To Kelly, Kevin, Jennifer and Allison

DAY ONE

Monday, June 21

CHAPTER 1

12:00 noon - Porcupine Canyon, Colorado

Grant Stevens braced for the explosion. He felt tightness in his stomach and up the back of his neck. He glanced sideways at his friend Bruce Godfrey and saw wild eyes and a tense smile. Bruce stared unflinchingly at the bombsite across the canyon. Neither of them would have missed this for the world. Grant looked back just in time.

The bombs detonated. Grant's entire torso flinched. Porcupine Dam exploded as particles jettisoned in soaring arcs above the structure. The concrete face of the dam came to life, bursting outward. A dust cloud expanded from the rubble, obscuring the entire structure of Porcupine Dam. Smaller clouds mushroomed out of the large one, in what seemed like a series of secondary explosions. Some of the rocks and pieces of concrete were propelled high in the sky, with trajectories like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

For an instant, Grant panicked. He was far too close. The onslaught of rocks and concrete would rain down on him, and kill him instantly. He would have no chance of escape. But then, as if on cue, the outward energy died. The particles reached the apex of their eruption and fell back to earth. Grant would not be killed after all, and he felt like an idiot for thinking it in the first place.

He relaxed. The explosion had been far more intense than he had expected, making him forget that they had not yet heard the noise. When the sound wave reached him, he ducked again. The loud impact made him feel like his chest might be crushed or his head split. He reached instinctively to cover his ears, in spite of the expensive twenty-decibel ear protection, clutching them tight to his head until the sound dissipated.

Only the dust was visible now, churning on itself like a thundercloud, and covering the carnage underneath. Although the dam's concrete structure was completely decimated by the explosion, and reduced to rubble, no flash floods or waves of water could be seen. In fact, no water could be seen at all in the streambed, or anywhere else below the dam. No reservoirs were released downstream by the demise. The canyon below the dam remained dry.

Grant realized he had never seen anything so spectacular in his life. He felt goose bumps on his arms and a grin spreading across his face. He stared at the fog of dust covering the far side of the canyon. A sound from behind startled him. It was a mixture of clapping, yelling, and a few whistles. Grant looked around and saw Bruce and the others applauding towards the demolished Porcupine Dam. At first, the cheering seemed foreign and wrong, but he slowly realized he felt the same way, and after a moment he joined in and clapped enthusiastically.

He glanced around at the others who were in attendance. Standing next to him on a flat plateau across PorcupineCanyon from the dam was a group of managers from the Bureau of Reclamation, representatives from the U.S. Department of Interior, and a large number of local politicians and various other VIPs from the Denver metropolitan area, including the governor of Colorado. The plateau, which acted as a grandstand for the large group, was conveniently located a half-mile downstream from the dam.

Below the plateau, sprinkled up and down the slopes, were the non-VIPs. This much larger group, which Grant estimated at a few thousand, was made up of non-managerial staff from the Bureau, farmers who had once irrigated using the water from Porcupine Reservoir, curious local residents, and a group of environmentalists with a banner that read: Free the Rivers, Kill the Dams. A scattering of deputy sheriffs infiltrated the group to keep peace between the environmentalists and the farmers.

While he stood and stared, he was vaguely aware of someone collecting the ear protection in a large basket. When the man, a Hispanic in a maroon tuxedo, approached, Grant deposited his ear protection in the basket with a mumbled "thanks." He looked back at the demolition site. The change was incredible. He had never seen anything like it. He rubbed his hand on his chest and admitted it still felt tight. He peered down into the canyon, but the dust frustrated his ability to see much of anything. If only the wind would blow the cloud away. However, that afternoon, PorcupineCanyon was devoid of any wind or even a breeze.

This event, which had drawn so many spectators up PorcupineCanyon on a hot Monday, was the culmination of five years of lawsuits, political jockeying, and environmental studies. Ironically, the Bureau of Reclamation, which had fought hardest against decommissioning Porcupine Dam, was now in charge of the event, and celebrating the dam's demise. Grant felt hypocritical. In spite of the excitement of witnessing the explosion, ultimately Grant wanted to build dams, not blow them up. As a manager for the Bureau of Reclamation, he detested the thought of destroying a working concrete dam. Although Porcupine Dam was not in the same league as the bigger, more well-known dams in the west, its sheer simplicity made it remarkable to an engineer like him - just a sweeping concrete arch, with two rounded spillways sculptured right in the middle.

Bruce Godfrey, his friend from the River Hydraulics Group, slapped him on the back. "What'd ya think?" Bruce had been unable to talk about anything else for weeks.

Grant pointed in the air. "For a second I thought some of the pieces were going to hit us."

"Yeah. Me too. It was awesome!" Bruce pumped his arm in excitement. "And it was way louder than I thought it would be. Even with the earphones," he said, motioning to his ear.

Grant pointed down in the canyon. "I wish I could see better. There's too much dust to see how much of the structure . . ."

"Give it a few minutes to settle," Bruce said, motioning toward one of the hospitality tents and a table of drinks in ice. "Let's get a drink."

Grant nodded and they both headed towards the table. He wondered if events like this were his future. How many more dams would the Bureau demolish over the next ten years?

Grant had worked for the Bureau for eighteen years. He had joined the Bureau to build dams, big concrete ones like Hoover and GlenCanyon. Their sheer size and power hypnotized him even after all these years as an engineer. As a child, he had toured Hoover Dam with his family while they vacationed in Las Vegas. At the age of seven, while looking down the six hundred foot face, he had announced to his parents that he would build dams when he grew up. But unlike most children, Grant had not stopped with his childhood dream. Instead, he had let his passion propel him through college - first a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, then a master's, all focused on the chemistry of concrete, structural analysis, and ultimately, dam building.

When Grant first started working at the Bureau of Reclamation in the early eighties, he had advanced quickly, gaining recognition both for strategic decisions and common sense. He garnished awards and promotions. It was not until his career was set and he had worked for the Bureau for over ten years that he finally realized the truth. It came in the form of disapproval for a dam proposal he engineered for the Snake River. It wasn't the disapproval that bothered him, because almost all his proposals had been denied. It was the lack of concern from his management at the Bureau. They had expected it to be refused.

The day the proposal was rejected, Grant's mentor Henry Petersen, who had helped design the Glen Canyon Dam in the late fifties, looked Grant in the eyes and said, "Face it, Grant, there ain't gonna be no more dams in America. It's over. It's not considered environmentally correct to build dams anymore."

It was at that moment that Grant's conscious mind grasped what his subconscious had known for years - he was too late. America's dams were already built. His dream would never be fulfilled. The Bureau of Reclamation had become a maintenance organization, content to monitor water usage. And, as the final straw, the Bureau was now decommissioning the dams it had built in the first part of the twentieth century.

When they reached the table, Bruce grabbed a cream soda and popped the top. "You all packed and ready to go?"

Grant smiled at mention of the trip. His luggage was packed for a flight that evening. "Yeah, as ready as you can be." He sorted through the sodas, and picked out a Diet Coke.

"How late are you guys leaving?" Bruce asked.

"Nine," Grant said.

This was a trip Grant was really looking forward to. The flight would take him first to JFK, then Paris, and then Nairobi, Kenya. After that it would be small propeller planes and cars to the dam site on the Tana River. Unfortunately for Grant, elephants would not be necessary, since there were actually paved roads to the site.

Since all the big rivers in the United States were already dammed, most of Reclamation's engineering work was now done in foreign countries. The Bureau consulted around the world on how to harness water resources. This particular trip to Kenya was a weeklong international symposium on dam building. Engineers, including Grant, would be attending from many of the giant projects around the globe, including the most impressive dam of all, the Three Gorges Dam in China. Grant had traveled to foreign countries before for business, but never a trip of this magnitude.

"You cleaned and oiled your rifle yet?" Bruce had a large smile on his face.

"Yeah right, like I could get a rifle through customs."

After the symposium in Kenya, Grant would vacation for an additional week around Kenya and into Tanzania. Who knew when or if he would ever get to Africa again? Bruce had been joking with him for weeks about going on a safari and shooting some big game, which he just might do. If he did, though, it would be with a loaner rifle, as he certainly had no intentions of trying to check his deer rifle in and out of airport security, border crossings, and customs.

Bruce laughed. "If you get me a Black Rhino head, I'll hang it on my living room wall."

Grant smiled at the image. He saw himself in customs with his hands cuffed behind his back, the unwrapped head of the endangered black rhino sitting on his luggage. But even as the image faded, another replaced it of seeing animals like the rhinos, elephants, zebras, and lions in their natural habitat. What an opportunity, an opportunity that comes only once in a lifetime. He was excited about the symposium itself too. Where else would he get to talk to engineers about real dam projects like Three Gorges? Certainly not in Denver.

Bruce frowned. "I can't believe Howard didn't try to horn in."

Grant scanned the crowd for his new boss and thankfully couldn't see him. "Even Howard knows he'd be out of place in Africa with a bunch of civil engineers at a dam symposium."

It was the first time in Grant's career he had reported to someone younger than him. But age was the least of Howard's problems. Historically, the Bureau's management consisted of civil engineers like Grant, who had worked their way up through the system. Howard, however, was a spy, and everyone knew it. In the U.S. government, the Bureau of Reclamation fell under the Department of the Interior. And Howard had come from Interior six months before. He was neither recruited nor interviewed. At the Bureau, it was inconceivable to become a manager without an engineering degree. But, by the early eighties, as the Bureau became less engineering oriented and more water management oriented, managers with MBAs had become the norm. Yet, Howard was neither an engineer nor a businessman. His education was the worst sort of training for actually accomplishing anything in life - he was a lawyer. The rumor was that a Senator had arranged for his position, one who wanted to find out how the Bureau of Reclamation worked, then gut it. Nobody at the Bureau seemed to know who the mystery senator was, but they knew that when the gutting started, Howard would be the one pointing the knife.

Life had been hell since Howard came aboard. He knew nothing about dams and water management. Worse, he came with the pre-conceived notion that everything the Bureau did was wrong. He ridiculed and scoffed at everything. Most frustrating, however, was that upper management seemed unaware or unconcerned. They let him roam through middle management unencumbered, allowing him to hand out endless busy-work and make decisions that could only be described as uninformed. Management either did not notice, did not care, or were afraid to do anything about the work efficiency problems or drop in morale.

Bruce reached over and scooped some salted nuts from a bowl. "Yeah, but I'm still surprised they left him in charge while they're gone. Roland should know better than that."

Roland Blackwell occupied the top position in the Bureau, the Commissioner. Besides managing most of the dams in America, and the Denver office, Roland flew back and forth across the country securing political support and funding. But at least Roland had once been a civil engineer, even if he hadn't been very good. Bruce's concern was legitimate - it was inconceivable that the Bureau would leave Howard, the spy, who couldn't build a dam in his flower garden, in charge while everyone was in Africa.

Grant shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Nothing's going to happen while we're gone."

Bruce put up his index finger. "Yeah, but what if it did?"

Grant shrugged. "Like what?" He turned and walked back toward the ledge where the remains of Porcupine Dam were finally becoming more visible through the dust.

Bruce hurried alongside. "Who knows? What if they had a catastrophe at one of the dams? Howard would have no idea what to do."

Grant shrugged. "What kind of catastrophe? The dams are practically automated."

Bruce hesitated, trying to think of something, then smiled. "What if they ran out of grease at one of the generating plants? The friction could damage the turbines."

Grant laughed and started walking again. "Sounds like a perfect job for Howard, greasing the turbines."

When they reached the ledge they stopped and looked at the remains of the dam. Although still partially obscured, it was obvious the precision charges had done a near-perfect job of reducing the concrete dam into a neatly stacked pile of rubble. By the end of the summer most of the debris would be gone, hauled down the canyon in trucks. Then the canyon would look more like it had before, except for the long scars where the dam had butted into the canyon walls.

Grant and Bruce dallied for an hour admiring the scene, eating and mingling. As managers for the Bureau, they had been allowed to attend the decommissioning with the VIPs, but both knew they were not important enough to rub elbows with politicians. That was the job of Commissioner Blackwell and his cronies. It was Grant and Bruce's job to stay out of the way, something Grant was more than happy to do.

After they both ate their fill of the appetizers and finished rehashing the explosion, they started back to their car. A gravel road snaked back and forth through some trees for almost a half mile down to where the cars were parked. They had just started down the road when Grant heard someone call his name.

"Stevens. Stevens. Hang on a second." Grant's boss Howard ran toward them, waving his arms. His forehead protruded and his bushy eyebrows grew together, making him look like he was constantly furrowing his brows.

"Our favorite guy," Bruce whispered.

When Howard got within ten yards of them, he shooed Bruce away with his hand. "Go on ahead Bruce. I need a few words alone with Mr. Stevens."

Bruce gave Grant a consolatory look and then continued walking to the car.

"What's up?" Grant asked, not really caring since he would be gone for the next two weeks.

"Grant, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but . . ."

Grant knew what he was going to say before Howard finished. They couldn't do this to him.

". . .but plans have changed. It seems the commissioner doesn't think I've been here long enough to run things with . . ." He looked around as if he didn't know how to finish. ". . .you know, with everybody out of the country so long."

Grant interrupted. "Are you trying to tell me you're canceling my Kenya trip?" He felt all the muscles in his face tighten.

Howard backed up a step and smiled. "I thought you would be happy to be left in charge."

Grant wondered if he had missed something. How could Grant be in charge, if both he and Howard were in America together? And then it hit him. Anger returned. His brows furrowed and he gritted his teeth, barely able to speak. Bruce had been right. "So you're taking my place?"

Howard shook his head and actually waved his finger back and forth. "No. No, Stevens. You've got it all wrong. I'm not interested in Kenya. Who wants to hang around with a bunch of boring engineers? I'm leaving. I decided to take vacation next week." Howard shrugged. "Then you can manage America's dams without my interference. Besides, ever since I came out west, my wife's been nagging me to take her to Yellowstone, so we decided--"

"How long have you known about this?" The thought of not going on the trip made Grant feel sick. He would kill to be able to discuss the challenges of building the Three Gorges Dam with the Chinese engineers. What about his safari in Tanzania? What would he tell his wife? Grant had spent a fortune on reservations for the week of personal travel. He had thought of nothing else but this trip for months.

Howard read his mind and waved his hands back and forth. "If you're worried about your personal money, don't. The Bureau's gonna pick up the tab. I told Roland about your vacation and he said the Bureau would reimburse you. He's already approved it."

That mitigated some of the anger, but not the emptiness. The disappointment was overwhelming. He needed to sit down. He kicked at a loose rock on the road.

Howard pursed his lips in an expression that actually showed compassion. "Look, I know you don't like this."

He didn't say anything. He knew Howard didn't care.

His boss, who had never even attempted to talk to Grant as a friend, now confided in him like they were pals. "Hey, I'm not happy about this either. They told me that I didn't have enough time at the Bureau to be in charge. They wanted us to switch roles, me report to you for the week. But I told them to stick it, and took some vacation."

Grant couldn't believe what he had just heard. They had actually suggested Howard report to Grant for a few weeks? Maybe Roland did know what he was doing. But even if the Bureau suddenly figured out they needed to leave a real engineer home, why did it have to be Grant? Roland and Grant had never seen eye to eye. Grant felt like Roland was too much of a politician, and Roland always thought Grant was too much of an engineer. Besides, unlike most of the others attending the symposium, Grant actually cared about the speakers, and the panels. He wouldn't be there just to schmooze.

Howard continued. "Anyway, Roland's admin will brief you in the morning about any issues that could come up in the next ten days." Howard's eyes softened until they reminded Grant of a puppy. "And if anything does come up, here's my cell phone number." He handed Grant a card. "You can call me anytime. I'll be in Yellowstone with my family."

Grant nodded. It seemed for a moment as if Howard was begging him to call, like a call might validate him somehow. It didn't matter though, because Grant wouldn't call Howard if his life depended on it.

Grant pocketed the card. They stood and stared at each other for a moment longer, even though the conversation seemed to be over. Howard checked his watch. Grant turned to go.

"Don't hesitate to call," Howard said.

Grant walked away with his fists clenched. He resisted the urge to pick up a rock and throw it. He felt like screaming, but he held his composure. He walked stiffly for a few minutes before a thought struck him. Did Howard say he would be vacationing in Yellowstone? Grant smiled. Hadn't he read about grizzlies being re-introduced into the park? Grant smiled as he pictured Howard focusing his camera while a huge grizzly charged toward him.

* * *

12:30 p.m. - Grand Canyon, Arizona

The water looked cold and dangerous. Only an idiot would dare swim out beyond the shallows without a life jacket, or some other flotation device. It would be suicide. The strong undertows would grab you, and pull you to the bottom before you knew what was happening. And then? Well, there wouldn't be anything after that because once the river had you, it would never let you go.

The solitary man reached down and touched the river. He rolled the wetness between his fingers to determine the texture. Unable to detect any silt with his fingers, his hand went to his face, and he inhaled, smelling it. Nothing. He dipped his hand again, and this time licked the tips of his fingers, tasting. Ah, now he could just discern the silt in the water, his tongue finding a few small particles and detecting the expected salty flavor.

Still crouching, he looked across the Colorado River to the other side, taking in the size, sensing the power. It was alive. He felt it. The river radiated power, especially the rapids. Unfortunately, even here in the Grand Canyon, the river was shackled, bound like a prisoner, unable to show its full strength. Others didn't notice, but he did. The concrete dams held it back. Sure the river ran a little stronger today than yesterday. But that only meant the flow through the turbines at the Glen Canyon Dam, some hundred and seventy-five miles upstream, had been increased, most likely due to a "hot one" in Phoenix, when the Arizonans cranked up the air conditioners. More electricity from the turbines meant more water downstream. It was as simple as that. The mighty Colorado River was a slave to man, caged and controlled.

