“Oh, hey,” Lauren exclaimed after wiping sleep from her eyes. “Did you find anything in the journal?”
“Not one damned thing,” Mercer said. Lauren’s expectant look dimmed. “It was interesting from a certain point of view, but I couldn’t find anything that would compel Liu to send gunmen to steal it. Maybe he really is interested in canal history.”
Lauren shot him a doubtful look. Mercer shrugged as if to say anything’s possible.
Juan switched on the fuel pump and keyed the ignition. The motor came to life. For the remainder of the trip down the canal, Tomanovic and Lauren had to remain out of sight. The idea was that Mercer was to act like a photographer who’d hired a local’s boat to take pictures of the ships using the lock. To enhance the deception he still had the camera and lens he’d brought to the River of Ruin.
Lauren and Vic ducked into the cabin to don half-millimeter Henderson microprene body suits, more as camouflage than thermal protection, as Juan pulled them away from their secluded anchorage and headed back for the main channel. They passed a couple of excursion boats lined with camera-wielding tourists in addition to the normal parade of oceangoing transporters. The sun continued its dive for the horizon. Its reddish glow mirror-flashed off the water whenever a wave turned to the proper angle.
Exiting Lake Gatun, they started down the narrower reach toward the Gaillard Cut and the Pedro Miguel Lock. Because the exclusionary marker buoys for the big ships left only tight lanes along the banks, Juan kept his craft tucked to the right shore, on the opposite side of the canal from Gamboa. Beyond the wide twists in the waterway, Mercer could see the looming massif of the continental divide. The closer they got, the narrower the canal became and the more the landscape revealed its artificial nature. The hills that once fell in lazy slopes to the water had been partially leveled and stepped back so they resembled the terrace farms Mercer recalled from trips to Asia and Africa. Jungle vegetation was just now reclaiming the land. This was the latest in a century-long effort to stem the landslides that had plagued the canal since the moment the first steam shovels began tearing open the passage.
One hundred and five million cubic yards of dirt had been excavated from the Gaillard Cut alone, fully half of all material unearthed for the canal project. An early description of the sheer volume of rubble removed to build the Panama Canal stated that if it were compacted into a column with the base the size of an average city block, it would climb to 100,000 feet. Or put another way, the overburden would fill a string of railcars long enough to circle the globe—three and a half times. As Juan Aranjo’s boat motored farther into the cut, Mercer felt that no guidebook comparison could possibly depict the awesome scale of the project. He’d seen many of the world’s engineering marvels, the Great Pyramids, the Coliseum in Rome, the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, the Channel Tunnel. All of them paled next to this.
Towering to their right, they passed what remained of a particular hill that had been blasted to the exact shape of the step pyramid at Saqqara. Then they reached the actual continental divide. Mercer was astounded to think that he was in the middle of a mountain range that stretched from the tip of South America all the way to northern Canada. Walls of andesitic basalt rose in stepped-back cliffs five hundred feet above the placid water. These were the remains of Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill, the highest mountains near the canal and yet the lowest the early engineers could find when they surveyed the route. Holes had been drilled into the rock and reinforced concrete plugs inserted to add stability, and still there was evidence that rockslides continued to occur. The canal was a little more than six hundred feet wide and it seemed the tops of these stone massifs weren’t much wider, looming like the sides of the artificial canyon this was.
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.”