Water Rites (13 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

T
he shrill beep of the alarm jerked Carter out of sleep just as he took aim at the sun-bright windshield of the VW. Groggy, he reached for the alarm . . . and nearly fell out of bed as his hand missed the nightstand that wasn’t there. The adrenalin rush woke him up fast.

He was in The Dalles, not Chicago. The nightstand was on
that
side of the bed. He slapped off the alarm. Four-thirty. He blinked at the glowing red digits. Five hours should have been enough, but it felt more like ten minutes. Carter threw back the sheet and stumbled to the bathroom. Day one as Old Man on this base. Time to start getting a feel for what the hell was going on here, and judging by last night, he’d better do it fast.

He wasn’t sleepy anymore. He turned on the water, gasping as cold hit his skin. Lousy insulation on the storage tanks. Carter made a mental note to get on Building Maintenance’s ass. No one needed a cold shower to start the day.

It was still dark as he left the apartment and walked quickly through the yellow-lit streets. He turned right, feet crunching in gravel. He’d memorized the layout here. Lights glimmered on his right — enlisted personnel housing according to the map. Toys cluttered the grass-carpeted front yards — bikes and three-wheelers, a battered doll lying spread-eagled beside the sidewalk. The base was closed here, as in Chicago; you lived on post. Inside the cage. It was hard on the families.

Headquarters was a long, low, concrete building, ugly and functional. The duty sergeant showed Carter to his office and gave him a quick tour of the layout. His office was about as shabby as Hastings’, Carter decided. Flow reports in hardcopy lay neatly on his desk, waiting for his signature. Carter leafed through them quickly. No problems, but he would know if there’d been any problems. A map of the Pipeline covered one wall and a blowup of The Dalles sector covered another. Veins, Carter thought as he studied the blue tracery. Those veins made him uneasy.
I wanted someone with more experience,
Hastings had said. Hastings could go take a flying leap. But those veins carried the lifeblood of this damn, dusty here-and-now. Cut them, and a lot of people would suffer. Die. How close to a war
were
they, out here?

Carter turned around at the sound of a cleared throat.

“Sir.” A gray haired sergeant with the wiry build of a jockey slauted. “Sergeant Willis, sir. Anything you need?”

This would be the topkick — the senior NCO. The duty sergeant had called him, and probably Delgado, as well. The new CO was up and roaming around. “Everything’s fine, Sergeant.” Carter looked around at his cramped office. “Notify all the COs that there will be a staff meeting at oh-seven-thirty,” he told Willis. “Right now, I need coffee. And some breakfast.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll take you over to the dining hall,” Willis said.

“Ten minutes.” Carter turned to the computer to take the pulse of the Columbia riverbed. It was interesting that Delgado hadn’t arrived yet. Perhaps the duty sergeant hadn’t called him after all. Or had Willis ordered him not to? Carter frowned at the numbers on the screen in front of him. What did Willis have to say that he didn’t want Delgado to hear? He would listen during his tour. He’d listen very carefully.

The sun was well up as Willis showed him around the base. A light wind brushed Carter’s face but it was going to be hot, later. Half asleep this morning, he’d forgotten sunscreen. Bad move. He had dark hair, but his fair skin never tanned. The dusty street ended at the vast wall of the dam. “This was a power company dam.” Carter looked up in awe at the enormous intakes that yawned like cave mouths in the stained concrete. “It never stored an acre foot of water for ag or drinking.”

“I guess they had plenty of water back then, sir.” Willis shrugged. “We wouldn’t be so tight now if the Trench Reservoir had been built sooner.”

True. Carter remembered his momentary vision of the waterfall. How could you worry about water when you looked at that every day? By the time the federal condemnation of private water rights had finally made it through the courts, it had been almost too late. Not that it could have kept the climate from changing, or the seas from eating Florida and much of Los Angeles, but it would have helped. If they’d started sooner, the Trench might be full clear to capacity. Now — if Johnny was right, and Canada shorted them on the tundra water — it might never fill.

“The O club’s down there, sir.” Willis nodded. “We use it as the officer’s mess. Enlisted mess is the 101 Building — that green monster down there. The exchange and the drill hall are across the street. This is Main. The MEQ is down there.” He pointed south, down the street Carter had walked up in the darkness.

“How tight is it on base?” Carter asked. He watched Willis think about his answer.

“It’s tight.” The corporal’s eyes flicked away.

