The Zarrabian Incident

by C. A. James

  “Wow,” said Bashir. “This is a lot to take in, but it makes sense.”

  McCaig turned to Bashir. “So you’re in?”

  “I’m still here,” said Bashir.

  “You realize you’re making a big mistake, right?” asked McCaig.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “You’re jeopardizing your career, Agent Bashir. Strictly speaking, you’re breaking the law. You should have Zarrabian in handcuffs, and maybe me too. Do you understand this?”

  “Didn’t we just figure out this is a big conspiracy? That Smith is one of the bad guys?”

  “Yeah, but think carefully what you’re doing. What happens if the bad guys win?”

  “I end up in prison if I’m lucky, or dead if I’m not,” said Bashir.

  “Exactly. I’ll keep you company. But you have to be sure this is what you want to do, because you can’t turn back.”

  “Christ, McCaig,” said Christine, “which side are you on? Now you’re trying to convince him to arrest you?”

  “It’s OK, Ms. Garrett,” said Bashir. “I swore an oath to defend the Constitution. Not Smith, not the director, and not the president. The Constitution. So thanks, boss, but I’m in.”

  McCaig nodded.

  “Colonel Zarrabian, there is one more thing,” said Bashir. “My official inquiry about your family was blocked by my superiors. But there was nothing to stop me or any citizen from doing research on my own time. Your wife and daughter are alive and well.”

  Zarrabian looked at Bashir for a moment, then at the floor. He finally cleared his throat and looked back up. “Thank you, Mr. Bashir.”

  Bashir hesitated for a moment, then continued. “I tried many things, but finally found information about your wife by hacking into the medical database of a hospital in Tehran. She spent several days in there.”

  Zarrabian looked up in alarm. “In a hospital? What was wrong?”

  “She is very healthy, Colonel. And your newborn son is doing well too.”

  Zarrabian’s eyes blinked for a moment, then he took a deep breath and exhaled. “This is, well, thank you, Agent Bashir. Thank you.”

  After a few more moments of respectful silence, Saylor sat up and slid Marina carefully from her lap to the couch. “OK, let’s get back to work. And McCaig, no more of your BS about plausible deniability. We’re way past that, and I’m putting myself in charge of research. Got it?”

  “Uh, sure,” said McCaig.

  “Research is what I do, and I’m good at it. Agent Bashir?”

  “Please, call me Omar.”

  “OK, Omar.” She gestured at the computers. “I’m guessing you’re pretty good at this too. The rest of you, your jobs are to answer questions, and answer them well. Got it?”

  Saylor glared around the room with the authority of a librarian in her element. They nodded. Omar sat at one of the computers behind Saylor and opened a web browser.

  Saylor continued, “You spent what, two hours researching already? What did you find?”

  “There are 75,000 dams in the United States,” said Christine. “We’re pretty sure the next group of terrorists is going to blow one of them up and cause a devastating flood.”

  “And why do you think that?” asked Saylor.

  Christine nodded to Zarrabian.

  “The name of the operation was ‘Noah’s Revenge,’” said Zarrabian. “And the team included a mining engineer and a demolition expert. Both of these men are experts with explosives.”

  “And so your theory is that ‘Noah’s Revenge’ means a flood, and the only way to cause a flood is to demolish a dam.”

  “Exactly,” said McCaig.

  “And these explosives experts support your theory?” she asked.

  “Seems like it,” said McCaig.

  Saylor’s brow furrowed and she turned her eyes to the ceiling for a few moments. “OK, and you are sure of these facts, Colonel Zarrabian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I agree, we should be looking at dams. What else have you found?”

  “Not much,” said McCaig. “There are just too many of them.”

  “You’re trying to find something, but you’re not sure what. The correct approach is to eliminate data that is of no interest.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Christine.

  Bashir turned around and faced them again. “I found this right off the bat. There are concrete dams, rock-fill dams, earthen dams, wooden dams, and steel dams. There are arch dams and gravity dams, hydroelectric dams, drinking-water dams and irrigation dams. There are dams built on rock foundations, and dams built on dirt. High dams and wide dams. Huge dams and tiny dams. Dams on major rivers and on tiny streams, and dams that only hold water that is pumped in.”

