“That is one monster of a truck,” Bell said.
“The only thing, other than a train on tracks, that can move around in the muck at the bottom of the canal.”
Sam climbed into the cab, while Bell got in position to fire the engine. It took more tries than expected, and Bell’s shoulder was screaming by the time the motor caught and the crank jumped so hard it almost broke his hand. A doctor and two orderlies arrived moments later, each carrying a bag of medical gear. They knew the drill, obviously, because they came running and immediately climbed onto the cargo bed.
Sam drove the Donkey fast but not recklessly, keeping to the main road for much of the journey. They passed the construction sites at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel and finally came to a turnoff that allowed access down into the Culebra Cut on a narrow track that had been carved into switchbacks to make it easier for pack animals. About a mile distant was the massif of Gold Hill, the tallest promontory along the canal route that had to be whittled down. This was the exact center of the continental divide.
The bottom of the cut was a flat, open plain with multiple rail lines heading southeast toward Panama City and its ocean reclamation project for the spoil. Like mechanical dragons wreathed in steam, the big excavators chewed eight-ton bites out of the earth, turned their booms like animals swinging their necks, and dumped the rocks and dirt onto the ore cars that slowly trundled by but never stopped. Gangs of men worked with picks and shovels, others tended the tall rotary drills for coring holes in the rock for dynamite.
As wide as the canal was there, its two sloped banks still seemed to focus the heat like a lens. It was easily a hundred and fifteen degrees, with no shade to speak of. And the noise. From the rim, it had sounded like construction going on in the background, a presence but not a problem, while down among the machines the constant clanking of trains and screams of whistles, the thunder of rubble crashing in the hopper cars, was an assault on the senses louder than at any site Bell had ever been. His ears ached.
One steam shovel sat dormant while all the others Bell could see were hard at work. The men killed were friends of the men toiling away, brothers in arms in their struggle to dig the Panama Canal, and yet the work continued. Always the work continued. There would be time for mourning later on that night, off the company clock. For now, there was nothing but the constant need to feed the ore trains chugging through the cut.
“Damn,” Sam said when they got close enough to see the serial number on the back of the machine.
“What is it?”
“That’s Lyle Preston’s rig.”
“You know him?”
“Not personally, but he and his crew hold all the records for moving dirt. He was the best by far. I bet the Vipers knew it and targeted him.”
Bell said nothing.
There were some men standing around the idle digger, moving about aimlessly, unsure of what to do. After a train loaded with ore had gone past on its way out of the Culebra Cut, Sam crossed the tracks and parked a short distance from the damaged Bucyrus steam shovel.
Bell was staggered by its size, now that he could see the machine up close. The rotating platform was on double sets of bogeys as tall as a man, and the cabin behind the boom, called a house, was as big as one. Keeping with that analogy, it was a house that had been caught up in a West Texas tornado of particular savagery.
Much of the corrugated metal sides of the cabin had been blown out when the big boiler erupted, exposing the excavator’s dizzyingly complex innards of crankshafts, pistons, bull wheels, gears and cams, and still other industrial equipment parts he couldn’t identify. At the rear of the platform was a coal bunker for the fireman to access to stoke the boiler. The eruption of high-pressure steam had blasted the coal from the bunker like a broadside of fired grapeshot. The coal lay scattered in a fifty-foot arc stretching out from the scene, and within its radius lay two corpses with their heads and torsos hastily covered with draped work shirts. They had been cut down by the flying coal.
Nearer to the steam shovel was the body of the stoker. He was covered head to toe with a filthy scrap of canvas tarp. The bodies of the two men who worked the business end of the excavator had been left in their seats, one in the forward section of the cabin behind a candelabra-like clutch of mechanical levers, the second man in his perch halfway up the boom.
The lead operator had taken shrapnel from the exploded boiler and had been cut almost in half. Exposure to steam had turned any skin not protected by clothing the color of an overripe apple. The guy in the boom had been spared having his body punctured, but the steam and the tremendous force of its wall of pressure had ended his life in a fraction of a second just like the others.
Bell climbed down from the big truck and strode toward the big excavator. His approaching caught the attention of the roughly half dozen men milling around and they turned toward him expectantly.
“Gentlemen, my name is Isaac Bell. I
