Deadly Waters (19 page)

XLVI

5/5/09 12:03 Arizona Standard Time

The all-important Glen Canyon team, the one led by Claudio and the only group carrying four large torpedoes, had loaded their weapons onto their pontoon boat two hundred yards south of Wahweap Marina. The houseboat of Mr. and Mrs. Dupree, the

same people who had seen the Colombians two years earlier, was moored to its peer at the edge of the marina, a few hundred meters north of the concrete landing the twelve men in the team were using to launch their craft. As soon as the men had motored from the shoreline and were on the deep water near the dam, a young Navaho man, the same young man who had approached the Duprees two years before, walked down the bluff overlooking the landing and came up to the elderly couple as they sat on the porch of their double-decker boat.

“Did you see that?” Wayland Zah asked them. “As bold as brass they were. Say, don’t I know you folks?”

“I don’t know...” said Mrs. Dupree. “Do we know you?”

“Maybe,” said Wayland. “I mean, I think we’ve met before. You know, I think those guys must be doing something with drugs. Lucky for us I got these great binoculars. I can see everything those guys are doing. Look, they’re dropping something in the water,” he said, peering through the glasses.

He handed Mr. Dupree his binoculars and a slip of paper on which he had the license plates of the Colombians’ rental truck. “If I were you, I would call the sheriff’s department in Page,” said Wayland. “You got a cell phone?”

“A smart one,” said Mr. Dupree, gazing through Wayland’s binoculars.

“The latest technology,” said Wayland.

“We got it last Christmas,” said Mrs. Dupree. “From our son out in—”

“I’ll bet it’s a great phone, ma’am,” said Wayland. “A great phone to make a call to the police on. Well, sorry to run. I got to get to work.”

Having taken the binoculars from Mr. Dupree, he ran up the slope above the landing to the parked car he had left there. He waited at the turn-off to Highway 89 for an hour and twelve minutes, at which time the Colombians passed him in their rental truck, and Wayland followed them at a safe distance. The twelve Colombians were running late Wayland noted, As he crossed the arch bridge over the Colorado and immediately south of the dam, he checked his watch and saw the fateful numbers 12:03 appear on his timepiece’s face.

They haven’t hit yet, he thought.

  He had time to put his hand down, time for his car to travel fifty meters before the first of four successive explosions hit the north side of the dam, shaking the bridge and bouncing Wayland’s car to the left-hand side of the road. The sensation was similar to what he had felt when, as a small boy, he had ridden his grandmother’s washing machine during the spin cycle. The explosions stung the base of Wayland’s spine and made his small intestines tighten as they did when he rode a roller coaster on a long down grade. The fourth and final blast knocked Wayland’s car back to the right-hand side of the bridge, out of the path of an oncoming truck that roared by him, its horn blaring.

“They didn’t get it!” was Wayland’s first thought upon reaching the bridge’s east side. He was momentarily pleased to look back over his left shoulder and see the seven hundred feet of grayish white concrete remained in place. Had he not been able to see it, he told himself, he would presently be under a hundred feet of water.

Drops of water fell like rain on the roadway as they had after the explosions at Flaming Gorge. Wayland drove on, passed the startled drivers who had screeched to a sudden halt on the eastern side of the river, and went up the hill into Page. At the first phone booth on Lake Powell Boulevard he dialed 9-1-1.

  “Hello,” he addressed the dispatcher, “this here is Harold Peters out at the city airport,” he said, using his impersonation of the man for whom he had once worked. “There’s some strange folks out here that have holed up in one of my hangers.”

“How are they strange?” asked Sally the dispatcher. “I have to tell you, Mr. Peters, we’ve got something going on at the dam.”

“They’re driving this big orange U-Haul truck,” said Wayland.

“Did you say an orange U-Haul truck?” asked Sally, her attention suddenly piqued.

“Right, a great big one.”

“How close are they?” the dispatcher asked.

“They’re in my east hanger, Hanger B, out beyond South Tenth Avenue,” said Wayland, knowing that was the place the Colombians had been instructed to wait for Kenneth Greeley and his plane. “By the by, one of them has something in his shoe.”

