Deadly Straits (A Tom Dugan Novel) (15 page)

Chapter Twenty

Judicial Investigative Directory HQ
Panama City, Panama
4 July

Reyes hung up the phone. Something was very strange.
Asian Trader
hadn’t delayed on the Pacific side even long enough to off-load the dead seaman’s body. A death at sea was traumatic for all concerned, and usually the company involved was eager to land the remains and put the event behind them. The ship’s agent had also seemed surprised, saying only that he was following orders from a Señor Dugan that nothing should prevent the ship from meeting her priority transit slot.

Given the accelerated transit, Reyes had expected pushback when he told the agent that since
Asian Trader
wouldn’t anchor at Cristobal until early evening, the inquiry would start the following morning in daylight. The agent had seemed unconcerned, allowing that was expected, and in any event, Señor Dugan himself would attend the inquiry and was not arriving until later this evening.

Now why would an owner pay dearly for early transit and then so easily accept delay? He had many questions for this Señor Dugan. But that was tomorrow.

He looked at the stack in his in-box and sighed. He’d actually been looking forward to getting out of the office for a while. He glanced at the time and considered calling Maria to meet him for lunch later. Then he remembered. She was helping with the field trip to the locks today. He smiled as he remembered the twins’ excited chatter at breakfast about seeing the big ships.

His smile faded as he looked back at the in-box. He sighed again and picked up a file.

Observation Deck
Miraflores Locks Visitor Center
Panama

“
Aiee! Miguelito. Cuidado
.” Maria Reyes grabbed her son. “No climbing. That means you too, Paco,” she added to his brother about to join his twin on the rail.

“
Si, Mama
,” said the boys in sullen unison before the ship in the lock recaptured their attention. Maria smiled and stepped back where she could keep an eye on all the children.

The passengers on the big white ship waved back at the excited children until the vessel moved away toward Pedro Miguel, replaced by a container ship, stacked high with colored boxes. With a mother’s eye, Maria noticed the onset of boredom as here and there children began to act out. She grabbed a boy racing by, hugging him close.

“Is this Alejandro I have captured, running when he knows not to do so?”

“
No, señora
,” the boy said with an impish grin.

“You are not Alejandro? You look just like him. Well, if you see him, please remind him not to run.”

“
Si, señora
,” said not-Alejandro.

“Good.” She released him with a playful swat. “Behave yourself and earn a treat.”

As not-Alejandro spread news of treats, Maria glanced at Señora Fuentes, who mimed eating. Maria nodded and herded the children toward the stairs. She hoped they liked her cookies. She knew two of them would. She smiled as she watched her sons, little copies of their father. If Manny returned from Cristobal early, she thought, they might work on their little “project.” A daughter would be nice this time.

M/T Asian Trader
Approaching Pedro Miguel Lock
Panama

The detonator felt heavy in Medina’s pocket as
Asian Trader
stood second in line at Pedro Miguel Lock, ships stretched behind her through Miraflores back to the Pacific. He watched the gates close on the leader, a tanker whose bright paint marked her as fresh from the builder’s yard, and glared at the American flag hanging limp above the name M/T
Luther Hurd
painted on her stern.

The captain relayed an engine order from the pilot, and Medina moved the joystick, inching
Asian Trader
’s port side along the center guide wall projecting from between the double locks. Heaving lines flew to drag aboard wires to attach the ship to the mechanical “mules” that would pull her through the lock, and Medina watched the
Luther Hurd
complete her vertical journey and inch from the lock ahead of them toward Gaillard Cut and Gatun Lake beyond.

Allah had been generous since the bosun’s death, cooling the deck with daily showers, but today the sun hammered the steel, and Medina worried about fumes. His target was Gatun Locks across Gatun Lake, where even a blast failing to breach the lock could destroy several ships and plug the locks with scrap. His secondary target was here at Pedro Miguel, which like the upper lock at Gatun, held back the lake. Destruction of either would drain the lake and destroy the canal, with catastrophic secondary damage. Allah guide me, Medina prayed as the ship inched forward amid clanging bells, the mules tugging her into the lock.