He stood and looked up the rock canyon walls rising thousands of feet on both sides of the river. Although he often visited the Grand Canyon, the immensity always inspired him. He tried to imagine the river carving the canyon over millions of years, an image that was impossible to visualize. But he knew it hadn't been this river; it had been a wild untamed river, over eight times larger during spring runoff, much dirtier, and powerful enough to constantly re-arrange the huge boulders.

The best way to describe the man, if anyone cared to, was that he seemed unremarkable in every way. No facial features worth remembering, a plain face with plain brown hair. His clothes showed his familiarity with the desert outdoors, but again they were not fancy and were well worn. The only attribute that anyone would likely remember if they tried to recall the man was his build. He was uncommonly skinny. Skinny enough that almost all would remember it, if questioned. Then there were his eyes. Some might be unsettled by them, and they would be recalled as wild eyes.

If anyone actually knew the man, they would likely describe him as obsessed with the Colorado River. He had studied it for years. He knew its history. Nobody cared more about the river than he did. Although he made a living as a technician in Las Vegas, keeping the casino lights flashing was only a job, secondary to his first love. Weekends and vacations were spent in the desert, the National Parks: Zion, Arches, Bryce, Canyonlands, and the Grand Canyon. Not just on the roads either, but in the backcountry. He knew them all, like a rancher knows his spread.

At that moment the man worried about the Colorado River, about what it had become. Most Grand Canyon tourists thought the river looked impressive, but they had never seen it before the Glen Canyon Dam destroyed it.

Before 1962, travelers described the river as a wild animal with rapids three stories high. The pre-dam Colorado was extremely dirty, carrying millions of tons of silt and mud. When the river receded from high flows, giant sand dunes were left deposited on the banks, creating the perfect environment for wild flowers and swallows that used the mud for their nests. Now, without the spring floods, the sand had eroded away, and the wild flowers and swallows had disappeared. The silt, meanwhile, was trapped behind the dam, slowly filling GlenCanyon.

He crouched back down and touched the water again. This time he held his fingers under the cold current. He didn't need a thermometer to know the temperature was in the forties. Too cold to bathe or swim comfortably. Since the dam was erected, it was always in the forties, forty-degrees Fahrenheit, plus or minus two, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. The temperature never changed at the bottom of a six hundred-foot dam.

One advantage of a colder river was that it benefited the rainbow trout introduced by the park service after the dam was completed. Rainbows love cold water, and the oxygen it carries. Unfortunately, the native humpback chub, which had lived in the Colorado for thousands of years, did not like it. Almost extinct now, the chub all but disappeared after the river turned cold, their exit accelerated by competition from the rainbows.

The man opened his pack. He gingerly moved the detonators and wires to the side, and reached for a clear Plexiglas container the size of a soda can. He uncapped it, and dipped it into the water. He recapped it and looked through it. Given some time, the silt would settle to the bottom, and he would be able to see exactly how much sediment was in the water.

He heard footsteps on the gravel behind, and he whirled to see two hikers, a man and a woman, approaching from upstream. He lunged to his pack, quickly covering the detonators, and almost dropped the water sample in the process. Had the hikers seen the detonators? He did not think so.

He studied their eyes to see if there were any signs that they had seen anything. The two did not look familiar, but that didn't mean they were not staying in the same campground. He had not talked to anyone. Leaving Las Vegas right after lunch the day before, he had driven straight to the North Rim, parked his truck, then made the long descent from the North Ridge via eight miles of winding trails to the river below, arriving in camp after dark. As the couple approached, the lady waved.

"Hi. It's a beautiful morning, isn't it?"

The skinny man stood and moved in front of his pack. He wiped his wet hand on his shorts and tried to think of a response. He didn't want a long discussion. "Yeah."

The woman's smile seemed to connect both ears. She had a few highlights of gray just visible under the straw hat. She and her male partner both wore khaki shorts and new hiking shoes, most likely purchased for this trip. The bearded man with her kept looking around at the canyon with his hand on his chin. He looked as if he would be more comfortable with a pipe in his mouth.

Neither the man nor the woman seemed particularly interested in his pack. Could that mean that they had not seen anything? Or were they just good actors?

The lady asked another question. "See any rafters on the river yet this morning?"

He looked across the river to avoid eye contact. "A couple."

"You're staying in our campground around the corner, aren't you?" She pointed upstream. "We saw you walk past our tent. You like to get going early, don't you? Where you from anyway? We're from Los Angeles. It's our first time in the Grand Canyon."

He wasn't sure which question to answer first. He hesitated then answered, "I like the peaceful mornings."

Maybe she was asking so many questions because she had in fact seen the detonators. What if these two were really undercover agents from some law enforcement agency? Or more likely, maybe they were just snoopy people who would report what they had seen to the first person they saw.

He quickly considered what to do. There was too much at stake to do nothing. What if he had to kill them? His knife was in the bottom of his pack and unreachable. He scanned the ground and saw multiple rocks the size of softballs. He looked up at the couple. The man was still gazing up the canyon walls. He was distracted. The woman seemed relaxed. What if he grabbed one of the rocks and bashed her in the head? That would do it. His hand twitched while he imagined her lying on the ground with a bloody crater on her head. He wondered if he would be able to get the man after the woman. The man's defenses would be up by then.

"What are you doing with that water?" She pointed at the plastic container of silty water in his hands. "You're not going to drink it, are you?" She stuck out her tongue in distaste. The woman made it hard not to look in her eyes, as if her eyes were hunting his.

He realized suddenly that these two had not seen the detonators. They were not a threat, and he would not need to kill them. They were just a couple of curious campers, happy to be in the Grand Canyon for the first time. Regardless, the encounter had made him nervous. He needed to move away from them and clear his head. He wondered how to end the conversation. "Well, I better go." He leaned down and zipped up the backpack, lifted it onto his shoulder, and walked past them. He held the water sample carefully in his hand.

She yelled after him. "Okay, we'll catch you later in camp or something."

From behind, the skinny man heard the man say to his wife, "I don't think he wanted to talk."

"Really? Why would you think that?"

He walked upstream around a bend in the river, away from the couple, away from people, until he was alone and could see a mile upstream. His heart was still beating fast. That had been too close, he had almost done something stupid, something that could have jeopardized everything he had worked so hard for. He had carried the detonators with him because he was too nervous to leave them in the truck, and that had almost screwed everything up.

He gazed upstream. He tried to picture the dam. He couldn't see it, of course; it was almost two hundred miles upstream. But he knew what it looked like. The Glen Canyon Dam rose over six hundred feet and completely blocked the canyon. It trapped LakePowell behind it, with houseboats, water ski boats, and jet skis, all buzzing around like bees, with over three million visitors per year.

What he had never seen, unfortunately, were the canyons themselves, under all the water. Only about a thousand people ever had, before the dam buried them forever. He read accounts of people lucky enough to have explored them including John Wesley Powell himself. They declared GlenCanyon one of the most beautiful places on earth. They described pink undulating sandstone walls, some striped, with rain forest-like jungles in some of the side canyons, and green fractures high on the walls nourished by seeping springs. The endless carved rock canyons contained lush overhangs and rock amphitheaters. But now it was all gone, forever. It made his stomach tighten every time he thought about it.

Instinctively, he knew that it would be impossible to build the Glen Canyon Dam or most of the other fifty-three Colorado River dams today. Environmental impact studies would never allow them. Unlike in the early 20th century, modern politicians feared environmentalists.

But, even though the government had stopped building dams, and society had decided dams were detrimental to the environment, they left the big ones standing. Now built, the dams were forgotten. Even the environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club or GreenPeace didn't waste resources trying to get rid of the dams. There were too many other issues brighter on the radar.

Not that the man hadn't tried. Over the years, he had made his rounds in all the major environmental groups including the "Glen Canyon Institute," a group dedicated specifically to decommissioning the Glen Canyon Dam and restoring its canyons. But he finally realized the groups were all pissing into the wind. The issue didn't even register with today's politicians. Since lawyers had won most of the legislative seats in Washington and taken over the House and Senate like a virus, no risks were taken, no big decisions were made, good or bad. The bureaucracy was impenetrable. Decommissioning the Glen Canyon Dam was a fantasy.

That's why, if it was to be done, it would need to be done another way. After much contemplation, the decision had been made. Preparations took over a year. The logistics were planned in excruciating detail. The Glen Canyon Dam would finally be decommissioned the next day, on Tuesday, June 22. The man would be there for the ceremonies. In fact, he would be in charge of the events. Because he was going to blow it up.

CHAPTER 2

2:00 p.m. - Lake Powell, Utah

Julie Crawford took a deep breath. "Hit it!" she yelled.

The ski handle in her hands jerked savagely. It felt like her arms were being pulled from their sockets. As her body dragged forward through the water, spray from the ski hit her directly in the face. She held her breath and closed her eyes as she always did. She could hear the roar of the boat accelerating. As the ski started moving through the water beneath her, she stood up in one fluid motion. The spraying water disappeared as the ski came up on plane. She caught her breath while the boat gradually accelerated to just under twenty miles per hour. She took a second to adjust her swimsuit. She could see the other five in the boat: her husband Greg, Greg's brother Max and his wife Darlene, and her best friends Paul and Erika Sanders. Julie's husband had a big smile on his face.

Julie leaned back and slightly right. The ski reacted to the wedge and skied to the right. She cut over the wake of the boat, absorbing the bump with her knees. Outside of the wake the water was as smooth as a mirror. She traversed to the right until she was at a 45-degree angle to the boat. She reversed her lean and cut back toward the boat's wake, spraying water behind her. As she approached the wake, she reversed again and cut back right, more aggressively this time. The water was incredible. Only LakePowell had water this smooth in the middle of the day.

The hot, dry desert air warmed her body. She relaxed and adjusted her hands on the rope handle. She took a second to glance up at the rock walls of the canyon. She loved the atmosphere. On her right side, a vertical rock cliff climbed toward the blue sky. The canyon walls, with their astounding variations of texture and red color, contrasted perfectly with the blue sky and cool water. They were miles back in one of the countless side canyons of the lake. Although there were probably thousands of boats at LakePowell, they had not seen anyone else for hours.

On Saturday, after picking up the rented houseboat, they had motored for hours upstream from the marina, towing the Mastercraft behind. They passed numerous canyons, but Greg wanted to go farther upstream where there were fewer boats. No one had objected. The leisurely tour up the lake had been relaxing. It gave the six of them time to catch up.

Paul and Erika Sanders had been the Crawfords' best friends for years. They met when both couples lived in Irvine, California where Greg and Paul worked as computer programmers. After being introduced by their husbands, Julie and Erika connected immediately and the friendship was sealed. When they first met, they were newlyweds, but over the years the Crawfords added two boys and the Sanders one girl.

Greg's brother, Max, was almost ten years older than him. Max and Darlene lived in Las Vegas with their three kids, the oldest being a teenage boy who was going to come with them to Lake Powell, but ended up going to Boy Scout camp instead.

For this trip all three couples had farmed their children out to friends and family. LakePowell would be a vacation away from runny noses and diapers, at least until the kids got a little older. Besides, it was sort of a reunion for the two younger couples, the first time they had reunited since Greg and Julie moved from California to Phoenix in February.

During Saturday's trip upstream, Julie and Erika shared pictures of their kids and recounted stories since their separation. Paul and Greg talked work and sports as if they had never been separated. The older couple, Max and Darlene, both avid readers, dove into novels from a whole box they had brought. Julie told Erika about life in Phoenix and how it was different from OrangeCounty.

All three couples had looked forward to the week at LakePowell. When Julie first met Greg, he already had a ski boat. It was a lifestyle that she readily adopted. Likewise, Paul and Erika were easily converted, and the couples had vacationed together on every body of water that allowed water ski boats within three hundred miles of Irvine. Occasionally, Max and Darlene came with them. Once a year, they planned a big trip, and the last three years it had been LakePowell. LakePowell was a water-skier's paradise. At almost two hundred miles long, with thousands of miles of shoreline, isolated canyons, and red rock cliffs, it felt like a different planet.

Julie tightened her grip on the rope and cut back to the left. This time she did not stop at the wake, but cut through it. On the left side she cut back and forth, each time gradually increasing her aggression. After a while, she felt the muscles burn in her back and arms. She knew she could push harder, but then again, they had the whole week ahead, so she tossed the rope into the air and coasted to a stop. As her body sank down in the water, she leaned back, floating on her back and letting her head rest in the water. She took a moment and looked up in the blue sky at a solitary white cloud. It reminded her of an oversized bed, covered with white blankets, and big pillows. Something was perched on top of the bed, a harp maybe. Yes, that was what it was.

Julie deserved this. Like the thousands of other boaters spread out in the countless canyons of LakePowell, Julie Crawford intended to make the most of her getaway. She would relax and purge all her stress. What else was there to do?

* * *

3:00 p.m. - Grand Canyon, Arizona

"RIGHT SIDE PADDLE! RIGHT SIDE PADDLE!" Keller screamed from behind. "Come on right side, we need you. DAVID, HELP OUT!"

It took all David's willpower to consciously reach his paddle ahead and grab more of the cold frothy water. His strength was gone and his hands were shaking. Where was Judy? A second ago she had been paddling just in front of him. Then the river had snatched her from the raft and swallowed her. How long could she hold her breath? Maybe she was dead. David blamed himself for organizing the trip, something he would now regret for the rest of his life.

"DAVID, PADDLE!"

He pulled hard on the oar and the raft slowly came back around into position, although he felt sure Sam, right behind, was doing most of the work.

Keller yelled from behind. "That's it, Judy. Hang on. We'll get you in a second."

David caught a glance of a bobbing head and a blue life jacket somewhere to his right, but he didn't dare look. His right foot, the one hanging in the low-forties water, was freezing cold as he straddled the right pontoon of the silver raft. He couldn't imagine how cold Judy felt. He hoped she was okay. He caught another glimpse of her, and relief warmed his body, but he kept his eyes straight ahead, focusing instead at the next wave downstream. Suddenly, her head popped up next to the boat. Before he could blink, Keller reached over him and grabbed her, dragging her up into the boat. He abandoned her immediately and resumed his position in the back. Judy sputtered some water, coughed, and amazingly looked up and . . . smiled!

The raft rolled through the next wave and this time stayed nose forward. Nobody fell out. David looked down as Judy scrambled to grab onto something. She looked rattled, but physically okay. David could feel his confidence coming back. The muscles in his arms began to respond again. He braced for another big one just ahead.

"Keep it straight, guys and girls," Keller reminded them from behind. "Right side paddle. Left side paddle."

David felt the boat drop as the hole sucked them down. They shot back up again, climbing the wave, then hesitated, almost stalling, then at the last minute the current grabbed the raft and pulled it over the top. He felt the raft bend as it crested. With the big rapids behind them, they slid through a series of smaller waves without incident.

After the river calmed, David finally got a chance to catch his breath. He willed his heart to slow down. The shaking in his hands gradually resided. Keller maneuvered the raft to snag Judy's paddle, which had followed the raft through the rapids. Afram reached out and grabbed it.

"Judy, you okay?" Keller reached up and patted her on the blue life jacket. "That's the best ride we've got out of Sapphire in a long time."

Judy finally spoke. "Awesome."

Everybody started to laugh. She shivered.

Sapphire Rapid, although not the biggest, was the wildest they had encountered so far on the trip, definitely the first one where someone fell out. One minute they were in perfect shape, the next the front of the boat went right. With the boat sideways, the next wave almost flipped them. The rapid was littered with truck-sized boulders scattered in the middle of the river. The canyon walls climbed steeply on both sides, but the texture was all boulders, apparently from eons of rockslides. Sapphire Rapid was located at mile 101 of the Grand Canyon. David had learned that river miles in the Grand Canyon were measured downstream from Lee's Ferry, the last place where boats could get access to the river, and just fifteen miles downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam and LakePowell.

Sapphire was one of the jewels, a series of rapids named after gemstones. They included Crystal, Agate, Sapphire, Turquoise, Ruby, and Serpentine. They stretched from mile 98 to mile 106. Crystal was rated the most advanced, and was generally considered one of the best rapids in the Grand Canyon. But it was Sapphire that pulled Judy out of the boat, and almost capsized them.

Monday was the group's sixth day on the river with Colorado River Foam, a white water group David found on the Internet. There were two rafts in the company, six paddlers in each raft, plus the guide, Keller, who mostly steered and barked orders from behind. Their boat was made up of David's group of five and George, who came with the group of six in the other boat.

David's group of five included himself, Judy, Sam, Becky, and Afram. They worked together in El Segundo, California, just minutes from LAX, and had been planning this trip for almost a year. To get reservations to run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon during peak season usually required well over six months notice. David had never heard of Colorado River Foam, but he saw the opening and grabbed it. Some of his co-workers had tried to book a trip the summer before but started too late to find anything.

After Sapphire, the river turned calm for the next few miles. The calm periods gave everyone a chance to catch their breath, get a drink or a snack, relax, and enjoy the scenery. The intermissions between rapids also gave them a chance to talk.

Afram turned toward Judy. "We thought we lost you. I only saw you bob a couple of times. Were you scared?"

Judy nodded. "Every time I went under, I wondered if I would ever come back up, but just when I thought I was going to die, I'd pop up. Now I know why Keller makes us wear these life jackets."

Everybody laughed nervously. David wondered if the others worried like he did, that she might have drowned.

Keller, constantly the boss, made the situation a teaching opportunity. "That happened because, the boat got out of shape. As long as the boat hits the wave head on, we're usually okay."

"Why only usually?" Sam asked from behind David.

Keller motioned downstream. "Hey, the river has a mind of its own. Sometimes we hit the wave perfectly with both sides paddling, and still get sucked down, pulled under, and spit out. Just wait, the best stuff is yet to come at LavaFalls."

"I can hardly wait," Judy said, climbing back into her position in front of David. "Bring it on."

Afram was shaking his head. "You are one psycho chick."

"She's got the right attitude," Keller said, pointing at Judy. "You guys paid your money. You might as well enjoy it."

