Grant considered the question. "I have an assistant here with me from Denver. She has put together a timeline of what's going to happen downstream. It shows our estimates for when the water will reach each dam, all the way to Mexico and the Gulf of California. I'll get you a copy. As far as damage is concerned, if Hoover holds, we don't expect to lose any of the three major dams. But with Hoover's spillways at capacity, we're going to have just under 500,000 cubic feet per second going downstream."

Phil looked confused so Grant clarified. "That's almost fifty times normal for the lower Colorado River, basically twice the flow of Niagara Falls. Anything next to the river is going to be flooded, badly. Laughlin will be a total loss."

Phil frowned. "You said you don't expect to lose any major dams. What does that mean? Does that mean some small ones are going to fail?"

Grant nodded. "By far, the two biggest are Davis and Parker, which hold back LakeMojave and Havasu. Both of those have spillways that, theoretically, should be able to keep up with Hoover. Downstream are two small dams, Head Gate Rock and Palo Verde, which have comparatively little storage. Their primary purpose is to divert water for irrigation. As a worst case, we expect both of these dams to fail. However, neither should substantially affect floods downstream. The one we're worried about is the Imperial Dam, just north of Yuma, Arizona. It'll definitely be breached and we'd like to figure out a way to minimize the damage. As I explained before, Yuma is where the United States desalinates the water going to Mexico. So we want to protect the desalination plant."

"Approximately how many hours will the flood last? How soon will you be able to get people in to access the damage and make repairs?"

Grant stared at Phil. "It's not hours, Phil, it's months. It'll be almost two months before Hoover drops below the spillways. If we're lucky, the people can move back in and start sifting through their stuff by September 1st."

Phil's jaw dropped and he walked over and sat down. "Two months of Niagara Falls?"

"Two months of Niagara Falls times two," Grant corrected.

"I had no idea." Phil looked around, then back at Grant. "What about Mexico? What's going to happen there?"

"Well, before it gets to Mexico, there's the Laguna Dam. It's less than ten feet high. It won't even slow the water down. The dam in Mexicali, Mexico is called the Morales Dam. Its primary purpose is to divert the water into the Gila canal. It's not very big, and if the water destroys it, maybe the United States can help them rebuild it."

"What about downstream from Morales? Any more dams?"

Grant shrugged. "No, that's it."

"And your girl's list shows timelines for all these dams?"

"Yeah, she did a good job. She wrote a crude model for the whole thing. It lists estimated times for each reservoir to fill, and water travel times between dams."

Phil stood. "All right, we have a lot of phone calls to make. Hopefully we'll get some National Guard personnel to help us."

Grant got the distinct impression that the interview was over. He walked toward the door of the small conference room. "I'll send Shauna up with your info." He heard Phil respond that he appreciated it as he walked out the door.

* * *

7:20 a.m. - Riverside, California

The skinny man took the exit. The truck needed gas. After blowing up the aqueduct, he had continued west and skirted the south side of Joshua Tree National Park, then joined I-10, which passed by Palm Springs and all the windmills. The exit put him in Riverside, California.

Back when he planned this day, he wanted to follow the Colorado River south, but he knew the cops would be looking for him. There would be road checks and detours, and staying near the river would be too risky. It would be bad enough to get caught, but especially out on the open highway traveling between targets. Ultimately, he had decided he had plenty of time. The long detour through Southern California would almost guarantee he would go unnoticed.

After starting the gas pump, he fished through his glove box and found the address of his next destination. A map had been printed from his computer. Days before, after calling numerous persons advertising on recycler.com, an online classified advertising company in Southern California, the skinny man had found the vehicle he was looking for. A deal had been made. Now all he needed to do was show up on the guy's doorstep before noon. The seller was expecting him.

When the tank was full, he looked at his watch. He saw a few fast food restaurants just down the street and decided he had time for breakfast.

* * *

7:30 a.m. - Hoover Dam, Nevada

Grant and Fred had climbed to the top of phase one of Hoover-Two. They walked carefully along the sandbags. Where they walked, it was only ten feet wide. Looking north over the lake, the employee parking lot was gone, covered with water. A slight breeze blew down BlackCanyon, rippling the surface, but the breeze was not refreshing, as the air temperature crept toward 100 degrees, even early in the morning.

For the last hour or so, the construction of the dike had transitioned from phase one to phase two. The ten-foot-high dike was finished and stretched from the cliffs on the Arizona side to the cliffs on the Nevada side. Phase two called for widening the dike from half the width of the dam to the full width, and building it up to a full height of twenty feet. The transition meant that trucks would no longer be able to drive across the dam and turn around, but would need to back up to unload sand bags. Phase two was gradually being built from the Arizona side toward the Nevada side.

Over the noise of the trucks and men, one could still hear the rumbling sound of the two spillways. By referencing off the concrete handrails on the top of the dam, Grant could approximate that the water level had risen about two feet above the concrete, meaning that two feet of water would be flowing over the top of Hoover if the sand bag dike wasn't there. So far, the dike was doing what it was supposed to do, a very satisfying feeling.

Fred seemed to read his mind. "This place would look a little different with a small waterfall stretching all the way across the dam, wouldn't it?"

Grant laughed. "I wouldn't mind a small one; it's a fifteen or twenty footer that I don't want to see."

Grant turned to Shauna who had just joined them on the dike. "How are we doing on water levels?"

She adjusted her glasses. "The rate at which the water is rising has started to slow slightly, even though the floods entering the lake are still peaking. That's mostly due to increased flood area of the landscape upstream as the water rises."

Fred laughed out loud. "In English?"

Shauna looked uncomfortable. "What that means, Mr. Grainger, is that the higher Lake Mead rises, the more it spreads out. It therefore takes much more water to make it rise. Basically, the surface area of the lake is growing faster than the flood, therefore the rate the water is rising in the lake is decreasing."

Fred, still laughing, struggled to talk. "I thought I understood, Miss Kingsly. I just wanted to see if you could say it in simpler terms."

Grant and Fred both laughed again.

Shauna smiled in spite of being the object of their joke. Grant didn't want to upset her, even if she did have a vocabulary problem. She had been invaluable on this trip, and her estimates had been near perfect.

"Are the levels still within our projections?" Grant asked.

She nodded. "Yes. In fact, I've reduced my projection for maximum depth from Hoover plus thirteen to Hoover plus twelve and a half."

"That's great. I'll take all the 'halves' you can give me," said Grant. "By the way, did you get that table of downstream stuff to the FBI guys?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Thanks." Grant considered the information. "What about time? Have you changed when you expect Hoover to peak?"

"No. I monitored the reports of peak flood stages as they moved through the Grand Canyon last night, and I actually expect peak flows to be entering the other end of Lake Mead within the hour, then decreasing gradually. However, flow into the lake will remain greater than 500,000 cubic feet per second until late this evening, approximately 9:00 p.m. After that, the lake should start to drop very slowly."

Grant remembered something that had crossed his mind while talking to the FBI. "Were you able to get a hold of anybody at the three small dams downstream yet?" He worried about them, because they were not under direct control of the Bureau of Reclamation. Headgate Rock Dam, whose major purpose was to divert water to the Colorado River Indian Reservation, was actually controlled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Palo Verde Diversion Dam was managed by a bunch of farmers in the Palo Verde Irrigation District. And Imperial Dam, way down by Mexico, was managed by the Imperial Irrigation District, the same group that managed the All American Canal, the largest of all the Colorado River aqueducts.

She nodded. "I'm glad you brought that up. I got ahold of them all, but the person I talked to at Headgate Rock said he couldn't do anything until the big wigs show up for work."

"You're kidding, right?"

"No, he was serious. He said the offices for the Bureau of Indian Affairs are in Phoenix, and they didn't have any home numbers for them at the dam."

"So what are we going to do?"

Shauna looked at her watch and then back toward the visitor center. "Well, we should be able to try them pretty soon. They answer their phones early, since much of their communication is with offices on the east coast."

"What about Imperial and Palo Verde? What did they say?"

"Imperial had already put two and two together. They knew they'd get flooded; they just didn't know when. I told them we were concerned with the desalination plant, and they said they had been sandbagging around it all night."

"What'd they say when you gave them the time frames?"

"It was later than they expected. They were actually relieved."

"And Palo Verde?"

"The guy I talked to was very concerned. He wanted to know how much higher the water would be, which I didn't know. He asked me to estimate, so I told him about ten feet. He told me ten feet would put the water level over his dam, which I told him I already knew. He asked what the plan was to save his dam and I had to tell him there wasn't a plan, that we knew it was going to fail. He didn't like that."

"Did you recommend that he break it himself?"

Fred laughed and Shauna looked up, surprised. "No. Should I have?"

Grant explained, "We need to call them back. It would cause a lot less damage if he breaks his dike before the water gets there. Why don't you call them back and explain it to them. Since both Palo Verde and Headgate Rock are landfills, an intentional controlled break before the water levels get out of control would be better. It would not only mitigate upstream flooding and reduce the amount of water released, but more importantly, they would be able to choose where they wanted the dike to break. That'll help them later, when they have to rebuild it."

Fred laughed. "I want to listen to their reaction when you tell them to break their own dams."

Shauna looked nervous. "I wonder how they'll react."

Grant nodded his head. "Oh, they'll be shocked when you suggest it. But once you explain why, they'll understand."

Shauna looked nervous and put her head down. Grant touched her shoulder. "Have you called your family? Is it okay for you stay out here for a few days?"

She looked back up and nodded. "I don't need to call. I can stay as long as you want me to. " She smiled. "It's been interesting."

"Had you ever been here before?"

She shook her head. "Not at Hoover. But when I was in high school, my parents took us to LakePowell. We didn't have boats or anything, but we took a tour boat over to see RainbowBridge. We toured the Glen Canyon Dam while we were there. They let us go down and see the turbines and everything. GlenCanyon seems very similar to Hoover."

"Not anymore," said Fred.

Shauna's head turned toward Fred before her eyes bulged. She looked back at Grant. "Oh! I keep forgetting. Was it terrible to watch?"

Grant nodded. "It was amazing and terrible at the same time."

Fred's eyes looked dreamy. "I wish I could have seen it."

Grant tried to visualize. It seemed like weeks ago. "When I left, there were two concrete outcroppings, one from each side of the canyon. That's all that was left of the dam. LakePowell was running down the canyon like a gigantic river, 600 feet deep. The GlenCanyonBridge was gone, buried in the bottom of the river."

Shauna's hand went to her mouth.

Grant broke out of his trance and motioned along the crest of Hoover Dam. "Now we have to save this one." He peered over the 600 foot drop to the river below. "If you believe in prayer, say a prayer for Hoover Dam."

* * *

7:45 a.m. - Wahweap Marina, Lake Powell, Utah

Julie stood in the Mastercraft and looked east toward Castle Rock at the early morning sun. Hundreds of people must have started hiking at first light. They had formed into multiple lines that snaked over the hill from WarmCreekBay. It would be hours before they had hiked around WahweapBay to the marina. She did not envy them.

She looked down at the water and marveled at how far it had dropped during the night. Was it possible that it had dropped another hundred feet? There were literally hundreds of boats stacked two wide below them on both sides of the launch ramp. Although boats had continued to enter WahweapBay the night before, the darkness had halted further attempts. That or the parks service had finally figured a way to prevent boaters from attempting the risky journey.

She wished she could see over to the main channel. What would it look like, with the water so low? Maybe it was too low to permit entry into WahweapBay. What if there was some sort of obstruction? What if there were still boats heading south, but they were all being swept over the remains of the dam? She hoped that was not true. She wondered how many people actually had been pulled over during the night. It was unreasonable to believe that nobody had. What if fifty people had died last night? What if a hundred?

"You're awake?"

Julie turned to see Erika walking down the ramp from above, with Paul following behind.

"You ready for breakfast?" Erika asked.

Julie was starving. "Is the restaurant open?" She couldn't imagine it was.

"They're not cooking, with the power out. But they put out some bagels and fruit on a table for the people that are arriving." Erika reached over and ran her fingers through Julie's hair. "Were you able to sleep much last night, with everything going on?"

Julie shook her head. "I might have gotten 15 minutes." She remembered the night being a series of boaters debating whether to ground their boats like the Crawfords had, then after finally doing it, walking up and down the ramp talking to anyone who would talk.

Greg pointed up the ramp. "Has anyone said anything about clearing this off?" He motioned at the slimy surface.

Paul shook his head. "Everybody is asking about it, but I didn't hear any answers."

"Have you seen any equipment show up? Any cranes?"

Paul shook his head.

Greg pointed at the Mastercraft. "Can you watch the boat? I want to go talk to some people."

Erika held out her hands. "That's why we came down here. We'll watch the boat while you guys go up and get something to eat, and get cleaned up. Take your time."

Julie liked the idea. She pulled Greg along and started up the hill.

* * *

8:00 a.m. - Hoover Dam, Nevada

The governor had arranged for breakfast to be brought in from the Hacienda Casino. A group of men wearing white shirts and hats carried in the long rectangular silver platters with lids. They set up a buffet along the west wall of the visitor center with a stack of plates on one end. The aroma of sausage, bacon, and maple syrup drifted through the visitor center.

Grant's entire body begged for sleep, and he'd actually considered allowing himself to take a quick nap, but that was before the food arrived. Another urge, more powerful than sleep, changed his mind. His last meal had been cut brutally short by the second bombing. And his stomach now told him that a breakfast buffet took priority over naps and dam discussions.

He, Shauna, and Fred lined up behind Governor Jenkins and Commissioner Blackwell's parties. Phil's team from the FBI lined up behind them. Grant scooped liberally from the first platter, which was filled with bacon and sausage.

"Easy on the cholesterol," Fred said, smiling.

Grant picked up one of the links with his fingers and took a bite. "Hmm . . . That was worth at least a year of my life."

Shauna smiled. "Don't laugh. It may have cost you a year."

Grant looked over at her. "Since it was my last year, I probably saved myself a year of cancer and chemotherapy."

"Pass the sausage," Fred said, laughing.

With no large table, everyone found wherever they could to sit. Grant's group found three chairs over by the wall. The whole lobby was surprisingly silent as they ate. Grant had to force himself to eat slowly enough to chew. He noticed that even Shauna ate like she didn't know where her next meal would come from.

About half way through breakfast, the governor stood. "Ladies and gentlemen, attention please. I've just received word that phase one of Hoover-Two is officially completed."

The crowd erupted with clapping and some yells. Grant couldn't believe the governor used the "Hoover-Two" nickname.

When the noise settled, the governor continued. "As you know, without Hoover-Two, there would be a waterfall all the way across Hoover Dam right now." More cheers and a couple of playful boos could be heard.

"If all goes well today, the Bureau," Grant noticed that the governor motioned to where he sat, not to where Roland's team sat, "the Bureau expects Hoover Dam and Hoover-Two to be holding back Lake Mead at an elevation of twelve hundred forty four and a half feet, which would be twelve feet over the top of the original Hoover Dam." More applause.

"And some time in the next sixty days, we expect the lake to have dropped back below the concrete, after which Hoover-Two will be torn down again." Grant could tell by looking around that not all had expected it to take that long.

The governor continued. "So, since this is a historic moment, I need everybody to walk out right now," he motioned, "and we're going to take a picture in front of Hoover-Two. Come on. Your breakfasts will wait."

With many still chewing, the group headed out the doors of the visitor center.

Almost an hour later, after the photos were taken and the breakfast was cleaned up, Grant inquired of Shauna as to what was happening downstream. He felt satisfied with what they had accomplished at Hoover and was starting to worry more about downriver.

She pushed her glasses up on her nose and paged through a bound notebook, stopping on her latest entry. "A little before 7:30 a.m., the levels stabilized at Davis Dam. We think the spillways have caught up to Hoover."

Grant considered the information. "Caught up?"

"Yeah. Davis handled the flood, and passed it on, just as we hoped it would."

"Any damage?"

Shauna hesitated. "Well, the level of LakeMojave didn't rise that far, so --"

Grant interrupted, "I meant downstream."

Shauna read from her notebook. "They're reporting major flooding in the casinos in Laughlin along the river, including the Edgewater, Colorado Bell, Golden Nugget, and the Riverdale Resort." She looked up briefly. "Basically, anything on the edge of the river is getting inundated. They said that the Colorado Bell has four feet of water running through the lobby."