Cruise Ship Stellar Spirit

The second mate of
Stellar Spirit
stood among the passengers lining the rail as a tanker crept into the east lock and his own ship prepared to enter the west. Mingling was required of the ship’s officers, not a chore on “fun runs” with willing young females eager for romance, but deadly dull on canal runs populated by oldsters and honeymooners who surfaced only for meals. The newly wed and the nearly dead, he thought, looking over gray heads to the gates closing behind
Asian Trader
as he debated slipping away.

M/T Asian Trader
In Pedro Miguel Lock, Panama

In the end, Medina’s decision was made for him.

“Bridge, this is the bow,” squawked the radio. “I smell strong gasoline fumes, repeat, strong gasoline fumes on deck. Over.”

Medina pulled his gun and was moving even before the control pilot keyed his radio to respond, rushing to the port bridge wing to shoot both the control pilot and captain in the head before returning to the wheelhouse to meet the confused assisting control pilot coming in from the starboard wing. He ended the man’s confusion with a bullet. The terrified helmsman fled the wheelhouse, down the outside stairs. Medina didn’t bother to chase him. He was calm now as he returned to the starboard wing, sure that when the people of his grandfather’s village spoke now, it would be of Saful, Sword of Islam, not Faatina, Whore of the Infidel.

“Allahuuuuu Akbaaaaar!” he screamed as he thumbed the remote.

***

The blast was beyond imagination, amplified by Medina’s design. Twelve blasts actually, grouped in pairs and separated by milliseconds, starting aft to build into a directional force, battering the gates that held the lake at bay.

The canal’s designers were no strangers to redundancy, and the locks had double, massively overdesigned gates, the twin leaves of each mitered pair meeting in a point upstream so the weight of water pressed them closed as a lock drained. A good design, but unequal to a blast of near nuclear strength. The gates crumpled like tinfoil and ripped free, their useless remains undulating in the rushing torrent, impeded only by the debris from
Asian Trader
.

Constrained by the lock walls and the incompressible water beneath the ship, the blast forced an escape upward, ripping the entire cargo-tank section free of the ballast tanks and tossing it into the air to crash down at an angle, one end landing on
Asian Trader’s
bow and the other on
Stellar Spirit
as the passenger ship nosed into the western lock. Checked at either end but unsupported in the middle, the cargo section split like an overripe fruit, ruptured tanks gushing tons of gasoline into the torrent now rushing through the open lock.

In the lock, watertight integrity vanished from
Asian Trader
’s battered remains as the forward collision bulkhead collapsed into the forepeak tank, and her after pump-room machinery was driven through the engine-room bulkhead. She sank, pushed by the torrent as she settled but restrained by remnants of the outer hull blasted tight against the lock walls. The steel screamed like a living thing as it yielded, a huge friction brake holding the mass upright as it settled to the lock floor.

The end of the ruptured cargo block resting on
Asian Trader
’s bow dropped as the bow sank beneath it until the middle of the cargo block rested on the wall separating the locks. There the section teetered, the high end on
Stellar Spirit
, the middle on the wall between the locks, and the low end dangling unsupported over the ruined lock, as spilled gasoline ignited, turning the entire scene into a maelstrom and sucking air from passengers still alive deep in the cruise ship. The flames rushed southward on the flood, a fiery wall of death moving toward Miraflores, Balboa, and the wide Pacific beyond.

M/T Luther Hurd
Gaillard Cut
North of Pedro Miguel Lock
Panama

“Christ. What was that?” asked Captain Vince Blake as he hung on the windowsill and stared out through the cracked glass of the bridge windows. The pilot shook his head and raced to the wing, Blake on his heels. Blake could see men down on
Luther Hurd
’s bow, some beginning to stir. He moved to the back of the bridge wing and saw a similar scene on the stern.

“Everyone’s down,” Blake said, “will you take the conn while I organize help?”

