The Saboteurs

by Clive Cussler

  Court Talbot opened his mouth to protest. Goethals silenced him with a look. “I don’t like it either. They haven’t gotten permission from the Panamanian government to operate outside the zone, which means the Red Vipers will retreat deeper into the jungle after hitting us. I’m sure the diplomats will get the authority for the Marines to chase them, but it’s going to be a dog and pony show. Like I said, I was inclined to let you can hunt them with your men, but this negates that entirely.”

  “May I make a suggestion?” Talbot said.

  “What?”

  “Let me try to find them before the Marines arrive. How long will that be?”

  Goethals lit a cigarette. “It’s going to be some time,” he admitted. “They need to mobilize them first and then get ’em down here on a troop transport. A month, probably.”

  “By which time Viboras Rojas will have grown in size and power.”

  While Goethals said nothing, it was a point he recognized. “That’s already happening. We haven’t made this public, but when you were in California, they raided a warehouse at Pedro Miguel and made off with a ton of explosives.”

  “Damn.”

  “No idea what they’re going to use it for, can’t be good.”

  “I’d like to see the warehouse,” Bell said.

  Goethals blew a plume of smoke up at the ceiling fan. “Think my men missed something?”

  “Doubtful,” Bell said diplomatically. “I’m the type of man who likes to see things for himself.”

  A moment passed. “I suppose if you’re good enough to single-handedly save Bill Densmore’s life, you deserve some leeway. I’ll allow it. However, you’ll need an escort at all times.”

  “What about me, Colonel?”

  “You can tag along, if you like.”

  “Thanks, I would, but what about letting me and my men go after the Viboras?”

  “My hands are tied. Unless there’s a massive escalation that will convince Washington that we don’t have the time to waste waiting for the Marines, you can’t search for them in the zone.”

  “And the local government has no interest searching for them in Panama, so there’s nothing to be done.”

  “That’s it precisely.”

  Goethals’s aide knocked and opened the door. “They’re here, sir.”

  “Thanks, Frederick. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ve got to tell some archeologists that the permit they had when this country was part of Colombia is void. Whatever bits and bobs they hoped to find have already been flooded when we sealed the Gatun Dam.”

  Bell and Talbot got to their feet. “Thank you for your time, Colonel.”

  “Yes, yes . . . Frederick.” The aide popped his head back through the door. “Get these gentlemen passes to be in the zone, and find Sam Westbrook. It’s his day off, but I saw him around here earlier.” He looked at Bell. “Westbrook’s one of my best men. He was the man who discovered the break-in.”

  “Thank you,” Bell said. “That’s a big help.”

  Ten minutes later, they were at the rail station just down from the administration building. Talbot dismissed his driver with some last-minute instructions, and they made it aboard the 10:10 train.

  “This is the secret to the whole construction project,” Sam Westbrook said, tapping his foot on the floor of the passenger carriage.

  It was an old railcar used by workers. The floors were dirty with mud, and the seats were gritty from clinkers thrown from the locomotive’s stack. The passengers were all workingmen.

  “The train?” Bell said.

  Westbrook was not yet thirty, with dark hair and eyes and a strong cleft in his chin. He was handsome enough yet had the unfortunate luck of not even topping five foot four. His handshake had been firm, but his hand was small in Bell’s. He was dressed in denim pants tucked into heavy boots and a linen shirt. He wore a panama hat similar to Bell’s. He spoke with a heavy New York accent.

  “Yes, the railroads. That’s the one thing the French never got right. They had decent steam shovels but couldn’t get the rock and dirt out of the excavations fast enough.”

  “Is that your background?”

  “New York Transit Authority,” he said proudly. “Started when I was sixteen and by the time I left to come here I was first assistant scheduler. We were responsible for making sure every train was on time at every station across the entire system.

