Getting in touch with the right person took a few minutes. Sandilands was not at work, or at home. Johnson got him on his cell, but the call was dropped and he had to redial. Another two or three minutes were lost in the fiddling. In the many hearings that would ultimately follow, much focus was placed on this time frame.
Turbee was back in mumble mode. His medication had kicked in, but the extra dosage he’d taken had had an adverse effect; instead of functioning more normally, he had slipped into a quiet, disconnected state. Looking at the floor and speaking to no one in particular, he said, “Why don’t you just open all the penstocks?”
Rahlson and George, both sitting next to Turbee, heard it. “What did you say, Turb?” asked George. Before he could respond, Johnson yelled to Dan.
“I’ve got Sandilands on the phone, Dan! Can I put him on the speakers?”
“Yes. Now please.”
“Hello Bill, been a long time since you and I have talked. How are things?” General Odlum opened up, once the call was connected.
“Jesus Christ,” Rahlson exclaimed. “Get on with it! There’s a sub in the water carrying a massive amount of plastic explosive. Dan. Call. The. Fucking. CAVALRY!” Dan, the General, and Sandilands all ignored him.
“Not bad. What can I do for you, Odlum?” responded Dr. Sandilands, his voice crackling and breaking up a bit over the control room speakers.
“We’re at TTIC, in Washington. The Terrorist Threat Integration Center. We’ve been following the trail of the stolen Semtex. We think that it’s now in a submarine in Lake Powell, heading toward the Glen Canyon Dam. We also think they might have a shaped charge explosive. Could a properly shaped explosive device destroy the dam, if you had, say, 4.5 tons of Semtex?” the General asked.
“Holy doodle,” responded Sandilands. “You guys have got a problem. The device would need to be properly shaped, and have the proper metals along its upper and lower walls. It would have to be machined with great precision. The construction would need to be perfect. And the device would need to be placed inside the dam. But if it were…”
“Suppose the device was in the interior of the dam. Like inside one of the penstocks, for instance. Could it destroy the dam then?” asked Odlum.
“Possibly. We’ve been developing some incredibly powerful shaped charge explosives. It’s amazing what you can do with these things. About three months ago we tested a device like that, and with less than 2,000 pounds of high explosive, we were able to blow through 25 feet of solid steel.” He paused for emphasis. “Twenty-five feet.”
“Of steel?” responded Dan, incredulously.
“Yes. Of steel,” affirmed Sandilands. “It’s highly classified. Up until now, I guess,” he continued. “A couple of our guys invented a new type of shaped charge. We call it a Tiani/Melvin Lens. It was developed by a team of highly skilled mathematicians and engineers. Down the center we used depleted uranium, a heavy metal, to increase the power of the device. We’ve got a couple of them sitting in inventory, actually. No guy off the street would be able to create or manufacture something like that.” He was silent for a second or two. The clock ticked to 10:39AM. “Umm. There is something you guys need to know.”
“What’s that?” asked Dan.
“We believe that a set of plans for the design of a T/M Lens may have been stolen. I’m not sure where they ended up. The FBI was involved in the case.”
“I can help with that,” said the FBI representative at TTIC, who had been quietly sitting at his workstation, taking notes the old fashioned way.
“You’re right when you say the FBI was involved,” he said. “We traced the theft to an Egyptian guy. Nasser somebody or other. He got them from someone at the Livermore Labs. It might have been the coinventor of the device, Mr. Tiani. We’ve been looking at some unusual spending habits of his in the past six months or so. We think that he gave someone else a computer key, allowing them entry to the server that contained the plans. We think the culprit emailed them to someone in Egypt, but we lost the trail there. With this computer-based theft, once someone has the information on a hard drive, it’s game over. You can’t control it or track it after that.”
The clock ticked to 10:40AM. Rahlson was drumming his fingers on his desk in disbelief and agitation. “Dan, God dammit, sound the alarm!”
“Quiet, Rahlson,” rebuked Dan. “We need the facts first. I’m in charge. We don’t want another Haramosh Star misadventure. The President was almost impeached over that.” Dan was now standing, ramrod straight, looking at the Atlas Screen. “George, get us in closer to the dam. Go ahead, General.”
Turbee’s mind was struggling to overcome the fog of too many drugs. He was still mumbling, this time a little louder. “Just open all the penstocks. No submarine of that size could withstand the turbulence that would create.”
“What, Turbee?” George asked again. Before Turbee could answer, General Odlum interrupted.
“OK,” said Odlum. “Bill, the question still stands. If someone made a device precisely in accordance with the plans you’ve developed, could 4.5 tons of Semtex destroy a dam?”
“Yes, I think it could,” said Sandilands. “What the device does is to focus the blast in a very narrow way. Almost like a knife-edge. All that power would be funneled along one plane. If you were to stand 100 feet behind it, you probably wouldn’t be hurt. But if you were 100 feet in front of it, it would cut you in two.”
“There’s 500 or 600 feet of concrete and steel above the penstocks. This device would cut the dam in two?” the General confirmed.
“Yes, I think so. It would be a very narrow blast. But the dam would be cut in two. Water pressure would do the rest,” Sandilands said slowly.
The room had become deathly silent. Everyone had stopped what they were doing and was listening to the conversation. The dam cut in two? And it might be only minutes away?
It was Rahlson who broke the silence. “I think Sandilands is right. The Glen Canyon Dam is done for unless the submarine is intercepted. But it’s much worse than that. If this happens, the dam will have a catastrophic failure. It will all go at once. Lake Powell will thunder down the Marble Canyon, and into the Grand Canyon. A massive amount of silt and mud will go with it, along with the remnants of the dam itself,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
“The water will hit Lake Mead maybe an hour or two later,” he continued. “God alone knows what will happen there. Maybe the Hoover won’t be able to withstand the increase in water. Maybe it’ll go too, and then every dam on the Colorado below that. If that happens, there will be no power or water for years to come. Vegas will become a ghost town. Without water or air conditioners, it will be uninhabitable. The Emir was right. He will destroy Vegas. The city will slowly cook to death. He’ll destroy the Hoover Dam, and a lot more besides. And all of this may be minutes away. I don’t see how that can be prevented. That submarine is 300 or 400 feet below the water surface. We can’t send divers down that far. I think it’s game over, people. I think we’re done for.”
Turbee continued to fight an internal fight against the sleepy, drugged state that was threatening to engulf him. “Just open all the penstocks at once,” he mumbled as the clock ticked over to 10:42AM. Again no one heard him.
The control room had gone dead silent with Rahlson’s words. No one looked up. If Rahlson was correct, TTIC would be a failure, and worse yet, untold economic damage would visit the USA. Maybe fewer people would die than in past terrorist strikes, but the cost would be far, far greater. Through the past month, they had been continually one step behind the Emir, or whoever it was that had engineered this attack. The technique was classic. They were always looking at spot A, only to find that the Semtex was already in spot B. Right up to the present moment, when the military forces of the country were protecting the Hoover Dam instead of being where they were needed, at the Glen Canyon Dam.