Grant shook his head. "Ouch. Two months of that and some of those hotels will be floating down the river."

Shauna continued reading from her notebook. "The cities of Laughlin and BullheadCity spent quite a bit of time sandbagging in preparation, and except for the buildings near the river, they've held. So there are a few wet places in the cities, but the major flooding has been contained to the river."

"Well, I guess that's good news."

Shauna continued. "However, just south of Riverfront Drive . . ." She motioned around with her hand. ". . . where the river curves east, it overflowed and flooded out the

Needles Highway

."

"Any damage farther down?" Grant asked.

"Maximum flow hasn't got to Needles yet, but we expect it during the next hour. I-40 and the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railroad's main lines go right next to the river there. The railroad's been trying to build dikes around the tracks for the last 18 hours, but they're afraid it's hopeless. It's their main east-west corridor out of the shipyards in Los Angeles. They average over 25 trains a day through there. A flood would shut 'em down."

Grant rubbed his eyes. "What's next downstream?"

"South of Needles, the river flows into LakeHavasu. Havasu's already rising fast, but it's going to double when maximum flow hits at around . . ." She turned the page and searched with her finger. ". . . 11:00 a.m. The lake will then quickly fill and top out sometime between 11:30 and 11:45 a.m."

Grant looked confused. "That doesn't sound right. The lake fills up less than an hour after peak flows get there?"

Shauna looked up. "It's right. Havasu is pretty small comparatively. Only 18,000 acres, compared to Hoover, which is more than ten times bigger. Plus, ever since Davis Dam opened its spillways early this morning, Havasu has been getting a full 500,000 cubic feet per second."

Grant thought about the damage being done in Laughlin to the casinos and the flooding by Needles. He wondered what kind of damage the railroad would sustain. He wanted to be at Parker Dam and make sure everything was done correctly. He looked at his watch. Here at Hoover, water levels would not peak until later in the evening. Today was going to be a disaster downstream. He had already written off two dams that he thought would fail downstream in the afternoon, not to mention the desalination plant at the Imperial Dam that they needed to protect. They might need him downstream. It was someplace where he could help out. Besides, the terrorists seemed to be moving that direction anyway. Grant made a quick decision. He was leaving.

"We'll be there when Havasu fills," he said. He noticed her head come up abruptly from her notebook. "You can come too. We need to be at Parker Dam when the spillways reach capacity." He hesitated, then added, "In case something comes up."

"What about Hoover-Two?" she said, almost pleading. "Who'll monitor the rising water levels?"

Grant motioned to Fred. "Fred'll take care of it. His guys can forward you the numbers. I want you to stay with me. I may need some quick calculations." He waved at Hoover Dam. "It's too late to do anything here. Hoover-Two is going to either hold or fail this afternoon, and it's too late for us to make a difference either way."

She hitched her glasses up on her nose and casually paged through her notebook, but Grant knew she wasn't really looking for anything.

"Don't worry," he said. "We can't be everywhere. Downstream is where we need to be. If there's anything to be done it will be down there."

Grant pointed at Fred. "I need another helicopter. See if you can reserve it for the whole day. And I'd better call the FBI and tell them I'm leaving."

Fred smiled. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

Grant shrugged. "What?"

"Don't you need to tell the commissioner?"

CHAPTER 31

8:20 a.m. - Hoover Dam, Nevada

"You're what?" The commissioner looked shocked.

"I'm going downstream to the other dams, to make sure everything gets done," Grant replied.

Roland motioned out the windows toward Hoover-Two and the monumental effort in process to complete the second phase of sandbags in time. "What about that?"

Grant shrugged. "My part is done. They can handle it from here."

"You are not done!" the commissioner yelled. "This project is far from finished, and we are far from being out of the woods, and you are responsible."

Grant held out his palms. "I'm not doing anything. They don't need me anymore."

The commissioner yelled, "Then start doing something. Go make sure they are doing everything right. Make sure we're not going to run out of sandbags. Make sure we are building it fast enough. Make sure we have enough volunteers. Who is doing all that?"

"It's all being handled. The governor's people are handling the sandbags, and the National Guard is managing the dike. They are all doing a great job. It's under control."

"Yeah, but what if something goes wrong? What if the water rises too fast or the dike breaks? These people consider you their leader, even the governor. Who would they go to?"

"Fred," Grant said. "He is taking over while I'm gone."

The commissioner turned on him. "Fred Grainger? What the hell does he know? They're not going to consider him in charge. He's not a dam builder."

Grant had had it. "How about you, Roland? You're here, aren't you? What about the other executives? Are they all worthless? How much more horsepower do you need?"

The commissioner looked surprised.

Grant continued, "Right now we have major flooding occurring downstream in Laughlin and Needles. Bridges and railroads are going to be lost. People will die. We will likely lose three dams this afternoon, maybe four if we don't manage them correctly. Are you going to go down there and take care of those problems?"

Roland had no response.

"I didn't think so." Grant pointed at him. "You belong here, in the limelight, with the governor and the cameras. I'm leaving. I'm going to try to save some dams downstream. If you get in trouble, call me." He held up the cell phone. "And I'll tell you what to do."

Commissioner Blackwell said nothing as Grant walked away.

* * *

8:40 a.m. - Grand Canyon, Arizona

David felt Judy stiffen on the ledge.

"What's that?" she asked.

David heard it too. It was the unmistakable sound of a helicopter. "Thank God!"

All three of them were physically and emotionally exhausted from the events of the night before and the lack of sleep. David was still cold and over the last hour had become incredibly thirsty. He craved a hot cup of coffee. Finally, they would be rescued.

When the helicopter rounded the bend downstream and became visible, it was much lower than they expected, flying just above the river.

All three of them waved their arms frantically. They jostled on the small space to prevent knocking each other over.

"OVER HERE!" David yelled.

Afram waved his arms back and forth to try to get the helicopter's attention, but the helicopter was too far below them. It could not see them. It was obviously flying low to search along the river. The eyes of the searchers were surely aimed downward. When it passed by them, they could only see the rotors. The three rafters continued to wave and scream as it passed. A moment later, it had flown upstream and around the bend.

"I don't believe it," Afram said.

Judy wiped at her forehead. "They didn't see us."

David spoke the obvious. "We're in big trouble."

* * *

9:30 a.m. - Hoover Dam, Nevada

The helicopter had "Las Vegas Tours" painted across the side just like the last one. It would stay with them throughout the day. The owner had been all over the idea of an all-day charter. With the rotor still spinning, Grant climbed into the front seat and restrained his urge to reach out and shake the pilot's hand, since the pilot didn't seem to have a free one.

"You Grant Stevens?" said the pilot without looking at him.

The pilot wore wire rim sunglasses and sported a full beard and mustache. The earphones he wore held his shoulder-length hair out of his face. Although not long, the beard was scraggly and the growth on his neck had not been trimmed. The tour company shirt was clean and pressed, and looked out of place with the man's worn jeans and tennis shoes. Grant guessed his age in the mid fifties.

"That's me," Grant yelled to be heard above the rotors.

He saw Shauna jump in one of the rear seats, place the computer case down by her feet and pull the door shut.

Grant pointed back toward the visitor center. "We're waiting for one more person."

The pilot pointed at the headphones hanging on the console. "Put those on."

Grant complied and positioned the microphone in front of his mouth.

"Makes it easier to talk." Grant heard the voice in the headphones and he noticed the guy was smiling at him. "I'm Lloyd."

Grant motioned for Shauna to put on her headphones.

"So I understand the first destination is Parker Dam?" said Lloyd. "What about after that?"

Grant looked over at him and could see he was genuinely interested. "We'll follow the river. There are a few small dams downstream from Parker. We'll probably stop at a few of those. Eventually there's Imperial Dam down by Yuma. We'll probably go at least that far."

Lloyd nodded with an excited look on his face. "I hear things are getting a little outta control downstream."

Grant sensed Lloyd was anxious to be going with them. "You know it. How'd you get assigned to us for the day, anyway?"

"Volunteered," Lloyd said, smiling. "I would have killed to get this gig."

Grant looked at Lloyd's eyes and decided he might be telling the truth. "Why?" Grant asked, although he thought he could guess the answer.

Lloyd looked at Grant as if he was his counselor. "I started flying choppers for the rush, the excitement. Flying low with bullets zinging past my head in Nam upped the ante. But since Nam . . ." He stared straight ahead. "It's not what it used to be. The most excitement I ever get anymore is when I'm flying around at night while somebody joins the mile-high club in the back seat."

Grant turned back toward Shauna, hoping she hadn't put her headphones on yet, but saw that she had, and that her eyes had grown at Lloyd's comment. The Vietnam story fit perfectly with Lloyd's looks. Grant wondered for a moment if they were safe, but remembered hearing that helicopter pilots who survived Vietnam were the best in the world, able to fly over a hundred miles an hour only inches off the ground.

"Yesterday, they had me flying down in the Grand Canyon. You know, to warn the rafters about the flood. That was good. We never get to fly that low in the canyon. I almost got my feet wet." Lloyd's teeth showed a devilish smile, one that Grant was glad Shauna couldn't see. Lloyd pointed over Grant's shoulder. "Is that your other passenger?"

Grant turned and saw a small female FBI agent in blue coveralls running crouched toward the helicopter. When she looked up, he recognized her as Agent Susan Williams, the one who'd met him at Davis Dam the night before. "That's her," he said into the microphone.

The pilot watched the woman approach the chopper and suddenly his jaw dropped and his expression showed fear for the first time. "Are you guys all FBI?" He must have seen the insignia on Agent William's coveralls. His nervousness made Grant wonder if Lloyd was hiding something under the seat.

Grant suppressed the laugh and smiled instead. "No, Shauna and I are with the Bureau of Reclamation out of Denver. The dam builders," he added for clarification.

"Hi," said Shauna, speaking for the first time.

"Hello, Miss."

Grant continued, "Agent Williams is an explosives expert from the FBI. She's coming along in case we encounter the bad guys or another bomb."

Lloyd's eyes lit up. "You think we might run into some explosives today?"

Grant heard the door shut behind him. He turned and smiled at Agent Williams. She returned the smile briefly, then reached for the seatbelt. Shauna reached over and handed her a pair of headphones. Grant felt the turbine accelerate and heard the sound of the rotors increase.

Grant gave her a minute, then said, "Agent Williams, nice to see you again."

His stomach dropped as the helicopter lifted. Agent Williams must have had the same sensation, because the response didn't come back for a few moments.

"How's your body?" she asked, meriting a quick glance from Lloyd.

"The toe's still a little sore, but the Advil is helping." Grant's soreness was mostly gone, or masked by the painkillers. It was replaced by an overwhelming desire to sleep. "I'm bushed, though. How about you?" Grant felt rude for not turning to face her during the conversation, but with her seated directly behind, combined with the G-forces from the helicopter, it was easier to look straight ahead.

"In the FBI, we're used to all-nighters."

Lloyd looked over and winked, showing Grant he'd interpreted her comment differently.

Lloyd flew south, roughly following BlackCanyon. None of the three passengers spoke, all of them craning their necks to stare down at the river below. On last night's ride in the darkness, Grant hadn't been able to see much. But now he could look down into the canyons. He could see whitewater occasionally on the Colorado River, and knew he was seeing big waves that either hadn't been there two days ago, or had been much smaller. After a few minutes the canyon widened and Grant could see the water of LakeMojave.

"How low can we fly?" Grant asked and immediately regretted it.

Lloyd smiled. "I can drag the landing gear if you want."

"No, that's not necessary." Grant pointed ahead to where he could see what looked like cabins on the side of the lake. "I just want to be low enough to see the effects of the higher water line."

"No problem," he said, and Grant felt the helicopter drop. Lloyd was smooth and maneuvered the chopper down to about a hundred feet of elevation with no erratic maneuvers. Even a hundred feet seemed way too low and accentuated the feeling of speed. Grant caught himself gripping the sides of his seat. Like Lake Mead, the water lines along the banks were noticeably missing, covered by the all-time-high water level.

For a while they didn't see any boats, but fifteen minutes into the journey, they saw a water-ski boat. Over the next few miles they saw many more, including a few houseboats. Evidently, not everyone heeded the warnings to clear the lake.

"Shauna, how much higher is the water?" Grant asked.

"Less than ten feet," she responded off the top of her head. "They don't vary the levels here near as much as they do at Mead and Powell."

"So basically, if there weren't a million warnings, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference? Except for the water marks?" he asked.

"No. The only difference would be the drift in the channel, and that would only be noticeable upstream where the lake is skinny."

They watched in silence again for a while. Grant knew the calm feeling on the lake was deceiving. There was chaos ahead. He could feel it.

Shauna broke the silence. "What are all those houses on the left?"

Grant stared at a hillside of homes, many of them at the lake's edge. He had remembered seeing their lights the night before.

"It's called Kathrine's Landing," Lloyd said.

"There's the dam." It was Agent Williams's voice.

Grant saw it, but Davis Dam was not nearly as obvious at low elevation and lacked the lights to make it stand out in the dark.

"Lloyd, can you slow us down so I can get a good look at the dam and the spillways?"

"No problem, Mr. Stevens."

Right up until the helicopter reached Davis Dam, everything seemed normal. The water levels seemed close to the top of the earth dike, but not enough to panic an untrained eye. However, as the helicopter passed over the dike in view of the concrete spillways, the normalness quickly disappeared. Unlike Hoover's spillway tunnels, Davis Dam's spillways did not disappear into the mountain. The concrete superstructure was built like a small dam itself and the spillways were positioned slightly lower than the maximum water level, channeling the excess water over the top of the concrete.

Close to 500,000 cubic feet per second was rolling over the top of the two spillways. Like GlenCanyon, the crashing water generated so much mist that it was difficult to see where the water was landing. One thing that was all too evident was that the river had leaped out of its channels. The concrete pool below the spillways was gone, covered in water. The whole area below the dam was underwater.

Grant turned and saw both of Shauna's hands in front of her mouth.

He heard Lloyd's voice in the headphones. "I assume this lake ain't supposed to be here?"

Grant nodded and thought Lloyd's classification of the flood below the spillways as a lake was an accurate description. The water covered the entire landscape below the dam, filling the riverbed and covering the entire parking lot and roads. He looked around for Blaine or Billy, the two security men he met the night before, but he couldn't see them. He could only see policemen.

"No, this lake wasn't here last night," he finally responded to Lloyd. He motioned with his hand. "This whole area below the dam was an old stream bed, dry gravel."

"You wanna look around some more, or move on?" Lloyd said.

Grant realized the helicopter had stopped in mid air, hovering, and that the pilot had been waiting for him. "No. Keep going, but stay low over the river."

The helicopter immediately banked and headed downstream. Just south of the dam, they passed by the large casinos lining the Nevada side of the river. Most of them featured riverfront amenities such as spacious pools and sun decks. None were visible, being covered with dirty water.

"Unbelievable," said Agent Williams from behind. "This is going to cost billions to clean up."

Grant noticed a couple of guys in a rowboat between two casinos trying to retrieve something wrapped around a tree. The Showboat, a casino shaped like a riverboat, was built right on the river, and suffered the most damage, with water flowing in one side of the building and out the other.

Grant only saw a few people around the casinos. He figured most of them had been evacuated. The ones he did see wore hip boots and carried shovels. Obviously, there had been a lot of effort to sandbag, as sandbags were piled next to most of the casinos to channel water around them. He wondered if he would have evacuated if he lived in Laughlin. He didn't think so. He tended to relate more with those who tied themselves to a tree before the hurricane hit, or climbed on the roof when the river bottoms flooded. Of course those were the ones that always died, too.

He tried to remember the name of the guy who decided to stay when Mount St. Helens blew in Washington. They tried to evacuate everyone, but he wouldn't budge. He said he'd lived there his whole life and he'd take his chances. It was the last time anybody ever saw him. Was Grant that stubborn? Maybe not.

But this was different. If he lived on the banks of the Colorado River and they told him it was going to flood, he couldn't imagine driving away. He might pack some stuff, and be ready to go at a moment's notice, but he wouldn't go miles away. Just up on the hill a little, so he could rush back down after the flood subsided. Maybe the people didn't have any choice. Maybe the police forced them to leave. That was something to consider. Besides, this flood would last almost sixty days. How would someone get supplies with all the stores closed?

