Authors: Theodore Judson
Deadly Waters (18 page)
The seven of them started across the nearly impassable mud flats, sometimes sinking up to their armpits and eventually resorting to crawling on their stomachs to avoid slipping to the sandy mire. They were soon so muddy from head to foot an observer could not have told one man from the other six.
“Things may not look so good at the moment,” Enrique counseled his six companions as they neared the shore. “One can never tell what the outcome may be. Let me do the talking. Don’t anyone do anything that might make them angry.”
5/5/09 12:03 Mountain Daylight Time
At the same time the Strawberry team was running--or rather crawling--into trouble in Utah, the Fontenelle team in Wyoming had already dropped their torpedoes into their reservoir and were driving south on Highway 372 when they heard their three weapons strike their wide, low target dam. As in Utah, the two hundred pound warheads made clean breaks in the dam, and the Green River ran through the gaps, creating a high bole the Colombians watched speed past them as they drove their U-Haul truck south.
“Look!” said the man riding in the truck’s passenger seat as he and the driver watched the surge in the river quickly level out and dissipate in power. “The water does nothing!”
The two men in the cab agreed that other than the holes in the dam itself, they had
done no damage. The area south of Fontenelle dam was a wildlife refuge. There were no houses or anything manmade in the vicinity the escaping water could harm. The river rose between two long groves of cottonwoods lining the east and west shores, uprooting some trees that had grown in the ancient flood plain. A few miles further down river the Green was only a swollen river carrying an unusually large mass of broken foliage.
“If the Russian and Senor Corello want to give us money for washing away a few trees, then I will not argue with them,” reasoned the driver, and his companion next to him said he was right.
They further agreed that the entire Russian race must be crazy. Look at the way Yeltsin had danced on the stage ten years ago. Their women resembled shaved gorillas. It was no wonder that when one of them got hold of a few million dollars he had to find some weird way to throw it away.
The river appeared a couple feet higher than normal when the Colombians reached the town of Green River, Wyoming, fifty miles south of the dam. The river always ran fast in the Wyoming desert during that time of year. The Colombians had been through the town that morning, and they could see no difference that Monday afternoon as they passed over the river bridge on the east side of town.
The passenger in the cab knew English well enough to understand about half the words he was hearing over the truck’s radio. He and the driver noticed that about fifteen minutes before they reached Green River’s city limits, the local stations had stopped playing music, and the announcers were talking in rapid speech about something important. The word “Fontenelle,” which was sounded a half dozen times in the midst of a wad of other verbiage, was an English word both driver and passenger recognized, and both realized what had the local DJs so excited.
The driver slowed to five miles an hour below the posted speed limit while the passenger straightened his spine and sat fully upright in his seat, a change of posture that he believed made him look less suspicious to the prying eyes of the gringos they were gliding past. Beyond the bridge they progressed up a long slope on Unita Drive and could see the empty sagebrush hills on the south side of town, where a lonely stretch of Highway 530 would take them into Utah, and from there to a spot in northwestern Colorado where they were to rendezvous with the Blue Mesa team and meet the DC3 flown by Greeley.
They went by the town’s sole shopping mall and past a road on the left leading to some nondescript large brick buildings even foreigners like the Colombians recognized as an American public school. They were coming parallel to the Visitors’ Center at the crest of the hill when they saw four police cars parked across the street and forming a roadblock.
“We can outrun them!” exclaimed the driver, and turned the truck around so sharply two wheels momentarily lifted off the pavement.
The five men in the rear of the truck were unaware of what was happening outside and slid across the floor of the storage compartment and slammed against the wall when the driver made the sharp turn. Had they seen the street, they would have seen that the lower end of Unita Drive offered them no place to go. They also would have seen the squad cars flying after them and overtaking the rental truck before it reached the bridge. They probably would not have enjoyed seeing a cop lean out the passenger window of one car and shoot out one of the truck’s rear tires with a shotgun.
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.
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 him.
“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.
