“Rome? Nice. Do you speak Italian?”
“Italian, French, some Portuguese, and of course English and Spanish. Oh, and some Tagalog. I was once stranded in Manila by a sea captain who didn’t want to pay his gambling debts.” He signaled the barman for two more demitasses of espresso.
“You seem to live off your wits, Mr. Ramirez.”
“I think that is why we like each other, Señor Bell. You do the same, no?”
“Differently, but close enough.”
“Hah. I can tell by looking at you that you’re formidable at cards. I know you’re married now yet I imagine there were countless youthful indiscretions in your past, and I bet you can outfight, outshoot, and outdrink any of the ruffians who drift in and out of this lawless place looking to make his fortune.”
Bell laughed at the flattery and said, “My ‘indiscretions,’ as you call them, weren’t countless. I know the exact number.”
Ramirez laughed appreciatively. “I really do like you. May I call you Isaac?”
“By all means, Felix.”
“How was your time with Jorge?”
“I had hoped to gain a local’s insight into Viboras Rojas, but he really couldn’t add to what I already know. Nice enough fellow, though.”
The chrome coffeemaker on the back bar was snorting and belching and producing bursts of steam as it prepared tiny cups of ultra-rich espresso.
“What about you, Felix? Any insights you’d like to share?”
“I learned long ago to never give my opinion. Anyone listening is also judging and could eventually use what you’ve said against you.”
“Keep your ears open and your mouth shut?”
“Precisely. But in this case, I will make an exception. Let’s be honest with each other. The American government backed a bogus revolution in order to break Panama away from Colombia in what was essentially an illegitimate annexation. They dispatched Marines and gunboats to send Colombia’s forces back south with its tail between its legs.
“What’s at stake here is money. Millions upon millions of dollars in revenue over the decades the canal is going to be in operation. My opinion is, the Colombians want some of that for themselves. Either a lump sum payment or annual payoff. If they can get that, they will stop telling the rest of the world about what an awful thing the American Imperialists did to their poor and downtrodden people.”
The barman brought the steaming little cups, and the two men took some time to appreciate the aroma and enjoy a couple of sips. At length, Bell said, “You think Viboras Rojas are part of a covert Colombian operation to pressure the United States into handing over reparations?”
“That’s my theory. To me, the group’s supposed goals are ridiculous. I can’t see anything stopping the canal’s completion nor do I envision a mass uprising to seize control of it once it’s done.” He leaned closer. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of backchannel negotiations being carried out between Bogotá and Washington. Your people will pay the Colombians, who, in turn, will act like they are negotiating with the Viboras to lay down their arms. Everybody gets what they want and nobody loses face. You know that expression?”
“Chinese in origin. It means ‘to avoid humiliation.’” Bell could find little fault in Ramirez’s theory, with the exception the guerrillas had gone too far by targeting a United States Senator on American soil. For that, they would be brought to justice, and the cost be damned. He said as much to Felix.
“Ah, there you might have a point,” Ramirez conceded. “I formulated my theory before that particular attack, and now with such loss of life at Pedro Miguel, maybe I should rethink everything.”
“I haven’t been able to wrap my mind around their exponential escalation in violence. It’s like there’s a deadline looming over their insurgency.”
“The Marines are coming,” Ramirez reminded Bell.
“But it was the Viboras’s actions that triggered them being sent in the first place.”
“Timing? The canal is nearing completion. Probably less than a year away.”
Bell shook his head. “I don’t believe that’s the answer. Or the entire answer. There’s something else. Something I’m not seeing yet.”
“I have confidence you will find what you seek,” Felix said with his slender cigar clamped between whiter-than-white teeth. He gathered his papers and stood up. “In the meantime, have some breakfast. And as many espressos as your nerves can handle.”
17
Isaac Bell had no idea how many times he’d traversed continental America by train, but he was quite certain he’d never done it in a little over two hours. That was how long it took to get from Panama’s Pacific Coast to the Atlantic. The rail line was about fifty miles long and rose only a couple hundred feet in elevation. The difficulty for its builders was hacking through an almost impenetrable jungle with little more than hand tools.
The original route followed the Chagres River Valley, but with the river now dammed at Gatun, and the world’s largest artificial lake continuing to expand across the land, the line had to be rebuilt so it would curve around the lake’s eventual shore. They also had two sets of tracks so trains could run east or west simultaneously. With a hundred and thirty ore trains coming out of the Culebra Cut on a daily basis, the Panama Railway was mostly a freight-carrying line. However, until the canal was completed, passengers wishing to avoid the perils of the Drake Passage around Tierra del Fuego used the rails as a middle leg in their oceangoing journey from New York to California.
Bell and Marion had a seat in a carriage meant for travelers rather than canal workers, so it was nicer than the car he’d ridden in out to the Pedro Miguel Locks site. They sipped at a glass of blended tropical fruit juices he’d bought at the Panama City terminal and enjoyed their ride across the continent. In most places, the jungle was little more than arm’s length from the carriage windows, while there were other places where they had an expanded vista. Bell saw dozens of crews tasked with picking up rocks that had fallen out of the open-sided ore cars. He imagined if such maintenance wasn’t performed, the rail line would be choked off in a matter of days.
