by M M Buckner
Boom
Saturday, March 19
10:34 PM
The sky was pitch-dark when the Pilgrim and Chausseur reached the Bonnet Carré Spillway. They anchored just downstream of the concrete weir and prepared for the colloid’s approach. But the green slick dawdled upstream, leaching more cargoes. Almost within sight of the spillway weir, it covered the Mississippi like radiant silver foil, and in the last hour, it had riddled half a dozen more barge hulls.
Spectators lined both banks with flashlights and flare guns. Sightseeing aircraft spiraled overhead casting spotlights. FOX was running live coverage. Roman’s mouth tasted like sand. He felt disaster building. Why had he ever imagined he could keep this quiet?
On the Pilgrim’s prow, a northerly breeze whipped a line against an aerial, setting up a steady ping ping ping. Gulls banked under the weir’s sodium lights, dropping guano. The river smelled alive. Its swollen current spurted between the tight wooden weir pins with a noise like raining gravel.
Roman stood at the rail and counted the pins. He had organized materials for a temporary catch dam inside the spillway, and his workers were already rushing to erect it. Trucks, barges, and helicopters were converging with supplies. He’d maxxed out his last line of credit. And he had still not received permission to open the Bonnet Carré weir. He counted another bay of wooden pins. The number in each bay was always the same. No variance.
Seated at Roman’s feet, CJ ignored the light rain that pooled around her on the cold steel deck. Roman’s red windbreaker flapped around her shoulders. Soggy and goosefleshed, she hugged her knees and watched a cormorant diving for fish in the cone of sodium light. A sharp thin bird, the cormorant was all angles and points, evil-looking, she thought.
Roman had approved her plan—maybe he was desperate. In any case, he’d ordered the gear she needed. As soon as the equipment arrived, she would go into action. She intended to lure the colloid through the weir using Max’s music. She would play it correctly this time, in the right order. She would collect a viable sample, then neutralize the rest before it did any more harm. For you, Max. She watched the cormorant dive.
Roman watched the sky glowing upriver. He could almost hear the colloid hum. He’d ordered Vaarveen to keep station at the slick’s leading edge and take readings. Vaarveen’s latest sample showed the colloid had transmuted to a radically new form.
Hovering somewhere between liquid and ice, it had evolved into a “meta-material,” a substance so complex, it could create otherwise impossible material effects, like negative light refraction. Its computer chips, microbes, plant sugar, Freon, and sundry suspended particles had blended so thoroughly, they were no longer recognizable as separate components. And its volume of dissolved iron had increased by an ungodly factor.
Roman raked his long hair with his fingers and watched Reilly scowl at the sea birds. Reilly claimed the colloid used iron to move. She said its neural net steered the magnetic solution by rhythmically altering its EM field. Maybe that’s how the picaro anchored against barges. How else could it resist the river’s plunging force?
He studied Reilly’s milk-white face. Behind those Anglo eyes clicked an astonishing intelligence. He counted the streaks of dirt on her bare knees. She was scary smart. But so was the colloid.
A horn boomed through the fluttering wind, and Roman turned to face the brightly lit Boston Whaler ripping across the black water toward them. On its superstructure glistened the red-and-white castle logo of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And on its bridge stood the one man Roman most wanted to meet. Joshua Lima, the New Orleans district engineer. They’d conferred by phone and e-mail, but Roman needed direct contact to make his argument stick. One word from Colonel Lima in the appropriate ears would open the Bonnet Carré Spillway.
Roman touched CJ’s shoulder, and their eyes met. “At all cost, we have to stop it here.”
Water hissed through the wooden pins. She choked back a taste of cold metal, like a gun pressing the roof of her mouth. “Let’s do it.”
Rise
Sunday, March 20
6:03 AM
The vernal equinox dawned clear and sharp over southern Louisiana. Light westerly breezes. Temperatures in the sixties. A good day to skip Mass and go sightseeing. That notion must have flowed like a cloud of memes through St. Charles Parish, because men, women, and children arrived in droves at the Bonnet Carré Spillway, with fishing tackle, picnics, and roving eyes.