  “Down here, we use the railroad like it’s a giant conveyor belt linking the Culebra Cut, where the lion’s share of the excavating is done, to where we need to dump the overburden. Most went to Gatun, to construct the dam that makes the entire canal possible, while some came here to Panama City to construct seawalls and reclaim land.”

  “How many trains per day?”

  “Five hundred. That works out to be about a train a minute during daylight hours. We’re moving more debris out of Culebra in a year than what the French managed in all their seventeen years here. I’ll take you to see the cut after I show you the warehouse. You really can’t imagine a five-hundred-foot-deep, thousand-foot-wide man-made valley that stretches nine miles. It’s something you have to take in with your own eyes.”

  The train snaked through a jungle so thick that Bell couldn’t see more than a few yards into the foliage. The growth oftentimes almost met overhead the railcars, so the effect was like riding through a jade-colored tunnel. They passed an occasional depot or siding, which were the only indications that man had had any impact on the lush landscape.

  The heat and humidity were rising the higher the sun climbed into the sky. It was worse than any sweltering New York City heat wave, and Bell imagined he’d welcome the next deluge of rain for the temporary relief it provided.

  Even though the train stopped at Mira Flores, the station sat behind some enormous warehouses so Bell couldn’t see the giant locks being constructed.

  “These here are the double locks,” Westbrook said. “There’s just a single set at Pedro Miguel, but don’t worry, you’ll still be impressed.”

  “How high above sea level will the locks raise the ships?”

  “Lake Gatun, and the rest of the canal, will be eighty-five feet above the oceans, so each individual lock chamber raises or lowers a ship about thirty feet.”

  “And all the water comes from the Chagres River?”

  “Yes. It was the reason this isn’t a sea level canal like the Suez, which the French originally wanted to build. They arrived in Panama and just started digging at the continental divide with no real plan on how to control the Chagres at full flood. Truth be told, when we first started, we wanted a sea level canal too yet soon realized it was impossible. The Chagres during the rainy season is a beast we simply can’t tame.

  “Once we’d properly surveyed the possible routes, it was clear we needed locks. I can’t imagine the precision it took to set everything at the right elevations across a fifty-mile canal, but that’s exactly what they’ve done. And here’s a kicker—because of ocean currents, the Pacific Ocean is a foot higher than the Atlantic and has twenty-foot tides compared to three-footers over in Colón.”

  “There were so many challenges to overcome,” Court Talbot said, “that I had my doubts it would ever happen.”

  Westbrook nodded. “A lot of people felt that way at first, but John Stevens, the chief engineer before Colonel Goethals, knew what he was doing. He was a railwayman, like me, and had overseen the laying of more than a thousand miles of track in some of the worst conditions America’s Northwest could throw at him.”

  With a blast from its whistle and the clang of couplings stretching out, the train pulled from the station. It was only a short distance to the next construction site on the canal, the Pedro Miguel Locks.

  Here, Bell got a better view of the monumental scale of what was being accomplished in the Panamanian jungle. The site stretched for more than a hundre
d acres. Just clearing that much jungle alone was an enormous undertaking. Then it all had been dug down so that the foundations would be below the canal’s eventual bed. And then they built perhaps the largest man-made structure ever conceived.

  The concrete walls of each lock chamber were fifty-five feet thick at the base with eighteen-foot-diameter culverts running through them so water from above the locks could be allowed into the structure from below. In this fashion, the boat in the lock wouldn’t be buffeted by the force of the water. The lock walls stood eighty feet tall and stretched for a thousand feet. The steel doors were among the largest on the planet, though they were hollow and watertight so their buoyancy meant they could be opened and closed with only a single electric motor.

  Each of the two side-by-side chambers were a hundred and ten feet wide, wide enough to accommodate whatever next-generation battleships the Navy built. The outside walls of the chambers were stepped back like the sides of a modern-day ziggurat and would eventually be buried with backfill up to the top, which then would have special train tracks installed on them so electric locomotives, called mules, would maneuver ships through the lock using tow ropes.

