by April Smith
Stone yells, “Don’t!” as Mr. Terminate lumbers toward it.
The shock wave of the explosion pummels my body, arms wind-milling backward, then slams me up short against a granite outcrop, loose earth like burning sparks raining in my hair. The force of it crunches my left shoulder at a bad angle against the rock and I feel that sickening snap, when you know something has dislodged somewhere important.
As I stumble forward, a big inhale of chemical smoke causes me to choke and cry. Mr. Terminate’s disarticulated body parts have been launched in a radius fifty feet wide. Coming to rest within my view is a facial fragment containing a partial set of bloody teeth, and a hand still wearing the silver rings. Above the blasted ridge of rock, a rhododendron bush has silently caught fire. Everything is silent because my eardrums have gone numb.
A tall, thin figure stumbles across the orange backdrop of burning trees and kneels beside Dick Stone, who was knocked down flat on his back.
“Doc!” I’m hearing as if underwater. “It’s Toby, brother.”
Thick wine-dark blood has pooled beneath Stone’s body. Toby kneels and cradles his head.
“He’s got a skull fracture. Small hole you can just stick your finger through.” Toby wipes brain matter on his jeans.
“For God’s sake, don’t touch it!”
Dick Stone’s face is pale and shocky, but he’s still breathing. He opens dull and searching eyes.
“Get me up.”
The fire is dancing across the highest canopy of branches. Black smoke boils and intense heat presses against our skin. In moments we will be trapped inside an inferno.
Stone’s lips say, “Water.”
Toby has a bottle in the pocket of his vest. Carefully supporting Stone’s wounded head, he maneuvers on his knees to wet his mouth.
“What are you up to now, you crazy coot? Is this the famous Big One?”
“It’s happening,” Dick Stone murmurs. “The salmon are running.”
I’m trying to lift Stone’s shoulder over mine. “Let’s get out of here.”
The choice is get him up or let him burn to death. We lift, but then Stone’s heavy legs give out and he ends up sitting. His bloody head lolls forward. My heart contracts with dread.
Toby shakes him. “Stay awake. Help us out.”
Dick Stone relaxes back toward the ground. A mischievous smile plays around his lips. To the last, I don’t know what he’s playing.
“Dying’s no big deal,” he says quite clearly. “People who get upset about it haven’t lived their lives the way they wanted to.”
“Medics!” Toby yells. “Code blue! Abort!”
He looks around, but nothing happens.
“Where are you?” he shouts.
I think that he’s gone nuts, flashing back to a burning jungle in Vietnam, but then SWAT advances from the forest like surreal toy soldiers in Nomex battle gear, with automatic weapons drawn.
Stone is whispering and motioning for me to hear. I bend close to his bloodless lips. He gropes for my shirt. Although our faces are almost touching, Stone’s roaming eyes cannot find me.
“He has taken advantage of all I stand for.” Dick Stone must have realized with his dying thought that beneath the tidy hiking gear, Toby Himes is wearing a bulletproof vest. And a wire.
“But you…” His voice trails off. He presses something into my hand. It is the PalmPilot. “Take this.”
Angelo and Donnato, festooned with earphones, ID tags, and gun belts, wearing bright blue FBI windbreakers, emerge from the blur, shouting questions.
I find that I am holding Dick Stone’s hand, and I place it gently on his chest while slipping the device into my pocket. There is nothing more to be learned from the half-open eyes of the dead.
I get to my feet. A malevolent presence fills the sky. The sun looks distorted through an atmosphere of brown, an orange-red alien disk. Black smoke billows toward the north, but ash is falling like the frozen drops of hail that tapped against our parkas on a turbulent day last spring as we waited in the lee of a volcanic plain to save the last free wild horses in the West.
“Who the hell is Toby Himes?”
Donnato takes my elbow, but I jerk away.
“Who is he? Is he an agent? He’s wired, he’s wearing a vest, and I’m playing it out. I’m for real. I’m involved with these people, and he’s—”
“I hear you.”