  “You found that just now?” asked McCaig.

  “He’s got the right idea,” said Saylor.

  “If you wanted to blow up a dam,” asked Christine, “wouldn’t you go for the obvious ones like Hoover dam? Shouldn’t we be looking at those?”

  “No way,” said McCaig. “Hoover, Shasta, Hetch Hetchy, you’d need a B-1 bomber to breach one of those. We’re looking for one that a small group could take out with just the explosives they could carry in one vehicle. But it has to be a dam that would cause a lot of damage if it broke. Like take out a city or destroy a couple million acres of farms.”

  “You’re starting to get it,” said Saylor. “You just eliminated all of the large, concrete dams in America. Don’t guess which dam they targeted. Instead, figure out what would not interest a terrorist. That’s usually much easier, and you’ll probably eliminate most of those 75,000 dams. Then look at what’s left, and maybe something will jump out at you.”

  “Not just the concrete dams,” said Zarrabian. “Any dam with a concrete facing, and dams that are rock filled. They would be impossible to blow up even with hundreds of pounds of explosives.”

  “What does that leave?” asked Saylor.

  “I’d say we can also eliminate all of the wood and steel dams,” said McCaig. “They’ll all be small and uninteresting.”

  “That leaves earth-filled dams,” said Saylor. “Now you are thinking like a librarian.”

  An hour later, Saylor pushed her chair back from the computer and twisted her head from side to side, stretching her neck. Bashir glanced over his shoulder momentarily, but then returned his attention to the computer. McCaig stood up from the couch, stretched, and yawned loudly. Zarrabian and Christine looked up from reading the books they’d found.

  “You guys have been quiet for a long time,” said McCaig. “Is there even a remote chance you’re going to find something?”

  “We’ve made a lot of progress,” said Saylor.

  “Progress? Does that mean you’ve found it?”

  “We’re down to a few dozen dams. Agent Bashir, I mean, Omar, found an online database operated by the United States Department of the Interior. He downloaded the data and created a database on this computer. For the past half hour, we have been using database queries to narrow our search, eliminating categories of dams that a terrorist would find uninteresting.”

  “And?”

  “We've narrowed the problem down from 75,000 dams to to eleven.”

  “Wow,” said McCaig. “I’m impressed. We’re almost there.”

  “No, we’re not,” said Christine. “If we can’t narrow it down to exactly one, we’re still screwed.”

  “She’s right,” said Bashir, turning from the computer. “So let’s start the dirty work. One by one, fact by fact, and see if we can eliminate any more. Even if we can’t narrow it down to one, maybe we can rank them most-to-least likely or something.”

  “So can you tell us what it took for a dam to make it onto our final list?”

  “Well, it’s a little complicated, but roughly speaking these are all compacted earth or hydraulic fill earth dams. Basically, they’re dirt. They’re among the biggest dams in America—in the world, in fact. And each one is on a river with a
t least one big city downstream that would have a catastrophic flood. And they have to be full of water. We tossed some of the big ones, particularly in California, like the San Luis and Oroville Dams, because both of those are down almost a hundred feet due to the drought.”

  “So, for lack of a better plan, let’s start with the biggest dams and work down from there,” said Saylor. “What’s first?”

  Bashir turned back to his computer and did some fast typing and clicking. A moment later, he turned back. “It looks like the Oahe and Garrison dams are tied for first place at about twenty-three million acre feet, followed by the Fort Peck Dam at about nineteen million acre feet.”

  Christine snapped her book shut and sat up straight. “Jesus Christ, what rivers are those three on?”

  Bashir looked back at his computer. “They’re all three on the Missouri River. In fact . . .” He clicked and brought up a map, scrutinizing it for a moment. “All three are in a row. Fort Peck is first, then downstream is Garrison Dam, and downstream from that is the Oahe Dam.”