David laughed. For a moment he had forgotten this trip was supposed to be fun. The first few days on the river had been easy, no real rapids, just a relaxing drift down the canyon. But today was different, multiple series of big rapids culminating in nearly capsizing and losing Judy. It had scared him. He realized the river now intimidated him. To begin having fun again, he needed to change his attitude. He looked across at Afram who was laughing to himself about something. He looked back at Sam and Becky who seemed more concerned with each other than the river. Even Judy, if he had to describe her, seemed more excited than scared, as if she had just completed her first sky dive or bungee jump. He seemed to be the only one freaked out.

David willed himself to relax. He had organized this trip. It was his idea. Besides, they weren't even halfway done yet. They had a week to go. He forced himself to remember the way they had looked forward to the trip, the nights spent camping on the beach, the lazy days floating. He remembered craving the rapids. The memory was like the clouds parting and the sun breaking through. He would enjoy this trip. No, he would love it. It was just a river, and thousands ran it every year. Then, just when David started to relax, he was jerked out of his thoughts.

"Get ready, rafters," Keller yelled. "Another jewel. This one is called Turquoise. It doesn't look too bad, but last year it flipped us. Right side paddle! Left side paddle!"

* * *

5:00 p.m. - Grand Canyon (North Rim), Arizona.

The man reached the crest of the long hike at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. He turned and looked across to the South Rim on the other side, and down to the river below. The eight-mile trek from the river left him both winded and exhilarated. Spending a night in the canyon before he started his quest had been a great idea. There was a good possibility he would not survive to do it again. And even if he did, it was unlikely that he would be free to hike around in the Grand Canyon. No, this was almost certainly his last hike up the canyon, and he had enjoyed it tremendously. He had taken his time, stopping often to look at plants and the panoramic views. As he envisioned, the time had strengthened his resolve to do what he had to do.

The only difficult part had been seeing the other hikers. Would they be able to get out in time? He had not foreseen his concern for others. They were similar to him. Not as knowledgeable, of course, especially about the politics and environmental damage caused by the dams. But like him, they loved the canyon, and the river. Many of them were environmentalists like himself.

Surprisingly, he had been unable to make eye contact with them, and had avoided interaction when possible. Killing individuals was an unfortunate outcome of what he had to do. He was uncomfortable with it, and wished it were not necessary. Or if it was necessary, why did it have to be other environmentalists, instead of the bureaucrats who built the dams and screwed up the river? He would feel much less guilt about killing them. A scene played in his mind where a giant wave of water washed over the top of a large yacht, while dozens of bureaucrats on deck raised their arms to fend off the water and their ultimate death. That scene felt good. Unfortunately, the politicians were in Washington, not on a yacht in the river. It was his people down by the river.

He likened himself to a general sending his soldiers to battle. He hopes they all will live, takes every possible precaution, but knows inevitably some will die. He knew exactly how this great responsibility felt. It was a heavy burden.

Finally, unable to enjoy the scenery any longer, he turned and walked into the parking lot. When he reached his pickup, he removed his backpack and laid it carefully in the bed of the truck, careful not to jar the detonators. The truck was a late-model, three-quarter-ton white Chevrolet Silverado pickup. He rummaged in one of the side pockets of the backpack and found his keys. After opening the door, he transferred the backpack to the front, and climbed in. He grabbed a fresh t-shirt out of the bag on the floor and changed out of the sweaty one he had worn in the canyon.

With a twist of the key, he started the truck and backed out. As he drove to the end of the line of parked cars, he was afforded one more glimpse of the canyon. He slowed. The view was awe-inspiring. He never tired of it. He wondered how different it would look in the morning. He had a long drive ahead, so he resisted the temptation to stay for an extended look. Instead, he turned and headed north toward the exit.

Tonight would be a marathon. There was much to accomplish. Many things could go wrong. If everything proceeded as planned, the Grand Canyon would never be the same. He would do something that environmentalists would talk about for decades. The Colorado River would run wild in the canyon once more. His spine tingled at the thought. Exiting the parking lot, he accelerated up to speed.

* * *

5:30 p.m. - Denver, Colorado

Grant walked in from the garage, slammed the door, and threw his briefcase on the couch. He was unbuttoning his shirt as he walked down the hallway toward his bedroom.

His wife Melanie poked her head out of their son's room. She looked concerned. Doors were almost never slammed at the Stevens' home. "What's wrong?"

Grant gritted his teeth. "Guess."

She looked confused.

"What've I been preparing for for weeks?" he added.

Her face showed shock. She held both her hands up to her face. "Kenya?"

He didn't say anything. He walked past her into the bedroom where he removed his shirt and threw it at the hamper.

She followed him into the bedroom and put her hands on her hips. "What happened? They can't just take that away from you. What about your vacation?" She reached out and put a hand on his arm.

He grabbed a worn t-shirt from a drawer and pulled it over his head. "Oh, the Bureau'll reimburse my personal expenses for the vacation."

She shrugged. "Well, at least . . ." Her voice tapered off.

At 38, his wife Melanie was still a beautiful woman. He could see the compassion in her eyes. Her face, always her greatest asset, had stayed young over the eighteen years of marriage. Her eyes twinkled, she had perfect teeth, and you had to look close to see the grays mixed in with her blond hair.

She grabbed his shoulder. "Who decided this? Is this Howard's doing?"

"It's hard to tell." He kicked off his shoes. "He's the one who told me." He talked while removing his slacks and replacing them with a pair of worn Levis. "He told me Roland decided that Howard couldn't be in charge with everyone else gone. Howard said they made him take vacation."

She smiled and reached up to hug him. "So they're leaving you in charge? That's good. Isn't it?"

Grant glared at her. "In charge of what? That's the whole point of Kenya. There's nothing to do here." He pointed east as if Kenya were only a couple miles away. "There are going to be engineers there, real engineers with real projects. I was going to work with the Chinese from Three Gorges." He pressed his fingers into his forehead, rubbing up and down.

She reached around his waist and pulled him close. "Look, I know how disappointed you are." She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. "But this could end up being a good thing for you."

He rolled his eyes at his wife--the eternal optimist.

She jerked him closer and raised one eyebrow, mimicking John Belushi. "They sent Howard away so he wouldn't bother you. Maybe they're on to him."

Grant shook his head. "Maybe it was Howard's idea and he's blaming it on Roland." He pulled away from her and headed back toward the family room.

She followed, still talking. "Why don't you call Roland and find out?"

He stopped and turned around. "Yeah, right."

"Why not?" she asked.

His wife thought he could fix anything just by talking to the right person. She had been out of the workforce too long. In business, some things were intentionally not communicated. "I'm not calling Roland."

He walked into the family room and grabbed the remote, then headed for the lazy-boy. After pushing back, he closed his eyes. Melanie wanted him to get rid of the chair, but over the years it had worn into the exact shape of his body. The feeling was one of comfort and security. In that chair, he could deal with anything life threw at him.

"Well, one advantage," Melanie said carefully, "is that now we can use the week of vacation for the family."

The last thing he wanted to talk about was where to vacation instead of Africa. "Whatever," he responded without opening his eyes.

"Isn't there someplace else you want to go?"

Why was she doing this to him? He opened his eyes and looked at her. "Hmm. How about we go to Australia, spend some time in the outback checking out crocodiles? We could hit the Great Barrier Reef while we're there. Hey I know, how about Mount Everest? We could fly into Nepal, then--"

She recoiled. "I'm trying to be serious."

"So am I," he retorted, a little too aggressively.

"Well, if you're going to act like . . ." She turned and walked into the kitchen.

Grant felt guilty for snapping at her. It wasn't her fault. She was just trying to put a positive spin on it. He knew he should chase after her and apologize, but he didn't have the energy. Not now. Besides, getting up out of the chair at the moment was unthinkable. He vowed to make up with her later. But at that moment he needed to be left alone.

He reclined and glanced around the room. He guessed it looked like any other middle-class TV room in Denver. A thirty-two inch TV sat in the cabinet, not a big-screen. The couch reclined, but the kids had broken the left side, so it slouched slightly. The veneer coffee table was nice enough, but didn't match the oak entertainment center, something that bothered his wife, but Grant couldn't care less about. Everything about the room was unremarkable.

When he thought about it, he realized he didn't know a single person who'd been on an African safari. That would have been something different, something special. Now what? Would they spend a couple days camping and roasting wieners instead? In Africa, he had a chance to see an elephant in the wild, or a cheetah. Now, if he was lucky he might see a jackrabbit. Then there was work. Talking to the Chinese engineers could have made up for a year of paperwork. Now what? For all the excitement he expected in the next couple of weeks, he could manage the Bureau from his recliner.

He leaned back in the chair and aimed the remote at the TV. The channel came up on some court TV show. He flipped through various channels, seeing nothing that interested him. He passed a channel showing an expanse of water he recognized. He went back to it. It was LakePowell. The camera panned across the horizon of the lake, showing the red rock cliffs surrounding a large bay. It zoomed slightly and focused on a large rock formation that Grant recognized as Castle Rock, which separated WahweapBay from WarmSpringsBay. Two houseboats meandered through a shallow cut between the two bays. He turned up the volume so he could hear the woman reporter.

"The below-normal spring runoff in the west has contributed to what was already a multi-year drought."

The camera, again panning the horizon, zoomed quickly to a narrow rock channel snaking back and forth. A water-ski boat motored next to the vertical rock cliffs.

"As you can see, water levels at LakePowell are well below normal."

The reporter referred to a bleached white band surrounding the lake. The contrast between the red rock and the white band left no doubt as to where the water levels had previously been. Grant didn't remember ever seeing the lake that low.

"Water allocation, already a problem on the Colorado River, has become more complicated."

The camera angle, obviously shot from a helicopter, showed the upstream side of the Glen Canyon Dam. In one fluid motion the helicopter flew over the crest, allowing viewers to look straight down the face of the six-hundred-foot dam. The next camera angle showed the dam with LakePowell stretching for miles behind it. The GlenCanyonBridge, a modern, silver-arched structure just downstream from the dam, stretched across the top of the screen, and framed the view perfectly.

While working at the Bureau for the last eighteen years, Grant had traveled to the Glen Canyon Dam many times. Like every civil engineer, he loved to look at it. However, in spite of his many visits, he had never actually been on the lake. His wife wanted to know where to vacation; maybe LakePowell was the answer. They could rent a houseboat and get lost on the lake for a week. Of course he didn't have a ski boat or any equipment, but he supposed you could rent all that stuff.

The reporter continued. "Although the Glen Canyon Dam is equipped with eight huge turbines, capable of generating enough power for over a million homes, low water has limited releases from the dam, forcing the Bureau of Reclamation to shut off four of the turbines. This has added to the power shortage in the west, just when households need it the most, during the air conditioning season."

Grant tried to remember the name of the new guy in charge of operations at GlenCanyon. Wasn't he scheduled to be at the symposium in Kenya? Maybe he could take Grant's spot at the Three Gorges discussion. Gee, maybe he could even take Grant's place on the safari.

The TV showed an aerial shot of another huge concrete dam, which Grant immediately recognized. "Similar circumstances exist downstream at Lake Mead and Hoover Dam - water levels and power output are both below normal."

The television showed the reporter in studio. She was a striking blond in a blue business suit worn over a red blouse. Her lipstick matched the blouse. A large flat screen monitor behind the reporter showed a close-up of a three-story houseboat towing two water-ski boats. The exposed part of the second deck carried six personal watercraft, with a large crane to lower them into the water. On the top deck, four bikini-clad women waved to the camera. Grant tried to focus on one, but the reporter's head moved in front of the scene.

The reporter furrowed her brows and looked directly into the camera. "The drought has everyone along the Colorado River nervous, especially the farmers. There are reports of cattle farmers in Utah and Arizona selling out due to lack of water for their herds."

A man's voice spoke, and the camera panned to show another reporter on the woman's right side. "Laura, how much rain do they need?"

She glanced at him for a second, before looking back at the camera. "That's a good question, Jim. The people I talked to at the Bureau of Reclamation say it rarely rains around these dams, that the Colorado River comes mostly from snow pack in the Rocky Mountains, not from rain."

The man turned to the camera. "So this problem isn't likely to get solved anytime soon then, is it?"

The camera zoomed in on the woman again. She shook her head, then stared into the camera. "No, Jim. It will take a wet winter, or more realistically, more than one, to get water levels back to normal on the Colorado."

The camera now moved to the male reporter. "Thanks for the report, Laura. In other news, a neighborhood in Boulder is suing the city for not responding to their complaints about -"

Grant pressed the button on the remote to shut off the TV. He stared blankly at the dark screen. Although he already knew the west was in another drought, he hadn't actually seen pictures of LakePowell. The low levels had shocked him, especially the one showing the boats passing through the cut next to Castle Rock. Normally that whole area was underwater. He remembered seeing low water before, but only in the fall, never in June. At this rate, by the end of the summer, the Castle Rock channel would be impassable, forcing boats to go the long way around Antelope Island, through the main river channel, an extra sixteen miles around from the marina.

He sat in his chair for a while, thinking. Finally he stood and walked into the kitchen. He took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water from the sink. He held it up and looked through it, before taking a drink. Out the window, excess water from his neighbor's sprinklers sprayed into the street. A small rainbow sparkled in the mist. Water ran across the sidewalk and into the gutter. Grant leaned forward and looked up and down the neighborhood. His neighbors all kept their lawns watered and green. He wondered how many of his neighbors were concerned about a water shortage in the west.

It was not unusual for the Colorado River to be in drought conditions. After all, the Colorado and its tributaries watered the bulk of the southwestern states, from Wyoming to California, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. Grant knew about the drought even before the reporter said so. But obviously his neighbors either didn't know, or didn't care.

He glanced sideways and saw his wife bent over rearranging stuff in the fridge. With the khaki shorts hiked up her legs, he could see the contrast between the beginnings of her summer tan and the white flesh above. The position emphasized the muscles in her legs.

He went to her and placed his hands on the back of her thighs. She jumped then straightened up. When she was upright he let his hands go under her shirt to her stomach in an embrace from behind. She leaned her head back on his shoulder.

"What happened to mad Grant?" she asked

"He's still here."

She smiled. "Let's try not to wake him up, then."

She turned around and faced him, putting her arms around his neck. Her lips were very close to his. "I'm sorry about your safari."

He pulled back. "It was more than a safari. I would have had a whole week with the Chinese engineers."

She pulled him back. "I'm sorry about everything."

She reached up and kissed him, a tender kiss of compassion. He pulled her close and kissed her back.

"They'll be gone a week, right?" she asked.

He nodded.

"Maybe we can have a safari here."

"What do you mean?"

She smiled mischievously. "You'll see."

CHAPTER 3

6:00 p.m. - Lake Powell, Utah

Julie Crawford and Erika Sanders paddled their kayak leisurely along a stretch of water next to the cliffs in an isolated rock canyon. The yellow kayak was the sit-on-top variety, and had been purchased specifically for LakePowell. It was especially fun in the late afternoons when they could paddle next to the cliffs and stay in the shade. Their water-ski boat was resting, tied to the houseboat, which in turn was tied to the rocky shore only a hundred feet away. Their husbands, along with Max and Darlene, were lounging under the shaded deck of the houseboat.

The two women stopped paddling. Julie dipped her hand in the water, and wiped the wetness on her cheeks. "Man, can you imagine being out here before the lake was here, when it was dry?"

Erika nodded. "Yuk. I'd die. I already feel like I'm going to burn up if I don't get in the water every few minutes." She pointed at the others. "I can't believe they're not in here too." She looked over her shoulder at Julie. "By the way, how long will we be out of the water tomorrow while we're hiking?"

The plan for the next day included an excursion to "Hole in the Rock", a spot made famous by a group of pioneers in the 1800s who were looking for a shortcut. They had blasted a trail and transported their oxen and covered wagons down a mile-long grade to the Colorado River. Although the bottom of the original grade was buried under LakePowell, Hole in the Rock was a popular spot. Hikers who could manage the steep climb were rewarded with a panoramic view, a monument, and a close-up perspective of what it would have been like to move oxen and wagons down the hill. The husbands had hiked to the spot before, but Julie and Erika never had.

"I think Greg said it was about an hour to the top."

Erika considered the information. "So an hour up and an hour down. That's two hours out of the water. What if I die?"

Julie laughed. "Going down shouldn't take as long as hiking up. Although, I guess if we rest for a while at the top, we might still be out of the water for two hours."

Erika rolled her eyes.

Julie pointed toward the houseboat. "That's why Greg's making us leave so early in the morning. We'll get up there and hike it before it gets too hot, and be back by noon."

"I think Darlene has the right idea," Erika said.

"There will be plenty of time during the week to sit around and read," Julie argued.

Max and Darlene had elected to stay behind the next morning. Darlene said she was too fat to climb the hill. The other two couples had argued with them, but to no avail. Darlene could stand to lose a few pounds and the hike was just what she needed. It would do her good. Greg had even suggested they modify the plan to go someplace less strenuous, like some of the rock cathedrals up the Escalante Branch of the lake, but both Max and Darlene had declined, insisting that the two younger couples needed some time together. Julie suspected that Darlene was already absorbed in her book, a romance novel.

"And we're stopping at Rainbow after?" Erica asked.

Julie shook her head. "No, before. On the way."

Since the trip to Hole in the Rock ran right past RainbowBridge, they planned on a quick stop to see the huge rock arch as part of the next morning's activities. Rainbow was by far the most famous attraction at LakePowell, and was visited by almost two hundred thousand tourists every year.

"Wouldn't the hike be cooler if we did it first, before Rainbow?"

Julie had wondered the same thing. "Yeah. I agree. But Greg says if we try to stop on the way back, the tour boats will already be there and it'll be too crowded. Plus we would be all sweaty."

