Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  Bob Mathers took Wayland by the arm and hauled him into the doughnut shop’s men’s room. He pushed the boy against the wall and jabbed a finger in his chest.

  “This is about drugs, isn’t it?” said Bob. “Don’t lie to me. If I find out you’re running drugs for these two morons, I swear: I will send your ass to prison, Way. I won’t want to, but I will.”

  “This isn’t drugs,” Wayland assured him. “Nothing to do with drugs, boss. Didn’t you once say you were my friend?”

  “I still am,” said Bob. “Maybe I’m the only one you’ve got in this place. That one, the fancy one with the tattoo, he’s the man you met in prison in California, isn’t he? What is this ‘job’ they’ve got for you? Tell me before you’ve gone and done something you can’t get out of. Tell me now, and those two will take the fall, not you.”

  “I have nothing to tell, boss,” said Wayland, breaking free of him. “Nothing I have to tell you, anyway.” He returned to the main dining room, and he and the other two men retreated to the rental car without getting any coffee for themselves.

  XX

  5/19/07 11:03 Atlantic Daylight Time

  “Let the drum down gently into the water,” Col. Method told the group of four Colombians in Spanish. “The anchor--the weight attached to the cable coils--must go in first, then the cable itself, then the oil drum. The entire device will remain suspended below the surface, exactly as the real torpedoes will.”

  The Colombians tossed the entire contraption as a single tangled bundle into the water, making a large splash in the weedy jungle lake. They looked at the angular man they knew as Colonel Max and hoped for a nod of approval.

  “Es bueno?” one asked.

  “No es bueno,” said Col. Method, scowling at them. “You must go slowly. Be more careful.”

  Abe Wilson, the machinist, met the pontoon boat on the pier as the trainees came back to the shore. From the way the chubby fellow was waving to them while the boat was far out in the small lake, Method guessed that something was amiss.

  “Max,” Wilson called to the colonel, taking him out of ear shot as soon as the boat docked. “Two of them are missing,” he whispered in English into Method’s ear.

  “Which two?” asked Method.

  The machinist read from a paper Ed Harris had given him. “Francisco Estafan and Juan Dolce, both of Medellin. Mr. Harris was giving them a class on the shop floor, and they weren’t there for roll call.”

  “They’ll take the road,” decided Method. “They’re city boys; they wouldn’t risk travel through the jungle.”

  He jogged the mile and a half back to the metal buildings and took one of the three Jeeps parked in the muddy yard. Method kept one hand on the wheel and used the other to call Mondragon in the United States on a satellite phone. Esteban and Dolce’s footprints were visible in places in the mud along the shoulders of the road, showing they had headed northeast to the village of Montecuel, the only inhabited spot between the compound and the mighty Orinoco River.

  “Do whatever you feel you have to,” Mondragon told him on the phone. “Otherwise, the others will want to go as well.”

  Method sped up the road to Montecual, and there found a bartender in an open-air tavern who said the two Colombians had been in town earlier in the day and had gotten a ride on a lumber truck bound for the river. Eleven miles west of the village, at another bar located at a forsaken crossroads, Method spotted the truck parked out front. The tavern owner in Montecual had said the truck had a split windshield and that the passenger side window was cracked from top to bottom and there was no rear-view mirror on the driver’s side.

  Method drove past the tar paper and tin saloon, up a hill about a half mile beyond the crossroad, and parked his Jeep off the road in the shadows of the trees. He checked the Lugar machine pistol he kept in a shoulder holster under his denim jacket. He passed the gun from hand to hand and commented to himself how well balanced it felt. He dragged a rotten log across the road a few feet below his parked Jeep and sat in shadows, the gun in his lap, waiting for the truck.

  The Colonel envisioned the three men in the primitive saloon drinking raw sugar cane liquor that was as clear as water, the Colombians loud and freely spending their money. The truck driver, no doubt a rough man in white cotton clothes, would be dreaming of the fat payment awaiting when they reached civilization. The anticipation of their arrival was so enjoyable to him that Method regretted hearing the low rumble of the truck’s engine as it climbed the hill below him.

