He looked more carefully and saw something that caught his eye. He loaded his last magazine into the butt of his .45 and took off at a pained trot.
The driver was barely ten feet from the open hole he’d climbed up through and lay in a lake of congealing blood. Bell understood what had happened as he drew nearer. He’d hit the man in the femoral artery high up his inner thigh. Another round had made a ruin of his face by piercing one of his cheeks. Adrenaline and fear had given him the strength to raise the ladder from the culvert, but the staggering blood loss meant he could go no farther.
Such was the nature of the jungle that flies were already starting to buzz around the body.
12
Bell found Court Talbot in the thick of the rescue work. The scene was like something out of the blackest reaches of Hell. Dead men lay everywhere, while the injured cried out in pain. The air remained fouled by the smell of sulfur, and in odd places were bloodstains where men had been standing when they were blown out of existence. Doctors had yet to arrive, but the Army veteran had seen enough injuries over his military career to triage the most grievous.
“Did you get him?”
“Yes,” Bell reported. “He’s in the far lock chamber. I want you to verify something about him.”
Talbot held up his hands. They were bloody to the wrist. “Little busy right now.”
“Where’s Westbrook?”
“He went to the telegraph office at the train station to organize transport out of here and to alert the big hospital at Ancon.”
The patient Talbot was working on had a deep gash in his right leg. Talbot was trying to fit the injured man with a tourniquet, but he was writhing in such pain that he couldn’t form a proper knot in the strip of cloth torn from a dead man’s shirt. Bell pressed his weight down on the man’s knees. He screamed, but it allowed Talbot to fix the binding and stanch the blood.
Talbot pointed to two workers who hovered close by. They had created a makeshift stretcher out of boards and empty cement bags. “Get this man onto the next truck to the station, and if he starts bleeding, turn the piece of wood I threaded through the knot of the tourniquet to tighten it even more.”
By virtue of his natural leadership and calm in the face of chaos, the men responded to Talbot like they were soldiers under his command. It didn’t matter that he had no actual authority in the zone, the men simply recognized his leadership and obeyed.
The work went on. Bell acted as litter-bearer and driver and helped corral some of the workhorses and mules that had been spooked by the explosion. It was exhausting work, mentally and physically, but he, like all the others, didn’t slow until the last living creature had been tended to.
It was three hours after the blast that the wounded had been evacuated by special train to the zone’s principal hospital, where all off-duty staff had been called in for the crisis. The doctors from the small clinic at Pedro Miguel had accompanied the train, though one remained behind for the grisly task of sorting through the dead to get an accurate count.
Talbot, Westbrook, and Bell found a hot metal lean-to just before the inevitable rain began to fall. They flipped over packing cases to use as chairs, and Court passed around Romeo y Julieta cigars from a leather cheroot case made of crocodile hide that he had tucked into one of his bush jacket’s pockets. The rain pounding against the tin roof made conversation all but impossible, but these men were beyond the need to talk. They each had their own thoughts on the tragedy and felt no need to discuss their grief. The humid air was soon perfumed by the cigars, and the simple act of sharing a companionable silence helped blunt the worst of the horror they’d seen.
A figure came through the curtain of rain falling across the jobsite so quickly that they never saw him coming. It was Goethals, wearing a dark poncho and a wide-brimmed hat on his head. The fury radiating off his face made the stuffy little shelter feel ten degrees hotter.
Westbrook jumped to his feet. “Colonel.”
Goethals waved him down. He shook out his wet things and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke ceilingward, where it mixed with the clouds from the Romeo y Julietas. He was too agitated to sit, and there was little room to pace, so he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, the white cigarette bouncing between his lips as he spoke.
“Damned savages,” he spat. “Twenty-seven dead, and they tell me there’s going to be more. Ancon Hospital is overwhelmed with wounded. Worse than the day back in ’09 when a premature dynamite blast killed twenty-three.”
Bell knew there was something troubling him even more than the loss of life, and the next sentence proved him right.
“And this is going to add months to the construction time. That crane’s a total loss, so we’ll have to make do with the one remaining on that side of the lock. And once word of this gets back to Jamaica and Barbados, we’re going to see our recruitment numbers dwindle to nothing. What a disaster.” He looked to Bell. “I heard you shot the bastard.”
“He bled to death in the lock.”
“I guess that’s some small comfort,” Goethals said. “Okay, Talbot, it looks like you’re getting your wish.”
“Colonel?”
“I want you to stamp out this nest of vipers and I don’t care how you do it.”
Normally, there would be much bravado in such a proclamation, but the Canal Administrator delivered it with tired resignation. While he was an officer of the United States Army, he was an engineer first and foremost. Sending troops into battle was not something he was accustomed
