Both horse and rider were drenched in sweat when they burst out of the undergrowth without knowing they had reached their destination. Before them stretched the dazzlingly white observation point’s parking lot with a motor bus disgorging a troop of tourists. It was a jarring transition from primordial jungle to modernity in just a few steps.
A dazzling kaleidoscope of images and an array of scents and feelings flooded Bell’s nervous system, almost causing him to fall from the horse.
He remembered.
He remembered it all. Everything came back. All the memories. The truck slamming into the water carrier and sending him over the edge of the Culebra Cut. The creeping despair of being buried alive. And especially his conversation with Court Talbot and Rinaldo Morales.
“Yes,” he shouted triumphantly, eliciting some startled looks from the tourists across the parking lot.
He had never felt such a tremendous sense of relief in his life. He’d felt like his mind had betrayed him, but now that the memories had returned, he knew that wasn’t the case.
He also understood two more things, one of which he’d deduced earlier but forgotten, the other was something new. He had the answer to the mystery of the humming clouds many locals had reported. And he’d figured out that Viboras Rojas, his very reason for being in Panama, didn’t exist.
29
Bell had made it safely to the Canal Zone. He was beyond the reach of the Panamanian police. That gave him some measure of satisfaction yet did not lessen the urgency of his mission. He wanted to race down to the administration building, but his mount was in no condition. The horse had given its all to get him to the summit of Ancon Hill, and that was as far as it would let itself be ridden. No amount of coaxing changed its mind.
He dismounted and led the horse down the other side of the hill along the winding road the tourist buses used. The horse plodded along, its head down and the sweat drying on its flanks. When they finally arrived at the soon to be completed building, Bell uncoiled the reata that was secured to the bridle and tied it to a tree in the middle of a lawn so the horse could graze.
“You can’t leave that animal there.” The speaker wasn’t any sort of guard, just a man in shirtsleeves and an accountant’s green visor.
“I’m late for a meeting with the Colonel. Care to join me to explain why I was further delayed?”
Between the little-veiled threat and his noticing the big pistol hanging below Bell’s left arm, the busybody decided his interest lay elsewhere and moved on.
Bell mounted the steps to the sprawling building. Workers moved purposefully around the site, some administration types, others tradesmen, such as carpenters and plasterers. He spoke to a construction worker installing some wooden moldings just inside the entrance to get directions to which parts of the building were already in use. Moments later, he found where Sam Westbrook worked and located the young man in the open office space. He was standing up behind his desk to give himself a bird’s-eye view of the hodgepodge of papers covering its blotter.
“Hey, Sam.”
“Mr. Bell.” His jaw dropped when he saw Bell’s battered appearance.
“We’ve been through enough together for you to call me Isaac, and I’m afraid our adventures aren’t yet done.”
“Of course. What on earth happened to you?”
“Where to start,” Bell said rhetorically. “First of all, I owe a horse some tender loving care. Is there someone here who can return it to its stable over on Avenue Peru y Calle?”
What Bell especially liked about Sam was that nothing seemed to faze him, not a terrorist attack or a bizarre request. “Sure. I’ll get one of my clerks to do it. Where’s the horse?”
“Tied to a tree out front.” Bell then hesitated, as if he wanted to say more.
“Something to add?” Sam asked in a teasing tone.
“I . . . Yes. I stole the horse and I need to make some sort of restitution to its owner, but my wallet was confiscated by the police.”
Sam took that news in stride as well. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a metal strongbox, which he opened with a small key on a ring of keys he kept in his pocket. He took out a rumpled five-dollar bill. “Petty cash.”
He called over a teenage junior clerk from the office across the hall. “There’s a horse out front that needs to go to that stable on Peru y Calle. Do you know it?” The towheaded lad nodded. “The owner is going to be ripping mad, so give him the money. Tell him it was taken on a drunken bet, or something.”
The kid threw a questioning look to Bell. Bell shrugged. “I sober up fast.”
When the clerk scurried out, Sam took a seat at his desk and indicated Bell should pull up a chair. “Police custody? Let me guess—you stole the horse to escape jail.”
Bell remained on his feet. “I stole the horse to escape being railroaded, shanghaied, and Count of Monte Cristoed. But that’s nothing but a distraction at this point, Sam. They have my wife.”
“What? Who?” Sam shot to his feet as if he were gearing up for action.
“Do you know Otto Dreissen?”
“Never heard of him.”
“He’s a German businessman who has a big house on the coast road south of the city. He had her kidnapped off the Spatminster and is holding her someplace here in Panama.”
“Do you think in his house?” Sam suggested eagerly.
“He wouldn’t be that stupid,” Bell said. “And Detective Ortega, his man on the police force, would have gotten word to him as soon as I escaped. Dreissen’s long gone. In his place is a trap set for me in case I go there looking for Marion. Maybe cops. Most likely Viboras Rojas.”
“The Viboras? This Dreissen is involved with the Viboras?”
“He’s bankrolling them,” Bell told him.
He was about to drop a real bombshell revelation when the shouts of men rushing through the building overwhelmed their conversation.