Which is difficult, because I’m blubbering and trying to keep my mouth clamped shut at the same time.
“It’s been tough on him, too.”
“Tough on him?”
Donnato maneuvers so he’s blocking my view; his face is all I see. “Toby Himes is a source.”
“A source?”
“He is Peter Abbott’s pocket source.”
“The deputy director of the FBI has a pocket source? He’s been off the street for years.”
“Toby Himes has been Peter Abbott’s unpaid informant, pretty much since they came back from Vietnam. We’ve known they were talking. We thought Abbott might be involved in a conspiracy. We ran an investigation under Galloway’s command. Abbott finally gave it up that Mr. Himes has been providing him with intel on criminal activity in the Northwest for years. Himes is nowhere on the books because he refuses to take money or be acknowledged. He’s an unsung hero. Doing the right thing for his country. When he told us Stone had recently acquired half a dozen cast boosters, we knew it was on.”
“What are you talking about?”
“High-energy explosives. They provide the initiation you need to ignite a major amount of Tovex. Do serious damage. We knew Stone was onto the Big One.”
Angelo approaches, having grabbed Toby Himes.
“A Highway Patrol officer picked up the APB on Jim Allen Colby, also known as Slammer, getting off a Greyhound bus in Cascade Locks. What does that mean, Mr. Himes?”
Toby replies, “That’s the Bonneville Dam.”
We should be running for the helicopters, but instead we are drawn to watch in respect as the paramedics strap Dick Stone’s heavy body onto a gurney.
Toby Himes’s face is tight. “Why did you wait and let him die?”
“We thought he might say something important. You did right,” Angelo assures him.
“It speaks to what we do to ourselves,” says the former Marine, and he walks away.
Sadness is rising. I swallow hard. An empty space is opening up, much like the empty space around my grandfather. Disappointment, mostly, in what might have been.
As for Darcy DeGuzman, without Dick Stone, she is lost.
Good-bye, soldier, Darcy thinks, and dies there, too.
Slammer gets off the fourth bus of the day at the Bonneville Lock and Dam, a National Historic Landmark. What a complete and total pain in the butt—but still, he is happy to have been chosen, back in the good graces. The old dude better appreciate this, hours and hours of waiting in stinky old bus stations in nowhere towns, and it’s late in the day and it’s cold and he’s starving.
Slinging the backpack, he crosses the parking lot toward the visitors area and picks up a brochure, as instructed. This thing is huge. It spans the river a mile wide, connecting the states of Washington and Oregon. The powerhouses are kind of scary, huge networks of high-tension wires and transforming stations that produce electricity from turbines deep inside the dam—enough to power the entire city of Portland, it says.
He opens the map and locates the Fish Viewing Building.
Two huge luxury tour buses have pulled up to the entrance, and quicker than you’d imagine, hordes of white-haired old folk have disembarked in a parade of walkers and wheelchairs, limping through the glass doors. Slammer holds the door politely for a chalk-faced living corpse attached to an oxygen tank, then heads for the elevators, totally freaked by the guy at the desk—an old fart from the Army Corps of Engineers wearing a black eye patch, who is staring directly at him with one lucid eye.
But it’s a great day for the fish. The Visitor Center is
filled with tourists. The benches in front of the underwater window are crowded with kids and strollers, in a claustrophobic room that smells of old radiators and cafeteria lunch. Slammer stares through the glass at the silver forms flying by as they climb the fish ladders that get them over the dam—hundreds per hour. Some old lady is standing in a booth, clicking each one off by hand. People are staring at her like she’s another exhibit.
Okay, he’s seen enough. He can’t wait to drop the dye. Man, it would be cool to see it happen from this window as the water slowly fills with red like a slasher movie. Better than blood and harmless to the fish, Julius promised. He checks his watch. Allfather said to pull the cord at precisely 4:15. It is 4:10 now.