Marion cried with delight when they passed a tree filled with red-furred monkeys with wizened faces like old men.
“I believe they’re called tamarins,” Bell said.
“They’re adorable.”
The train rolled across the Chagres River on a low trestle bridge, and Bell got his first look at what essentially powered the Panama Canal. Since this was the rainy season, the river was swollen and surged with such power that it was like a living thing. The surface was muddy brown and littered with branches and boughs and entire trees it had torn from their roots as it eroded its way down from the highlands.
The train made several stops as it meandered across the country, exclusively at building sites affiliated with the canal’s construction. Few people got on or off, and the train left the stations quickly.
The Port of Colón, unlike Panama City, had no colonial history. It had been built in the swamps of Manzanillo Island on reclaimed land made possible by stone quarried nearby. It was meant to be the Atlantic port for the railroad. Thus, the city was not yet seventy years old when Bell handed his wife down from the train carriage onto the bustling station platform. Opposite were the freight yards, where machines and material shipped from the States were transferred to trains. Bell could see the harbor through a forest of electric-powered cranes and derricks. There seemed to be an armada of merchant ships in Limon Bay awaiting their turn to have their cargos unloaded.
Just at the limit of what Bell could see, a line of Jamaican men was boarding a two-masted schooner. Having seen the hellscape of the Culebra Cut firsthand, Bell could only imagine these men were happy to be heading home.
Colón was tidy, compared to Panama City, and logically laid out, more like New York than Boston, Bell thought. The streets were paved
, for the most part, properly pitched so that water didn’t pool in the gutters. He found a taxi outside the station and instructed the driver to take them to the Gatun Locks. He showed the driver that he had a pass to enter the Canal Zone. Marion didn’t need one because she was with him.
The ride took only a few minutes.
The stage of completion at Gatun was ahead of the work at Pedro Miguel. The locks had already been backfilled to make access for mechanics installing the mitered gates easier. Here, rather than a single chamber, there were three locks strung together in a row that rose up the slope of an artificially constructed hill. In essence, it was a concrete and steel sculpture stretching for more than two-thirds of a mile and climbing eighty-six feet to what was to be the final depth of Lake Gatun.
This was Marion’s first visit to a lock, so Isaac took time to explain how they worked and the function of each piece of equipment.
As impressed as Bell had been at Pedro Miguel, the audacious scale of this structure was even more amazing. At a distance, the men laboring around the locks were Lilliputian, the vehicles delivering parts and supplies like toys. The small electric locomotives, called mules, had already been installed and really did look like model trains. The seaward door to the bottom lock was open so water had filled the thousand-foot chamber. Bell could picture a giant battleship or elegant ocean liner being drawn into the lock by one of the plucky little locos. He could see the doors close, the water level inside the lock raised by the inundation coming through the maze of pipes and culverts, as the ship made its journey up through the next two chambers and ultimately out onto Lake Gatun.
Bell had the driver park for about ten minutes while he watched the work and studied the site. “Okay,” he finally said. “Take us to the dam.”
Roughly six miles from where the Chagres River met the Caribbean, an earthen dam stretched some seven and a half thousand feet across the river valley. The measurements for its other dimensions were equally impressive. At its base, the Gatun Dam was a half mile thick, tapered to four hundred feet at the waterline, and was just shy of one hundred feet at its top. The structure was built using spoil carved out of the Culebra Cut, and other parts of the canal, deposited in two parallel rows and sloping inward to meet at the top. The hollow cavity between these two walls was then filled with a slurry of clay and water that, when dry, hardened into a core as solid as concrete. The downstream slopes had already been grassed over, so the mammoth dam already looked like part of the landscape.
Only at the dam’s center did it look like the work of man. A semicircular concrete spillway had been built next to a red-tile-roofed hydroelectric power plant. The spillway prevented the annual floods from overtopping the dam and eroding it away, while the electricity produced from water flowing through the turbines supplied all the electrical needs of the entire canal.
Because Lake Gatun was still filling up behind the dam, the spillways were dry, but water was flowing through the plant and wending its way down to the sea.
There wasn’t much for them to see. Bell had the driver cross the bridge over the spillway and go up to the far side of the dam so he could get out and look to the water. Beyond the dam, Lake Gatun continued to grow at a rate of about one hundred thousand cubic feet per second. It sounded like a lot of water, and it was, but it was feeding into a lake that would soon be some one hundred and sixty square miles.
“I can’t hear any humming,” Marion said. “Remember what they said about ground pressure causing mysterious noises?”
“I can’t imagine it’s a constant thing,” Bell replied. “I bet it’s localized in pockets of weaker soil.”
“It’s odd to think this lake isn’t natural. It looks like it’s been here forever.”
What were once hilltops surrounding a lush jungle valley were now isolated islands dotting the lake’s tranquil surface. In just one year’s time, it would be the transit route for countless ocean liners and freighters. Bell truly understood what an accomplishment this was and how transformative it would be for the United States.
