Deadly Waters (12 page)

XXVII

8/7/01 13:07 MDT

By mid-afternoon the Strawberry team had gone to their reservoir, found their pontoon boat awaiting them, and had dropped their three drums into the water by 1:07 pm local time. Very easy work, they all agreed. They were returning to the shore, telling jokes about the homely waitress back in Heber City and commenting on how extraordinarily cold Yankee lakes were in mid-summer, when they saw a peculiar black and white car parked near their orange rental truck and two men in khaki uniforms standing near the car. One of the men appeared to be holding a large firearm, possibly a rifle or shotgun.

“
Policia
!” exclaimed the man from Calle, for he had been to the United States before and had been arrested on that occasion.

Enrique, the group leader, discretely dropped his pistol into the muddy water. The other six men, each of them supposedly unarmed, likewise disposed of their weapons. They were in an impossible situation but Mondragon had promised to get them quickly released from any incarceration.

“Let me do the talking,” Enrique told the others as they approached the shore.

  The others did not speak a word of English and were not in a position to argue with him.

The tall man on the shore not holding a rifle was James Witherston, Sheriff of Wasatch County, Utah, a seasoned law enforcement veteran and not one to sympathize with seven strange men he had watched drop something into Strawberry Reservoir. That morning Witherston had received a call warning him of suspicious men in a U-Haul truck, and if that alert and the large barrel-shaped objects he had watched the men handle had not aroused his curiosity, then observing the men drop something else--possibly guns or drugs--certainly did.

“Hello, Mr. Armed Law Enforcement Person!” Enrique called from the boat. “The angling was most excellent today.”

“I would hope so,” said Witherston. “Most times it’s hard to catch fish without any fishing rods. Why don’t you boys hop out of there one by one and line up against the truck?”

The seven men readily followed Enrique’s example and leaned against the U-Haul, hands to the truck’s side panel, legs spread, thus assuming the stance of arrested suspects.

“You’ve done this before, fellas,” said the sheriff.

  “Many times this has befallen our lot in our native Venezuela,” said Enrique.

“You don’t say,” said Witherston. “Keep still while we frisk you.”

He and his deputy searched the seven Colombians and found some wallets full of large bills along with their fake passports and phony Venezuelan identity cards.

“What were you doing out there?” Witherston asked one of the men.

“Angling for the fishes,” said Enrique.

“I didn’t ask you,” said the sheriff.

“He doesn’t speak good English,” said Enrique.

“How would you know?” asked Witherston, but his sarcasm was wasted on Enrique.

The lawmen searched the boat and found only two metal bars and some heavy rope of the sort they had found inside the truck.

“Tell me, Mr--” asked Witherston, addressing Enrique specifically. “
Com
se
llama
usted
?”

“
Habla
Espanol
?” asked Enrique, whose mood would have been more appropriate for a man conversing with a friend than for a man about to be arrested.

“About as good as you speak English,” said Witherston. “What did you say your name was?”

“It is in my papers,” said Enrique, and nodded his head at the cards in the sheriff’s

hand.

“Most people have memorized their names by the time they get to be your age,” said the sheriff. He read: “You’re George Ortega De Silva of Caracas, Venezuela.”

“In truth, I am,” agreed Enrique.

“It says here you’re a theoretical physicist?” said Witherston.

“Si, I am a doctor and I act upon the stage
tambien
,” said Enrique, proud to be a professional for the first time in his life.

“Good for you, chief,” said Witherston. “Let’s see the rest of your crew’s identity cards.”

Mondragon had given the Colombians absurd occupations. Were the fake cards and passports to be believed, the seven scarred and badly dressed men with high and greasy pompadour hairdos were bankers, doctors and research engineers.

“O.K.,” said Witherston, “Mr. De Silva, I’m going to give you one chance to give me a straight answer. What were you dropping in the reservoir?”

Enrique had again forgotten that he was supposed to be De Silva and did not reply.

“How’s this?” said the sheriff. “The one that speaks English...”

“Yes?” said Enrique.

“What were you dropping in the water? And start telling the truth.”

The policeman did not know that Enrique was celebrated in his hometown as a pickpocket, not as a thinker. Many years of success in his chosen profession had taught him that daring profited a man more than reflection. None who knew him would have been surprised at the answer he gave the sheriff:

“Angling gear. We did not drop them, either, to be more than correct. A great fish pulled them from our many hands.”

“I see, chief,” said Witherston, “looks like you win the grand prize.”

*

An hour later the seven Colombians were in the Wasatch County Jail in Heber City, awaiting fingerprinting. By five o’clock that afternoon their prints had been run through the F.B.I. computer in Washington D.C., and criminal records for three of the seven men appeared on Sheriff Witherston’s computer screen. Furthermore, none of the passports or I.D. cards the men had been carrying were legitimate.