  The three men were not drunk, merely a little more joyous than usual, and were laughing over some joke when they came to the log across the road. Estafan and Dolce jumped from the cab, still chuckling, and stooped to take hold of both ends of the piece of wood as Method stepped forward and took a marksman’s stance, his feet spread comfortably at shoulder width and both hands on the Lugar.

  He first shot the driver through the windshield, right between the eyes. The two Colombians stood upright and blinked into the darkness of the forest; they would have run, had they the time. Method remained calm and shot Dolce between the eyes as well. As Estafan turned to dash back to the truck, Method hit him in the back of the head. The last man was still moaning when Method walked up to him and shot him another time in the skull.

  “Three men, seven bullets,” thought Method, as he shot each of them twice more in the head. “I must be getting old to waste ammunition like this.”

  He took wallets from the two dead Colombians as well as their rings and gold necklaces; the latter of which would be familiar to the remaining thirty-eight men. He collected all of his spent cartridges from the ground and drove back to Montecual and then to the jungle compound.

  When the other Colombians went to dinner that evening, placed beside the beans and rice and tortillas Bill Thorpe and his wife had prepared for them on the mess hall’s long central table, was the jewelry and money from Dolce and Estafan.

  “This is what happens to deserters,” Col. Method told them in Spanish. “Our Russian friend has gone north for a while. He left our jungle home surrounded by hundreds of his KGB brethren. The men these trinkets belonged to thought they could leave here any time they wished, thought they could go and tell everything to the first policeman they met. Now they are lying dead along the road, and when they do meet a policeman he will think they were killed by bandits. For their daring, Senors Dolce and Estafan have each earned a pauper’s grave in unconsecrated ground outside Montecual. Wild beasts will come in the night to dig up their bodies and eat what is left of them. Escape from here is impossible, my friends. You must each fulfil your contract, then you can go home rich men. Try to leave, and you will share the fate of these cowards.”

  *

  Mondragon telephoned Earnest Gusman in Cartagena and told him to find two more men to send to Venezuela. “Send them as soon as possible,” he said. “They need to start their training right away.”

  XXI

  7/4/07 22:30 Eastern Daylight Time

  Margaret Smythe and Ronald Goodman watched the spectacular fireworks display over the Capital from her apartment balcony in the Watergate Building. Ever since she was a child Margaret had felt sad at the end of Independence Day; the celebration came and went, and everyone had lavished attention on the flag, on historic events, on old men in uniforms, and no one had paid much attention to her.

  The festivities concerned events and dead people from more than two hundred years earlier, when men wore powdered wigs and everyone behaved--according to her understanding of the facts--pretty much the way the Amish still do. This was mid-summer, a time of year when she was tan and could lose that pesky extra five pounds because she could exercise outdoors, and yet she remained unappreciated.

  Congress was not even in session, and while the senators and representatives were back home, there was no one in town she wanted to impress, had any of them been paying attention to her.

  She was thinking of this as she lay beside Ronald on her metal outdoor furniture
. A great red chrysanthemum of fire burst overhead and made the white marble of the Capital Building glow pink for a few fleeting seconds.

  “I love you,” whispered Ronald.

  “What?” she said. “Don’t say crap like that. You sound like a country and western song.”

  “I thought women wanted men to say that,” said Ronald.

  “What women? Ones waiting tables in nasty little towns in Oklahoma?” asked Margaret. “You read that in some stupid magazine, didn’t you?”

  “No, absolutely not,” said Ronald, who had indeed read in GQ that after coitus women needed to be told they are loved. “I take it back, anyway. I was only being nice.”

  “No you weren’t,” said Margaret. “If you were a nice guy you’d be sweeping floors or flipping hamburgers with the other losers. You sure as hell wouldn’t be in your thirties and already an undersecretary.”

  Ronald adjusted his bathrobe and sat upright on the edge of the lounge chair. “Have you given any thought to what we should ask the Army to do?”

  “Do about what?”

