But then he fought the panic, forced himself to regain rationality. It was okay that he’d lost it for a second, he told himself. He was only human, and the reaction had been a natural one, but now he had to focus. He got a handle on his nerves, his skin cooled, his heart slowed, and he took slow, even breaths.
He now knew his name and said it just to hear if it sounded right. “Isaac Bell.”
Yes, that was it. It sounded natural and right. He was Isaac Bell. He was a detective, and he had a wife named Marion. He was currently on an assignment in Panama. He remembered leaving his hotel that morning, Marion staying in bed because of the rain, his herculean effort not to join her under the covers. After that, there wasn’t much. He had no recollection of how he’d gotten himself inside a metal cylinder.
And then it started to come back to him. Or parts of it. He remembered driving the truck, the crash, going over the side of the Culebra Cut. Maybe there was another vehicle. And some explosions. He vaguely remembered seeing a boat swallowed in the mist.
His truck, the one he’d been lent by Sam Westbrook, was a tanker for supplying the steam shovels and other boilers needed along the canal with water. He was inside its tank. That had to be it. He had no idea why he’d climbed into it, but at least he knew where he was. The panic attack subsided further.
The tank was almost perfectly level, with about eight inches of water pooled at the bottom. He regretted not bringing the little flashlight Court had given him. By feel, he found his submerged pistol. He drained it, pulled the magazine, and blew water from the weapon’s inner workings. He racked the slide a few times, shedding even more water, before returning the magazine and securing the Colt in his holster.
He wondered why the water was so cold. The truck sat in the sun all day, every day. The water should be hot. Even with the daylong rainstorm, the tank’s contents would at least be lukewarm. The water here was icy almost. And then the answer hit him. Bell realized that the water had cooled to the ambient surrounding temperature. The truck wasn’t lying on its side out in the open. It had been buried.
He slapped at the steel walls and they returned a dull tone in response. There wasn’t one place that gave even the faintest hollow echo to indicate that it wasn’t covered in dirt. While he had no idea how deeply he was buried, at this point it didn’t matter.
He located the filler cap. Using the puddle as a guide, since his own sense of balance was still recovering, Bell found the cap was only halfway up one wall. But its metal lid was jammed, and no amount of pushing would get it open.
Isaac Bell was well and truly buried alive.
20
While Bell was not a man to give in to panic, the past little incident notwithstanding, he had to admit his current predicament was more than a little unsettling. He took stock of the things he could control. He had enough water to last him a week or more, though it probably was teeming with parasites. He had no food, but that wouldn’t be a problem for a while. He stripped out of his wet clothes and laid them out on the tank above the waterline. His body couldn’t generate enough heat to dry his clothes. It was best to let them air-dry.
Then came the realization that sent his heart back into overdrive. Water and food meant nothing if he couldn’t get air. He had no idea how long he’d been out, but there was only a finite amount of oxygen in the tank and no way to dispense with the excess carbon dioxide.
He allowed himself two deep, calming breaths and then regulated his breathing by allowing himself small sips of air only. He knew his only hope was a quick rescue.
Had anyone seen the accident? Would they come to investigate? Even if a survey team came out to assess the damage, the tank was somehow buried. They wouldn’t be able to reach him until it was dug up, and that could take weeks. He had hours at most.
Bell popped the magazine out of the .45 and offered a silent apology to John Moses Browning because he was going to use the pistol’s butt like a hammer against the tank’s interior. It hit with a dull thud. Not the sound he needed. There was a narrow flange around the filler cap. He rapped it with the gun and it delivered a satisfying chime.
For some reason the only song that came to mind was the popular rag “Sailing Down the Chesapeake Bay,” and so that’s what he tapped out again and again, pausing only after two hours to get into his still-damp clothes. They weren’t perfect, yet he soon felt warmer.
He switched arms regularly and tapped out the tune again and again. A hundred times, five hundred? He didn’t know, but he could tell the air was growing more fouled. His mind grew fuzzy, and while he couldn’t see anything save Stygian darkness, he felt his optic nerves constricting as if his vision were fading.
He didn’t know he’d nodded off until he woke with a start after just a couple seconds. He hit his gun against the flange. He couldn’t remember the tune he’d been playing, so he began tapping in Morse code. Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dot.
S.O.S.
It was never an abbreviation for anything, merely a Morse phrase that was easy to remember and transmit, but many believed it stood for “Save Our Ship” or “Save Our Souls.” For Bell, it was a plea to whoever was out there.
Search Out Survivor.
He blacked out several more times,
