“For fuck’s sake, will someone please call the goddamn cavalry!?” shouted a highly agitated Lance. He was standing now. “If some terrorist bastard is down there in Lake Powell with a sub and this shaped charge thing, will someone please blow it the hell up now? Please?!”
“We’ll see about that,” said General Odlum. “We’ve got a couple of Hoovers flying over Lake Mead. They’ve already been directed to the Glen Canyon Dam. And we have other firepower up that way from Edwards. Yes, the cavalry is definitely coming.”
“Hoovers?” asked George.
“Hoovers. Otherwise known as Vikings. Lockheed S-3B Vikings,” said Odlum. “They’re used specifically for the detection and attack of submarines. We had two of them patrolling the Lake Mead area already, to make sure that there was nothing illicit in the waters. Nobody really thought of patrolling Lake Powell.”
The S-3B Viking was an exotic, high-tech aircraft, if there ever was one. It carried a crew of four, including the pilot, copilot, tactical coordinator, and sensor operator. It had highly efficient engines, which sounded like vacuum cleaners when in operation — hence the nickname “Hoover.” The Viking’s powerful computer system processed information generated by acoustic and nonacoustic target sensor systems. The plane also possessed an impressive array of airborne weaponry and antisubmarine ordnance. One of these weapons was the AGM-84 Harpoon, a self-guiding missile that gave the Viking below-surface capability. This weapon turned on its seeker, located its target, and struck it, without further guidance from its launch platform. Once it was in the water, any target would have considerable difficulty avoiding the missile. General Odlum, who knew all these details, noticed his hands shaking as he dialed the numbers on the phone. The entire American Southwest would be depending on those very missiles for its future.
The general uproar in the control room increased with every passing minute. Sandiland’s call was dropped at some point. No one but George and Rahlson heard Turbee, still mumbling to himself.
“Turb,” George finally asked, “why open the penstocks?”
“Because it’s a small submarine,” said Turbee, rousing himself enough to answer. “It will head toward a closed penstock. If it goes toward an open penstock, turbulence in the water will pull it in and destroy it. To be successful, it will have to go toward a closed penstock. If these guys are half as smart as they seem to be, the pilots of the sub will have received these as their most important instructions. It’s really basic, you guys. It’s our best bet. And I think it might be the only way to stop them, at this point.”
George and Rahlson, almost as one, yelled from their stations. “Open the penstocks! The turbulence will destroy the submarine!”
“What?” asked Dan, typically slow to react.
“Get the dam to open the penstocks! It’s your best bet,” urged George. He had exploded from his seat and sprinted toward Dan. Now he grabbed his arm and shook him.
Dan slowly extracted his arm from George’s grip and looked at Dennis Daley, who had come over from FEMA. “Can you get them to do that too?”
“I think so. Let me call FEMA headquarters.” He did so, but was then transferred from one station to another, put on hold, and then disconnected. Ten minutes later, he was still lost in the endless maze of Washington bureaucracy. When he was asked, at the hearings that took place in the months after, why he hadn’t simply called directory assistance, or Google’d the dam for the number, all he could do was shrug. It wasn’t policy to go around the other agencies like that. They had a protocol.
55
Mustafa was waiting for them at the Page airport. The Ford screeched to a halt, and Yousseff, Kumar, Izzy, and Ba’al ran toward the idling Lear. The plane roared down the airstrip. When the rental agency clerk came running out of the terminal, he found the truck still idling on the runway, with no one else in sight. “You haven’t signed the paperwork…” he said quietly to himself.
It was 8:50AM, Mountain Standard Time, and 7:50AM in California. Yousseff’s second pilot, Badr al-Sobeii, already had the Gulfstream running when they arrived in Long Beach. Rika was by his side. Both were worried and stressed almost beyond endurance by the time the rented Lear finally taxied to a halt in front of the PWS hangar. Ba’al, Izzy, Kumar, and Yousseff disembarked. They wasted no time. The five of them, friends since childhood, boarded the jet. Mustafa cut the engines on the Lear, then ran to join them. Badr taxied out the second the door was closed.
The Vikings arrived at the east end of the canyon within 15 minutes. It took a few more to reach their destination. There, just ahead, was the awesome structure of the Glen Canyon Dam — every bit as large and impressive as the Hoover. At 9:02AM, the two planes dropped four AGM-84 Harpoon missiles into Lake Powell, just upstream from the dam.
Sam and Hank watched the two jets fly overhead, pull a steep turn, and come directly back toward the dam at a low elevation. They saw puffs of smoke from each wing, and then watched four missiles enter the water and disappear from view.
Deep beneath the surface, Massoud and Javeed had cut though the last of the steel vertical mullions protecting the penstock. It was time to start the final transfer. This was the trickiest part of the mission. The payload was extremely heavy. The Ark itself weighed more than a ton, and the Semtex within it weighed 4.5 tons. It had been set on the roof of the Pequod as the little submarine was starting to descend, so that the buoyancy of the water lessened the pressure and weight of the load. According to physics and the engineers, this had been the only way to saddle the small sub with such weight. Moving it to its final destination would be just as complicated. The Ark was sitting on the small platform, equipped with small rubber wheels, that made up the Pequod’s roof. Javeed pressed a button, and the latches that attached the transfer platform to the sub were automatically loosened. The platform lifted up, away from the body of the sub.
Massoud positioned the Pequod so that the submarine was below the penstock entrance and the Ark itself level with it. The platform assembly on which the Ark was mounted had, built underneath it, two telescoping rails that extended a little more than 50 feet forward. Javeed flipped a series of switches on the console before him, and flawlessly, noiselessly, the two rails extended through the penstock cavity deep into the interior of the dam. As a final piece of wizardry, Kumar had created further extending tracks, along which the Ark’s platform would glide, traveling even deeper into the structure of the dam. The technology that had connected the Mankial Star to the Haramosh Star looked archaic compared to this, the final transfer. Power was provided to the platform for this process by a mini power cable, which connected directly to the powerful engines of the Pequod.
Now came the final hurdle. The ballast tanks of the Pequod were large and, at this point, full of air. Normally that would not be the case at this depth, but the weight of the Ark had required it. This had been the only way to keep the sub from sinking into the mud and silt at the bottom of the lake, trapped by the weight of its cargo. If the Ark slid off the sub willy nilly, the sudden change in weight and buoyancy would be so great that the Pequod would be wrenched upward in a wild and unpredictable course. The Ark would derail, and the mission would fail. Instead, as the Ark was slowly pushed forward into the penstock, controlled by Massoud, the ballast tanks were slowly discharged and filled with water by pumps controlled by Javeed. It was a slow and dangerous process, with the Pequod’s tail sometimes lurching upward, sometimes down. There were many times when one or the other of the ji-hadists jumped, sure that they had lost the precarious balance and failed at the mission. Gradually, however, the platform, with its deadly cargo, moved from the Pequod onto the rails that had been deployed within the penstock tunnel.