  “I was talking about this new initiative the Secretary of Defense has thought up,” said Ronald. “You should read your inter-office memos, Maggie.”

  “I’ve told you can’t call me Maggie,” she said. “Is this the Delta Force thing you’re talking about?”

  “That’s close. We can access Delta, as well as some other units. It’s in the budget. I doubt if anyone but us and a few staffers know about it.”

  “How much did they give us? You’re the only one Hasket talks to.”

  “A hundred million. Plus we get two full battalions of light infantry whenever we need them.”

  Margaret went to the balcony rail and thought long and hard about what she could do with a hundred million dollars and several thousand men. She thought for nearly thirty seconds. “Teach them how to fix dams,” she said. “Dams are what we are supposed to be experts in.”

  “The trouble is,” confessed Ronald, “I had a chat with one of those engineering fellows--the Corps of Engineers is full of them--and it seems dams aren’t very fixable, don’t you see. Not once they’re broken. According to him, should a terrorist blow one up, it would be deuce hard to build again. The big ones cost millions in the Thirties, and these days they would cost billions and billions.”

  “Really?” said Margaret, surprised to learn that dams were so expensive. “Did you say ‘deuce’ just now?”

  “Yes,” said Ronald. “It sounds English, doesn’t it? I like to throw ‘deuce’ and ‘bloody’ and ‘hey what’ and other Anglo phrases in now and then. I’ve got a rumor going round Capital Hill I was educated at Oxford. Should someone ask, please don’t tell them any different, Margaret.”

  “You say the dams can’t be fixed?” she asked, at the same time thinking of important people she would tell that the closest Ronald had ever been to Oxford was when he was wearing a certain style of shoe.

  “Water pressure is a real problem apparently,” said Ronald. “Who knew water was so heavy?”

  “How about if we train soldiers to evacuate people from urban areas?” said Margaret. “They could evacuate the same bunch in case of a chemical or biological attack. We’d be killing two birds with one stone.”

  “Not bad,” said Ronald. “Though there is another problem this engineer fellow mentioned to me. Turns out that if one of these big dams breaks the water will come rushing out like the bloody deuce.”

  “How fast is ‘the bloody deuce’?” asked Margaret.

  “According to him, it would get going at about two hundred miles an hour in no time. Evacuating anyone down river would be a bloody miracle. I think we best not mention that when we float our ideas past Lew this Monday.”

  “Lew?” asked Margaret. “Do you mean Senator Hasket? Why are we seeing him on Monday, and since when did you call him by his first name?”

  “You sound paranoid,” said Ronald. “We’ll be appearing before him together. Lew has come to thinking you should have the title, be official head of the task force, rather than me.”

  Margaret watched a yellow starlight explode outside and counted one thousand one, one thousand two, before she heard the loud “boom” the eruption had caused.

  “You aren’t sleeping with him, are you?” asked Ronald.

  “Good God!” exclaimed Margaret. “Now who sounds paranoid? The man’s old enough to be my grandfather.”

  As anyone knowing Margaret Smythe could have guessed, she was indeed sleeping with Senator Hasket, and had been doing so since the night of her first embarrassing

  presentation in front of his committee, when Ronald had showed her up badly.

  “How can you ask me that, darling?” she said and stroked the arm of Ronald’s dressing gown.

  XXII

  7/9/07 11:18 EDT

  “So I think,” said Margaret to Senator Hasket’s committee, which was again meeting in truncated form to hear testimony from the DoD’s Anti-Domestic Terrorism Task Force, “that the lion’s share of the task force’s budget be given to a joint Army/National Guard/Civil Defense unit designed to save civilian lives in large urban areas. Specialized Army brigades would be trained to move human assets dwelling in afflicted regions to zones unaffected by chemical or biological attacks or--in the case of sudden, explosive-induced floods--to locales above the flood plain.”

  She looked up from her notes and made eye contact with Senator Hasket, a sign that she had reached a resting point where he might ask some more of his inane questions.

  “Now, Miss Smythe,” he asked, “about how much damage would the destruction of a major dam cause?”

