by Behn, Noel;
“To make the system operative you set the timing mechanism on the inside. At the specified time the device turns on the generators, then it opens the outtake gates and closes the intake gates. This fills the tunnel with water. At a later moment the device shuts the intake gates and opens the outtake gates. This drains the tunnel of water. The device then shuts down the generator.
“That’s how it’s now programmed. The original intention of the device’s design was to use the natural watershed from the hills for flooding the tunnel … with an exception. A wire may have been connected to one of the small water gates in the side of the reservoir. But I believe some last-minute adjustments were attempted.”
Thurston turned the instrument and tapped its end. “If you look inside you’ll see the timing mechanism is scratched and dented, as if someone clumsy, or in a very big hurry, was trying to turn it off or alter it.” He displayed the other end of the device, indicated a large connecting screw. “This was probably the pole for the sluice gates at the reservoir. One of the small gates in the reservoir’s eastern wall. A decision to open other reservoir gates seems to have been made on the spur of the moment. The line attached to this pole was most likely disconnected and brought over here.” Thurston walked to the other edge of the dock, indicated a group of cables running along the tunnel wall. “These lead to every reservoir sluice gate, those in the wall as well as the two in the basin floor. The other ends of the cable have been attached directly to the second generator and its four support engines. The splicing and taping here is sloppier than with any of the other connections. It’s likely a second person did this work. Someone who was racing the clock. One way or another, the hookup was completed by eight Friday night and tested out right away. We estimate it took another four hours of adjustment before they got the gates to open. Three gates in all … one in the reservoir wall, two on the basin floor.”
“Got the bottom gates to open,” Safra emphasized. “Dismiss the side gate and it’s a trickle. Bottom gates opened! Discharged twice as much water as the system was capable of containing. Demolished whole sections of the tunnel network. Sent tens of millions of gallons of water west for the mud instead of going into Prairie Port’s sewers and then out into the Mississippi River.” Safra reached over and patted the time device Thurston was holding. “All because of this little hell box. Our good Mister Thurston omitted mentioning that no one shut this hell box off until we came along late last night.”
“The box went on operating?” Jessup asked.
Thurston nodded. “It didn’t start the initial flooding on Friday night, but it activated shortly after and shut down the generators. It didn’t matter that the device wasn’t directly connected to the reservoir gates. Those gates were tied in to the second generator, and the device controlled that generator along with the other. The reservoir gates were hydraulicized. Once the power to them was cut off, they automatically closed. It was holding them open which caused the power drains and blackouts. Opening them under that much water was like tilting up one end of a New York City skyscraper.”
“… You said the initial flooding took place on Friday night,” Jez said. “Which Friday night?”
“Last Friday, August twentieth … the night of your robbery.”
“We haven’t established when, precisely, over the weekend, the perpetration occurred,” revealed Jez.
Safra put in, “No robbery, I can assure you, could have happened in the cave under the bank after the first flooding occurred on Friday. The area was totally inundated.”
Jez asked, “Do you have some idea when on Friday night the robbers would have had to leave the cave or be inundated?”
“Eleven-forty-five,” Thurston answered.
“Not eleven sharp or one A.M. Saturday?” pressed Jez. “Not maybe ten-fifty or midnight?”
“No, sir,” Thurston said. “Our monitoring equipment recorded three specific incidents of power dips other than the ones that began in the middle of last week. Those earlier dips bear the characteristics set when the first generator is operative. The three dips I’m referring to, the later dips, are identical to the characteristics made when the second generator is operative.
“The first of those three dips came at eight P.M. Friday and was brief. This, we now know, indicates the second generator was activated and immediately turned off. Activated and turned off, I assume, as a test to see if the equipment would function. Twelve minutes later, at eight-twelve P.M., the first blackout occurred in the Prairie Port area … a result of the second generator being activated again and given a trial run of perhaps fifteen minutes.
“The dips disappeared until eleven forty-five P.M. Then the largest dip of all was registered. I have little doubt that’s when the gates opened in the reservoir. When both generators and all six engines were operative. When eighteen million gallons of water came through.”
Yates looked to Safra. “Why would Prairie Port’s Department of Sewerage show no record of excessive water in its system until late Saturday afternoon and early Sunday morning?”
Thurston answered for Safra. “The second electric dip at eight-twelve Friday was sharp enough to put their monitoring equipment out of commission. Theirs and the Water Department’s. We have special instruments for just such an incident. Their measuring equipment was affected the way a digital clock is affected when power is shut off and then restored. It blinks on and off repeating the time of the disruption. This happened to the display sign on the Prairie Farmer Building. The Prairie Farmer outdoor timeboard kept repeating eight-twelve P.M. that night until it shorted out. It seems,” Thurston said not unkindly to Yates and Jessup, “that your robbers presented a calling card of their intentions for all of Prairie Port to see … the flashing eight-twelve on top of the Prairie Farmer Building on Friday night.”