Living in Denver, he didn't ever remember hearing about evacuations, other than localized ones for gas leaks or something. But it seemed like every spring, the news would show pictures of places in the Midwest getting flooded by the Mississippi or the Missouri or some other river, and those disasters were always followed by some governor declaring a national disaster area, and promising millions or billions in relief funding.

Grant was no fan of disaster relief. Isn't that what insurance was for? He remembered one year, one of the news programs talked to an old-timer who had lived by the river all his life. That guy was no fan of the government bailouts either. He said that the river had flooded the bottoms every five years as long as he could remember. Nobody got hurt until they started building housing developments in the river bottoms. He figured if anybody was dumb enough to build down there, they deserved to lose their homes. And sure enough, when the flooding started, it was them that were flooded out. The old-timer on TV did not want his taxes to bail out a bunch of idiots, and Grant agreed with him.

But this might be different. The lower Colorado River hadn't flooded for over seventy years.

Leaving Laughlin and the casinos behind, only desert remained. In fact, aside from green vegetation on the sides of the river, the valley seemed almost lifeless. There were places where the river had broken out and flooded some of the dry lowlands. Grant wondered if it would make a difference. Would long-dormant flower seeds germinate and sprout, and transform the extended banks into something beautiful? Not likely. True, in the early 1900's, before Hoover Dam, the river flooded the valley every spring. But Grant didn't recall hearing about any fields of flowers, only the pictures of flooding and devastation.

"How many miles to the next city?" Agent Williams asked.

Shauna responded with no hesitation. "It's just under thirty miles to Needles. You can see it ahead, over there." Grant couldn't see her pointing, but he could see the small town.

"LakeHavasu is just beyond, through that small mountain range," Shauna said.

"Tighten your belts and we'll be there in a quickie." Lloyd smiled and Grant felt the helicopter tilt forward and accelerate.

Looking down, it was easy to see the river was higher than normal. In many sections it had spilled over the sides and made small lakes on either side of the channel. Grant saw many places where riverside homes were surrounded by water. He saw water flowing over the top of a bridge in Needles and water on many of the streets close to the river. There were people all over the place, which meant the evacuation order had been largely ignored. After Needles, the damage was less obvious. Grant noticed that the BNSF railroad had given up, and water had breeched their sandbags and buried the tracks just south of the city. He shuddered at the thought of unburying and repairing the rails when the flood was over.

When the river ducked into Topock Gorge, Lloyd followed it, causing Grant to clutch the seat again. After a few minutes the water spread out into a beautiful canyon of jagged red rock. LakeHavasu, like LakeMojave before, showed no signs of flooding or disaster. The water looked turquoise and calm. No boats were visible on the north end of the lake, but Grant looked ahead and saw a few farther south defying the warnings.

After a few minutes, Lloyd laughed loudly. "Check out those guys in the red boat at three o'clock."

Grant scanned for a second to see what Lloyd was talking about, while Lloyd and Agent Williams laughed in his earphones. A long red and white boat pulled two water-skiers while being chased by a police boat with blinking lights. From a distance it looked like the tanned bodies, both skiing and in the boat, were naked from the waist up, but as they got closer, he saw that the girls wore swimsuits, just incredibly tiny ones.

"Whatever it takes to get smooth water," said Lloyd.

Ahead, Grant could see a growing city spreading up from the east shore. "Is that Parker?"

Lloyd answered. "No, that's Havasu City, Arizona. The city of Parker is a couple of miles downstream from the dam."

Grant nodded. He had never been to LakeHavasu before and was amazed at how isolated the turquoise lake was, surrounded on all sides by the red rock cliffs.

He heard Shauna's voice in the headphones. "If you look over on the right you can see pipes going up over that hill, and the pumping station on the edge of the lake. That's the California Aqueduct. That's the one that was blown up this morning."

The pipes were larger than Grant imagined. And the hill they went up was tall and steep. He guessed the amount of electricity to pump the water up the hill wasn't trivial. And with that much water, no wonder the bombed aqueduct made a huge mess.

Lloyd looked over at Grant. "When did that happen? I hadn't heard about that."

"It was a few hours ago, just before the sun came up."

"It looks okay to me," Lloyd said.

Shauna explained, "It was out in the desert about twenty or thirty miles from here. The flood made a big lake before they finally shut off the pumps."

"You want to go check it out?" Lloyd asked, hopefully.

Grant thought about it. The aqueduct had supposedly torn up the hillside and flooded acres of desert. He would like to see it too, no doubt about it. But they were far too late to do anything. There were more pressing issues at the dams downstream.

"No, it's out of our way. Besides, we need to get to Parker. We may still be able to accomplish something there."

Lloyd's mouth twitched slightly, which Grant thought might've been an indication of his disappointment. But it happened too fast to be certain. Up ahead, Grant could now see the concrete structure of Parker Dam. He had a feeling that there would be plenty of action there.

CHAPTER 32

11:00 a.m. - Parker Dam, California -Arizona Border

As the helicopter approached Parker Dam, Grant could see the place was crawling with police. Agent Williams had called ahead so the helicopter was expected. However, the entire roadway on top of the dam was covered with police cars and they had to hover for a few minutes while some of the cars were moved to make room for the helicopter to land.

Parker Dam, compared to Hoover and GlenCanyon, seemed unimpressive. The concrete dam rose only 85 feet from the river below, and the superstructure another 60 feet above the roadway. But Grant knew looks were deceiving. When building a concrete arch dam, it was necessary to dig through all the substrate until bedrock was reached, to anchor it. In the 1930's when Parker was built, the Bureau of Reclamation dug 320 feet down before hitting bedrock, making Parker the deepest below-ground dam in the world, with almost seventy five percent of it underground.

As soon as they landed, Lloyd killed the engine, and the rotors started winding down. Grant turned and looked at Shauna. "What time was the water level supposed to peak here?"

"11:45," she said with no hesitation.

"All right, that gives us 45 minutes. See if you can find out who's tracking the water levels, and let's get an update on how soon it'll reach the top of the spillways."

"Where are you going to be?" she asked.

"I'll be over by the spillways themselves to see if there's anything we need to worry about. I'm certain that these spillways haven't been used in years, and never at full capacity."

Agent Williams spoke from behind. "I'm going to go talk to the police for a few minutes, then I need to check in with Phil. I'll find you later."

Lloyd was looking at Grant. He was hurrying to shut down all the electronics. "You mind if I hang with you for a while?"

Grant laughed. It was obvious the pilot was excited to be in the middle of everything. "No. Come on." Grant jumped out of the helicopter.

No sooner had Grant walked out from under the still spinning rotors than a short, fat man appeared to greet him. The man wore a white polo shirt with the words Parker Dam embroidered above the pocket. The pocket itself sported three pens in a plastic pocket protector. He rested his pudgy arms on his extended stomach and his black slacks barely reached down to the tops of a pair of black tennis shoes. The guy wore thick glasses and attempted to hide his nearly bald head by combing his hair across it. In spite of the sunny location, this man had no tan whatsoever. Grant guessed he was in his early fifties.

The man reached out with one of the pudgy arms. "Mr. Stevens? Hi. I'm Charlie Jorgensen. I've been expecting you. Fred Grainger called from Hoover and said you were coming."

"Nice to meet you, Charlie." Grant noticed as soon as he released the handshake that Charlie returned the arm to its resting place on his stomach. An awkward moment of silence ensued as Charlie just stood looking at Grant with a weird smile on his face.

"Well, how about you show me the spillways?" Grant started to walk around him before the man suddenly snapped out of his trance and hustled alongside.

"Sure, Mr. Stevens. Right over this way." He motioned to where Grant was already headed.

Unlike Hoover, Parker's spillways did not rely only on the water levels to operate. There were huge gates that opened upwards to allow the water through. Like Davis Dam, the spillways were built at the top of the concrete structure, channeling the water through the top instead of around the dam. At the moment, four of the five gates were partially open, allowing an impressive amount of water to pass.

"Why isn't the west spillway open?" Grant asked.

Charlie adjusted the thick glasses. "That's number five. It jammed. We're working on it."

"How long since it's been used?"

"The only time we ever used the spillways was 1983, the year of the big spring runoffs. Other'n that, we've been able to keep up with Davis using only the penstocks."

Grant wasn't surprised. It was the same at Hoover and Davis. "I understand they haven't been used for a while, but don't you ever test them?" Grant thought he knew the answer.

Charlie adjusted the glasses again. "Yeah, we test the gates a few times a year, but we don't move 'em very far, usually less than a foot. Number five jammed at about a foot and a half. It hasn't been moved that far since '83."

They reached the spillways, and Grant stopped and looked over the edge of the upstream side toward LakeHavasu. Parker Dam's five spillways, each separated by a wall of concrete, were built right in the center of the arch. Each measured twenty-five feet high and twenty feet wide. Looking at the five huge holes made Grant relax a little. They were bigger than he'd expected. His instincts told him that if they were all open, they would be large enough. But then again, what if they weren't? And they definitely weren't all open.

Grant walked along the dam until they were above the unopened spillway. He could hear someone banging on the metal gate below. "What about the others? Why aren't they open all the way?"

Charlie looked down at the ground. "I didn't feel it was necessary yet. We're still within acceptable levels on Havasu."

That didn't surprise Grant either. None of the people at the dams upstream were gutsy enough to do anything until they were ordered - why should Parker be any different? "Well open 'em now -- all the way! The penstocks aren't going to be able to handle 500,000 cubic feet per second."

Charlie's face contorted. "What about number five?"

Grant motioned at the other four. "Opening the others will take some pressure off number five. Tell the guys working on it that they have another half hour before we get some demolition guys in here to blow it open."

This time Charlie took off the glasses and wiped the sweat off his brow. "Blow it open? But then it would never close, not without major repairs. And we'd have to lower the whole lake to get access to it."

"That's tomorrow's problem, Mr. Jorgensen. Today's problem is getting 500,000 cubic feet per second to go downstream without overtopping this dam."

Grant raised his head and looked around. The area on both sides of the dam seemed flat and at nearly the same elevation as the dam itself. If the water rose too high, it was not evident where the low point was. As he took in the surroundings, he noticed that Charlie was moving around, trying to see what Grant was looking at.

Grant explained. "If the spillways don't keep up, where's the water going to go?"

Charlie looked around, panicky. "What d'ya mean, where's it going to go? The spillways were designed to keep up."

"Yeah, but they have never been tested, have they? And besides, right now you can't open all of them anyway. We have to have a contingency. That's why I'm here." Grant looked at his watch. "And we have at most forty minutes to figure it out."

Charlie lowered his head again and prepared to leave. But Grant stopped him. "Oh, Mr. Jorgensen, be sure to call a demolition team. I want them here and ready if your guys can't open the gate on number five." Grant glanced at the top of the metal gates. "Oh, and tell them to bring some of that stuff that burns through metal, the stuff they use underwater to sink ships." Grant considered that it was doubtful they had any of that in Parker, Arizona.

The small man adjusted his glasses one more time and scurried off to relay the instructions. Grant noticed Lloyd standing next to him for the first time since they left the helicopter. He looked at Grant and a large smile appeared across his face.

"You're gonna give the poor man a heart attack," Lloyd said. "He's not used to that kind of pressure."

"Maybe he needs a heart attack. If he'd seen how much water was going through the spillways at Davis, maybe he'd pull his head out."

Grant looked again at the dam and surrounding hillsides and decided the dam itself was probably the lowest point. He walked past a group of police officers, over to the downstream side of the dam. Looking down at where the spillways exited the top of the dam, he decided there was probably less than ten feet of concrete between where he was standing and the top of the spillways.

He had a thought. "Hey Lloyd, if we had the demolition guys blow the top off the spillways, you think that would make a huge difference in how much water we could get through here?"

Lloyd looked down at the spillways, and then back across the dam. "Mr. Stevens," he said, "I don't think Charlie Jorgensen is going to like having you around."

* * *

11:10 a.m. - Carlsbad, California

The skinny man climbed into the back of the truck and checked the tie downs. He verified that the four-wheel ATV he had just purchased was secure and would not move around. The other items, including buckets, shovels, and gas cans, were stacked around it.

"Good luck with it," the other man said. "It's never given me any problems."

The skinny man nodded. "I think it'll work out just fine."

After arriving at the man's house he had taken the ATV for a short test drive in the cul-de-sac where the man lived. The engine was stronger than he expected and the tires were practically new. The muffler was quiet as claimed, which was one of his most important criteria. The four-wheeler had been stored in the garage and seldom used according to its owner. It looked almost new. Besides, he only needed it to run for the next 24 hours.

Satisfied that it was tied securely in the back of the truck, he hopped down and shut the tailgate. The seller stopped counting the wad of twenties for the third time and reached out to shake hands. The skinny man quickly glanced at his watch and then shook. He climbed into the pickup and started the engine. When he glanced one last time at the seller, he was busy counting the bills again.

As he drove the truck back toward the freeway, he wondered how far south the floodwater had traveled. According to reports on the radio, flooding was bad around Needles, which wasn't far from Parker Dam. That put it an hour or two later than he had estimated, but well within the worst-case calculations he had made. He smiled. He had plenty of time. Forty-five minutes south to San Diego, then an hour east and he would be right back in the action.

* * *

11:15 a.m. - Grand Canyon, Arizona

The three rafters were prepared. They couldn't afford to miss any more helicopters. Two had already flown past without seeing them. The problem was how to be noticed.

They were getting desperate. All three of them were thirsty, and the sun was almost directly above them, beating down on them. Additionally, there was no telling how much longer the helicopter searches would continue before they were called off. David wondered how long they could survive on the small outcropping with no food or water. And the space was becoming even more confining as the day went by. David's calves hurt from standing on the jagged slope, and sitting or laying down provided little relief.

The only upside was that over the last four hours of looking over the 300-foot ledge, David was finally becoming more comfortable with heights. It still scared him to look down, but nothing like the first time this morning. Gone were the shakes, sweating, and dizzy spells. Now it was just subdued fear.

The last four hours had oscillated between conversation and silence. They had speculated over and over, all the possible ways for their friends to have survived. But logic told him otherwise. It would be a miracle for any of them to be alive.

The second most popular topic had been how to attract the attention of the helicopters. They had discussed ways to get their attention: noise, fires, mirrors, all to no avail. They did not have the resources to communicate in any of those ways. They agreed that something visual had to be done, and waving arms hadn't worked the previous times. A smoky fire would be best, but all they had at their disposal was rock. Afram had suggested that if only he could throw a rock and actually hit the helicopter, they would be noticed. But both David and Judy knew that the probability of making contact was extremely small.

They needed something to draw the pilot's eyes upward. All three agreed that seeing something catapulting down the cliffs would do the trick. And that ultimately had given them their final idea.

"I think I hear one." Judy cupped her hand to her ear.

David stood and listened. "I can't hear any--"

"I hear it too!" Afram said. "Get ready!"

David crouched and so did Afram. Judy would be first. They had agreed on the sequence in advance. David held on to Judy's legs to stabilize her. The helicopter flew around the bend and became visible. Judy threw her life jacket and it started to fall down the cliff. The life jacket fell 75 feet, then hung on a rock outcropping. Judy crouched and David stood and threw his life jacket as hard as he could, the motion almost carrying him off the ledge. David's jacket dropped slightly farther before hanging on some sagebrush a hundred feet below. The helicopter showed no sign of recognition, maintaining its speed and trajectory. David crouched.

Afram, who had assured them his idea was best, rolled a large rock off the ledge that he had worked out of the hill. His lifejacket was wrapped tightly around the rock. The rock fell twenty feet before impacting rock below it. The collision sprayed dust in all directions and catapulted the rock farther down the canyon. In the next impact, it broke into two smaller pieces and the life jacket came off in another spray of dust. The two rocks continued rolling, unsettling other rocks in their path.

"Wave!" Afram yelled.

All three stood and waved their arms. One of the rocks bounced all the way to the river and splashed. The helicopter slowed.

"They saw it!" Judy said, jumping up and down on the small ledge.

"Wave!" Afram yelled again.

The helicopter veered as if it was searching for something. It climbed higher.

"Keep waving!" Judy encouraged. "They're looking for us."

The helicopter climbed and headed directly toward them.

"I think they see us," David said.

Judy shook her head. "Don't stop until we're sure."

