Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  “They are only a few,” they told Claudio. “Ten at the most. They are not men like us. Run out and kill them, now, or we will not reach the plane when it lands.”

  “We are not shooting at anyone,” commanded Claudio. “There may be more of them on the other side of the hanger. We cannot see anything of them. They may all have machine guns.”

  They heard a propeller whirring somewhere overhead, and the man at the fan vent searched the sky again while the others waited with upturned faces. After a minute of anticipation, the watcher saw the sound came from a small private plane at the north end of the airport’s sole runway. Greeley’s plane was supposed to have been waiting for them upon their arrival from the dam. A half an hour had now passed, and nothing like a DC3 was anywhere in sight. In their desperation, the men began speaking of wild schemes to get away from the hanger. If they could only run to the ridge to the east, some argued, they might cross the desert from there into Grand Canyon National Park.

  “We only have to walk sixty miles to blend into the crowds at the canyon,” argued Alfonso. “No one will pick us out among the tourists.”

  The other ten men in the team said they thought this was a great idea. They would make a dash out the front door and across the half mile of open ground to the ridge. When they said it aloud they realized what an absurd idea it was, and their arguments ground to a slow halt.

  “Where would we go once we got to the Grand Canyon, should any of us not be shot dead here at the airport?” asked Claudio.

  “We could...get a boat?” suggested Alfonso.

  “To ride the treacherous river all the way to Mexico?” said Claudio with a scowl. “Listen to me, my friends. What have we done? We set off some explosions that did no damage. This dam is not even dented. Now, what will they do to us? They will give us a couple years in a soft federal prison. More likely, we will be bailed out before we reach trial, and we will then make our escape to home, exactly as the group in Utah did during the trial run.”

  “Yankee federal prisons are not so bad,” remarked one man.

  “For those with a taste for other men,” said Alfonso.

  “If the Russians do not save us,” suggested Claudio, ‘we’ll turn what is called ‘state’s evidence’ in the Yankee courts. The Yankees will be crazy to get at the Germans and Russian. They are the big fish.”

  A light came on inside Alfonso’s head when he heard the words ‘state’s evidence’.

  “We’ll be put in the witness protection program!” he exclaimed. “Did you see that movie starring the great Steve Martin? The FBI gives one a home in the suburbs and one marries a blonde possessing big hair.”

  The others admitted they would like a home in the Yankee suburbs and a wife with big hair. They decided to put the matter to a vote and devised some ballots out of some lottery tickets Alfonso had in his pocket.

  *

  Outside the hanger and behind the row of squad cars, Deputy Allan had an emergency call come over his shoulder radio. “Patch him through to Mathers,” said the emotionally exhausted deputy. “He’s good with people. It’s Terry Rhodes from out at the dam,” he said to Bob. “He’s got some kind of problem.”

  Terry Rhodes was an engineer Bob knew from his wife’s church. Rhodes was a large, calm man and as good a Mormon as Bob’s wife Becky, and she would be upset if Bob did not speak to Terry in spite of the dangerous situation Bob and the other officers were in.

  “What’s happening, Brother Terry?” Bob asked into his car radio.

  “Nothing good,” said a weary voice. “I’m up on top, looking down the south face. I don’t see any cracks on this side of the dam.”

  “That doesn’t sound bad,” said Bob.

  “We’re not doing that well inside,” said Terry. “We have internal leaks, on the second deck. Jim Haddock, a worker down there, he found it first. The thing was only a fine, little mist coming out of the north wall. Looked like a pane of glass down the middle of the chamber. Like a big fan spreading out. Jim made the mistake of trying to touch it; the pressure cut off his fingertips.”

  “What?” asked Bob, not believing what he was hearing.

  “The pressure,” repeated Terry. “The pressure from tons and tons of water. The water coming through is like a knife. We had to get Jim and the others out. I don’t know what else to do. I’m looking around, now, to see if there are any fissures in the top of the dam. We’ve opened all the gates,” he told Bob. “I can’t see if that’s doing any good.”

