River of Ruin m-5

by Jack Du Brul

  “How long?”

  “A minute, maybe less. The wiring will be disabled before the water can cause a short. Tell Mercer to let the ship sink in deep water. If we can stay afloat long enough, sail her right under the Bridge of the Americas and let her go in the Bay of Panama.”

  “Will do. Good job.”

  “Munz almost has it.” Foch’s report was met by a stunned silence. “The timer. He almost has it deactivated. The ship’s not going to explode.”

  “He’s sure?”

  “Bomb disposal men aren’t known to boast when their butts are on the line.” Foch grinned. “He says that if the ship can make it to try to let her sink in deep water.”

  “Never happen,” Harry said. “We’ll be lucky to make it out of the canal. I can’t tell how fast we’re shipping water, but I can’t see us getting more than another couple of miles out of her.”

  “Okay,” said Mercer. “What’s out there in the next couple of miles?”

  Lauren thought about it. “Balboa and the abandoned navy fueling depot at Rodman are on the right side of the canal. On the left is all Hatcherly facilities.”

  As soon as she said it, Mercer, Harry, and she exchanged a look. “What about it, Harry?” Mercer asked.

  He chuckled. “I can’t imagine a more fitting burial for this old girl than right up Liu Yousheng’s asset.”

  Mercer waited for confirmation that Munz had succeeded before calling the USS McCampbell. Two minutes later, the German and his French partner ambled onto the bridge. Their uniforms were soaked from the flooding holds, but nothing could diminish their sense of accomplishment. “I don’t care where you two are on the promotion lists,” Foch gushed and kissed his men on both cheeks. “You’re each getting bumped a grade.”

  “Angel Two to Heaven,” Mercer called after adding his congratulations.

  “Go ahead, Angel.”

  “Slight change of plans. The bomb’s been deactivated. We’re going to try to reach the Hatcherly container port. We can’t see it yet. Can you give me an idea of shipping around it?”

  “One moment, Angel. Ah, are you sure about the bomb?”

  “We’d be screaming for that chopper if we weren’t.”

  “Roger, Angel. There’s only one ship at the facility at this time. It’s just now emerging from an enclosed dry dock.”

  Mercer had a sneaking suspicion he knew what ship that was. “Heaven, any chance you can read its name?”

  “We can read the magazine stuffed into the back pocket of a deckhand by her jackstaff. She’s the MV Korvald, registered in Liberia.”

  “Korvald’s coming out of the dry dock,” Mercer told Harry.

  He goosed the throttles a little farther “Say no more.” Harry looked up to speak to his ship. “Okay, baby, you hold together for old Captain Harry and he’ll give you a send-off befitting a dreadnought.”

  “Are you going to ram the Korvald?” Rene asked.

  “If the Rose’ll let me.” Harry smiled and patted the wheel.

  “Are you insane? We’re loaded with thousands of tons of explosives and the Korvald’s carrying eight intercontinental ballistic missiles. You are going to kill us all and level five square kilometers.”

  “Don’t worry, Rene.” Mercer interceded before Bruneseau completely lost it again. “Harry’s making another of his bad jokes. He’s not gonna hit her. What we’ll do is box her in and keep her from escaping. Those missiles are the perfect evidence against Liu Yousheng.”

  The French spy seemed satisfied, but the scowl didn’t leave his face. It was clear that he would never trust Harry White.

  Mercer moved close to his friend so Bruneseau couldn’t overhear. “You really weren’t planning on ramming the Korvald, were you?”

  “Oh, I’m still planning on it.” Harry cackled. They were a half mile from the Hatcherly port. Against the backdrop of the storm, the tall Hyundai gantry cranes stood like colossal scaffolds. Behind them was a maze of shipping containers. Immediately next to the cranes was the dry dock. The tail of a ship was slowly backing from the cavernous entrance. “Take the wheel.”

  “What?”

  Harry stepped away from the ship’s controls. “I said take the wheel. We’ve got a couple minutes and I wasn’t kidding that I have to take a leak. Just keep her on course for the dry dock.”