“How tight?” Morale mattered. These were his people now.

Willis frowned, clearly picking his words. “The kids’ve gone, so my wife and I took a single-bedroom unit.”

“You’re entitled to more.”

“Yes, sir.” Willis nodded. “There’s two families sharing the three-bedroom unit we had, sir.” Willis cleared his throat. “Colonel Watanabe authorized extra air conditioners, sir. For some of the units.”

He was waiting to see how Carter would react, or maybe Delgado had pulled the extra units. “Good move,” Carter said and watched Willis not show his relief. Carter shaded his eyes, squinting into the harsh sunlight. The gray wall of the dam zigzagged across the dusty gouge of the riverbed. The Corps buildings and residences clustered on the Oregon side, sheltered by the concrete wing of the dam. Firs and a few thirsty maples shaded the dusty streets. An old spillway had been converted into a tunnel that led to the west gate. Beyond the dam, the spidery span of a highway bridge arched over the riverbed. People still used it.

He watched a bright-blue semi pull a triple trailer across the bridge. Beyond it he could see The Dalles. Metal-sided warehouses and a couple of ancient wooden grain elevators baked in the sun. Fruit, Carter remembered. And wheat. That was what people had grown around here, back when the river was full of water. Now they grew drought tolerant soybeans and sugar beets, all dependent on those blue veins full of water buried under his feet. Wind vanes turned steadily, ranked along the shelving banks like strange, metallic trees. The wh
omp-whomp-whomp
of their turning created a constant base note beneath the sounds of the day. Carter had a feeling he was going to get tired of that sound very quickly. Parallel strands of bright-orange wire fenced the compound on all sides, strung four inches apart on six-foot poles. Carter approached it cautiously.

“Don’t touch it, sir. It’ll knock you cold.” Willis stepped up beside him. “It could kill you if you got tangled in it. A cut strand or a ground activates an alarm.”

It hadn’t stopped Greely, Carter thought sourly. Security better have found that hole. He stared at the orange wire, tired with a weariness that went beyond the physical. Why couldn’t the people on the other side of that wire understand that only so much water existed? “Where do you keep the coffee?” Carter asked.

“This way, sir.”

“Not today.” Carter shook his head. He needed to know how his people ate, too. That mattered. “We’ll hit the enlisted mess.”

*

The noise level dropped by an order of magnitude as Carter walked through the door. The CO. It didn’t quite get silent, but he felt the eyes as he picked up a tray at the end of the serving line. The mess was open, he noticed. Families could pay and eat here. Which meant that the food situation locally wasn’t good — or at least it wasn’t a good idea to shop locally. The families sat on one side of the hall, the active duty personnel on the other. Not many families this early. A very young woman with an infant in her lap was trying to hush a complaining three-year-old girl.

“The colonel opened the mess, sir. You got to go to Bonneville to buy a lot of stuff, these days.” Willis held out a plate for scrambled eggs. “Gas costs over ten bucks a gallon out here.”

Which most of the lower grades wouldn’t be able to afford. “Why can’t you shop in The Dalles?” Carter filled a mug with coffee — or what passed for coffee these days. “Local attitude?”

“It’s not bad, sir.” Willis stressed the words slightly. “The colonel opened the mess before we closed the base. You don’t have much choice outside of the local market or the government store. The locals don’t live so good, either.”

This man didn’t hate the locals, anyway. Why did Delgado? Carter picked up a glass of orange juice. Maybe that was why Willis hadn’t included him this morning. Carter had a feeling that Willis was doing a bit of subtle propagandizing:
The situation doesn’t have to be this bad. How about it, boss?

They were all asking, every man and woman on the base. How about it, boss? How are you going to handle things? Carter felt the weight of those silent questions as he picked up his tray and turned away from the line. Then the child threw a bowl onto the floor with a clatter and launched herself into a screaming temper tantrum. The whole room went silent. The woman’s face was red as she tried desperately to silence her daughter, and now the baby was crying. Carter looked away, straight into the agonized face of a Corporal across the room. Dad. Scared that Carter might just get pissed and close the mess.

It was tough for the enlisteds.

Carter waited until the woman looked up, then caught her eye. “Kids,” he said, and smiled.

