by Jack Du Brul
From the low vantage of Juan’s boat, Mercer couldn’t accurately gauge the scale of this amazing system, nor could he see the mile-long Miraflores Lake beyond. On the far end of that lake was a pair of double locks built in stair-step fashion that raised or lowered ships a total of fifty-five vertical feet from the level of the Pacific Ocean.
As he watched, the freighter in the left-hand lock began to rise perceptively, levitating as gravity dumped eight and a half million gallons of water into the chamber. In just a few minutes, the level within the lock reached that of the cut and the massive doors swung outward. The mules heaved on their lines to pull the ship out. Once the steel hawsers were cast away from the vessel, white water erupted at its stern as its huge propeller powered it away.
Mercer looked down at Lauren once again. “We’re here. We’ll wait for twenty minutes or so for the sun to go down a bit more and then put you and Vic in the water.”
“Okay.”
Juan knew his role as tour guide and began pointing out features for Mercer to shoot with his camera. Not that there was any film in it. He tried to determine if there was any unusual activity going on at the lock, but all seemed normal. A continuous procession of ships lumbered by. None of them were cruise liners or PANAMAX freighters because it was getting late and the sun would be down by the time they reached the Gatun Locks on the other side of the country.
Mercer dutifully acted like he was burning through pictures, all the while his stomach tightened with tension. He hated that he was asking Lauren and Vic to do something of which he himself was incapable. It wasn’t in his nature to let others put themselves at risk, but this was too important to trust his rudimentary diving skills. All during the wait he checked on her as much as he dared without acting too unusual. Her outward calm didn’t seem to be hiding anything more than a natural sense of anxiety.
After twenty-five minutes, Lauren said the angle of the sun was right for their dive. The surface of the canal was a flickering sheet of reflected sunlight, as if the water had turned to flame.
“A cargo vessel is about to come out of the right lock,” Mercer informed her out of the corner of his mouth. “Its bulk will prevent anyone at the lock from seeing you scramble over the side as long as no one’s on the ship’s wing bridge. I’ll keep watch, and as soon as I say go, get yourselves into the water.”
Vic stood behind Lauren on the short stairs rising up from the cabin so he could help her maneuver off the boat with the big air tank on her back. A belt of lead weights draped from her waist and a buoyancy compensator hung from her neck. Lauren and the Serb had already pulled on hoods that matched their dive suits and had their masks in place. Both carried their flippers, which they would slip on their feet once they were safely under water.
Taut muscles in Lauren’s arms and shoulders made slender crests in her suit. From behind the mask, her eyes were steady. “When water flushes through the lock’s access pipes,” she said, “we’ll face some pretty tough currents that’ll cut into our bottom time. Even at minimal consumption these tanks have a maximum of sixty minutes of air. Scubapanama didn’t have any of the bigger ones I wanted.
Vic and I’ll be back exactly forty-five minutes after we go in, and that’s pushing it far beyond what’s safe. Understand?”
“Three-quarters of an hour. Gotcha.”
She touched his arm. “I mean it, Mercer. Expect us in forty-five minutes, but if we’re not back in sixty, we ain’t coming back. There is no leeway in these numbers. If you don’t see us in one hour, you won’t see us at all. Promise me you’ll get your butt out of here.”
Mercer held her gaze for a second, nodded, then raised his camera to study the freighter through the long lens.
The ship’s captain and canal pilot must have stationed themselves on the far side of the vessel because only a pair of Panamanian soldiers acting as guards stood at the wing-bridge rail. One waved down at the little boat and Mercer turned the camera away, not wanting to give them any reason to remain. The rest of the four-hundred-foot ship appeared deserted.
Mercer watched the two bored troopers surreptitiously and the instant they moved away from the rail to return to the air-conditioned comfort of the bridge, his voice cracked, “Now!”
Tomanovic moved so fast he was nearly carrying Lauren and her sixty pounds of gear as he lunged up the steps. When he reached the gunwale, he grasped her around the middle and spun around so that when he tumbled over the side he shielded her body with his. They hit with a small splash and a boil of bubbles. A few moments later, two gloved hands rose from the water and gave the divers’ circular okay signal by touching thumb to index finger.
The hands vanished and the water churned slightly as the two finned away. Mercer pulled Lauren’s Rolex from his pocket and noted the time. Forty-five minutes, she’d said. They’d be back up at seven-eighteen.
The sensation was like falling into a bottomless bathtub because the water was blood warm. Lauren twisted in liquid space and tucked her knees to her chest to slip on her flippers before adding air to the buoyancy compensator. She and Vic found their equilibrium at the same time and both slid toward the surface to give Mercer a signal that they were all right. She bled a little air from the vest, allowing her to drop back into the void. They leveled off at forty feet, deep enough for much of their exhausted breaths to dissipate. She immediately equalized the pressure in her ears and behind her face mask. Through the murky water, Lauren could feel the throbbing engine and thrashing propeller of the freighter passing abeam of them.
Because she was used to ocean diving, it took her a few moments to get used to the difference in buoyancy the freshwater gave her and its silty taste. Visibility was pretty bad, maybe twenty feet, but would give her enough warning if there was anything in the water with them. There was little current this far from the locks, yet Lauren was prepared for the suck of water once one of the chambers began to fill.
