by Cap Daniels
My hand struck something that felt like a tree trunk—cylindrical and hard. I felt along the object and followed it toward the center of the canal. It never changed shape or size in the fifty feet I traced it. I wasn’t sure what I’d discovered, but it definitely wasn’t plastic explosives or a detonator cord. I turned to follow it back toward the piling, running my gloved hand along the smooth surface. When I reached the footing of the bridge pile, it occurred to me that the object must have been one of the many underwater cables spanning the canal, carrying telephone, data, and electricity between North and South America. I discovered four more of the massive cables before something slammed into the top of my head. My full-face mask was knocked off and it immediately filled with salt water.
As I was trying to figure out what hit me, a pair of strong hands grabbed my shoulders. I was about to be in the fight of my life, and I was at a terrible disadvantage. I had a flooded, dislodged facemask and a stream of bubbles pouring skyward in front of my face. I was blind, without air, and badly disoriented.
I tried to retreat to reseal and clear my mask, but I couldn’t escape the other diver’s grip. Realizing that I was about to inhale two lungs full of water, I reached for the knife on my belt. If I was going to find out what awaits assassins on the other side, I wasn’t going alone. This guy was coming with me even if I had to—as Anya would say—gut him like pig with her knife.
The aggressor removed his right hand from my left arm and situated my mask back on my face. I pulled the bottom of my mask away from my chin, and the water evacuated immediately, leaving me with a clear mask and all the air I needed.
Why would he hit me and then save my life?
“Are you okay, college boy? I didn’t see you. It’s like swimming in a sewer down here.”
“I almost introduced my dive knife to your liver,” I said, relieved to hear Clark’s voice.
“A little jumpy, are we?”
“No, I just wasn’t expecting you to swim into my skull. Did you find anything?”
“A pistol, a fishing rod, and two pairs of sunglasses. How about you?”
“I found a bunch of big cables, but nothing explosive,” I said. “Let’s head back to the boat, if we can find it, and check out the other side.”
“I’ll race you to the top, bubble boy.”
Racing to the top had been a long-standing joke between Clark and me. I had an irrational fear of getting decompression sickness, commonly called “the bends.” It’s a condition that occurs when nitrogen gas suspended in divers’ body tissue expands rapidly from surfacing too quickly. It’s like shaking up a carbonated drink and unscrewing the lid. The nitrogen gas comes out of solution and forms bubbles, just like the carbon dioxide in the carbonation. It causes all sorts of nasty symptoms and can be fatal.
Clark had been diving for twenty years and never worried about getting bent, but it was almost always in the back of my mind each time I was underwater. The accepted standard is to ascend at one foot per second, but I liked to double that safety margin to two seconds per foot. I was in no hurry to race to the surface with Clark or anyone else.
I surfaced after Clark, who was already in the boat. “What took you so long?” he asked, pulling me back aboard.
“I was just enjoying the scenery on the way up.” I pulled off my mask but left the rest of my gear in place, knowing I’d be back in the water as soon as we crossed the canal.
Clark pulled up the anchor. “Maybe the viz will be better on the other side.”
“It can’t be any worse,” I said as I headed the boat to the west.
Clark pointed up the canal. “Look,” he yelled over the engine noise. “The Pearl will be in the locks soon.”
He was right. The Pearl was a couple miles north of the bridge, and the southern gates of the first lock were less than a mile off her bow. The Miraflores Locks are a two-stage set of locks that would raise the ship fifty-four feet, and if she didn’t sink, she’d continue into Lake Miraflores toward the Pedro Miguel Locks and end up at Lake Gatun. But I was pretty sure the Pearl wouldn’t be seeing Lake Gatun anytime soon.
“Do you think they’ll sink her in the first stage or the second?” I yelled back.
“I think I’d sink her on the high side. That’d make a bigger mess and make it a lot harder to clean up, but that’s a two-sided lock, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, they’re parallel,” I said.
“Then sinking a boat on one side won’t close the locks, will it?”
“It will now. The western side has been shut down for maintenance for six weeks, with another twelve weeks scheduled. The eastern side is the only operational lock right now.”
“Hmm, that’s convenient,” Clark huffed.
The western side of the canal was significantly deeper than the eastern edge. We tried to anchor in forty feet of water, but without enough rode to get the anchor to bite, we had to move closer to the shoreline and increase our swim distance. Finally, we anchored in a spot still far enough away to keep anyone from swimming out and taking advantage of our abandoned boat.
We double-checked our gear, I pocketed the boat key, and overboard we went. I was pleased the visibility was much better, and I could actually see my fins. Clark gave the signal, and we were on our way to the bottom. Although there wasn’t much natural light at depth, the actual visibility had increased to ten feet or more. I could finally use my torch without being blinded in the fog.
We decided to conduct an arm’s-length grid instead of risking another head-on collision. Clark swam on my left at an arm’s distance away, and we scanned the bottom around the foundations of the bridge pilings. After eighty minutes underwater, we’d searched every inch of the foundations and a swath of the bottom near the foundations. Not only were there no explosives, there was no sign that anyone had been on the bottom. Except for the cables that were plainly visible, we didn’t find anything.