  By the time Harry returned from the head, the Englander Rose had started to list to port at an angle that deepened remarkably fast. They were separated from the dry dock by a quarter mile of choppy water and the Korvald was almost free from the enclosure. With the load of water filling her bilge and starting to swamp her lower cargo decks, the Rose became more sluggish. Her speed fell away to the point that Harry didn’t think they were going to make it. He eased back on the throttles.

  “Okay, folks, this is what I want to do,” he said. “If we go, we’re going to roll to port. She won’t flip completely because the water here isn’t deep enough. She’ll just settle in the mud on her side. All of you go out on the starboard wing bridge and wait for it to happen.”

  “What about you?” Foch asked.

  “I’ve got to hold her on course as long as I can.”

  “Someone find some rope,” Lauren ordered. “We can tie a loop around your waist and haul you up when the ship capsizes.”

  Gathering the weapons, the group moved outside while Mercer jury-rigged a climber’s harness out of some rope and secured Harry to the wing-bridge railing. “How’s that?”

  “Feels like a damned straitjacket,” Harry complained.

  “You’d know.”

  Mercer stayed at his friend’s side as the ship moved closer to its target and slid closer to overturning. By the inclinometer screwed into a bulkhead, her angle was twenty-two degrees. The measuring device had a mark stating she could recover from a forty-degree dip, but not with her holds flooded and probably only when wave action would help to right her. Harry leaned into his harness while Mercer was forced to hold the console.

  They could see the Korvald clearly. She was newer than the Rose; larger too. Her cargo wasn’t heavy enough to hide the bright line of antifouling paint along her waterline. Men stood at the fantail, and others were visible on her wing bridge. Three were in dark naval-like uniforms while two others wore suits. Both civilians were shorter than average, although one had a thick build. Something nagged at Mercer about the thinner of the pair. He groped for the binoculars, swinging them up one-handed, and spreading his feet farther as the ship’s list deepened past thirty degrees.

  He dialed in the focus, zeroing in on the men guiding the refrigerator ship from under a tarp protecting the exposed bridge from the rain. Facial features became clear. All were staring at the tired tramp steamer limping toward them. Mercer recognized none of the crew, nor the heavy-set civilian, but he knew the frail figure.

  His hand tightened on the binoculars and began to tremble. “Sun’s on that ship.”

  “Who? The torturer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, goddamn.”

  “Harry, we can’t let them get away.”

  “I’m working on it, pal, I’m working on it.”

  Although she was barely moving under her own power, the current rushing down the canal was enough to keep the Rose charging at the Korvald. The range dropped to a hundred yards, then eighty. Armed men suddenly appeared at the rail of the Chinese ship. They opened fire, sporadically at first, and then more sustained and concentrated. For the third time, bullets ricocheted around the bridge. Harry and Mercer dropped to the deck to find cover.

  “Shit!”

  “What is it?” Mercer asked over the din, fearing Harry had been hit.

  “I need to see which way the Korvald’s going to turn. She could back around and head straight for open water or she could cut inside us and circle the harbor to get out behind us.”

  “How can you tell which way she’ll go?” A round blew the stuffing out of the chair Lauren had been using.

  “I need to see the w
ash from her bow thruster and how her rudder’s cocked.”

  Lauren shouted from the protection of the offside wing. “Get out here, you two. You’re going to get yourselves killed.”

  “It isn’t worth it,” Foch added.

  Mercer ignored them and tried his radio. “Heaven, come in. This is Angel Two. Where’s that chopper?”

  No sooner had he asked than the beating rotors of an SH- 60 Seahawk filled the bridge with noise as it thundered twenty feet over their heads. The downblast whipped a brutal wind through the shattered windows. The chopper had come in low, using the drifting hulk of the Englander Rose as cover, popping into view at the last moment. It pirouetted to get an angle for a door gunner to rake the missile ship with his M-60.

  Hitting only two of the Chinese soldiers, he still managed to clear the railing as the others dove for cover.

  Mercer helped Harry to his feet. There was a frothing patch of water near the Korvald’s bow. Using the powerful athwartship thruster she was beginning her turn, hoping to beat the Rose by swinging herself to shoot directly down the canal.