Slammer takes the elevator to the top level, where you can walk outside and have a view of the whole river, and get close to the salty smell of the fish ladders, which are basically steps flowing with water. You think of a dam like something out of a children’s book, all neat and sparkly, but when he looks around, he decides the place looks more like a prison. There are high barbed-wire fences to keep people away from the banks of the river. If you somehow fell in, you’d be swept into the rotor blades of giant turbine engines. The skies are gray and the water dark. He trudges up to the top of the weirs, out onto a catwalk where a toddler is squatting and pointing to the water.
He fingers the rope dangling from the backpack. Remembering the small explosion of gunpowder bound to occur when he pulls the switch, he moves away from the family.
“Don’t let the little dude fall in,” he advises.
“Slammer. Stop.”
Still smiling, he answers to his name, and there’s the chick from the farm coming toward him. She looks all different. She’s got on a baseball cap and a vest that says FBI, and she’s walking funny, tilted over to one side.
My left shoulder is bandaged up underneath the blastproof vest, but the pain is breathtaking.
“What are you doing?” Slammer asks.
“Don’t move. Do not pull that cord.”
“How’d you get here?”
Military helicopters fill the skies. On the shore, a fleet of cop cars and ambulances is lining up along the road.
I keep a distance.
“Slammer, please don’t move. Do you know what’s in that backpack?”
“Nothing is going to happen. It’s just dye, to stop them from destroying the salmon runs.”
“That pack contains explosives. Not just a blood bomb. Something a lot more powerful.”
“Why?” the boy asks, confused.
There is a ripple of anxiety in the crowd that moments ago had been peacefully watching the fish jump through the roaring water. SWAT teams in combat gear are quickly moving families away, while moon men in bomb suits and helmets with built-in microphones direct a score of firemen ready with hoses. The woman with the toddler picks him up and carries him away, staring at Slammer with hate.
“Julius wanted to blow up the dam. To get revenge on the U.S. government, and because he was a sick individual. A lot of innocent people could get hurt—”
Alarmed, he says: “Where is Allfather?”
“He’s dead. There was a fire at the farm. Everyone is dead except for Sara. She’s okay; you can see her as soon as we resolve this. Right now, it’s very important for you to listen to me. Do not move. The bomb squad will remove the backpack.”
Slammer laughs. “No way he’d do something like that. Besides, one little bomb can’t blow up all these tons of concrete. He wouldn’t send me here just to blow myself up? For a couple of fish?”
“We’re not going to let anything bad happen to you.”
“You’re trying to trick me.”
“I’m trying to save your life. I did that once before, when he buried you alive, remember?”
“You’re a liar!” Slammer screams. “You sold us out! You’re a fed! You’re a liar! You deserve to die!”
“I do care, Slammer. That’s why I’m standing here. These guys could take you out in a heartbeat.”
Slammer glances above him; the snipers are set up on the roof.
“You’re a good person. You know how I know? Because you didn’t kill Herbert Laumann when you had the chance. There is good in you, Slammer. It shines. You’ve had a real hard time of it. People haven’t let you be good. But I know you are. I wouldn’t be risking my life if I didn’t think your life was very important. More important than the fish. Come on, dude.”
“Stay back,” he says.
“No. I’m coming to help you.” I take a step closer.
“Why should I believe you ever again? You think I’m that incredibly stupid?”
I stop just short of tackling distance. Slammer’s eyes are glassy and big, and he’s chewing indecisively on those childlike lips. We face each other in a standoff as the human crowd recedes like a tide, leaving the windswept concrete walkways quiet except for the peeping song of the ospreys patrolling low over the water.
“I trust that you’re not going to do this, Slammer, because you’re smart enough to know you’ve been set up by Allfather. He’s the one who was lying to you.”
“It’s another test,” he decides. “Of fire and ice.”
And then he jerks the cord.
In one stupefying moment, I grope for a lifetime of reconciliations. A series of pop-pop-pop explosions blows me backward and knocks Slammer to his knees as red dye fumes and spurts in all directions. While it continues to spray like a fireworks sparkler gone wild, he wrestles the backpack off and throws the whole thing into the fish ladders, and the water turns blood red.
