River of Ruin

The freighter was well outside her lane now, and under other circumstances Roddy would have been fired for letting a ship get away from him like this. Hell, he thought, I was fired for it once. Her bows were less than two hundred feet from hitting the shore and at the speed they were traveling, the impact would tear open her forward compartments as if they were made of aluminum foil. It wouldn’t take long for the wind to swing her stern across the waterway and block the channel to all traffic. Then, at least one of the bomb ships would heave-to, and the crew would go overboard to be picked up by the sub for transport back to Pedro Miguel or maybe under the crippled freighter to Gamboa.

After that. .

“Drop the starboard anchor.”

The officer pressed a button on his console and three hundred feet forward of the wheelhouse the big capstan began to unwind. The anchor vanished under the surface to plunge forty feet to the bottom of the canal.

Because there was a constant stream of water feeding the great locks, the canal was scoured clean constantly. There was little mud or debris for the anchor’s flukes to skip against. Almost as soon as it hit the bottom, the anchor fell sideways and the hardened steel dug into the rock.

The ship shuddered as she fought the anchor before the officer slowly allowed more chain to drop through the fairleads, keeping tension on the anchor so it wouldn’t lose its grip.

“Good. Good,” Roddy whispered softly, feeling the ship return to its tug-of-war with the sub. The Chinese crew down there would never know what was coming.

He raced for the starboard wing bridge to watch the chain disappear into the green water far below. He could also look across to port and see the shore coming up alarmingly fast.

He had to give it just a few more-“Now! Bring up the anchor!”

Like a dog snapped back on a leash, the Mario diCastorelli came up hard against her anchor when the capstan was reversed. The violent action sent Roddy staggering into a railing and sent two of the American commandos watching on the bridge to their knees.

Two things happened at once. The anchor chain’s weakest link, deep under the water near the anchor itself, failed under the enormous strain. Like a whip, the chain came flying out of the water at a hundred miles per hour and snapped back at the ship. The forward cargo hatch was quarter-inch steel. The chain tore a twenty-foot gash across its surface with little more difficulty than a knife cuts paper. The impact blew the links apart, spraying the superstructure with chunks of shrapnel the size of a human head. One struck the superstructure’s forward window and embedded itself in a bulkhead at the rear of the bridge, narrowly missing two Green Berets.

The second thing that occurred was that the electromagnetic clamps that held the Chinese submersible to the freighter’s hull let go.

Free from its monstrous burden, the truck-sized submersible accelerated away from the ship, driving at full speed toward the shoreline before its two-man crew could stop it. It hit the canal’s edge like a torpedo strike, a burst of water and froth that lofted twenty feet before splashing back to earth. It surfaced seconds later, an oxide- red tube resembling a ship’s boiler with an integrated impeller fan at least fifteen feet across.

Roddy saw immediately why Liu had never tried to divert one of the big PANAMAX ships. The size of the submersible meant she had to attach herself under shallow draft vessels, and even then the unusual craft would have been dangerously close to being crushed against the bottom.

The sub remained surfaced with water gushing into its shattered nose. Air trapped in the hull seethed and made the water look like it was boiling. A moment later, the struggling figure of a crewman emerged from the battered hulk. The submariner was injured; he fought the roiling waves using only one arm while the other floated uselessly next to him.

Well versed at the dynamics of these large ships, Roddy knew that his quick thinking and decisive action wouldn’t be enough to save the Mario diCastorelli. He glanced into the wheelhouse to see Captain Chaufleus frantically working rudder and throttle in a desperate attempt to swing her bows away from the shore. Even he knew it wasn’t in the cards.

Roddy turned back to see the Chinese sub’s surviving crewman look up at the massive wall of steel bearing down on him. Roddy couldn’t hear his scream but watched his mouth open, a round black hole in his round white face.

The ship bowled over the sub, crushing it flat, and struck the bank with an impact ten times worse than the jolt when the anchor caught the bottom. The rending of steel on rock shook the massive vessel like an earthquake. Even those who’d prepared themselves for the collision by grabbing for handholds were thrown to the floor or propelled into bulkheads. Roddy was almost tossed over the railing as the bows crumpled inward and then lifted up onto the bank, pushed onward by the momentum of her own engines and that of the submarine.

The bow pushed twenty feet into the rain-soaked earth, piling before it an oozing mound of mud that almost reached to her main deck. Grounded so firmly that she didn’t list more than a degree or two, her stern had been driven deep by her unnatural angle.

Automatic watertight doors slammed throughout the vessel, echoing shots that were as jarring as they were useless. The Mario diCastorelli was in no danger of sinking. With her stern jutting out into the canal, and her bows hard into the shore, she wouldn’t be going anywhere without a fleet of salvage ships and tugboats.

Still determined to save his vessel, Captain Chaufleus called for full reverse on both shafts, driving her engines far beyond their tolerances. He cranked the rudder from lock to lock, hoping to get the vessel to rock, and break the hold of the clinging mud. Apart from the churn of her screws kicking water into a white cauldron, his actions were futile.

Roddy sagged, wiping a mixture of rain and sweat from his face. They had failed. He reached for his miniature radio. “Mercer, it’s Roddy. The sub’s been destroyed, but we’re grounded. The captain’s trying to break free, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m sorry.”

Before Mercer could respond, Jim Patke broke in on the connection. Roddy had sent him to the fantail to watch the bomb ship through a pair of the ship’s powerful binoculars. “This is Devil One. There’s activity on the Change. They’re turning the vessel to block the rest of the canal and I think they’re prepping the lifeboats to abandon ship. They must have seen what happened to the sub. We should go get them.”

“Negative.” It was Mercer. “You don’t have the time to worry about them or save the Mario. The Robert T. Change is going to blow in forty-five minutes.”

“Are you sure about that?” Patke asked.

“That’s when our ship goes up. According to Foch there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Get yourselves to shore and run as fast as you can.”

“Mercer, you won’t be able to get the Englander Rose past us,” Roddy cried. “You’ll be stuck at the lock!”

“We knew there was a real chance this could happen.” Mercer paused. “We’ll have to go with our second option and pray the VGAS cannon on the McCampbell is as accurate as they claim.”

The Englander Rose Panama Canal, Panama

Shortly before the Mario diCastorelli grounded, Mercer stood on the bridge of the Rose. He could guess why Roddy had cut him off on the radio. The pilot had enough on his hands trying to stop the Chinese from burying his freighter in the mud. And Mercer had plenty to keep him busy on his own ship.

“Are you okay?” Lauren asked, striding past the ruined chart table, her M-16 trailing a wisp of smoke from her single shot.

Mercer bent to massage his foot. “Now that the shooting’s stopped I realize I hurt my ankle when I jumped to the flying bridge.”

“Quit your bellyaching,” Harry growled. He’d unscrewed the handle from his sword-cane and handed it to