  Harry spotted it immediately. “We’ve got them.” He cranked the wheel toward the big reefer ship.

  Maneuvering her bow so that it was perpendicular to the dry dock but still pointed toward shore, Captain Wong had hoped to beat the derelict by dancing inside her. Had he known what Harry White knew, he would have spun out the other way and easily outflanked the sinking ship.

  With twenty yards separating the ships, and both directed more or less downstream, Harry cranked the throttles one last time. Ever so slightly she built up headway, forcing more water into her holds. She started to capsize.

  Mercer scrambled up the deck to the safety of the flying bridge and helped the others draw Harry up to them. They pressed themselves to the deck, holding fast against the bulkhead that would soon become the floor.

  The dynamic angle of the keel and rudder shot the ship toward the Korvald. With water pouring over her rail, the Englander Rose nosed into the refrigerator ship just hard enough to tear a large gash in her hull. With her momentum expended, the Rose settled over even more, fountains of air and water exploding from ventilators and leaky hatch covers as her interior spaces were drowned.

  When her bow struck the bottom her keel bent in an agonized scream of wrenching metal. She settled deeper, rolling ever so slowly. Her forward cranes were smashed like matchsticks when they slammed the Korvald’s deck. The upper edge of the superstructure crashed into the other ship’s wheelhouse in an explosion of broken glass and men too slow to get out of the way. The funnel snapped off when it struck, and rolled like an enormous pipe onto the deck. It caught two gunmen and crushed them flat.

  Wave action from the collision separated the two vessels for a moment before they struck again, harder, opening another hole in the Korvald’s hull. As the Rose continued to settle on the shallow bottom, torn plates, tangles of rope and other debris locked the two vessels together. The Chinese ship was pulled downward by the Rose’s dead weight. She ended up with a ten-degree list when at last the tramp freighter stopped sinking. But with water rushing through her torn hull, the Korvald also began to go down.

  The Rose lay as though dead, with more than half of her bulk underwater and waves lapping just five feet below where her crew huddled.

  Rabidoux was the first to recover. “I think they are going to come after us for what Harry did to their ship.”

  Lauren disentangled her legs from under Foch, struggling to find her orientation on this world turned sideways. Looking down through the bridge door she saw nothing but water. She grabbed her weapon. “He’s right. We can’t stay here. They’re going to cut us down.”

  Mercer fingered the knot on the back of his head. He’d hit it against the wall during the final plunge. “Let’s give it a minute.”

  “What?” they all shouted at once.

  Mercer twisted his wrist so they could see his borrowed watch. It was 11:00. “We’ll make our move when the Change lights off. The chopper can provide cover.” He radioed his plan to the McCampbell, who would pass it on to the pilot of the Seahawk, swirling out of reach of small-arms fire from the Korvald.

  “According to my watch,” Lauren said, her free hand gripping her M-16, “it should come in four, three, two, one. .”

  Nothing.

  “It’s that Rolex you wear,” Foch teased. “Too accurate. They’re using a cheap Chinese knockoff.”

  Harry was about to crack a joke when a dazzling flash arced across the underside of the low-lying clouds, a blinding display that left his jaw slack and his eyes stinging.

  Twelve miles up the canal, seven thousand tons of explosives detonated. It wasn’t so much an explosion as a hurricane of fire that shredded the sky as it bloomed and billowed into a towering column of flame. The Robert T. Change ceased to exist, wiped from the earth in the first milliseconds of the blast. Slapped as if by a giant fist, the Mario diCastorelli was lifted from the water and tossed nearly a half mile, while chunks of her hull sailed even farther. The billion gallons of vaporized water added to the overpressure that hammered the surrounding rock. In an instant, the soil below the canal turned into a slurry no stiffer than Jell-O and the fractured mountains began to collapse, tumbling and grinding and filling the crater gouged by the explosion. Clouds of dust rose around the blast scene like the banks of ash that pour from a volcanic eruption.