  “Billions.”

  That’s an answer? thought Ronald Goodman, seated right beside her. He’ll eat you alive if you don’t get more specific.

  “Thank you, Miss Smythe,” said the senator.

  She is sleeping with him, thought Ronald. You slut! You filthy little slut. That’s why you’re leading the task force again. The old fart told me it had to do with putting a woman in charge and how that would please the affirmative action jackals. Don’t you worry, bitch, I don’t get mad; I get even.

  “The extent of damage depends upon how close the city or other human environment is to the ruptured dam,” said Margaret, stroking her long, light brown hair and pursing her full, blood-red lips together. “If a tentative group was situated a few miles downstream from a broken dam--say Pierre, South Dakota, immediately down river on the Missouri from the Oahe Dam--it would be immediately overwhelmed by twenty-two million acre feet of water. The sudden change in pressure would also destroy the Big Bend Dam and destroy the cities of Chamberlain and Yankton and cause serious damage three hundred miles down the Missouri in Sioux City.

  “Communities farther downstream in Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri would suffer negligible damage. These cities would witness a gentle raising of the river’s level as the original giant wave loses its power. The loss of Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia would cause major damage as far away as Richland, Washington, but do almost nothing to Portland, Oregon.

  “Should Hoover Dam be destroyed--or Hoover and Glen Canyon together--that would be perhaps the worst of all possible scenarios. If Glen Canyon Dam were lost, the resulting wall of water would accelerate through the Grand Canyon--much as the smaller Big Thompson River accelerated through Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado in 1975--and would reach into parts of Las Vegas and utterly demolish smaller communities on the lower Colorado River.”

  “Wait, Miss Smythe,” interrupted the senator, stealing a glance at a map an aide had handed him, “you say the water would reach Las Vegas? My map shows Las Vegas to be west of the river by forty some miles.”

  “The river bends south there, senator,” said Margaret, who had made a phone call to a civil engineer and thus had a good idea of the potential damage. “Boulder City would be devastated, completely erased. Some water would escape the flood plain and reach clear to the Las Vegas Strip. Because of the steep fall in elevat
ion they have out west, and because of the narrow natural river bed, the river bore would dissipate very slowly. Downstream towns such as Laughlin, Riviera, Bullhead City, Needles, Lake Havasu, Blythe and Yuma would all be severely damaged.”

  “No kidding?” exclaimed the senator, for once truly impressed by information Margaret had brought him. He regained his composure. “That’s a lot of would be’s, Mar,,,er Ms. Smythe.”

  Damn, thought Ronald, I have to regroup. She stole a march on me while I thought I had a safe lead. Well, Maggie my love, the big chiefs lead the tribe. They also take the arrows. We’ll see how many arrows your pretty hide can hold.

  “We can’t prepare for anything like that,” said the senator, stung by an original thought. “We’d scare everybody living in that part of the country if we even talk about it. They see the Army out practicing for a broken dam and it’ll frighten the pants off them. No, we can’t go down this road.”

  “Senator Hasket,” said Margaret, “we already have funding—”

  “No!” said the senator. “Look at those little towns there along the Colorado. All those retired folks in their Bermuda shorts, out on their patios drinking sun tea. We can’t upset retired folks. We might as well cut Social Security. The AARP would have our heads either way.”

  This I like, thought Ronald.

  “Senator—” Margaret began to say.

  “I won’t hear any more,” said the senator, gathering his papers and rising to leave. “Let the Army boys do what they have to do. Make sure they’re way out in the boonies somewhere when they play their war games. Or evacuation games, or whatever you want to call them. Spend the money you’ve been allotted and keep the Management and Budget people happy. But keep quiet and play smart. Or play stupid, if that’s what’s needed. Don’t ever bring this up to anybody who has to run for re-election. They can’t help you. Good day to you all.”

  How you like being in charge now? thought Ronald. To Margaret he said, “I know the fellow to set up secret exercises for you. He’s one of our fast-track full Colonels; ambitious and discrete.”