“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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.