Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  The truck veered to the left, in the direction of the burst tire, and collided with the bridge’s steel railing, sideswiped an oncoming truck, and landed on its side when the driver tried to re-cross the dividing island in the middle of the road. Officers shot the lock off the truck’s rear door, and the Colombians came out bloodied and bruised, but still able to raise their hands over their heads.

  XLV

  5/5/09 12:03 MST

  The Blue Mesa team in Colorado had the trickiest operation to perform. On the night before the torpedoes were detonated, they crossed the Gunnison River on Highway 92 and carried one of the new and smaller torpedoes by hand into Point Marrow Reservoir down river from the much larger Blue Mesa Dam. They carried another into Crystal Reservoir down river from Point Marrow, and set both of the smaller weapons for the fateful time of three past noon.

  On the morning of the Fifth, they sailed their pontoon boat to within a quarter mile of the Blue Mesa Dam and dropped their three large torpedoes in the deep water. Unlike the remote Fontenelle and Strawberry Reservoirs, there were hundreds of other small craft on Blue Mesa that spring Monday. The men had to wait for the times when water skiers were not whizzing past them before they made their drops.

  Compared to the inept Strawberry team, the Blue Mesa group worked as well as Swiss timepieces and had returned to their truck before the warheads struck the dams. Their efficiency gave them only a mixed success. One of the warheads that hit the big Blue Mesa dam failed to explode. The other two did, and while they did not break the structure immediately, they did crack it, and the enormous weight of the water behind it did the rest of the work a few minutes later.

  A dozen miles downriver at the Point Marrow the first of the smaller torpedoes broke the smaller dam cleanly. Farther still downstream the torpedo planted there veered to the north and hit the entrance of the diversion tunnel and, as Ed Harris had predicted, did very little damage. The released Gunnison River poured through the broken dams and over the smaller intact diversion dam and into the spectacular Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

  Within the seven hundred foot high walls of the canyon the river picked up speed and spewed out the western end like a waterfall lying parallel to the earth. In the eastern part of America, or in the middle west along the branches of the Mississippi, flood water spread out in an enormous series of lakes that can cover millions of acres of flat land. In the mountain west, where the land is either rising or falling and never level, the flood water stayed in the channel, tearing out the smaller bridges it hit and swelling across the tops of some of the larger spans, thus turning a managed stream into a deadly barrier no one dared cross.

  As the highway traffic on the western slope of Colorado was only slightly heavier than what the Fontenelle team had encountered in Wyoming, the Blue Mesa team was able to drive north on US 50 unnoticed by the general public and unmolested by the police. They crossed the newly freed Gunnison River only once, at the small town of Delta, where the bridge remained in place, and they went via Grand Junction to Rangely on Highway 139. By the time they reached Grand Junction, they witnessed crowds of people standing on the sidewalks and heard sirens, a sign the news about Blue Mesa had preceded them.

  No one in the area had begun spreading reports about U-Haul trucks, so they drove north over Douglas Pass unmolested. No one stopped them when they went through the small coal mining town of Rangely, and then to Dinosaur, and onto a dirt road leading to the desert landing strip where they expected their plane to land. They parked the truck and waited.

  They searched the sky for the DC-3 and for the two other teams they expected to come driving down the dirt road toward them. The seven men spread out across their little patch of desert and found a few high mounds in the sagebrush that gave them vantage points from which to see farther. They twice sighted a well service truck rumbling across the prairie. No one they recognized came to the landing strip. Night began to come on, and they built a couple smoky bon fires from the pungent sagebrush in the vain hope that they could illuminate the runway. They all checked and rechecked their watches and looked at each other in silent consternation.

