Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Color

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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 Black Canyon. 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 Lake Mojave.

"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 Glen Canyon, 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.