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Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Color


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42

David pushed toward shore until he could stand. Then he quickly ran through the shallow water up onto the beach.

"Pull, David. Help him." It was Keller's voice.

David pulled as hard as he could, but he realized immediately that he and Afram would never be able to pull the boat against the strong current. It was pulling both of them at a fast walk toward the rocks at the other end of the beach.

"Dig in when I tell you." Afram said over his shoulder.

David leaned back even more and prepared to dig in.

"Now!" Afram said.

David dug in his heels and saw Afram do the same, but they were both pulled vertical immediately. David saw large rocks ahead and knew that the whole effort had been in vain. He wondered how he and Afram would get back in the boat. Then while looking at the rocks he saw something. He stopped pulling, letting his rope go slack.

"Hey, what are you — "

David crossed under Afram's rope and ran toward the rocks. "Come on," he said.

Afram figured out what he was doing and followed.

When David reached the rocks, he wrapped the rope around a large rock twice. Afram did the same on another rock. Not a second later both ropes were pulled tight, but they held. In the water, the raft stopped with a jerk and slid quickly over against the rocks. The others in the group yelled their approval and climbed out of the raft onto the rocks. A moment later Keller and Sam reached them. Together the four men were able to pull the now empty raft back upstream and onto the sandy beach. David collapsed on his back in the sand.

"You kinda did that the hard way, didn't you?" Judy smiled at him from above. "That whole under the boat thing was planned, right?"

David laughed. "At least we made it, and we're safe."

Not if the water gets any higher." Keller said. He pointed at the beach where they had just landed. They all looked. If the water rose another twenty feet, the sand would be underwater, and then they would be floating in a small canyon with vertical rock walls on all sides.

5:50 p.m. - Hoover Dam, Arizona

"You want to do what?" The governor put his hands on his hips.

"We want to extend the height of the dam another twenty feet." Grant pointed out at the concrete dam.

"What good is that gonna do?"

Grant tried to choose his words carefully. "Governor, we're in a dry year. Luckily both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are lower than usual. The Bureau's study in 1998 assumed both lakes would be full, as a worst case. We've run some new numbers based on the newly opened spillways and the extra capacity available in Lake Mead. If we're right, only about ten or fifteen feet of water will end up going over the top of Hoover."

The governor's eyebrows furrowed as he tried to understand the reasoning. "That's good, isn't it?"

"Yeah. It means that the overtopping won't be as bad as I originally told you."

"Then why do we need to do anything?"

Grant started ticking off his fingers. "Two reasons, governor. First, even ten feet going over Hoover could still break it apart. Second, even ten feet would definitely take out Davis Dam downstream, and Parker too."

The governor' s face lost some color and he wiped his hand across his forehead. "If the water breaks though Davis Dam, Lake Mojave's going to drain out and flood Laughlin?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Hell, most of the casinos are below the lake. It'd wipe em out. Laughlin would be obliterated."

Grant knew Laughlin's casinos were going to be destroyed either way with all the water that would be going downstream, whether or not Davis Dam failed. But, he didn't want the governor to worry about that yet. "Exactly, governor."

"That's billions of dollars." He looked at Grant and his voice changed from bewildered to harsh. "What makes you think Davis's gonna break? How can you be sure?"

"It's a landfill dam, governor. It can't withstand overtopping."

The governor looked as if his home had just fallen into the ocean. "So what are you guys suggesting?"

Grant jumped back into the conversation. "We think if we can build up the top of Hoover Dam by another twenty feet, we can hold the flood water in Mead. And save Davis and Parker." The tone came out almost pleading.

The governor looked confused. "Is there enough time? The concrete wouldn't even have time to set."

"We're not going to build it with concrete. We're going to build a landfill dike on top of Hoover."

Fred looked at Grant with a questioning expression. "Landfill, do we have enough space?"

Grant grabbed a piece of paper off the table and turned it over so he had a blank sheet. He drew a cross section of a dike. When he graduated in civil engineering and joined the Bureau over fifteen years ago, he'd had high hopes of designing huge engineering marvels like Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams. Finally he would build his first dam. With the governor and Fred looking over his shoulders, he estimated that he would have at least thirty seconds to perfect his design. "Okay. The standard formula for a land fill dam is a three to one ratio of substrate to the height of water you want to contain."

