Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River (50 page)

"In the FBI, we're used to all-nighters."

Lloyd looked over and winked, showing Grant he'd interpreted her comment differently.

Lloyd flew south, roughly following
Black
Canyon
. None of the three passengers spoke, all of them craning their necks to stare down at the river below. On last night's ride in the darkness, Grant hadn't been able to see much. But now he could look down into the canyons. He could see whitewater occasionally on the
Colorado River
, and knew he was seeing big waves that either hadn't been there two days ago, or had been much smaller. After a few minutes the canyon widened and Grant could see the water of
Lake
Mojave
.

"How low can we fly?" Grant asked and immediately regretted it.

Lloyd smiled. "I can drag the landing gear if you want."

"No, that's not necessary." Grant pointed ahead to where he could see what looked like cabins on the side of the lake. "I just want to be low enough to see the effects of the higher water line."

"No problem," he said, and Grant felt the helicopter drop. Lloyd was smooth and maneuvered the chopper down to about a hundred feet of elevation with no erratic maneuvers. Even a hundred feet seemed way too low and accentuated the feeling of speed. Grant caught himself gripping the sides of his seat. Like
Lake Mead
, the water lines along the banks were noticeably missing, covered by the all-time-high water level.

For a while they didn't see any boats, but fifteen minutes into the journey, they saw a water-ski boat. Over the next few miles they saw many more, including a few houseboats. Evidently, not everyone heeded the warnings to clear the lake.

"Shauna, how much higher is the water?" Grant asked.

"Less than ten feet," she responded off the top of her head. "They don't vary the levels here near as much as they do at Mead and Powell."

"So basically, if there weren't a million warnings, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference? Except for the water marks?" he asked.

"No. The only difference would be the drift in the channel, and that would only be noticeable upstream where the lake is skinny."

They watched in silence again for a while. Grant knew the calm feeling on the lake was deceiving. There was chaos ahead. He could feel it.

Shauna broke the silence. "What are all those houses on the left?"

Grant stared at a hillside of homes, many of them at the lake's edge. He had remembered seeing their lights the night before.

"It's called Kathrine's Landing," Lloyd said.

"There's the dam." It was Agent Williams's voice.

Grant saw it, but Davis Dam was not nearly as obvious at low elevation and lacked the lights to make it stand out in the dark.

"Lloyd, can you slow us down so I can get a good look at the dam and the spillways?"

"No problem, Mr. Stevens."

Right up until the helicopter reached Davis Dam, everything seemed normal. The water levels seemed close to the top of the earth dike, but not enough to panic an untrained eye. However, as the helicopter passed over the dike in view of the concrete spillways, the normalness quickly disappeared. Unlike
Hoover
's spillway tunnels, Davis Dam's spillways did not disappear into the mountain. The concrete superstructure was built like a small dam itself and the spillways were positioned slightly lower than the maximum water level, channeling the excess water over the top of the concrete.

Close to 500,000 cubic feet per second was rolling over the top of the two spillways. Like
Glen
Canyon
, the crashing water generated so much mist that it was difficult to see where the water was landing. One thing that was all too evident was that the river had leaped out of its channels. The concrete pool below the spillways was gone, covered in water. The whole area below the dam was underwater.

Grant turned and saw both of Shauna's hands in front of her mouth.

He heard Lloyd's voice in the headphones. "I assume this lake ain't supposed to be here?"

Grant nodded and thought Lloyd's classification of the flood below the spillways as a lake was an accurate description. The water covered the entire landscape below the dam, filling the riverbed and covering the entire parking lot and roads. He looked around for Blaine or Billy, the two security men he met the night before, but he couldn't see them. He could only see policemen.

"No, this lake wasn't here last night," he finally responded to Lloyd. He motioned with his hand. "This whole area below the dam was an old stream bed, dry gravel."

"You wanna look around some more, or move on?" Lloyd said.

Grant realized the helicopter had stopped in mid air, hovering, and that the pilot had been waiting for him. "No. Keep going, but stay low over the river."

The helicopter immediately banked and headed downstream. Just south of the dam, they passed by the large casinos lining the
Nevada
side of the river. Most of them featured riverfront amenities such as spacious pools and sun decks. None were visible, being covered with dirty water.

"Unbelievable," said Agent Williams from behind. "This is going to cost billions to clean up."

Grant noticed a couple of guys in a rowboat between two casinos trying to retrieve something wrapped around a tree. The Showboat, a casino shaped like a riverboat, was built right on the river, and suffered the most damage, with water flowing in one side of the building and out the other.

Grant only saw a few people around the casinos. He figured most of them had been evacuated. The ones he did see wore hip boots and carried shovels. Obviously, there had been a lot of effort to sandbag, as sandbags were piled next to most of the casinos to channel water around them. He wondered if he would have evacuated if he lived in Laughlin. He didn't think so. He tended to relate more with those who tied themselves to a tree before the hurricane hit, or climbed on the roof when the river bottoms flooded. Of course those were the ones that always died, too.

He tried to remember the name of the guy who decided to stay when Mount St. Helens blew in
Washington
. They tried to evacuate everyone, but he wouldn't budge. He said he'd lived there his whole life and he'd take his chances. It was the last time anybody ever saw him. Was Grant that stubborn?
Maybe not.

