There was an extra gap where one of the trucks, out of rotation, had been driven off.
“Hey,” Bell called out to get the mechanic’s attention.
“What?”
“Where’s the truck that should be parked fifth from the end?”
The man scratched at the back of his head. “Don’t know. It was there a little while ago.”
“You sure?”
“Yup.”
Bell looked out across the jobsite. Now that he was concentrating on finding a particular truck, he saw trucks everywhere. Some were parked and seemingly abandoned while others were trundling along to whatever task needed to be done. If the truck they sought had been moved from the garage, the explosives were going to be in play. There were several thousand men clambering over and around the massive lock, and he knew that was the most likely target. From where he stood, he could see several trucks parked along the lock’s length.
A sense of foreboding gripped him.
“We need to clear the site immediately,” he told Westbrook. “There can’t be much time.”
The engineer thought for a moment. “There’s a signal siren that goes off at—”
The explosion was a catastrophic roar that could be felt at the very base of the brain. It overwhelmed the senses so that the men standing even as far away as they were felt dizzy and disorientated. Next came the shock wave. Bell reflexively turned his back to the blast, but it still felt like he’d taken a half dozen simultaneous hits from baseball bats. He was driven to his knees as he noted the sky going dark. He turned to look over his shoulder. The explosion had gouged a great crater next to the wall of one of the locks, and the mass of pulverized material had been lofted a hundred feet or more into the sky, momentarily blotting out the sun.
And then it all began to fall back to earth in a hailstorm the likes of which no one had ever seen. At the epicenter, larger pieces of rock and chunks of concrete fell like boulders, while across a great swath of the work zone clots of gravel fell from the sky and hit like the pricks from a swarm of stinging wasps. Bell curled himself in a ball, with his hands wrapped around his head, like he was about to be raked by salt from a shotgun.
No sooner had the sky cleared of debris than he was on his feet and running to where the truck had exploded almost directly beneath one of the towering gantry cranes. As he sprinted, he watched in horror as the crane’s support structure buckled and began to collapse. High up on the lock’s rim, a full bucket of cement had been dangling over a group of workers ready to dump it into a form. The multi-ton crucible slammed down on the edge of the concrete structure so hard that the liquid cement erupted from the bucket like it was lava from a volcano. Two of the men were spared, but three others were hit with hundreds of pounds of mud-like concrete and sent hurtling off the eighty-foot-high perch. Their shouts stopped short when they hit the bottom of the lock.
The crane continued to fall as if its steel frame had turned to rubber. The empty cement bucket was yanked off the top of the lock by the crane’s plummeting and whipsawed toward the ground, where it struck a locomotive pulling a trainload of fresh wooden planks.
The locomotive’s boiler was solidly built and could sustain two hundred and fifty pounds per square inch of steam pressure, but it wasn’t designed to take such a crushing blow. The boiler split and erupted in a scalding plume of superheated steam that consumed the engineer and his brakeman, plus a handful of poor souls caught nearby, before the cloud curled heavenward and dissipated.
The main body of the crane struck the ground and crumpled under the weight of its heavy wheels and cogs and drums of braided cable. The long boom landed last, folding like paper as it slammed into the earth.
Around the smoking crater, vehicles and equipment had been tossed aside. Several wooden storage sheds were blown flat and set ablaze. Bodies and parts of bodies littered the landscape. Bell knew the death toll would be in the dozens.
Bell wasn’t running to offer aid or to help rescue anyone who’d been trapped. That duty would have to fall on others. His was a more deadly pursuit. He’d observed the driver of the explosives-laden truck moments before the blast. Something must have gone wrong because the man hadn’t gotten far enough from the detonation.
Bell raced into the swirling clouds of dust, past men who were covered head to toe in fine powder and whose eyes were those of the haunted. The moaning and cries were the stuff of nightmares, and he witnessed every dreadful permutation of what high explosives could do to the human body.
He was still fifty yards from his target and sprinting hard when the truck driver raised himself up off the ground and shook his head to clear it. It was Bell’s bad luck that the man possessed the feral instincts of a sewer rat because as he zeroed in on Bell charging at him he instinctively knew he was in trouble and took off running in the opposite direction.
Bell didn’t really see the man’s face, but he could see that he was young and in shape, for he moved like a thoroughbred, or, more aptly, a steeplechaser. He leapt over any obstacle that got in his way, using his arms for additional leverage. It was almost like he had springs instead of muscles. Bell was having
