“Where,” asked the still unconvinced former CIA man, “are the arrested Colombians now? My people would love to talk to them.”
“The suspects...” said Margaret with hesitation, “made bail and have since disappeared. They may have returned to Colombia.”
“Really?” said the CIA man, and everyone present appreciated the scorn in his two syllable response.
“The federal judge in Salt Lake City,” said Margaret, “did not understand the seriousness of the situation. The Sheriff of Wasatch County did not dredge the reservoir until after bail had been set. Local authorities were unable to grasp what had happened until the suspects were gone.”
“Yes, local authorities,” chimed in General Parnell, and everyone, including the CIA man, nodded in agreement, as they all mistrusted anyone not in a position of supreme federal authority. “We know about local people,” said the general, and an uneasy laughter spread through the room. “Very good, Miss Smythe,” he added to Margaret. “Do keep us up to speed on this. We are absolutely counting on you.”
General Parnell and everyone else nodded to her again. Margaret was invited to other high level meetings and in time gained a permanent place in the president’s legions of security advisors, yet neither she nor anyone else ever did anything substantive to counter the perceived threat. She and everyone concerned wrote memos to their superiors concerning the Colombian threat; none of them sent any additional investigators into the field.
The President was told by second-hand sources of the potential threat, and the rumor, which had grown to gigantic proportions, was leaked to the press. The New York Times ran an item on page seven of a Sunday edition, which caused a stir in the other branches of the media, and among the handful of Americans concerned about such matters.
By late February of 2008 the matter had been sifted through the million-handed media until even Internet gossips had tired of fingering it. By summer of that year “Colombian Terrorists” had become the title of a regular skit on a late night talk show; actors dressed in ponchos and big sombreros and sporting huge bushy mustachios snarled: “We coming to get you, gringo!” into the cameras, and the words “Colombian Terrorists” quickly thereafter became one with Killer Bees and Black Helicopters, and was a byword for a threat that never came to fruition. Only in the highest levels of government, where for reasons of national security both humor and irony are strictly forbidden, did anyone continue to take the threat seriously.
Late one July night in that peaceful summer of 2008, the outgoing president was sitting at what he liked to call “the big chair” in the Oval Office, gazing across the lights of the Quad while he sipped his Sleepytime nightcap. The cabinet members had
gone home hours ago and the first lady was at the Kennedy Center for the revival of “Annie Get Your Gun.” Only the president and the squadrons of armed Secret Service men were at home. He turned to the Secret Service guard beside him, a veteran of the force named James Winthrop, who was the only black American the president spoke to on a daily basis, and who made the president feel progressive whenever the chief executive paused to hear a few seconds of James’ opinions.
“Jim,” he said, “you were in the military, eh?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President, for twenty-four years,” said the guard. “Airborne Rangers, sir.”
“Then you understand about these explosive things and so on,” said the president. “Like they use to blow up things, other things than the explosive things themselves.”
“I suppose I do, sir,” said Agent Winthrop, sounding a little confused by the president’s famous disregard for sentence structure.
“So, if this Colombian terrorist bunch were real,” mused the president, “and you, for the sake of argument, were one of them. Not that I’m saying you would want to be. You not being a Colombian. When do you hit us?”
“That depends, sir, on what targets I wished to strike,” said the guard.
“Well, how about these dam things? Like out there at Hoover Dam?”
“Then, sir,” said Agent Winthrop, “In the spring, when the runoff is the highest, sir.”
“Come again, Jim?”
“You see, sir,” said Winthrop, “the reservoirs out west will be full to overflowing. The snow in the Rockies will have melted, with the rivers running up to their shorelines, sir.”
“Now, Jim,” said the president, “I know you know about that engineering stuff.
Classes at West Point and all that. So I wanted to ask you this: if one of these big dams was blown up, went completely, how fast would the water go? Would it keep picking up speed? Just go faster and faster?”
“Running water, sir, essentially falls downhill,” said the Secret Service agent. “Falling objects within the atmosphere increase their speed at thirty-two feet per second every second they descend. Every object has a terminal velocity depending upon weight, environment and the shape of the falling object. Speaking in rough terms, they do not accelerate much past two hundred miles an hour. The water in this instance would be slowed by the ground it traveled over. So, sir, I estimate the water escaping from a really big dam would travel at a little under two hundred miles per hour, sir.”
The president looked into his yellow-green tea and tried to picture it. “That would be fast water, Jim,” he agreed.
XL
8/19/08 20:30 Arizona Standard Time
Bob Mathers stopped his squad car on the high bridge over the Colorado east of Page and looked north into the darkness toward the massive black outline of the dam. Below him on the banks of the river he could see the lights of SUVs and recreational vehicles lining both sides of what in dim light appeared as a wide band of silvery white. One hundred degree plus weather had made recent days barely liveable in Arizona. In the evening cool, campers and sportsmen far beneath Bob’s feet were rising to a new level of activity. He heard some of them cooking late suppers over Coleman stoves and others making the day’s final casts into the river. The unmistakable sound of children laughing likewise drifted up to him as he stood on the high steel span across the canyon.