A wide-eyed clerk rushed into the room, breathless. “Do you fellas know where the Colonel is?”
“He left this morning for the power plant at the dam,” Sam said. “What’s going on?”
The kid was already rushing out again. He shouted over his shoulder, “The Red Vipers hit us again.”
“What?” Sam and Bell said in unison. They took off after the clerk, who was racing for the telephone exchange’s office. Other office workers were already there, milling around outside the closed door. Someone had beaten all of them there with Goethals’s location and was in the exchange having a call placed to the power station. The mood of the crowd was ugly, anxious, and more than a little fearful.
Sam grabbed the elbow of one of the men he knew and drew him away a little from the mob.
“What do you know, Billy?”
“Not much. They say one of the big steam shovels down in the cut exploded. They say a bunch of guys were killed and that it was the Vipers that did it.”
“How do they know it wasn’t an accident?” Bell asked sharply, almost like an accusation. “Steam engines explode all the time.”
“Not the shovels, Isaac,” Sam said. “Those machines are babied by a team of mechanics. For all the years they’ve been digging, we’ve never had one blow. Men have been killed on ’em, and by ’em, but not like this.”
“I need to see.” Bell said it in such a way that it wasn’t a request, it was an order.
Sam Westbrook nodded. “Fastest way is if we take the Donkey.”
“Donkey?” Bell said with skepticism. “Surely horses would be quicker.”
“Not this donkey.” He turned to his friend. “Any idea where the attack happened?”
“The base of Gold Hill.”
Bell said, “Call the hospital, have a doctor meet us at the, er, Donkey.” He asked Sam if they would know where that was and was assured any doctor would.
“Do you want a change
of clothes?” Sam asked. “You look like a bum and smell like an old nag that’s on its way to the glue factory.”
“We’ve got to do this on the jump, Sam. Clues could be compromised.”
“Right. At least I can get you some decent boots.”
They found the beast parked under a tin-roofed lean-to near the rail marshaling yards. It had started life as a one-ton truck with an open flatbed behind the cabin. The bed had been fitted with rows of seats like a bus, and a canvas cover stretched across a metal frame kept out the rain and blocked the sun. What made the truck so unusual was that the suspension had been modified to run on four heavily treaded tractor tires. It required some ladder rungs welded to the side of the truck to get in the cab. A small platform secured to the bumper for the driver to stand on could be unfolded to provide the proper leverage to crank the six-cylinder engine.
“That is one monster of a truck,” Bell said.
“The only thing, other than a train on tracks, that can move around in the muck at the bottom of the canal.”
Sam climbed into the cab, while Bell got in position to fire the engine. It took more tries than expected, and Bell’s shoulder was screaming by the time the motor caught and the crank jumped so hard it almost broke his hand. A doctor and two orderlies arrived moments later, each carrying a bag of medical gear. They knew the drill, obviously, because they came running and immediately climbed onto the cargo bed.
Sam drove the Donkey fast but not recklessly, keeping to the main road for much of the journey. They passed the construction sites at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel and finally came to a turnoff that allowed access down into the Culebra Cut on a narrow track that had been carved into switchbacks to make it easier for pack animals. About a mile distant was the massif of Gold Hill, the tallest promontory along the canal route that had to be whittled down. This was the exact center of the continental divide.
The bottom of the cut was a flat, open plain with multiple rail lines heading southeast toward Panama City and its ocean reclamation project for the spoil. Like mechanical dragons wreathed in steam, the big excavators chewed eight-ton bites out of the earth, turned their booms like animals swinging their necks, and dumped the rocks and dirt onto the ore cars that slowly trundled by but never stopped. Gangs of men worked with picks and shovels, others tended the tall rotary drills for coring holes in the rock for dynamite.
As wide as the canal was there, its two sloped banks still seemed to focus the heat like a lens. It was easily a hundred and fifteen degrees, with no shade to speak of. And the noise. From the rim, it had sounded like construction going on in the background, a presence but not a problem, while down among the machines the constant clanking of trains and screams of whistles, the thunder of rubble crashing in the hopper cars, was an assault on the senses louder than at any site Bell had ever been. His ears ached.
One steam shovel sat dormant while all the others Bell could see were hard at work. The men killed were friends of the men toiling away, brothers in arms in their struggle to dig the Panama Canal, and yet the work continued. Always the work continued. There would be time for mourning later on that night, off the company clock. For now, there was nothing but the constant need to feed the ore trains chugging through the cut.
“Damn,” Sam said when they got close enough to see the serial number on the back of the machine.
“What is it?”
“That’s Lyle Preston’s rig.”
“You know him?”
“Not personally, but he and his crew hold all the records for moving dirt. He was the best by far. I bet the Vipers knew it and targeted him.”
Bell said nothing.
There were some men standing around the idle digger, moving about aimlessly, unsure of what to do. After a train loaded with ore had gone past on its way out of the Culebra Cut, Sam crossed the tracks and parked a short distance from the damaged Bucyrus steam shovel.