While his idle chat on that topic with Court Talbot and Senator Densmore back in San Diego had been speculative, seeing the canal with his own eyes brought the feat into sharp focus. Bell now understood what was at stake, and he understood the canal’s vulnerabilities too. No matter how far the workers here had come, they weren’t done yet, and it could all still come to a crashing halt.
He told the driver to take them back to the station. Bell had seen enough. He didn’t know where or when the Red Vipers would strike again, but after seeing the rest of the canal, he understood their tactics, and that gave him his first advantage in the game.
18
Monday started out with the kind of rain the locals knew would last all day, a thin drizzle without any wind to lend the patter of drops striking the ground any variation in tone. A monotonous rain, in every sense of the word. Bell ate early at the hotel, and would have enjoyed Felix Ramirez’s company, but the man was nowhere to be found. Marion had awoken with him, took one look at the rain through the balcony doors, and scampered back to bed.
“No thank you,” she’d said and pulled the covers to her chin. “See you when you get back.”
Sam Westbrook had managed to scrounge a vehicle from the Authority’s motor pool for Bell’s use. It was a three-year-old Gramm-Bernstein two-ton truck. Instead of a traditional cargo bed, the big vehicle had a large cylindrical tank for hauling water to feed the insatiable thirst of all the steam boilers in the Canal Zone, especially those powering all the mechanical shovels chewing their way through the cut. The truck was well used. One of the fenders had been torn off and replaced with a replica fashioned from an old oil drum, and the water tank had a deep dent from being backed into some obstacle.
On the passenger’s seat sat a bucket of dirty water and a sponge on a stick. Bell quickly realized it was to clean the spray of mud the poorly fabricated fender didn’t prevent from being splattered against the windshield whenever the truck slogged through a turn.
The town of Gamboa sat where the Chagres River debouched into the canal just to the north of the Culebra Cut. It sat just three miles from the abandoned town of Las Cruces, which had been the starting point for the Spanish Conquistadors’ El Camino Real de Panama, a four-foot-wide cobblestone mule path that remained in use until the construction of the railroad in 1855.
The town was purpose-built on cleared land by the Canal Authority for workers and support staff, mostly Caribbean islanders living in identical bunkhouses. Many of the town’s other buildings were nothing more than old boxcars that were beyond repair for use as rolling stock. At the water’s edge were some storehouses and a dock. A little way off was the temporary earthen dike that prevented the slowly rising waters from flooding into the still-dry Culebra Cut. The lake’s water level was low compared to what its final depth would be, leaving the dock looking awkward on its tall, creosote-coated pilings.
The journey from Panama City was approximately twenty-five miles, but the road was in rough condition because of the heavy rains. The potholes were spine-jarring at any speed, and Bell had to traverse many areas where inches-deep water sluiced across the gravel track. Despite the truck’s weight, several times he felt the Gramm get caught in the wash and slide sideways. He kept it on the road each time, yet there were a few close calls, with the vehicle right up to the edge of the road and teetering. Things got worse when he came upon the tail end of a caravan of trucks all heading in the same direction as he was. They were lumbering cargo haulers, and their progress was plodding at best. With few opportunities to pass, he had no choice but to ride along behind the vehicles, which were like circus elephants marching trunk to tail.
Whenever the snaking road ran parallel to the train tracks, he got a sense of how the railroad was essentially a continuous loop conveyor belt of fully laden ore cars coming out of the cut and empty ones returning. He was also afforded some spectacul
ar views of the cut when the road meandered closer to the rim. Once filled with water, it would lose much of its grandeur, but since it was still dry it reminded Bell of looking out over a massive canyon.
Bell arrived in Gamboa a little past ten and threaded his way through town to the harbor. As this was a work camp, there were few people wandering the streets, but those that did wore wide-brimmed hats of woven grass for the rain and didn’t bother with shoes for the mud. A few men stood under an awning attached to a building housing a commercial kitchen that also was used for dining. The tables were overturned barrels, and they didn’t have chairs. Bell could smell the jerk seasonings as he passed.
He parked in a gravel lot between warehouses just shy of the dock and took a moment to dump the sludge from his windshield washing bucket and leave it out in the rain to refill. On the quay were a group of men handing bags and crates down to others on a boat too low to be seen from the parking lot.
Court Talbot broke off from the men when he saw Bell approaching through the veil of drifting rain. Around his waist he’d strapped a leather belt with a holster for a Webley top-break pistol. The bottom of the holster was secured to his thigh with a leather thong. They shook hands and sought cover in the open entrance of one of the warehouses. Inside, wooden boxes were piled to the ceiling. Workers moved crates on steel-wheeled trollies under the watchful eye of a supervisor. Out through the open doors on the opposite side of the warehouse, Bell could see boxcars being loaded with crates and steam coiling from a waiting locomotive. At least there was a roof over most of the platform to protect the men from the dreary weather.
“This is your secret plan?” Bell asked while Talbot lit a cigar. “A boat?”
“The only powered boat on all of Lake Gatun. I had her laid up here in Gamboa when they started blocking off the Chagres. I had hoped to hire her out to the Authority during construction. During Stevens’s time in charge, there wasn’t enough water in the lake to use her, but now, with plenty of it, Goethals wouldn’t give me permission to move her.”
The Saboteurs Page 15