  *

  One of the other teams, Blue Mesa, was waiting for the Flaming Gorge group, who at exactly 12:03 had stood atop a hill southwest of their target dam and watched their three torpedoes slam into their horseshoe-shaped target. The ground beneath them trembled like cafeteria Jell-O at each strike; the men felt their teeth clack, and the soles of their feet stung from the vibrations. The water on the northern side of the dam burst into white clouds of spray that covered the countryside with moisture. The dam, which was much taller and thicker than any target except the Glen Canyon site, remained standing when the last of the spray had splattered onto the earth. There had been a couple dozen people parked on the roadway that went atop the dam and even they seemed uninjured; the explosions knocked them off their feet and left the older ones among them lying prostrate, confused and gasping for air. After the smoke had cleared the Colombians could see there was not so much as a broken bone among the fallen.

  “Nothing happened!” said the seven Colombians together.

  One of them did mention that the young German engineer--he meant Ed Harris--had said something about the shaped warheads cracking the dam internally so that the water’s weight would break the structure open. The other six Colombians commented that the engineer was an idiot, but not as big an idiot as anyone who believed him. They shook their heads in disappointment and drove away through the mountains on Highway 191 into northern Utah. Among the pine forests of the high Unita Mountains they quickly lost sight of the Green River running to the east of them and had an uneventful drive down a series of switchbacks into Vernal, where they turned east on Highway 40, toward Rangely, Colorado, and their landing strip.

  Nine miles east of Vernal, as they approached a village called Jensen in the midst of green agricultural land, the Colombians came to a stretch of highway lined by two rows of cottonwood trees, beyond which there were sugar beet and corn fields and some immaculately pure-white Mormon farm houses. Ahead of the Colombians appeared an unexpected jumble of vehicles filling both lanes.

  “Go up ahead,” the team leader told one of the men. “See what is blocking the road.”

  The scout was gone for more than an hour, and like the Blue Mesa team, the Flaming Gorge men checked their watches and wondered if they were going to be on time to meet their plane. Other cars and trucks drove up behind them and came to a halt on the crowded highway, blocking their retreat route back to Vernal. When at last the man sent ahead returned, the others could see his wide eyes while he was still a hundred meters away.

  “The Green River,” he panted as he ran up to his six companions, “she is as big as the damned Amazon! She is over the bridge! We cannot drive on to Colorado!”

  The engineer the Colombians had called an idiot had been correct: the Flaming Gorge Dam had, in fact, given way approximately three minutes after the Colombians had left the site. The angry Green River, now increased by the released water from the Fontenelle, had rushed down the constricted defiles of the Unita Mountains, smashing everything in its path. The river swell had moved much faster than the seven Colombians had in their rental truck. It had overrun the Highway 40 bridge and cut the Colombians off from all points east; in time the river would take out sections of the bridge, creating a barrier the Flaming Gorge team would have needed wings to cross.

  “The water is not fanning out!” the scout explained. “It piles on top of itself in the river bed, like a big, moving wall!”

  Among the traffic backing up to the west behind them, some local police were moving through the cluster of vehicles and people, trying to get some to turn around toward Vernal. The officers also seemed to be questioning people about something the Colombians could not discern at a distance.

  “Perhaps we should leave the truck here,” said the team leader.

  “How will we get to the air strip beyond the river?” the others asked hi
m.

  “I have a special radio transmitter in my shoe,” the leader revealed to them. “Senor Corello gave it to me. He can locate us anywhere we go. In Vernal, we will board a train to some place Senor Corello and the Russian can send a plane for us.”

  “What if there is no train?” one of the men asked.

  “This is the United States,” said the team leader, “the richest country in the world. They will have trains everywhere.”

  The seven men began walking along the north side of the road toward Vernal, some nine miles away. Dressed in suede jackets, silver-tipped cowboy boots and silk shirts with wide lapels, the dark skinned, Spanish-speaking strangers strolled through the traffic jam unaware of how conspicuous they looked in a lily-white Mormon community. It was a good measure of how great the confusion was on that normally quiet stretch of road that no one stopped them during their long walk back to town.

