Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River (19 page)

Julie laughed while she watched Erika swim after Paul who was staying just out of her reach, and splashing her. While the couple teased each other, Greg stood and stepped gingerly up the rocks to where they had left their possessions. When he reached their stuff, he turned and put his hands on his hips, scanning up and down the shoreline. Julie thought she could see a look of concern on his face.

"He pointed down by the edge of the water. "Doesn't it look like the water has gone down?"

Julie looked at the wet ring above the water. She saw Paul stop and look at it too. Erika took advantage, and grabbed her husband from behind. Paul shucked her like she was nothing and dunked her. Greg pointed at the Mastercraft. "Look at the boat."

Julie looked but did not see anything out of the ordinary. "What's wrong with it?"

Paul interjected.
"The rope.
We left some slack when we tied it off. Now it's tight."

Julie saw that the rope was in fact very tight and pulling the Mastercraft up against the rocks. "Maybe it came loose and somebody re-tied it."

"No, Julie. Look at the wet band around the lake." He motioned again with his hand and raised his voice. "The water has dropped, maybe five feet or more."

Julie wondered why the big deal.

"So?" Erika said. "Who cares if the water dropped a few feet?"

Greg crouched and chewed on his fingernail. It made Julie nervous. Generally Greg was very cool headed. She climbed up the rocks out of the water. Erika followed.

Greg started gathering shoes and socks. "Let's go. There must be something wrong. They must be dumping water like crazy or something."

"Who?"
Paul asked.

Greg was already headed for the boat.
"The people at the dam.
I don't know. We can ask what's going on when we get to the
Marina
."

Julie gathered up her wet shoes and other possessions. Erika and Paul did the same. The three of them headed for the boat with their arms full. Greg was trying to pull the boat up enough to get slack in the rope with no success. Paul tossed his stuff on the ground and tried to help. Both men struggled, but the rope was already so tight that they would need to lift the boat to get enough slack.

"What are we going to do now?" Julie asked.

Greg fished through the glove box in the boat and retrieved his pocketknife. He freed the blade, cut the rope up close to where it was tied on the rock, and the Mastercraft settled into the water. He retrieved the remainder of the rope from the rock and threw it in the back. He climbed in while Paul held the boat away from the rocks. Greg reached for Julie and Erika's things, and then helped them both in. He was hurrying, which made Julie and Erika hurry too. When everyone else was in, Paul pushed off and jumped in himself. Greg started the engine immediately.

Julie sat in the other front seat and looked at her husband. His brow was furrowed as he scanned up and down the shore. He put the boat in gear and quickly accelerated as they headed out of the small bay into the main channel. Greg was very nervous, something that was very rare for Greg Crawford.

* * *

Sid followed his friend Ryan as they hiked east along the Escalante Trail. To their left, a couple hundred feet below
flowed
the
Colorado River
, which seemed to be running above normal. To their right the
Grand Canyon
rose gradually almost four thousand feet to the Navajo reservation, where they had left their car, but that was two days ago. Unlike the lightweights that rode mules up and down the tourist trails, Sid and Ryan considered themselves seasoned hikers. You had to be, to hike Tanner and Escalante, two trails which were not for the faint hearted, especially Tanner. Two days before, while descending the twelve-mile
Tanner
Trail
, only two miles from the bottom they encountered the last obstacle, a steep climb nicknamed Asinine Hill. Two days later, Sid considered this whole hike to be asinine.

Over the years, he and Ryan had hiked most of the major trails in the Grand Canyon, some multiple times. Tanner, which was located almost 30 miles upstream from the major South Rim trails, had eluded them. And now Sid knew why. Tanner was a killer. Hiking down the trail had wiped him out. His left knee, which had never bothered him before, now screamed out with every step. And Escalante, comparatively, was the easy part. It only ran along the base of the canyon paralleling the river. The hard part, tomorrow, was yet to come, back up the twelve grueling miles of Tanner to the rim. Besides, this part of the canyon wasn't as narrow, and to be honest, wasn't as spectacular. In fact, when he lost sight of the river, Sid thought the landscape was downright ugly. Of course he grudgingly admitted that it might have something to do with the pain in his knee.

"Let's rest." Ryan said without looking back.

Sid didn't respond. But he immediately stopped and let Ryan help him out of his pack. With a sleeping bag, food, water, and stove, each pack weighed a ton. Sid leaned his pack against a rock then sat down and leaned back against it. He massaged his knee, but couldn't quite get his fingers deep enough to do any good.

