Gauntlet (61 page)

“Thank you, Mr. McKay. Thank you very much,” the President said. He turned to the men in the room. “Gentlemen, you heard the man. Yes, a major dam has been catastrophically attacked, but we can and will rebuild it. We can avoid any further catastrophe in this situation. There has been significant loss of life, but our country has seen worse. We will recover.”

T
URBEE watched the footage of the Lake Powell floodwaters propelling themselves through the Grand Canyon over and over again. First a torrent of water, then a cave-in or collapse of some geographical feature, then the temporary damming effect, and then another torrent of water. He had listened to the White House Situation Room interaction between the President and various members of his team. They had a problem. They were assuming a uniform and continuous flow of water. But the video evidence now displayed on all the 101’s showed a very different process at work.

“Here’s what I think is going to happen,” he said, not talking to anyone in particular, but speaking loudly enough to be heard by all. He did not notice that the floor was becoming quiet. They knew Turbee was cooking something up. “People along the shores of Lake Mead,” he continued, “need to get a long distance from that shoreline. If you look at the west end, where all the marinas and people are, this is where the waves will be the most dangerous. We’ll have classic cresting and undertow conditions, like what you saw during the Boxing Day Quake.” Turbee cleared his throat, glad that the meds were now working properly. “We could have waves 200 feet high crashing along the western shore. People have maybe two and a half hours before this starts, but when it starts, if you can see it, you’re probably in trouble.” He was pointing to the western shore of Lake Mead on the Atlas Screen.

“What was that, Turbee? How high will the waves be?” asked Dan.

“He said 200 feet, Dan, maybe more. Pay attention,” George barked sharply.

Turbee carried on as though Dan didn’t exist. He tapped a couple of keys on his keyboard. The map on the Atlas Screen altered slightly. “This is a simulation of what will happen. I’ve put in the shore features, roadways, and so on. We’re in a hurry, so I don’t have all the hotels and motels. But you can see what’s happening. We do have the land’s topography programmed in here, so the area on the map will show how far we expect the waves to go inland. It could easily be a mile. It could be two. I think even people in Boulder City should be thinking about moving to higher ground.”

“Turbee, what makes you think that the waves will be so high?” asked George. “No one connected to the White House Situation Room conference said that.”

“Well, look at the videos on the 101’s,” said Turbee. “You can see that the motion of the water is sporadic. It’s discontinuous. It is literally lurching from cave-in to cave-in. You get a 300-foot-high cascade, then a landslide, a temporary dam, then another 300-foot-high cascade. It’s an effect that started at the Glen Canyon Dam and is continuing throughout the entire Grand Canyon. When the huge cave-in at Canyon Village occurred, the waters were dammed for a full 30 seconds. With the flow rate, the water piled up to a height of, I think, close to 500 feet. Then the water literally exploded through that, and the effect continued, further downstream.”

“So how does that affect what will happen at the Hoover Dam?” asked George.

“Just look at it. It is a discontinuous process. Those bolts of water shooting through the canyon right now could be 400 or even 500 feet high. There is nothing to compare this to.”

“What happens, Turbee, when those waves hit Lake Mead?” interrupted Rhodes.

“Just imagine it,” Turbee replied. “A 400-foot wall of water and sand and rocks and whatever hits Lake Mead at a good 25 miles an hour, judging from the progress that it’s making through the Grand Canyon. It’s elementary Newtonian mechanics. That force doesn’t just disappear. It has to go somewhere. It hits the lake and creates a tsunami. Then there’s a period of lesser flow, and then another one of these huge waves, which creates another tsunami, and so on.”

“So? What does that have to do with the Hoover?” Dan interrupted.

“So that’s the point, sir. It won’t be just one wave. It will repeat, over and over again, until the flow of water from Lake Powell is finished. The erosion of the Grand Canyon will continue, so long as that flow is maintained. That could be years, but that’s not important. What is important is that the waves will start to interfere with each other. They’ll create super waves of unimaginable height, especially in the relatively enclosed spaces of the Boulder and Black Canyons, immediately adjacent to the Hoover. What those guys in the Situation Room are missing is that it’s not going to be a smooth flow. It is not like turning on a tap. It’s going to be very violent, sir. Very, very violent. George, can you put the Black and Boulder Canyons on the Atlas Screen?”

“Glad to oblige, little buddy,” George said.

