewmen were still in the upper decks had barricaded themselves in the wheelhouse. The hatch was solid steel, dogged tight and locked from the inside. Nothing short of a satchel charge, which they didn’t have, would blow it open.
“Is there another way?” Mercer asked Harry.
“Not on this level. We’ll have to go down one and then try to get in from outside. When we approached I saw a stairway leading from there up to the wing bridge.”
Mercer looked at his watch. “We’re running out of time.” He keyed his throat mike. “Roddy, what’s your situation?”
“We’re almost between Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill. We’re expecting the sub to try to divert us any moment.”
“You’re ready for it?”
“They used this trick to get me fired once. They won’t get away with it a second time.”
Mercer looked to Harry again. “What about going up one deck and just jumping onto the wing bridge?”
“You’ll either take them by surprise or they’ll take you,” Harry said seriously. “But it sounds better than trying to fight our way up from outside.”
They backtracked to the stairs and climbed up a dim shaft that ended in a flat hatch. It took all Mercer’s strength and a push from Sergeant Rabidoux to unseal the hardened paint that had frozen the portal solid. Heaving against its dead weight they finally threw it open. It dropped flush with the roof of the wheelhouse. Rainwater eased the cordite sting from Mercer’s eyes and he let a few drops trickle down his throat.
From this vantage he could see the Robert T. Change about a quarter mile ahead but the Mario diCastorelli was out of view as the three ships wended their way deeper into the mountains. The hills were bare, blasted rock, chiseled by explosives with the precision of the Egyptian pyramids. Some had been pinned with huge steel rods to solidify them further. Waterfalls splashed to the canal, torrents made greater because the ground was so saturated by the rainy season’s regular deluges. Something Mercer was sure Liu’s experts had counted on.
He took in all of this in a moment’s glance. He was certain the captain of this vessel was radioing his counterpart on the other bomb ship and discussing options.
Making sure to keep his footing on the metal deck, he shuffled to the edge of the wheelhouse while Rabidoux moved to the opposite side, positioning themselves above where the wing bridges cantilevered over the water. They exchanged a quick look to synchronize their timing and moved as one, dropping neatly the eight feet to the stubby flying bridges.
Landing hard, he could see Rabidoux across the expanse of the bridge already had his FAMAS ready. Mercer brought up his weapon, picking his first target, presumably the captain because he was screaming into a handheld radio, and rattled off a tight three-round burst through the glass weather door that protected the bridge from the elements.
As the glass fell in a crystal avalanche, the Chinese captain of the Englander Rose was flung as if body punched. Scarlet drops of blood danced in a tangent away from his crumpling corpse. The helmsman went down at the same moment, raked from hip to head by the French commando.
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.
The ship shuddered as she fought the anchor before the officer slowly allowed more chain to drop through the fairleads, keeping tension on the anchor so it wouldn’t lose its grip.
“Good. Good,” Roddy whispered softly, feeling the ship return to its tug-of-war with the sub. The Chinese crew down there would never know what was coming.
He raced for the starboard wing bridge to watch the chain disappear into the green water far below. He could also look across to port and see the shore coming up alarmingly fast.
He had to give it just a few more—“Now! Bring up the anchor!”
Like a dog snapped back on a leash, the Mario diCastorelli came up hard against her anchor when the capstan was reversed. The violent action sent Roddy staggering into a railing and sent two of the American commandos watching on the bridge to their knees.
Two things happened at once. The anchor chain’s weakest link, deep under the water near the anchor itself, failed under the enormous strain. Like a whip, the chain came flying out of the water at a hundred miles per hour and snapped back at the ship. The forward cargo hatch was quarter-inch steel. The chain tore a twenty-foot gash across its surface with little more difficulty than a knife cuts paper. The impact blew the links apart, spraying the superstructure with chunks of shrapnel the size of a human head. One struck the superstructure’s forward window and embedded itself in a bulkhead at the rear of the bridge, narrowly missing two Green Berets.
The second thing that occurred was that the electromagnetic clamps that held the Chinese submersible to the freighter’s hull let go.
Free from its monstrous burden, the truck-sized submersible accelerated away from the ship, driving at full speed toward the shoreline before its two-man crew could stop it. It hit the canal’s edge like a torpedo strike, a burst of water and froth that lofted twenty feet before splashing back to earth. It surfaced seconds later, an oxide-red tube resembling a ship’s boiler with an integrated impeller fan at least fifteen feet across.