  “I remember this. Some guy on the Internet wrote a hypothetical story about terrorists blowing up Fort Peck.”

  Bashir spun back to his computer, typing furiously with Saylor bent over his shoulder watching.

  “Holy, holy crap,” he said a moment later. “I think she’s right.”

  They all gathered behind Bashir’s chair.

  “Oh my god,” said Saylor. “This is awful. This has to be the one. Montana. Fort Peck, Montana. This dam has the one. It’s the proverbial perfect storm: unprotected, easy to destroy, and an unbelievable amount of damage.”

  Bashir clicked his mouse and scrolled the screen to see more.

  “And it’s all right here on the Internet.”

  “Fort Peck, Montana?” said McCaig. “What, they’re gonna drown some cows?”

  “Yeah, some cows. Then some towns you haven’t heard of like Frazer and Poplar, and on down the river through a half dozen more small towns to Williston. The flood might even run backwards up the Milk River and take out Nashua.”

  “Never heard of those places. How many people?” asked McCaig.

  “By the time it gets to Williston, maybe twenty or thirty thousand people have fled, and a few thousand might be dead.”

  “That’s not good,” said McCaig. “Still, it seems like a small target. Why not a dam where there are more people?”

  “Oh, we’re just getting started,” said Saylor.

  “Watch this,” said Bashir. “There are a lot of anti-dam activists, mostly ecologists and engineers. They put a simulation on the Internet of what would happen if the Fort Peck dam breaks.”

  He clicked a button, and a map of the Missouri River started changing. The slender blue line of the river below the dam changed to a red color before swelling and widening, traveling down the Missouri River Valley.

  “See there at the bottom of the map? It’s the time since the dam breach, in hours on the left. On the right, that’s an estimate of the death toll.”

  Saylor narrated as they watched. “The real trouble starts when the Fort Peck flood hits Lake Sakakawea and the Garrison dam, the next dam down the river. It’s too much water, and Garrison dam breaks too. Now instead of nineteen million, we have over forty million acre feet of water.”

  “This is more than a few cows,” said McCaig.

  “The river is just getting warmed up,” said Saylor. “Eight hours after the dam goes, the flood wipes out Bismarck. Remember that from grade school? It’s the capital of North Dakota. A hundred thousand people, but most of them escape because there’s time to warn them. Then the water hits a third dam, Oahe, which breaks. Now we have over sixty million acre feet of water loose in the Missouri River Valley.”

  “That sounds like a lot of water,” said McCaig.

  Saylor continued. “Then another state capital, Pierre, South Dakota. Sioux City, a hundred thousand people. Omaha, Nebraska, eight hundred thousand people. Then Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis. Millions of people. Through Arkansas, Mississippi, and into Louisiana, where it takes out a third state capital, Baton Rouge. Finally, the entire city of New Orleans.”

  There was silence. The computer simulation had stopped, but it showed a red swath of destruction that cut the country in half.

  “Damn,” said McCaig.

  Saylor looked at her screen again. “Nobody really knows, but a good guess is tens of thousands dead, millions homeless, and every major insurance company bankrupt. The stock market would collapse.”

  “And there’s not a single highway or railroad left that goes across the country,” added Bashir. “Every bridge across the Mississippi River is out. The whole country is cut in half.”

  “Fifteen percent of the country’s electricity generation is destroyed,” said Saylor.

  “Huh,” said McCaig. “You say New Orleans would be destroyed?”

  “That’s what this says. Underwater. And it would probably break levees all over the place. The Army Corps of Engineers would have a hell of a time putting that river back in its banks.”

  “Did you know New Orleans is the biggest seaport in the world?” said McCaig.

  “No way,” said Christine. “New York and Amsterdam are huge.”

  “I worked there one summer on a case,” said McCaig. “If you include all the facilities on the river from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, it handles more tonnage each day than New York or Amsterdam.”

  “My God,” said Christine. “Everyone worries about nuclear terrorism. A nuclear bomb in New York City wouldn’t do as much damage as this.”