"How much farther do you think it is?" he asked. Ryan always knew how far things were.

"Close.
Maybe an hour."
He looked at his watch. "We can have lunch at the trail head, filter some water,
then
head up Tanner. The farther we make it tonight, the better."

Sid closed his eyes and tried to wish himself a day into the future, up at the rim looking down, and the hike would be behind him. He opened his eyes to see if it worked, but saw he was still at river level. Maybe he was too greedy. He decided to try again, this time wishing only for a mule to carry him up the hill. Hanging from the mule, the knee would still hurt, but it would definitely felt better than hiking.

"Look at that helicopter!" Ryan said suddenly.

The mule disappeared. Sid opened his eyes.
"Where?"

Ryan pointed upstream. "I didn't think they were allowed to fly that low."

The helicopter flew at an altitude of only a couple hundred feet above the water as it followed the river. Since the Escalante trail ran above the river, they were at almost the same level as the helicopter.

For a moment it looked like the chopper would fly right past the hikers, but it veered straight toward the two hikers. Ryan stood up defensively, something that Sid would have done too, if it weren't for the knee. Sid peered around the legs of his friend at the helicopter, which had stopped in the air and hovered less than a hundred feet away. They were close enough for Sid to see that both the Pilot and the other guy wore dark glasses and had dead serious looks on their faces. For a moment Sid wondered if the chopper had guns, because if it did, he and Ryan would be sitting ducks.

Not the pilot, but the other guy, spoke into a microphone. "The Glen Canyon Dam has collapsed upstream." The sound was so loud it made Sid
want
to cover his ears. "Hike immediately to higher ground. Try to get at least five hundred feet above the river, maybe more."

No one moved for a moment. The helicopter hovered. Ryan stood staring at it with his mouth open, and Sid sat peering around Ryan's leg. Was this a joke? He looked at the serious expressionless faces of the two men in the helicopter and decided it wasn't.

"Go now!" said the man. "The river is already rising and the water level will increase rapidly from here on out."

With that
said,
the helicopter veered off and dropped back into the canyon. They watched it go until it disappeared around the bend downstream. Sid had never seen the Glen Canyon Dam. He looked upstream and tried to imagine a wall of water. How tall was the dam? He couldn't remember, but something told him it was taller than two hundred, which meant he would be underwater if he didn't move. He noticed Ryan had turned and was pulling at the straps on his backpack. He untied the sleeping bag and tossed it aside.

"You just gonna leave that here?" Sid asked.

"Yeah.
Screw it." Ryan responded. He tossed a frying pan and stove out as well. He stopped digging through his pack for a second and looked down at Sid. "Come On! Get up."

Sid argued. "Won't we need the bags tonight?"

Ryan pointed upstream. "Our first priority is to make Tanner without getting rimmed by the river. Sleeping in a warm bag is second priority."

Sid rolled over and stood, trying to ignore the knee, which didn't seem to understand the emergency. He reached for his pack, but Ryan grabbed it first and started tossing out anything that looked heavy, including his flashlight, pans, a coffee cup, sleeping bag, and ground cloth. The only thing safe was the water. Sid only watched. However, things had gone too far when Ryan readied to toss Sid's camping tool, the one that looked like needle-nose pliers except for all the accessories including straight blades, serrated blades,
screw
drivers, corkscrews, not to mention the black leather pouch. The tool had been a Christmas gift from his estranged father. Sid reached out and plucked it from Ryan's hands.

"No. I'll carry that." Sid clutched it close to his body with both hands.

Ryan looked at him for a second,
then
rolled his eyes. "All right, let's go."

Ryan grabbed Sid's pack and held it up for him, then pulled his own on. Ryan led and Sid followed. They were still buckling belts and straps as they walked. The knee hurt, but it felt much stronger carrying the lighter pack. Compared to before, the backpack seemed empty. Sid looked down at his knee and it thanked him. They walked quickly for almost five minutes before either spoke. Ryan actually jogged for a short stretch, but when he turned and looked back, Sid shook his head.

Ryan stopped and pointed ahead. "Look how high the river's getting."

Sid nodded, wondering if it had been that way for a while, and he hadn't noticed, or if it had increased in the last few minutes.

Ryan cocked his head and looked straight up the canyon walls, then back at the river, obviously agitated.

"What's a matter?" Sid asked.

"Before we get back to Tanner, Escalante goes right down by the river. It'll be underwater."

Sid remembered that. It would be impassable. He pointed at a ridge a few hundred feet ahead and above them. "What about that over there?"