  All around the site, thousands of men still toiled as if in the shadow of a great cathedral under construction. Four towering cranes built on metal scaffolding and running on rails laid outside the locks carried buckets of cement from a nearby dedicated plant. Welders were at work amid fountains of sparks that cascaded down the lock like fiery waterfalls.

  Dwarfed by the massive concrete and steel colossus, the workers looked like ants. But the sound of their endeavors was a throbbing din of train whistles, droning rock crushers, the pounding of rivets with pneumatic hammers, and the shouts of men. Trucks swooped around the site on gravel roads to prevent them from sinking into the mud quagmire of so much overturned earth and rainwater.

  As Bell, Talbot, and Sam Westbrook stepped from the train onto the platform, one of the cranes trundled along the length of the lock, an enormous bucket of cement dangling from its two-inch-thick cable. It was lowered to where workers stood ready at some newly built forms. Once it was centered, a lock at the bucket’s base was struck with a shovel and the bottom dropped out. The lock wall was too tall for Bell to see, but he imagined the concrete sloshing into the form and completing a few more cubic yards of the structure.

  Adjacent to the lock was a small town’s worth of buildings. They weren’t where the workers lived, that was farther from the site. These were the warehouses, machine shops, and other support structures. A distance away, and linked by temporary rail, was the cement plant, where mounds of rock and sand were delivered hourly by train. The special cars laden with concrete buckets destined for the cranes came out the other end of the plant.

  “This level of coordination boggles the mind,” Bell said in awe.

  Sam nodded. “If just one moving part in the chain doesn’t work, like we miss delivering a load of portland cement, then the whole thing grinds to a halt. Come on, the warehouse that was robbed is this way.”

  10

  Westbrook led them across the busy construction yard, pausing once to let a five-car train carrying gravel from the rock crusher to the cement plant pass by.

  “What kind of security do you have here?” Bell asked as they entered a warren of massive warehouses.

  “Night patrols, and even though we’ve stepped up the numbers since Viboras Rojas appeared, as you can tell this place is enormous. We mainly rely on our isolation here. There’s only one road in or out, plus the railroad, and the zone extends five miles into the jungle. We actually employ very few Panamanians.”

  They passed the last of the warehouses and came to a brick-fronted building that had been buried in rubble so that it looked like it had been dug into a mountainside. The door was steel.

  “We have explosives bunkers like this all over the zone. To date, we’ve gone through about thirty thousand tons of dynamite.”

  Bell noted how Westbrook used possessives when describing the canal as if it were his. He was certainly proud of his work here.

  A guard halted their approach while a bucket brigade of Caribbean laborers moved wooden boxes of explosives from the bunker and loaded them onto the back of a heavy-duty truck. They were watched over by a supervisor, as well as a bookkeeper, who counted each crate and recorded it in a ledger. Once the vehicle pulled away on its journey to wherever the explosives were needed, the three men stepped into the bunker’s cool, gloomy interior.

  Bell first checked the door’s lock. It required a large key but wasn’t particularly difficult to pick. “Who has access?”

  “Quite a few people,” Westbrook admitted. “And I know for a fact that one of the keys went missing a few months ago.”

  “How?”

  “Dropped in the jungle while the quartermaster was answering the call of nature.”

  It was ridiculous enough to be true, Bell thought, yet that didn’t mean it hadn’t been found later. “How are relations between the locals and the Caribbean workers? Would the islanders help an insurgency?”

  “Some might,” Talbot said, wiping the inside of his hat with a bright bandanna. “But mostly the Panamanians are afraid the islanders will stay once the construction is completed so they’re hesitant to work with them.”

  Bell looked around. There were warning signs plastered on the walls not to smoke, and all the lightbulbs had wire mesh cages so they wouldn’t be accidentally smashed and cause a spark. Thousands of identical wooden boxes were stacked in orderly blocks, from the earthen floor to just below the rafters. No amount of dirt piled onto the building could contain a blast of the magnitude this amount of dynamite would cause.