  “You’re the engineer, Brother Terry,” Bob told him. “What is there you can do?”

  “Nothing. The cracks may stop. We could, in time, get it fixed. A long process. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  At this point in the conversation the twelve Colombians came filing out of the hanger, their hands above them. The man in front held up his white t-shirt as a sign of surrender.

  “I think I can get that first one right now,” exclaimed Deputy Tony, rising off his haunches in anticipation of action.

  “Hold up!” said Bob and quickly ran over to Tony to take the rifle from him. “The federales will be wanting to talk to these fellows.”

  Bob and the other lawmen came forward, guns held before them, while the Colombians lined up and waited to be taken into custody.

  “Lay low! Lay down-o!” yelled Deputy Allan, and gestured with his palm turned toward the ground to show what he meant.

  (Adding an “o” to words was as close to speaking an alien tongue as Allen ever cared to go.)

  “Abajo!” shouted Bob Mathers. “Sur el campo! Pronto!” and the Colombians understood he wanted them to lie face down on the tarmac.

  “They look like Mexicans to me,” decided Allan, jumping into the bunch of men and putting handcuffs on the first one he could reach.

  “We don’t know what they are,” said Bob. “They might be Colombians; maybe they’re a party to that same bunch we heard about two years ago. I mean the ones here and up in Utah. They were on the lake, just like the other group, and they’ve got the same kind of rental truck.”

  “One of them has got something in the sole of his shoe,” said the eager Tony and began taking shoes off the feet of the prostrate suspects.

  “What are you doing, son?” Bob asked him.

  “We had a couple phone calls that tipped us off,” explained Allan, sweating and panting hard as he handcuffed more of the men.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Bob. “One of them was from an elderly couple out on Lake Powell. Their names were something that started with a d: Delpy, Duper...Dupree.”

  Allan and several of the city police stood upright and looked at Bob in open-mouthed amazement.

  “How the hell did you know that?” asked Allan. “You gone psychic on us or what?”

  “The other call; it was from Wayland Zah?” asked Bob.

  “Well, maybe you aren’t psychic,” said Allan, and went back to his handcuffing. “Old Harold Peters from out here at the airport called in.”

  “Harold Peters isn’t here, Al,” said Bob.

  “Sally took the call. I think she would know Harold. She’s lived here all her life.”

  “Harold and his wife are in Salt Lake,” said Bob. “Their daughter is getting married in the Temple. I know because he wasn’t in church this week. This is a set-up of some sort, Al. I don’t know who’s behind it or why. I know these fellows aren’t the only ones involved in this and that Wayland Zah is mixed up in it somehow.”

  They continued putting cuffs on the men, and Tony continued taking shoes off the men and making inspections of each pair. While he was not discovering any hidden slips of paper, he was finding out that Colombian criminals do not bathe or change socks very often. The young officer recoiled at the odor, and as the smell spread about the space in front of the hanger, all the officers swore and had to step away to catch a breath of fresh air. At this awkward moment Bob received another call on his shoulder radio.

  “We’ve got a problem,” said Terr
y Rhodes on his handheld radio. Bob was not atop the Glen Canyon Dam so did not see the giant fan of water spreading along the height of the dam as a thin crack spread through the tons of gray concrete to the south side. Bob probably did hear some heavy breathing and some odd jingling, the later sound being Terry’s keys rattling in his pocket as he sprinted toward the east side of the failing dam.

  “Come in, Brother Terry,” Bob said into his radio.

  “Oh shit!” Bob heard the pious Mormon engineer exclaim, for the great fan had vanished and in its place was an open ditch that widened and deepened as the mighty dam melted away like a sugar cube in warm tea. Running as fast as he could, Terry thought of the cartoons his children watched on Saturday mornings and had to prevent himself from laughing hysterically as he dashed ahead like the Roadrunner fleeing Wiley E. Coyote while the ground disappeared behind him.

  “I’ll fall and not be hurt,” he thought. “They’re never hurt in cartoons.”