From the top of the weir, Ranger Robert Dréclare commanded a panoramic view of his eight thousand acres. He could see the small blue stream winding toward the bright sparkle of Lake Pontchartrain on the far horizon, six miles away. He tipped the brim of his park ranger hat lower over his eyes and sauntered along the catwalk, surveying the lines of traffic on the access roads. Colonel Lima had ordered him to evacuate the spillway ASAP, and how was he supposed to do that? He had himself, his maintenance supervisor, and three borrowed sheriff’s deputies to turn away a crowd of thousands. A crowd that clearly did not want to leave. Everyone wanted to see the Big Show. The Corps of Engineers was going to open the Bonnet Carré Spillway.
Half a mile down the spillway, Dréclare could see the crescent wall of sandbags they’d been building since the previous midnight. Three Corps helicopters were still busy hauling cargo nets full of sandbags from the New Orleans stockpile. The semicircular dam looked small from this distance, but still a miracle of speed and coordinated effort.
The ground crew hustled around with trucks and cranes, reinforcing the wall on one side with interlocking blue gates and on the other with big yellow water-filled bags. Dréclare patted a trickle of sweat from the back of his neck. Mighty imposing edifice just to catch a refrigerant slick. He’d worked with engineers his whole career, and he’d never seen such structural overkill.
Dréclare adjusted his gear belt lower over his hips. This was the looniest mixed-up project he’d ever heard of. Corps staffers designed the dam, a Coast Guard captain ran logistics, and a private corporate muckety-muck hired the ground crew. Mr. Roman Sacony. One hell of a big wheel. Dréclare tugged at his damp collar. On the Mississippi River, anything was possible.
He focused his binoculars on the crowds. Already, picnickers lined both guide levees. They’d brought blankets and lawn chairs. A Channel 17 news truck had driven axle-deep into the mud, and a bunch of boys with a pickup and a come-along were trying to pull it out. Dréclare could hear the winch’s laboring whine.
Across the stream, fishermen honked horns at the boat ramp because Deputy Hernandez would not let them launch. Farther down, men and boys were sliding sideways through the bogs on their four-wheeler ATVs, standing up in the saddle and turning doughnuts, which they were not supposed to do. Deputy Corman was chasing them. Crazy private airplanes buzzed the fields, and helicopters circled overhead. Out in the marsh, photographers were setting up tripods.
Of course the river wasn’t high enough to make a real show. It wouldn’t be like 1997, when the Mississippi rose eight feet above floodstage and surged fast enough to fill the New Orleans Superdome every second. Enough water poured through the spillway that time to fill Lake Pontchartrain twice over. Dréclare would never forget how it blasted down the slope, tearing up trees and boulders. Compared to that, today would be a mild performance, especially after they plugged the weir with barges.
Peculiar idea somebody had about that, Dréclare mused. After the toxic slick washed through, the powers-that-be planned to broach two rusty old derelict barges against the open bays to stop the flow through the weir. They expected to separate the slick from the river like a raw egg yoke from the white. Dréclare grunted. At a higher river stage, that stratagem would be plain foolery because the massive force of the water against the barges would crack his concrete bays to splinters. As it was, he expected serious damage. He worked his mouth and spat.
Just below him inside the weir, loud water foamed through the wooden pins and rumbled into the stream where CJ was loading an aluminum a
irboat with gear. She hardly noticed Dréclare’s stocky figure watching from the catwalk, and she would not have cared what he thought about her plan. As she hurried up the spongy bank to Roman’s rented Jeep, anxiety made her nerves twitch.
A petite blue bird alighted on the Jeep’s fender. She didn’t recognize it as an endangered Cerulean Warbler, but its beauty made her pause and stare. Warily, it tilted its head and scrutinized her. Then it flitted to the stream’s edge for a drink.
She swatted a loose curl and hurriedly stripped off her long pants. Underneath, her khaki shorts were wrinkled and muddy, and the breeze cooled her bare legs. As she mentally reviewed her tasks, the humble stream glittered past her, unobtrusively irrigating the marsh so a tiny songbird could pause for a meal on its long journey from Venezuela to Quebec.
