He considered turning back, but he wouldn’t without at least trying to cross the hazard. He eased out into the water. The truck’s tires were two inches of solid rubber around wooden-spoked wheels, so they offered little resistance to the current. The front of the truck, with the heavy engine and Bell’s own weight, remained solidly rooted to the road. It was the back end that swayed and skipped drunkenly, forcing Bell to crab the vehicle like an airplane caught in a crosswind.
Even though he kept the speed steady, as he reached the far side of the watery hazard the road dipped so that the level of the water rose dangerously fast. The tail of the truck slewed hard, and he had no choice but to gun the motor, dashing from the trap like a hippopotamus launching itself from some African river. The truck bellowed and snorted and didn’t let him down. He was soon out of the zone of danger and on gravel once again.
A short distance later, the jungle to Bell’s right vanished as the road began to run parallel to the rim of the Culebra Cut. The huge earthen dam back in Gamboa prevented the rising waters of Lake Gatun from flooding the works, yet Bell had been told by Sam Westbrook that it would be blown up in the autumn by President Wilson pressing a button in the Oval Office. The remainder of the excavations within the cut would be carried out by floating dredges.
The left side of the road remained an impenetrable wall of tropical trees, bushes, and creeping vines.
Bell was reaching around the edge of the windshield with his sponge-tipped stick to clean mud from the glass when he spotted something on the road. Though at first it looked like a narrow channel of water cutting across the dirt track, he soon realized it was a downed tree. He straightened and slammed his foot on the brake, the big truck’s tires cutting deep grooves into the muddy roadway.
In the seconds until impact, he considered turning the wheel but wisely kept it straight. Hitting the foot-thick trunk at an angle would likely flip the water carrier. Its rear end started to slip sideways, as he slowed, and he steered the vehicle through the skid. It straightened and came to a stop a few feet from the downed tree. Had he hit it, the wooden-spoked front wheels would have come apart and the front of the truck would have collapsed. Bell had seen such accidents before. The driver invariably went through the windshield like he’d been launched from a catapult. Survival was a fifty/fifty proposition.
He shook out his hands because they were clutching at the wheel tightly enough to have gone bloodless and white. Leaving the motor sputtering, he swung down from the truck, his attention on the fallen tree. The rain had intensified, the sound of it falling through the jungle was like standing next to a waterfall.
He hadn’t gone even two steps when there came a roar from the jungle, and a truck much like his own burst out of the foliage in reverse so that it led with its big water tank. Bell had no option but to leap back into his truck, and he managed to wedge himself into the footwell with the gas and brake pedals by the time the other vehicle slammed into his.
It hadn’t built enough speed to stave in the side of Bell’s cab yet had the momentum to shove his truck bodily across the road to the precipice of the Culebra Cut. Bell clutched the underside of the steering wheel. He knew he was going over.
Geology dictated how steep the sides of the cut had to be. In areas where there was solid rock, the workers shaved the walls so they were near-vertical cliffs. In other places, where the soil was particularly soft, the earth had to be gently sloped so that it didn’t break free and ooze into the canal like the Cucaracha slide that had vexed the French effort and still defied the Americans.
The ambush to take out Isaac Bell had been laid in a spot that was a mixture of both. The ground was solid enough, but not so stable that there wasn’t some degree of slope.
When the two outside tires went over the edge, it felt like the truck was going to remain upright for a joyride down to the bottom. And then they hooked, and the heavy truck fell onto its side. Bell felt like he’d just been mule-kicked in the chest.
Had Westbrook lent him any other type of vehicle, what happened next would have seen the truck barrel-roll down the quarter-mile hill, shedding bodywork with each ever-accelerating tumble, until there was nothing left but the chassis and engine, spinning like a dervish. Bell’s lifeless body would have been jettisoned from it like a rag doll long before it came to rest in the muddy mess at the canal’s bottom.
But the big, round water tank was like a toboggan on snow. There was little friction between its smooth metal sides and the watery mud. This allowed the truck to slide down the slope with barely any resistance. The cab dug in a little, causing the vehicle do a slow pirouette as it went down the hill. But it remained on its side, and Bell continued to cling tightly to the steering wheel as he understood that this delicate balance could shift, and the truck could begin to flip at any moment.
That didn’t come to pass, and the truck slid sedately to the bottom of the canal, where pooled rainwater quickly flooded the footwell where Bell sheltered. He scrambled up to the seat and then had to hoist himself out of