The helicopter climbed higher and moved directly in front of them. David could see someone inside pointing at the three rafters.

"Hello." The sound was metallic and came from the helicopter's PA. A man inside the helicopter waved.

David had never been so happy in his life. The three rafters stopped waving, although Judy was still jumping up and down. The men in the helicopter pointed up at the rock cliffs. It looked like they were talking strategy. David realized the helicopter could not get close enough to help them without causing the rotors to hit the cliff. The men inside continued talking and pointing. The rafters waited.

The metallic voice returned. "Unfortunately, we are not going to be able to retrieve you from that location. We'll need to send another helicopter, one that can get you from above." He pointed up.

David felt disappointment that they would be on the ledge longer.

"Don't worry," the voice continued. "We'll be back." The man smiled widely. "Don't go anywhere while we're gone."

And with that, the helicopter flew up the river and was gone.

* * *

11:20 a.m. - Parker Dam, California/Arizona Border

Spillways one through four were now completely open and the volume of water was scary. Grant guessed that they were each running at eighty percent capacity, needing LakeHavasu to rise only a few more feet to max them out. According to Shauna, just before Charlie opened the gates, LakeHavasu was rising just under an inch every two minutes, which meant the full volume of water from Davis and Hoover was entering the lake. Opening the four spillways had slowed the rate considerably, but it was still rising. They needed the other spillway open.

Charlie's guys had rigged some scaffolding off the downstream side of the dam allowing them to climb down into the spillway itself. Grant now stood on the scaffolding inside number five, looking up at the stuck gate. The metal head gate was designed to slide down two slots in the concrete. Electric motors pulled huge chains to move the gate up and down. With the right side stuck, the left side had dropped enough to wedge the entire gate. One of Charlie's men had climbed up the ladder and was banging on the top of the head gate, where it was jammed. Now Charlie was worried about burning up the motors, since the one on the right started smoking during the last attempt. Obviously, the more pressure on the gate, the harder it would be to break loose, and the rising water on the other side wasn't helping. The worker on the ladder continued pounding mercilessly with the sledgehammer to break it loose. He stopped hammering for a second, mopped the sweat off his brow with his glove, and gave Charlie a thumbs up.

Charlie stood next to Grant, looking up at the worker. "You want to try it again?"

The worker nodded.

Charlie held a radio to his mouth and prepared to have someone inside the dam try the motors, when Grant interrupted him. "Can you separate the motors?"

Charlie shrugged and adjusted his glasses. "What do you mean?"

"Can you try raising it with just the left motor?" Grant pointed up at the top. "That might un-jam it."

Charlie relayed the request into the radio. The response came back that there was only one switch.

"Aren't there separate circuit breakers for each motor?" asked Grant.

The person on the radio answered that there were. Charlie thumbed the radio. "Turn off the right motor, then try to raise it."

They waited for a while then they heard the gate screech and Grant saw the left side move up slightly.

"Stop!" Charlie yelled in the radio.

A couple of the men started cheering, including the man up on the ladder.

"Okay, now turn the right motor back on," Charlie said into the radio. He gave the operator a few moments to flip the switch. "All right, now try both motors down." He motioned for Grant to cross his fingers.

The gate started moving down. The workers cheered again.

"Stop!" yelled Charlie into the radio.

The gate stopped and Grant heard the response from the radio. "What's wrong now? Did it jam again?"

Charlie explained in the radio. "No. But we need to get out of here before you open it -- or you'll drown us all," he added.

That made perfect sense to Grant. He headed for the scaffolding, at the same time noticing the man with the sledge hurrying behind him. When Grant reached the top, climbing onto the safe concrete structure again, he saw Shauna and Lloyd waiting.

"So you fixed it?" said Lloyd.

"It's not open yet," Grant answered.

He turned to see Charlie climbing over the rail. He looked terrible. His un-tucked shirt was smeared with dirt and soaked with sweat under both arms and in the middle of his chest. The three other workers followed, handing the ladder up as they came. With everyone on the deck, Charlie first nodded at Grant, then keyed the radio. "Okay, we're all out. Let 'er rip."

Grant watched over the side of the dam at number five as the switch was activated. He could hear the metal gate moving. After only a few seconds the small stream exiting the spillway increased. The stream quickly grew until it was almost half the size of the other four.

Charlie's head showed up next to Grant's. He yelled to be heard over the water. "The right motor is smoking like hell."

Grant looked over at him. "What'd you tell him?"

Charlie grinned. "I told him to let it smoke. We'll replace the motor later."

The sound of the gate raising was barely audible with the noise of the water. But Grant knew it was still moving because the water exiting number five continued to grow, now almost equaling the other four.

Charlie's radio squawked something indiscernible and he walked to the middle of the dam where it was quieter. He said something into the radio, but Grant couldn't hear. Charlie looked back at Grant, then walked toward him. "We burned up the right motor. It's on fire."

Grant looked back at the streams of water blasting from the spillways. If number five's flow was less than the other four, it wasn't by much. He turned back to Charlie. "Is it all the way up?"

Charlie adjusted his glasses and shook his head. "It's still got a couple feet to go."

Surely, a couple of feet wouldn't make much difference. But Grant knew it was a wish more than a fact. Grant grabbed Shauna's arm and led her to the middle of the dam where the sound wasn't as loud. "I need you to watch the water levels, by the minute. Number five is jammed again and this time we're not going to be able to fix it."

"We're already monitoring the levels every minute. But Havasu needs to rise higher until the water reaches the tops of the spillways. Only then will the spillways be at full capacity. That's when we expect the water levels to stabilize."

Grant nodded. "How soon?"

She looked at her watch. "Next half hour?"

Grant nodded again. "Okay, keep me informed." He watched her turn and walk quickly through the police officers until she was out of sight.

Grant turned and looked at Charlie again. "Order a new motor and get it installed ASAP. These spillways are gonna be open for two months. The longer we wait to open the spillway that last two feet, the more likely the water is going to damage the head-gate. Besides, if it turns out that it isn't open enough, and water starts going over the top of the dam, you'll need that motor to fix the problem."

Charlie nodded and walked away. Grant returned to the edge of the dam and stood next to Lloyd, observing the water leaving the spillways. Both stared for a few minutes without saying anything. Finally Lloyd broke the trance. "All right, Mr. Stevens, what's next?"

Grant straightened and they both walked slowly across the dam. "As soon as Shauna's water levels start to stabilize, we're off." He pointed downstream. "With all that water, Headgate Rock Dam, fourteen miles downstream, is probably getting topped already."

"You can't do anything about it?"

"We already tried. We told them to dynamite it, you know, open it up to let all this water through. But they refused."

Grant saw Lloyd's eyes grow and his mouth contort before he continued. "It's not going to matter anyway. The water'll tear the dam apart in a couple of hours. It'll just flood a little upstream before it lets go."

"What's upstream?"

"The reservoir is called LakeMoovalya. It's tiny compared to LakeHavasu, or Mojave, let alone Mead. More like a wide spot in the river. There's not much on the banks. They might get a little flooding. It shouldn't last long, though. I think Shauna's numbers predicted that at full flow, it'd take less than fifteen minutes to fill up the whole lake and spill over the top of the dam."

Lloyd pointed toward Parker Dam's spillways. "Doesn't Headgate Rock Dam have spillways?"

"Sure. But nowhere near big enough to handle 500,000 cubic feet per second."

"Why not? The other dams upstream got 'em."

Grant shrugged. "The dams downstream from LakeHavasu were only built to divert water for irrigation and aqueducts. Relatively speaking, there was no intent to do water storage or flood management. That would be handled upstream, primarily at Hoover and GlenCanyon."

"But what about a disaster like this?"

"You mean a complete failure of the Glen Canyon Dam? Believe me, that was never planned for at any of the dams, including Hoover. Keep in mind that all these dams - Hoover, Davis, Parker and even Headgate Rock - were all built before GlenCanyon. So they were mostly worried about controlling spring runoff and generating electricity. Handling flood waters from a failed mega-dam wouldn't have even been considered."

"Well, right now, you're probably wishing they had been designed for it, aren't you?"

Grant considered Lloyd's comment. What if all the dams downstream were equipped with red buttons: press here to engage management system for failed dam upstream. It definitely would have made life easier over the last thirty-six hours. But realistically some disasters are too big to warrant contingency plans. What if all 747's were to crash in one day, or what if California's big earthquake finally hit and everything west of the San Andreas fault sank into the ocean, or what if all the nukes self-detonated? These are all "what ifs" that are too expensive and unlikely to prepare for. The strategy, instead, is to do everything possible to prevent the events from occurring, versus contingency planning for the events themselves. Grant would place the failure of the Glen Canyon Dam in this category. How could you possibly prepare for it?

Grant smiled at Lloyd. "Right now I'd be happy if we just end up saving Hoover, Davis, and Parker. I might get fired for it, but I expect the flood to wipe out all the other dams downstream. That, I would consider a huge success, considering the cards I've been dealt. We could rebuild all of the small dams in a year if we had to."

"Then why would you get fired for it? Aren't your bosses going to see it the same way?"

Grant smiled at Lloyd. "Is your boss logical?" He didn't wait for an answer. "No, this thing is going to be a media circus. When they finally get a death count from Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon, show video of all the floods including flooded farmland, floating houses, dead cows, damaged casinos, stranded houseboats, nobody's going to be saying 'just think how bad it would have been if Grant Stevens hadn't saved Hoover Dam'. They won't be looking for heroes, and if they do, it'll be some park ranger who dragged a fat lady out of the Grand Canyon before she drowned. More likely, the media is going to come down hard on the Bureau of Reclamation on this one. They'll want a scapegoat. And I can't see my boss volunteering."

"You really think they'll come after you?"

"Hey, look at what happened in Oklahoma. Remember when that whacko blew up the OklahomaFederalBuilding and killed all those people including the kids in the daycare center?"

"Yeah, but he intentionally blew them up."

"The bomber is not who I'm talking about. If you remember, the president vowed to track down everyone responsible. The bomber had a friend who supposedly taught him how to build fertilizer bombs on his farm."

"I remember him. Isn't he the one they want to re-try in Oklahoma?"

"Yeah. He's only serving a life sentence, but they want the death penalty." Grant overemphasized the word "only" to make the statement sound more sarcastic.

Lloyd looked confused. "I don't understand what that has to do with --"

Grant interrupted. "He's a fall guy. When the feds prosecuted him in Colorado, the jury acquitted him on all the murder counts. They couldn't prove that he knew anything about the bomber's plans to blow up Oklahoma."

Lloyd's brows furrowed. "That doesn't sound right. If that were true, why'd he get life in prison?"

"The jury found him guilty of two crimes - involuntary manslaughter and conspiracy to make a weapon of mass destruction. Then they leaned on the judge to throw the book at him."

"Well, if he's guilty of those two things, why shouldn't they throw the book at him?"

"Do you know what involuntary manslaughter means?" Grant continued. "Involuntary manslaughter means there was no intent to kill and that you were only indirectly responsible for someone's death. Involuntary manslaughter is the law we use to punish people for accidents. You know, it's the law district attorneys use when a child drowns in a swimming pool, or a parent accidentally backs over their kid in the driveway."

Lloyd raised his voice. "Yeah, but what about the other one? What'd you call it, mass destruction?"

"That's one of the government's 'big brother laws.' It's a selective prosecution law."

"What do ya mean?"

"They make a law where everybody's guilty, and then big brother can decide when to come in and prosecute. This law, Conspiracy to Make a Weapon of Mass Destruction, is broadly written. Hypothetically, let's say I'm a smart guy, and we sit down at your kitchen table one day over a couple beers, and you ask me how nuclear bombs work. Let's say I build a small model using apples and toothpicks. We could both be guilty of the conspiracy law."

Lloyd shook his head. "I don't think so; just talking about it can't be illegal. There are books in the library that tell you how bombs work, and internet sites. How can we make it illegal to teach somebody how to make a bomb?"

"That's just it. They don't prosecute everybody, just who they want. That's why the other guy is in prison for life, and in jeopardy of being re-tried so they can get the death penalty, even though re-trying someone for the same crime in this country is supposed to be against the law."

"But that bomb was actually used to kill people."

"But the second guy didn't know that. At least they couldn't prove it or he would have been guilty of murder. They couldn't prove he knew anything about the plan to blow up Oklahoma. They only knew that he taught the bomber how to make fertilizer bombs. That's it."

"Well, building bombs in your corn field is illegal."

"Yeah. But it doesn't warrant life in prison, or the death penalty, does it? No, he was a scapegoat, a fall guy, someone that the president could throw to the masses."

Lloyd was quiet for a long time. Both of them had stopped walking without realizing it. Lloyd finally looked up at Grant. "And I thought I was into conspiracy theories."

Grant smiled.

Lloyd's smile vanished. "You're not saying they're going to prosecute you for these floods, are you, all the deaths and everything?"

"No, but they will look for scapegoats, both the government and the media, especially if they don't catch whoever's blowing up the dams. And firing somebody like me from the Bureau of Reclamation is a small price to pay, to be able to say that you've . . ." Grant made a sign in the air for quotation marks with his fingers, ". . . implemented corrective action."

Grant saw Shauna walking through the crowds, scanning her head back and forth, obviously looking for Grant. He yelled at her. "Shauna!"

She turned at the sound and her face lit up when she saw them. She quickly walked toward where they were standing.

"What's happening with the water levels?" Grant asked.

"The water is still rising, but just barely. After you opened number five, the rate changed from an inch every two minutes to almost five minutes per inch. Since then, the lake has risen another six inches and now the rate has slowed to almost ten minutes for the last inch. And we're still six inches below the tops of the spillways."

"So you think it'll handle it?"

"No problem," she said immediately.

"All right then. Let's go."

Shauna stepped back. "You mean leave? Before the water level stabilizes?"

"Yeah. You said it'd handle it." He knew he was pushing her. She didn't like leaving loose ends. But then, neither did he. Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough time to eliminate every reasonable doubt. If there were, he'd still be at Hoover; actually, he might even be at GlenCanyon. He pointed downstream. "Right now, the water's probably topping Headgate Rock. We need to go."

"Yeah, but what if --"

"They'll call us, believe me." Grant motioned for the helicopter.

At that moment, Charlie walked up, followed by a guy in a hard hat. "Well the demolition guys are here." The guy in the hard hat nodded toward Grant. Charlie adjusted his glasses then returned his hand to its resting place on his stomach, which was now stained from the sweat and grime from the last hour. "Guess we don't need them anymore, since we got the gate open. Right? You want me to send 'em home?"

Grant glanced over at Shauna before answering. "No, we were just talking about that." Grant stepped closer and reached out toward the guy in the hard hat. The man responded and they shook hands. "Grant Stevens."

"Duane." Duane's hands felt dry and rough.

Grant pointed toward LakeHavasu. "The water levels haven't stabilized yet. We expect them to, probably sometime in the next hour." He checked Shauna's expression to verify accuracy, and since he saw no changes, assumed he was okay. "But we'd like to have you hang around for a few hours until the water level does stabilize. Just in case."

Charlie looked surprised and quickly adjusted the glasses again. "The spillways are pretty much open now. And we couldn't get Duane down there to blow it anyway."

Grant knew where this was going. "Charlie's right. The spillways are as open as they're going to be. If that's not enough to stop the water from rising, then we have to do something else." Grant saw Charlie's mouth drop open. "Lloyd and I were thinking that the concrete at the top of the dam that goes over the top of the spillways is probably, what, about six to eight feet thick?" Grant looked at Charlie for affirmation.

Charlie nervously adjusted his glasses. "Yeah, sure. That sounds about right, but --"

"So if the spillways can't handle it, you could blow the top off a few of them. That would definitely open them up enough." Grant looked directly at Duane. "You think you could open up that much concrete?"

The man in the hard hat shifted uncomfortably and glanced over at Charlie. "Well, sure, I guess. But I'll need to check to see -"

Grant held out both of his hands. "Look, we're pretty confident we're okay. You're probably not going to have to blow up anything. But we'd like you to hang around and be ready. You can work with Charlie."

Charlie looked over, concerned. "Why? You're not leaving, are you?"

Grant nodded quickly at Lloyd, who immediately left toward the helicopter. "Yeah, Charlie, we are."

"How soon?" he asked, adjusting his glasses again.

"Right now."

