Deadly Waters (17 page)

XLII

4/17/09 05:30 Eastern Standard Time

“Comrades,” said Mondragon in Spanish to the forty Colombians in the mess hall of the base near Montecual, Venezuela, “today we go forth to cripple the Yankee empire!”

The men arose as one from their breakfast tables and cheered. “Senor Corello! Senor Corello!” they chanted till Mondragon and Colonel Method gestured for them to be silent.

“My friends,” said Mondragon when order had been restored, “we have been training anew these past seven months to prepare for the great mission that will bring the colossus of the north to her knees. Never again will the Yankees sneer at us as they have done every day for a hundred years. Never again will our special friend’s nation”--he indicated Taylor, whom the Colombians of course believed was Russian—” be ravaged by the greedy, grasping Norteamericanos.

“You have trained, my comrades, over and over, again and again, until your tasks are second nature to you. You will be like steel. The Yankees, they are like soft dough. They have been watching television, all those naked girls on “Baywatch.” They have been eating Chicken McNuggets and drinking Pepsi till they vomit. The Yankees are so stupid they think a bunch of Negroes sitting around making noise like monkeys in the trees is music. They do not so much as know what real football is.”

This rhetorical slap at the strange sport played by men in armored suits once more brought the cheering Colombians to their feet. “Hurray for Corello!” they called out. “He will give us each a half million Yankee dollars. May he live forever. Send the Yankees to hell!”

Mondragon and Method had to signal them to quiet down another time.

“After the job is completed, my boys,” said Mondragon, of the money he had promised to pay them. “After we are safely on the airplane, everyone will be paid. Now, comrades, our Russian friend, Mr. Petrovski, would like to say a few words to you.”

Taylor came onto the elevated platform to stand beside Mondragon and to nod sheepishly to the group. “Hello,” Taylor began speaking in very bad Russian to the forty men who could not tell good from bad in that tongue. “The weather looks very good today.”

“He says,” translated Mondragon, “that he and his suffering nation will be forever grateful to you for the mighty blow you will deliver against capitalist hegemony.”

The Colombians gave another rousing cheer and called out: “Viva Senor Petrovski!”

Taylor then noted in Russian: “The wind is in the west, I think. Is that your wife? She must weigh a thousand kilos.”

Mondragon raised an expressive eyebrow, but translated this into Spanish as: “The friendship you will forge between your nation and mine will last a thousand years. There are men asleep on the other side of the world who will hear of your deeds and will doubt their manhood because they were not here to stand with you.”

The forty Colombians went absolutely wild. They climbed atop the cafeteria tables and broke into an impromptu dance. Mondragon and his bulldog Col. Method let this outburst last for a few moments, until the Columbians had shouted themselves hoarse, before they again restored order.

The stern military veteran, still known to the men as “Colonel Max,” next took the podium and went over the itinerary the men would be following on this, the actual attack upon the United States. “You must do everything in precisely the same manner you had done before, save for the Blue Mesa team, which now has two smaller torpedoes to use on two additional targets, and for the Fontenelle team, which should go to the same rendezvous point as the Blue Mesa group. Eat at the same restaurants, stop at the same gas stations, and take the same roads to your destinations as you did during the first expedition.

“The people you meet will often be the same people you met on your trial run,” explained the colonel. “They are accustomed to you now, and will be at ease.”

Enrique, the leader of the Strawberry team, raised his hand. “We were arrested the last time,” he said. “Do you really want us to do everything we did the first time?”

“What are the mathematical odds against you being arrested a second time?” said Method. “Do you believe the sheriff and his men will be on the shore waiting for you again? Do you really know so little of the laws of probability?”

Most of the Colombians saw reason in Colonel Method’s argument. Those who did not kept their mouths shut. They knew they were going to get paid no matter what happened. They concentrated on that happy eventuality rather than on the off chance they might get caught.

Before he sent them on their way, Method reminded the forty men, “Every team other than the Glen Canyon group will have one new member that they did not have during the trial run. Take care to help the new men when the need arises and do not demand more of them than had been done during training. No one is an expert the first time out. Good hunting and good luck.”

The men finished their breakfast on that uninspiring note and began migrating from the cafeteria to the barracks, where they each packed a single suitcase for the trip north. Mondragon and Taylor approached Claudio, the leader of the critical Glen Canyon team, and gave him a pair of new shoes.

