“Yes. I will speak with Naa and make him understand the importance of this trip.”
They met on the beach an hour before first light. The five paddlers, plus Bell, Marion, and Father Marcos. Marcos offered to remain behind to lighten the boat, and Marion insisted on doing the same. Bell didn’t like leaving her behind but understood every extra pound in the canoe slowed them down.
“You’ll be okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” she assured him.
“I’ll borrow or steal a steam launch as soon as I can. With luck, I’ll have you back in Colón in time for dinner. Father Marcos, could you please ask Naa if we can make for the canal’s entrance rather than the Colón docks? With TR’s visit, I suspect Colón will be a madhouse.”
“That’s a good idea. Downtown was packed with visitors yesterday.” He exchanged a short conversation with the Kuna Indian. Naa caught Bell’s eye and nodded to show he understood.
Bell fished something from his pocket. It was the chamois sack that Court Talbot used to pay his men. In it was about a hundred dollars’ worth of coins. He opened it so they could all see the gold in the light of the torches several of them carried. He gave it to Naa.
“Gracias,” he said.
“No. Me gracias to you.”
Bell kissed his wife good-bye and helped launch the dugout into the dark waters of the Caribbean Sea. The men rolled into the canoe, each took up a paddle, Bell included, and they began to stroke. It took Bell a few minutes to get into the natives’ rhythm because their strokes were a little shorter and choppier than he was used to. Soon enough, though, they were gliding across the water at a pace he wasn’t sure they could maintain but prayed they could.
Into the fourth hour, Bell felt like he was going to die. His shoulders and arms ached with an unholy fire, and his spine felt like it had been fused into one solid, unbending bone. His eyes stung with sweat and the need to squint against the relentless glare of the sun. He couldn’t draw enough air into his lungs, leaving him light-headed. Water from the gourds they carried was warm and barely made a dent in his thirst, and the smoke-dried fish they ate left his mouth coated with a pungent paste. The only bright spot on the grueling journey for Bell came an hour earlier, when they’d paddled past the Fowler-Gage biplane, which had drifted into the ensnaring tendrils of a mangrove swamp. He vowed to tow it to safety when he returned to rescue Marion.
His companions were showing no difficulty at all with the voyage. They dug their paddles into the water at a rate and tempo that seemed mechanical. They were silent, unflagging, seemingly built for the very task they were performing and no other. Bell could only marvel at their strength and stamina.
They started seeing other boats a little over five hours into their ordeal. They were fishing vessels out of Colón, and, in the far distance, smoke hovering along the horizon indicated the presence of big steamships heading to or from the busy harbor.
Twenty minutes later, they rowed past the city itself. They had cut a full half hour from their regular time. Bell finally let himself relax and set down his paddle even as the other men kept up their machine-like strokes. He had to rest his body. He didn’t know what was coming his way and he needed to be alert and loose. He rolled his shoulders and massaged his hands to return feeling to them. The new calluses oozed clear fluid.
They turned into Limon Bay, and up ahead was the beginning of the canal, a long, slender artificial channel that led to the three gigantic chambers of the Gatun Locks system. Naa and his men didn’t slow. They stroked at the exact pace they had started with.
Closer still, Bell saw the open mouth of the right-hand chamber, the one used for vessels transiting up to the lake. The left chamber for ships exiting the canal was closed. A long, low seawall jutting out into the channel divided them. That meant a ship had gone up and was presumably still on the lake. He would have heard an explosion of the size needed to take out the dam from a dozen miles away. He wasn’t too late.
Bell pointed to where he wanted the dugout maneuvered down the right side of the seawall, and Naa steered them in.
They drew closer still, and the huge chamber began to loom over them. A thousand feet past the open gates were the closed doors leading to the middle lock. At this distance, and from the channel’s surface, they looked like the entrance doors to the lair of some mythical Titan. The seawall was on their right, while on their left was the still-natural-looking shoreline, with newly grown grass and even a strip of beach.
It was low tide, so the lock’s walls towered thirty feet above their heads, the concrete as thick as any fort’s in the world, maybe thicker. He’d seen these chambers several times now and still couldn’t believe their scale.
Bell didn’t want to enter the chamber itself. It was literally a dead end with the far doors closed. There was a small platform just outside the gates and rising from it were iron rungs embedded in the cement wall. He pointed, and Naa and his men aimed the canoe for it. They dug their blades in the water to slow to a stop at the last second, and the wooden craft kissed the platform without a sound.
“Gracias,” Bell said and slid over the gunwale and onto solid ground.
He climbed the ladder as quickly as he could, the hot iron aggravating his already damaged hands. When he popped up on top of the high lock’s wall, he startled a worker