“The three identified criminals are from Colombia,” said Witherston tapping his finger on the computer screen to show his deputies. “Get hold of Henry Hamilton and have him take his old barge out and dredge that part of the reservoir. We’ll find something out there. You wonder where they got the dumb idea to stash dope under deep water. How did they figure on retrieving it?”

“Scuba divers?” suggested Dave Jensen, the deputy Witherston brought to the reservoir.

“That would take forever,” said Witherston. “People would notice them out there.”

“Little submarines, maybe,” said Adam Meyers. “They could sail one of those two-

man subs down the river and get the stashed dope out that way.”

“Channel Seven is running that James Bond-a-thon this week, aren’t they?” said Witherston.

“Sure,” said Adam, “last night—”

“Last night they showed
Thunderball
. Lots of little submarines in that one,” said Witherston. “Let’s not make up any theories till we get the Strawberry dredged.”

Pending further investigation, the Columbians were charged with possession of false passports and with entering the country illegally, federal charges, and put into federal custody. A judge in Salt Lake set the men’s bond at $50,000 apiece, and the men languished behind bars for nearly two weeks, by which time the other teams had long since returned to Venezuela. On the Twenty-third of August, a bailbondsman named Ned Buntline received $350,000 from a certain Charles Corello and he was able to free the seven men. The judge released the men to a local church group that cared for undocumented people and he warned them they had to remain in Utah until their trial began. They would never again appeared in his court. In September the dredging of Strawberry Reservoir yielded only some old oil drums that had cables welded to them. Sheriff Witherston took samples of a black sticky substance inside the drums that turned out to be petroleum.

“No trace of dope?” the sheriff asked the state lab technician on the telephone.

“No.”

“Is this toxic stuff?”

“This is plain old oil,” said the technician. “Some of it’s really old and gummy, like

it’s the residue of empty drums that haven’t been used in a long time.”

“Then you’re saying these boys came thousands of miles to another country in order to dump garbage?” asked the sheriff.

The technician did not have an answer to that.

XXVIII

8/7/07 13:07 MDT

At the same time the Strawberry team was foundering on the shore of their reservoir, the other four teams were completing their missions in reasonably good form.

The Fontenelle team found their target was a low, concrete and asphalt dam built at the southern end of a long but shallow artificial lake on the upper Green River in the sagebrush desert of southwestern Wyoming. In that isolated spot there was no one else on the water. A couple fishermen passed the dam on nearby Highway 372 while the team was lowering their three oil drums into the reservoir. No one stopped to watch the seven men go about their work. Upon leaving Fontenelle, they drove their truck north to Pinedale and the town’s small municipal airport. Within two hours of their arrival in that small town, Kenneth Greeley had landed his sturdy DC-3 and collected them.

At the Flaming Gorge Dam in northern Utah, a few miles south of the Wyoming border, the team designated for that area found a structure that was far more formidable than any the Strawberry or Fontenelle teams had seen. The dam was several hundred feet high and thick enough on top to accommodate a two lane highway; moreover, the canyon holding the reservoir was extremely deep and narrow and contained dozens of fiord-like side channels. It was obvious that during the real attack the real torpedoes would have to be placed a few hundred meters directly in front of the dam, or else get lost in the maze of red sandstone cliffs. The Colombians wondered if, no matter how close the real torpedoes were placed, the explosives could crack the massive horseshoe-shaped structure that sealed the gorge’s southern end.

“The bombs will bounce off like mosquitoes on an elephant,” one team member said to his comrades as they gazed from their boat at the thick, abrupt grey wall.

His friends were of the same opinion. They also noted that they were going to be paid regardless of what happened.

In contrast to the Fontenelle Reservoir only two hundred miles to the north, Flaming Gorge was speckled with hundreds of boats on that summer day. The seven Colombians had to use the utmost discretion as they slipped the three drums one by one into the dark blue water.

“The river is loved in a desert country,” said one of the men of the numerous boats.

He had read that sentiment in a greeting card--or perhaps an old girlfriend had once said something along that line--either way, his friends were not charmed.

“A horse’s backside will talk less nonsense than you,” one commented on the man’s flight of poetic fancy.

From the dam they drove south to Vernal, Utah, then east across the Green and into Colorado to an abandoned airstrip near the village of Dinosaur, where Greeley picked

them up. They were in the plane, counting their money, when one of the seven had the horrifying thought that if the real torpedoes destroyed the dam, then the raging Green River would take out the bridge they had crossed, trapping them on the Utah side of the Green River, away from their landing strip. His comrades explained to him that the young engineer (they meant Harris) had told them the torpedoes would crack the dam and the weight of the water would gradually burst it. If the structure collapsed earlier than they expected, they could still outrun the river’s surge in their truck.

