Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Color

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Since the dam was built in 1935, only twice had the water been high enough to flow into the spillways: once, when the dam was first filled, and again in 1983, when high snowmelt in Utah and Colorado caused both Lake Powell and Lake Mead water levels to rise.

Fred had witnessed 1983. Lake Mead had risen high enough that four feet of water flowed over the metal gates into the spillways for 60 days. He remembered it as quite a spectacle. During that year the Nevada and Arizona spillways together dumped twenty eight thousand cubic feet per second of water, more than doubling the normal Hoover Dam output. This, however, was less than five percent of the capacity of the spillways, which together could theoretically handle about four hundred thousand cubic feet per second, although that had never been tested.

As Fred studied the spillways, he wondered what it would be like to see them perform to their potential. That was why he ate here. He liked to imagine seeing that much water blasting down the huge hole. Just thinking about it made him shiver. He wondered if he would dare stand so close, or whether he would feel inclined to stand back a little. Although he considered it unlikely, he wondered if Hoover's spillways would ever reach their potential. Maybe a huge flood in the Rocky Mountains would do it, but it would have to be a big one.

After Fred finished his sandwich, he stood and walked over to the fence. He looked right down the fifty-foot hole. He'd give anything to see the spillways at their full capacity. After staring for a few minutes, he blinked, then turned and walked away, back toward the dam. Unfortunately, it didn't matter how bad Fred wanted to see it, because there was no way it would ever happen in his lifetime.

CHAPTER 4

7:00 p.m. - Page, Arizona

As the man's car rounded the hill, the car in front slowed on the descent, forcing him to slow as well. As both cars drove onto the bridge, he glanced left and got his first good look at Glen Canyon Dam, his first look in the last several months anyway. It was always impressive, even though he couldn't see all six hundred feet down to the river from his angle on the bridge.

Although he hadn't been to the dam for several months, he had seen it many times before. He had spent almost a year studying it and for one three-month period, he had spent almost every weekend in Page, Arizona. He took the tours on and in the dam, he hiked up on the hills and looked at it, he bought books which he read and re-read, attended lectures, and talked to everyone he could about how the dam worked. He even rented a boat and motored down next to it, although a barricade of buoys prevented him from getting as close as he wanted.

As long as he could remember, he had always wished he could blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. But then, many others before him had wanted to do the same, yet the dam was still there. If it were easy, someone else would have already done it.

During the months of planning, he came up with numerous ideas to destroy it; unfortunately, none of them were practical or feasible. His favorite idea had been the one from Edward Abbey's "Monkey Wrench Gang", where houseboats were loaded with explosives, floated down toward the dam, and detonated on impact. The skinny man was no genius, but even he knew that wouldn't work. An explosion on the outside of the dam wouldn't be enough. Even an airliner crash, like September 11th, wouldn't work. There was just too much concrete: sixty feet thick at the top, and 300 feet thick at the base. The airliner would just splat on the concrete and then slide down to the river below. Most people thought of concrete dams as walls, but that wasn't really true. Most dams were built more like pyramids. One couldn't hope to topple a pyramid from the outside. If you were to have any chance at all, you needed to blow it up from the inside. Even Abbey knew that.

That led to all kinds of crazy ideas, like what if you sent a torpedo down one of the intake towers, so that it detonates inside the water works. But that would require an incredibly sophisticated bomb, tons of money, and, frankly, technology that he didn't understand. Besides, that level of sophistication would require that he work with others, something he was unwilling to do. He realized his lack of social skills, and his inability to include others without getting caught. No, if this were to be done, it would have to be done by him, alone.

So he kept coming to Page. He knew there was a good idea out there somewhere. He just hadn't figured it out yet. He continued to research and study. He spent hours up on the hills, staring at it. One week, while home in Las Vegas, he overheard someone talking about listening to the police using a scanner from Radio Shack. After that, every time he watched the dam, he listened to a scanner while he watched. He listened to the tour guides talking to each other. He listened to the operators and technicians at the dam. And most valuably, he listened to the security guards talk to each other.