The food wasn’t bad. Soy eggs and bacon, but who ate the real stuff these days. Johnny, he thought wryly. Maybe not even him. The orange juice was real, even if it was grown in a cell tank. Time breathed down his neck now. The staff meeting was coming up. Carter ate fast and pretended he wasn’t aware of the inaudible and collective sigh of relief as he left the mess.

Delgado and Captain Arris, Security’s CO from last night, waited for him in his office.

“There is no breach in the base perimeter.” Arris’s eyes were locked on Carter’s left shoulder. “Sir.”

“How did a civilian get in here?” From the corner of his eye, Carter watched Delgado scowl.

“I don’t know, sir.” Arris’s face was stone. “No excuse, sir.”

Shit on that. Families lived on this base and this could turn into a war zone any day. “Go find it,” Carter said gently.

“Yes, sir.” The captain saluted, spun on his heel, and marched out.

“I could have found out, sir.” Delgado studied the ceiling. “If we’d arrested Greely.”

“We don’t play that way, Major,” Carter snapped. Easy, he told himself. He needed this man, whether he liked him or not. “I’m going to be feeling my way around for awhile,” he said, making his voice warmer. “The general warned me about Greely, and I’ll keep my eyes open. If he’s behind this, we’ll get him.”

“I hope so, sir.” Delgado didn’t sound convinced. “Just watch yourself, sir. They shot Colonel Watanabe in cold blood.”

He needed to look into the evidence there, find out what had happened. Not now. The clock on the desk glared at him. “We’ve got a staff meeting in five minutes,” he said. “Afterward, you can give me a tour.” And tell me about Greely, Watanabe, and what you think is going on here, he didn’t say.

*

The staff meeting was everybody’s chance to size up the CO, and Carter’s chance to take their measure. Operations, Communications, Pipeline Maintenance, Base Support, MPs, and even Battalion Aid; they all gave Carter a brief evaluation of their situation. It wasn’t as bad as he had expected, and he felt a cautious relief as he listened. Tension here, yes, and hostility toward the locals, but morale seemed to be solid. Sabotage — aside from the two sniping incidents — had been limited to shooting out the guts of the wind turbines or busting the solar arrays that powered the pumps. The chief surgeon reported that stress levels on the base were within normal parameters for a low-threat combat zone. This wasn’t a war. Yet.

That feeling was borne out as Carter toured the rest of the base. The comments he overheard were that the locals weren’t too bad as a whole, but there was an open hatred for the few terrorists who had been doing the shooting. No, it wasn’t a war yet, and he was going to make damn sure it didn’t end up one.

*

It was midafternoon before he got a chance to tour Operations with Delgado. This was the nexus of the job — the air-conditioned heartbeat of their sector of the Pipeline. Carefully protected from dust by a double set of doors and an autonomous air-filtration system, the room was a maze of electronics. Inset terminals lined the four walls and the long stations that ran down the center of the room. Screens glowed with multicolored schematics, blinking numbers in green and amber monitoring water flow, turbulence, temperature, and pipewall stress. One entire wall was covered with a detailed topographical map of The Dalles sector of the Pipeline. Uniformed men and women sat at their stations, faces intent.

“This is the readout on the main flow.” Major Carron, who had been conducting the tour, stopped beside a bank of four monitor screens.

“Everything is within normal parameters, sir.” A small, red-headed lieutenant saluted, her eyes sweeping Carter with one quick, appraising glance.

“Tell me what you’re doing.” Carter leaned over her shoulder.

“Monitoring flow turbulence, sir.” She pointed. “These screens give us a veiw of the Pipe’s interior wall via optical fibers. Those screens give a readout from the flow sensors. An increase in turbulence means a leak. A sudden decrease indicates a failing pump, sir. The water backs up into the sumps.”

“You see a lot of pump problems?”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant’s face was expressionless.

Courtesy of the locals. The lieutenant wasn’t going to say it.

Carter frowned. Apart from the main Pipeline, The Dalles sector was responsible for the first miles of the Klamath Shunt, a major diversion that led down through the Klamath Aqueduct to augment the output of California’s vast desalinization plants, watering the fertile Sacramento Valley. Turbulence and wear on the Pipeline was intense at the enormous valve complex of the Shunt. The Corps also monitored every local diversion line, every branch, and every individual tap line. Consumption was recorded by individual ration meters, but the Corps kept flow data on every line, no matter how small. If piracy was suspected, the flow rates could be retrieved and reviewed for evidence of a tampered meter or an illegal tap.