Just like Stone’s test run.
And that’s the extent of it.
Slammer can’t stop laughing for joy, even as a pile of agents brings him down.
“I believe in Allfather!” He keeps on snickering. “I belieeeeve, oh yesss!”
Stunned, the bruised shoulder searing with pain, I wipe at the splattered dye on my face. The wind off the river is icy. The helicopters keep circling. Radios crackle, and SWAT reinforcements overwhelm the top level.
My hair is whipping across my eyes. From the catwalk is a panoramic view of the river. Below, fish continue to flop over the weirs, the big clock of nature ticking placidly along, but now I am listening to a different buzz in a higher key. All the craft on the water have been diverted, except for one that has torpedoed through: a small powerboat heading in a perfectly straight line toward the dam.
I grab a pair of binoculars from one of the SWAT guys.
It is the boat I saw at Toby Himes’s. The wheel is tied down. Otherwise, the boat is empty.
Except for large plastic barrels that contain military-grade explosives.
Mountain Man must have sent it on the final voyage. Slammer and the red dye were a diversion. The real attack bears down on us now on an automated suicide mission at eighty miles an hour, loaded with enough high explosives to blow a crater in this concrete monolith, where hundreds of agents, police, and tourists have massed—powerful enough to cause the river to overflow its banks, flood towns, destroy farmland, shut down the Northwest power grid. It is what terrorism experts call “a secondary explosion,” the dual purpose being to inflict the greatest human casualties on responding personnel.
“INCOMING!” I scream. “THE BOAT IS ARMED.”
Orders are relayed and everything starts moving backward. Ambulances screech off the road. Police units back out of the parking lot. Fire trucks and panicked tourists push toward the woods. Only the military helicopters swing forward in unison, flying low over the water, gunners leaning out the doors, firing .50-caliber automatic weapons at the boat, intercepting its kamikaze mission a scant two hundred yards before the target. The choppers jam it, up and away, as an orange ball of fire explodes out of the water. The boom echoes off the riverbanks, and every living creature along the Columbia River Gorge quakes.
The catwalk shakes under the confident steps of Peter Abbott. The SWAT gear he wears looks more like a costume now, his bearin
g that of a civilian, with a civilian’s priorities of personal gain and comfort, not justice; no longer one of us. Tall and balding, glasses blank as coins, he fairly bounces with authority.
“Give me the data.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Toby Himes reported that he saw Dick Stone hand it to you.”
“Good old Toby.”
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“What happened at the farm?”
“It’s gone,” says Abbott impatiently. “Everything burned to the ground.”
“The barn and the orchard?”
“Orders were to destroy everything.”
“They were your orders. You assassinated an unarmed woman.”
“She was not the primary target. But she was a terrorist.”
“And you burned the trees. Why did you burn the trees?”
“Calm down. You are not in control of yourself.”
“Did you kill the little horse, too? Did you mow him down, just for the hell of it?”
“Give me the data, and let’s go inside.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about the device that Stone gave you.”
“Why? What did Dick Stone have that brings you here, way out on a limb? We know he had an inside source. So? Ah well, you’re right. You never could tell what was real with him anyway. But what about you, sir? Which side are you on? Was Toby Himes relaying information on criminal activity in the Northwest…or was he your lackey to get to Stone?”
“Toby Himes is a loyal patriot,” Abbott replies swiftly. “And you are done, Agent Grey. Your picture was posted on the Internet by Stone’s accomplice.” He describes Rooney Berwick’s personal Big One. The suicide. The photo ID of Darcy DeGuzman. “Your identity has been exposed. Your career as an agent is over. Let’s go out like a hero.”
We are standing alone on the narrow walkway that spans the fish ladders. Water rushes in shallow channels under our feet. What are my options? The rampant power of the river is far beyond the concrete decks and barbed-wire gates.
“If I give you the data, what are you going to do for me?”