Back on the boat, we pulled off our dive gear and sat on the tubes while drinking bottled water. Dehydration can cause decompression sickness, and I wasn’t taking any chances.
“So, what do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t know, man. There’s nothing down there.”
I replayed Javier’s interrogation in my head, trying to determine if I’d been duped. “Do you think Javier was lying about which bridge they were going to blow?”
“I don’t think so. He seemed surprised that we’d even ask him about the Centennial Bridge.”
“That’s the impression I got as well, but there’s nothing here,” I said.
Clark’s eyes widened and he stared through me. “What did you just say?”
I stared back. “I said there’s nothing here.”
“That’s exactly what Javier said about the Centennial Bridge. He said, ‘Why would we want to blow the Puente Centenario? There’s nothing in the water there.’ Or at least that’s what I think he said. My Spanish isn’t as good as yours.”
“The cables!” I yelled. “They’re going to blow the—”
An echoing roar rolled down the mouth of the canal like thunder in a canyon.
My heart stopped. “That little son of a bitch. He did lie to us. They just blew the locks.”
17
A Snap
Clark yanked the anchor from the mud and hauled it aboard. At the touch of the key, the engine fired, and we were headed up the canal. It was three miles to the Miraflores Locks, but I could already see the smoke rising. The scene unfolding in front of us was mayhem of the highest order. I’d never seen anything like it.
I tried to make sense of what I was seeing, but it was utter chaos. Alarms bellowed, and people ran in every direction. Panic had consumed the scene. Water cascaded over the remains of the lower gates of the lock in a huge waterfall. The stern of the Pearl was resting at an unimaginable angle. The top of her rudder was exposed, and she listed to port. Her hull was pinned against the walls of the lock. Her keel had come to rest on the bottom of the shallow lock with her bow jut
ting skyward and her stern weeping helplessly down toward the Pacific sea level. The main deck was still well above water, but the towering stacks of containers were beginning to list and succumb to gravity’s angry insistence. To see the massive freighter in such a perilous condition was impossible to comprehend.
“It looks like they sank the Pearl between the intermediate gates and blew the downstream gates to stick her to the bottom.”
Without looking back at me, Clark said, “I think you’re right, but that wasn’t enough noise for four hundred pounds of C4. I don’t think they’re finished.”
The torrent in front of us churned with rolling waves of surging water as if it were alive. The creek where we’d discovered Javier’s boat was billowing with a white foamy wall of water rushing southward. Someone had opened the bypass dam in a desperate attempt to alleviate some of the pressure from the badly damaged locks and the enormous ship stranded within them.
I couldn’t fathom the recovery operation that would be required to resolve the disaster.
Clark finally turned away from the horrific scene. “What will happen if they blow the upstream gates?”
I couldn’t come up with a good answer. “I don’t know, but I think it might wash the Pearl back out into the canal.”
“Not if she’s on the bottom,” he said.
I don’t know what I thought was going to happen when they sank the Pearl in the locks, but the reality of the event was far worse than anything I could’ve ever imagined.
Clark stood in the bow, shaking his head. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
He couldn’t have been more correct. It was time for us to run. I pushed the throttle forward, brought the boat about, and headed south away from the chaos. With the incredible volume of water rushing through the bypass channel, I expected the canal to be turbulent, but the further south we went, the calmer the water became.
A massive second explosion rang through the air. I swung the boat around. The western side of the lock that had been down for maintenance was pouring smoke, dust, and plumes of brown water into the sky. They’d blown the intermediate gates on that side, rendering the reopening of the parallel lock completely out of the question.
There was nothing we could do except continue south. Returning to the locks would only put us in more danger. By the time we’d almost reached the bridge, in stark contrast to the turmoil upstream, the surface of the water looked like glass.
The serenity gave me the opportunity to concentrate and piece together a plan. “I think we have to get back in the water. If those cables are rigged to blow, they’re probably rigged in a daisy chain instead of all the C4 being in one place. That’s how I’d do it.”
“I think you’re probably right,” Clark said. “We have to go at it from both ends and meet in the middle.”
“Exactly. I’ll put you in the water on the west side, and then I’ll run across and anchor on the east in the shallows. Will our coms work that far apart?”
Our full-face masks had electronic communications built in so we could talk to each other underwater, but I’d never tried using them a thousand feet apart.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I guess we’ll find out.”
By the time we reached the western bridge piling, Clark was already in his dive gear and poised to go overboard. I slowed the RHIB to ten knots, and he rolled backward, vanishing beneath the murky surface.
I shoved the throttle forward and turned toward the east bank. Emergency response vehicles raced northward from Panama City, and a fleet of boats headed for the Miraflores Locks. I wondered if any of the men aboard those boats knew what unthinkable disaster lay before them and what they would do once they arrived on scene.