But this was different. If he lived on the banks of the
Colorado River
and they told him it was going to flood, he couldn't imagine driving away. He might pack some stuff, and be ready to go at a moment's notice, but he wouldn't go miles away. Just up on the hill a little, so he could rush back down after the flood subsided. Maybe the people didn't have any choice. Maybe the police forced them to leave. That was something to consider. Besides, this flood would last almost sixty days. How would someone get supplies with all the stores closed?

Living in
Denver
, he didn't ever remember hearing about evacuations, other than localized ones for gas leaks or something. But it seemed like every spring, the news would show pictures of places in the Midwest getting flooded by the Mississippi or the Missouri or some other river, and those disasters were always followed by some governor declaring a national disaster area, and promising millions or billions in relief funding.

Grant was no fan of disaster relief. Isn't that what insurance was for? He remembered one year, one of the news programs talked to an old-timer who had lived by the river all his life. That guy was no fan of the government bailouts either. He said that the river had flooded the bottoms every five years as long as he could remember. Nobody got hurt until they started building housing developments in the river bottoms. He figured if anybody was dumb enough to build down there, they deserved to lose their homes. And sure enough, when the flooding started, it was them that were flooded out. The old-timer on TV did not want his taxes to bail out a bunch of idiots, and Grant agreed with him.

But this might be different. The lower
Colorado River
hadn't flooded for over seventy years.

Leaving Laughlin and the casinos behind, only desert remained.
In fact, aside from green vegetation on the sides of the river, the valley seemed almost lifeless. There were places where the river had broken out and flooded some of the dry lowlands. Grant wondered if it would make a difference. Would long-dormant flower seeds germinate and sprout, and transform the extended banks into something beautiful? Not likely. True, in the early 1900's, before Hoover Dam, the river flooded the valley every spring. But Grant didn't recall hearing about any fields of flowers, only the pictures of flooding and devastation.

"How many miles to the next city?"
Agent Williams asked.

Shauna responded with no hesitation. "It's just
under
thirty miles to Needles. You can see it ahead, over there." Grant couldn't see her pointing, but he could see the small town.

"
Lake
Havasu
is just beyond, through that small mountain range," Shauna said.

"Tighten your belts and we'll be there in a quickie." Lloyd smiled and Grant felt the helicopter tilt forward and accelerate.

Looking down, it was easy to see the river was higher than normal. In many sections it had spilled over the sides and made small lakes on either side of the channel. Grant saw many places where riverside homes were surrounded by water. He saw water flowing over the top of a bridge in Needles and water on many of the streets close to the river. There were people all over the place, which meant the evacuation order had been largely ignored. After Needles, the damage was less obvious. Grant noticed that the BNSF railroad had given up, and water had breeched their sandbags and buried the tracks just south of the city. He shuddered at the thought of unburying and repairing the rails when the flood was over.

When the river ducked into Topock Gorge, Lloyd followed it, causing Grant to clutch the seat again. After a few minutes the water spread out into a beautiful canyon of jagged red rock.
Lake
Havasu
, like
Lake
Mojave
before, showed no signs of flooding or disaster. The water looked turquoise and calm. No boats were visible on the north end of the lake, but Grant looked ahead and saw a few farther
south
defying the warnings.

After a few minutes, Lloyd laughed loudly. "Check out those guys in the red boat at three o'clock."

Grant scanned for a second to see what Lloyd was talking about, while Lloyd and Agent Williams laughed in his earphones. A long red and white boat pulled two water-skiers while being chased by a police boat with blinking lights. From a distance it looked like the tanned bodies, both skiing and in the boat,
were
naked from the waist up, but as they got closer, he saw that the girls wore swimsuits, just incredibly tiny ones.

"Whatever it takes to get smooth water," said Lloyd.

Ahead, Grant could see a growing city spreading up from the east shore. "Is that Parker?"

Lloyd answered. "No, that's
Havasu City
,
Arizona
. The city of
Parker
is a couple of miles downstream from the dam."

Grant nodded. He had never been to
Lake
Havasu
before and was amazed at how isolated the turquoise lake was, surrounded on all sides by the red rock cliffs.

He heard Shauna's voice in the headphones. "If you look over on the right you can see pipes going up over that hill, and the pumping station on the edge of the lake. That's the California Aqueduct. That's the one that was blown up this morning."

The pipes were larger than Grant imagined. And the hill they went up was tall and steep. He guessed the amount of electricity to pump the water up the hill wasn't trivial. And with that much water, no wonder the bombed aqueduct made a huge mess.

Lloyd looked over at Grant. "When did that happen? I hadn't heard about that."

"It was a few hours ago, just before the sun came up."

"It looks okay to me," Lloyd said.

Shauna explained, "It was out in the desert about twenty or thirty miles from here. The flood made a big lake before they finally shut off the pumps."

"You want to go check it out?" Lloyd asked, hopefully.

Grant thought about it. The aqueduct had supposedly torn up the hillside and flooded acres of desert. He would like to see it too, no doubt about it. But they were far too late to do anything. There were more pressing issues at the dams downstream.

"No, it's out of our way. Besides, we need to get to Parker. We may still be able to accomplish something there."

Lloyd's mouth twitched slightly, which Grant thought might've been an indication of his disappointment. But it happened too fast to be certain. Up ahead, Grant could now see the concrete structure of Parker Dam. He had a feeling that there would be plenty of action there.

CHAPTER 32