Roddy saw immediately why Liu had never tried to divert one of the big PANAMAX ships. The size of the submersible meant she had to attach herself under shallow draft vessels, and even then the unusual craft would have been dangerously close to being crushed against the bottom.
The sub remained surfaced with water gushing into its shattered nose. Air trapped in the hull seethed and made the water look like it was boiling. A moment later, the struggling figure of a crewman emerged from the battered hulk. The submariner was injured; he fought the roiling waves using only one arm while the other floated uselessly next to him.
Well versed at the dynamics of these large ships, Roddy knew that his quick thinking and decisive action wouldn’t be enough to save the Mario diCastorelli. He glanced into the wheelhouse to see Captain Chaufleus frantically working rudder and throttle in a desperate attempt to swing her bows away from the shore. Even he knew it wasn’t in the cards.
Roddy turned back to see the Chinese sub’s surviving crewman look up at the massive wall of steel bearing down on him. Roddy couldn’t hear his scream but watched his mouth open, a round black hole in his round white face.
The ship bowled over the sub, crushing it flat, and struck the bank with an impact ten times worse than the jolt when the anchor caught the bottom. The rending of steel on rock shook the massive vessel like an earthquake. Even those who’d prepared themselves for the collision by grabbing for handholds were thrown to the floor or propelled into bulkheads. Roddy was almost tossed over the railing as the bows crumpled inward and then lifted up onto the bank, pushed onward by the momentum of her own engines and that of the submarine.
The bow pushed twenty feet into the rain-soaked earth, piling before it an oozing mound of mud that almost reached to her main deck. Grounded so firmly that she didn’t list more than a degree or two, her stern had been driven deep by her unnatural angle.
Automatic watertight doors slammed throughout the vessel, echoing shots that were as jarring as they were useless. The Mario diCastorelli was in no danger of sinking. With her stern jutting out into the canal, and her bows hard into the shore, she wouldn’t be going anywhere without a fleet of salvage ships and tugboats.
Still determined to save his vessel, Captain Chaufleus called for full reverse on both shafts, driving her engines far beyond their tolerances. He cranked the rudder from lock to lock, hoping to get the vessel to rock, and break the hold of the clinging mud. Apart from the churn of her screws kicking water into a white cauldron, his actions were futile.
Roddy sagged, wiping a mixture of rain and sweat from his face. They had failed. He reached for his miniature radio. “Mercer, it’s Roddy. The sub’s been destroyed, but we’re grounded. The captain’s trying to break free, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m sorry.”
Before Mercer could respond, Jim Patke broke in on the connection. Roddy had sent him to the fantail to watch th
e bomb ship through a pair of the ship’s powerful binoculars. “This is Devil One. There’s activity on the Change. They’re turning the vessel to block the rest of the canal and I think they’re prepping the lifeboats to abandon ship. They must have seen what happened to the sub. We should go get them.”
“Negative.” It was Mercer. “You don’t have the time to worry about them or save the Mario. The Robert T. Change is going to blow in forty-five minutes.”
“Are you sure about that?” Patke asked.
“That’s when our ship goes up. According to Foch there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Get yourselves to shore and run as fast as you can.”
“Mercer, you won’t be able to get the Englander Rose past us,” Roddy cried. “You’ll be stuck at the lock!”
“We knew there was a real chance this could happen.” Mercer paused. “We’ll have to go with our second option and pray the VGAS cannon on the McCampbell is as accurate as they claim.”
The Englander Rose Panama Canal, Panama
Shortly before the Mario diCastorelli grounded, Mercer stood on the bridge of the Rose. He could guess why Roddy had cut him off on the radio. The pilot had enough on his hands trying to stop the Chinese from burying his freighter in the mud. And Mercer had plenty to keep him busy on his own ship.
“Are you okay?” Lauren asked, striding past the ruined chart table, her M-16 trailing a wisp of smoke from her single shot.
Mercer bent to massage his foot. “Now that the shooting’s stopped I realize I hurt my ankle when I jumped to the flying bridge.”
“Quit your bellyaching,” Harry growled. He’d unscrewed the handle from his sword-cane and handed it to Mercer. He then nudged aside the helmsman’s body and took his position at the wheel.
The silver handle that doubled as a flask had been refilled with Jack Daniel’s. Mercer took a pull and offered it to Lauren, who declined with a knowing smile. “Still the best birthday present I ever gave you,” he said to Harry.