Looking at the curved surface of the dam, Bob had a vision of the cement colossus suddenly collapsing before him, and of the river that had been imprisoned behind the 1400 foot wide and 700 foot tall structure for forty-eight years surging forward to cover everything in its path. Page, sitting as it did atop high ground southeast of the river, would be spared. The campers, the SUVs, and the children’s laughter he sensed in the darkness below him would be gone in an instant.
Are they after the dam?
He had no idea if an edifice of that size could be broken by anything less than a nuclear explosion. Could anything else bust open that much concrete? Are a bunch of Colombian mules and other petty criminals up to the task?
Bob decided the answer had to be no. Wayland Zah could not know anyone sufficiently evil and sufficiently competent to do the job. Mathers decided his original suspicion had been correct, and this entire episode had to have something to do with drugs. “That must be what they’re up to,” he told himself.
XLI
9/19/08 21:03 Pacific Daylight Time
The call came to Erin Mondragon as he was fixing himself a sandwich and preparing to watch The Tonight Show.
“I’m done,” said Ed Harris, the engineer who was calling from Venezuela. “You can call everyone back.”
“We’ll be in touch,” said Mondragon, putting the phone down.
In the morning he sent a message to Earnest Gusman in Cartagena, instructing him to recall the forty men. As Mondragon had expected, the task could not be done overnight. One of the men had been killed in a shoot-out with a rival gang and another was in prison on manslaughter charges for shooting the man in question. Two other men were missing; they could be dead or in some other nation, or be hiding somewhere in the green campo beyond Colombia’s crowded cities.
Earnest Gusman had panicked and, against Mondragon’s wishes, made a phone call to Erin’s office in San Francisc
o. Gusman tried to use English, a language he spoke no better than John Taylor spoke Russian. In his frenzied state of mind he spoke only gibberish.
“We must...the men, they speak...everyone knows,” he stammered into the phone. “Where are they, hey?”
“Get off this line,” Mondragon told him in Spanish and gave him the number of a pay phone. “Wait twenty minutes and call me there.”
At the pay phone Mondragon tried to console the frightened little man. He told Gusman to find four of the stupidest men in the worst barrios of Colombia. “We will put one each on different teams,” he told Earnest. “They will be men who only have to lift heavy weights.”
“You do not understand, Senor Erin,” protested Gusman. “They each have spoken of our plans during the past year. Whether I go to Calle or Bogota or Medellin, people have heard of the men making bombs in the Venezuelan forest. The Yankees will have heard of this by now.”
“The Yankees do not listen as carefully as you think,” said Mondragon. “Go and do your work. You have nothing to worry about.”
Arrogance can, as surely as too much freedom, make a clever man foolish. Contrary to what Mondragon said, the Yankees had been listening to the rumors circulating around Colombia’s most dangerous neighborhoods. The wild tale Vladimir Petrovski had hatched in New Jersey, and Margaret Smythe had enlarged in Washington DC, had pushed the American intelligence into action.
A half dozen CIA agents in Bogota alone had put their ears to the ground and were hearing rumblings of a strange plot involving forty men and former Russian and East German operatives. After they had made the practice run and had returned home, the small-time criminals Gusman had found for Mondragon had told their cronies on the street corners, and the loose women they slept, with everything they knew and had made up some things no one knew.
As veterans of Trafalgar and Waterloo had dined out for years on the currency of their war stories in early Victorian Britain, during the past year the forty Colombians had been given free drinks in hundreds of dirt floor saloons in return for tales concerning fake bombs dropped in gringo reservoirs and secret bases in the jungle. The man arrested for killing his comrade had tried to peddle similar tales to Colombian prosecutors in return for a reduced sentence, and the CIA men had dispatched these lurid stories back to the USA. Fortunately for Mondragon and his fellow conspirators, this new intelligence caused nothing more than a flurry of new top secret memos, and no one ever got around to doing anything more in response to the perceived threat.
XLII
4/17/09 05:30 Eastern Standard Time
“Comrades,” said Mondragon in Spanish to the forty Colombians in the mess hall of the base near Montecual, Venezuela, “today we go forth to cripple the Yankee empire!”
The men arose as one from their breakfast tables and cheered. “Senor Corello! Senor Corello!” they chanted till Mondragon and Colonel Method gestured for them to be silent.
“My friends,” said Mondragon when order had been restored, “we have been training anew these past seven months to prepare for the great mission that will bring the colossus of the north to her knees. Never again will the Yankees sneer at us as they have done every day for a hundred years. Never again will our special friend’s nation”--he indicated Taylor, whom the Colombians of course believed was Russian—” be ravaged by the greedy, grasping Norteamericanos.
“You have trained, my comrades, over and over, again and again, until your tasks are second nature to you. You will be like steel. The Yankees, they are like soft dough. They have been watching television, all those naked girls on “Baywatch.” They have been eating Chicken McNuggets and drinking Pepsi till they vomit. The Yankees are so stupid they think a bunch of Negroes sitting around making noise like monkeys in the trees is music. They do not so much as know what real football is.”