"So to hold ten feet of water it needs to be thirty feet wide?" The governor pointed at Grant's picture.

Grant smiled. "Kind of. I'd like a little bit of a safety margin. In case the water is over ten feet."

Fred nodded. "The dam is about forty feet wide at the top."

"Then let's use it all. We can build it twenty feet high and forty feet wide. Then we'd be able to contain almost fifteen feet of water. If it gets any higher than that, we'll be in trouble." Grant looked up for approval.

All three men looked at each other, waiting to see if there were any arguments.

The governor looked at his watch. "Is there enough time? It's already 6:00."

Grant's stomach felt like something was boiling inside. They expected the water to rise above the top of Hoover early the next morning. According to Shauna's latest calculations, they had roughly twelve hours to build the dike. "There's only one way to find out."

CHAPTER 20

6:15 p.m. - Hoover Dam, Boulder, Nevada

It'd taken only fifteen minutes to persuade the governor, although Governor Jenkins still didn't think they could build it fast enough. In the end he had convinced himself that even if they didn't finish building up the dam in time, whatever they did finish would delay the floods downstream. Grant, Shauna, and Fred stood in the hallway of the visitor center and plotted how to accomplish their task.

Shauna shook her head. "It won't work."

"It has to," Grant said.

"But Grant, when you build a land fill dike, you have to build it slowly, and wet it, and you have to use non-permeable soil. If we rush it, it'll leak."

Grant knew she was right. They couldn't just throw it together, even if they compressed it with bulldozers. If the soil allowed water to seep through, it would wash out. He wondered if they would find the right kind of soil around Las Vegas, where as far as he knew, everything was sand. And everyone knows you can't build a dam with sand.

Grant held out his hands. "How do they build those dikes around the Mississippi River when it floods? It seems like they're always trying to protect some town from getting flooded by the river. Don't they need to be built fast?" He felt helpless. He had convinced the governor, but now he wasn't convinced himself.

"Seems like all the ones I see on the rivers in the Midwest are built out of sand bags," Fred said.

Grant and Shauna both looked up at him. Sandbags? It just might work. Heaven knew there was certainly plenty of sand around Las Vegas. Besides, building a dam out of sand bags would be faster since the layers would not need to be meticulously compressed with heavy equipment. The more he thought about it the more excited he became. A sandbag dike might even hold up if it were overtopped by a foot or two. It could even hold water while it was being built. The question was, where would they get enough bags, and the labor to fill them?

6:20 p.m. - Lake Powell, Arizona

Julie guessed they had been in the traffic jam at Gregory Butte for almost an hour. They were almost out. The narrowest point had only enough room for ten boats to go through the turn at a time. Unfortunately, about 50 lines were merging into the small space. And after living in California, Julie knew what happened during rush hour when cars needed to merge. Boats were even worse. It was like a herd of sheep trying to get through an open gate. Julie was glad the bumpers were out because the Mastercraft had been bumping other boats for an hour. Finally they were only a few boats away. Greg let the boat on his left go past.

"We're next," Greg said. "Everybody sit down."

Paul climbed down off the bow and started pulling in the bumper pads from both sides. As the boat on their right pulled out, Greg pulled in behind it. They idled slowly at first around the bend with the boat almost touching on both sides. As the canyon turned straight again, it widened. As a result, the boats were able to spread out and speed up. Greg gave the boat some throttle.

Julie had been on many crowded lakes before, but nothing compared to this. There were probably between 15 and 20 rows of boats, all going as fast as possible. Greg tried to stay in the wake behind the boat in front of him, but many others were swerving back and forth passing each other. That many boats, traveling that fast, made for rough water. Julie saw Darlene and Max hanging on tight as the boat jarred up and down, sometimes with loud banging noises. Personal watercraft darted between the boats. It reminded her of the motorcyclists in southern California that dart between the cars on the freeways. Even though it was perfectly legal in California, she was always afraid one would go down in front of her and she would run over it.

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