by Scott Carson
“No problem.”
Caleb turned and walked down the tunnel and Deshawn lifted a water bottle to his dry, chapped lips. His head still ached from the sleepless night and too much drinking. The relentless pounding of steel blades into granite seemed to be boring through his ears.
Eight more hours. Screw it. What could go wrong in eight more hours?
He walked back toward the Mole, and when he passed the crew of men in filthy overalls who stood on high wooden timbers and watched him from above, he didn’t look up. They weren’t real, let alone worthy of attention.
Stay down here and stay focused. One more shift.
UPSTREAM
41
In the last minutes of his life, Arthur Brady had proven obdurate, but before he’d died he’d also demonstrated the process for opening and closing the spillway gates, and for deactivating the siren system and the security monitors. If he’d continued to do his job without complaint, if he’d simply followed orders, he might still be alive.
Arthur had been edgy with him from the first, but it was only when Mick requested the second gate be raised that he voiced any reluctance.
“If it’s the spillway you’re worried about, then this will do more harm than good. We should be closing gates, not opening them.”
“I was told you’d spoken to Mr. Cochran. I was told you understood your role here and would not question my authority.”
“I’m not questioning your authority,” Brady had said, “I’m questioning your idea. If it’s cavitation and that stone face is peeling off, we’ll make it worse increasing the flow. We should be shutting her down completely.”
“In a record flood? With the reservoir this high?”
Brady had faced him defiantly. “Yes. Because the dam can hold on.”
“Not for long.”
“Longer than if the spillway is cutting her knees out from under her!”
Mick had regarded Brady with a measure of surprise and admiration right then. The old dam operator understood the structure better than Mick would’ve guessed. Mick remembered the way Brady had compared the sound of the spillway to a sick human. More from the chest, he’d said. It ain’t a head cold anymore.
“Mr. Brady,” Mick had said, “this situation requires my focus, and my expertise. I can’t engage in debate over the matter.”
“You’re gonna have to. Because she can hold it. For a few days at least. We’ve got time. Not much, maybe, but—”
The gun had come out then, and they moved swiftly from talk of structural integrity to talk of sirens and surveillance cameras. Arthur Brady was more compliant with the weapon at his head.
Too little, too late, of course.
Mick had fired with the barrel of the revolver nearly pressed to Arthur Brady’s forehead. Close range was critical. He knew he wasn’t a marksman, and he needed to be sure.
He’d been sure.
He’d left Arthur in his chair, taken his keys, and gone outside to observe in person the changes along the spillway. He was in his car, alone in the rain, when the sheriff arrived.
Now, while Arthur’s body floated alongside the sheriff’s in the access chambers below, trapped by the steel grates that caught the debris like a giant strainer, Mick opened the spillway’s third gate, bringing an additional thirty thousand gallons of water per second storming down the old stone face and downstream.
He was frowning while he did it, and not out of guilt.
The math didn’t work.
The math was thrown off by T = time.
All of the terrible risks of cavitation were offset by the pace of the process. Cavitation could devastate a dam—it could create a full breach, yes—but not quickly. Even if the eroding spillway face was chewing a hole at the base of the Chilewaukee Dam, increasing the water flow and pressure would hasten the process only so much.
Arthur hadn’t been wrong about that. His understanding of the structure’s chest cough was on the money. Pneumonia killed you, but not quickly. Not by morning.
Mick needed the dam to be dead by morning.
He sat in the gatehouse in Arthur Brady’s chair, swiveling between one arched window and the next, watching the reservoir at one end and the surging tailwaters below, and then he regarded Anders Wallace sadly.
“It won’t work,” he said.
“It will,” Anders told him. Anders stood by the locked door at the stairs with his perfect posture, a bearing that wasn’t rigid but elegant. A bearing of purpose and confidence.