“These are very special shoes we have made for you, our special comrade,” Mondragon said, and presented the Colombian a pair of black Clarks. “In addition to the co-ordinates of the other teams’ rendezvous sites that are hidden in your heel, you will have an electronic transmitter. Each of the other team leaders will have one. If our pilot has trouble finding any of you, the transmitter will tell him exactly where you are.”

Claudio was very grateful to Senor Corello for the sturdy high-tech shoes. He vowed to wear no other pair during the entire mission. He shook hands with the two middle-aged men he assumed were his benefactors and climbed aboard a bus waiting to haul him and his thirty-nine companions to the nearby airstrip.

“What’s really in the shoes?” asked Taylor as the bus pulled noisily away, belching black diesel smoke among the dense foliage.

“A piece of paper,” said Mondragon. “It shows the latitude and longitude of the places all five teams will go to meet Greeley’s DC3. Or where he is supposed to meet them, I should say. It’s in the sole of the left shoe. Harris put a transmitter from an old radio in the heel, just in case Claudio takes a look. Does no harm if he throws it away. By the way, John,” he asked, “you haven’t been drinking, have you?”

“No,” lied Taylor, who was carrying a half empty flask of vodka in his jacket at that very moment. “Why do you ask?”

“Nothing,” said Mondragon, avoiding hurling direct accusations at his old friend. “Only that you were speaking some odd Russian back there. Plus your face is red. You have to remind yourself this isn’t a game we’re playing.”

“I’m sunburnt,” said Taylor, wiping a hand across his sweaty face. “So hot down here.”

Mondragon did not say anything more to him on the subject. He did later mention to Colonel Method, as they were walking through the base’s four large metal buildings and sprinkling gasoline on everything that could be burned, that he was worried about Taylor.

“His job’s over,” said the colonel. “From here on out, he follows you around.”

“His job is never over,” said Mondragon, pouring fuel on the empty beds inside the deserted barracks. “Like the rest of us, he has to keep quiet for the rest of his life. That will be a really big job, Colonel. Maybe bigger than taking out the dams.”

XLIII

5/3/09 OO:03 Arizona Standard Time

There was a delay in the mission at its very beginning. Weather reports indicated there was still ice on the reservoirs in Wyoming and Colorado, making it impossible to lay torpedoes until the spring thaw had cleared the surface water. Mondragon had to put the forty Colombians in a hotel in Guadalajara, Mexico for fifteen days while they waited for warm weather in the Central Rockies. When the heat at last came to the high country--if one can call chilly rain replacing snow true heat--every stream and muddy river draining the arid Great Basin filled to overflowing for the only time in the calendar year.

The mighty Colorado and its tributaries ran thick brown from bentonite mud, the heavy, paste-like soil that covers much of the region’s deserts. Mondragon and his cohorts knew the snowfall was above average that year. They did not appreciate that the biggest snow storms of the season in the Rocky Mountains usually come late in the spring, and by an unexpected bit of luck they had chosen to attack the dams only days after one of the worst blizzards on record, when the high country was blanketed with a fresh two feet of wet slosh.

In southern Arizona, where Mondragon, Taylor, Method, Harris, the Thornes, Wilson and Greeley rented the trucks and brought them to the gathering point north of Tucson, there was no trace of this new precipitation. As they stood beneath the stars after midnight and watched the moon rise over the blooming Palo Verde and creosote trees, Mondragon wondered if the arid western weather was not conspiring against them.

They waited for twelve hours. The sun was at the top of the white hot sky when the Colombians and their now nineteen torpedoes arrived at the dusty rendezvous spot. The forty picked men were as reckless as ever. They sweated and strained and swore as they manhandled the heavy torpedoes from the semi into the smaller U-Haul trucks. The way they tugged and jerked at their deadly burdens terrified the men watching them.

“Tell them those aren’t empty drums this time,” complained Harris. “If one of those things goes off, they’ll set off the others!”

“Don’t you think I’ve told them that ten thousand times already?” said Mondragon, also on edge because of the Colombians’ carelessness. “The stupid sons-of-bitches are like cattle; you can yell at them as much as you want, and they’ll not understand.”

He and Col. Method did yell at the men anyway, telling them to take care in how they were hustling the explosive devices around the trucks’ empty storage compartments. The Colombians did not slow down much. They each had a criminal’s regard for orders and--unless they were delivered in the form of outright threats--they did not obey commands very well. A majority of them had a vague understanding that the torpedoes were dangerous, yet since none of them had seen one of the warheads detonated they did not know the power the C4 plastique had. All of them but the four new men had seen the size of the Yankee dams, and not one of them believed they were really going to do any damage to the five gigantic targets. At the moment they understood that the sun was hot and they wanted to get into the trucks and on the road as soon as possible.

