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 Mercer. He then nudged aside the helmsman’s body and took his position at the wheel.
The silver handle that doubled as a flask had been refilled with Jack Daniel’s. Mercer took a pull and offered it to Lauren, who declined with a knowing smile. “Still the best birthday present I ever gave you,” he said to Harry.
“Okay, let’s see what we have here.” With an expert glance, Harry noted compass heading, speed, wind direction and velocity, temperature and the readings on a dozen other gauges. “Lauren, honey, do me a favor. There should be a plaque somewhere around here that gives the ship’s dead weight and some engine information. I need to know what this old girl’s made of before we get going.”
She started her search, saying, “Anyone but you call me honey like that and you can get yourself a good sexual harassment lawyer.”
Rabidoux continued to talk with Foch over their radio net as he dragged the corpses to the captain’s cramped office. “Oui ... Oui ... d’accord, mon lieutenant.” He sought out Mercer, who had gone to the port wing bridge to watch the ship slow as Harry reduced her speed. “Lieutenant Foch needs to see you right away.”
Mercer heard alarm in the young soldier’s voice. “What is it?”
“The bomb’s timer has already been activated. The lieutenant is in the aft hold.”
Mercer turned away without a word. He handed back the radio Captain Patke had given Lauren. “I’m going below. Foch thinks the bomb’s already primed.” Her face blanched. He wanted to assure her that everything was going to be all right, but she would have seen through the lie. “Coordinate whatever Harry needs with the McCampbell, just in case.”
She overcame her momentary flash of fear. Her color returned and she managed a weak joke. “Funny to think of Harry giving orders to the crew of an American missile cruiser.”
“I hope you mean funny as in bizarre and not funny ha-ha.”
Running hard, it took him five minutes to find the hatchway that led to the rear hold. The metal door was open and he could see the waving beam of a flashlight Foch must have found nearby. The dim lightbulbs placed high on the ceiling cast no more than a weak glow, accentuating shadow more than providing light.
He stepped over the coaming. His nose began to burn and his eyes water. Above the rust smell and the oily stench of fouled bilges was a chemical odor so sharp and so overpowering that even breathing through a flap of cloth from his sleeve couldn’t dull its reeking presence.
The hold was fifty feet deep, forty wide, and nearly twenty tall. The rush of water against her cold hull plates sounded like a steady escape of steam. The cargo wasn’t laid out in orderly stacks, as he’d anticipated. Instead it had been placed in precarious pyramids and triangular projections along the hull, secured in place with heavy chain or thick canvas belts. Higher up, what looked like thick pipes running the length of the hold revealed themselves to be tubes of a puttylike substance that had been stuck to the steel.
Having never heard of cargo being arranged in such an odd fashion, but knowing that there was no other explanation, Mercer gaped as he understood what lengths Liu had gone to to ensure the Panama Canal would be sealed for years to come.
Foch strode over with another trooper, who trained his light on various features in the nightmarish space. “Oui, mon ami,” Foch said. “It is what you think. The devious son of a bitch has turned the entire ship into one enormous shaped charge. The way he has placed the explosives guarantees that every bit of energy will be properly directed. It looks like she’ll blow downward first and then an instant later the outer charges go.”
Mercer said nothing, unwilling to believe what he was seeing. With the bomb ship tucked hard against one of the overshadowing hills in the Gaillard Cut, the detonative force would hollow out the seabed under the ship, probably fifty or even a hundred feet deep. The secondary charges, the thick tubes of plastic explosives running the length of the vessel, would then burrow into the rock underpinning the mountain. Add the synchronized explosion on the other ship, and the whole floor of the canal would be so fractured that the weight of the adjacent hills would deform the geology to the point where everything would fall in on itself.
He’d worked enough shots in his career as a mining engineer to understand what would happen. Especially when he took into account how the rain-saturated ground would transmit shock with little energy dissipation. Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill would receive two enormous pressure waves an instant after the soils supporting them had been either removed or had surrendered to the phenomena of liquefaction.
“You have to hand it to him,” Foch said. “Ingenious.”
“Screw him,” Mercer snapped, hating that he did feel a grudging respect for Liu Yousheng. “You said the timer’s already running?”
“This way.” Foch turned and retreated deeper into the shadowy hold, the handheld light seeming puny in the presence of so much deadly force.
The men who’d set these charges, back in China most likely, hadn’t taken any precautions to hide the suitcase-sized timing and detonating mechanism. It sat openly on the deck next to one of the towering mounds of explosives. The wires running from it were thick, heavily insulated, and vanished to all points in the hold. Mercer looked at the digital timer set in a plastic panel on the otherwise blank case. They had fifty-one minutes exactly, and with each second he stared at the glowing numbers their window shrank that one second more.
Mercer didn’t know anything about this type of equipment. He assumed it was military and asked Foch the only logical question that came to mind. “Can’t we just cut the wires?”
“Possibly,” the soldier with Foch said. He was a German named Munz. “And it is possible that doing so will set off the charges.”
“Munz is our explosives man,” Foch explained. “If any of us has a chance defusing the ship he’s it.”
The German-born Legionnaire had already taken out some tools. They lay next to the evil-looking device like surgical instruments. And he showed the false quietude of a surgeon who hides that he’s not sure he can save the patient.
“Do you need anything else?” Mercer asked.
“I just called Rabidoux down to help,” Foch answered for the demolition man. “They work as a team.”
“What I need,” Munz said in his precise English, “is for you to assume that I will not be able to disable this device. You must do what needs to be done, thinking I cannot stop it.”
Mercer was shocked by the man’s pessimism. “Do you really think you can’t do it?”
“Sir, I approach all bombs thinking I will fail because there will be a time when I am right.” He bent to his task and Foch and Mercer started back for the bridge.
Once into the corridor beyond the hold, Foch elaborated on what Munz was saying. “It is the way it is done. We must never plan for a bomb to be defused. It is—” he searched for the appropriate English idiom—“wishful thinking. No one can guarantee they can take out a device so we must be prepared for it going off.”