CJ sprinted up the muddy bank for another load of gear. The airboat belonged to the St. Charles Parish sheriff’s patrol. Roman had procured it for her use, along with Martin, the taciturn young pilot. Martin helped her remove the back seat to make room for her equipment. Thickset and broad-faced, Martin rarely made eye contact. As she passed him on the bank, he kept his head down.
Rapidly, she went though her gear. Wireless laptop, EM sensor, infrared optics. Roman had been generous. She’d also ransacked Peter’s workstation on the Chausseur and gathered everything that might be of use. Peter was still upstream, monitoring the colloid. The fickle platinum-green slick had settled to the river bottom again, heavy with sugar and dissolved metals. And it was creeping downriver. She had to hustle.
In the aluminum airboat, CJ propped her laptop on the dashboard and reviewed her data. Sun glinted across the screen. The Lubell speakers were still waiting in the Jeep, along with Max’s disks. Every thought of Max stung her afresh—and strengthened her resolve to stop the colloid.
She peered at the distant sandbag dam, reinforced with the same blue gates and yellow bags Roman had used before. Creque and Spicer had hauled their vacuum gear into the marsh on a flatbed truck. She could see them setting up the pumps to collect her sample. The plan was to lash the Lubells outside the weir so they could broadcast Max’s music through the river and draw the colloid toward the weir. Roman had rented more Lubells to place close to the sandbag dam, and all the speakers would have to be wired together to play the music in unison. CJ looked at her watch on one wrist, her Ranger Joe compass on the other. Then she stripped off the red windbreaker and tied it around her waist. She was sweating.
The noisy little stream jostled her boat, and she glanced up at the frothy water gushing between the pins. When the weir was fully opened, that froth would swell into a crashing cascade. She paused and scratched her nose. How was she supposed to send coherent sound waves through that?
The water sang like cymbals. She closed her laptop and listened to its charging force, and her mind traveled back to a course in fluid dynamics at MIT. She thought about liquid turbulence and advection, slip boundaries, stretching, folding, and chaotic flow. The water echoed her thoughts with ringing high notes and subsonic thuds.
Distortion. The Queen Bitch’s warning. That noisy chaos would blow her music lesson to bits.
CJ bolted from the airboat and waded into the water. At the base of the weir, mist fanned through sunlight and shimmered with the ghost of a rainbow. She felt the current swirling between her legs, tugging her off balance. Distortion. So simple. How could she have missed it?
She cupped handfuls of rushing water. The colloid hadn’t responded to her call in the river because he didn’t hear it. Turbulence had shredded her music to gibberish. The lagoon had been contained, quiet, small. Sound waves propagated clearly there. She watched the froth spurt through the weir. She couldn’t duplicate those quiet conditions here.
She slogged to the bank and fell on her hands and knees. The catch dam, the equipment, all this effort—she felt like a brainless clod. Her plan was useless.
Ideas pinged through her cortex. She absolutely had to lure the colloid through this weir, but how? Not with food. The river already supplied a moving feast. No, the bait had to be intelligent contact, she felt certain about that. Language. Music. Rich content. But what kind of information would travel through fast-moving water without distortion? “Harry, tell me what to do.”
A second later, she whipped open her phone and called Elaine Guidry. “Where’s Yue? Which hospital? I need her number.”
Bluster
Sunday, March 20
7:22 AM
In the early 1930s when the Bonnet Carré weir was built, the Corps invented a new kind of concrete to withstand pressures up to five thousand pounds per square inch, a remarkable feat for that time. And yet, decades later on a clear Sunday morning in March, when the crane began lifting out the wooden pins and the swollen river began to pound through the bays, Roman could feel the weir vibrate underfoot.
He stood on the catwalk beside Joshua Lima, the New Orleans district engineer, a robust caramel-skinned man with black eyes, high forehead, and noble black eyebrows. His features hinted almost pure Spanish descent. They could have been brothers, they looked so much alike. When they first met, Roman had hailed him in their native language.
“Buenas noches, hermano. Por fin encontramos.”
But Lima answered in a resonant Louisiana drawl. “I don’t speak Mexican. We talk American here.”
Roman wanted to roar—Mexico is American. But he held his tongue, because it was Lima who convinced the Mississippi River Commission to open the weir.
