Crush Depth

that Voortrekker was here.

TWENTY

On Challenger

Jeffrey’s injured torpedoman was gone to a hospital. The Prima Latina was slowly being towed through the entry locks, at the beginning of the Panama Canal, by electric locomotives running on tracks along the bank. Sitting at his console in the control room, Jeffrey had to take this mostly on faith. He couldn’t exactly go up on the freighter’s bridge to greet the canal pilot and customs officials at Cristobal. All Challenger’s periscope showed him was the inside of the submarine hold. He had to take Rodrigo’s word for what was going on.

The feeling in the control room was stuffy and tense. There was nowhere to go, trapped inside the tramp steamer, herself imprisoned inside the shallow canal locks. Jeffrey had set Challenger at battle stations hours ago, as a precaution, but the crew had no real way to defend themselves — except for last- ditch small arms.

Silence was their best, their only protection. Even though the decks all rode on sound-isolation gear, Jeffrey’s crew walked gingerly on tiptoe. They spoke in whispers and sign language, if they spoke at all. Now and then someone would grab a wad of toilet paper, kept handy to clean the console touch screens. Instead they’d mop their brow. With the fans stopped the air was warm, and getting warmer all the time.

Doubts and worries kept running through Jeffrey’s mind. From the looks on the faces around him, he wasn’t alone. Jeffrey hated this feeling of loss of control. The helpless wait was excruciating — and the trip of half a day through the canal had barely begun.

What if the Prima Latina had engine failure? What if she collided with another ship crossing big Gatun Lake in the middle of the canal? What if one of the locks got jammed, or the submarine-hold doors malfunctioned and dropped wide open and snagged the canal bottom? What if there was an earthquake here, or a landslide in the narrow Gaillard Cut through the high southern mountains? A dozen things could go horribly wrong.

COB and Meltzer manned the ship controls gamely, though there was nothing at all for them to do. COB, exhausted from days of nonstop repair work, began to nod off. He started to snore, and Meltzer immediately nudged him. COB roused, and Harrison offered a cup of stale coffee. COB gulped it gratefully.

Jeffrey himself had to stifle a yawn. He’d already had so much coffee he was getting acid stomach, so he resisted asking for another cup. He was sure he wouldn’t sleep until his command was through the canal, and out of the freighter and out of this waking nightmare, safely submerged and free in the Pacific Ocean at last.

A nervous fire-controlman began to cough — he’d choked on his own saliva, his throat was so tight. He desperately covered his mouth with both hands to suppress the hacking noises. A friend pounded his back, firmly but quietly. The fire-controlman eventually stopped choking.

For the moment, it was so quiet Jeffrey could hear the sound of his own circulating blood, an unnerving rush in his ears. Jeffrey drew a deep breath. The ship’s chronometer seemed to move so slowly, he thought it must be broken. But the chronometer and his wristwatch agreed, as did Bell’s.

The same awful thoughts plagued Jeffrey again and again. Trapped within the Prima Latina, cornered in the canal, Challenger was a clay pigeon. Panama’s armed forces, bitter since America’s anti-Noriega sanctions wrecked the local economy years ago, would act violently. Challenger’s too-thin cloak, this secret hold, could easily become a secret execution chamber.

Worst thing of all, if found out — USS Challenger, a belligerent’s nuclear submarine bearing many nuclear arms — she’d provoke a diplomatic incident of monumental proportions. The scandal and outrage as word spread fast might well push teetering Latin American countries to spurn the U.S. altogether and join the Axis cause. The impact on the outcome of the war would be disastrous.

Jeffrey felt this burden every second of the way, more suffocating than the stale air in the control room.

A messenger came from aft, so silent Jeffrey didn’t notice until he felt a tap on his arm. The messenger mumbled in Jeffrey’s ear. Wilson wanted to see him.

Transiting the canal, Jeffrey spent several hours with Commodore Wilson and Lieutenant Sessions in private, working further on their tactics for when they reached the South Pacific.

Then, back in the control room, Jeffrey saw on the periscope screens that Rodrigo was coming down the gangway to Challenger’s hull. Rodrigo’s posture was casual, and he didn’t look concerned, so Jeffrey tried to relax.

Rodrigo waved at the periscope head for Jeffrey to come up. Glad for any change of scenery, Jeffrey climbed the forward escape trunk.

“Greetings, Capitan.”

“How are we doing?” Jeffrey asked.

“All is well so far. Your crewman is at a good hospital. My employer has agents in-country, who will keep an eye and make sure he is not bothered by enemy operatives.”

“Good, terrific. Thank you, Rodrigo…. Was that everything?”

“By no means. I thought you might enjoy fresh air. How would you like to come on deck for a moment?”

“Is that wise?”

“You will have to be disguised, of course, lest the wrong person see you. But the crew of the Prima Latina are all picked men. They are very trustworthy.”

“Okay.”

Jeffrey followed Rodrigo through the crawl space. In the cargo hold, Jeffrey heard scurrying and pattering sounds. He was glad he didn’t meet the local wildlife. Rodrigo pointed to a pile of clothes: dirty rubber boots, worn dungarees, and an oil-stained tank-top shirt.

Jeffrey gingerly inspected the outfit for spiders or rats. He changed. The clothes were baggy. Rodrigo led him out of the hold and along a passageway. Jeffrey clumped in the rubber boots. They came to a storeroom. Rodrigo gave Jeffrey dark sunglasses, a large straw hat, and a paste-on beard.

“We must avoid the bridge. The canal pilot is there.”

Rodrigo and Jeffrey went out on deck.

The change from down inside the hold was stunning.

The bright sun, low in the east, was a beautiful extra-yellow. The early morning sky was cloudless, a brilliant cobalt blue. It was hot, but not too hot if Jeffrey didn’t stand in the direct sun. The air was humid, but pleasantly so.

The Prima Latina was going around a broad curve, between steep hills that towered hundreds of feet on either side.

“This is the Gaillard Cut,” Rodrigo said.

“I’ve heard of it.”

“It was the most difficult part of building the canal. Thousands died, you know, of many nationalities and races, from malaria and yellow fever and worse.”

“I know,” Jeffrey said.

“Yet now it is so beautiful here.”

Rodrigo was right. The jungle growth on the mountainsides was exuberantly dense and vibrantly green. The different colors of tropical flowers and bushes and vines were breathtakingly rich. Stands of bamboo seemed to shimmer dazzlingly in the sunlight. Strange trees with smooth gray trunks towered a hundred feet in the air.

Then Jeffrey remembered these mountainsides were artificial, here in the cut. Millions of cubic yards of earth and rock had had to be removed laboriously, much of it by pickax and shovel, by wheelbarrow or mule. More than once, huge mudslides had ruined the work and killed dozens or hundreds of men. That was all a century ago or more; in modern times, the cut had been widened and stabilized.