  “You there?” Bob asked.

  *

  Nearly simultaneously with his question there came a brief but intense rumbling in the ground beneath Bob’s feet. He and the other officers standing over the Columbians swayed about like figures on an electronic football field for several seconds. Young Tony fell backwards on his rear end. The ground went still just as quickly as a wave of cool air swept across Page, as though an enormous fan had been waved over the town.

  “What was that?” commented Deputy Allan. “That must’ve been about a billion on the Richard’s Scale!”

  “That was something blowing up,” said Tony, picking himself off the ground.

  The group stood in silent thought for several moments. They stared toward the west, in the direction of the Colorado River. Each of them could guess what it was they had heard and felt and were afraid to say what it was. Only the renewed crackle of Bob’s radio broke the spell of their silence.

  “Yes?” said Bob. “You there, Brother Terry?”

  “I think I am,” Bob and the others heard the engineer say between deep gasps for air.

  *

  For the last twenty yards of his sprint to the east side of the dam, Terry had felt the concrete slipping away beneath his feet. The fat man had leapt forward like a gazelle chased by a lion, freed by terror of his shifting, bouncing flesh. The other men had already evacuated the dam to that side and were stunned by his inspired speed as much as by the dam falling away behind him, as Terry ran as though on fire. Once safe on solid ground, he had fallen on his face and let his friends pull his abundant frame to a point farther from the rampaging Colorado.

  “I think we have a major problem here,” the engineer said into his walkie talkie. “I’m at a loss at what we’re going to do about it, Brother Bob.”

  XLVII

  5/5/09 12:53 Arizona Standard Time

  Deputy Allan took charge of the arrest scene at the airport while Bob Mathers went to the county’s auxiliary jailhouse and made calls to people down river, warning them that the Glen Canyon Dam had been destroyed. Those he contacted on the phone did not accept the news at face value.

  “Who is this really?” asked the Chief Park Ranger at the Grand Canyon when Bob got him on the line.

  “This is Robert Mathers, Deputy Sheriff in Page, Arizona,” said Bob, and gave the ranger his badge and phone numbers. “You can call me back if you don’t trust me.”

  “Is this another one of the fraternity boys at ASU?” asked the ranger. “We’ve had quite enough of you boys at Phi Alpha Phi. Those two guys in the bear suit were only a stupid stunt, son; a couple tourists got scared; nobody got hurt. Impersonating an officer is way over the top. I’m warning you, junior, you waste any more of my time, and I’m calling the university president. You hear me?”

  The ranger made some clanking noises on his desk top to pretend he was turning on some sort of recording equipment. “I’m getting this on tape,” he warned Bob.

  “Junior?” said Bob. “I’m telling you the Colorado River is going to wipe out anybody you’ve got on the canyon floor, and you’re calling me names?”

  “That’s good,” said the Chief Ranger. “You’ve almost got the Hicksville Deputy Dawg routine down pat, except for the accent. Too bad you sound like you could be

  from the coast, a surfer dude or something instead of a good ol’ boy.”

  “I’m going to come down there and good ol’ boy your ass!” swore Bob and slammed the phone into its cradle.

  “College boys,” said the ranger as he hung up. “You think they’d be getting smarter one of these days.”

  *

  Bob’s call to the Civil Defense Commander in Las Vegas was more successful. Apparently, the TV and radio were full of news about other attacks on dams upriver from Arizona, and in Las Vegas they were ready to believe anything extraordinary. The Commander alerted communities below Las Vegas, setting Bob free to go to the dam site and see the physical damage first-hand.

  At twenty-two past one he reached the edge of the canyon on Highway 89. He did not drive to the point the road sloped toward the bridge, as traffic had backed up and he could proceed only on foot for the last two hundred meters of asphalt. The truckers and recreational drivers parked in front of him were looking at each other in disbelief, few of them dared to speak and when they did they whispered questions like, “Did you see it?” and, “Where did the water come from?”