In the summer, large boats from Wahweap and Bullfrog Marinas arrived at RainbowBridge by 10 a.m., spilling tourists out and changing the serene atmosphere to one more like Disneyland. Julie had been there at the same time as the big boats before and agreed that it ruined the experience.

Erika nodded as if that made sense. "Are we going to ski on the way?"

"We could, but it would take longer. Ya know, all the stops and everything. Besides, it's no fun to ski in the main channel. It's too rough."

Erika flicked some hair off her face. "I remember Rainbow being huge. How tall is it?"

"I don't remember the exact dimensions; I think around three hundred feet high. They say you could fly a 747 through it."

Erika reached down in the water then ran her fingers through her hair. "Isn't it one of the seven natural wonders of the world?"

"I don't know about that, but I read that before GlenCanyon was flooded, only a couple thousand people ever saw it, not counting the Navajos. It was so remote. The hike down to it was over twenty miles in burning heat. Many of them rode mules. When environmentalists protested the flooding of GlenCanyon, the government pointed out that most of the protesters had never even seen the arch. The environmentalists couldn't even argue. Now, supposedly, over a hundred thousand people see it every year."

"Not as remote as it used to be, huh?" Erika said.

Julie slid over and let herself drop off the kayak into the water. Erika followed. While Erika held on, Julie dove underwater to wet her hair.

Julie swam back and draped her arms over the kayak like Erika. "You'd think the environmentalists would be happy that the area is more accessible. I mean, I understand they covered up some stuff with the water, but at least now, people can get there."

Erika cocked her head. "That's not the way they think. They don't want people to see it, or enjoy it. Didn't you hear? They want to eliminate cars from Yosemite, and snowmobiles from Yellowstone. They want to ban motorcycles from the desert. They use words like undisturbed, and pristine. They think that only they should be able to see it. The rest of us should be satisfied with pictures."

Julie smiled. "Wow, I didn't know you felt so strong about it."

Erika continued, "You know why it pisses me off? Because I consider myself an environmentalist. I'm against big businesses dumping garbage into the rivers, air pollution, and all that other stuff. But the environmentalists in the news are over the top. Shutting down logging over an owl, sleeping in trees, lying in front of bulldozers and trains. They're nuts. They believe we should pretend there aren't millions of people in America. Environmentalists are giving environmentalism a bad name."

Julie laughed. "Ya know, I never looked at it like that. But, when it comes down to it, I feel the same way. I don't litter. I recycle. Aren't I an environmentalist?"

Erika laughed. "Not in their minds. You're a heathen. You drive a car; actually, worse - a pickup. You live in a neighborhood." She gasped and cupped her hand over her mouth. "You eat meat, you sicko. And worst of all, you take hot showers with soap and scented shampoos, every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Don't you know that to be a true environmentalist you have to wear one of those dyed tee-shirts with weird colors, use a blue bandana to tie up your unwashed, uncombed hair, and let the hair grow out in your armpits and on your legs?" Erika wagged her finger. "No. You are not, and never will be, a true environmentalist."

Julie held up her arm and looked at her cleanly shaved armpit. "No, I guess not."

* * *

6:30 p.m. - Hoover Dam, outside Las Vegas, Nevada

Fred Grainger stood behind the computer technician in the control room at Hoover Dam. The control room was located on the downstream side of the dam just above river level. Fred, the site supervisor, had worked there for twenty-two years. At 53, he was the oldest guy at Hoover. Actually, that was only true if you counted the people who took care of the dam and were employed by the Bureau of Reclamation. There were many others, guides and even a few security guards that were older than Fred. But Fred considered them another group.

Jeremy Rottingham, the technician in front of Fred, stopped typing and turned around. "Just got a down request from California Edison. Want me to turn down Arizona or Nevada?"

Fred's group was responsible for monitoring power needs from locations throughout the western United States and adjusting electricity generation accordingly. Basically, all major dam controls at Hoover were his responsibility. There were two generation plants, one on the Nevada side of the river, and one on the Arizona side, hence Jeremy's question of which plant to throttle down.

"Which one is hotter?"

"Nevada, but not by much."

"Let's take it out of Arizona, then; she carried the load yesterday."

Jeremy made the necessary adjustments with the keyboard. The computer handled the rest of the job. Most of the controls at Hoover had been automated. The technicians set the amount of power that they wanted from each plant and the computer did the rest. The rest entailed adjusting water flow through the penstocks to each generator to determine power output. Penstocks were the huge tubes that carried water to each generator. At Hoover, each penstock was thirteen feet in diameter. Nine generators were housed in the Arizona plant and eight in the Nevada plant. Each generator rose over seven stories high and was capable of powering 100,000 homes. With all seventeen generators running, Hoover could power a respectable portion of the West.

"Aren't you out tomorrow?" Jeremy asked.

Fred shook his head. "No, that's next week."

Fred had scheduled a few days off. He had accrued too many days of vacation, and if he did not use them by the end of June, he would lose them. He had lost unused vacation days before, something that bothered his wife more than him.

"Where are you going?" Jeremy asked.

Fred moaned. "Nowhere special. The wife wants me to take her to see the inside of the new casinos. There are a couple of new ones that've been open for over a year that she still hasn't seen. The inside of one of them is supposed to be pretty cool. Least that's what she's heard. You been in 'em yet?"

Jeremy shook his head. "Nah, I spend all of my gambling time downtown. The odds are better in the smaller casinos."

"You gamble? I thought technical folks didn't gamble."

"I dabble. Craps is a statistics game. If you know the rules and when to bet, you can increase your odds."

Fred laughed. "You can increase your odds even more if you don't gamble."

Fred looked over Jeremy's shoulder at one of the readouts. "Did you turn down Parker?"

"Yeah, about an hour ago."

Parker and Davis Dams were downstream from Hoover, but Fred's group controlled both via microwave communication from the Hoover control center. Davis Dam, almost seventy miles downstream from Hoover, created LakeMojave, and Parker Dam, another ninety miles farther, created LakeHavasu. Hoover of course, held back Lake Mead, the largest man-made lake in the United States. At over 110 miles long, with 9.3 trillion gallons, Lake Mead would cover the state of Pennsylvania with a foot of water. From the control room where they sat, Fred controlled the lion's share of the water in the lower Colorado River system.

"No adjustment requests for Davis yet this evening?" asked Fred.

"Not yet, but I expect one any minute," Jeremy replied.

Fred turned to go. "All right, I'm gonna take a break for dinner."

"Okay, boss."

Fred took his lunch box from his desk in the control room and ambled down two stories of stairs out of the central plant. Walking through a hallway deep in the heart of the dam, he came to the elevator. He used his personal key to call it, then waited for it to arrive. He would have dinner on top tonight. He needed some air and wanted to enjoy what was left of the sun. The elevator took a few minutes to cover the six hundred vertical feet to the top of the dam. Unlike elevators in high-rise office buildings, he could feel this one accelerate up to speed. He was glad his wife wasn't with him. It would have made her nauseous. When the doors opened, he shielded his eyes. He had forgotten his sunglasses. He stepped out of the elevator and made sure the elevator was locked.

Summers were always crowded at Hoover. Over a million people visited the dam annually. Since there were no major bridges across the Colorado River in the area, US-93 used Hoover as the bridge between Nevada and Arizona. The result was millions more people crossing the dam each year in cars.

Fred waited for a break in the traffic, and then crossed to the upstream side of the dam. He then headed west toward the Nevada shore, where the visitor center was located. His walk was on a slightly elevated sidewalk with a concrete rail to keep him from falling into the lake. The walk along the rail offered a spectacular view of Lake Mead. Every now and then, Fred had to step down off the sidewalk into the road to get around a family or groups of tourists looking over the handrail. As he walked, he passed a concrete walkway that went straight out into the lake on his right. The walkway, blocked by a chain, led to two huge column-shaped towers. The first tower was about one hundred feet away from the dam and the second another hundred feet beyond the first.

The two towers, and the two just like them on the Arizona side, were intake towers. Their purpose was to collect the water being routed to the turbines for generating electricity. The towers did not pull water from the surface, however. They pulled water from two inlets at depths of two hundred fifty feet and three hundred fifty feet. Pulling water from those depths avoided sucking fish and other debris into the turbines.

When Fred neared the west end of the dam, he followed the edge of the dam around to the right. The sidewalk now took him away from the bulk of the crowds and past the old visitor center on his left and the snack bar on his right. Walking through the employee parking lot, he was now headed upstream on the Nevada bank of Lake Mead. The Nevada intake towers were still on his right. Up in front of him on the other side of the parking lot was the Nevada spillway.

He found a bench that offered a good view of the spillway and the lake, then opened his lunchbox. He inspected the contents, wondering what kind of sandwich his wife had made, and was pleasantly surprised to find tuna. She must have run out of lunchmeat, the usual.

As Fred ate, he studied the spillway. The tops of the spillways were twenty-seven feet below the crest of the dam. Each spillway, one on the Nevada side and one on the Arizona side, fed enormous fifty-foot-diameter spillway tunnels that disappeared into the canyon walls and exited at river level downstream from the dam. In front of each spillway tunnel was a large trough or ditch about one hundred fifty feet long with concrete walls on both sides to keep water out until the levels rose high enough to flow over, or spill into the spillways. In fact, Hoover's spillways were equipped with metal gates that rose automatically with high water, forcing the water another sixteen feet higher before it was allowed to flow into the spillways.

Since the dam was built in 1935, only twice had the water been high enough to flow into the spillways: once, when the dam was first filled, and again in 1983, when high snowmelt in Utah and Colorado caused both Lake Powell and Lake Mead water levels to rise.

Fred had witnessed 1983. Lake Mead had risen high enough that four feet of water flowed over the metal gates into the spillways for 60 days. He remembered it as quite a spectacle. During that year the Nevada and Arizona spillways together dumped twenty eight thousand cubic feet per second of water, more than doubling the normal Hoover Dam output. This, however, was less than five percent of the capacity of the spillways, which together could theoretically handle about four hundred thousand cubic feet per second, although that had never been tested.

As Fred studied the spillways, he wondered what it would be like to see them perform to their potential. That was why he ate here. He liked to imagine seeing that much water blasting down the huge hole. Just thinking about it made him shiver. He wondered if he would dare stand so close, or whether he would feel inclined to stand back a little. Although he considered it unlikely, he wondered if Hoover's spillways would ever reach their potential. Maybe a huge flood in the Rocky Mountains would do it, but it would have to be a big one.

After Fred finished his sandwich, he stood and walked over to the fence. He looked right down the fifty-foot hole. He'd give anything to see the spillways at their full capacity. After staring for a few minutes, he blinked, then turned and walked away, back toward the dam. Unfortunately, it didn't matter how bad Fred wanted to see it, because there was no way it would ever happen in his lifetime.

CHAPTER 4

7:00 p.m. - Page, Arizona

As the man's car rounded the hill, the car in front slowed on the descent, forcing him to slow as well. As both cars drove onto the bridge, he glanced left and got his first good look at Glen Canyon Dam, his first look in the last several months anyway. It was always impressive, even though he couldn't see all six hundred feet down to the river from his angle on the bridge.

Although he hadn't been to the dam for several months, he had seen it many times before. He had spent almost a year studying it and for one three-month period, he had spent almost every weekend in Page, Arizona. He took the tours on and in the dam, he hiked up on the hills and looked at it, he bought books which he read and re-read, attended lectures, and talked to everyone he could about how the dam worked. He even rented a boat and motored down next to it, although a barricade of buoys prevented him from getting as close as he wanted.

As long as he could remember, he had always wished he could blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. But then, many others before him had wanted to do the same, yet the dam was still there. If it were easy, someone else would have already done it.

During the months of planning, he came up with numerous ideas to destroy it; unfortunately, none of them were practical or feasible. His favorite idea had been the one from Edward Abbey's "Monkey Wrench Gang", where houseboats were loaded with explosives, floated down toward the dam, and detonated on impact. The skinny man was no genius, but even he knew that wouldn't work. An explosion on the outside of the dam wouldn't be enough. Even an airliner crash, like September 11th, wouldn't work. There was just too much concrete: sixty feet thick at the top, and 300 feet thick at the base. The airliner would just splat on the concrete and then slide down to the river below. Most people thought of concrete dams as walls, but that wasn't really true. Most dams were built more like pyramids. One couldn't hope to topple a pyramid from the outside. If you were to have any chance at all, you needed to blow it up from the inside. Even Abbey knew that.

That led to all kinds of crazy ideas, like what if you sent a torpedo down one of the intake towers, so that it detonates inside the water works. But that would require an incredibly sophisticated bomb, tons of money, and, frankly, technology that he didn't understand. Besides, that level of sophistication would require that he work with others, something he was unwilling to do. He realized his lack of social skills, and his inability to include others without getting caught. No, if this were to be done, it would have to be done by him, alone.

So he kept coming to Page. He knew there was a good idea out there somewhere. He just hadn't figured it out yet. He continued to research and study. He spent hours up on the hills, staring at it. One week, while home in Las Vegas, he overheard someone talking about listening to the police using a scanner from Radio Shack. After that, every time he watched the dam, he listened to a scanner while he watched. He listened to the tour guides talking to each other. He listened to the operators and technicians at the dam. And most valuably, he listened to the security guards talk to each other.

He listened every weekend for almost a month. He learned all the guards' names, their interests, and their wives' and girlfriends' names. He actually started to feel like he knew them after a while. Then one night he heard something that gave him an idea, an idea that had grown with time. An idea that eventually had grown into a plan, a plan that tonight would be executed. Tonight would test both the worthiness of the idea, and his ability to execute it. A few hours from now, there would be no turning back.

After the slow car crossed the bridge, it turned left onto a lookout point. The skinny man had spent many hours at that lookout. But tonight he had other plans. He accelerated up the hill. The highway veered right, and he saw the city of Page on top of the knoll.

Suddenly, he wondered if his stuff had been discovered. What if the police were waiting? An ambush? When he turned left on

Navajo Drive

, he scanned the streets carefully. If he saw someone, he could just drive on, and hope they couldn't tie him to anything. Boat storage and repair shops lined the street. But, he saw no police cruisers, which allowed him to relax.

Almost a half mile down Navajo, he turned left onto a small unmarked street, then a hundred yards later he pulled up to a chain link gate and stopped. A rusted sign on the gate said "PETERSEN SELF-STORAGE - Authorized Access Only". The skinny man put the truck in park and climbed out. He stretched. The drive from the Grand Canyon had taken just over two and a half hours. He walked over to the gate and inserted a key from his key ring into the huge padlock. When he rented the garage in the facility, over six months before, the owner had apologized for the padlock, saying that he would install security cards and an electric gate. But he knew better, even then. The owner was filthy and the whole place looked ratty and run down. Any upgrades would have been out of character.

After unlocking the gate and swinging it out of the way, he pulled the truck inside and relocked the gate. Driving all the way to the back, past all the boats and motor homes to a row of rundown garages, he veered left at the end of the row, went another twenty yards, then parked in front of number seven.

As he jumped out of the truck, he instinctively scanned in all directions. He fingered through his keys again and found the one for the second padlock, which he inserted in the lock on number seven. What if they were waiting for him inside the compartment? The thought made him tense. But the lock was dusty, making an ambush from inside unlikely. Nevertheless, he carefully scanned inside as he rolled up the door, and let the evening sun shine into the contents of the compartment.

In contrast to the rest of Petersen Self-Storage, the inside of number seven was spotless. A large enclosed utility trailer was the only obvious occupant. The skinny man flipped on a light switch, lighting a single incandescent bulb, then pulled the door down behind him. Now completely secluded, he plugged a new orange extension cord into the outlet under the light switch and the whole compartment was bathed in fluorescent light from three separate fixtures, one above each side of the trailer, and one behind. The lights were his first improvement to the compartment. It was impossible to do precision work with bad light.

He walked behind the trailer and saw the motorcycle was still there, helmet, gloves and leather jacket still sitting on the seat. He wondered if he should start it up and make sure it still ran, but that could wait. He instead found a third key and inserted it in the lock on the back of the utility trailer. The utility trailer was top-of-the-line. The sides and top were white metal panels, connected at the corners by rounded aluminum. The front top corners were beveled, round silver pieces. After removing the padlock on the back, he rotated a cast handle at the bottom of each door, which in turn maneuvered large vertical brackets that went all the way to the top of the doors, just like on the back of every eighteen-wheeler on the road.

The inside of the trailer seemed much smaller than the outside. Like the garage, the inside of the trailer was immaculate. Black metal tool cabinets lined the left side, and on the right were a mixture of implements, including a small ladder, a stack of bright orange highway construction cones, a lab stool, a hard hat, a coiled extension cord, and a separate coiled utility light. Notably, each one of the items on the right had a special bracket or shelf designed to fit it exactly. Even the ladder slid into a long compartment along the bottom.

The man ignored the items on the right, and the black metal drawers on the left. Instead, he stepped immediately past them to a small, knee-high, white utility box. Carefully he bent down and looked closely at where the top left rear corner of the box met the wall. He craned his neck until his eyes were inches away, then slowly a smile broke across what had been a tense face. Nobody had disturbed it. He reached down and retrieved the single hair stuck between the utility box and the wall. They didn't know.

DAY TWO

Tuesday, June 22

CHAPTER 5

4:00 a.m. - Page, Arizona

The man turned off the alarm on his watch. It had been unnecessary because he was already awake and about. Sleep had been impossible, which was something he should have guessed before such a big day. However, he needed to perform flawlessly, in spite of the lack of sleep. Looking back, he should have considered sleeping pills, to guarantee he would be rested.

The fluorescent lights fully illuminated the storage compartment. He only had a few more things to do, the next of which was to put the stickers on the trailer. They were about the size of a soccer ball. He removed the adhesive backing, and then placed one sticker on each side of the trailer. He stepped back and studied his work. He considered it a perfect rendition. The logo was simple, and had not been difficult to re-create. The designer in Las Vegas told him that his picture taken with a telephoto lens was of adequate resolution, and that the company's logo was simple anyway. He had two additional logos for the sides of the truck, although they were bigger, more like the size of a basketball, and made of a magnetic material.

