the rail itself would hide it.
Twice more, they repeated the exercise, dragging the huge weight across the lock, and lowering it into the water, fastening it off with the bowline, and feeling it swing gently against the giant hinges.
On the nearside of the gates, CPO O'Riordan was doing the same. But his men did not have that backbreaking journey across the lock, and it was as well that Bill Peavey, one of the strongest men in the U.S. Navy, was among the muscle present on that dark and treacherous night.
By midnight, the SEALs had moved into position, Lieutenant Rougeau back on the roof of the original building, accompanied by three bodyguards, four MP5s and powerful night binoculars. Lt. Commander Peavey was heading back out into the lake in one of the Zodiacs and everyone else was clearing up and preparing for the getaway.
The Commanding Officer was accompanied by Chief O'Riordan, who was now speaking to Patrick Rougeau on the radio. They headed out into the lake more than a quarter of a mile from the gates but still well within the range of the deadly transmitter that would flash its electronic signal simultaneously to the six bobbing little aerials outside the lock gates.
The plan was simple. Lieutenant Rougeau would give them clearance to detonate when the Chinese destroyer was safely through the exit gates from the upper chamber, almost thirty feet lower, and being hauled along to the second chamber by the automatic locomotives. In various forms, these iron horses have done the task for generations, like an old-fashioned car wash used to drag vehicles through the soapsuds.
The men on the lake would then wait six minutes for the SEALs to make their escape off the roof, back to the beach, and the last boat, at which point they would send in the fatal signal.
West of the destroyer's approach path, the SEALs watched from the Zodiacs, as it steamed slowly toward the lock gates. They could not see them slowly open, outward into the lake, powered by no fewer than ninety-two electric motors, but they saw the great 470-foot-long hull of the warship slide between the jetties, at which point Chief O'Riordan knew the bombs would have eased back into the wide recesses in the walls.
Up on the roof, Patrick Rougeau and his team watched the locomotives drag the warship into the chamber and the giant gates shut behind it. And somewhere deep below them they heard the distant thunder of the water, millions of gallons, gushing through the tunnels, emptying the lock. The ship did not appear to be moving, but after five minutes it was undoubtedly lower in the water.
For twenty more minutes they waited, until the superstructure of the ship had virtually disappeared. Then they saw the gates at the far end slowly open, and they could hear the revving of the locomotives as they dragged the ship out of the chamber into the narrow waterway toward the next set of gates, the entrance to the middle lock.
Over in the Control Room, the entire procedure was being watched by four Chinese technicians on the sixty- four-foot-long electronic model, which demonstrates every progression, every step of the way for every ship that moves through the canal. It records the actions of every one of the 1,500 electric motors, and now it showed the Luhu Class destroyer at the beginning of its short run to the second pair of gates it would encounter.
'H-HOUR! H MINUS SIX!' called Patrick Rougeau. H for HIT, that is.
Out in the Zodiac, Bill Peavey hit the stopwatch, which would count down the six minutes it would take Patrick and his boys to clear the rooftop, race down the stairway onto the jetty, down the long ladder to the beach, and board the last inflatable waiting to ferry them away.
Working the radio, Chief O'Riordan immediately summoned the Sea Stallions, which were ready to take off from the carrier. They were scheduled all to arrive at the landing beach together.
Five minutes passed, by which time Lieutenant Rougeau and his team were clambering into the boat, everyone scared to death the blast from the bombs might send the entire lock skyward, millions of tons of concrete. They fired up the engine, now careless of the noise, and traveling flat out, made 300 yards south, by the time Bill Peavey hit the button.
The electronic pulse flashed unseen across the dark water, hit the little aerials, and simultaneously detonated all six of the 400-pound bombs. They blew with staggering force, and with a deafening roar, which kicked a twenty- foot wave back into the lake, where the Zodiac carrying Bill, Chris, and the boys was making forty knots, southwest.
The blast annihilated the great iron hinges and blew both lock gates fifty feet into the night air. At which point a wall of water, with a forward motion of zillions of tons, over sixty feet high, thundered into the empty chamber like the mother of all previously known tidal waves.
It slammed into the second gates with the kind of force that would have flattened the Pentagon. They gave way as if they were made of cardboard, and the thunderous torrent, now driven by another zillion tons of water surging in from the lake, reached the hapless 9,000-ton Qingdao, ripped it from the chains of the locomotive and hurled it forward.
The sharp, pointed bow of the Chinese warship cleared the gates of the second chamber some thirty feet higher than it should have been and it was the keel and propellers that splintered the giant lock doors, smashing them off their hinges.
By now the torrent was gathering strength, and as the new water drove into the old, surging through the narrow reinforced concrete channel, it drove the destroyer's bow upward, sending it through the second chamber at an angle of fifty degrees from the horizontal, the propellers tearing along the concrete bottom.
It hit the end gates like a gigantic battering ram, never even slowed as it ripped straight through the channel to the last chamber, slammed into those gates, cannoned off the sides, and then smashed its way forward through the last gates and crashed down the final twenty-eight feet into the Caribbean Sea.
Patrick Rougeau mentioned to his colleagues they had just watched the fastest transit in the entire ninety- four-year history of the Panama Canal, the final two chambers having been negotiated by the Qingdao in a little under forty-five seconds!
It was by no means over. There was no way of stopping the tidal surge from Gatun Lake. The wall of water just kept coming, cascading through the locks, thundering downward, picking up the Qingdao and hurling it clear of the channel out into deep water, holed, battered, many dead and injured, but still floating.
Meanwhile, 164 square miles of deep lake water just kept roaring. And it would continue to do so for seven days, until the lake was almost entirely drained.
The SEALs? They came racing into their landing beach, loaded up the helicopters, with everything except the far too heavy inflatables. These they sent out toward the middle of the lake, tossing a hand grenade into each one as it went. Then they all hit the beach and watched the little boats explode some sixty yards offshore, before scrambling aboard the Sea Stallions and heading back to the Eisenhower.
Lt. Comdr. Bill Peavey's signal was concise. 'Mission accomplished. Panama Canal destroyed. Casualties zero.'
Epilogue
Ravi and Shakira sat companionably with a couple of cold beers at their favorite corner table overlooking Martyrs' Square. Their short visit to the Librairie Avicenne bookstore had yielded two American film magazines, a copy of the London Sunday Telegraph, and Tuesday's New York Times.
Shakira was staring at a big cover photo of Troy Ramford, with the Irish writer Edna Casey, clasped in each other's arms, at a private ceremony at the Headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild where Troy finally collected his Oscar for Timeshare.
The caption read: Troy gets his statue one month after the lights went out. Edna gets her man. Shakira was riveted.
She knew, of course, that the lights had gone out on the American West Coast. They'd been home now for almost two weeks and the newspapers in the Middle East had been full of the story. But the Iranian Government had prudently forbidden Hamas to claim responsibility.
It was her own stunning, precision timing that brought a huge smile to the face of Shakira Rashood now basking in the knowledge of her shocking impact on the climax to the 2008 Oscars ceremony. Here was old Troy