Bell was staggered by its size, now that he could see the machine up close. The rotating platform was on double sets of bogeys as tall as a man, and the cabin behind the boom, called a house, was as big as one. Keeping with that analogy, it was a house that had been caught up in a West Texas tornado of particular savagery.
Much of the corrugated metal sides of the cabin had been blown out when the big boiler erupted, exposing the excavator’s dizzyingly complex innards of crankshafts, pistons, bull wheels, gears and cams, and still other industrial equipment parts he couldn’t identify. At the rear of the platform was a coal bunker for the fireman to access to stoke the boiler. The eruption of high-pressure steam had blasted the coal from the bunker like a broadside of fired grapeshot. The coal lay scattered in a fifty-foot arc stretching out from the scene, and within its radius lay two corpses with their heads and torsos hastily covered with draped work shirts. They had been cut down by the flying coal.
Nearer to the steam shovel was the body of the stoker. He was covered head to toe with a filthy scrap of canvas tarp. The bodies of the two men who worked the business end of the excavator had been left in their seats, one in the forward section of the cabin behind a candelabra-like clutch of mechanical levers, the second man in his perch halfway up the boom.
The lead operator had taken shrapnel from the exploded boiler and had been cut almost in half. Exposure to steam had turned any skin not protected by clothing the color of an overripe apple. The guy in the boom had been spared having his body punctured, but the steam and the tremendous force of its wall of pressure had ended his life in a fraction of a second just like the others.
Bell climbed down from the big truck and strode toward the big excavator. His approaching caught the attention of the roughly half dozen men milling around and they turned toward him expectantly.
“Gentlemen, my name is Isaac Bell. I am the lead investigator for the Van Dorn Detective Agency and I am here with the permission of Colonel Goethals himself. This is a potential crime scene, and I must ask all of you to please stay at least fifty feet back. I need to talk to any of you who saw the explosion or anything else you think might be important.” He saw most of the men nod and only a couple frown at being shooed away. But they did comply. “Thank you. I’ll talk to you once I’ve had a chance to look around.”
The doctor and his orderlies ran to where another, smaller group of men were attending to two figures lying inside a tent that was used as a temporary zone office.
Five dead and two wounded, Bell thought. Not as bad as at Pedro Miguel, but a high butcher’s bill nevertheless.
He circled the excavator in ever-tightening rings, looking at the ground, the sprayed pattern of coal. He looked for footprints or trash or anything that shouldn’t have been there. He lifted the shirts covering the faces of the two West Indian islanders who’d been struck by flying coal. Both men had fist-sized indentations in their foreheads and multiple other places.
Bell knelt over the body of the stoker, who’d been blown fifteen feet from the excavator, and gently pulled back the tarp. The force of the blast had stripped him of all his clothing, and the scalding heat of the steam explosion had stripped him of all his skin. He looked piebald and boiled. The only small mercy was, death would have been instantaneous. Bell settled the shroud back over the corpse and continued his preliminary inspection.
The only thing of note, and he wanted to know if it was unusual, was that the giant boulder they were trying to dislodge with the shovel’s iron bucket seemed too big for the machine to move.
He gave himself fifteen minutes. Any longer, and the witnesses either would drift away or they would start to misremember the incident. He’d heard of controlled experiments where witnesses to a single incident were asked about it in differing increments of time—minutes, hours, and days of the week—and the accuracy of their recollections faded sharply while, at the same time, their imaginations created details that hadn’t occurred.
Before talking to the men, Bell so
ught out the doctor and gave him permission for he and his men to retrieve Lyle Preston and the bodies of his crew from inside the excavator and asked that an autopsy be performed. The doctor said he’d planned on it anyway as a formality.
Bell spoke to each witness individually, breaking from the group and walking a short distance away. He kept his questions vague enough so that the men gave rambling answers often tending to fill in subtle details. It was another investigator’s trick. Yet, in the end, he learned nothing. The boulder would have put a strain on the steam shovel, but it could handle it. There was no warning before the blast, no whistle or unusual jet of steam or odd color to the smoke coming from the stovepipe funnel atop the digger. It had been a typical workday, unremarkable in every way.
Bell cut any worker off who wanted to discuss how Viboras Rojas had managed to sabotage the Bucyrus. He had no interest in conjectures or theories.
He had two more men to interview as Colonel Goethals’s private train arrived. It slowed just enough for its passengers to jump free since there was a long ore train behind it, and nothing, not even the Canal Administrator, could slow the work. Bell cut the witnesses loose as Goethals led a two-man entourage straight for the damaged steam shovel. The Colonel wore a tropical suit, while the men in his party were in grease-stained overalls. Mechanics, Bell assumed. The older was a fireplug of a man and the chief, obviously. The other, younger and taller, was his protégé. Bell desperately needed their cooperation and had no idea how to get it because he was about to accuse them of gross incompetence.
30
Bell gave Goethals and the others a few minutes to inspect the wreckage before walking over. Sam joined him.
“I’ll figure it out, Colonel,” a voice said in a rasp from inside the ruined husk. Bell assumed it was the chief engineer. “I’ll know by nightfall how they sabotaged my girl here.”
The Saboteurs Page 25