  XLVI

  5/5/09 12:03 Arizona Standard Time

  The all-important Glen Canyon team, the one led by Claudio and the only group carrying four large torpedoes, had loaded their weapons onto their pontoon boat two hundred yards south of Wahweap Marina. The houseboat of Mr. and Mrs. Dupree, the

  same people who had seen the Colombians two years earlier, was moored to its peer at the edge of the marina, a few hundred meters north of the concrete landing the twelve men in the team were using to launch their craft. As soon as the men had motored from the shoreline and were on the deep water near the dam, a young Navaho man, the same young man who had approached the Duprees two years before, walked down the bluff overlooking the landing and came up to the elderly couple as they sat on the porch of their double-decker boat.

  “Did you see that?” Wayland Zah asked them. “As bold as brass they were. Say, don’t I know you folks?”

  “I don’t know...” said Mrs. Dupree. “Do we know you?”

  “Maybe,” said Wayland. “I mean, I think we’ve met before. You know, I think those guys must be doing something with drugs. Lucky for us I got these great binoculars. I can see everything those guys are doing. Look, they’re dropping something in the water,” he said, peering through the glasses.

  He handed Mr. Dupree his binoculars and a slip of paper on which he had the license plates of the Colombians’ rental truck. “If I were you, I would call the sheriff’s department in Page,” said Wayland. “You got a cell phone?”

  “A smart one,” said Mr. Dupree, gazing through Wayland’s binoculars.

  “The latest technology,” said Wayland.

  “We got it last Christmas,” said Mrs. Dupree. “From our son out in—”

  “I’ll bet it’s a great phone, ma’am,” said Wayland. “A great phone to make a call to the police on. Well, sorry to run. I got to get to work.”

  Having taken the binoculars from Mr. Dupree, he ran up the slope above the landing to the parked car he had left there. He waited at the turn-off to Highway 89 for an hour and twelve minutes, at which time the Colombians passed him in their rental truck, and Wayland followed them at a safe distance. The twelve Colombians were running late Wayland noted, As he crossed the arch bridge over the Colorado and immediately south of the dam, he checked his watch and saw the fateful numbers 12:03 appear on his timepiece’s face.

  They haven’t hit yet, he thought.

  He had time to put his hand down, time for his car to travel fifty meters before the first of four successive explosions hit the north side of the dam, shaking the bridge and bouncing Wayland’s car to the left-hand side of the road. The sensation was similar to what he had felt when, as a small boy, he had ridden his grandmother’s washing machine during the spin cycle. The explosions stung the base of Wayland’s spine and made his small intestines tighten as they did when he rode a roller coaster on a long down grade. The fourth and final blast knocked Wayland’s car back to the right-hand side of the bridge, out of the path of an oncoming truck that roared by him, its horn blaring.

  “They didn’t get it!” was Wayland’s first thought upon reaching the bridge’s east side. He was momentarily pleased to look back over his left shoulder and see the seven hundred feet of grayish white concrete remained in place. Had he not been able to see it, he told himself, he would presently be under a hundred feet of water.

  Drops of water fell like rain on the roadway as they had after the explosions at Flaming Gorge. Wayland drove on, passed the startled drivers who had screeched to a sudden halt on the eastern side of the river, and went up the hill into Page. At the first phone booth on Lake Powell Boulevard he dialed 9-1-1.

  “Hello,” he addressed the dispatcher, “this here is Harold Peters out at the city airport,” he said, using his impersonation of the man for whom he had once worked. “There’s some strange folks out here that have holed up in one of my hangers.”

  “How are they strange?” asked Sally the dispatcher. “I have to tell you, Mr. Peters, we’ve got something going on at the dam.”

  “They’re driving this big orange U-Haul truck,” said Wayland.

  “Did you say an orange U-Haul truck?” asked Sally, her attention suddenly piqued.

  “Right, a great big one.”

  “How close are they?” the dispatcher asked.

  “They’re in my east hanger, Hanger B, out beyond South Tenth Avenue,” said Wayland, knowing that was the place the Colombians had been instructed to wait for Kenneth Greeley and his plane. “By the by, one of them has something in his shoe.”

