“We have explosives bunkers like this all over the zone. To date, we’ve gone through about thirty thousand tons of dynamite.”
Bell noted how Westbrook used possessives when describing the canal as if it were his. He was certainly proud of his work here.
A guard halted their approach while a bucket brigade of Caribbean laborers moved wooden boxes of explosives from the bunker and loaded them onto the back of a heavy-duty truck. They were watched over by a supervisor, as well as a bookkeeper, who counted each crate and recorded it in a ledger. Once the vehicle pulled away on its journey to wherever the explosives were needed, the three men stepped into the bunker’s cool, gloomy interior.
Bell first checked the door’s lock. It required a large key but wasn’t particularly difficult to pick. “Who has access?”
“Quite a few people,” Westbrook admitted. “And I know for a fact that one of the keys went missing a few months ago.”
“How?”
“Dropped in the jungle while the quartermaster was answering the call of nature.”
It was ridiculous enough to be true, Bell thought, yet that didn’t mean it hadn’t been found later. “How are relations between the locals and the Caribbean workers? Would the islanders help an insurgency?”
“Some might,” Talbot said, wiping the inside of his hat with a bright bandanna. “But mostly the Panamanians are afraid the islanders will stay once the construction is completed so they’re hesitant to work with them.”
Bell looked around. There were warning signs plastered on the walls not to smoke, and all the lightbulbs had wire mesh cages so they wouldn’t be accidentally smashed and cause a spark. Thousands of identical wooden boxes were stacked in orderly blocks, from the earthen floor to just below the rafters. No amount of dirt piled onto the building could contain a blast of the magnitude this amount of dynamite would cause.
“And there are other caches like this?” he asked Westbrook.
“Some even larger, like the ones at Culebra. In fact, we’re in the process of closing this one down.”
“Any chance they were stolen months ago or that they aren’t missing at all and this was an accounting error?”
“No to both questions, Mr. Bell. This is a government run project under the supervision of a military man. Every i gets dotted and t crossed around here. There are rules and regulations for everything. Heck, there’s a prescribed way of shaking out cement bags to get the most out of them.”
Bell suppressed a chuckle and said, “That this is a government project doesn’t bode well for its efficiency, but I believe in the guiding hand of Colonel Goethals. So I will stipulate that. How heavy are the crates?”
“Fifty pounds each.”
Bell did the math for a ton of explosives. “Forty wooden cases of dynamite were removed from this bunker recently, and I can tell you that I know that the boxes are very close to the mechanics’ garage. Or wherever you pool your vehicles.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Talbot asked, his voice dripping with skepticism.
“That is a bit of a stretch,” Westbrook agreed.
“Not at all,” Bell continued. “I’ve observed that the average Panamanian man is slight of stature and build, so chances are it’s one crate per man. That’s forty men sneaking in here, grabbing a crate each, and vanishing back into the jungle. Not likely your guards would miss such a mob. And even if Viboras Rojas had some real bruisers in their ranks and doubled up on the crates, we’re still talking about a crowd of twenty men. Again, unless your guards all suffer from myopia, we can discount that possibility. Therefore, the explosives were loaded onto a truck by a handful of insurgents using the bucket brigade method we ourselves just saw used.”
“You’re making sense up to this point,” Westbrook admitted. “Why is the truck near the garage? Why didn’t they take off and hide it in the jungle?”
“No idea why,” Bell said. “But I know that’s exactly what happened.”
“How can you be so sure?” the young engineer persisted.
“It’s simple.” Bell smiled. “You track everything that moves within the zone, and since no one has reported a stolen truck, it has to still be here, hiding in plain sight. The garage is the most logical place.”
The silence that followed was pierced by an angry curse when Westbrook realized Bell’s logic was airtight.
Bell sympathized with the younger man. When it came to problems of logic, most people consider themselves smart enough to figure things out. They become truly confounded when they meet an actual expert. It was a reaction Bell encountered time and again.
The garage area sat on a small rise all the way across the massive site. It took them fifteen minutes to reach it. The machine shop itself was corrugated metal, with four mechanic’s bays accessible through barn-style doors. Around it was oil-stained gravel littered with empty barrels and castoff vehicle parts. To one side were two rows of trucks with fully enclosed rear beds. The vehicles were showing signs of heavy use in harsh conditions. Bodywork was dented and rust-streaked, and some were missing tires and propped up on jacks. A few had been cannibalized for parts after becoming too damaged to fix and resembled mere skeletons of their brethren.
The chief mechanic saw the party striding toward them at a pace that told him something bad was about to happen. Or already had.
He zipped up his overalls to hide his hairy belly and spit the wad of tobacco from his mouth.
“Have any trucks gone missing?” Westbrook asked as they approached.
“Nope.”
“Anything odd happen to any of them?”
“‘Odd’?”
“Been moved without any reason.”
“Nope. The ones that run get used and the ones that don’t get fixed.”
Bell ignored the pointless conversation and studied the trucks. There were at least thirty of them and they had to be inspected because their suspensions were so stiff that a ton of cargo in the