Claudio, the leader of the Glen Canyon team, was the one man trying to do more than he should. He carried the propeller end of three, six-hundred-pound torpedoes, and by the fourth load was staggering. He slipped in the sand directly in front of Mondragon, causing Col. Method to dart forward and catch the burden before it hit the ground.

“Really,” whispered Ed Harris. “They’re not armed.”

“They can still be damaged,” said Mondragon. “Tell the men to double up,” he ordered Method in Spanish. “This isn’t a race.”

Reluctantly, the men got out the iron bars they used to move the torpedoes onto the

pontoon boats, and one by one, six men to each device, they unloaded the large tractor trailer. The process took more than twice as long as the unloading of the empty oil drums had during the trial run. “We have plenty of time,” Method told the men before they drove away on their separate routes. “While we were in Mexico, Senor Petrovski and I planned another day into your schedules. The single important thing you must remember is that you now have two days to reach your targets. Be alert, be on time, do everything I have told you, and the Yankees cannot stop you. Now, God be with you, comrades.”

Despite Method’s last minute advice, there was something about undertaking the real endeavor that agitated the Colombians more than the trial run had two years earlier. The first two rental trucks leaving the tangle of desert trees and entering Highway 89 drove away much too swiftly, leaving clouds of dust behind as they peeled out on the dirt road. Mondragon felt he had to have another word with Claudio before he, too, left in a hurry.

“You are the key man,” Mondragon told him. “For the sake of the entire operation, you must succeed in your mission. We chose you because you are not like these petty criminals; you are a man of honor, of distinction. If captured, you are not a man to speak to the Yankee police. You are smarter than the others, aren’t you, my friend? Our hopes ride upon your shoulders, comrade,” and he clasped Claudio by those same sturdy shoulders.

*

The Glen Canyon team leader did drive more slowly than the others, at least until he was out of sight, when at the urging of the man beside him in the cab, he too slammed his foot to the floorboard. They had to be in Page by nightfall and on Lake Powell by mid-morning of the Fifth. Claudio was happy to be the good soldier for the foreigners with the money, but he was not quite the reliable man the gringos said he was. He could not guess that both Method and Mondragon were but too aware of his rash nature, and were expecting him to rush into his mission exactly as he did.

The Strawberry team, still led by the irrepressible Enrique, drove north into Utah, stopping for the day in Salt Lake City, where they drank the only five gallon jugs of wine they could locate in that Mormon city, and arrived at the Monday Café in Heber City at six o’clock Monday morning, hung-over and hungry for pancakes. Dinah, the same waitress on duty when the seven Colombians came through Heber City two years earlier, took their orders.

“Didn’t you boys go fishing up here a while back?” she asked them while she filled their coffee cups.

Enrique had failed to improve his English since his last visit to the Monday Café. He realized the odd woman wearing her hair piled atop her head was asking him something about them and their last visit. He stuck to what he had been told to say to anyone asking questions.

“We are Mexican businessmen on a recreation expedition,” he said. “We have come for the fish.”

“I thought you said you was Venezuelans the last time,” said Dinah. “Didn’t you fellows get into some kind of trouble up in the Salt Lake City court? There was something in the papers.”

“We have our papers,” declared Enrique, and he and the six men with him showed the waitress their phony passports.

“So,” said Dinah, “you boys going to Strawberry again?”

“We do not speak of it,” said Enrique. “Too bad she is so old,” he said in Spanish to his companions. “I think she is fond of me.”

As she had done twenty-one months earlier, Dinah telephoned Sheriff Witherston and told him a mysterious rental truck was headed to Strawberry Reservoir. “It’s those same Colombian gents you arrested back in 2007,” she told him. “They’re driving like they’re headed for the last glass of water in Hades.”

*

At eleven AM on the Fifth of May, 2009, Enrique and his men were aboard the pontoon boat that had been left for them and on the water near the south end of Strawberry Reservoir. He had his men lower their three torpedoes into the eerily clear water near the dam, the only clear water in a lake that was otherwise muddy brown. By twelve o’clock, by which time they should have been back ashore and inside their truck, they were only beginning to turn toward the landing. The unloading had been unexpectedly arduous; each torpedo had an anchor and cable on its underside. In addition to the four men carrying the weapon by the steel bars, another had to carry the anchor in front of them and drop it into the reservoir before the weapon itself. To complicate the operation, the men had dropped the first torpedo in the wrong way. They did not realize the mistake until they were lowering the second.