Together, she and Vic began swimming in easy strokes toward the lock.
Her PADI instructor once told her that scuba was the sport for the lazy. Do nothing fast and don’t waste energy you might need later. It was advice she’d never forgotten.
Using just the strength in her supple legs, she kicked through the milky emerald water toward the distant concrete structure. Vic stayed at her side. Above them, the setting sun had turned the surface into a distant plane of crimson mercury. Below lurked an impenetrable gloom.
Mercer’s assurance that he was okay rang in her mind. She wouldn’t have gone in the water if she didn’t believe him. He was up to this mission, yet she still harbored a lingering doubt. He had been damaged in that torture chamber in some way he refused to acknowledge. It was a male thing, she felt, the unwillingness to admit pain. She’d seen it in her father, her brothers, and all during her military career, especially in Kosovo. Like most men, Mercer would stupidly spend days or weeks working it out himself rather than save time by talking.
Lauren wanted to help him. She remembered him talking about his childhood in Africa and knew he was capable of expressing his feelings. If she could-
Focus, damnit, she admonished herself, concentrating on her breathing. She had her own priorities right now.
After ten minutes of swimming, a shadow formed in front of her and Vic. Like coming across a sunken building, they approached huge walls of cement that quickly filled their vision. The front of the twin locks.
Vic jerked a thumb downward. Lauren nodded and the two sank farther into the abyss, coming up on the bottom at fifty-five feet. The floor of the canal was barren stone, swept clean by the remorseless tidal action of the locks filling and draining. It looked like a desert. Not a piece of trash, leaf, or stick in sight. The bottom of the locks sat on a massive concrete foundation ten feet above them. The steel doors were like those guarding a giant’s castle, utterly impregnable.
Flanking each set of doors were culverts formed within the cement, each bigger than a subway tunnel. These eighteen-foot-diameter pipes wer
e the inlets through which water entered the lock. Feeding off them inside the lock’s walls were fourteen evenly spaced branches, each large enough to accommodate an automobile. These cross-passages stretched under the chambers themselves, and from them a total of seventy separate stem valves rose into the floor of the lock to evenly distribute the flow of water. The apertures in the lock’s floor in which the stem valves sat were ostensibly the smallest component of the whole mechanism and yet each was four feet square. All this piping could fill a 110,000-square-foot lock at a rate of two feet a minute. The billions of gallons that drain from the canal each year are replaced by seven feet of annual rainfall recharging Lake Gatun through the Chagres and other rivers.
Lauren hung suspended, mesmerized by the scale of what she was seeing. Age had darkened the concrete to a dull black, but the main feeder pipes were darker still, somehow malevolent, like haunted caves from a child’s nightmare. Despite the warm water, a chill ran up her spine and she whirled around, certain she was being watched.
Vic signed if she was all right and she acknowledged that she was. Her heart refused to slow and her breathing had accelerated. Again, she looked around. This time she caught a flicker of movement. Something was out there, another patch of darkness that wavered just beyond her view. She strained to see it, beaming her dive light in its direction. Nothing.
Come on, girl. Get a grip.
And then it came, resolving out of the murk, driving at them with the speed of a torpedo. Lauren got a brief impression of something silver before it was upon them. Even with the distortion of the water, it was at least eight feet long, powerful. She screamed into her mouthpiece, choking as she took a mouthful of water.
Vic’s hand lunged out to grip her shoulder, the touch enough to calm her. She blinked and realized their attacker was one of the tarpon that regularly got caught in the canal. The monstrous fish with its underslung jaw broke off its investigation and carved a tight circle around them to return to its hunt for a way out of the freshwater trap.
Lauren gave Tomanovic an embarrassed shrug. She readjusted the equipment that had shifted during her violent thrashing, making sure to note her air consumption. She compared her gauge to his. They were about even.
She looked back at the doors above them. It was hard to believe that something that large could move, yet they began to swing outward on hinges that weighed nearly twenty tons apiece. She could feel the movement of water as newly installed hydraulic rams forced them apart. A freighter or tanker would be drawn out from within the lock by the mules in just a few minutes. After that the doors would reseal themselves and the water within the chamber would drain into Miraflores Lake to lower the level for the next vessel coming up the thirty-foot stair.
Once that next ship was secured inside the lock and the doors closed, more than eight million gallons of water would be sucked through the intake pipes to raise it up to the level of the Gaillard Cut. The rush would create a surge more powerful than the worst rip current, a force that neither Lauren nor Vic could ever hope to fight. They’d likely be crushed within the labyrinth of tunnels under the lock and their corpses would eventually flush through the system like so much trash.
It was time to find the submersible.
Keeping the dive lights angled downward so they wouldn’t show to guards and workers above, they began scouring the bottom of the canal, looking for anything out of place, some piece of evidence that ships were being intentionally diverted by something kept here at Pedro Miguel.