He looked around the compartment and decided everything was ready. He knew he should sit tight, but he felt too jittery to remain in the compartment any longer. Extinguishing the lights, he opened the garage's sliding door and looked out into the dark desert sky. In spite of the outdoor lights at the storage facility, the stars were clearly visible over the silhouettes of the boats and motor homes. The desert air was stifling even so early in the morning - between 85 and 90 degrees, he guessed. He placed the magnetic logos on the truck doors and was surprised at how hard they pulled when he held them close to the metal. He climbed in the truck, started the engine, and the headlights came on automatically. He would have preferred they had not, and hoped that no one else noticed.

He maneuvered the truck into a better position to hook up the trailer, and then turned off the engine to kill the lights. Rolling the trailer forward enough to line up the hitch was no easy matter. In fact, for a moment he panicked and thought he wasn't strong enough to do it. However, after he strained and got it moving, it lined up perfectly over the ball. He hooked up the trailer lights, but passed on the safety chain. It would be a short trip.

He jumped back in the truck and carefully pulled the trailer out of the garage. This time he left the truck running when he climbed out. He shut off the lights inside the storage compartment, which was now empty except for the motorcycle, and pulled down the door. He considered leaving it unlocked for later, but changed his mind and relocked the padlock. Back in the truck, he drove slowly up to the front gate. He left it running while he jumped out and opened the gate.

As he turned off

Navajo Drive

and headed down the hill, he could see the brightly-lit Glen Canyon Dam. Even from miles away, the sight of it stirred strong feelings in him. He hated the dam, how it had screwed up the Colorado River, and buried GlenCanyon. But in spite of his feelings, he had to admit the dam was an amazing structure, one of the most amazing he had ever seen. It made him doubt what he was about to do. How likely was it really, that he could blow it up? The nagging notion that he had little chance caused him to consider giving up, to just keep driving, all the way back to Las Vegas, back to his 8-5 job, and back to a life without such unrealistic goals. Who was he anyway, to think he could pull it off?

As he passed over the bridge, however, and looked down on the dam, the hatred resurfaced. After all, this wasn't the first time he had argued with himself over this issue. Yes, there was risk that his plan wouldn't work. In fact, he admitted it was a long shot. But he had to try. The upside was too good. Unleashing the Colorado River would be a historic event, something that would be talked about for generations. And when it came down to it, there was no other way. No one else was willing to take the risk. Besides, how could he live with himself if he did not even try?

He turned into the visitor center parking, and reached over on the seat and touched the clipboard, making sure it was still there. He drove past the visitor center, and then almost a hundred yards farther until he reached the west access road to the dam itself. A solitary guard walked out of the guard shack. He stopped the truck and rolled down his window.

The guard shined a flashlight in his eyes. "What are you doing here?"

He shoved the clipboard toward the guard. "I'm from Jensen Industrial Elevators in Denver. You know, to service the west elevator." He pointed toward the dam.

The guard skimmed through the pages of the work order. "Nobody said anything to me about--"

The skinny man interrupted. "When I talked to Dan last night, he told me to get here early, so I'd be gone before the visitor center opens at 8:00 a.m." He looked at the guard's badge and saw the name Brian. What a lucky break. He knew Brian was the graveyard shift supervisor.

He reached his hand out the window. "You're Brian, aren't you? Dan told me you'd be in charge when I got here."

He had learned all of the security personnel's names from the scanner radio. He lied, of course, about talking to Dan the night before, but if he could convince the guard that it was approved, he might have a chance.

The guard stared at the work order. "Well, Dan didn't say anything to me."

The skinny man was ready for this comment. "Call him," he said, although that was the last thing he wanted him to do.

The guard looked at his watch and grimaced.

The skinny man knew what was going through his head. The guard did not want to call his boss so early in the morning and wake him up, not for something routine like elevator maintenance.

He finally looked up. "When did you talk to Dan?"

"He called us yesterday morning. Said the west elevator wasn't lining up correctly at the top. Said people were tripping over it. He wondered if we could fix it before the tours started this morning. I drove straight through from Denver last night."

The guard shook his head and looked back down at the work order. "Yeah, but he usually tells us when to expect somebody."

He could tell the guard was weakening. "It's kinda weird he didn't tell you. Like I said, feel free to call him and verify it if you need to."

The guard looked around as if he hoped someone might walk up and make the decision for him. He glanced down at the work order again, then shook his head. "Naw. I ain't gonna wake him up over this. Everything looks legit." He took a pen out and noted a time on the work order then handed it back. "How sure are you that you can be done and outta here before eight?"

The skinny man felt goose bumps rise on his arms and he wanted to yell out in exhilaration, but kept his voice monotone. "I won't know for sure until I get down there, but I don't see any reason why not."

He watched the guard walk over and unlock the huge metal gate and swing it open. He then put the truck back into gear and started through.

"Hey, wait a minute," the guard said.

His heart skipped. What had he seen? He stopped the truck. "Yeah?"

"Didn't your company used to use vans?"

He relaxed. It was a question he had anticipated. "Yeah, we just got these rigs. Now we don't have to take the trailers on the small jobs. Besides, this truck does a lot better on long hauls. Those vans were gutless on the highway."

The guard looked skeptical but finally nodded and waved him through. "I'll be down in a minute to open the doors."

He started down the road again. In his mirror he saw the guard swing the gate back and lock it. He drove down the short access road and onto the dam itself. He turned left and headed toward the west elevator shaft. Looking east across the dam, he could see a gate blocking access to the east side of the dam, and about a half dozen cars parked on the dam itself. He knew that they used the east side of the dam and the east elevator shaft for workers and kept the west side accessible for tours from the visitor center. He didn't expect to encounter anyone else on the west side during off hours.

When he reached the west elevator tower, he drove past it, then backed the trailer right up to the door, leaving only enough room to open the trailer doors. He waited while the guard walked down to open the gate. So far, so good.

He was out of the truck and waiting when the guard arrived. The man rummaged through a huge key ring for the proper key, then opened the large metal door. The skinny man stepped forward and used a shim to block it open. Both men walked into a small room, where the elevator doors sat. Instead of a button to call the elevator, it required a key.

The guard looked back at him, at the same time twisting another key off the ring. "I'll leave this one with you. You'll probably need it. If you go down to the bottom, be sure to take it or you won't be able to get back up." He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. "I'm sure you know all about that."

When the security man opened the elevator, he looked down at the floor and ran his foot over the seam. "It looks fine to me."

"It might be intermittent. I'll run her up and down a couple of times and see. If not, I'll adjust the switches anyway. That should fix it." His research on elevator maintenance suggested that adjusting the switches was the answer to almost everything.

The guard nodded, then handed him the key. "All right, I gotta get back to my post. I'll come back to check on you occasionally." He started off, then stopped and turned. "By the way, what'd you say your name was?"

The skinny man froze. He forgot the name he was supposed to use. The name "George" floated through his head, and he almost popped it out, which would have been a disaster since it would not have matched what was on the work order. The name was not George, but it sounded similar - Jerry, John . . . He suddenly remembered and blurted it out. "Jim. Nice to meet you."

The security man didn't seem to notice anything strange. "Good luck, Jim. Let me know if it starts looking like you won't be done by eight."

He nodded, and watched the guard walk away. He clenched his hand around the elevator key. He was in. Now the hard part.

* * *

5:00 a.m. - Page, Arizona

By 5:00 a.m., he had the control panel open in the elevator, exposing the wires. He placed cones around the back of the trailer to discourage anyone from walking in. He hoped the guard wouldn't come back until he finished what he needed to do.

Out of the tool belt on his waist, he pulled a disassembled cell phone that had been wired into a small circuit board. He had already tested the phone back in Vegas, and he knew his modifications would work. He placed the phone up high, almost to the ceiling of the elevator, then duct taped it to the wall. He checked the signal strength and saw three bars, which was good enough, something he had worried about. Sorting through the wires from the control panel of the elevator, he found the two he was looking for. He bared some of the insulation from the two wires and then clipped a wire to each from the circuit board. He then quickly replaced the control panel. After close inspection, he saw that everything looked normal except for the two wires connected to the cell phone and circuit board. If anyone looked up, they would think it was a bomb. However, he had no intentions of letting anyone see it.

Now things would get exciting. He walked outside and peeked around the back of the trailer at the guard shack. He could see the guard was still in the shack. He knew he didn't have much time. He hustled back into the trailer, and removed the false wall, where the night before he had retrieved the single hair. Before, with the false wall in place, someone could have noticed that the inside wasn't even half the size of the outside. However, he had not intended to let anyone get a good look.

Now with the panels gone, a dozen white metal fifty-gallon barrels were exposed, stacked three wide, two high, and two deep. He used a special dolly with a lift jack to grab the first barrel off the top row. When he first tried to move the barrels back in Vegas he was surprised at how heavy they were, hence the expensive dolly. He wheeled the barrel down a metal ramp out of the trailer and right into the elevator. Laying it down on its side on the floor he shoved the barrel's bottom against the back of the elevator. A few minutes later a whole row of barrels were lying on their sides against the back of the elevator. He was on his way back to get the next barrel when he heard the security guard's voice.

"Everything all right in there?"

The sound made him freeze. He wiped sweat off his forehead, then poked his head out from behind the trailer. The security man had walked down the access road onto the dam, but headed west toward the visitor center door instead of toward the elevator.

He yelled out to him, "Yeah, I'm just checking everything right now."

The man waved and kept walking toward the visitor center.

He increased his pace on the remaining barrels. Fifteen minutes later he had all twelve barrels stacked, four wide and three high, against the back of the elevator. The elevator sagged slightly at the weight and no longer lined up perfectly with the floor. With the last barrel in place he removed the clamp off one of the top barrels and removed the metal lid. The inside was packed tight with what looked like dirty white crystals or pellets. The smell of diesel invaded his nostrils when the lid came off. He removed the remaining lids and tossed them in the small room outside the elevator shaft, the smell of fuel now strong in the elevator.

He hustled back into the trailer twice and retrieved the footlocker on one trip, and a car battery on the next. He set the car battery under the elevator control panel, and then opened the footlocker. He pulled a metal tube almost eighteen inches long and an inch in diameter out of the box. The tube had two wires hanging out of it. He forcefully rammed it in one of the barrels until only the wires were visible. The motion dislodged white pellets which trickled to the floor. He took no notice, continuing working until all twelve barrels had wires hanging out of them. He then spent the next few minutes wiring them together. He finished by connecting them to the circuit board and finally to the car battery. When he connected the car battery, a red LED illuminated on the circuit board.

He took a moment to check his work. The materials he used were all readily available. The white pellets were the hardest to get, and required that he make a purchase in Utah, using his grandfather's name for their farm in southern Utah. Even the farm stores wouldn't sell that much fertilizer to a city boy. The ammonium nitrate fertilizer was common enough, if you had a good reason to buy it. Of course his grandfather was too old to notice that it never made it onto the fields.

Although he had heard about ammonium nitrate being used for bombs, most notably the OklahomaFederalBuilding, it had been a surprise to learn that ammonium nitrate was not the core of the bomb. The explosive part of the bomb was the diesel fuel itself. The ammonium nitrate only acted as an accelerant, providing an oxygen boost during the chemical reaction of the explosion. However, gasoline bombs, with and without the fertilizer, were not in the same league, as evidenced in Oklahoma, where the bomb sliced through ten stories of the Federal Building as if it were cut with a knife.

One of his biggest concerns for this bomb was channeling the explosive. Since the elevator shaft traveled down the downstream side of the dam, he needed the bulk of the explosion to be channeled upstream. That's why he pushed the barrels back against the back wall of the elevator, and left the fronts open. Explosions take the path of least resistance, and he hoped that the bomb would get plenty of upstream momentum before it hit the huge wall of concrete. It wouldn't do any good to blow the elevator shaft apart. He needed it focused upstream, to channel the explosion.

The detonators had been made using household chemicals and electronics. He had driven out in the desert one weekend and tried one and was surprised at how violent of an explosion the little suckers made. They needed to be pretty hot, to get the ammonium nitrate and diesel to react the way he needed it to.

Admiring what he had done in the elevator, he felt mixed emotions. On one hand it looked great. It had gone together exactly as he had envisioned it. On the other hand, he wondered if it would be enough. He needed to blast through nearly a hundred feet of concrete. Would any bomb be powerful enough to do that?

He reminded himself to keep moving, so he stepped out of the elevator and turned the key to let the door shut. He taped a strip of yellow stripping labeled CAUTION across the elevator door, although if anyone walked in, the smell of diesel would tip them off. He hustled out of the building and noticed that the security man was back in his shed. Walking around to the front of the trailer, he unhitched it. He wouldn't be needing it anymore.

The guard was waiting for him when he drove up the access road. But it wasn't Brian, it was someone else. His tag read "Jessie."

The new guard walked right up to the truck's window and looked inside. "What's wrong?"

He leaned out. "The good news is I found the lever that's starting to stick. That's probably why the thing was hit and miss. The bad news is I ran out of grease. I need to run into town for a second and get another tube of grease."

The guard checked his watch. "Everything's gonna be closed."

"I can get this grease at the gas station. I should be back in a few minutes."

The guard walked over to unlock the gate. "You gonna be done by eight?"

He responded out the window as he drove past. "Don't worry. I'll be miles down the road by eight. I guarantee it."

CHAPTER 6

6:00 a.m. - Lake Powell, Utah

"Okay, everybody ready?" Without waiting for an answer, Greg turned the key and fired up the Mastercraft.

Paul stood on the deck of the houseboat and unwound the rope from the two cleats. He tossed the rope into the water-ski boat, pushed off, and jumped in. He sat in the seat facing backwards from Greg. Julie sat in the other front seat next to her husband, and Erika sat facing backwards from her. Erika was rubbing her eyes, still half asleep. Greg shifted to forward and idled away from the houseboat.

Julie felt bad that Max and Darlene were staying behind, although spending the morning with just Paul and Erika would be fun. She felt the boat throttle up, and her body was pulled back into her seat. Julie watched her husband. He looked over at her and smiled. She relaxed and took in the majestic scenery all around them. The rising sun cast long shadows in the canyon. It had been hard to get going so early, but it was worth it. She loved being in these remote canyons. She grabbed the armrest on her seat as the boat banked in to a slow turn around a bend. She looked ahead and saw another curve. Every time they left the houseboat, she meant to count the number of twists and turns it took them to get to the main channel, but she never remembered until they were half way. This time she remembered but didn't feel like counting.

She turned and glanced back over her shoulder at Erika, who was gazing up at the red rock walls behind. Erika looked tired and had not spoken since they woke. Paul and Greg looked calm and happy. Julie changed her mind. Let Max and Darlene enjoy the morning alone. What difference did it make that they were separating for the day anyway?

* * *

6:05 a.m. - Page, Arizona

The man rode his motorcycle onto the GlenCanyonBridge. The white truck was back on

Navajo Street

, safely parked inside the storage unit, away from curious
eyes. After riding over the bridge, he continued slowly up the hill. He glanced in his mirrors to verify no one was behind him. The image of hundreds of police officers, sirens wailing, kept projecting into his subconscious mind. However, a quick scan of the road ahead and behind revealed that he was alone. Page, Arizona was not an early-bird town.

Approximately fifty yards up the hill, he pulled over to the side of the road. He put the bike on its kickstand and dismounted. He left the engine running. He pulled a cell phone from an inside pocket of his jacket. It seemed to tingle in his fingers. He walked across the street to the other side where he had a better view back toward the Glen Canyon Dam. Every movement seemed to be playing in slow motion in his head. The sun had just poked its head above the horizon. The effect left the rock walls on the opposite side of the canyon in darkness while sunning the ground under his feet. He focused on the huge concrete structure. Night lights still lit the top of the dam. Everything looked normal. No blinking police lights, no sirens.

He held the cell phone in front of him and dialed the nine-digit number from memory. Before he hit send, he hesitated. He thought about the Colorado River. He fantasized about it breaking through all the man-made chastity belts blocking it from where it wanted to go. Maybe the city dwellers, especially the greedy Californians, would finally have to conserve a little, turn down the sprinklers, turn off the water fountains, drain some of the pools and artificial lakes. He snickered as a scene floated through his head of a big fat guy diving into an empty swimming pool, the guy squishing head first into the bottom of the pool and tipping over, like in a cartoon.

He stopped the images. He'd come here for a reason. None of it would happen if he didn't press the button. In a moment of frustration, his head told his thumb to press, but it wouldn't obey. How could it all fall apart now, at the final moment? The thought made him angry. His brain sent the signal again, and this time he felt the small button click under the pressure. He stared at it for a second then cupped it to his ear. He heard two rings, then a connection, then nothing.

In the west elevator of the Glen Canyon Dam, another cell phone, this one with wires hanging out of it, rang twice and stopped. Electricity from the phone's ringer traveled onto a small circuit board, through a voltage relay, then down two wires into the elevator control panel. The elevator reacted immediately by starting down. Simultaneously a digital timer started a very quick countdown. Since the elevator was near capacity, stuffed with twelve barrels of ammonium nitrate soaked in diesel fuel, the downward motion began with a jerk. The elevator continued to descend into the dam. Exactly 18 seconds after the cell phone started its motion, the elevator had traveled approximately two hundred feet from the top of the dam. At that moment, the timer expired. A very small electrical current traveled from the timer to a voltage relay. This relay sent a much larger current from the car battery to the homemade detonation devices tucked into each barrel of ammonium nitrate. The result was immediate and forceful. Because of the way the explosives were packed in the elevator, the energy of the explosion was channeled horizontally upstream toward the lake side of the dam.