Safra spoke up. “If what the newspapers say is so, and the thieves escaped by boating through the tunnels, which is the only practical way they could leave, it might be that they wanted to catch the Treachery. The Treachery is the curious midstream current flowing in the river along Prairie Port and below. It’s a fascination for us hydrologists. The Treachery comes and goes for no apparent scientific reason, but on a very projectable schedule. We thought it might have something to do with the inland flooding and mud so we got that schedule. The Treachery would have been strong until one A.M. Saturday, August twenty-first, until an hour and a quarter after the first and major flooding by eighteen million gallons of water. If the thieves had gone through the tunnels under Prairie Port and gotten out into the river and onto the Treachery by one A.M. they would have been carried forty miles downstream faster than by car. If they reached the river after one, motors or paddles would have been needed. The Treachery disappears promptly at one A.M. Saturday, August twenty-first … does not start up again for another seventy-six days.”
Jessup stood mute.
“Those later floodings,” Yates asked, “the ones after Friday night, August twentieth, did they occur at regular intervals?”
“Precisely at ten twenty-two, as the timing device prescribed,” Thurston answered. “As I mentioned, the device’s inner mechanism seems to have been tampered with, but it was set for ten twenty-two. Neither A.M. nor P.M. was stipulated. There was a second tunnel flood at ten twenty-two Saturday night, August twenty-first. Twelve hours later, at ten twenty-two Sunday morning, there was a third. They were even larger and longer than the first flood. Between them, they spilled another forty million gallons of water into the tunnels. The electricity the generators required for the Saturday and Sunday flooding caused the severest power dips and blackouts … each at ten twenty-two, A.M. or P.M., as the case might be. After the Sunday morning flood the timing device shifted to a twenty-four-hour cycle and far shorter operative periods. Floods were recorded at ten twenty-two A.M. Monday and ten twenty-two A.M. Tuesday. The accompanying power dips were less extreme. We estimate seven million gallons were discharged from the reservoir at each instant. Overall, in the five-day
period from Friday until we disconnected the device late last night, Tuesday, a total of sixty-two million gallons of water was released into the tunnels … the first half of which flowed right through the Prairie Port sewer system and on out into the Mississippi River … the second half of which was diverted inland, west to the mud.”
Jez took the timing device from Thurston, turned it over, studied the maze of wires and cables. “What sort of person would have the skills to build this … to manage the other electrical and mechanical work? To make fuses and read old charts and rewire and splice into high-voltage lines and get antique generators going?”
Thurston shook his head. “No one I’ve come across in thirty years with Missouri Power and Electric. Maybe one of those Ph.D.s at the university or up at the aerospace labs could have. They’re pretty strong in the wizard department. As I said before, there was wizardry at work down here.”
St. Ives’s motorboat led the way through the opening water gates of the partially flooded tunnel. Beyond the gates St. Ives throttled up, trained his twin flood beams on the bending blackness ahead. Thurston rode with St. Ives. Yates and Jessup followed in the boat operated by Safra.
“How did you know about the Sewerage Department report?” Jez yelled to Yates over the motor roar.
“Remember I used to know everything?” Yates called back.
“Cut the crap.”
“I’m inquisitive. I read every report coming into the office that I can … including the one from the Sewerage Department.”
St. Ives shouted, trained his search beams on the line of large round holes in the wall to their right. Safra explained these were the mouths of the drainage pipes leading down from the hills above, intake pipes the timing device had opened and closed.
St. Ives, with another holler, turned his search beams straight up in the tunnel. On the ceiling far above was silt and mud … residue, Safra explained, from the highwater mark of the rampaging floodings.
The first stop, five miles from where they began under Warbonnet Ridge, was at the platform leading into the passageway that brought them out into the cave beneath the Mormon State National Bank, where a special team of FBI lab technicians was at work chipping away the caked mud that encrusted every surface.
Seven and a half miles farther downtunnel, St. Ives and Safra cut the motors, let their boats drift into an array of flares and electric lights. Yates and Jez saw scores of frogmen working in the shallow water, piling up sandbags and reenforcing walls of what seemed a wide, high cathedral-like structure.
This, St. Ives told them, was the bypass terminal beneath Lookout Bluff, a subterranean diversion point leading into Prairie Port’s sewerage system immediately south and connecting to the spur tunnel running due west … the very spur tunnel built thirty-four years ago to drain out the caves and crevices beneath the western sectors of Prairie Port and which had remained sealed until the recent flood smashed it open.
“It will stay open a good while now,” Safra predicted. “Draining it out will take years.”
Yates asked, “What are the divers doing?”
“Buttressing for the backlash,” Safra told him. “We’ll be trying to tap the underground mud crown west of the city within the hour. Drilling down into the mud dome and easing the pressure before it erupts. If it erupts before we drill, or if we misdrill and cause it to erupt, a river of mud could be coming in this direction. They’re preparing for the river.”
The boats putted across the bypass terminal, entered the city’s sewerage tubes.
“This is where your robbers went.” Safra was emphatic as he pointed ahead. “They rode the crest of the water through here and then on to the sewers ahead.”
“Why couldn’t they have gone west, into the spur tunnel?” Yates asked.