"But the water --"

"Don't worry, you can call us if anything goes wrong." Grant felt confident that Charlie wouldn't blow up anything without calling first.

"But --"

"Shauna will tell your people what we expect the water levels to do. If it varies much, call me and we'll figure it out. If it gets bad enough, we'll come back. Don't worry."

Grant heard the whine of the turbine on the helicopter and started walking toward it. Grant saw Shauna dart away, most likely to brief the person watching the water levels. Charlie hustled up to walk next to Grant. He looked like he wanted to say something, but wasn't sure what. As they reached the outer perimeter of the now spinning rotors, FBI Agent Susan Williams joined them. She looked surprised.

"Are we leaving? I heard the helicopter."

Grant nodded. "Yeah. You ready?"

"Yeah. I guess."

Grant turned back to Charlie and shook his hand. "Nice working with you, Charlie. Hopefully we'll run into each other again sometime."

Charlie's lips moved, but he didn't say anything. He looked nervous, but realistically the hard part was behind him. Parker Dam's spillways would be at full capacity for the next sixty days. He'd settle in after a while. He'd have to. Looking at Charlie Jorgensen, Grant realized he kind of liked the guy, in spite of his weirdness.

Grant broke the handshake, patted Charlie on the shoulder to reassure him, then walked under the rotors toward the passenger seat of the helicopter. Right before he opened the door, he turned and pointed to Charlie. Grant motioned a phone at his ear and mouthed the words "call me."

Charlie nodded weakly.

Grant climbed in. Lloyd held out the headphones, which Grant pulled on. He saw that Agent Williams was doing the same.

"Are we waiting for your girl?" It was Lloyd's voice in the headphones.

"Yeah. She'll only be a minute."

They waited without talking. When the door opened and Shauna jumped in, the rotors had already begun to accelerate. She was still attaching her seat belt when the chopper lifted off.

As they rose quickly into the air, Grant noticed the water exiting the five spillways. The aerial view didn't do it justice. You had to be standing right next to it to get the real feeling for how much water was heading down the Colorado River.

* * *

12:00 p.m. - Lake Powell, Utah

Julie was ecstatic. Finally, a crew had arrived to clean the launch ramp. They brought five power washers, and had started scouring back and forth at the top of the ramp. The moss was washing right off, although many of the boaters were now considering that the power washers might have been the wrong approach. It seemed that after being exposed to the dry desert air through the night, then baked in the sun all morning, the moss could almost be swept off the ramp. But with a crew busy cleaning, nobody wanted to throw a wrench into the works for fear the effort would stop.

They had yet to see any equipment arrive that was capable of lifting the boats onto the trailers. The equipment was available in Page, as it was frequently used to move boats around in the repair lots. But the bridge across GlenCanyon was gone. The Crawfords had been surprised to find out that it had collapsed in the flood.

Paul pointed at the team of men power-washing above them on the ramp. "How much longer before you think we can load up?"

Greg shrugged. "It'll be a while." He motioned at the boats farther up the ramp. "We'll have to wait for all these guys to go first."

"Do we have a couple of hours?" Paul asked.

Greg nodded. "Sure. This will take a while. Why?"

Paul pointed in the direction of where the Glen Canyon Dam had been. "I thought maybe we could drive over and check it out. It's only a few miles."

Greg looked up at the men working. "I'd better stay here by the boat, but Julie'll probably want to go." He looked at her.

Julie nodded enthusiastically. She was dying to do something besides wait.

Paul waved at Julie and Erika. "Let's go, then."

A few minutes later they had made the hike up the ramp and climbed into Paul and Erika's SUV. It was a short drive to the highway, but the road was blocked as they neared the dam. Paul parked off the side of the road like many other vehicles, and the three of them jumped out and started walking. As they approached, the canyon opened and they could see more with each step. Another barrier had been set up to prohibit pedestrians. About 40 or 50 people were crowded along the barrier for a look.

Julie's eyes locked onto both ends of where the GlenCanyonBridge had been the day before. The highway abruptly ended on both sides. It looked like an optical illusion for a road to just end like that.

Paul led them to the far right of the barrier so they could see better around the visitor center, which was partially obscuring their view of the dam. Like Julie had seen the night before, jagged concrete protruded from the sandstone walls where the dam had been. The water had dropped substantially since she and Greg had almost been sucked over the dam. Julie could see that the water flow had also decreased from the night before.

She looked upstream and saw the wet vertical rock canyons. She tried to imagine what LakePowell must look like upstream. The large bodies of water like PadreBay must be empty. She couldn't believe it. LakePowell was gone, replaced by a narrow winding river.

CHAPTER 33

12:10 p.m. - South of Parker Dam, California/Arizona

The helicopter followed the Colorado River downstream from the dam as it wound gracefully through jagged rock canyons. The river was lined with mobile homes, cabins, and houses, leaving almost no gaps. The few small spaces were filled with trees and other green vegetation. The river bottoms contrasted dramatically with the dry barren mountains just a hundred feet away.

The increased flow from all five spillways had upset the serenity. Many of the homes that bordered the river were partially underwater. Only a mile downstream from the dam, the river had torn out a row of mobile homes and piled them in a small park. Grant could still see the tops of a playground. From the air it was obvious the water flowed out of its banks, swirling around homes, through back yards, and even down a small street, the road only identifiable by the protruding mailboxes.

Normally the river ran turquoise and clean below the dam, but today was different. Garbage, papers, trashcans, clothes, and whatever else the river had encountered littered the surface of the water. In one place Grant saw something incredibly large rolling in the water downstream briefly before it sunk. Only afterwards did he realize it had been a car, a Volkswagen Beetle. It took a moment for his mind to assimilate it. Farther downstream, he saw two mobile homes in the middle of the river.

Grant saw many residents, standing, huddled together in groups at higher elevations on the shores. They all acted the same, standing stationary like zombies, staring at the destruction of their lives and property. At least they'd had the presence to hike a few feet up the hill and save themselves.

Grant heard a scream in his headphones.

"It's a body!" Shauna said, pointing ahead to the left of the chopper.

The corpse floated face down still fully clothed. The long-sleeved flannel shirt and the worn denims were still identifiable. The hair, which was either white, or more likely gray, gave Grant the impression that the unlucky victim was an old man.

Grant knew there were two types of drowning cases. One group resisted taking the water into their lungs until the very end, the carbon dioxide building up and increasing their panic level until they finally lost consciousness. When divers found this type of body, they were tense with eyes wide open and teeth clenched. The other type sucked in the water and tried to breath it. In these cases the panic was replaced with a calmness or state of well-being right before they died. These bodies were found relaxed with eyes closed, and sometimes with smiles on their faces.

Grant had read a study on the two types of drowning, where the hypothesis was verified by interviewing survivors, people who had drowned and were later revived. The ones that respired the water described the calmness that followed. More than one had used the words "this isn't that bad" in their descriptions.

Hopefully the old man floating face down on the Colorado River had ultimately breathed in the water. The fact that he was still floating was not a good sign. It could mean there was still air in his lungs.

He heard sniffling in the headphones as they passed over the body and flew downstream. He didn't have to look back to see that Shauna was crying. He wanted to say something to reassure her like "don't worry, everything will be all right." But that wasn't true, was it? Especially for the old man. He couldn't think of anything to say, so he said nothing. Although Grant knew many had died on the Colorado River over the last two days, it was the first he or Shauna had witnessed.

Up ahead the river widened. A dam was barely visible downstream - Headgate Rock Dam. Headgate Rock was only fourteen miles below Parker Dam. The resulting reservoir, LakeMoovalya, was even smaller than he expected. In fact, it hardly seemed like a lake at all.

Only one hotel, the Bluewater Casino, had been built on the banks of the lake. Since the casino sat on the Arizona side of the river, Grant knew it had to be owned by the Indians. In fact, that explained why it was the only structure on the lower part of the lake. The land was probably part of the Colorado River Indian reservation.

The hotel was huge with walls of glass facing the lake. A medium-sized marina extended from the hotel. On the river's edge sat a small shack with a bar right on the river. However, all was not right with the Bluewater Casino. The jetty supporting the bar was underwater, only visible from the helicopter. Two men sloshed through waste-deep water with armfuls of bottles from the bar. The docks in the marina floated and were safe, but the base of the hotel and the dockside sidewalks were underwater.

On his right Grant could see where the highway bordering the west side of the lake now ran right down into the water. Stranded cars had stopped and their drivers stood next to them. No boats could be seen on the small lake.

"Now I know why they call it Headgate Rock Dam," said Lloyd.

Grant nodded in agreement. In the middle of the river channel, just past the Bluewater Casino, was a large black rock formation, obviously Headgate Rock. On the west side of the rock, stretching to the Californiashore, was an earth dike, topped with dark red and black rocks. On the east side, slightly downstream from Headgate Rock, was the concrete waterworks including seven square spillways. A smaller earth fill dike connected the concrete structure to the big rock. Like Parker, this dam had a large square concrete structure above each square spillway to pull the head gates up into. Unlike Parker, the head gates were already up all the way.

Lloyd's voice was in the headphones. "Where do you want me to put us?"

"When we get closer, slow down a little, get a little lower, then fly across the downstream side of it. It looks like the water hasn't breached yet. We're going to be just in time to see this fiasco." Grant wondered why it hadn't breached yet. He'd expected the water to be high enough already.

Without looking back, Grant spoke into the headphones. "Shauna, didn't we expect the dam to be getting topped by now?"

"Yeah, but only a few minutes ago." As she spoke, the helicopter flew over the crest of the dam.

Grant had meant to look down, check out the spillways, and assess the dam itself, but something else had caught his eye. Immediately below Headgate Rock Dam, right in the river bottoms on the Arizona side, was a whole community of mobile homes. They were packed together like sardines, stretching all the way down toward a railroad bridge about a mile downstream. They would be obliterated when the dam let go. It was unavoidable and he knew it. He didn't see any people walking around. Hopefully they had cleared out. If not, there would be many more floating bodies.

When he finally looked down, the spillways were blasting. "Wow, look at 'em. No wonder it hasn't breached yet. They're dumping a ton of water. They must have lowered the lake to get ready." He turned and looked over his shoulder at Shauna. "What's the exact capacity of those spillways?"

"Originally they were designed for 200,000 cubic feet per second, but when they modified the dam to generate electricity, they actually built the water works into a couple of the spillways. That reduced their total capacity to around a 140,000."

Grant considered the numbers. Headgate Rock could handle a 140,000, and almost 500,000 was headed for it. It did not take a genius to understand that Headgate Rock Dam was not going to survive.

"Hey, should those guys be standing down there?" Grant recognized the FBI agent's voice in the headphones. He turned and saw her point off to what was now their right side, as the helicopter had turned and now faced upstream.

Lloyd pivoted the helicopter slightly and Grant saw that a pickup had driven down the steep road and parked in the small parking lot near the generation plant. Three men stood by the truck looking up at the dam. One of them wore a yellow hard hat. The truck was close enough for Grant to make out BIA on the truck door, for Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Shauna answered. "No, they shouldn't be there. If the dam breaks on that side, they won't stand a chance."

Grant heard the pilot's voice. "How much time do we have?"

"It can't be long. Let's fly back over the crest and see if we can see any low points."

The helicopter tilted forward and dropped toward the dam.

"Look on the left side of the spillways," yelled Shauna, a little too loud for the headphones.

Grant saw a small stream of water was now running over the top of the cement.

"It's on both sides now," said Agent Williams.

"Does that mean the concrete part of the dam is what's going to fail?" asked Lloyd, somewhat unsure of himself.

Grant shook his head. "No, the dikes are way softer. The water's going to carve into that gravel right next to the concrete. They would have been much better off if they had listened to us, and broken the dike themselves. Now it looks like it's going to break right next to the concrete."

"Is that bad?"

"It might be. Remember this flood will last for two months. With all that water flowing right next to the structure, it'll definitely damage it."

"Look," Shauna said. "It's starting to carve into the banks. Look how dirty the water's getting."

Grant saw that the volume of water had increased substantially over the top of the concrete. He remembered the truck and the three men. "We better get back and tell those guys to get outta there." He looked over at the pilot. "You got a PA in this thing?"

"Sure thing."

The helicopter banked hard and flew back toward the truck. Grant saw that the men hadn't stayed put, but had walked closer to the dam. As Lloyd maneuvered the helicopter lower, the rotors blew toward the men, making them put their arms in front of their faces.

Lloyd flipped a switch and gave Grant a quick thumbs up, before grabbing back onto the controls. At first Grant didn't know what to do, expecting a hand-held mic. He looked over at Lloyd, confused.

"Just speak," said the pilot, and Grant heard Lloyd's voice from the outside as well as through the headphones.

Grant tried to remember what he needed to say. "People, the dam is about to break."

None of them seemed to be looking as they shielded their eyes from the turbulence.

"Please, hurry back to your truck and get clear of the area!"

Incredibly, one of the three men, the one in the hard hat, waved the helicopter aside. They weren't moving. Grant looked over at Lloyd and the pilot shrugged. The man continued motioning for the helicopter to move.

Lloyd flipped the PA switch off. "What do you want me to do?"

Grant was angry. "We warned them. What else can we do?"

Lloyd immediately lifted the helicopter out of their way. Grant wondered if the man was the moron Shauna had talked to on the phone at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. That guy was an idiot. She had tried everything to reason with him. But the guy wouldn't budge. He kept telling Shauna there wasn't any way he was going to intentionally break his own dam. Deep down, Shauna didn't think the guy actually believed Headgate Rock Dam would fail. He had chosen to not believe it, as if that would prevent the whole tragedy from happening.

As soon as Lloyd had moved the chopper out of their way the men continued walking toward the concrete structure.

"Look, there are two more guys over by the spillways," Agent Williams said.

Sure enough, two men stood next to the spillways. Grant wondered if they had been inside the structure a few minutes before.

Lloyd moved the helicopter higher and back toward the concrete structure. Looking up where the breach first occurred, Grant saw that over five feet of water was pouring over the top of the structure, both edges being noticeably dirty water. He wondered if the five idiots below had noticed the breach.

Grant reached over in front of the pilot and flipped the PA switch himself. "Attention below. Look up at the top of the structure. The dam is breaking apart.Get out of there! Now!" He flipped the switch back down.

One of the two guys by the spillways pointed up toward the breach, and the other shielded his eyes and looked up too. The water was now tearing into the dike on the right side of the dam. Both men started running toward the pickup.

"About time," Shauna said, obviously relieved.

However, when the two men reached the three who had arrived in the truck, they argued. Grant could tell by their body language, plus they were all waving their arms and pointing. Grant saw the guy with the hard hat shake his head back and forth.

"That idiot doesn't think it's going to fail," said Grant

"Look at the dam," cried Shauna.

Grant looked up in time to see a large piece of the gravel dam break off and fall into the river that was now tearing into the dike on the right of the spillways. Looking down, he saw water standing where the two men had stood only moments before. Glancing to his left, he saw that the two men had abandoned the argument and were running toward the steep road out of the parking lot. But the three that arrived in the truck stood still, gazing up at the spectacle.

"We're gonna have to watch these idiots die, aren't we?" It was Agent Williams' voice in the headphones.

Grant looked up again in time to see another large chunk of earth slough off. Grant estimated the water to now be ten feet deep into the dike. It looked like the stream was equal to one of the spillways. The entire stream was now dark brown from the debris it was cutting.

"Looks like two of them got religion," Lloyd said.

Grant glanced over and saw two of them running, but the guy with the yellow hard hat stood still, staring up at the dam.

When Grant looked back at the dam, he couldn't believe how fast the flow had increased. He'd only taken his eyes off of it for a few seconds. It seemed twice as big as a moment ago. Yet now it dwarfed the volume of the spillways. Another large section broke off and was swept out immediately. Grant could now see LakeMoovalya through the cut.

"Oh my . . ." It was Shauna's voice.

"It's history," said Lloyd.

For the next few moments, Grant could only stare. The volume of surging water grew at an alarming rate. Large chunks of the dike fell every couple of seconds. A part of him wanted to look down to see if the guy in the hard hat ran, and make sure the others had made it, but his eyes wouldn't let him. They stayed glued to the scene unfolding in front of him. Time stood still. In one final motion, a fifty-foot-wide piece of the dike let go, and the Colorado River broke loose and barreled down the riverbed in a large wave of frothy brown water. The first two guys had climbed up the road far enough to be safe. The next two had reached the truck and were climbing in the back, even as a wave of water smashed into the side of it. The truck started moving and swapped ends. Within moments Grant guessed the water would pull the truck off the elevated parking lot and into the channel. There was no sign of the guy in the hard hat.