  The air around Bob felt oddly cool, as if he were walking toward the ocean in the face of an evening breeze. There was a constant noise above the parked cars that sounded like a train that never got completely past. He did not recognize the river water when he saw it; at first sight he thought that he was seeing ground on the far side sticking above the lip of the canyon, until the ground moved and he realized he was seeing the crest of the Colorado rising at mid-stream several feet above the canyon walls.

  Looking north, he saw mud flats and small ponds forming on the flanks of Lake Powell where the standing water had been most shallow. Hundreds of white houseboats and pleasure craft that had been sailing on the flat water were left stranded on the ground that had emerged from beneath their keels. An unlucky few boats had been hovering over the old channel of the river and had been sucked into the wide gap in the dam to their destruction.

  One such doomed craft, an awkward double-decker houseboat that had never before made more than thirty miles an hour, came rolling down the river while Bob was standing on the crowded highway watching the disaster unfold. He saw someone pounding on the inside of one of the boat’s upstairs windows and could, for a split second, see the image of an old woman calling out for help as she and her craft hurried along to their doom miles downriver, to be dashed against the canyon walls.

  An ambulance and its EMTs stood idle on the road with Bob. The medical personnel could only wait until the water receded before they started collecting bodies.

  Confronted by several hundred feet of rushing brown water and the dying reservoir the Colorado was leaving behind it, Bob saw nothing he could do either, so he returned to the airport to assist his fellow deputies.

  “Was anybody hurt?” Deputy Allan asked him.

  “A lot worse than hurt,” said Bob. “I guess we can get some small boats and maybe some rubber rafts and get people out from what’s left of the lake. Beyond that, I think we’re going to have to do the best we can and hope God forgives us.”

  “Larry found a piece of paper in one of these assholes’ shoes,” said Allan, showing Bob the page. “This make any sense to you? They’re just numbers.”

  “Those are map co-ordinates,” said Bob after glancing at the three numerical sets. “Latitude and longitude. The double dashes are for minutes, the singles mean seconds. This one at the top would be here in Page.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” said Allan. “Say, we’ve got FBI flying in. The radio says six copters full of agents will be here before sundown. A couple jets straight from DC will be here in a couple hours. This’ll be out of our hands then,” he added with obv
ious relief.

  “They will want to be in charge,” agreed Bob. “Has anyone of the men said anything about Wayland Zah?”

  “Christ, forget about that Indian,” said Allan. “We got other things on our plate. Besides, these old boys speak Mexican. God only knows what they’re saying about anything.”

  XLVIII

  5/5/09 12:48 Arizona Standard Time

  Marcus Bell had kayaked the Amazon from the Peruvian highlands to Belem on the Atlantic Ocean. In 1996 he had taken part in a successful assault on K2, the second highest mountain in the world. His sunburnt face and long blond locks had twice been on the cover of Outside magazine. Nearly every woman who took his wilderness survival course each September and March in Maui thrilled at the obvious power of his barrel chest and the confident virility of his bounding stride.

  At 12:48 that sunny afternoon Marcus had just taken his party of day tourists through some class two rapids in the Marble Canyon of the Colorado, one mile north of the boundary line of Grand Canyon National Park. He climbed atop a boulder and looked down upon the exhausted members of his party as they lay sprawled on the beach and moaned. Marcus took off his shirt so the two rather attractive college girls from Philadelphia in the party could see his taut pectoral muscles, which he took care to flex for several seconds before he spoke to the weaklings in his care.

  “That wasn’t much,” he laughed. “We’ll be seeing some water that makes a class two look like...” He had to pause to think of a word. “Like not much,” he decided. “You will really have to work in a class four.”

  “Can I have a Coke from the cooler?” asked a sweaty, plump lady from Ohio.

  “There is nothing worse for your digestive system than a cold soda,” opined Marcus, and slapped his washboard abdomen to show he knew about fitness. “A cola will have close to three hundred useless calories produced by refined sugar derived from corn syrup.”