“Didn’t we do the first one the other way?” asked the new man on the team.

“Why do you ask?” asked Enrique.

“It was pointed the other way, away from the dam,” said the man, and pointed to the Strawberry dam some four hundred meters away.

“The Germans and Russians, they made them to turn toward the dam,” said Enrique. “Can’t the things find their own way?”

The rest of the team said that Enrique was probably right; they should perhaps put the other two in pointed toward the dam, just to be certain that one or two of the torpedoes would go in the right direction. They recalled Colonel Max had many times instructed them to use the red end to point at the target, so perhaps they should. When Enrique flipped open the panel on the back of each torpedo and switched on the small computer Harris had placed there, the others worried aloud that they were getting dangerously close to the fateful time of 12:03.

“We have a hour to get back to the shore and drive away,” Enrique assured them. “We will hear the explosions as we drive away to our four hundred and seventy-eight thousand Yankee dollars.”

Thus it was that they were headed back to the shore at twelve o’clock without a worry in their seven separate skulls. Ahead of them lay smooth brown water and the peaceful shoreline. The rental truck came into view and the open landing dock... and about the dock there appeared four men in tan uniforms holding high power rifles equipped with scopes. Enrique and the five veterans on his team at once recognized the broad shape of Sheriff Witherston, and their expectations sank to depths lower than the deep water holding the three torpedoes they had planted only minutes earlier.

“What do we do?” the others asked their team leader. “This time we’ve planted real

explosives!”

“Perhaps if we went back onto the reservoir,” said Enrique, “they will get tired of waiting, and eventually go away.”

They did as their leader proposed and motored back into deep water. In a vain effort to mislead the men on the shore watching them through the telescopic lenses, the Colombians pretended to cast imaginary fishing lines into the reservoir.

“I hate to raise this question,” said the new man on the team, “but what time do you have?”

“Three past eleven,” said Enrique, checking his watch.

“Guadaljaran time?” asked the new man.

“Don’t talk rubbish,” said the team leader. “Do you think I am a fool? Of course I set my watch ahead for Arizona.”

Thanks to some providence mocking Enrique that day, the torpedoes, set on fifty minute timers and unable to tell Mountain Time from Mexican, chose that moment to come to life. The torpedo the Strawberry team had pointed in the wrong direction broke free of its anchor cable and sped through the water in a wide loop as its nose camera tried to turn it back toward the dam. The torpedo rose as it moved and made an arch in the surface as though a supercharged large fish were tearing through the normally calm reservoir.

Before the device could complete its arch, it ran aground on a rocky beach and leaped into a sandstone cliff. Both the ground around Strawberry Reservoir and the muddy water seemed to jump several inches into the air when the warhead detonated. The entire cliff for fifty yards on both sides of the impact disappeared in a dust cloud, and tiny sandstone pebbles showered onto an area hundreds of acres wide.

The Colombians on the pontoon boat and the lawmen on the shore fell flat on their faces and covered their heads as the stinging pieces of rock descended upon them. The other two torpedoes moments later hit the asphalt and earthen dam square in the middle and blasted two wide gaps through which the Strawberry River began making its long delayed escape. The high brown water beneath the Colombians’ boat began draining in the direction of the two new cascades like water leaving a gigantic bath tub. Enrique and his men suddenly began going backward toward the dam and to a certain death should, they be carried over one of the waterfalls.

“Faster, turn on the motor and go back!” Enrique ordered his frightened team. “We are going into the dam!”

The man at the rudder steered the rectangle-shaped craft to the north as the other six men threw the anchor overboard. The motor puttered helplessly against the current. The boat skittled about from side to side as it slowly edged southward toward the new cascades. The helmsman pulled the rudder hard to his left and by sheer good luck spun the boat wildly to starboard and onto a sandbar shaped long ago by the river’s original channel. The water ebbed away from the craft, leaving behind a vast field of mud on which thousands of stranded fish flopped about on their sides.

Thinking they might run away, two of the Colombians jumped from the grounded boat and onto the mud, and immediately sank up their waists in the soft brown goo. One of the sheriff’s deputies on the shore approximately a half a mile away fired a warning shot over their heads, prompting the seven Colombians to stand stock still and put their hands in the air.

“You crappy sons-of-bitches!” the men could hear Sheriff Witherston screaming at them from the distant landing. “You get out of there or we’ll shoot your asses dead!”