“I don’t think so. It will take too long. They’ll have to hurry, yes, but they can. They’ll kill me, they’ll close the gates, and then they’ll come with full awareness of the ticking clock. It would have been better if I’d never said a word. The way I left yesterday was the way to go about it. No one was going to trust Brady’s word against mine. So long as I told them the structure was sound, they’d have believed me. You made me rush. That was the mistake.”
As he sat here in the old gatehouse with its shining floors, mopped clean of blood, he knew that he wouldn’t succeed. It had all been for naught. Oh, he’d draw attention to the Chilewaukee, certainly. Helicopters would circle, news cameras would run, politicians would make statements, but the dam would hold and thus the story would become that of a man gone mad. They’d miss the point.
“They’ll still forget,” he said. “The panic will be temporary. Then they’ll get it fixed, and everyone downstream will say, ‘See, there was never anything to worry about,’ and no one will have learned a thing.”
Anders gave a wan, almost sad smile. Then he stepped away from the door and walked to the far end of the room, where the iron ladders led down to the access chambers. The corpses of the two men Mick had killed bobbed just below.
“You fail to understand the math, sir,” Anders said.
This accusation made Mick indignant. If there was one thing he absolutely understood, it was the math.
“It will take too long,” he said. “I’m sure of that. It’s about the issue of time, nothing else. This approach takes too much time.”
“It is about the idea of time,” Anders agreed, resting one hand on the top rung of the ladder. “But you don’t have a full understanding of time.” He beckoned. “Come here.”
Mick sighed, but he rose and crossed the room and joined Anders at the top of the ladder.
“Go down,” Anders said.
Mick stared into the darkness. The only sounds were the soft lapping of water that had leaked through decaying pipes or thin cracks in the stone, and the sloshing thumps of the dead men hitting the trash racks.
“Go down and see what you’re failing to account for,” Anders Wallace said, and his voice was less genial now. “Remember your equation?”
He remembered it, but he still hadn’t made sense of it. There was the strange inclusion of the uplift pressure.
“Go on,” Anders said firmly.
Mick wrapped his hand around the cool iron rung. He swung his foot out, felt in the darkness, and found the next. Stepped down, and down again. He paused when his head was level with the floor, and looked up. Anders stared back down at him, seeming taller now, an immense figure. Mick turned away and went down the ladder into darkness.
He was twenty rungs down when he heard the sound of metal on rock. He paused and listened. It was a rhythmic noise, a whipping rush of air followed by the ping of iron on rock. Whoosh, ting, whoosh, ting, whoosh, ting.
He descended another step, and then another, and now a pale light began to emerge. He could see the rough-hewn rock floor below, dimly illuminated in a flickering light.
See what you’re failing to account for, Anders had said.
Mick’s foot left the ladder and landed on the stone floor. He should have been standing in water now, but just like last night there was stone waiting for him instead.
The light was coming from his left, and so was the sound—whoosh, ting, whoosh, ting—and now he could hear another sound, this one a scraping, also rhythmic
. The light flickered but the sounds were steady.
He released the ladder and stepped toward the sound and the light.
He was facing a crew of miners. A dozen of them, maybe. Their dress was of another era, like Anders’s, and men and women worked side by side. Gray dust rose all around them, and they worked in the shifting light of a lantern. The men swung picks against a sheer rock wall—whoosh, ting—and the women scraped the rock fragments up in wide shovels and deposited them in a tall, rusted iron cart. They looked at Mick but did not pause.
A tall man seemed to be directing the work. He was swinging his pick unrelentingly, dust billowing back into his face. The woman beside him scraped the rock from the ground and dumped it into the cart.
They worked on, at a feverish but precise pace, and it made Mick think of the old story of John Henry versus the machine. The furious but fruitless endeavor of human strength pitted against mechanical power, a race against…
Time.
It is about the idea of time, Anders had said. But you don’t have a full understanding of time.
Uplift pressure. A force that Mick hadn’t understood. Unseen but powerful.