This rhetorical slap at the strange sport played by men in armored suits once more brought the cheering Colombians to their feet. “Hurray for Corello!” they called out. “He will give us each a half million Yankee dollars. May he live forever. Send the Yankees to hell!”
Mondragon and Method had to signal them to quiet down another time.
“After the job is completed, my boys,” said Mondragon, of the money he had promised to pay them. “After we are safely on the airplane, everyone will be paid. Now, comrades, our Russian friend, Mr. Petrovski, would like to say a few words to you.”
Taylor came onto the elevated platform to stand beside Mondragon and to nod sheepishly to the group. “Hello,” Taylor began speaking in very bad Russian to the forty men who could not tell good from bad in that tongue. “The weather looks very good today.”
“He says,” translated Mondragon, “that he and his suffering nation will be forever grateful to you for the mighty blow you will deliver against capitalist hegemony.”
The Colombians gave another rousing cheer and called out: “Viva Senor Petrovski!”
Taylor then noted in Russian: “The wind is in the west, I think. Is that your wife? She must weigh a thousand kilos.”
Mondragon raised an expressive eyebrow, but translated this into Spanish as: “The friendship you will forge between your nation and mine will last a thousand years. There are men asleep on the other side of the world who will hear of your deeds and will doubt their manhood because they were not here to stand with you.”
The forty Colombians went absolutely wild. They climbed atop the cafeteria tables and broke into an impromptu dance. Mondragon and his bulldog Col. Method let this outburst last for a few moments, until the Columbians had shouted themselves hoarse, before they again restored order.
The stern military veteran, still known to the men as “Colonel Max,” next took the podium and went over the itinerary the men would be following on this, the actual attack upon the United States. “You must do everything in precisely the same manner you had done before, save for the Blue Mesa team, which now has two smaller torpedoes to use on two additional targets, and for the Fontenelle team, which should go to the same rendezvous point as the Blue Mesa group. Eat at the same restaurants, stop at the same gas stations, and take the same roads to your destinations as you did during the first expedition.
“The people you meet will often be the same people you met on your trial run,” explained the colonel. “They are accustomed to you now, and will be at ease.”
Enrique, the leader of the Strawberry team, raised his hand. “We were arrested the last time,” he said. “Do you really want us to do everything we did the first time?”
“What are the mathematical odds against you being arrested a second time?” said Method. “Do you believe the sheriff and his men will be on the shore waiting for you again? Do you really know so little of the laws of probability?”
Most of the Colombians saw reason in Colonel Method’s argument. Those who did not kept their mouths shut. They knew they were going to get paid no matter what happened. They concentrated on that happy eventuality rather than on the off chance they might get caught.
Before he sent them on their way, Method reminded the forty men, “Every team other than the Glen Canyon group will have one new member that they did not have during the trial run. Take care to help the new men when the need arises and do not demand more of them than had been done during training. No one is an expert the first time out. Good hunting and good luck.”
The men finished their breakfast on that uninspiring note and began migrating from the cafeteria to the barracks, where they each packed a single suitcase for the trip north. Mondragon and Taylor approached Claudio, the leader of the critical Glen Canyon team, and gave him a pair of new shoes.
“These are very special shoes we have made for you, our special comrade,” Mondragon said, and presented the Colombian a pair of black Clarks. “In addition to the co-ordinates of the other teams’ rendezvous sites that are hidden in your heel, you will have an electronic transmitter. Each of the other team leaders will have one. If our pilot has trouble finding any of you, the t
ransmitter will tell him exactly where you are.”
Claudio was very grateful to Senor Corello for the sturdy high-tech shoes. He vowed to wear no other pair during the entire mission. He shook hands with the two middle-aged men he assumed were his benefactors and climbed aboard a bus waiting to haul him and his thirty-nine companions to the nearby airstrip.
“What’s really in the shoes?” asked Taylor as the bus pulled noisily away, belching black diesel smoke among the dense foliage.
“A piece of paper,” said Mondragon. “It shows the latitude and longitude of the places all five teams will go to meet Greeley’s DC3. Or where he is supposed to meet them, I should say. It’s in the sole of the left shoe. Harris put a transmitter from an old radio in the heel, just in case Claudio takes a look. Does no harm if he throws it away. By the way, John,” he asked, “you haven’t been drinking, have you?”
“No,” lied Taylor, who was carrying a half empty flask of vodka in his jacket at that very moment. “Why do you ask?”
“Nothing,” said Mondragon, avoiding hurling direct accusations at his old friend. “Only that you were speaking some odd Russian back there. Plus your face is red. You have to remind yourself this isn’t a game we’re playing.”
“I’m sunburnt,” said Taylor, wiping a hand across his sweaty face. “So hot down here.”
Mondragon did not say anything more to him on the subject. He did later mention to Colonel Method, as they were walking through the base’s four large metal buildings and sprinkling gasoline on everything that could be burned, that he was worried about Taylor.
“His job’s over,” said the colonel. “From here on out, he follows you around.”
Deadly Waters Page 15