“You saw what?”

“I saw him stick something in there,” explained Wayland. “Something like a slip of paper. You calling the sheriff’s deputies out too?”

  “Right now, Mr. Peters,” said Sally, so excited she immediately switched on her phone and left Wayland hanging on the line without so much as a good-bye.

*

Bob Mathers was at home that Monday, watching a baseball game on his day off, when he got the call from another sheriff’s deputy. He and his wife Becky had come home from shopping at a little after noon, and had heard an explosion northwest of town. They had guessed they were hearing one or more sonic booms, which are common in the southwest, the home of many U.S. Air Force bases.

“There’s trouble out at the airport,” Bob heard Deputy Allan say into his mobile phone. “It’s a 189 or a 122 or something, Christ, I don’t know, something big. They’re the men what set the explosions off out at the dam! They’re driving--I mean, they’ve driven this big truck out to the airport. You got to get out here! All the Page police is coming, too.”

Bob did not stop to ask what explosions or take the time to put on his uniform; he grabbed the rifle Becky made him keep locked in a basement cabinet and sped through Page with his squad car’s warning lights blazing. At the corner of Elm and Lake Powell, directly across from the Empire House Hotel, he thought he momentarily spotted Wayland Zah sitting at the intersection in a car Bob did not recognize. He did not have time to investigate.

At the city airport at the end of Tenth Street, on the eastern edge of Page, chaos had already reigned for a quarter of an hour by the time of Bob’s arrival. Page’s other full-time deputies were on scene, as were seven of the city police and a couple civilian men Deputy Allan had deputized on the spot. They were couched behind their automobiles, their guns drawn and pointed at the isolated metal hanger on the southeastern end of the airport’s cluster of buildings.

An empty U-Haul truck was parked in front of the hanger’s closed double doors. Bob scanned the squadron of agitated law officers and noticed that Tony Phelps, a young policeman possessing two weeks of SWAT training from a seminar in Phoenix, had his HLK sniper’s rifle cocked and aimed across the hood of a squad car.

“I think we should maybe keep the guns at the ready rather than aimed, Tony,” said Bob in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “We don’t know if these characters have done anything.”

“They’re the ones tried to blow up the dam!” yelled Tony, his finger trembling inside the trigger guard. “They’re foreign terrorists of some sort!”

“The FBI is on their way,” Deputy Allan told Bob. “We should keep our heads down and wait.”

The deputy showed relief that Mathers was there and voiced his wish for the chief of police to make an appearance, as though the burden of command was weighing heavily upon him.

“We could lob some tear gas in there,” he said to Bob.

“Why do you think they are suspects, and in what crime?” Mathers wanted to know.

“Some kind of bomb went off,” replied Allan, braving a glance over his car, then ducking down again. “Thankfully, no damage was done. The dam is still there, of course.”

“How do we know they did it?” Bob persisted.

“Some people out on the lake saw them. Saw them get in and out of that truck,” said Allan. “Turns out they’re Colombians, like that bunch you tried to get the government interested in a couple years back.”

“Wait, how do we know they are Colombians, Al?” Bob asked him. “How could anyone tell? See them at a distance out on the lake and you wouldn’t know if they’re from Neptune.”

“You’re asking too many questions,” said Allan. “I need help out here. I got Tony hot to start shooting people, and these city boys don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Can you go around, Bob, and get ‘em calmed down?”

*

While these events were unfolding behind the squad cars, Claudio and his eleven men were pacing the concrete floor inside the hanger and growing increasingly anxious about what was happening. They had spotted three black and white police cars near the airport tarmac. Some civilian vehicles were parked nearby. Clearly some armed men were congregating behind the cars. Claudio had sent a man up to the hanger loft to look out the fan vent to see if Greeley’s plane was approaching. The man had seen nothing. Several of the band, his cousin Alfonso among them, were taking occasional glances out the crack between the big double doors and were loading their guns for a clash with the lawmen.

“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.”