“How fast can water go?” the group leader asked. “Can’t we all out-walk a scrap of wood floating in a river? How fast is that? Maybe five or six miles an hour at the most.”

They each saw the truth in this and went back to counting their $10,000 bonuses.

Earlier that day the Glen Canyon team discovered that mighty Lake Powell was a giant magnet for people. At Wahweap Marina there were several hundred people milling about the shoreline. The team had to share their mooring with two other parties, both of them in double-decker houseboats. The twelve men in the crew did not notice a lone figure watching them through binoculars from atop a sandstone bluff immediately to the west of the landing. Wayland Zah kept the men in sight as they powered their rectangular-shaped boat into the deep water and artfully lowered their four drums in a line near the dam. Before they had time to return to the marina, Wayland strode down the slope and initiated a conversation with the elderly couple that owned the largest of the two houseboats at the Colombians’ mooring.

“Come here often, sir?” he asked an old man in blue and white checkered shorts. Wayland had been scouting the area for weeks and knew the man and his wife spent the entire summer season on the lake.

“Been here since June,” said the man.

“Say, weren’t those fellas a funny looking bunch?” asked Wayland, referring to the Colombians out on the lake. “What do you think they are? Mexicans?”

“I didn’t speak to them,” said the man.

“They sounded Mexican to me,” said Wayland. “I saw that same bunch in that little convenience store there in Page. What’s the name of that place? It’s right on the central street through town.”

“Circle K?” said the man’s wife, making a very reasonable guess, as nearly every other street corner in Arizona has a Circle K store on it.

“That’s it,” said Wayland. “I speak a little of that Mexican lingo, and one guy was saying he was from Calle. Where in Mexico is Calle? I never heard of the place.”

The husband and wife gave each other a significant glace. They had heard the awful name Calle on the evening news and had read of it in
Newsweek
magazine.

“Drug dealers!” declared the couple in near unison.

“Maybe,” agreed Wayland. “Probably they’re hiding something out there. Look, right now as we speak they’re dropping something off the rear of the boat.”

He handed the man his binoculars so he might see the Colombians drop a cylindrical object into the deep cold water close to the dam.

“You think those could be full of cocaine?” said Wayland as the man handed the binoculars to his wife for her to have a look.

*

That evening Bob Mathers, while on duty during the late-day shift, interviewed Dan and Betty DuPree, a retired couple living for the summer in a boathouse on Lake Powell, who were anxious to speak to someone in the sheriff’s office. The DuPrees claimed that earlier that day they had witnessed a group of Colombian drug dealers hiding a major stash on the bottom of the reservoir.

Bob was polite to the DuPrees, thanking them for their rather breathless testimony. He later filed his report on what the DuPrees had seen in the same drawer he kept reports on ghost sightings. He thought little of the report until a week or so later when the office received a bulletin from a Sheriff Witherston in Wasatch County, Utah, describing how the sheriff had arrested seven Colombian nationals for dumping some peculiar objects in Strawberry Reservoir.

Bob noted there had been a large U-Haul truck at both locations, and Harold Peters, the Page airport manager, told Bob twelve men had brought a U-Haul truck to the municipal airfield on the sseventh, and had boarded a private plane from there. The truck had been returned to town by someone named Charles Corello.

“They were all Venezuelans,” said Harold. “Only one of them could speak much English.”

“That’s strange,” said Deputy Mathers. “They must have been the same group they caught up in Utah. What could they have been doing out on the lake?”

*

Also on August 7th, the Blue Mesa team had made their practice run without incident, but had also discovered a fact about their target that would delay the conspirators’ final strike. Harris and Method had told them they would destroy the Blue Mesa Dam and the water from the massive reservoir--the largest body of water in Colorado--would overwhelm the smaller Point Marrow Dam, a dozen miles down the Gunnison River. But Method and Harris had been using inaccurate maps. Westward beyond Point Marrow Reservoir was a third reservoir, this one named Crystal Lake, and it was formed by a diversion dam at the very mouth of the Black Canyon of Gunnison, a spectacularly deep and narrow passage that resembles a miniature Grand Canyon. The diversion dam sent a portion of the current through a tunnel that in turn waters most of the agriculture in west-central Colorado. Unlike the dams, the tunnel was cut into the thick granite cliffs and was not a structure that could be significantly damaged by the torpedoes.

To complicate the matter still more, the law forbade motorized vehicles on either Point Morrow Reservoir or Crystal Lake. One of the team members had the foresight to obtain a proper map of the area from the Gunnison Chamber of Commerce, and after the seven Blue Mesa team members had gone to the landing strip east of Dinosaur, Colorado, and then to Venezuela, the map they brought with them was destined to throw Mondragon’s master plan into turmoil.