“Do it,” the pilot said, moving to the opposite wing as Blake raced to the phone.

“Engine Room. Chief,” Jim Milam answered.

“You OK down there, Chief?”

“I think so. What happened, Cap?”

“Explosion ashore. The mate’s down on the bow, and I can’t see the second. We’re in the cut, and I can’t leave the bridge. Can you—”

“We’re on it,” Milam said.

“Thanks, Jim,” Blake said, hanging up to join the pilot on the starboard wing.

He followed the pilot’s gaze ashore, confused.

“We’ve slowed down?”

The pilot shook his head. “There’s a current,” he said, pointing at eddies and flotsam moving along the bank.

Oh shit, Blake thought.

“Full ahead,” the pilot said.

“Full ahead,” Blake relayed the order to the third mate at the joystick.

The pilot stared ahead, fear in his eyes.

Miraflores Locks Visitor Center

Maria pushed herself up from the sun-heated tiles, relief washing over her at the sight of her sons nearby, stunned and crying but unhurt. Señora Fuentes’s timing had been fortunate, placing them in the patio area behind the building before the blast. The teacher herself was less so. She lay on the tile in a growing circle of blood, the back of her head smashed on the corner of a concrete bench. Maria fought down panic and crossed herself before closing the teacher’s sightless eyes.

The other mothers had recovered and were calming the terrified children, dabbing at scrapes with napkins wet with bottled water. Outside their sheltered corner, the ground was dotted with bodies and sparkled with broken glass. A big blond man staggered onto the bridge wing of the ship in the lock and peered upstream.

Suddenly, Maria stood in water and the man screamed, pointing as she splashed from her corner to look. Water poured over the lock gate. What didn’t fall into the lock fanned out in shallow waves, lapping at buildings to slosh back and fall into the lock from the sides. Mule wires moaned as the ship rose, operators dead or unconscious, unable to slack the wires. One by one, the mules were pulled from their tracks and overturned. Upstream, beyond the colored boxes of a container ship, she saw a yellow blur.

“Fire!” the blond man screamed. “Go inside! High! Away from the windows!”

Maria called to Isobel and Juanita, and the three mothers started the group up the outside steps to the observation deck, Maria clutching her boys’ hands as she brought up the rear, counting heads. The first level was littered with bodies and glass crunched underfoot as the mothers ignored scattered moans and herded their charges upward. They had to save the children.

The children were all crying by the time they reached the next level. Maria could feel the heat.

“No time to go higher,” she shouted, trying a door. “We must get inside!”

The door was locked. The building was controlled access with entrance from the ground floor only. Doors relocked behind people as they exited to the observation decks at each level.

“The toilets,” she yelled, and the women herded the children toward three doors near the end of the observation deck.

“There is no room,” Maria said as the other mothers divided the children between the two small restrooms. “I will put my boys in the janitor’s closet.”

Isobel nodded as the door closed, and Maria was left alone with her sons. She dragged them to the tiny closet, faint with relief to find a janitor’s sink filling the small space. She lifted her boys into the big sink and turned on the cold water, stilling their protests with slaps.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Do not turn the water off. Keep your heads under and only stick your noses out. Understand?”

“Don’t leave,
Mama
,” Paco pleaded.

“If I stay, we cannot close the door. I’ll be fine with the others,” she lied. “Remember I love you,
hijos
,” she added softly.

“
Si, Mama
,” the boys sobbed as she closed the door.

God, protect my sons, she prayed, moving through the heat.

“Your boys aren’t here,” Juanita said as Maria pushed in. “They must be in the other toilet with Isobel.”

Maria forced a smile and prayed God would forgive her for putting her own children in a more sheltered location. “Yes, but there’s no more room there,” she lied. “I’m your new roommate.”

Juanita nodded as Maria fished out her cell phone—to find it dead. An image flashed of Manny chiding her for not keeping her battery charged. Oh
Mi Amor
, she thought, I hope you know what a wonderful life you have given me.