The skinny man timed the 18 seconds on his watch. It seemed like an eternity. For an instant, he thought something had gone wrong. Then directly below where the vertical elevator disappeared into the dam, a ball of fire and concrete exploded out of the face of the dam. Chunks of concrete fell to the river four hundred feet below. An instant later the top of the elevator shaft on the top of the dam exploded upwards, scattering debris in all directions. A crushing sound wave followed both explosions. The skinny man ducked instinctively.

Although the fireworks were impressive, they were less than he had expected and he felt certain the entire effort had been in vain. He strained to assess the damage, specifically if any water was leaking from the dam. Unfortunately, his view of the face of the dam was totally obstructed by a huge cloud of smoke. He stepped closer and craned his neck for a better look. The smoke swirled and for a moment he thought he saw something, then his view was blocked again. He needed to leave now, but he also needed to know.

Then he saw it: a single stream of water spraying from the small hole. It looked to be no more than two feet in diameter. He couldn't believe he hadn't seen it before. The pressure, 200 feet down in the reservoir, created a solid spray way out into the river, although because of his angle, it was impossible to tell the distance for sure. It was definitely far enough to clear the generation plants at the base of the dam.

As he watched, the water seemed to jerk, and change its trajectory. There was much more water now. He now estimated the column at least five feet in diameter. The jerking continued every couple of seconds, each time resulting in higher water flow. It reminded him of holding a frozen garden hose in the winter and feeling the water force the pieces of ice out the end of the hose.

He couldn't have hoped for a better result. The water tearing through the hole two hundred feet down in the dam was enough to continually carve at the dam. It would disintegrate rapidly. Not nearly as fast as an earth dam, but plenty fast enough. He had heard that if you could drill a small dime-sized hole through the face of a dam, the water rushing through the hole would eventually tear the dam apart. He would have loved to test that exact hypothesis, dangling from a rope from the top of the dam, but was fairly sure that the security people at GlenCanyon wouldn't have sponsored the experiment.

He watched for a moment longer. The water was now blasting. If only he could stay and watch it tear itself apart. He knew he could not. He needed to make St. George, Utah and I-15 before the cops figured out what happened and blocked the road, or the remainder of the week would be jeopardized. He turned and headed back toward the motorcycle. As he pulled back onto the highway, he glanced back at the rising sun. It was almost completely above the horizon. The LCD display of his digital watch showed 6:08 a.m. What a great day this was going to be.

CHAPTER 7

6:08 a.m. - Page, Arizona

Jim Nance heard the explosion while completing his security walk above the turbines in the base of the dam. Jim had worked graveyard security at the dam for three years without ever hearing anything that loud. He figured the sound came from the base of the dam and started running in that direction. When he arrived at the west end of the plant, he met Peter Hansen, a technician, running down the stairs from the control room.

The technician pointed toward the dam. "What was that? Something blow up?"

Jim nodded. "Sounded like it. From down there someplace." He pointed down the west elevator access hallway. "Is that where you were headed?"

Peter shrugged. "I don't know. I was just checking it out."

Jim continued jogging down the hall and Peter fell in behind.

They ran out the plant door, and across the walkway toward the dam. On their right a large expanse of grass had been planted on the roof of the structure to mitigate the dust. Jim reached for the glass door into the dam, and both men shot through. Jim led them down the long corridor. Up ahead, around the corner to their right, would be the west elevator. When the two men rounded the corner, they both stopped.

Water poured out of the west elevator shaft and smashed against the wall across the hallway. After hitting the wall, the water curled upwards ripping off ceiling tiles, and then headed down the hallway toward them. To Jim, it seemed like a dump truck had dumped a load of water at him, a dump truck with no end. Until now he had never understood why a deer would freeze in the headlights of an oncoming car. However, at that moment he understood the principle perfectly. He wanted to turn and run from this wall of water advancing toward him, but in spite of his desire, both he and Peter stood like statues while a large wave carrying a metal trashcan hit them head on. In the instant before the water hit, Jim heard his radio squawk, "The dam blew! Everybody get-"

Jim missed the rest when the wall of water hit him, but he could have guessed how the message ended anyway. The water knocked both men off their feet. In the fall, Jim dropped his radio and his head went under. He tried to secure footing to stand, but couldn't find traction on the wet tile. For a moment it felt like he was at the water park with his kids. The feeling of being carried, arms flailing and body thrashing, was similar. At a certain point, he realized the water had washed them around the corner and back down the long corridor, but he had no memory of going around the corner. He bumped into Peter several times, but not enough to hurt.

At that moment, Jim remembered the glass door at the end of the corridor, and he panicked at getting caught inside as the area filled with water. How would he open it? Then it hit him that the door opened out, and the water wouldn't have any trouble opening it. While he was thinking of just that, his head came up for long enough to see that they were almost at the door. He felt the water slow slightly, then suddenly accelerate again as he was sucked out the door.

Once outside, the water cascaded off both sides of the walkway to the plant, and Jim and Peter found their footing and stood up. Jim grasped the handrail.

Peter yelled to him. "You okay?"

Jim nodded. "I guess so, how 'bout you?"

"Yeah."

Jim motioned back in the plant. "Anybody else up there with you?"

"Yeah, two others."

Jim looked nervous. "We gotta tell them to get out of here."

"You want me to go back up?"

Jim felt for his radio, but it was gone. "Yeah. Why don't ya. I'll go back and clear the rest of the plant."

Both men took a second to look at the water coming out of the dam and running off the walkway. Because their view up was blocked by the canopy over their heads, neither could see the water spraying out of the face of the dam four hundred feet above them.

As they ran into the plant, Jim pointed east. "Take 'em down the east stairs."

* * *

6:15 a.m. - Page, Arizona

Overlooking the top of the dam in the security office, which was part of the HadenVisitorCenter complex, Brian Thacker, graveyard supervisor, waited for a response from his radio alert. "Hello, is anybody there? Jim? Jessie? Mark?"

The radio squawked. "Jessie here." "Mark here." Jessie and Mark were stationed at the two access road gates, but Jim was down in the dam someplace.

Brian waited several seconds then pressed the button. "Jim? Do you read me?"

Nothing.

He tried again. "Office calling Jim Nance, please respond."

His radio squawked again. The voice was much higher than Mark's usual tone. "I haven't heard him yet, Brian. You want me to go down and check on him?"

Brian knew something was wrong. Jim should have responded by now. He looked out the window again. The water was blasting out the hole. Every time he looked, there was more water. He felt sure that hole was close to twenty feet in diameter now. There was no way he could send anyone down there. It was too dangerous.

Mark's voice came from the radio again. "Brian, you want me to go down the east elevator?"

Brian looked at the water one more time. Jim was in trouble, but the dam was breaking apart. "Negative, Mark. Stay put. I'll try the control room and see if they know where he is."

He tried the radio one more time. "Jim, do you copy?"

He waited a moment, then dropped the radio and grabbed the phone. He dialed the control room first, letting it ring at least ten times. Next he tried the break room, then two different guard stations. Nothing from any of them. They were either dead or on the move. He prayed they were on the move. Walking to the windows, Brian tried to see down to the asphalt strip bordering the generation plant, but there was too much smoke to see down to river level.

He heard the radio again. "Brian, this is Jessie. You called anybody yet? Reported it?"

Brian picked up the radio. "When would I? I'm trying to figure out if everybody's okay."

Jessie's voice came back calm. "I know, Brian, but you need to call. Now. You can't help Jim from where you are. They can use the tunnel. Make the call."

Jessie was right. An access tunnel led down to the base of the dam from several miles away on the Page side. He needed to get the cops down there.

First he called 911. The phone rang three times. To Brian, it seemed like fifteen minutes. Finally, a calm voice answered, "What is your name, please?"

"There has been an explosion at the Glen Canyon Dam. The dam is leaking and might break up. I need you to--"

"Whoa," the woman interrupted. "One thing at a time. You say that you are at the Glen Canyon Dam? What is your name?"

Brian could hardly stand it. "Brian Thacker. The dam--"

"Okay, Brian, what is the problem?"

"The dam is failing. There is going to be a flood. A big one! Send a couple of police cars down the tunnel. I can't reach any of the crew on the radio. They might be hurt. Can you do that? I need to make some other calls."

"Hang on, Brian, I need you to stay on the line."

"I can't. Just tell the police to get over here." He knew he shouldn't, but he hung up the phone.

He walked over to a red clipboard hanging on the wall. The next calls would not be dialed from memory. The first call was to the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver. They built the dam and were responsible for it. He thought they would want to know it was falling apart. As it turned out, they were, in fact, very interested. The lady on the line took Brian's number and promised to have someone return the call in a few minutes.

The second call went to Hoover Dam, 300 miles downstream. He placed the third call to the National Parks Service, who would relay a message to the Grand Canyon. Both conversations were similar - short and to the point. Brian told them he was calling because there had been an explosion at Glen Canyon Dam. They asked if the dam had failed. He told them not yet. They asked how much water was flooding. He responded honestly and reported that the hole was about twenty feet in diameter. They both asked him to keep them updated. Brian left both calls with the same impression that they weren't going to do much unless he called back and said the dam failed completely. In fact, Brian wondered if they would even know what to do then.

CHAPTER 8

6:25 a.m. - Denver, Colorado

Grant Stevens burst out of the bathroom into his dark bedroom. The loud piercing beeps from his pager seemed to emanate from all four walls of the bedroom, making it impossible to zero in on it. He headed straight for the dresser, where he always left it. He held a towel around his waist with his left hand, while he swept back and forth with his right. His fingers found the small box and pressed a button to stop the noise. He looked at the luminescent readout and noted the seven-digit number had a '911' after it. He heard a clicking sound from behind, and the bedside lamp came on, illuminating the room.

"Who is it?" his wife mumbled from the bed. She shielded her eyes from the light.

"Somebody from work. I don't recognize the number."

"I thought they were all out of town," she said.

"Me too."

He walked over to the nightstand next to the bed and grabbed the cordless phone. His wife got up and went into the bathroom. Who could it be at this hour? Maybe someone headed to Kenya had forgotten something, some document or report. The fact that they would page him this early in the morning, with a 911, bugged him to no end, as if he didn't have anything more important to do. He walked back over by the dresser and considered for a while whether to delay calling back. However, a morbid curiosity of who was nervy enough to do it made him decide to make the call.

The number on the pager had timed out, so he pressed the button again to re-illuminate it. He keyed in the number and waited. In the process of holding the phone in one hand and the pager in the other, his towel fell to the floor. He had just bent over to pick it up when the person on the other end of the line answered on the first ring.

He propped the phone between his shoulder and ear while trying to position the towel. "Hello."

"Grant? This is Julia, you know, Roland's admin."

He knew who Julia was. She was the commissioner's new executive secretary. The consensus at the Bureau was that Roland had selected her because she looked like a model. Grant himself had never talked to her in his life. What could she possibly want? He wrapped the towel around his waist and tucked it in before he answered. For some reason he didn't feel right about talking to Julia when he was naked, even on the phone.

"Hi," he said.

"I'm so glad you're there. As you know, Roland and the other executives are on their way to Kenya. I can't get a hold of them."

Grant could tell she was nervous; she sounded like she might cry. "That's okay. What do you need?"

"I just got a call from the Glen Canyon Dam. There's been an explosion."

Grant sat down on the bed. "What?" The image returned from the day before of the concrete dam he had seen on TV.

She continued. "The guy who called's name is Brian. He's a night security guard."

The shock of the information waned enough to make Grant ask another question. "Julia, what is the Bureau doing?"

There was silence on the other end before she finally spoke again. "That's just it, Grant. Everybody's gone. That's why I called you."

He knew she wanted a response, but he couldn't speak.

"Grant, Roland told me he was leaving you in charge. You need to handle this." She continued, "I just called the pilots for the Gulfstream. They'll meet you at the airport."

Although the Bureau of Reclamation had an expensive corporate jet, only the commissioner and other executives used it. Grant had never flown in it.

"The Gulfstream?" Grant repeated.

"They'll get you down to the dam within the hour. I have Brian's number at GlenCanyon. Do you have a pencil?"

Grant realized his mouth was hanging open. They were sending him on the Gulfstream? He stood and moved back toward the dresser, subconsciously realizing the towel had dropped again. This time he made no effort to retrieve it. "Hang on a second." He grabbed a pen and one of his business cards, then flipped over the card to write on the back. "What's the guy's name again?"

"Brian," she repeated.

"Okay. Give me the number."

She read it to him and made him repeat it back to her.

"Is there anything you need from the office?" she asked.

Grant couldn't think. Then all of the sudden he wondered what would happen downstream if the Glen Canyon Dam failed. LakePowell was huge, one of the largest reservoirs in the country. The damage downstream would be catastrophic. He remembered suddenly that the Grand Canyon was directly downstream from the dam.

"Julia, wait a minute. The Bureau did a study in the late nineties about what would happen if the dam failed. Can you get me a copy of the report? It's a Failure Inundation Study. I think Bruce's River Hydraulics Group did the analysis."

She responded slowly as if she had written it down. "Okay, but I won't be able to get it to you at the airport. I'll have to fax it to you on the plane."

"The plane has a fax machine?" He couldn't believe it.

"Sure."

Grant suddenly felt urgency. "What time should I-"

"They'll be ready for you as soon as you can get there," she interrupted. "I called them right after I paged you. How long will it take you to get to the airport?"

Grant looked at the alarm clock next to his bed. 6:27 a.m. What should he pack to supervise a dam failure in Arizona? A calculator? A measuring tape? Hip boots?

"How about seven? I'll try to get there a few minutes before. Wait, Julia! I've never been on the jet. Is it on the other side of the airport? How do I get there?"

She informed him that the Gulfstream was not at DenverInternationalAirport, but at Denver Centennial, a smaller and closer airport. He knew the location, but she gave him specific instructions on how to get to the terminal. He wrote the information on the backs of two more of his business cards.

"What's your cell phone number?" she asked.

"I don't have one, the Bureau never thought . . ." He hesitated. "Wait, I'll take my wife's." He gave her the number and hung up the phone.

"What's going on?" his wife asked, now wide awake.

"There's been an explosion at the Glen Canyon Dam. They're worried it might fail. And everybody is out of town."

She looked puzzled. "So they're sending you?"

He nodded. "There's nobody else. The Bureau's jet is taking me to Arizona as soon as I get there. Can you help me pack?"

* * *

6:55 a.m. - Kanab, Utah

He slowed the motorcycle down to forty-five miles per hour as he approached the small city. He could not afford a traffic ticket. That would unravel everything. He scanned ahead for a roadblock. Although possible, he was fairly sure they wouldn't have one set up yet. He expected to hit one sooner or later. He imagined back at the dam they'd still be running around in circles and wondering what happened. He passed a sign that said "Entering the City of Kanab. Pop. 4492." Letting off the throttle, he allowed the motorcycle to coast down to thirty-five miles per hour, just five over the limit. You could usually go five over without getting noticed, even in these hick towns.

According to the signs, the run from the dam to Kanab, Utah, measured just less than seventy-five miles, all open road. He'd made it in just under an hour. He knew it was the most critical leg of his escape. At Kanab, he'd be joined by traffic from the north rim of the Grand Canyon and ZionNational Park. After that, it would be easier to blend in. Another forty minutes and he'd pass through ZionNational Park, and traffic would be even heavier. Forty-five minutes beyond Zion and he would hit I-15 and St. George, Utah. After that he'd have to crash to get caught.

He cursed himself for not bringing a radio on the motorcycle. Would the news be carrying the story yet? Maybe not. And when they did, what would they say? There was a small explosion at the dam? The dam is failing? He was dying to know what was going on. When he last saw the water shooting out of the smoke, it had been maybe ten feet in diameter. It would certainly be way more than that by now. That was an hour ago. But how big, he had no idea. What if it had not gotten any bigger? What then?

Instinctively, he knew that the dam would tear itself apart. He had read that, but nothing said how long it would take. It could take days, for all he knew. His instincts told him it would take around eight hours. But he was not sure why. It just felt right.

As the motorcycle exited Kanab, he accelerated. It felt good. His hair stood up on the back of his neck. His arms felt stiff. He felt physically tired, although his mind raced. He had done it. He had blown up the Glen Canyon Dam. There was much more to do. But the big one was done. Even if they caught him now, which didn't seem likely, his name would be famous forever. The mightiest dam on the Colorado would soon be gone. The river wasn't free yet, but it would be soon.

* * *

7:00 a.m. - Lake Powell, Utah

Greg pointed at a rock wall on the east side of the channel. "That's it." He aimed the boat in that direction.

Julie saw only a rock wall. She saw no opening, or anything that looked like it might be a canyon. She wondered how it was possible for her husband to tell which canyon it was. All the rocks looked the same to her. But Greg seldom made a mistake, and if he did, he recognized it almost immediately.

Sure enough, as they approached the rock wall, an opening appeared. Greg steered in, and they passed through the gap into ForbiddingCanyon. Once inside, the red sandstone walls rose vertically on both sides of the boat for hundreds of feet. Greg carved the boat back and forth along the winding channel. Not far in, they approached a fork, and Greg veered right without hesitation. How he remembered the way, she would never know. She had once heard a woman comedian joke that there were only two things where men were definitely better than women: navigating, and writing their name in the snow with urine. Julie agreed with both.

She held on to her seat as the boat carved back and forth around each bend of the rock walls. There was absolutely no traffic, a testament to Greg's decision to arrive early. By ten or eleven, traffic would be heavy around RainbowBridge.

She felt Erika touch her shoulder from behind. She turned and Erika's face was right there. Her eyes were sparkling.

"How far back in the canyon is it?" she asked.

"I think we are almost there. We should be able to see it in a few minutes."

At that, Erika came up and slid into the seat next to Julie. Julie made as much room as possible, but the seat was only meant for one person. The girls squished together, with Erika's bikinied rear end hanging off the edge of the seat. Julie laughed. Her friend always surprised her, no inhibitions. She saw Greg glance down at the girls and look back up, smiling.