Mick watched them work, the iron picks spitting sparks when they struck granite, the shovels gathering each fallen fragment. They were as fine-tuned as any machine, an unbroken chain of efficiency until the tall man set down his pick. The others worked on, but he leaned on his pick, wiped his filthy face with his shirtsleeve, and stared at Mick.
There was something familiar about him.
“Do you understand now?” the tall man asked.
“Who are you?”
“You should know the name.”
He did know it. Suddenly, the face was more than familiar. It was nearly his own. The man was Jeremiah Fleming.
Mick’s grandfather. A man he’d never met in life.
Jeremiah Fleming smiled a wicked grin. “The man should be forgotten, but the work should be remembered. They’ll know my work. They’ll know our work.”
Mick didn’t answer.
“Do you understand now?” Jeremiah repeated. He leaned forward, his lanky, whip-strong body tensed, as if Mick’s answer mattered a great deal.
“Yes,” Mick said. “I think I do.”
He meant it, too. He was beginning to understand it all—the world down here wasn’t far off from the one he’d explained to the sheriff just before he’d killed him. Back then, he’d told the sheriff that the disaster brewing at the Chilewaukee wasn’t a problem of rain alone, or of failing stone. It required both. Forces from above, and forces from below.
For years, Mick’s interest had been on the surface, but other forces had been trapped below. They’d pushed on, fighting for an advantage, just as he’d described to the sheriff.
And they were relentless.
Whoosh, ting, whoosh, ting. Scrape, dump, scrape, dump.
They’d been working a long time for this moment. Tirelessly. Forgotten but undeterred.
“It won’t take all that much help from me, will it?” Mick said. “You’ve got the head start. So now it won’t take nearly as much pressure as it should. Which means not nearly as much time as I expected.”
“I’m not sure,” Jeremiah said. “You’re the surface engineer.” He wiped his face again, staring at Mick through the haze of rock dust. “But I’d say we’re close, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. I’ve got to get back to work now. So do you. We will need you downstream. You understand that?”
“The process starts at the Chilewaukee,” Mick said. “It doesn’t end there. It doesn’t end until it reaches the city. You’ll need me to guide it downstream.”
“Correct.”
Jeremiah Fleming turned from Mick then, whipped the heavy pick backward, and drove it forward. Iron sparked off rock, a chunk of the wall fell free, and a shovel scraped in to claim it.
Mick walked back to the ladder and climbed out of the lantern light and back through darkness to the gatehouse above.
42
Aaron arrived home feeling both exhausted and jittery, as if he’d over-caffeinated to fight fatigue. He wanted to talk to his father. He knew that Steve would listen to Gillian’s stories. His father always listened, even to the most deranged jailhouse phone calls. There was a reason he’d been elected time and again. When people spoke to Steve Ellsworth, they felt as if they’d been heard. Whatever the result might be, they didn’t go away feeling voiceless.
The sheriff’s cruiser was gone, though, and the house was empty, a note left on the table, three sentences, two scrawled hurriedly, the other printed with care, almost as if left by two different hands:
Home shortly, thanks for helping Mathers. Lots to discuss.
And beneath it:
Thank you, son.
Aaron started to toss the note into the trash but then stopped. Moving toward the garbage can required facing the sink, and he saw that the whiskey glass had been moved. He’d left it in the sink, but it was gone.
He understood the Breathalyzer demand now. He also thought he understood the different pacing of the writing on the note. Thank you, son had been added, written with care. Written after he’d passed the Breathalyzer. Maybe even after the corpse had been found and Aaron’s story validated.
He put the note back down on the table rather than depositing it in the trash. Then he called his dad’s cell phone. It went directly to voicemail. Aaron said, “Hey, it’s me. Just wanted you to know that I’m home. I’ll be here.”
Ordinarily, that would’ve been enough. But ordinarily his father wouldn’t have thanked him in a note, either, so Aaron felt a pull to offer something in reciprocity, some gesture of appreciation.
