Deadly Waters (16 page)

XXXIX

12/18/07 09:02 EST

In the city of Vladimir Petrovski’s birth rumors were weapons one stored up for future use against one’s enemies. The Moscow of his youth was not the Washington DC of late 2007. In modern Washington rumors were a commodity the ambitious used to buy a better position. In that month of December, when a new administration would be in power in a little more than a year, and powerful people were still jockeying for the right positions on various campaigns, Washington was a seller’s market.

The piece of fiction Vladimir had given gratis to the FBI man was quickly traded--at the price of a promotion--to his supervisor, who traded it to Margaret Smythe at the DoD, who traded it to Senator Hasket, who traded it to a member of the president’s inner circle, and each time the wild rumor passed from seller to buyer it accrued in value.

The lowly agent who had interviewed Vladimir became a field director, his supervisor rose to the position of FBI Director’s Special Advisor on Counter Terrorism, Margaret got double her requested budget, and Senator Hasket, once referred to in the Washington
Post
as “the Demosthenes from Dogpatch,” became the outgoing president’s point man on security and defense issues in the Senate. Hasket had but to pick up a phone and he would have the ear of someone on the White House staff. Margaret Smythe had simply to pick up another telephone to have the ear of the senator.

At the first informal meeting of the Security Council that month, Vladimir’s rumor was subject number five on the agenda, right after security in the Taiwan Straits and ahead of peace keeping in the Balkans. Martin Parnell, the former general and the administration’s Chief Security Advisor told the group everything he knew, a process that took about twenty seconds.

“The continuing crisis in Colombia,” he said to the group, “has, according to an FBI investigation, spawned a terrorist group bent on attacking America’s major dams. Miss Smythe here,” he showed Margaret to the group, for she, much to her unutterable delight, was there among the Brahmins of the Beltway “has been monitoring the situation for the past seven months. She is the authority, in present times, on possible terrorist attacks on the nation’s dam sites.” Every celebrated head present nodded in her direction. “We will be picking your brain, Miss Smythe, from time to time, when and if the need arises.” He gave a final nod, with his most celebrated of heads.

Margaret was transported into the golden realms of Paradise. For what must have been the only time in her life, she was at a loss for words. To sit among the famed and powerful was to have the new BMW under the Christmas tree her father, the government drudge, had denied her in her youth. Carols rang in her ears, and these songs were not exclaimed in celebration of some ancient deity’s birth; they were for her, Margaret Smythe, a newly crowned princess in the most powerful government in the history of the world!

The corners of the room, filled to its four walls with faces she had seen on the evening news, were blurry to her, on account of the tears forming in her shining eyes. She was a year from her thirtieth birthday, and she had arrived at this pinnacle decades ahead of her peers at school, which made her triumph that much the sweeter. Everyone here was so polite! What did it matter now that she had been denied a position on the cheerleaders’ squad when she was a high school freshman? She was now one of those people mentioned on Page Six, one worth the entire public’s attention.

Think of the famous men she would be able to sleep with during the coming year! She was living one step below the angels. The president himself might call her one day. In fact, as she stood before the room of famous people, in her mind she practiced taking that phone call. “Yes, Mr. President,” she would say, “I think you’re doing a great job, too.”

She snapped back to reality when someone she recognized as a former CIA chief

posed her a question:

“What, Miss Smythe, is the gist of this plot? I wonder if there is anything to this other than this Petrovski character? You must know that we in the agency have long thought Petrovski is an unreliable number, a man who had to flee the Soviet Union and is willing to say anything. The man would claim he is Anastasia’s son if he thought he could get away with it.”

Margaret had prepared for such an ambush. She squared her shoulders and replied, “The FBI agent’s interview has been confirmed by three separate state investigations; one conducted by sheriff’s deputies in Northern Arizona, another by the sheriff’s department in Wasatch County, Utah, and a third by the California Department of Corrections. Approximately twenty Colombian criminals-three of whom have been identified as men having criminal records in this country and ties to the drug cartels back home-have been sited on Lake Powell in Arizona and on Strawberry Reservoir in Utah.

“The ones in Utah were briefly detained by local authorities; thus we know who they are. Two men, men connected to the Colombians by the Arizona investigation, one claiming to be an ex-con from California named Charles Corello and the other claiming to be Petrovski himself, have been tied to this vague plot, and might be the ringleaders.”

The famous men of the cabinet did not know for certain that Margaret was lying. They were old Washington hands and thus expected everything they were told was exaggerated. Nonetheless, some of them gasped appropriately at her dramatic revelations.

“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 Francisco. 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.