From the deck of the small boat, he had to tilt his head all the way back as they motored between the shadows of these man-made cliffs. The recent rain had saturated the veneer of soil on top of the hills, so water cascaded down the faces of the hills in white horse-tail streaks.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” Lauren asked from the entrance to the cabin. The black microprene suit clung to her body like a second skin.
Mercer had to force himself not to stare. “I was just thinking that when they were digging the cut, the temperature must have been about a hundred and twenty degrees.”
“The heat was about that bad, yes, but what bothered them most were the landslides. Months of digging could be refilled in just one avalanche, burying steam shovels and train tracks and men. I read it was so unstable that not only would mud slide into the dig, but at times, the bottom of the cut actually bulged upward because of the weight of the mountains next to it.”
Mercer visualized the titanic weight of the two hills pressing into the soft substrata and causing an upthrust between them, like pinching two ends of a balloon to expand its center. It was rock mechanics on the largest scale.
They watched in silence for a few minutes. Lauren finally spoke. “On the drive over, you were kind of vague about what Vic and I are looking for down there.” Behind her, the Serb used a whetstone on the blade of his dive knife. “Care to give me something specific?”
“I’m not sure,” Mercer said. “Roddy told us that all the ships that suddenly went off course had been delayed coming out of the west lane at Pedro Miguel. He and the other pilots didn’t report anything wrong with the ships’ steering. No one had tampered with the auxiliary controls or anything like that. Roddy and I think that maybe something was attached to the hulls of these ships to cause the course changes.”
“A submersible?” she asked doubtfully.
“I know it sounds farfetched, but how would you go about changing the direction of a twenty-thousand-ton ship? Remember, none of the vessels that went off course were PANAMAX ships. They were smaller freighters passing through the canal at night. This would give a submersible the room to maneuver and, depending on how it was designed, the power to alter the course of such a vessel. The sub could be moved into position as soon as the lock doors open. The ship is then held up for a few minutes while the sub is attached. And when the time is right, it uses its engine to nudge the freighter off course.”
“Why go through all that when it would be cheaper, and easier, just to pay off a couple of canal pilots to cause these accidents?”
“If Liu does close the Panama Canal the subsequent investigation is going to be massive. He can’t risk those pilots being questioned and can’t kill them either because that would be more suspicious. Also, by staging a string of such strange incidents he’s created a pattern that would explain away an explosives-laden ship he intentionally rams into the canal’s bank.”
Lauren’s brow creased as she considered Mercer’s explanation. He could tell she was reluctant to believe his idea. Her nod was more to say that he should go on than that she bought the scenario. He saw that their relationship had suffered in some fundamental way because of his reaction to the torture. He didn’t know what he could do or say to reassure her that he was still thinking clearly. Nothing, probably, until he did finally come to grips with what Sun had done to him.
“I’ve got to hand it to Liu,” Mercer continued, putting aside her uncertainty. “He’s damned thorough. He’s planned dozens of moves ahead, and remains flexible enough to react to our presence. Every contingency I can think of, he’s already considered. Any investigation into a catastrophic explosion will show that American-trained canal pilots have a history of screwing up. Following the trail of gold he’ll pay to Panama only leads to a mine that looks legit. If the canal is closed for a couple of years, the fact that Hatcherly Consolidated has container ports and bought a rail line and has almost finished an oil pipeline will seem like a case of right place right time, not something deliberate.”
“It all seems so convoluted.”
“It is, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s too complex to be plausible and yet there’s no other explanation.” He paused. “Anyone with enough motivation and explosives could blow up anything in the world. The trick is getting away with it. That’s what separates a lunatic from a calculated terrorist. We’re not dealing with suicidal fundamentalists. These are rational people who want to survive the attack and enjoy their rewards. That’s why it has to be so complex. Liu’s got this operation planned to the final detail and is weeks, maybe only days from pulling it off.” His eyes bored into hers. “Lauren, do you realize that if I hadn’t been suspicious about how Gary Barber died the investigation would have ended in the jungle with that police officer you don’t like. No one would have any idea that a Chinese company, ostensibly owned by their government, was about to shut down the Panama Canal in such a way that the United States would be unable to react.”
“
Mercer looked up. Like an oasis of technology in the middle of a primeval jungle, the Pedro Miguel Lock lay just ahead. Their little boat was now on the Pacific side of the continental divide so the terrain had flattened into gentle slopes covered in golden grass and palms. On the east bank a shantytown of corrugated buildings abutted the chain-link fence that stretched along this section of the waterway. Laundry swayed from lines stretched across the squatters’ village, and behind it was the railroad and the trans-Panama highway. Closer to the side-by-side locks sat a mooring site for the small boats pilots used to reach the ships they were to guide, several parking lots, and two long warehouses. These structures were maintenance sheds for the electric trains that towed vessels through the locks. The trains ran on tracks laid on the edges of each thousand-foot-long lock chamber and on the sixty- foot-wide wall that divided the two concrete basins. Up to six of these engines, called mules, were needed to guide their unwieldy charges into and then out of the locks so that neither was damaged. It was up to the canal pilots to coordinate a ship’s own motive power with that of the mules, and to maintain proper tension on the heavy towlines to see the vessel transit the lock safely.
A tanker had just passed out of the right lock, giving Mercer a view down the length of the chamber to the tops of the mitre doors that held back Lake Gatun. They closed inward in the shape of a flattened V so the angle helped spread the tremendous load they held at bay. From Roddy he’d learned that the doors were sixty-five feet wide, seven feet thick, and were hollow so that they floated to make opening them easier. Each individual gate weighed upwards of seven hundred tons. And here at Pedro Miguel, both lock chambers had two sets of doors on the downstream end so that if one were somehow broached, there wouldn’t be a catastrophic failure that could conceivably drain the lake.
From the low vantage of Juan’s boat, Mercer couldn’t accurately gauge the scale of this amazing system, nor could he see the mile-long Miraflores Lake beyond. On the far end of that lake was a pair of double locks built in stair-step fashion that raised or lowered ships a total of fifty-five vertical feet from the level of the Pacific Ocean.
As he watched, the freighter in the left-hand lock began to rise perceptively, levitating as gravity dumped eight and a half million gallons of water into the chamber. In just a few minutes, the level within the lock reached that of the cut and the massive doors swung outward. The mules heaved on their lines to pull the ship out. Once the steel hawsers were cast away from the vessel, white water erupted at its stern as its huge propeller powered it away.
Mercer looked down at Lauren once again. “We’re here. We’ll wait for twenty minutes or so for the sun to go down a bit more and then put you and Vic in the water.”
“Okay.”
Juan knew his role as tour guide and began pointing out features for Mercer to shoot with his camera. Not that there was any film in it. He tried to determine if there was any unusual activity going on at the lock, but all seemed normal. A continuous procession of ships lumbered by. None of them were cruise liners or PANAMAX freighters because it was getting late and the sun would be down by the time they reached the Gatun Locks on the other side of the country.
Mercer dutifully acted like he was burning through pictures, all the while his stomach tightened with tension. He hated that he was asking Lauren and Vic to do something of which he himself was incapable. It wasn’t in his nature to let others put themselves at risk, but this was too important to trust his rudimentary diving skills. All during the wait he checked on her as much as he dared without acting too unusual. Her outward calm didn’t seem to be hiding anything more than a natural sense of anxiety.
After twenty-five minutes, Lauren said the angle of the sun was right for their dive. The surface of the canal