He listened every weekend for almost a month. He learned all the guards' names, their interests, and their wives' and girlfriends' names. He actually started to feel like he knew them after a while. Then one night he heard something that gave him an idea, an idea that had grown with time. An idea that eventually had grown into a plan, a plan that tonight would be executed. Tonight would test both the worthiness of the idea, and his ability to execute it. A few hours from now, there would be no turning back.

After the slow car crossed the bridge, it turned left onto a lookout point. The skinny man had spent many hours at that lookout. But tonight he had other plans. He accelerated up the hill. The highway veered right, and he saw the city of Page on top of the knoll.

Suddenly, he wondered if his stuff had been discovered. What if the police were waiting? An ambush? When he turned left on Navajo Drive, he scanned the streets carefully. If he saw someone, he could just drive on, and hope they couldn't tie him to anything. Boat storage and repair shops lined the street. But, he saw no police cruisers, which allowed him to relax.

Almost a half mile down Navajo, he turned left onto a small unmarked street, then a hundred yards later he pulled up to a chain link gate and stopped. A rusted sign on the gate said "PETERSEN SELF-STORAGE — Authorized Access Only". The skinny man put the truck in park and climbed out. He stretched. The drive from the Grand Canyon had taken just over two and a half hours. He walked over to the gate and inserted a key from his key ring into the huge padlock. When he rented the garage in the facility, over six months before, the owner had apologized for the padlock, saying that he would install security cards and an electric gate. But he knew better, even then. The owner was filthy and the whole place looked ratty and run down. Any upgrades would have been out of character.

After unlocking the gate and swinging it out of the way, he pulled the truck inside and relocked the gate. Driving all the way to the back, past all the boats and motor homes to a row of rundown garages, he veered left at the end of the row, went another twenty yards, then parked in front of number seven.

As he jumped out of the truck, he instinctively scanned in all directions. He fingered through his keys again and found the one for the second padlock, which he inserted in the lock on number seven. What if they were waiting for him inside the compartment? The thought made him tense. But the lock was dusty, making an ambush from inside unlikely. Nevertheless, he carefully scanned inside as he rolled up the door, and let the evening sun shine into the contents of the compartment.

In contrast to the rest of Petersen Self-Storage, the inside of number seven was spotless. A large enclosed utility trailer was the only obvious occupant. The skinny man flipped on a light switch, lighting a single incandescent bulb, then pulled the door down behind him. Now completely secluded, he plugged a new orange extension cord into the outlet under the light switch and the whole compartment was bathed in fluorescent light from three separate fixtures, one above each side of the trailer, and one behind. The lights were his first improvement to the compartment. It was impossible to do precision work with bad light.

He walked behind the trailer and saw the motorcycle was still there, helmet, gloves and leather jacket still sitting on the seat. He wondered if he should start it up and make sure it still ran, but that could wait. He instead found a third key and inserted it in the lock on the back of the utility trailer. The utility trailer was top-of-the-line. The sides and top were white metal panels, connected at the corners by rounded aluminum. The front top corners were beveled, round silver pieces. After removing the padlock on the back, he rotated a cast handle at the bottom of each door, which in turn maneuvered large vertical brackets that went all the way to the top of the doors, just like on the back of every eighteen-wheeler on the road.

The inside of the trailer seemed much smaller than the outside. Like the garage, the inside of the trailer was immaculate. Black metal tool cabinets lined the left side, and on the right were a mixture of implements, including a small ladder, a stack of bright orange highway construction cones, a lab stool, a hard hat, a coiled extension cord, and a separate coiled utility light. Notably, each one of the items on the right had a special bracket or shelf designed to fit it exactly. Even the ladder slid into a long compartment along the bottom.

The man ignored the items on the right, and the black metal drawers on the left. Instead, he stepped immediately past them to a small, knee-high, white utility box. Carefully he bent down and looked closely at where the top left rear corner of the box met the wall. He craned his neck until his eyes were inches away, then slowly a smile broke across what had been a tense face. Nobody had disturbed it. He reached down and retrieved the single hair stuck between the utility box and the wall. They didn't know.