  “You saw what?”

  “I saw him stick something in there,” explained Wayland. “Something like a slip of paper. You calling the sheriff’s deputies out too?”

  “Right now, Mr. Peters,” said Sally, so excited she immediately switched on her phone and left Wayland hanging on the line without so much as a good-bye.

  *

  Bob Mathers was at home that Monday, watching a baseball game on his day off, when he got the call from another sheriff’s deputy. He and his wife Becky had come home from shopping at a little after noon, and had heard an explosion northwest of town. They had guessed they were hearing one or more sonic booms, which are common in the southwest, the home of many U.S. Air Force bases.

  “There’s trouble out at the airport,” Bob heard Deputy Allan say into his mobile phone. “It’s a 189 or a 122 or something, Christ, I don’t know, something big. They’re the men what set the explosions off out at the dam! They’re driving--I mean, they’ve driven this big truck out to the airport. You got to get out here! All the Page police is coming, too.”

  Bob did not stop to ask what explosions or take the time to put on his uniform; he grabbed the rifle Becky made him keep locked in a basement cabinet and sped through Page with his squad car’s warning lights blazing. At the corner of Elm and Lake Powell, directly across from the Empire House Hotel, he thought he momentarily spotted Wayland Zah sitting at the intersection in a car Bob did not recognize. He did not have time to investigate.

  At the city airport at the end of Tenth Street, on the eastern edge of Page, chaos had already reigned for a quarter of an hour by the time of Bob’s arrival. Page’s other full-time deputies were on scene, as were seven of the city police and a couple civilian men Deputy Allan had deputized on the spot. They were couched behind their automobiles, their guns drawn and pointed at the isolated metal hanger on the southeastern end of the airport’s cluster of buildings.

  An empty U-Haul truck was parked in front of the hanger’s closed double doors. Bob scanned the squadron of agitated law officers and noticed that Tony Phelps, a young policeman possessing two weeks of SWAT training from a seminar in Phoenix, had his HLK sniper’s rifle cocked and aimed across the hood of a squad car.

  “I think we should maybe keep the guns at the ready rather than aimed, Tony,” said Bob in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “We don’t know if these characters have done anything.”

  “They’re the ones tried to blow up the dam!” yelled Tony, his finger trembling inside the trigger guard. “They’re for
eign terrorists of some sort!”

  “The FBI is on their way,” Deputy Allan told Bob. “We should keep our heads down and wait.”

  The deputy showed relief that Mathers was there and voiced his wish for the chief of police to make an appearance, as though the burden of command was weighing heavily upon him.

  “We could lob some tear gas in there,” he said to Bob.

  “Why do you think they are suspects, and in what crime?” Mathers wanted to know.

  “Some kind of bomb went off,” replied Allan, braving a glance over his car, then ducking down again. “Thankfully, no damage was done. The dam is still there, of course.”

  “How do we know they did it?” Bob persisted.

  “Some people out on the lake saw them. Saw them get in and out of that truck,” said Allan. “Turns out they’re Colombians, like that bunch you tried to get the government interested in a couple years back.”

  “Wait, how do we know they are Colombians, Al?” Bob asked him. “How could anyone tell? See them at a distance out on the lake and you wouldn’t know if they’re from Neptune.”

  “You’re asking too many questions,” said Allan. “I need help out here. I got Tony hot to start shooting people, and these city boys don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Can you go around, Bob, and get ‘em calmed down?”

  *

  While these events were unfolding behind the squad cars, Claudio and his eleven men were pacing the concrete floor inside the hanger and growing increasingly anxious about what was happening. They had spotted three black and white police cars near the airport tarmac. Some civilian vehicles were parked nearby. Clearly some armed men were congregating behind the cars. Claudio had sent a man up to the hanger loft to look out the fan vent to see if Greeley’s plane was approaching. The man had seen nothing. Several of the band, his cousin Alfonso among them, were taking occasional glances out the crack between the big double doors and were loading their guns for a clash with the lawmen.