“I think the Hoover will come apart at the seams, and I think that will be very soon after the first wave hits,” continued Turbee. “You’ll see that the Hoover Dam channel commences here, at an angle from the direction of the lake, and veers toward the south. Initially, it will only catch the edges of the waves that are going to be generated. These waves may only be 50 to 100 feet high.”

“Only. Only 100 feet high. Like only as high as a ten-story building,” interrupted Rahlson. “Only my ass.”

Turbee carried on. “The dam structure is probably sufficient to withstanding that. Now here’s where we get into a problem. The Hoover Dam is, more or less, a planar surface on its upstream facade. The waves will rebound from it nicely, and head back toward the main lake area. It took a good 17 years to fill Lake Powell, and it will take a while to empty it. You can expect the wave crests to be coming for a long, long time. That’s what makes this different from the Boxing Day Quake.”

Turbee paused for a second to take a sip of cold coffee. His thoughts were moving so quickly that he was having trouble getting the words out fast enough, and his voice was quitting on him. “The Indonesia quake produced only one series of tsunami, broken up into a set of 11 or 12 separate waves. With the configuration that we have here, these waves will come, for all intents and purposes, forever. Throughout the lake, but especially in the Hoover Dam channel, which is long and narrow, with high side walls. There is going to be a lot of destructive and constructive interference. Where a crest from one wave hits a trough from another, they cancel each other out,” he continued, “and in theory we have no wave. But where a crest of one wave meets the crest of another, we get a doubly high wave. A super wave. It’s called constructive interference. Theoretically, there is a very real possibility that a super wave crest will hit another super wave crest, and I don’t have a clue what will happen after that.”

I
T TOOK LESS THAN AN HOUR for the four Tiani/Melvin focused charges to be transported from the Livermore Laboratories to the downstream entrances of the four diversion tunnels. Four Raptors landed at an airfield less than a mile from the many buildings that constituted the Labs. The shaped charge devices had already been taken out of storage, and were immediately hauled to the runway. The Raptors had been chosen because they had internal bomb bays and, in this situation, bomb bays just large enough to contain the Tiani/Melvin devices; one in each. It took 20 minutes for the exotic planes to traverse the 400-mile distance between the Livermore Labs runway and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, just north of Las Vegas. By the time the bombs reached Nellis, the raging waters released from what had once been the Glen Canyon Dam had passed the midpoint of the Grand Canyon.

It took a few minutes to transfer the four bombs to two HH-60J Jayhawk helicopters, and another ten minutes, at 200 miles per hour, for the Jayhawks to land beside four M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, each weighing more than 30 tons. The weight of these vehicles would be used to wedge the Tiani/ Melvins into the concrete plugs within the original bypass tunnels. The Bradleys for the east (Arizona) side of the Colorado would also require a military transport vehicle, to ferry them across the river along the top of the dam. Each Bradley had a crew of four. The four separate crews were quickly named Team Arizona One and Two, and Team Nevada One and Two, for clarity during any radio communication.

The concrete plugs were located just north of the dam itself, and the trip down each tunnel was nearly three miles. Following the Bradleys were four Jeeps, each carrying another two men. When the four parties entered their respective tunnels, intent on their mission, the first blast of water was still an hour from the east end of Lake Mead.

The wall of mud and water was more than 300 feet in height, and would be traveling at an astonishing rate of speed when it reached South Cove, Lake Mead. According to the workup Turbee was doing in the TTIC control room, that wave would create an enormous impact when it hit the lake’s calm waters. It would be carrying with it millions of tons of silt and debris. The flow of water would not be even but would mimic the ebb and flow of the ocean tide. The size of the waves created by this action would be dictated by simple geometry. As the lake widened, the energy created in the waves would be dispersed over an ever greater area. At the widest part of the lake, the waves might be only 40 or 50 feet in height, with no crest. They would simply be large swells, moving at a high speed toward the southwestern end of the lake. But as the lake narrowed again, and became shallower, the power of the waves would, according to Turbee, be reconstituted. A portion of the waves would enter the narrow channel containing the marinas and homes that formed Lake Mead’s western shore. Another portion would enter Boulder Canyon and, from there, Black Canyon, which was blocked at its distal end by the Hoover Dam. According to Turbee’s calculations, the entire lake would become a chaotic environment of super wave after super wave. Also according to Turbee’s calculations, the marinas and homes that formed Lake Mead’s western shore would disappear. And that was only a start to the destruction. Once the waves from the flood entered Boulder Canyon and Black Canyon, they would reach the Hoover Dam. According to Turbee, the dam would not withstand the impact.