Just when Julie thought straight ahead was the only way possible, Greg veered left into a narrow opening she had not even seen. She shook her head. No wonder explorers had spent months looking for it. After passing through this narrow cut, they finally saw their destination. Up ahead, a long line of floating docks wrapped around the bend.

Erika stood, holding on to the windshield of the boat. "Where is it?"

Greg pointed upstream. "It's around the corner." He slowed as they reached the first dock then pulled forward to the last available mooring.

There were no other boats. Paul jumped out and attached ropes to the cleat on the dock. Greg shut off the engine. Erika climbed out onto the dock and helped Julie up behind her.

Julie watched as her husband grabbed the cameras and a cooler that contained their breakfast. He climbed out of the boat. "Are we in a hurry?"

Greg looked at his watch. "Not really. If possible I'd like to leave before eight, but that still gives us an hour."

Erika pointed to where the docks disappeared around the bend. "Let's go already." She held out her hand for her husband. "Come on."

Julie took a camera bag from her husband and followed. "Why are you so excited anyway? You were just here last year."

"That was a year ago," Erika called out as she and Paul hurried along. "I love this place."

The two couples walked for a few minutes until Greg spoke. "There it is."

Erika, who was ahead of Greg, stopped and looked up. "Where? Oh. I see it."

The large rock bridge was barely exposed as it blended in perfectly with the cliffs on the right. The rising sun had not yet reached it in the deep canyon, further disguising it.

Erika stormed ahead. "Let's hurry and we can eat breakfast under the bridge before anyone else shows up."

"We can't," Julie called out. "It's sacred. The Indian tribes."

"That's bull and you know it. Besides, I don't see any Indians."

A sign mounted close to the rock bridge designated the area under Rainbow as sacred by six different Native American tribes. However, many considered it pretentious for the tribes to lay claim to the site, especially considering that when explorers first tried to find the arch in the early 1900s, most of the Indians had never seen it, and even with hired Indian guides it took months of trial and error to locate it. An early black and white photo showed a picture of an Indian sitting on a horse on top of the arch. Maybe it was only off limits to the white man. Julie generally avoided walking under it more to avert dirty looks from other visitors than any belief that the spot was sacred.

The closer the two couples got to the arch, the larger it became. Julie knew it was three hundred feet tall. She tried to imagine a football field standing on end under it, and agreed that it might fit. They were climbing now, but they stopped about a quarter mile away to rest and take a group picture. Julie glanced at her watch. They had plenty of time.

* * *

7:10 a.m. - Denver, Colorado

Grant gazed out the window of the Bureau of Reclamation's Gulfstream IV-SP. He was the sole passenger on the small jet - just him, two pilots, and a pretty flight attendant. The jet had already been running when he arrived. Supposedly the jet had just arrived from the east coast after dropping off the commissioner from his international connection the night before.

Before that morning, he had never seen the Bureau's jet. When he had approached it at the airport, the Gulfstream had glistened in the rising sun and looked brand new. He remembered hearing the scuttlebutt when the Bureau purchased it in the late nineties, replacing their older jet. Everyone at work was surprised that the government had funded it. And even now, riding in it, he wondered what kinds of shenanigans were performed to justify it. With federal deficits, how could the Bureau justify a 50-million-dollar-plane?

The story of how the Bureau of Reclamation had bought its first jet was legendary. In the 1960's, the haydays for building dams in America, Floyd Dominy, the most famous commissioner to ever serve in the Bureau, had asked for a jet and been denied. However, Dominy arranged for the cost of a jet to be buried in a dam appropriation bill in Congress. His bosses at the Department of Interior had been furious, but Dominy kept the plane. And over the years most of the other large government agencies had followed the Bureau and acquired jets. Since Dominy paved the way, commissioners of the Bureau of Reclamation, and whoever they wanted to schmooze, had flown in style, zipping back and forth between Denver and WashingtonDC at five hundred thirty miles per hour.

Grant repositioned himself into the comfortable leather seat, which felt infinitely better than a coach airline seat. Travel on commercial airlines would never be the same after this trip. The Gulfstream was even more luxurious than he imagined. The first thing he noticed was the huge oval windows along the sides. They were much larger than anything he had ever seen before. And they looked more like clear glass than the milky plastic of a commercial airliner. An expensive lever lowered an accordion blind between the panes. The cabin actually felt roomier than a full-sized plane, which Grant attributed to the lack of storage compartments overhead, and the large and well-spaced leather seats. Grant ran his hand along the polished wood grain hand rests below the windows. He stretched his legs out. No problem. A seven-footer could ride comfortably in this seat. The plane was beautiful as well as roomy. It made Grant envy the lifestyle of his bosses.

He knew that this particular trip was an anomaly. Normally he wouldn't be allowed within a hundred miles of this situation. He could guarantee the commissioner and his entourage would take over as soon as Julia could arrange their early exit from the symposium in Kenya. The remoteness of the location in Africa, however, would slow their return.

As the plane climbed out of Denver, Grant looked west over the Rocky Mountains separating Denver from Utah. A few cumulus clouds floated over endless mountains. The view from the valley floor in Denver was misleading, and gave the impression that one only needed to drive through a small mountain pass to arrive on the other side to another open valley. But the view from above told a different story. The range visible from the valley was only the beginning. The mountains continued, peak after peak, for what seemed like at least fifty miles. Grant knew that if someone tried to hike through, without a compass to point west, he would end up hopelessly lost in the range with no hope of ever finding SaltLake and the Mormons.

The flight attendant tapped his shoulder. She held out a plate with a selection of bagels.

He nodded yes and selected one with onions on top.

She handed him a napkin, knife, and small package of cream cheese. "Would you like some orange juice?"

He nodded. "Sure."

He guessed she was in her thirties. She looked plain at first glance, but her smile changed everything. The perfect white teeth and sparkling brown eyes, in addition to her trim figure, made him wonder if she had been a model before. If not, it was only because she hadn't smiled enough.

She returned with a cup of orange juice, then sat on the arm of the chair next to him. "Hi. I'm Wendy."

"Grant Stevens," he replied.

When he first arrived, he was surprised to find a flight attendant at all. For some reason, he expected a big cooler on the floor, and executives tossing each other sodas and peanuts. Now the thought seemed absurd. When he cut open the bagel, it felt warm and fresh, making him wonder how Wendy could have had time to shop during the short layover.

"So how long are we going to be in Page?" she asked.

The question surprised him. It had never occurred to him that the plane would be waiting with him in Page. "I don't know. I'll have to figure that out when I get there."

The thought made him wonder what was happening at the dam. He looked out the window and decided the plane was at cruising altitude and he should probably make the call to GlenCanyon. He asked Wendy if the Gulfstream had a phone, and she pointed to a compartment by the window.

"What are you doing at the dam? Do you have an important meeting or something?" she asked.

He looked up at her and saw mild interest, but no fear whatsoever. "Julia didn't tell you?"

She shook her head. "No. She just said to be ready to fly somebody immediately. I just figured . . ." Her voice trailed off, then he saw her brows furrow. "Julia didn't tell me what? Why, what's going on?"

He opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by another phone in the rear of the plane.

"Excuse me, please," she said, then quickly stood and walked back toward the rear of the plane.

While she was gone, he figured he better make the call. He leaned forward in his seat and searched in his right rear pants pocket for the card he used to scribble the phone number. He found the crumpled card and straightened it enough to read the number. Grant took a bite out of the bagel, then punched in the nine digits. Someone picked up immediately.

"Hello, this is Brian."

"Brian, this is Grant Stevens from the Bureau of Reclamation. How bad is it down there?"

The man sounded nervous. "Well, there was an explosion about an hour ago. I didn't see it, but I heard it. It blew the top out of the elevator shaft and a hole in the dam."

Grant wondered what could blow up the elevator shaft. None of the turbines were even near there. "What blew up? Do you have any idea?"

"Heck, I don't know. It must have been somewhere down the elevator shaft. Something blew. It seemed like a bomb."

For the first time since the call from Julia, Grant considered that the explosion might have been intentionally set. Until then, he had considered it an equipment-related explosion, but, if it were intentionally caused, then why? "You said there was a hole in the dam, Brian. How big?"

Brian hesitated. "It looked pretty small when I first saw it, but now it's way bigger. It keeps growing. The water is really shooting out the hole."

Grant pictured water pouring over the top of the dam in a small cut, but Brian's description didn't make sense. "Where exactly is the hole?"

"It's in the west elevator shaft."

That wasn't what Grant meant by the question. "How far down?"

"About a third of the way, maybe two hundred feet."

The answer felt like a gut punch. Grant leaned back in the seat and rested his head against the cushion. Was it possible he misheard? "Sorry Brian, could you repeat that?"

"Two hundred, or maybe even two fifty."

Grant bent forward and put his head in his hands. This was much worse than he had imagined. The pressure that deep in the dam would--

Brian's voice rang in his ear. "Hello. Are you there?"

He rubbed his forehead. "Yeah Brian, I'm here." Grant hesitated at the next question, not too sure he wanted to know the answer. "You said the hole is much larger now, you said shooting out. Approximately how big is it?"

"You mean how big is the hole? I'd say let's see . . . maybe twenty-five or thirty-five feet."

Grant tried to picture the leak; he'd never seen a column of water that large. Actually, a thirty-foot column of water, no one on earth had, for that matter. How could there not be any casualties? "Did everyone get out of the plant?" he asked.

Brian's voice became low, almost a whisper. "I don't know, I couldn't contact them on the radio. I can only hope."

Grant pictured what amounted to tons of water falling another four hundred feet down onto the generation plants below. "Has the water destroyed the plant yet?"

Brian seemed to choose his words. "At first, the water shot out the hole so far that it cleared the plant completely. It didn't even touch it. By now, some of the water must be hitting the plant, but I can't really tell, there's too much mist down there."

Grant tried to picture the whole canyon filled with mist. "Are you alone?"

"I was alone in the visitor center, but there's a couple of my men at the upper access roads. Anyway, the cops showed up about a half hour ago."

Grant pictured a dozen police cars parked haphazardly. "What are they doing?"

"Mostly keeping people away, you know. But some of them are just looking themselves."

He imagined the spectacle and how temping it would be to just stand and stare. Grant wondered if he would be able to not stare after he arrived.

"Hey, I need to go." The security guard sounded anxious to get off the phone.

"Okay, Brian. I'll be there as soon as I can." Grant replaced the phone in the compartment.

Wendy was staring at him with wide eyes. "Is it bad?" she asked.

Grant sighed. "Oh yeah."

"The dam?"

Grant nodded. "Yeah. Looks like somebody blew it up. It's breaking apart."

Her eyes grew even bigger. "Will people die?"

Grant considered the question. How could people not die if the dam failed completely? "Luckily, the area downstream of the dam was the Grand Canyon, for three hundred miles. Not a lot of people. If someone could just warn them." He hesitated, then looked down. "I'm sure some people will get hurt."

Wendy just stared, then her demeanor changed as she remembered something. She offered Grant about twenty pages of paper. "This just came in on the fax machine. It's from Julia."

Grant took the pages and flipped them around. The title page read, "DAM FAILURE INUNDATION REPORT, Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona." He scanned the table of contents, then looked up.

"Wendy, how soon will we be there?"

"We should land in Page in about fifteen or twenty minutes."

Not enough time to read the entire document. He started reading. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Wendy walk toward the back of the plane. After the second sentence, Grant skipped ahead, looking for paragraphs with numbers. Farther into the document he found tables that included flood depths and times downstream at various places in the Grand Canyon. At some point he realized he had been muttering. His stomach began to boil. He had to consciously stop himself from rubbing his forehead. Near the back of the document, he found an analysis of what would happen after all the floodwater from LakePowell joined with Lake Mead. It described theoretical water levels and their impact on Hoover Dam. Grant swore under his breath.

* * *

7:15 a.m. - Lee's Ferry, Arizona (16 miles downstream from the GlenCanyon Dam)

Fifty-two-year-old Ted Johnson leaned upstream in the current and took a step to his left. He felt with his toes to find a rock large enough to act as a perch, but the rubber waders weren't the greatest for feeling around. He wiped sweat off his forehead for the third time in what seemed like the last minute. He was in serious trouble.

The morning had started out easy. He woke before the sun, and threw all his gear in the back of the pickup. Then it was just a short drive to Lee's Ferry. He always arrived early, before the rafters and other fishermen so he could be first down the windy road and grab the best parking spot, the one next to the river. Although he couldn't see the sun yet because of the steep canyon walls, Ted could always see the light from the sunrise on the rocks high above. That put Ted in the river right when those rainbow trout were just waking up and looking for their breakfast. And this morning, just like every other morning, he waded right out into the shallow river, staying close to the gravel strips. As usual, Ted had been overly careful to stay out of deep places. Any fool knew that you couldn't swim with waders on.

And for the first hour everything had happened just like any other day. By then he already had three big ones in his basket. But then, when he cast his bait over a nice green hole that was sure to be a virtual trout condominium, he felt the cold squeeze of the waders a little too high, up above his privates. It was a sure signal that he was too deep.

The funny thing was, he didn't remember walking deeper. And when he tried to climb back up the strip of gravel, he could have sworn the water had risen in the last few minutes. It was at that moment that he looked around and knew there was more water. He confirmed his suspicion by looking back at his pickup. There was definitely more water between him and it, than when he arrived. After climbing up to a higher point in the river, he looked back toward where he needed to go. It was time for a big decision. He could either try to wade back, or strip off the waders, shuck his clothes, and swim for it. He had taken a moment on the decision, inspecting upstream and down, debating one route verses another, and calculating the value of the gear he would be abandoning. It would be risky, but he had decided to wade.

Ted Johnson now knew he had made the wrong decision. His feet were barely holding against the strong current, and worse, even with water up to his waist, he was fairly sure he was on a high point, meaning that any direction would take him deeper. And nobody had to tell him he could not fight the current if the water levels got any higher, which Ted now knew was happening.

He scanned the bank to see if anyone was around to help, but saw no one. If only he could get out of the boots now. Unfortunately, the only way possible would be to first flood them, relieving the squeeze, and then try to swim out of them. It was a skill that he had heard of others practicing in a pool, in a controlled environment. At the time, he hadn't even considered practicing the skill. Now, however, he would pay anything for that knowledge. He would forfeit his favorite rod and reel for a quick lesson.

In fact, at that moment, the idea of his rod and reel meaning anything to him seemed absurd, even though an hour before, he would have chosen his graphite pole over his pickup. He looked down at the rod in his right hand, a few minutes ago his most prized possession, now a lead weight. He tossed it away and watched it disappear under the current. The basket over his arm was next, and then the hat with his best flies attached to it.

The motion of pulling off the basket upset his balance. He felt himself tipping. He reached with his left foot for the next toehold downstream. However, even a few feet downstream the water felt deeper. His foot slid in the gravel, finding no holds. To retain his balance, he let his other foot go. Now he was a passenger to the current. If he didn't find a hold in a second, it would be too late, although a part of Ted Johnson thought it already might be.

Suddenly, Ted felt himself drop into a hole. The feeling of water inside the waders was instantaneous. In spite of the feeling of panic, Ted knew what he had to do if he wanted to live. He could not survive with the waders on, and getting them off in deep water would be the most challenging feat of his life.

He tore the suspenders off his shoulders, and started peeling at the rubber material. During the motion his head went under. He let go of the waders and kicked upwards for air. Nothing. He frantically reached for the waist of the waders. His foot felt bottom. The waders were forgotten as he pushed hard off the bottom, flailing his arms for the surface of the water. Again nothing. He realized reaching the surface was impossible with the waders on. He bent and started pulling on them. His surroundings got darker, and Ted wondered if he was deeper, or if he was blacking out.

An intense pain in his chest told him that he needed air soon. A new pain in his ears meant something, but he didn't know what. His attempts to peel off the waders were not working. He gave up and decided to try to slither out of them. Moving quickly now, he straightened his body and a blurry feeling came over him, not in his vision, more in his mind. In spite of the blurry feeling, his heart was pumping furiously, and he lunged upward trying to shed the heavy rubber death boots. His movement did nothing to shed the waders, so he lunged harder, using energy he did not know he had.

The pain in his chest now spread through his body. He felt his motivation to struggle dissipate slightly, but not enough to make him quit. He resisted the impulse to gulp water. He lunged upward again, although he knew the motions were doing nothing to remove the waders. His last thoughts were of darkness, and pain in his chest, and a blurry drugged feeling that made it all bearable. He passed out without giving in to the urge to breath water, and became the first fatality on the Colorado River that morning.

* * *

7:25 a.m. - Lake Powell, Utah

The popping in Grant's ears told him the plane was descending. He looked out the window and noticed the landscape had changed dramatically; the mountain range was gone, replaced by endless red rock formations, canyons, and vertical walls. Down below he saw the blue of LakePowell with its endless side canyons. It surprised him that Powell was so long and skinny. Although he had seen pictures before, his instinct kept painting the lake as much broader.

Wendy walked toward him and asked if he needed anything. "Are you done with that?" She reached for the empty cup and napkins.

He handed her the rest of the unfinished bagel. "Can you ask the pilot to fly low over the dam before he lands?"

"Sure." She turned and headed for the cockpit.

As the plane continued to descend, Grant looked down into some of the side canyons of LakePowell. Many of the canyons stretched for miles away from the main channel. Occasionally a houseboat sat up on the shore, with what must have been either water ski boats or jet skis tied next to them; too small to know for sure. Here and there Grant spotted two or more houseboats in the same place. He tried to imagine the party that must have occurred the night before. "Get out of there," he whispered. "Turn on your radios." How on earth would they be able to warn everyone? They wouldn't. It would be impossible, he knew.

The right wing dropped as the plane began a gradual turn to the right. Grant could see the main channel of LakePowell, a narrow expanse of water with rock islands rearing their heads out of the water. The Gulfstream had descended much lower and Grant could make out four people in a water-ski boat below them. The boat skimmed across the water below, headed for the other side of the channel, streaming a white elongated triangle behind, the wake stretching forever behind the boat.