Ryan hesitated and gritted his teeth. "Man I hate to go off trail. We could get rimmed, then what?"

Sid nodded. In the
Grand Canyon
, like any other steep rock canyon, it might look like you could just find your way back up, but in reality you would eventually get stopped by some vertical cliff that you just couldn't find a way around. There was a reason why the popular trails are so well used, and why there were so relatively few of them.

Sid shrugged. "We don't have any choice though, do we?"

Ryan grimaced. "Guess not." He started again, this time veering off trail and climbing upwards toward the ridge.

After a few moments of hiking over rocks, Sid's knee started to cry out again, making him wish he were back on the trail. Without slowing down, he reached down and rubbed it. Probably due to the combination of walking over rocks off trail, and rubbing his knee at the same time, Sid tripped. It wasn't a big fall. In fact he didn't actually go down. He caught himself with his hands. Unfortunately, he still held the pliers when his hand hit the rock.
Which meant a nasty gash on two of the knuckles of his right hand.

"You okay?" Ryan asked.

Sid looked at his bloody hand, then at the pliers from his father, the ones that a few minutes before had been so important. He admired the way the leather pouch wrapped perfectly around it, and how the stitching gave it such a professional touch. He unclasped the top, and slid the pliers out, just a little, enough to feel the polished stainless steel handle. He glanced down at the river, then back at the ridge.
"Yeah.
Let's go."

Ryan turned and started walking.

Sid followed, tossing the pliers over his shoulder into the sagebrush.

* * *

The man turned his motorcycle onto a street in the small neighborhood in
East Las Vegas
. Unlike the many newer developments around the outskirts of the city, this street felt neither clean nor organized. A dog, chained to the water spigot on the front of a neighbor's house, ran out and barked at the motorcycle. A worn semicircle area showed the reach of the dog's chain. A car up on blocks on the left side of the street, and a front yard enclosed in chain link fence on the right, told visitors that there was no homeowner's association in this neighborhood. No one was out in the street to wave at, not that he would have waved anyway.

The motorcyclist continued to the corner lot at the end of the street. He stopped in the driveway, found neutral, and put the bike on its stand. He let it run while he dismounted. His legs were stiff from the two-hour ride from
Utah
. After he stretched, he walked over and pulled up the garage door. Inside was another almost new white pickup. It looked almost identical to the one he left in Page. He returned to the motorcycle, mounted it,
then
drove it in the garage. After shutting off the engine and dismounting, he immediately pulled down the door to keep his neighbors from inspecting the contents of the garage.

He unbuckled his helmet and pulled it off. His hair was soaked in sweat from the long ride in the heat of the day. He ran his hands through the wet hair, and then scratched his scalp. He tossed the helmet on the seat and headed into the house, leaving the job of unpacking for later, or potentially never. He stripped off his shirt as he walked into the stifling house, and scratched his stomach and chest, which where also soaked in sweat. He walked through the kitchen, not noticing the clutter of unwashed dishes on the counters. He headed directly to a dusty television propped on what looked like a nightstand that belonged next to a bed. He grabbed a remote control and hit the power button while he backed away a few steps for a better view. He remained standing. The channel showed a news reporter in studio with a picture of the Glen Canyon Dam behind, before it was blown up. He knew if he waited, the channel would eventually show what he wanted, but he flipped the channel anyway. The next channel showed a reporter interviewing what looked to be a park ranger. He flipped again. All the channels were running the story, but the third channel showed the view he wanted, an aerial view of where the dam used to be.

He caught his breath and backed up and sat on an old couch, not bothering to move the clutter aside. What he was looking at was even better than what he had seen in
Utah
two hours ago. Only the edges of the dam were still visible jutting from the rock walls. The water ripped through the opening, rolled over what looked like a fifty-foot drop,
then
raged down the canyon. It mesmerized him to watch it. It made goose bumps appear on his arms, in spite of the stifling heat. He smiled broadly and settled back into the couch.

He needed sleep after being
awake
most of the night. But at that moment, he couldn't imagine pulling himself away from the TV. The camera view panned upstream into
Lake
Powell
, although he wasn't interested in that. He wanted to see downstream, where the water was going. He wanted to see the flooding in the
Grand Canyon
. He wanted to see how far the flood had traveled, and what the expected arrival times were at various places. He wanted computer rendered images of what would happen when the water reached
Lake Mead
and beyond. He wanted more information about downstream. That was where the action was headed. That was where he was headed.

* * *