"Those guys in the back of the truck need help!" Agent Williams yelled.

Grant saw the truck swap ends again and teeter dangerously as the water moved it toward the edge. Both men waved their arms back and forth. Lloyd reacted and the helicopter headed toward them.

"What are you gonna do?" Grant asked.

Lloyd concentrated ahead on the men. "Their only chance is to grab onto our landing gear."

As they accelerated toward the truck, the truck jerked sideways and one of the men fell into the water. The other one reached over the side and quickly pulled him back in.

"Hurry," cried Shauna from behind.

When the helicopter arrived, before the two men could reach out, the chopper dropped quickly and the landing gear hit the top of the pickup's cab, putting a large dent in it. The impact scared the two men, making them hesitate. Grant could see the terror in their eyes, since they were only a few feet away.

"Why'd you do that?" asked Grant.

Lloyd brought the landing gear over the men's heads and they both grabbed on. Grant couldn't see them anymore, since they were on the pilot's side.

"I had to ground us first," said Lloyd, not taking his eyes off them. "The rotors build up static electricity. We could have electrocuted 'em."

Grant saw that Lloyd was lifting them toward the cliffs above the dam, although the motion was so smooth that Grant felt no acceleration. He wondered how many times Lloyd had done this trick in Vietnam, and how many years it had been since his last attempt.

Grant turned and looked back at Shauna, who sat crouched over looking out at the men hanging on the landing gear. He saw her nodding her head and mouthing words of encouragement to them.

"How're they doing?" Grant asked.

"Hurry," she coaxed, ignoring the question.

When Grant looked forward again, he saw the helicopter had reached the height of the cliffs. Lloyd moved the helicopter sideways until they were over dry land, then lowered slightly.

"They let go," said Shauna. "They're okay."

Lloyd set the chopper down and the men approached, still crouching. Grant saw that the first two had hiked to the top of the road and now came running toward them. Lloyd opened his door.

"Thanks, Mister," one of the men yelled. He was a Native American. All of them were.

"What happened to your friend in the hard hat?" asked Lloyd, also yelling.

"He didn't think it would fail," he answered. "The water got him."

"Well, you guys almost waited too long yourselves."

They both smiled, not in happiness, but in relief. Grant could see their faces. They knew they were lucky to be alive.

Lloyd shut the door and the chopper took off.

"Let's make one more pass over the dam," said Grant.

Grant watched as they headed back toward Headgate Rock Dam. The whole area beneath the dam was now flooded and white caps were visible. The cut in the dam now stretched over a hundred feet from the left side of the spillways. The water level in LakeMoovalya had dropped almost fifteen feet and was no longer breaching the concrete.

Grant shook his head. "Idiots. We warned 'em."

Lloyd spoke without turning his head. "Some guys can't be told. They have to figure it out for themselves."

"Unfortunately," said Grant, "the guy in the hard hat is dead because of that."

When the helicopter passed back over the broken dam, Lloyd looked over. "You want to see anything else?"

Grant shook his head. "No, let's go. Head downstream."

When the helicopter pivoted and pointed downstream, Grant could see the community of mobile homes for the first time since the dam had broken. The entire row of homes bordering the river was gone, torn out. A couple of them drifted in the middle of the channel, but the bulk of them were piled up against the railroad bridge downstream. Most of the second row of mobile homes had held, but water pushed against them. Then, as Grant watched, the second row let go like dominoes, and the river pulled them out into the channel.

A large group of people stood up on the Arizona bank, out of the danger. Even at a distance, Grant saw a couple of them cover their eyes with their hands. Another had his hands on top of his head. The group was large and Grant guessed they were the inhabitants of the trailer park. He imagined there would be lawsuits against the Bureau of Indian Affairs for not breaking the dam earlier.

Lloyd had been hovering, allowing them to witness the destruction below. Finally he looked over at Grant. Grant understood the unspoken question.

"Go ahead. I've seen enough. Head downstream toward the next one. Hopefully they listened to us and busted their dam already. I don't think any of us want a repeat performance."

Lloyd's reaction, as usual, was immediate. The helicopter banked and headed downstream.

* * *

12:40 p.m. - Farmland, south of Parker, Arizona

Daniel Tahbo shifted the Massey Ferguson into high gear and his long black hair blew in the wind as the tractor accelerated. His father didn't like Daniel to use the high gear of the old tractor on gravel roads. The bumps would rattle the tractor to pieces. But Daniel's father worried too much. Everybody knew that. Besides, Daniel was already 15 years old. He would have his license in another year, and he had been driving tractors since he was eight. He could tell when the road was too rough. He knew where all the bumps were on the road, and could easily dodge them.

Daniel's father would not approve of this trip anyway. Daniel needed to hurry, hook onto the ditcher, and take it back to the house. If Daniel's father caught him, he would be furious, but after he made it home safe with the ditcher, and his father discovered it later, he'd be happy. Sure he'd still grumble and swear and tell Daniel he'd acted like an idiot, but he'd be pleased to have the ditcher just the same. Daniel would retrieve the ditcher and be home before the river flooded.

The three hundred acre Tahbo farm was part of the Colorado Indian Reservation, a small farm compared to most of the neighbors. They worked hard on their farm, too hard to lose the ditcher in the flood. Daniel had argued this fact with his father that morning, but his father was a stubborn man. His father believed in the old ways, simple and conservative, no unnecessary risks.

Although the Tahbo farm was small, it was good land, right next to the Colorado River, and only two miles south of the bluffs. The family had great water rights too, being so close to Headgate Rock Dam, where the canal was diverted from the river.

Daniel's father was nervous, with the terrorists and all. Ever since the bombing the day before, the farmers had talked of nothing else. Who blew it up? Why? When would the water reach the reservation? How bad would it flood the farms? How fast would the soil recover? Would the government help? If so, how much? His father had attended a meeting the night before at the high school with representatives from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The officials had practically guaranteed that Headgate Rock Dam was safe, but his father did not believe them.

Daniel's father worried too much, especially when there was actually something real to worry about. His mother said that his father didn't sleep a wink last night, and Daniel believed it.

Daniel thought all farmers worried too much. They worried when it wasn't raining, then they worried when it was. They worried when the wind blew, or when it was too calm. They worried when crop prices moved. If the prices were stable, they worried that they would change in the future. Daniel didn't want to be a farmer. He didn't want to worry about anything. He liked driving better. Tractors were okay, but driving something big like bulldozers or excavators would be even better, maybe even an eighteen-wheeler. At least then, Daniel would be able to get off the reservation.

As Daniel approached the end of the gravel road, he slowed the tractor, choosing a slower gear. He could see the Colorado River just past the fields at the end of the road. He had never seen it this high or rough before. Usually the river floated lazily past the Tahbo farm, but today it filled the river bottoms, spreading out from its main channel and flooding the willows and grass that grew around the river. There was strength in the river today, a power that Daniel had never seen before.

The ditcher lay in the corner of the field at the end of the road. As he got closer, he noticed water on the road and around the ditcher. A small stream had washed through the bank of the river and now flowed right in front of the ditcher and out into the cornfield. Daniel pulled past the ditcher, stopped, then flipped the steering wheel and backed around toward it, stopping while the rear wheels were still on the gravel. He stared at the small stream and wondered how long it had been flowing past the ditcher. If the water had time to soak into the soft soil in the cornfield, the Massey Ferguson would get stuck in the mud. If the stream had only been flowing a couple of minutes, it would not have had time to soak in, and the small tractor would be fine. Daniel cursed his father for not buying a four-wheel drive John Deere tractor like the neighbors. If he had, getting stuck would not be an issue.

Daniel put the transmission in neutral and climbed down off the tractor, leaving the diesel engine idling. Walking around behind, he stopped and stared at the ditcher, so close and yet so far away. He felt reluctant to back the tractor into the mud. He had gotten tractors stuck before and his father always kicked his butt. Besides, this was no time to bury the tractor, especially if the flood materialized as his father expected it would. Better to sacrifice the ditcher than his father's tractor.

Wait. If he could drag the ditcher up onto the road, then hook it up, he wouldn't need to get the tractor in the mud. Daniel ran around the tractor to retrieve a small log chain stored in the tractor's toolbox. He returned a moment later, dragging the chain behind. He looked over at the ditcher, judging the distance.

For a moment Daniel didn't notice it. His eyes, after all, were focused only a few feet away at the ditcher. But his subconscious mind noticed something and sent a warning to his brain. Something on the horizon didn't look right. Daniel looked up. He blinked. His eyes must have been deceiving him. But blinking did not correct the problem.

Daniel saw a line of water that covered the whole valley between him and the canyons upstream. The wave was less than a mile from where Daniel stood, but it was hard to tell how high. It did not appear to be moving, but Daniel knew better. What could it mean? It could only mean that his father had been right to worry about Headgate Rock Dam. The dam had failed.

Daniel dropped the chain. He forgot about the ditcher. He ran around the tractor and climbed on it. He fumbled with the gears and selected high. Feathering the clutch, he attempted to go, but the gear was too high. He quickly selected a lower gear, popped the clutch, spun the steering wheel, and the Massey Ferguson leaped forward and headed back down the gravel road. A moment later, when the tractor had reached speed for the lower gear, Daniel crammed it into high gear. The Massey reacted, pouring black smoke from the stack.

Initially, he thought he could outrun it, but the gravel road headed east and crossed in front of the flood. For safety reasons, most tractors did not go much faster than twenty miles per hour due to poor handling characteristics. Daniel suddenly wished the Massey was an exception. He would gladly take the risk. Unfortunately, the Massey topped out at about nineteen. Daniel watched the approaching water on his left and forgot to watch for the bumps he had memorized. The tractor bounced through a large pothole, almost tearing the steering wheel out of his hand.

Daniel had only traveled a half mile before he saw the water breach the gravel road a hundred yards in front of him. The water hit the raised embankment of the road hard, curling upwards briefly before being pushed across by all the water behind. A few seconds later, the water was in front of the Massey Ferguson. Daniel steered into the water with the tractor still at full speed. Water sprayed everywhere and Daniel swerved to regain control. He had no choice but to clutch and shift to a lower gear.

As the tractor plowed through the rising water, Daniel was forced to continually choose lower gears. Creeping along with almost four feet of water flowing across the road, Daniel knew the water would soon be over his feet. The front tires were completely underwater, and he could not see them anymore. When would the engine stall? He looked ahead. The water had buried the road for almost a mile in front of him. The dry road seemed so far away.

Suddenly the rear of the tractor slid a few feet. Daniel spun the steering wheel to stabilize it. He felt the water move the tractor again, just as the water started flowing over the deck where his feet were. He hadn't been able to see the road for a while, looking instead at the disappearing road ahead. The water moved the tractor again, and this time it didn't stop. He felt the tractor slide sideways over the downstream embankment and in one motion the right tire dropped and the water pushed the Massey Ferguson over.

Daniel was pulled underwater in one quick motion. He reached out to push off the steering wheel and realized it wasn't there, the current had already pulled him away from the tractor. He lunged for what he thought was the surface of the dirty water, only to plow his fingers into the ground underneath. He was confused by his disorientation and lunged again. Nothing. He panicked. He could swim, but he wasn't a strong swimmer. He would never dare swim in a flowing river. His lungs were bursting and his eyes felt like they were going to pop out. He flailed his arms in an inefficient effort to propel himself.

Suddenly his head came out of the water. He gulped for air a second too late and got a breath of water. His body tried to reject the water with coughing and gagging contractions. Daniel knew he only had one more chance. He kicked hard to get back up and made it. He coughed out some of the water and involuntarily inhaled again, sucking more water in.

This time when his head went back underwater, his body had lost the strength to fight. The panic had also subsided. He gulped in another mouth full of water. But his body stopped trying to reject it. He felt calm. With no apprehension, he wondered what his father would say about the Massey Ferguson. Surely his father would not be happy. But at the moment, the thought didn't seem to bother him. Instead his entire body felt calm. He felt himself going to sleep. He closed his eyes and relaxed. Then 15 year old Daniel Tahbo drowned.

* * *

12:45 p.m. - South of Parker, Arizona

Viewed from the helicopter, the landscape changed dramatically downstream from Headgate Rock Dam. The rock canyons ended, opening up into a wide valley that stretched as far as Grant could see. Huge square grids of green, yellow, and occasionally brown painted the unmistakable picture of farming. The river wound lazily back and forth along the valley's west side. An extremely large canal accompanied the river out of the canyon, having been diverted by Headgate Rock Dam. Countless other irrigation canals stretched east from the river.

Native Americans of the Colorado River Indian Reservation owned the farms just downstream from Headgate Rock, but looking south over the endless farms, it was impossible to tell where the reservation ended and non-Indian farming began.

When the floodwater hit the valley, it spread out, burying the north end of the valley under a shallow brown lake. The helicopter sped past the flood and followed the river south toward the Palo Verde Diversion Dam. In the helicopter, at well over a hundred miles per hour, they expected to arrive at the dam by 1:00 p.m. The floodwater wasn't expected until 2:15 p.m.

With no disasters to stare at through the windows, Grant decided to catch up with the FBI. He was beginning to think they had no idea what was going on. It had occurred to Grant that he had as much chance of solving the crime as the FBI. "So, Agent Williams, what'd you learn from the cops at Parker Dam?"

Grant couldn't see her face behind him, but disappointment resonated in her voice. "They didn't know anything. They didn't even know we were looking for a guy in a white pickup. He could walk right up to them and they wouldn't recognize him."

"Would we?" asked Grant.

She hesitated. "I talked to Phil on the phone. They're working on some leads."

Grant doubted the leads were serious. "Really. Like what?"

"I'm not sure if I should say."

Grant cast his eyes over at Lloyd and they traded smiles. Grant pushed her. "Why not? You afraid me and Lloyd here are gonna leak it to the press, and spoil the investigation?"

She hesitated. "It's not that. It's just that Phil probably needs to --"

He interrupted. "Needs to what? Run down all the leads before he asks me for more?" He swiveled in his seat to look her in the eyes. She seemed surprised at his line of questioning. He swiveled back forward. "You know, even when I watch TV, when cops communicate, it's only in one direction. I tell the FBI everything I know. And they tell me nothing." He swiveled again. "I've come to the conclusion that passing information one way is not the best way to communicate."

"What are you saying?" she asked.

"I'm saying that if we want to solve this thing, I need to know what's going on. I need some facts."

Agent Williams stammered. "Well, I'm not authorized to say anything. I would need Phil's --"

Grant interrupted. "Look, I understand. If the FBI wants to try to solve this in a vacuum, without interaction with the Bureau of Reclamation, who am I to complain?" Grant pointed ahead toward an open hay field. "Lloyd, you can set it down in that field over there. Agent Williams wants to get out."

Lloyd smiled again. "That one just up ahead?" The helicopter started dropping.

Agent Williams sounded nervous. "Phil said we're going to meet with you again, and trade information. But we need to chase a few things down first. Maybe this evening, or maybe tomor -"

"This thing will be over by tomorrow!" Grant yelled, "and Lloyd and I have commitments this evening at Palo Verde and Imperial Dams. Don't we, Lloyd?"

They had almost reached the hayfield and Lloyd looked over at Grant. "You want me to put it down?"

"No," said the agent.

"Yeah. Go ahead," Grant said.

The chopper dropped quickly toward the ground.

"You can't leave me here," she said. "You agreed to take me along today. You'll be impeding the investigation."

Grant laughed. "No, the way I see it is, we can't keep you with us. We'd risk you accidentally telling us something we shouldn't know, spilling some piece of secret information in a non-secure environment. We couldn't allow that. You know, for national security reasons."

The landing gear touched down.

"I'm not getting out," she said.

"Does your cell phone work out here?" Grant asked. "You can call one of your secret agent buddies to pick you up. You could talk more freely with them."

Agent Williams hesitated. "All right, I can probably share some information, but only with you. We can walk a few feet away from the helicopter."

"No deal," Grant said. "The government trusted Lloyd in one of their multi-million-dollar helicopters in Vietnam. You ought to be able to trust him now." Grant turned to Lloyd. "Lloyd, didn't you have a security clearance?"