  “And there are other caches like this?” he asked Westbrook.

  “Some even larger, like the ones at Culebra. In fact, we’re in the process of closing this one down.”

  “Any chance they were stolen months ago or that they aren’t missing at all and this was an accounting error?”

  “No to both questions, Mr. Bell. This is a government run project under the supervision of a military man. Every i gets dotted and t crossed around here. There are rules and regulations for everything. Heck, there’s a prescribed way of shaking out cement bags to get the most out of them.”

  Bell suppressed a chuckle and said, “That this is a government project doesn’t bode well for its efficiency, but I believe in the guiding hand of Colonel Goethals. So I will stipulate that. How heavy are the crates?”

  “Fifty pounds each.”

  Bell did the math for a ton of explosives. “Forty wooden cases of dynamite were removed from this bunker recently, and I can tell you that I know that the boxes are very close to the mechanics’ garage. Or wherever you pool your vehicles.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” Talbot asked, his voice dripping with skepticism.

  “That is a bit of a stretch,” Westbrook agreed.

  “Not at all,” Bell continued. “I’ve observed that the average Panamanian man is slight of stature and build, so chances are it’s one crate per man. That’s forty men sneaking in here, grabbing a crate each, and vanishing back into the jungle. Not likely your guards would miss such a mob. And even if Viboras Rojas had some real bruisers in their ranks and doubled up on the crates, we’re still talking about a crowd of twenty men. Again, unless your guards all suffer from myopia, we can discount that possibility. Therefore, the explosives were loaded onto a truck by a handful of insurgents using the bucket brigade method we ourselves just saw used.”

  “You’re making sense up to this point,” Westbrook admitted. “Why is the truck near the garage? Why didn’t they take off and hide it in the jungle?”

  “No idea why,” Bell said. “But I know that’s exactly what happened.”

  “How can you be so sure?” the young engineer persisted.

  “It’s simple.” Bell smiled. “You tr
ack everything that moves within the zone, and since no one has reported a stolen truck, it has to still be here, hiding in plain sight. The garage is the most logical place.”

  The silence that followed was pierced by an angry curse when Westbrook realized Bell’s logic was airtight.

  Bell sympathized with the younger man. When it came to problems of logic, most people consider themselves smart enough to figure things out. They become truly confounded when they meet an actual expert. It was a reaction Bell encountered time and again.

  The garage area sat on a small rise all the way across the massive site. It took them fifteen minutes to reach it. The machine shop itself was corrugated metal, with four mechanic’s bays accessible through barn-style doors. Around it was oil-stained gravel littered with empty barrels and castoff vehicle parts. To one side were two rows of trucks with fully enclosed rear beds. The vehicles were showing signs of heavy use in harsh conditions. Bodywork was dented and rust-streaked, and some were missing tires and propped up on jacks. A few had been cannibalized for parts after becoming too damaged to fix and resembled mere skeletons of their brethren.

  The chief mechanic saw the party striding toward them at a pace that told him something bad was about to happen. Or already had.

  He zipped up his overalls to hide his hairy belly and spit the wad of tobacco from his mouth.

  “Have any trucks gone missing?” Westbrook asked as they approached.

  “Nope.”

  “Anything odd happen to any of them?”

  “‘Odd’?”

  “Been moved without any reason.”

  “Nope. The ones that run get used and the ones that don’t get fixed.”

  Bell ignored the pointless conversation and studied the trucks. There were at least thirty of them and they had to be inspected because their suspensions were so stiff that a ton of cargo in the back wouldn’t make them noticeably sag. There was an order as to which ones got signed out, and there were obvious gaps in the rows where crews had requisitioned vehicles for their work shifts. They rotated through the vehicles over the course of a week or ten days so that all of them shared the workload evenly and wouldn’t require additional maintenance.