“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.
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.
“Do you have your cell?” she asked Juanita.
Juanita shook her head. “I left my purse in the excitement.”
Maria nodded as the roar and heat increased.
“Oh Maria, what can we do?” Juanita asked.
“It’s in God’s hands, Juanita,” Maria said. “We should pray.”
Juanita nodded, unable to speak, as Maria turned to the children.
“Children, we will talk to God. Please hold hands and help each other be brave.”
They joined hands as she prayed. “Padre nuestro que estas en el cielo, santificado…”
The blast enlivened a slow news day in the US with newsrooms on holiday staffing. In moments, a CNN staffer discovered the Internet camera feed from the Canal Authority, with real-time photos of ships in transit. Five minutes later, he dreamed of a bonus as he e-mailed photos of the final feed of the Centennial Bridge camera: one of a man on the bridge of the M/T Asian Trader, mouth open in a shout, a gun in one hand and a remote in the other; the second showed the explosion. The photos were aired in two minutes flat, and within five, all the networks had them. Talking heads speculated, and executives screamed at people to get some goddamned facts or to make them up if necessary.
Breach of an upper lock was an event long feared, for the canal’s designers had respect for the forces of God and nature, an outlook validated just months before the canal’s opening when the “unsinkable” Titanic plunged to the bottom. But fears faded with decades of safe operation until they seemed as quaint as high button shoes. Gone were safety chains to restrain runaway ships, removed in 1980 in admission that ships were now so big as to make them useless. Eliminated earlier were the emergency dams meant to seal a breach; removed in the fifties after years of disuse. Only the double gates had survived, now blasted to scrap; for what design could anticipate the deluded fanaticism of Jihad?
The chopper hovered above Pedro Miguel as Juan Antonio Rojas, administrator of the Autoridad del Canal de Panama, watched gasoline drain from wrecked tanks, not a gush now but gurgling belches as air bubbled up to break vacuums. Each burp flared, but the gas burned near the source now, with only scattered islands of flame floating southward.
“It’s burning out,” he said into his mike.
“I pray you’re right,” said Pedro Calderon, ACP operations manager, from the seat behind Rojas.
“How fast are we losing the lake?” Rojas asked.
“Hard to say,” Calderon said. “I’ll know more after the next depth reading, but the lake was already low. If that plug fails…” He pointed at the wreckage partially blocking the lock.
As if in response, gasoline gushed anew from the ruined tanks, sending up a fireball and disturbing a precarious balance. For the ruptured tanks had not disgorged their contents evenly, and most of the gasoline remaining in the mangled mass was trapped in the lower, unsupported end. As the last of the cargo drained from the higher end, the cargo block pivoted on the central lock wall like a huge seesaw, the lighter end rising from Stellar Spirit as the lower end dipped toward the waters of the lock. The upper end of the cargo block was inches off the cruise ship when the fire-weakened steel buckled in the middle, dropping the higher end back down across Stellar Spirit as the lower end plunged into the lock. Water rose behind the new obstacle, forcing it down the lock and tearing it free of the remaining wreckage ashore. At the moment of separation, the portion of the cargo block in the lock shifted, filling the lock wall to wall as it slammed into the face of the ruined deckhouse.