Lloyd nodded.

Grant laughed. "Besides, Lloyd came with us today to see some explosions, not create them, didn't ya Lloyd?"

Lloyd nodded again, smiling.

"We're not worried about Lloyd," she said, barely loud enough to hear.

This caught Grant off guard. He and Lloyd both turned around and looked first at Shauna, who also looked surprised, then agent Williams, who wouldn't meet their eyes.

"The FBI's worried about Shauna?" Grant asked.

She hesitated. "It's not Shauna per se." Agent Williams glanced nervously between them. "It's the Bureau itself. Both of the attempts at the dams were executed with credentials. Both attempts required detailed information about procedures and the dams themselves. We suspect that our bad guy might be -"

" - an insider," Grant finished.

Grant turned back around facing forward, nodding for Lloyd to take off. The rotors accelerated immediately and a few moments later they were back in the air.

The agent spoke again, almost pleading. "Look. We don't suspect either of you, but we wanted information to be minimized through your organization."

Grant had to admit when he first heard about the credentials, he wondered if it could have been an inside job. He'd dismissed the idea mostly due to motive, but it was certainly possible for someone in the Bureau to become disillusioned with the organization. When it came right down to it, he felt disillusioned with the Bureau, especially his bosses. Of course, he never considered blowing up any dams. His bosses maybe, but not dams.

"All right, Agent Williams, we accept the FBI's notion of an insider as a potential suspect. But don't you think it would've been better to bring us in earlier? We could have discussed how Shauna and I would handle ourselves when communicating back to Denver."

"Absolutely. But things have been happening so fast. We just haven't had enough time to sit down and talk it through."

Grant tried to remember the last time he had a few minutes to relax. He wondered about the next twenty-four hours - would they be any different? He didn't think so. They still had Palo Verde and Imperial Dams to worry about, not to mention Hoover-Two. Then there was the dam in Mexico. Although the Bureau of Reclamation had no responsibility or jurisdiction below the border, Grant had a nagging feeling he might end up getting involved, even if only as a consultant.

Without looking back at the agent, Grant talked into the headphones. "Okay, so let's say we suspect somebody in the Bureau. How do we go about figuring out who it is?"

"We're generating a list of any employees that were absent over the last three days, vacation, sick, or even traveling. Our contact in the Bureau is pretty confident about generating the data quickly. She said the Bureau is pretty anal about attendance and time keeping."

That made sense. Grant had personally been written up for time card violations a few times. And he had only been a day behind on the information. He tried to think whether he personally knew anyone who had been out for the last few days. No one came to mind. Wait, Howard, his boss, was in Yellowstone. Oh, that would be too good to be true. He snickered silently, imagining his boss being escorted between two FBI agents with his head bowed and his wrists cuffed. But Grant knew it could not be Howard. He wasn't smart enough. His expertise centered more around politics and less on planning and execution, and he didn't like to get his hands dirty.

"So once you get the list?" Grant asked.

"We'll run it past some of the other data we're already looking at - cellular phone usage near the dams, credit card usage, hotel records, and even the list we put together about boating accidents."

Grant considered that for a moment. "When they crashed into the World Trade Centers, I seem to remember you guys figuring out all the names of the terrorists within a few hours."

"That was different. We received flight numbers from all four planes within minutes. It was only a matter of calling the airlines and getting passenger lists."

Grant tried to phrase his next question correctly. "So in cases like this, where the bad guys don't leave any obvious clues, how long does it usually take, you know, to sift through all the data and everything?"

Agent Williams seemed to resent the question. "That's kind of hard to answer. Every case is different."

"Best case?" said Grant. "What's the fastest it's ever happened?"

"Well, when the Oklahoma Federal Building was blown up, we got him within a couple of hours."

"That's different. That wasn't the result of sifting through data and suspects; you got lucky when he drove through a stop sign and the cops nabbed him."

"Yeah, but we would have caught him eventually. We found the truck rental agreement and we figured out where he bought the ammonium nitrate."

"Sure, days later. That's my point. Without a lucky break, it'd be unreasonable to expect all these lists to be whittled down until after it's all over. The most likely scenario is to arrest the perpetrators next week, after the damage is already done. Even September 11th was like that, way too late."

Agent William's voice sounded defensive. "Don't underestimate lucky breaks. All criminals make mistakes. We'll get one here, too. You'll see."

"Will it be in time though? That's what worries me. Will it be in time?"

"In time for what?" Agent Williams asked.

Grant turned around to face her again. "In time to prevent whatever other pandemonium they have planned."

Lloyd interrupted them. "Is that your dam up ahead?"

Grant looked ahead. He had never actually seen the Palo Verde Dam before, only pictures. It seemed smaller than he expected. Even from the distance Grant could see two bulldozers at work on the dike. It meant the Headgate Rock fiasco would not be repeated.

"Good job," he said.

* * *

12:50 p.m. - Grand Canyon, Arizona

David watched as a large red helicopter lowered a cable with an orange padded loop. The helicopter was at least a hundred feet above them.

The white helicopter that found them hovered just off the cliff as before, relaying instructions. "Be careful. Don't let the harness pull you off the ledge."

Afram grabbed the harness. The noise was loud with both helicopters so close, and turbulence buffeted the rock ledge. David sat down to ensure he didn't fall.

"YOU FIRST." Afram motioned to Judy with the harness.

Judy put the harness over her head and looped her arms over the padded material. She gave a quick thumbs-up sign to the white helicopter. Immediately she was lifted. Seeing her dangling out over the canyon made David sick and he had to shut his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them Judy was almost up to the helicopter.

Before long, the empty harness was sent back down to them. Afram pushed the harness toward David, but he wasn't ready.

"NO. YOU GO."

Afram looked unsure, then pulled it on and allowed himself to be lifted. Again David winced when Afram's body lifted out over the edge of the cliff. He was not looking forward to this.

When the harness was lowered back down, David held it in his hands and looked at it. Suddenly the fear of heights was back and he was afraid to stand and try to put it on. What if he fell while putting it over his head?

"Go ahead, son," the metallic voice coaxed. "You'll be fine."

Still sitting, David pulled the harness over his head and looped his arms over the pad. He intended to take a minute to catch his breath before motioning he was ready, but they didn't wait for him. As the harness lifted David, his body went rigid and he screamed. He tried to hook his feet on the jagged rocks, but he was pulled up and out. Once in the air, the tension in the cable made him feel more secure and the panic subsided. But he didn't dare look. He kept his eyes firmly shut. The chopper's buffeting air grew stronger as he was hoisted. Before he knew it, he was in the chopper and a man was removing the harness. When he was free, he collapsed in a seat next to Judy and Afram.

* * *

1:00 p.m. - El Centro, California

The skinny man took a long swig from his Big Gulp. Too much driving. From San Onofre beach, he had driven another hour south into San Diego, then east, parallel to Mexico on I-8 for an hour and a half, and according to the last sign, El Centro should be the next exit, the heart of California's Imperial Valley. That would be just in time. He needed to get out and walk around. He needed to find a restroom. And he was hungry.

The AllAmericanCanal ran parallel to the Mexican border on his right almost five miles south of the freeway. He'd already passed over the WestsideMainCanal, the last and westernmost of the six major diversions off the All American.

Below Imperial Dam, for all practical purposes, the Colorado River became the AllAmericanCanal. Most American's didn't know that, but he did. Imperial Dam diverted more than twice as much water west into the canal than it allowed to flow into Mexico. No one cared if the river dried up before it reached Mexico. Certainly not the farmers of the Imperial Valley, that's for sure. If the United States had not agreed in a treaty to guarantee a fixed amount to Mexico, the Mexicans wouldn't get anything, and they knew it.

Only a few miles back, when he first drove into the valley, he passed a dirt field too dry to grow sagebrush. No bushes, weeds, or anything, just dirt. An empty irrigation ditch ran right next to the freeway, which explained why nothing grew. Without water from the Colorado, Imperial Valley would be a dust bowl, just like it once was.

Up ahead was the main exit for El Centro. Good. There were some fast food joints where he could eat, visit the restroom, and stretch his legs. He needed it, because he had a big day ahead of him. After all, he was going to blow up the AllAmericanCanal.

CHAPTER 34

1:10 p.m. - Palo Verde Dam, California

Don Simpson from the Palo Verde Irrigation District was nervous. He'd been venting on Grant since the helicopter landed. Don looked to be about fifty, a little under six feet, and bulky, maybe 220. He wore shiny brown cowboy boots and a western shirt with snaps instead of buttons. He would have looked complete with a felt cowboy hat, but instead, he wore a green baseball cap with a Palo Verde Irrigation District logo on the front.

"You're sure there's nothing we can do to save this dam?" he asked.

"Absolutely," said Grant. "We just watched Headgate Rock fail from the helicopter. We just came from there. One guy from the Bureau of Indian Affairs didn't believe us, and he's dead right now."

Don's face softened. "Well, we're ready; I just wanna be sure. The farmers in my district rely on this dam for irrigation, and it's not natural to bust a dam intentionally."

Grant laid it on the line. "You're gonna have almost 500,000 cubic feet per second of water coming through here for the next sixty days until Lake Mead settles back below its spillways. Your dam can't even handle close to that much. You tell me how your dam is going to survive."

Don didn't answer.

Grant looked around. The Palo Verde Diversion Dam had three gates for the Colorado River and a separate gate for a diversion canal. The concrete structure sat on the California side of the river, right next to an old house, still occupied. A big willow tree shaded the front yard and a friendly white dog walked from person to person, nudging their hands with his nose. A dirt dike over a thousand feet long connected the head gates to the other side of the river. No other homes were visible. The California bank of the river rose into a small dry mountain range. On the Arizona side, endless farms were visible. Like Parker and Headgate Rock Dams, police cars littered both sides, and many officers could be seen walking around on the dam itself.

Even from the helicopter, Grant could tell they had lowered the reservoir. All three Colorado River gates were completely open and a wet line circled the upstream side of the river showing that the water had dropped at least five feet. Upstream, the reservoir veered east a quarter mile from the dam, making it impossible to see the full size of the reservoir.

"How long before the bulldozers will be done?" Grant asked. "After they open it, the water'll need time to clean it out before the flood gets here."

Two extremely large bulldozers had carved a 70 foot section down to the water level by pushing the dirt and substrate off the downstream side of the dam. This resulted in a huge pile of dirt and gravel below the cut.

Don checked his watch. "Both dozers've been going since 10 a.m. They're both D-11 Caterpillars, the biggest suckers available. They're almost at water level now." Don turned back toward Grant and pointed upstream and motioned at the wet banks. "As you can see, we already lowered the reservoir."

Grant nodded. "Yeah, I noticed, but that may work against us."

Don furrowed his brows. "What do you mean? I thought that would be better."

Grant watched a bulldozer push a blade of dirt into the water. "Well, you're gonna need to dig five feet deeper now, before the water starts helping." Grant pointed upstream. "And I'm a little worried whether there's enough water to really open the dike, you know, wide enough for the flood."

Don turned and looked at the river. "I didn't consider that. I just figured the less of a flood I cause downstream, the better."

Grant held out the palms of his hands. "Any flood you cause will pale compared to the flood that's on its way, Don."

Don's head jerked back toward the dam. "Hey, what if I shut all the head gates while they're digging? We could start filling the reservoir again."

Grant looked at his watch as a bulldozer pushed another blade off the dike. He figured they still had almost an hour, but no sense cutting it too close. "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. The more water the better."

Don barked orders to a young guy with a John Deere hat. He lowered the gates, one by one. Grant stood on top of the concrete structure, looking straight down into the three spillways. In spite of the dam's small size, the amount of water churning and swirling under the three gates was respectable. After a few minutes, all three gates were shut and the water downstream stopped churning.

Agent Williams stood in the shade of the tree by the house, talking on her cell phone. Shauna had walked over next to the reservoir, and was staring down at the wet rocks as if measuring how fast the water had risen since they closed the head gates. Lloyd walked over and joined them, with the white dog from the house nudging at his hand.

"So what's the agenda, boss?" Lloyd asked.

Grant smiled back at the pilot. "I'm making a small flood, just for you." He pointed toward the bulldozers. "They're going to continue lowering the middle of the dike and in a few more minutes they will meet the rising water. Then they'll make a few cuts below the water level, and get the hell out of there before it comes tumbling down. Should be pretty spectacular."

Lloyd smiled wide. "Wow, you guys put on a good show. How much you charge for this kind of entertainment?"

Don glanced over at Lloyd. Grant guessed Don didn't know what to think about the pilot.

* * *

1:25 p.m. - Palo Verde Dam, California

In the ten minutes since they closed the head gates, the bulldozers had lowered the 70 foot-wide notch another couple of feet. At the same time, the reservoir itself rose a few feet, and now some small streams began trickling through the large notch.

"Okay, this is the critical part," Don said to an already tentative audience.

Everyone on both sides of the river, including the cops, stood watching. One of the bulldozers headed up the slope out of the dike away from Grant, a slope that had been intentionally left for their escape. Halfway up he stopped. The operator jumped off the bulldozer, and shortly appeared dragging a chain around the back.

"What's he doing?" asked Lloyd.

Don answered, "He's getting a chain ready; in case the other one gets in trouble, he can hook onto him and pull him out."

While the first operator stretched out the chain, the other D-11 Caterpillar pivoted, placing the right track on the downstream edge of the dike and the blade facing away from them. He stopped. Even from a distance, the group saw the water streams through the notch had increased slightly in the last few minutes, and the tracks of the bulldozer glistened wet. After the two drivers waved to each other, the second D-11 dropped his blade and cut a two-foot deep swath, stopping after only ten feet, as dirt piled up in front of the blade. The D-11 reversed back through the two-feet-deep water. Grant guessed it would take four more passes to open the dike.

"Why is he starting downstream?" asked Grant.

Don glanced over at him and shrugged. "I don't know; maybe he's afraid if he starts on the upstream side, the downstream side will wash out."

That made sense. Either way, after the last cut he figured the bulldozer wouldn't stop but hustle his rig up the slope as fast as he could.

After the bulldozer completed its second pass and again reversed through the water, Grant looked at Don. "How deep of water can they drive through?"

Don smiled. "I asked the same question. They said they could go to the top of the tracks, if the ground under them was firm. That'd be over four feet."

The bulldozer reversed from his third pass and prepared for what they knew would be the final assault on the notch in the Palo Verde Diversion Dam. Grant felt some sweat run down the center of his back.

"Here comes the hard part," said Don.

The D-11 hesitated for an instant, sitting with its right track on the edge of the dike, then black smoke poured out of the exhaust stack and it lurched forward. Almost immediately Grant saw water flowing off the dike from behind the blade and through the crawlers tracks. As the dirt piled up in front of the dozer, he lifted the blade and continued over the top of the dirt he had just pushed and the driver raced for the slope. The other D-11, seeing that he wouldn't be needed, accelerated forward out of his way. Both of them climbed up the slope onto the other side, not stopping until they both sat on top of the dike.

Behind them, the two-foot deep by ten-foot wide channel cut by the second dozer flowed off the downstream side of the dike.

Lloyd turned to face Grant and shrugged. "Doesn't seem like enough to do anything."

"Don't take your eyes off it," Grant said.

Grant suddenly wished he had a video camera. He looked around and saw that somebody else did, likely one of Don's guys from the irrigation district.

For what seemed like a minute or two, the water appeared to only be increasing slightly. Then suddenly Grant realized it had doubled. The rising reservoir itself was making it harder to focus on the ditch, since water now flowed across the entire notch, making a 70 foot wide waterfall, and obscuring the deeper ditch in the center. But the water in the center ditch grew swifter by the second. Unlike the waterfall that simply dropped off the dike, the ditch water shot through, causing the water below to churn into a brown froth. Grant guessed the ditch was much wider than ten feet now.

For the next few seconds, the water volume and trajectory increased almost as fast as a hose while opening the valve. Then Grant saw something spectacular and unexpected which drew an "ooh" from the other bystanders. The volume in the ditch suddenly increased enough to drop the reservoir right next to the dike, which killed the waterfall over the top like curtains being drawn, as the waterfall disappeared from inside to out.