It was a possibility that left Turbee and those around him breathless with horror.

According to the calculations of the mathematicians, engineers, and technicians at the Hoover Dam, however, if the plan to open the diversionary tunnels worked, and the next hour was spent in draining Lake Mead, any waves that formed would be minimal. The volume of water in Lake Mead would be significantly reduced, and the possibility of super waves would be infinitely smaller. The Hoover would be able to weather the test of the water coming toward it. If the diversionary tunnels could be opened quickly enough. If the water was drained from Lake Mead at the rate they calculated. It was what the men in, around, and on the dam were hoping for.

T
HE TTIC CONTROL ROOM was quiet. One of the helicopters had a video camera focused on the Hoover Dam. At Turbee’s request, the helicopter increased altitude, so that the entire channel leading to the Hoover Dam was shown. The signal was delivered over one of the Milsat satellite’s many channels. Other cameras were trained on the flood waters, from various elevations and angles. As they watched, wave after wave formed in the narrow chute that was the Grand Canyon. Behind each wave there were still more, lining up for miles, as the uncaged Colorado River smashed its way through cave-in after cave-in along the canyon, rushing toward Lake Mead.

T
HE TWO DIVERSIONARY TUNNELS within the dam itself were already fully opened, and a massive volume of water was roaring through them. The four teams had traveled from the south ends of the outer diversionary tunnels to the concrete plugs that had been placed there more than 70 years earlier.

Each team proceeded to jackhammer notches into their respective concrete plug, so that the Tiani/Melvin devices could be neatly inserted. When the holes were large enough, the T/M devices were wedged in place by the 30-ton Bradleys. No one had time to worry about whether the devices would be damaged by such action, or whether they would even work in such tight quarters. Once the placement was accomplished, timers were set, and the crews raced out of the tunnels to the relative safety of the tunnel outlets, where hovering helicopters were waiting to pick them up.

Seconds later, a booming sound was heard, deep within the tunnels. An explosion of water and stone burst out of the downstream outlets of all four outer tunnels. As with the initial, but much larger, T/M charge that had cut the Glen Canyon Dam in two, each device had sent a super-heated blast of plasma directly into the concrete plugs, vaporizing them. With the plugs out of the way, the water had quickly found and entered the tunnels, pushing the debris out of its path in a quick and powerful surge.

From above, it was a spectacular sight, with all four diversionary tunnels now open, along with the penstocks and tunnels of the dam itself. All told, a volume three times greater than the original volume of the Colorado was now flowing through, under, and around the Hoover Dam. Massive plumes of water were being ejected hundreds of feet into the air. Rainbows could be seen playing in the mist that now partially hid the great structure. The engineers calculated that at this rate, Lake Mead would be dropping close to a foot an hour. They thought that it just might be enough.

“You see, Mr. President,” Jordan McKay was saying over the phone. “It is not as bad as it could have been. The Glen Canyon Dam failed catastrophically, but the Hoover is strong enough to withstand the extra volume. With all the diversionary tunnels now open, the level of Lake Mead will not rise nearly as quickly. Our engineers are calculating the net rate of increase of water volume in Lake Mead. It is starting to appear that for a few weeks water will flow over the top of the Hoover, but the dam itself will not be compromised by this.”

“What about downstream from the dam? Lake Mojave, Lake Havasu, and so on?” asked the President.

“Those lakes are large enough to hold the overflow volumes. Obviously there will need to be emergency dyking. The Army Corps of Engineers will be working overtime on it, along with many other companies, but it is a manageable problem. The Hoover will stand, sir,” replied Jordan. “The Hoover will stand.”

“A manageable problem...” These were the words that were being echoed up and down the chain in the Intelligence Community. This was the phrase picked up by the media. Yes, a major dam had been destroyed, but the question of controlling the huge flows was a manageable problem. All of the media corporations had helicopters above the Hoover Dam. The fantastic picture showing the enormous geysers of water ejected through the four diversionary tunnels and, in addition, the massive flow of water through the dam, via the penstocks, was comforting. The rainbows were beautiful. People began to breathe a little easier.