This was Marion’s first visit to a lock, so Isaac took time to explain how they worked and the function of each piece of equipment.
As impressed as Bell had been at Pedro Miguel, the audacious scale of this structure was even more amazing. At a distance, the men laboring around the locks were Lilliputian, the vehicles delivering parts and supplies like toys. The small electric locomotives, called mules, had already been installed and really did look like model trains. The seaward door to the bottom lock was open so water had filled the thousand-foot chamber. Bell could picture a giant battleship or elegant ocean liner being drawn into the lock by one of the plucky little locos. He could see the doors close, the water level inside the lock raised by the inundation coming through the maze of pipes and culverts, as the ship made its journey up through the next two chambers and ultimately out onto Lake Gatun.
Bell had the driver park for about ten minutes while he watched the work and studied the site. “Okay,” he finally said. “Take us to the dam.”
Roughly six miles from where the Chagres River met the Caribbean, an earthen dam stretched some seven and a half thousand feet across the river valley. The measurements for its other dimensions were equally impressive. At its base, the Gatun Dam was a half mile thick, tapered to four hundred feet at the waterline, and was just shy of one hundred feet at its top. The structure was built using spoil carved out of the Culebra Cut, and other parts of the canal, deposited in two parallel rows and sloping inward to meet at the top. The hollow cavity between these two walls was then filled with a slurry of clay and water that, when dry, hardened into a core as solid as concrete. The downstream slopes had already been grassed over, so the mammoth dam already looked like part of the landscape.
Only at the dam’s center did it look like the work of man. A semicircular concrete spillway had been built next to a red-tile-roofed hydroelectric power plant. The spillway prevented the annual floods from overtopping the dam and eroding it away, while the electricity produced from water flowing through the turbines supplied all the electrical needs of the entire canal.
Because Lake Gatun was still filling up behind the dam, the spillways were dry, but water was flowing through the plant and wending its way down to the sea.
There wasn’t much for them to see. Bell had the driver cross the bridge over the spillway and go up to the far side of the dam so he could get out and look to the water. Beyond the dam, Lake Gatun continued to grow at a rate of about one hundred thousand cubic feet per second. It sounded like a lot of water, and it was, but it was feeding into a lake that would soon be some one hundred and sixty square miles.
“I can’t hear any humming,” Marion said. “Remember what they said about ground pressure causing mysterious noises?”
“I can’t imagine it’s a constant thing,” Bell replied. “I bet it’s localized in pockets of weaker soil.”
“It’s odd to think this lake isn’t natural. It looks like it’s been here forever.”
What were once hilltops surrounding a lush jungle valley were now isolated islands dotting the lake’s tranquil surface. In just one year’s time, it would be the transit route for countless ocean liners and freighters. Bell truly understood what an accomplishment this was and how transformative it would be for the United States.
While his idle chat on that topic with Court Talbot and Senator Densmore back in San Diego had been speculative, seeing the canal with his own eyes brought the feat into sharp focus. Bell now understood what was at stake, and he understood the canal’s vulnerabilities too. No matter how far the workers here had come, they weren’t done yet, and it could all still come to a crashing halt.
He told the driver to take them back to the station. Bell had seen enough. He didn’t know where or when the Red Vipers would strike again, but after seeing the rest of the canal, he understood their tactics, and that gave him his first advantage in the game.
18
Monday started out with the kind of rain the locals knew would last all day, a thin drizzle without any wind to lend the patter of drops striking the ground any variation in tone. A monotonous rain, in every sense of the word. Bell ate early at the hotel, and would have enjoyed Felix Ramirez’s company, but the man was nowhere to be found. Marion had awoken with him, took one look at the rain through the balcony doors, and scampered back to bed.
“No thank you,” she’d said and pulled the covers to her chin. “See you when you get back.”
Sam Westbrook had managed to scrounge a vehicle from the Authority’s motor pool for Bell’s use. It was a three-year-old Gramm-Bernstein two-ton truck. Instead of a traditional cargo bed, the big vehicle had a large cylindrical tank for hauling water to feed the insatiable thirst of all the steam boilers in the Canal Zone, especially those powering all the mechanical shovels chewing their way through the cut. The truck was well used. One of the fenders had been torn off and replaced with a replica fashioned from an old oil drum, and the water tank had a deep dent from being backed into some obstacle.
On the passenger’s seat sat a bucket of dirty water and a sponge on a stick. Bell quickly realized it was to clean the spray of mud the poorly fabricated fender didn’t prevent from being splattered against the windshield whenever the truck slogged