With the waterfall gone, they could see the ditch better, and it looked to be at least 30 feet wide and 25 feet deep. A loud cracking sound startled the group. They all looked downstream in time to see a large tree in the river bottoms get toppled by the raging river.

While everyone watched, a large section of dirt on the Arizona side broke off and sloughed into the water only to disappear immediately. Not a second later, a similar slab followed from the California side. The combination of the two seemed to double the flow. Grant looked upstream and saw the water in the reservoir had dropped over five feet right next to the dike. And the previously still water could be seen moving quickly toward the cut. More of the dike sloughed off every few seconds until the ditch had widened to almost the entire 70 feet cut down by the two D-11s. This perspective was reinforced when part of the slope the dozers had used to climb out collapsed into the stream. As a result, both D-11s poured black smoke out their exhausts and surged away, heading along the dike toward the Arizona riverbank. The policemen and others standing on the dike ran to distance themselves from the cut.

When Grant thought the flow had decreased, he looked upstream. He saw the wet band around the reservoir all along the river had dropped another five feet. Downstream, the river was a mess. The color ran an ugly brown and had spread wide, filling the old river bed for what Grant guessed was the first time since spring floods before Hoover dam was built, during the 1930s. The river bucked, jigged, and swirled around trees and other obstacles that hadn't been threatened for the last 70 years.

The water blasting out of the cut in the dike was less visible now, as the water level downstream had risen almost as high as the reservoir upstream.

"Wow," said Lloyd.

Grant nodded. "Yeah. That's a good way to describe it."

Don turned and faced Grant, visibly shaken. "What now?"

Grant looked at his watch. "Now we wait. The water should be arriving here some time in the next twenty minutes." Grant patted Don on the shoulder. "Hey, the hard part's over. You did it. That was a lot better than waiting for the reservoir to rise another twenty feet to the top of the dikes and let it break itself. Now, in a couple of months when Hoover's spillways stop and things get back to normal, you can fix your dike and you'll be back in business."

Don forced a smile. "You act like it's no big deal."

Grant looked serious. "It isn't, compared to what happened to the Indians upstream. There's dead people up there, homes washed away, farmland flooded," Grant pointed at the concrete structure, "and their dam is gonna suffer over the next couple months, millions of dollars worth of damage."

Don seemed to think about that. "Speaking of the structure, you think I should open my head gates again?"

Grant looked upstream. "Yeah, why not? The more water that flows through the gates, the less to wash away your dike." Don nodded and walked off to get the gates open.

"So we gonna hang around? Wait for the flood water?" said Lloyd.

"Absolutely." Grant pointed downstream at the raging brown Colorado River. "According to Shauna's numbers, it'll take almost three and a half hours for the water to work its way down to Yuma and the Imperial Dam."

* * *

2:00 p.m. - East of El Centro, California

The skinny man slammed his fist against the steering wheel and cursed loudly.

National guardsmen swarmed along the banks of the AllAmericanCanal, not just the bridges and the overpasses either. They were everywhere, and the canal was over eighty miles long.

His plan had been perfect. The whole area between El Centro and Yuma was an off-roader's dream with sand dunes as far as the eye could see. All he needed to do was stop at one of the many OHV spots, find an isolated parking spot next to the canal, set a ten-minute timer, and be five miles down the road when the canal blew and started watering the desert.

Now what? He had already driven past all the places he had scouted, and the soldiers were crawling all over the thing. They weren't even letting motorcycles approach the canal, let alone his pickup.

He pulled into one of the lots and stopped next to a motor home, letting the engine run. The AllAmericanCanal was still 50 yards away, 50 yards of deep sand. The soldiers carried assault rifles. He wondered if they would shoot him if he drove over there. He knew they'd be reluctant to shoot a civilian. But then again, they were probably hot and bored and he wouldn't put it past them. The idea of planting his bomb was unthinkable.

He wished he had one of those anti-tank weapons, the ones that shoot a little rocket out of a tube. He could stand next to the motor home, take aim, pull the trigger, and bingo. He salivated at the thought. He imagined it blowing sand all over the place, in a bright fiery ball, with soldiers flying head over heels in all directions.

A year before, when he planned the bombings, he knew everything would be easier with the good stuff: missile launchers, plastic explosives, and wireless detonators. Although everything could be had for a price, his finances wouldn't allow for that. Besides, it would have required that he work with others, and broaden his circle. And he didn't trust anybody. If he could do it alone, without anyone else, that would be the best way.

He hadn't done too poorly, either. The Glen Canyon Dam was history, and the California Aqueduct. Too bad about Davis Dam; the three of them would have made a nice little package, a portfolio of success. But two out of three wasn't bad. Besides, if that sandbag fiasco the government was building didn't work, Hoover and Davis would get busted.

He was proud of the aqueduct, but GlenCanyon was a miracle. He couldn't think of a better word. Sure, he had prepared for a year, but he couldn't help but feel that God had intervened for him, a strange thought for a guy who normally considered himself an atheist. But there had definitely been a god at GlenCanyon, a god who had mourned for the river as he did.

He forced his mind back to the issue at hand. At this point he had no ideas how to blow the AllAmericanCanal. It had been an important part of his agenda, being the largest by far of the diversions off the Colorado River, over twice as big as the aqueduct. Blowing the canal would have forced Imperial Dam to send the water downstream into Mexico where it belonged. As soon as the explosion occurred, they would have radioed the dam and closed the gates immediately. If only he knew the phone number and could make the call himself.

The thought made him pause. Could it work? What if he didn't blow up anything, but just called in a report of an explosion, or a bomb scare? Would they shut the gates? He didn't think so. They had too many eyes on the canal; they would know immediately that there had not been an explosion, and they were unlikely to shut the gates until they confirmed a large leak. Even if he had the phone number, he couldn't think of what to say to make them shut the gates.

He scratched his chin. Maybe the AllAmericanCanal would have to survive. It was a thought that took the energy out of him, and put a knot in his stomach.

He reached forward and pulled the shift lever into reverse. Turning his head from the canal, he looked over his shoulder and backed away from the motor home. If only there was something he could do to make them shut the gates. But what would possibly make them shut down canals that furnished water for irrigation and drinking to so many people?

He slammed on the brakes. The truck skidded to a stop in the sand. Of course! Why hadn't he thought about it before? What would make farmers want to shut it off? How would you get households to demand that their drinking water was turned off? He laughed out loud.

He shifted the truck into drive and headed back to the freeway. He needed a phonebook. The phone number for Imperial Dam would be best, but even the cops would do. It was starting to look like God loved the river as much as he did.

* * *

2:05 p.m. - Hoover Dam, Nevada

Fred Grainger watched the national guardsman place the last sandbag on Hoover-Two. The soldier slid it effortlessly in the gap between the two other bags. And it was done. The dike was complete.

For the first time since the construction began, the mass of national guardsmen stopped moving. They hesitated, glancing back and forth between each other. Then they started yelling. Arms pumped into the air, whistles were heard, clapping. Fred couldn't stop the smile from stretching across his face. They had done it, and none too soon. The water in Lake Mead was still rising, and had eclipsed the original height of Hoover Dam hours ago.

An hour earlier it had been touch and go, as the water had reached the top of some of the sandbags near the visitor center, and started to flow over the first phase of the dike. Since the twenty-foot-high second phase started from the Arizona side, the section on the Nevada side, by the visitor center, was the last to be finished. For a half hour the team scrambled to keep up, and Fred had worried that the water would open a large gap and get ahead of them, but it didn't happen. The men stayed one step ahead of the water until the larger dike grew west and closed the weak point. Since then, the soldiers had been building the dike up to its full twenty-foot height.

Fred looked east to the Arizona shore, and admired the sandbag extension. From a distance, the sandbags blended together perfectly, and the dike looked like it was made of concrete, but with an interwoven texture where the bags fit together. Fred was proud of what they had done, and he wished Grant and Shauna were here to see it. So far it was working, just as Grant had planned. Lake Mead was higher than ever in history: crest plus almost eleven feet. Although the next few hours would be nerve-racking as the water continued to rise, Fred was confident that the dike would save Hoover Dam. With that thought in mind, he headed back into the visitor center to call Grant.

* * *

2:10 p.m. - Palo Verde Dam, California

According to their watches, the floodwater from Headgate Rock was due any moment. Grant did not expect anything spectacular. If everything went as planned, the water behind what was left of the Palo Verde Diversion Dam would rise between ten and fifteen feet for an hour or more, then gradually subside a few feet. The water being dumped through the head gates plus through the new notch in the dike would stabilize at just under 500,000 cubic feet per second, and remain like that for about two months. Five hundred thousand flowing through Palo Verde would be the most water in 70 years.

Lloyd stood next to Grant, watching upstream. Shauna had walked over by the reservoir and peered at a measuring stick again, while Agent Williams remained separated from the group, talking on her cell phone.

Don Simpson walked toward Grant and Lloyd from the house. The white dog followed him, wagging its tail. "I was just thinking," he said.

"I hate it when that happens," whispered Lloyd.

Grant laughed, but put his hand on Lloyd's to signal him to be quiet. "Thinking what, Don?"

The irrigation manager stopped in front of them. His cowboy boots weren't shiny anymore. "I was just thinking that when Headgate Rock broke, it let all its water out at once, just like we did. Doesn't that mean that we're going to get a tidal wave down here?"

Grant shook his head. "When we flew over it in the helicopter, it had already jumped out of its channel and spread out. Looked like it was going to flood all the Reservation farms upstream. Anyway, that will disperse it. We might get more water during the first hour, but I don't expect any tidal waves."

Grant felt a wet nudge under his hand and looked down at the dog's pleading eyes. He scratched behind its ears. Living clear out here, the dog probably only encountered visitors occasionally. But with all the people on the dam, the dog was getting lots of action. The dog had no sense of the flood to come. In a way, Grant envied the dog.

"It's started," yelled Shauna from the reservoir. "The level just rose an inch."

Grant saw a group of policemen sitting in the shade under the willow tree stand and move toward the water. Grant walked over to where Shauna stood.

She pointed at a measuring stick in the water. "Look at it for a second, you can almost see it rising."

Grant stared at the stick, while the water lapped against it. He couldn't see anything move, but sometime during the thirty seconds he stared, it went up another inch.

"See?" Shauna said.

He stood and looked upstream. One of his clearest memories from Headgate Rock Dam was the trailer houses being piled up against the railroad bridge. Although illogical, Grant couldn't help wondering if he would see a mobile home drift around the corner.

"Another inch," called out Shauna to a growing crowd.

Don arrived and stood next to Grant. "When will the peak --"

"Another one," said Shauna.

"Now," answered Grant. "We only expect the peak to lag the leading edge by five or ten minutes."

"Two more," called Shauna. She pointed at the stick. "Now you can actually see it rising."

Grant looked back at the stick. Sure enough, he could see the water rising on the index marks. If he hadn't known better, he would have sworn it was the stick sinking into the mud, not the water rising.

He left the small crowd gathered around the stick and walked back to where he could look downstream. If the current had increased below the dam, it wasn't visible, at least not to him.

"What do you think?" Lloyd asked.

Grant shook his head. "I can't see any difference over here."

"Did you expect to?"

"No, not yet." Grant cocked his head around and looked downstream.

When they first arrived at Palo Verde, two clean green streams exited the dam, the river itself and a large canal. Both flowed in man-made channels, which only covered a small percentage of the original riverbed. Trees and other bushes grew in the other sections. Now, brown water covered the entire expanse, having toppled most of the trees. Brush poked up through the water in places and wet marks were visible on the banks.

"Looks kind of like a lull in the storm, doesn't it?" Lloyd said.

Grant looked back at Lloyd and nodded. "Yeah, hopefully whatever wildlife lived in the riverbed will take the hint and get out while the getting's good. Heaven knows there's not going to be anymore lulls for several months."

Lloyd pointed toward the slice where they broke the dike. "I have a question. What's going to happen to the dike, after two months of floodwater? Won't that tear it up even worse?"

Grant shrugged. "Sure. It'll probably be two or three times wider by August, when Hoover's spillways shut down. That's the whole reason we wanted a controlled break. Even if it grows by a factor of three, it'll still be a ways from the concrete structure and the head gates, and that's what we wanted to save."

Lloyd held out his hands. "It all comes from us taxpayer's pockets anyway, don't it?"

Grant laughed. "Yeah, but that doesn't mean I like the government throwing money down holes when people are stupid."

"Then why are you working for the Bureau? I bet you guys waste as much as anybody in the government."

Grant nodded. "You have no idea. I ask myself why I work there every day. Unfortunately, it's too late to go anywhere else."

Lloyd raised his eyebrows. "You don't really believe that, do you?"

"Sure. Where would I go? You think your company would hire a washed-up dam engineer as a helicopter pilot?"

"No, but there's got to be some place."

"Oh, it happens, occasionally. Other countries are still building dams. But then I'd have to move my family to Brazil or China. I could always try to slide sideways and become a bridge or freeway designer, but then I'd be starting over and competing with college grads."

Lloyd shook his head. "You're an engineer. You talk like you're all washed up."

Grant smiled. "I am. For the most part, American engineers as a breed are headed for extinction."

"What are you talking about? Engineers are the brains behind everything. They design our cities."

"Not if we can outsource it," Grant said. "Haven't you noticed how many electrical engineers have been laid off over the last twenty years? U.S. companies are figuring out that they can outsource more than labor to third-world countries. Have you called tech support for your computer lately?"

Lloyd smiled. "You got a point there. Some guy from India answered the phone. He was smart, but I had a hard time understanding him."

"Case in point. If it can be outsourced, they will outsource it."

Don and Shauna led a group of people over to where they were talking. Grant glanced over at the water funneling through the dike and noticed that it had increased considerably during his conversation with Lloyd.

Don pointed. "It's up over five feet."

"Is it still rising?" asked Grant, more to Shauna than Don.

She responded. "Oh yeah. We just wanted to see how it looked down here."

Grant looked again. The wet marks on the far bank told him that the water had been at least ten feet higher when they broke the dam.

"So far, so good."

Shauna turned to go. "I'm going back to watch the levels. I'll tell you when it peaks and starts to fall."

They didn't have to wait long. Less than ten minutes later, she called out that the water had started to drop slowly. By then, the water levels below the dam were almost as high as when they broke it. The brown water heading downstream flowed fast and dirty. Grant heard a couple more trees collapse in the current downstream.

"There it goes again!" Don pointed as another large slab of the dike sloughed into the cut. "It's gonna wash the whole thing away."

Lloyd winked at Grant.

"It will keep doing that for a while," Grant said, "but it'll stabilize, hopefully before it gets to the concrete." Grant knew it wasn't easy watching the water wash the dam away, especially for Don and the other irrigation guys.

While they stood staring at the spectacle, Grant felt a tug on his sleeve. He turned to see Agent Williams. He hadn't seen her for at least a half hour.

"We need to talk," she said.

"Not now." He pointed at the cut. "We're at peak flow right now."

"I know, but -"

He cut her off. "Can't this wait a few minutes?"

"No!" she said. "It's the bomber. He's struck again, at the AllAmericanCanal."

CHAPTER 35

2:30 p.m. - Palo Verde Dam, California

Grant, Lloyd, and Agent Williams stood in the shade under the willow tree. Shauna, who wouldn't leave her post, remained at the measuring stick, writing down water levels and times.

Grant scratched his head. "So nothing was actually blown up?"

Agent Williams shook her head. "No. The caller only stated that he inserted 200 gallons of a biological agent in the canal."

Grant wondered what type of biological agent it could be. He knew that the Bureau of Reclamation spent time thinking about terrorists poisoning the water supply, and what could be done in reaction. But it was something he knew nothing about, information he generally let wash over his head. Unfortunately, right now he'd feel better if he knew more about it. He wondered who at the Bureau to call. "I thought the National Guard was guarding it."

"They are," the special agent responded.

Grant shook his head. "Then how did he get close enough to dump four 55 gallon barrels in it?"

"We don't know."

Grant had a thought. Wouldn't the bomber have guessed that the canal would be guarded, especially after he blew the aqueduct? Maybe he planned in advance for it. There would be ways to get the poison into the canal, even if it was guarded, if you planned in advance. "What if he didn't do it today?"

Agent Williams and Lloyd looked confused.

Grant continued. "Maybe he set it up weeks ago, underground, then flipped a switch and pumped it in. The soldiers wouldn't see anything."