“There wasn’t enough room to get through on Friday night,” Safra said. “It wasn’t until later, until the water began backing up in the spur tunnel and collapsing the walls, that there was enough room. Even so, area and velocity was with the sewage tubes. They acted like vacuums by then, sucked everything through with tremendous force … sucked tile right off the ceiling.”
Safra’s flash beam swung up to the ceiling. Tile chip after tile chip was missing.
The motorboats came out onto the Mississippi River at the far southern end of Prairie Port … came out 21.6 miles downstream from Mormon State National Bank. A helicopter was waiting …
TEN
Teddy Anglaterra, ever since washing up dead on South Beach on Monday night, had been bureaucracy’s child. South Beach was a county beach even though it fell within the city limits of Prairie Port. When Teddy’s body, mistakenly thought to be alive, was picked up by the River Patrol ambulance, it should have been taken, dead or alive, to University Hospital, a county facility. Instead Teddy had arrived at Missouri Presbyterian Hospital, which was private. Had Presbyterian admitted Teddy and made out his death certificate, copies would have been sent to the appropriate city, county and state authorities. Since he had obviously been murdered, a state inquest would have been mandatory. Had the inquest decided further investigation was required, the matter would have fallen to the state police. Presbyterian Hospital, however, had refused to accept Teddy and ordered he be shipped to city morgue. And he was, in one of Presbyterian’s own ambulances rather than in the River Patrol vehicle which had brought the body over originally.
City morgue was situated in the basement of University Hospital. The two facilities, while having direct access to one another, had separate entrances and receiving docks. Had Presbyterian’s ambulance brought the body directly into city morgue, Teddy would have become exclusively a city case and the Prairie Port PD would have been notified. The ambulance, as was not unusual, delivered him into the main emergency room of University Hospital, which once again made Teddy a county ward. Seeing that the ambulance belonged to Presbyterian, the administrative nurse classified Teddy as “a Missouri Presbyterian Hospital patient-on-exchange, deceased” and made out the appropriate admittance papers but nothing else … no mandatory “suspected murder notification,” no “unidentified person report.” The nurse assumed, erroneously, that Presbyterian Hospital had followed correct procedure and notified all city, county and state agencies of the unknown murder victim.
Rather than perform an autopsy on an unidentified body, as it had the authority to do, University farmed the task out to city morgue, which more and more had begun to handle county cases such as this. The city medical examiner, rather than bring Teddy down into the basement morgue, took him up to the second-floor operating area in the hospital wing housing the state university medical school, where he performed the autopsy in front of a group of forensic students. Because it did not occur on its own premises, the morgue did not list the event on its daily log of autopsies … a log made available to law-enforcement agencies on request. The med school kept no records whatsoever on such educational procedures.
The medical examiner put a copy of Teddy’s autopsy report in his own file in the basement and sent the original upstairs to the County Medical and Health Administration on the third floor of the building. Adhering to correct procedure, the M.E. notified no one else of the incident. A clerk in County Med and Health, assuming Presbyterian Hospital would make the necessary follow-up contacts on what was listed as Presbyterian’s patient, did absolutely nothing except file the report in its own record room and send Presbyterian a brief teletype resume of the M.E.’s findings. Presbyterian had no record of the unidentified person referred to in the teletype and disposed of the communication.
Teddy, through it all, remained in a refrigerated locker on the second-floor hospital wing occupied by the state med school. Statistically he was a nonentity, had not been included on any city or county or state official tabulation of unidentified persons or murder victims—or even as a death, for that matter. The state police had put out a five-state make for Tedddy’s fingerprints with instructions to contact city morgue if information was available, but that was the
extent of it. This sort of macabre snafu in accounting for dead bodies had occurred before in Prairie Port. Occasionally an incident was publicized, but with little outcry ensuing.
At 11:50 A.M. Wednesday, as Jessup, St. Ives and Safra helicoptered west toward the mud fields and Thurston drove Billy Yates into downtown Prairie Port, Teddy’s body was identified in the med school’s cadaver room by a short, muscular young man in a tight black T-shirt and sharply creased chinos who produced verification he was the decedent’s nephew, Fred C. Anglaterra, of Sparta, Illinois. Fred, whose well-coifed hair was parted in the middle, volunteered no information as to how Teddy might have ended up in Prairie Port, nor was he asked. He merely filled out a med school release form stating he intended to take Teddy back home to Sparta for burial and that he had a hearse waiting outside. The med school had to summon its dean, who in turn signed a form releasing Teddy to the authority that in this instance held jurisdiction over the state and med school. Then the medical examiner made out his own forms that released Teddy to the agency that held sway over the morgue under these circumstances: the County Medical and Health department three floors above in University Hospital.
… Jessup, Safra and St. Ives watched the spinning bits lower, one by one, from a line of derricks set along a field not far from Laggerette Hunt and Ride Club, saw them chew into the ground and spin straight down, spin deeper, spin from earshot. For a long time silence held. Then a tremor was felt. Hissing echoed. Hissing from all sides of the field. The land quaked and rumbled. Mud geysered up from under the second derrick, spouted twenty feet into the air. The third and first and fourth derricks followed suit, erupted into towers of gushing mud. The pressure deep beneath the surface had been tapped, the incipient mud volcano neutralized.