  The shock wave traveling through the earth made the surface of the canal near the Rose come alive. They could see the growing fireball climbing over the horizon but could hear nothing yet as jittering waves topped ten feet and washed over their tight group. The pressure wave hit a second later, and then came the rumbling thunder of the detonation, a roar like a thousand jet aircraft.

  In the cut, tens of thousands of cubic yards of rock and debris tumbled from the mountainside in an endless cascade. On the opposite bank was a gently sloping field nearly four acres square. The structural shifts in topography caused the top ten feet of dirt covering the field to slide like a conveyor belt into the canal. The avalanches fell unabated for several minutes, and slides would continue for days as the landscape resettled itself.

  For the first time since October 10, 1913, when a telegraphed signal from Woodrow Wilson in the White House detonated the dike separating the Gaillard Cut from Lake Gatun, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were no longer joined. The most vital sealane in the history of maritime commerce had been severed. Below the churning dust and dissipating flames, angry water lapped at both sides of an earthen plug that stretched from bank to bank.

  Mercer roused his people as soon as the sound hit them. They couldn’t waste the precious seconds of distraction the explosion gave them. The Seahawk pilot understood her orders and didn’t bother staring at the awful destruction taking place up the canal. She swung her chopper in a tight circle, lowering her altitude so the door gunner could open fire directly into the Korvald’s bridge. Glass and blood flew.

  The Legion soldiers led the group around the wing bridge and across what had once been the side of the superstructure. The steel was slick with rain and the footing treacherous. There was no cover. Had it not been for the chopper keeping the Chinese pinned, their charge could have been cut down before it ever really got going.

  Munz and Foch reached the edge of the superstructure first, dropping flat to peer over the lip to see who or what was below them. Mercer and Lauren watched where the Korvald’s wing bridge jutted out ten feet over their heads. So far no one on the Chinese ship presented themselves as a target.

  “Clear,” Foch called and disappeared from view over the edge.

  The others rushed forward. The Korvald’s rail was only a foot below them and was less than a yard away. The water between the two ships continued to bubble as air escaped from the capsized freighter.

  Foch waited in the shadow of a ventilator to help steady the others as they leapt over. Above them and forty feet aft, the ship’s mangled wheelhouse continued to take a
utomatic fire from the Seahawk. A short way off two pairs of legs shown grotesquely from under the Rose’s decapitated funnel.

  “What’s your plan?” Mercer asked the Legion officer.

  He shrugged. “Je ne sais pas. I thought you’d have an idea.”

  Looking toward the bow, Mercer saw movement. A Chinese soldier was working his way along the raised hatch covers to find a way to shoot down the helicopter gunship with his type 87. Mercer swung his M-16, but Rabidoux was quicker and triggered off a three-round burst that threw the soldier flat.

  Two more Chinese rose from their hiding places to counterfire and were cut down by Lauren and Foch.

  “The chopper’s keeping everyone on the bridge occupied,” Mercer said, his breathing growing ragged as adrenaline once again electrified his body. “Foch, take two men and mop up the forward deck so no one can sneak up behind us.”

  “D’accord.” He grabbed Munz and the Legion trooper whose name Mercer didn’t know and vanished around the funnel.

  Mercer and the rest shuffled over to the superstructure, mindful of glass still falling from the bridge. Reaching a sealed hatchway, Bruneseau took up a covering position while Rabidoux spun open the dogs. No one was waiting inside.

  “Haven’t we already done this once today?” Harry remarked as they stepped out of the storm.

  “Quit your complaining and help us find a place to hole up until Foch gets back.”

  They made their way down a dim passage, turning left toward the interior of the ship, and found an unlocked cabin. Mercer went in first, his M-16 held tight to his shoulder. It was clear. Harry went straight to the desk and sat down. “Ah, that feels better. Damned peg leg is starting to bother me.”

  A minute later, they heard movement outside the cabin. Rene peeked out the door then opened it wide for Foch and the others. “Is the deck clear?”

  He nodded. “There were three others. What do we do now, hunt down the rest?”

  Mercer thought about it. “No. Just one of them.”

  “Sun?” Harry asked, understanding.

  “I’ve got to do it,” Mercer said. “I can’t explain why, but I’ve got to.”