I set the anchor and pulled on my gear. Seconds later, I was back in the nearly silent world of zero visibility. I followed the foundation of the bridge piling and descended through the soup. I found one of the tree-trunk-size cables and followed it into the depths of the canal.
I left the key in the boat. What was I thinking?
There was no time to go back for it. I’d just have to hope no one wanted my boat more than I did.
I swam toward the center of the canal, allowing my gloved right hand to slide along the smooth surface of the cable. With near-zero visibility, my sense of feel had replaced my sight. I pressed my dive computer to my mask and watched the depth display reach sixty-two feet just as my right hand struck something solid.
I stopped kicking and felt the object carefully. It was the size of a shoebox, had a pair of thin wires coming from one end, and was affixed to the cable with a mechanical band. I couldn’t see it well enough to know if it was a device that was supposed to be part of the cable system or if it was an explosive charge. I pressed my mask as close to the object as possible and discovered it to be relatively clean with no marine growth of any kind. It was fresh, and it was a block of C4.
Clark’s voice crackled through my comms. “Are you in the water yet?”
“Yeah, I’m wet, and I’ve found a device. It appears to be a block of C4, maybe three or four pounds, with a pair of wires leading on down the cable.”
“I’ve found two of those already,” he said in a tinny, electronic voice.”
“Did you disarm them?”
“Yeah, I just pulled the blasting caps out and left the charges on the cable. I’ve not cut anything yet. How about you?”
“I’m doing the same,” I said. “I don’t want to cut anything until we know how it’s all wired.”
Clark asked, “How many of these cables are there?”
His question froze me in my tracks. I had no idea how many there were. If we couldn’t find a way to ensure that we’d searched every cable, there would be no way to know if our mission was complete.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” I said. “How many do you think there are?”
“I count six.”
I quickly did the math. Six cable runs of over a thousand feet each. I pressed my dive computer back to my face. Seventy-seven feet.
While I was trying to determine how long we could stay on the bottom, Clark asked another question that stopped my heart. “Uh, Chase, when do you think they plan to set these off?”
Suddenly, my bottom-time calculations no longer mattered. Not knowing when the explosion would come meant we had to disarm everything we could find as quickly as possible.
“If I were running the op, I’d blow them now to disrupt as much commo and electric as I could.”
“Trying to think like a maniacal Chinese tactician is not something my brain can do, but I can’t imagine them waiting much longer.”
I swam as quickly as I could while still keeping my hand on the cable. I found three more charges and removed the detonators from each. When the visibility started to improve, the work became easier, but it was still nerve-racking. If the charges were on a timer and we didn’t get them all disarmed before the time ran out, they’d blow, and there would be nothing we could do to stop them. If they were on a remote and someone was waiting to set them off when some event on some timeline occurred, we were equally screwed. All we could do was continue disarming the charges as quickly as we could find them.
Exhaustion set in after two and a half hours in the water. I could hear the fatigue in Clark’s voice and feel it in my spine. Even if we gave up the search for more explosives, we couldn’t head directly to the surface. Because of the amount of time we’d spent at depth, our bodies were loaded up with nitrogen, and we were in for a long decompression stop to let it off-gas from our bodies. I wasn’t interested in my bloodstream turning into a fizzy fountain.
“How you doing, Clark?”
“I’m hurting. How about you?”
I drew in a long breath. “I’m okay. Just a little tired. I think there’s just one more cable. Where are you?”
“Uh, I’m on the murky side at forty feet.”
I pressed my computer to my face. “I’m just below you at fifty-five. I’m comin
g to you. Hold your position. We’ll finish together.”
“Roger.”
My fatigue, coupled with the non-existent visibility, made finding Clark more difficult than I’d expected. I finally brushed against him ten minutes later. We moved to the final cable and began to fin for the depths. We discovered two more charges and removed the detonators just as we’d done with the previous twenty-seven devices we’d found. The visibility was slightly better at the bottom, and I could see Clark’s face for the first time. We both sighed behind our masks, wondering how much longer we could keep this up. I was thirsty, hungry, and exhausted, and his drooping eyes showed he felt the same way. In silent acknowledgment of each other’s condition, we continued on.
With the slightly improved visibility and the aid of our torches, we discovered a device near the cable at the center of the canal. We’d found the mother ship.
According to my computer, we were in seventy-eight feet of water.
“It’s times like these when I wish I’d gone to EOD school,” Clark mumbled.
Explosive Ordnance Disposal is a highly specialized craft developed over thousands of hours of study and years of experience. Neither Clark nor I were formally trained in the craft. What little I knew had come from books, and Clark’s experience had been mostly as an observer in actual combat situations. We were out of our element, over our heads, and quite literally, under pressure.
“What do you suppose that is?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’d guess it’s the brains of this spiderweb of death.”
“I think you’re right. It looks like we’re going to have to—” An alarm on his dive computer went off. He pulled the instrument toward his face and shook his head. “No wonder I feel like crap. My scrubber is failing. I’ve got high CO2 levels.”