Up ahead, Grant could see the end of LakePowell. The water came to an abrupt end in a tight canyon, the abruptness bordered by a white structure, the Glen Canyon Dam. From this angle the dam seemed small, maybe twenty feet tall across the quarter mile canyon. However, Grant had looked over the downstream side of the dam just a few years before. The massive face of the dam dropped seven hundred and eighteen feet to the river below.

The pilot positioned the plane to finish its turn just downstream from the dam. The dam would be visible on Grant's right, directly out his window. Grant repositioned himself in the seat, to get a better view. Before he could see deep enough in the canyon to see the leak, he noticed the mist coming out of the canyon, rolling up over the canyon walls. Definitely not normal.

As the plane glided in at just over two hundred fifty miles an hour, he got the line of sight he needed. He heard Wendy gasp from the seat behind him. About one third of the way down the seven-hundred-foot dam, on the west side, a huge column of water poured out of the dam. Actually, pour wasn't the right word - it was pressurized, and shooting out of the concrete face, just as described by Brian. Grant estimated the column of water at seventy-five feet in diameter. He couldn't see it hit the river. There was too much mist. The canyon below would be radically re-arranged by the impact of that much water.

He considered that before when he had talked to the security guard, the water was only about thirty-five feet in diameter, and now it had grown to seventy-five. The diameter had doubled in a half hour. Additionally, since volume grew as the square of the radius, it meant the volume of water exiting the dam had quadrupled in that same half hour.

The plane completed its pass over the dam and banked left for the airport in Page. Grant lost sight of the jetting water. He leaned back in his seat, staring up at the ceiling of the plane in deep concentration. If the diameter continued to double every half hour, how long would it take? He pictured the dam, with a seventy-five-foot diameter circle on the left side. He then imagined a one hundred-fifty-foot circle, twice as big, on top of the smaller one, then a three-hundred-foot circle, then a six-hundred-foot circle. But the dam was only seven hundred feet high! Grant added up the half hours - four. His watch showed 7:28 a.m. local time. According to his rough estimate, the Glen Canyon Dam would be gone by 9:30 a.m. Grant closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers back and forth across his forehead.

CHAPTER 9

7:50 a.m. - RainbowBridge, Lake Powell, Utah

Julie climbed back in the boat. Greg had timed their trip perfectly. The two couples had been the only visitors at Rainbow for almost the entire duration of their visit, not encountering anyone else until they arrived back on the docks. At Erika's insistence, the two couples had in fact eaten in sacred territory under RainbowBridge. But, Julie made sure they didn't leave any trash or evidence of their trespass.

"How far is it up to Hole in the Rock?" Paul asked.

"A little over twenty miles," Greg answered off the top of his head.

Julie stored the cameras and the cooler and sat down. Everyone situated themselves and Greg fired up the engine. Paul pushed off.

"So about an hour, then?" Paul asked.

Greg nodded "If we hurry." He backed the boat around and headed back out the way they had come in.

Ten minutes later they exited ForbiddingCanyon and headed north in the main channel toward Hole in the Rock.

* * *

7:55 a.m. - GlenCanyon Dam, Arizona

Grant arrived at the dam in a police car. The car had been waiting on the tarmac at the PageAirport. As soon as the Gulfstream taxied in, a cop rushed Grant into the police cruiser and sped off. When they drove down the hill and the dam became visible, Grant leaned forward in his seat for a better look. While driving across the GlenCanyonBridge, clouds of mist floated over them and they actually had to turn on the windshield wipers. At the dam, an officer waved the cruiser through the barricade. They pulled right up to the door of the HaydenVisitorCenter, a round building on the edge of the canyon. They parked in the red zone. When Grant opened the car door, he heard the rumble. It reminded him of Niagara Falls.

Before heading toward the building, Grant walked toward the rail, followed by the officer. Mist clouds rolled up over them and the entire canyon ledge. The handrail and sidewalk were sopping wet. Grant had looked over the rail before, but he had never seen anything like this.

He could clearly see the column of water exiting the dam in spite of the mist. The sound was deafening and Grant could feel the rumbling in his chest. He tried to grasp the amount of water exiting the dam and couldn't. The hole had grown to nearly a hundred feet now. It looked like it had dug farther down into the dam too. Hadn't Brian told him the original hole reached about two hundred feet down from the top of the dam? Grant now estimated it to be over two hundred seventy feet down. The width had expanded too. The hole was even wider than tall, almost reaching the center of the dam.

A man grabbed Grant's arm, yelling to be heard over the noise, "COME INSIDE WHERE WE CAN TALK." He pointed at the dam. "YOU CAN SEE EVEN BETTER INSIDE."

Grant waved a thank you to the police officer and followed the man into the visitor center. His clothes felt damp. As soon as the door shut behind them, the noise dissipated. He swallowed and his ears popped. The lobby was round with high ceilings. A curved wall shielded them from a wall of windows. Grant was pulled toward the windows in order to get a better view of what was happening below. As he approached, he noticed someone had set up a table and chairs next to the large windows.

The man who grabbed Grant's arm, obviously the security guard, shook Grant's hand. "Glad to see you."

Grant nodded. "Grant Stevens, Bureau of Reclamation. You must be Brian?"

The man nodded his head.

Brian's baby face made Grant wonder if he was old enough to be guarding anything. He had traces of fine blond peach fuzz on his face, which showed that he hadn't shaved for a while. He was shorter than Grant, maybe five foot six. Although his hands were small, when he shook, he gripped hard like a salesman.

"Yeah, I'm the one who called you. You sure got here quick."

Grant looked at his watch. "The Bureau has a small jet. It made a big difference."

There were four other men in the lobby besides Brian, three of whom wore the same security uniforms; the other wore Levi's and a polo shirt. Brian introduced the one without a uniform. "This is Dan Mumford. He's my boss in charge of security for the dam. He just got here."

Grant nodded at the man, then turned back to Brian. "Did your guys get out of the plant okay?"

Brian nodded. "Yeah, they showed up after I talked to you on the plane. Everybody got out. It was a huge relief. As it turned out, the security guy down in the plant got hit by a wall of water and dropped his radio. That's why I couldn't contact them. They went out the access tunnel."

"Well, I'm glad they're all right."

Brian motioned toward the table by the windows. "I've set up a place over there where we can talk, a make-shift command center for lack of better words. The light is better over there. We lost our power a few minutes before you arrived."

Grant looked at the lights. "You lost power? So the water killed the turbines in the dam already?"

Brian looked back. "Yeah, first the main power grids went down. Then a few minutes later the small turbine that powers all the stuff in the dam itself followed. I can only imagine the destruction happening below right now. Anyway, the digital phone system went down with the power, but we found an old analog phone in the back. It still works off the phone company's power; they must be on backup or something. So at least we have a phone."

Grant heard the noise of the water again briefly as someone came in the door. When the door shut, the noise disappeared. A police officer ambled across the floor, seemingly in no hurry. He wore a khaki uniform, about the same color as a boy scout. His face was covered with an extremely bushy moustache that hung over his lips, completely concealing them, and rolling down on the sides of his face to the sides of his chin. The brown facial hair was streaked with gray, giving him a worn look. His eyes seemed to match - red and droopy. Grant couldn't help wondering how the officer could feed himself without getting food stuck in his mustache.

Brian motioned toward the man. "This is Earl Smith. He's the captain for the Page police department."

"Nice to meet you," carried from somewhere beneath the mustache.

Grant didn't remember ever hearing such a raspy voice. He reached out his hand. "Grant Stevens, Bureau of Reclamation."

Earl's hand was rough and cracked like a farmer or mechanic.

The group found chairs around the table and sat down. Grant chose a seat that allowed a good view of the dam. Everybody looked at Grant, an unspoken message that he was in charge. They all looked relieved to have someone new to give orders, especially Brian.

Grant looked around the table before speaking. "Well, first things first. Has everyone been notified, upstream and down?"

Brian nodded. "I called everyone in the red book. That includes the Grand Canyon downstream and LakePowell's water patrol." He pointed at Earl. "The police closed all access to Lee's Ferry and other roads into the canyon."

"What about the dams upstream?" Grant asked.

Bran shook his head. "They weren't in the book."

Grant pointed at the phone. "Well, we should probably call them too, and shut them down, like Flaming Gorge in Utah, it won't help us for a day or so, but tomorrow, we're going to wish we had."

"How did the Grand Canyon folks react?" Earl asked.

Brian shrugged, glancing around as he answered "Well, that was one of the first calls I made this morning. And to tell the truth, they didn't seem as worried as I would have expected."

"You told them the dam was breaking apart, and they didn't seem concerned?" Grant asked.

Brian looked around. "Well, like I said, that was a while ago, and I didn't want to say anything that wasn't true, so I just told them the facts, you know, that there had been an explosion, and that water was coming out of the dam."

Earl spoke from beneath the mustache. "Better call 'em back and update 'em."

Grant nodded. "So when the first calls were made, they were never told the dam was collapsing?"

Brian leaned forward. "When I made the calls, I didn't know--"

Grant waved his hand to silence him. "That's all right. You just gave them the facts." He stood and walked over to the large windows. He looked down into the canyon as he spoke. "Just in case you guys want an official statement from the Bureau, the Glen Canyon Dam is going to fail. My guess is it'll be gone before noon. Let's get back on the phones and update everyone. Maybe that'll wake up the rangers in the Grand Canyon."

Brian and his boss Dan stood to leave the table.

"Hang on," Grant said, pointing at Brian. "I need to ask you a few more questions. Can you get somebody else to make the calls?"

Brian's boss motioned to one of the guards who had been quiet up to that point and they walked a few feet away from the table and had a brief conversation. Afterwards the quiet guard left and Dan returned to the table.

Grant walked back from the window and sat down at the table. "All right, I want to start with what has happened so far, chronologically. Brian, can you tell us everything you remember? Try to include time estimates when possible."

Brian started, "Well, I was back in my office when I heard the explosion." He motioned down a hallway.

"Did you check the time?" Grant prompted.

"Sorry, no."

Grant coaxed, "The Bureau called me at 6:27 a.m. Arizona time. Try to estimate how long before that you heard the explosion."

Brian looked around nervously. "Wow, things were moving kinda fast around here. How about 20 minutes."

Dan, Brian's boss, spoke up. "Was it still dark?"

Brian shook his head. "No, the sun was coming up." He pointed to the window. "When I ran over here to look, the sun hit me right in the eyes."

Grant smiled, "You mean you saw the sun rising? A partial sun?"

"Yeah, I guess."

Grant nodded. "Good, we can estimate the time of the explosion based on sunrise. That'll give us a good approximation of the time. Let's use 6 a.m. as our estimate until we can check it against the 911 logs." Grant looked around the table. "Who's taking notes?"

Dan raised his hand.

Grant pointed to him. "Okay, Dan. You're elected." Grant turned back to Brian. "Now, you heard the sound at 6 a.m., then what happened?"

"When I looked out the windows, the first thing that caught my eye was the smoke on top of the west elevator tower. Then I noticed the water spraying out of the dam. There was smoke there too."

"When you first noticed the leak, how big was it?"

"I'd say about five feet in diameter, not too big," Brian shrugged.

"Did you see anybody around the elevator before it blew?" Grant asked.

"Sure, the elevator service guy was here working on the west elevator before the explosion."

Dan jumped up, "What elevator service guy? There wasn't any service scheduled last night!"

Brian looked nervous. He talked directly to his boss. "I know, but he showed me the work order and he said it needed to be done before we opened today, per you. He knew your name, first and last. I figured you forgot to tell me about it, so I let him in."

Dan yelled at him. "Why didn't you call me, I would have told you--"

Brian pushed his chair back and stood, yelling back at his boss. "It was 4:00 in the morning! Besides everything looked legit and it was the same company that always comes. I just thought . . ." He sat back down.

Dan remained standing, staring down at his employee. Brian put his head down.

Grant spoke to Earl, "Officer Smith, you want to ask any questions? I think we just figured out what caused the explosion."

Earl leaned toward Brian, "What did this guy look like?"

Brian gave a description of a slim, white guy in his early thirties wearing gray coveralls with a matching hat. He had a mustache, Brian remembered. He drove a white Chevy pickup, pulling an enclosed utility trailer behind. Brian responded to a question from Earl by stating that, no, they didn't usually watch when service guys were working.

"Did you guys write down the license plate?" asked Earl.

Brian nodded and handed a clipboard to the police officer, pointing to the number.

Earl barked orders to one of his officers. "Call our buddies in Utah and down south. We need roadblocks on all major highways. He looked at his watch and grimaced. "He's got almost a two-hour head start."

Everyone turned as Dan yelled from the windows. "Is that the trailer?" He pointed toward the dam.

The others hurried over to the window. A white enclosed utility trailer was parked on the dam, mostly hidden by the west elevator shaft. The lookers wondered why they hadn't noticed it before, possibly due to the more impressive sight of water blasting out of the dam.

Earl looked at Grant. "Mr. Stevens, I'd like to send a couple men out there to investigate. Does the Bureau consider it safe enough?"

Grant stood and walked to the window. Without looking back, he answered, "It's definitely going to collapse. The question is how soon."

"All we gotta do is run out there, look around, and get back. We got time for that?"

Grant turned and spoke directly to the officer, pointing toward the dam. "My assumption, based on how far down the hole is, is that the top of the dam will hold for a while, maybe an hour. I can't say for sure. However, my assumption is just a guess. The lawyers at the Bureau would never allow anyone on the dam."

Earl responded, "I ain't interested in what the lawyers think. I just need to understand how fast it's going to break up."

Grant continued, "How long do you think you need?"

"I'd just like to have my men look in the back of that trailer and see what they see. I'm bettin' that there are a few clues to what kinda bomb was used. Clues that could help us find out who did this."

Grant looked at Earl. "Officer Smith, obviously I can't authorize you to go out there. But I'm not going to say you can't, either. You make your own decision. However if you're going, go now. The longer we talk, the more dangerous it becomes."

Earl stood and headed for the door. This time his stride was hurried. He turned before he went outside. "We'll be ready in a few minutes." When Earl opened the doors, the sound of the water rumbled into the lobby again.

Grant wondered if he had made the wrong decision. If the dam collapsed while the cops were out on it, they would hold him responsible. He considered running outside and stopping Earl, telling him he had changed his mind. Although Grant still estimated it would be at least an hour before it collapsed, he could be wrong.

While he waited, Grant decided to do something he needed to do. There was a phone call to make. It'd been a mistake for Julia to send him alone. He knew that now. He needed someone here with him, to run calculations, and coordinate with the office in Denver. He had a feeling that the computers at the Bureau would be humming before too long, trying to analyze the flood implications downstream.

As he dialed, he hoped Shauna Kingsly would be at her desk. She was the one he wanted. She had worked for Grant for over five years now and although everyone considered her a little intense, Grant wanted her with him. She had the ability to organize data and make sense of it better than anyone in the group. She was tenacious at getting the support she needed from other groups, which would be essential to coordinate communication from the Denver office. She would definitely be overwhelmed. She was an introvert who thrived in a structured environment, and was terrified by change. She didn't have much of a personal life, seldom varying from the path between her parent's home and work. A trip to the field would freak her out, but do her good. Shake her up a little, in a positive way.

She picked up on the second ring. "Hello?"

"Shauna. It's Grant."

"Grant? Are you at GlenCanyon right now?" She sounded excited.

"Yup. What have you guys heard?" He'd wondered if the word had got around yet.

"Well, the news was all over the radio on the way to work. But I just thought you were late this morning. The rumor that you were there, at the dam, didn't come down until a few minutes ago."

"Well, I'm definitely here. And the radio doesn't do it justice. The Glen Canyon Dam is tearing itself apart by the minute."

"How big is the hole?"

"Just a second and I'll look." Grant carried the cell phone over and looked out the windows again. "I'd say about a hundred-fifty feet in diameter." He heard Shauna gasp. "And it's kind of hard to see, with all the mist, but the water is probably shooting out a couple of hundred feet before it hits the river below."

"Wow."

Grant got to the point. "I need you out here."

"What? Me?" she said softly.

"Yeah. I need somebody out here to run numbers and coordinate with the office. Bring your laptop. You'll need it. Get a cell phone too. Check one out. If they give you any crap, call Julia, Roland's admin. She'll help."

"When should I come?"

"I want you on the first plane out of Denver. You determine how much time it'll take to go home and pick up what you need. If travel gives you any guff or takes too long, bypass 'em and book your own ticket." Grant could tell she was writing while he talked.

"What airport do I fly into?"

"Page . . ." Grant suddenly realized that few commercial airlines flew into Page. She would have difficulty getting a flight. It would take her hours, maybe until late afternoon. He looked out at the dam. It would be history by then. She would never make it. "No. Don't fly here. By the time you get here, I'll be gone. Meet me at Hoover."

"Hoover?" She sounded surprised.

"Yeah. Fly into Las Vegas, then take a taxi to Hoover. That's where I'm headed after this."

He waited while she wrote, then continued. "If you beat me there, our contact is Fred Grainger; at least I hope he's there, not on vacation or something." Grant had worked with Fred before, definitely a good man. He needed to call him, as soon as he got a minute. "Hang on. Here's my cell phone number." Grant read her the number off his wife's phone.

"Anything else?" she asked.

"Yeah, before you leave, go tell Bruce that I have his Failure Inundation Report. You get a copy too. Tell him, if he has any updates, we need them now. I want the flood levels recalculated using this morning's water levels from LakePowell and Lake Mead."

He waited again while she wrote.

"All right, what else?"

"That should be enough. You've got plenty to do. I'll see you at Hoover."

He hung up while she was still writing.

* * *

8:00 a.m. - Highway 59, East of Hurricane, Utah

8:35 a.m. - GlenCanyon Dam, Arizona

9:10 a.m. - St. George, Utah