“Be safe,” he said, but that sounded ominous or nervous, and so he added, “In this weather, I mean. Be safe in the rain, Dad.”
He disconnected then. His throat was thick and he wasn’t sure why. He looked at the note again. Why did those few words seem to matter so much?
Listen to the water, he’d written once in a book given to him by his mother. Not many words, but they’d mattered. Maybe because there were so few.
He left the note on the table and then went upstairs. He intended to inspect the wound on his foot, clean it, re-bandage it, and take an Advil. Instead he fell asleep with his boots on, waiting on his father’s return.
DOWNSTREAM
43
Ed Cochran couldn’t remember a more miserable day. Hours of rain, hours of angry phone calls.
Most of the time, he was the recipient of the anger. The lone exception was his brief, terse chat with the sheriff of Torrance County. The sheriff was cooperative beneath his crankiness. Concerned for someone other than himself.
That was a pleasant change from the rest of the calls. Every other elected official seemed worried about what they’d known and when they’d known it. The calls with the engineers were better—but unsettling. The engineers seemed both grim and smug, with I told you so sneers barely buried beneath the Oh, shit responses. The engineers knew Mick by reputation if not in person. If Mick Fleming was nervous, the others were scared. If Mick was scared? Well, then. That was a different situation.
Three different people told Ed that an evacuation should be considered based simply on Mick’s concern. Then, just when he was about to agree with them, Mick called.
“Please tell me you’re at the Chilewaukee,” Ed said.
“I’m here.” His voice was steady. None of the usual haughtiness, that sense of a barely suppressed sigh that was typical of Mick.
“Good. You’re about to have company. I don’t think we can wait until tomorrow,” Ed said. “I’m freaking out more people with every call I make. I can’t get a full team up there today, but I can get—”
“You’ve got time.”
“You’re sure?”
“If Arthur Brady does what he’s told and operates the gates so I can see that spillway react to flow changes, then yes. He’s become more coopera
tive. So has the sheriff.”
“I talked to Sheriff Ellsworth,” Ed said. “Made it clear that this thing can’t be fixed with a bass boat and a winch.”
Mick laughed. Ed smiled, but almost more out of curiosity than amusement. When was the last time he’d heard a genuine laugh out of Mick Fleming? Had he ever?
“The guy needed a little prod, didn’t he?” Ed said.
“He certainly did. He went down in person to make sure Brady did what he was told. It’s been easier since I’ve had direct contact. Knowing the locals is critical.”
“Sure,” Ed said. “Boots on the ground, brother. I get it. But I’m going to send you some help anyhow. Tabor, Bruce & Goy are sending some people up. I’ll be right on their heels.”
For a few seconds he thought he’d lost Fleming. Then the voice came back with a new, albeit more familiar, tension.
“That’s a mistake.”
“Excuse me?” Ed leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “I read your email, Mick. You told me this was urgent.”
“I know what I said. I also said that tomorrow was the day for a full team.”
“Got that, but this isn’t a full team; this is the bare minimum I can send up there and keep my job. The friggin’ politicians? They’re scared, and if they’re scared, then I’m in the crosshairs.”
“Tomorrow,” Mick Fleming said. His voice was bristling, almost enraged.
“Listen—” Ed began, but Mick cut him off.
“You’ll ruin it. I’m not kidding, Ed. You’ll ruin everything.”
“What in the hell are you talking about? You asked me to—”
“I asked you to get people ready for tomorrow morning! And I told you that was because I needed time to get the locals on board. I told you this. I wrote it down. It was in fucking black-and-white for you.”
Ed’s eyes went wide. Was this really Mick Fleming? Mick Fleming, who never raised his voice, who couldn’t make eye contact when he was disappointed? Mick Fleming was now reading his boss the riot act?
Nerves getting to him. That has to be it. The little prick would never be insubordinate if he wasn’t scared.