  “You are getting too excited,” said Zarrabian, who had been quietly watching from behind. “There is still no proof at all that this is the target. You are confusing drama with good detective work.”

  Saylor looked at Zarrabian and nodded. “He’s right. Just because some guy wrote a scary article and someone else made cool animated graphics, those things don’t add any weight to evidence.”

  “Tell me more about this dam,” said Zarrabian.

  “Well here’s something,” said Bashir. “It already failed once, back in 1938 right after it was finished. It’s a hydraulic fill dam, meaning they built it with mud that they dredged up using river water. They miscalculated the weight and the strength of the shale. Almost two thousand feet of the dam collapsed into the reservoir.”

  “And the dam burst?” asked Christine.

  “No, it was still mostly empty.”

  “So basically, the mud did what mud does,” said Christine.

  “Did they fix it?” asked McCaig. “I mean, I guess so since the dam is there today, but what did they do?”

  “Yeah, they fixed it. But it took two more years. And eight guys died that day. Six of them were never found, and are still buried in the dam somewhere.”

  “That is it!” said Zarrabian. “That is the key! This is the right dam!”

  “What?” said McCaig.

  “There is no doubt. I overheard the soldiers talking one evening after supper while we trained for our missions. They all laughed about something, and the team leader said ‘We will send those six men’s bones to New Orleans.’ The Fort Peck dam is their target.”

  “Morning, Saylor,” said the waitress. She bent down and smiled at little Marina in her high chair. “Good morning, cutie! How are you this morning?” Marina smiled at the waitress and banged a spoon on the tray.

  “Brought some friends this morning?” asked the waitress.

  Saylor glanced around the table at her bleary-eyed companions. Bashir didn’t look too bad, but was still in the same rumpled shirt and slacks he’d come in. Christine and McCaig looked like they’d barely slept in the short four hours since they’d left the library. Zarrabian was waiting in the RV, and had assured them he’d make do with whatever they brought back.

  “Morning Jeanie,” said Saylor. “Yeah, an old college buddy of mine and, uh, these are his parents.”

  McCaig raised his eyebrows and suppressed a smile.r />
  “They were passing through the area and surprised me.”

  “Well, glad to have you. What can I get you?”

  They all ordered, and a minute they later eagerly embraced the four steaming cups of coffee that arrived.

  “Well, what now?” asked Saylor.

  Bashir shook his head. “I have no idea. I’m used to working with the Bureau. Someone brings in a problem, some evidence, you make sure it’s legit, then you go to the boss and see if it’s worth starting an investigation. By the book. Now . . . I don’t know.”

  McCaig put down his coffee. “And that’s exactly what we’ll do: investigate and find the crooks. Only we do it on our own this time.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” said Bashir.

  “No, but what choice do we have?” asked McCaig.

  “Well, I know one thing for sure,” said Christine, “You don’t get a story from 1,500 miles away. We have to get to Fort Peck.”

  “Agreed,” said McCaig. Bashir nodded his head too.

  “And we have to get there before this goes down. That’s where the story is, and that’s where your crime is going to take place.”

  “So you just show up? Then what?” asked Saylor.

  “I’m not sure,” said Christine. “But it’s a long drive and we’ll have a lot of time to think. Between me, Bashir, McCaig, and Zarrabian, we’ve got some good brains.”

  “What about me? You got me in on this, now you think you can just leave me behind?” asked Saylor. “I want to go.”

  “No way,” said McCaig. “For a hundred reasons, not the least of which is your baby. And you can probably figure out the rest of them yourself. The fewer the better on a mission like this. Besides, what do you think you can do? No offense, but this could be dangerous.”

  “I can do research, help you find information,” she said.

  “You can do that from here. I’m sure Bashir can find a secure way for you to contact us.”

  “Piece of cake,” said Bashir.

  Saylor leaned back with a disappointed sigh. “You’re right. But I had to ask.”

  “And I know this sounds melodramatic,” said Christine, “but these really are dangerous people. They’re willing to start wars. Killing us wouldn’t be a big deal to them. I’d like to go into this knowing that someone else can tell the story if I can’t.”