If she and Vic couldn’t find evidence, they’d all have to rethink their theory about what Liu Yousheng and Hatcherly were trying to accomplish in Panama. Maybe this really was an elaborate smuggling scheme that had nothing to do with the canal. It could be that was what was bothering Mercer, Lauren realized. The idea that his theory could be tossed out the window and he wasn’t in on the investigation. From their first night on the River of Ruin, she knew he was a man who valued his self-reliance and she doubted he’d accept someone else’s conclusions without investigating on his own.
That wasn’t a male thing, she thought. That was a scientist thing.
Get your head back in the game, Lauren.
Above them, the long dark shape of a freighter pulling from the lock cut the scarlet reflection on the water’s surface. At its stern was an area of roiling vortices as its prop thrashed to build up speed. The hull was coated in barnacles that would drop off by the time the ship exited the Gatun Locks on the Caribbean side of the canal. Like the tarpon, they couldn’t survive long away from their natural saltwater environment.
The area she and Vic had to survey was much larger than Lauren had anticipated, and they had about ten minutes before they needed to retreat away from the intake tunnels for the duration of the filling process. The shaft of light from their dive lamps drilled a cone through the murk that only reached twenty-five feet. By swinging side to side, they cut fifty-foot swaths back and forth across the bottom, eyes tracking the sweeping beams. Vic pointed out a couple of industrial shapes, old equipment dumped off to the side of the lock gates, but nothing resembling a submarine or large underwater propulsion platform.
They’d been under for twenty-two minutes. By working from the lock back toward the boat, they shortened the distance needed to return, giving them another twelve minutes, including a couple for decompression. Lauren began to feel the futility of their task. There wasn’t anything down here. Mercer had been wrong. She didn’t think Roddy Herrara had lied about his accident to cover incompetence, but whatever happened to him and the other pilots who’d been fired had nothing to do with this lock.
Intent on their search, Lauren and Vic didn’t notice that the huge doors had closed. In another three minutes, the valves that controlled flow into the chamber would open. The lane they were cutting across the canal was just beyond the danger point where it would suck them in.
Neither did they notice that they were no longer alone.
Six amorphous shapes had moved into position above them, hovering like wraiths. At a signal from one of them, the six swooped downward in pairs, slicing through the water with the ease of sharks.
Lauren was the first to feel that something was wrong. It was the same sixth sense that had anticipated the tarpon charge. She flipped onto her back and gazed upward just as the frogmen plunged down at her and Vic. They wore black wet suits. Four held knives while the other pair carried spearguns. Bewilderment immobilized her for just a moment before her combat training took over.
She flashed her light at her dive partner, alerting him, then reached for the knife strapped to her thigh. If not for the spearguns, Lauren would have pumped more air into her buoyancy compensator and rushed past them for the surface. Instead she dumped air and raced for the bottom. Vic dove with her, swimming on his back so he could watch their stalkers. He held his knife across his chest.
The two divers with spearguns halted their advance twenty feet off the bottom, taking up positions that covered their partners as they continued downward in pursuit. The angle of the hunt took everyone closer to the locks.
Lauren found rocky footing on the bottom, bracing herself for the rush of attack. As the distance closed, she saw that the divers were Chinese. A frogman lunged from above and to her right, a straight slash that she easily ducked because her flippers were wedged against a stone and gave her leverage. She swept her knife as the diver tried to twist away. Dark blood bloomed in tendrils from the gash in the man’s calf.
She swam after him. The wound slowed the Chinese diver enough for her to catch up. Unable to brace her body for a killing strike with her blade, Lauren slashed again, opening another cut below the man’s double tanks. He spun over to face her. Lauren parried his attack, the clash of metal on metal muted by the water. With her free hand she reached for his dive vest, found what she wanted and with a squeeze filled the bladder of his buoyancy compensator like a balloon.
The frogman shot upward like a rocket, effectively taking him out of the fight for
a couple of minutes. Lauren panted through her regulator.
Tomanovic struggled with the other three Chinese divers. One of them was bleeding from his shoulder while the other two looked unscathed. They had Vic surrounded in a cordon large enough for one of the divers above to shoot the Serb with his speargun. Lauren stroked into the battle, coming up behind one of the Chinese. She feinted going for his air hose, and when he moved to protect it she pumped up his vest so he began to rise uncontrollably. This time she stayed behind her victim as they ascended toward the two armed divers, using him as a shield.
Had the Chinese been a larger man, stronger, she wouldn’t have been able to smother his writhing attempt at escape. She held on tight, steering them to slam into his partner. The blow barely distracted either man, but Tomanovic used those few seconds to back away from the men who’d nearly captured him.
Lauren was now embroiled in a fight that resembled an aerial battle from World War One. She and the two frogmen tumbled through the water, pursuing one another and fleeing at the same time, defending and attacking in a ball that continued to shrink as each tried to get an inside advantage. The speargun had been nullified by the closeness of the combat, but knives flashed in the glare from the wrist lights the Chinese wore. It seemed no one could get the advantage to end the struggle.
The second speargunner watched the squirming ballet, waiting for an opening.
Vic launched himself from the bottom of the canal, ignoring the two divers who came after him. The speargun swiveled at him when he was spotted and still he kept coming. The Chinese diver steadied his aim, waited until his quarry was less than five feet away and pulled the trigger.