“You caused one hell of a traffic jam,” Lima blustered. “Man, we got a hundred and fifteen ocean freighters moving through here this week alone, with a quarter million tons of cargo bound for the Port of New Orleans. We don’t need traffic jams.”
Roman tried to smile.
Lima moved like a professional boxer. As he strode along the catwalk, knees flexed, hands clenched at his sides, he appraised the work in progress with a shrewd eye and made one or two astute suggestions. Roman grudgingly acknowledged his competence. Of all the senior officials, only Lima had actually read the science team’s data.
Normally, lifting seven thousand pins and securing each one so it wouldn’t float away required a minimum of thirty-six hours. But once Lima read the reports, he knew they didn’t have thirty-six hours. So his crane operator was tossing the pins, sacrificing them to the water. As each heavy timber splashed into the brown current, Roman compulsively tallied another sum.
The FOX helicopter swooped overhead, and Roman spotted the newshound with the copper hair. Hal Butler, that was his name. Crammed in next to Butler and the pilot, half a dozen wide-eyed passengers pressed against the windows for a view. The helicopter buzzed low, scaring away gulls, and Butler pointed his camera like a gun.
“I hear that reporter is selling rides to tourists.” Lima’s black eyebrows rippled. “He’s charging a thousand bucks for a ten-minute flight.”
Roman breathed heavily through his nose. As he studied the swelling crowd, he mentally cursed the madman who had leaked word about their Bonnet Carré plan. He sensed that his most horrendous nightmare was about to come true.
“The bozo’s gonna kill somebody. Ought to have his license pulled.” Lima spat in the water. “Bleepin’ FAA still won’t issue a flyover ban.”
The two Hispanic men stood together, fuming at the chopper. Bumper-to-bumper traffic lined both access roads, and people were pouring out of the vehicles, pushing over the barricades of yellow sawhorses and orange tape. Roman had feared the residents would panic, but this was worse. This crowd was turning out for carnaval. No one wanted to miss the once-in-a-decade opening of the Bonnet Carré.
“Lookee there.” Lima pointed to a troop of middle-aged environmentalists who stood knee-deep at the stream’s edge with a big white banner: SAVE OUR WETLANDS. Ranger Dréclare was wading through the shallows in his Smoky-the-Bear hat to talk to their leader.
Roman’s nostrils curled. “Ecologistas.”
Lima hawked and spat. “Forest fair
ies.”
Roman reached for his binoculars again—and found the gas mask draped around his neck. Gracia de Dios, he thought. None of these people had gas masks. They were at the colloid’s mercy. He fingered his mask. After a moment, he slid the strap through his long hair, took off the mask, and tossed it into the spillway stream. For several seconds, the mask floated on the surface. Roman looked away.
People flowed across the grounds unchecked. Teenagers clumped in nuclear groups, while small children buzzed around like stray electrons. As yet, only a few hundred pins had been pulled from the weir, and already the brown stream was rising out of its banks. Soon it would blast down the marsh in a four-hundred-foot-wide surge.
Lima shook his head. “This is worse than a coonass turkey fry.”
Roman had no idea what that meant, but he nodded. Then they heard gunshots.
“Jesucristo.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
They spun in unison to see a fat blond man firing a deer rifle at the environmentalists’ white banner. His bullets ripped holes in the vinyl letters and passed through to the grassy bank, where spectators shrieked and scattered. A woman screamed. Roman saw her sprawled in the grass. “Madre de Dios!” He voice-activated his ear loop and called an ambulance.
Lima punched his short-wave radio. “Dréclare, arrest that fool.”
While Ranger Dréclare and Deputy Dac Kien chased the lumbering rifleman on foot, Roman called Dan Meir, who was overseeing the sandbag dam. “I want two dozen workers reassigned for crowd control. Get them here fast.”
There hadn’t been time to call up the National Guard, so Captain Ebbs assigned his Coast Guard crew to shore duty, and Roman bussed in a gang of roughnecks from a nearby oil field. Meanwhile, Rory Godchaux rounded up every Quimicron employee he could find. Together, their ad hoc battalion totaled less than a hundred. Meir said they’d installed new hinges on the blue gates, and they were just starting to pump water into the yellow NovaDam bags.