Some of those areas had been getting rain every day for a week. Lots of water raining down into Mississippi and its tributaries, joining the ice melt pouring down from the Rockies. What this meant was that the floods weren’t going away any time soon. The rivers would stay full, and that would delay repair work on the levees and bridges, prevent people from returning to their homes, and hamper the evacuation.
Well, Jessica thought. It was time to work out what she could do.
The river below Vicksburg was still under her control, even though she’d lost everything north of it. But she could use the controlled part of the river to affect the flood to the north. When rivers flowed fast, it was for one of two reasons: either there was an enormous weight of water behind them, pushing the water down its channel at greater speed; or the path of the river was steeper. When a riverbed was steeper, gravity pulled the water along it at increased velocity. Jessica didn’t want to increase the volume of water, which would only increase flooding. But she could make the river steeper. She could release water through the Old River Control system in Louisiana. Old River Control was one of the Corps of Engineers’ most colossal and long-term projects. It was designed to keep the wandering Mississippi firmly in its place.
Over its history, the big river shifted its path through most of the state of Louisiana, always seeking the steepest, shortest route to the sea. It settled into its present path around 900 A.D., around the time of a large earthquake on the New Madrid fault; and when human settlements were built in the years since, they tended to take the Mississippi’s route as given.
By the mid-twentieth century, it had become clear that the Mississippi was ready to make a leap out of its bed and carve itself a new route to the sea. Most likely, it would bypass Baton Rouge and New Orleans and spill out into the Gulf in the vicinity of the modest town of Morgan City, well to the west of New Orleans. The salt ocean would pour upward into the river’s old bed, turning the New Orleans waterfront into a narrow, twisting bay that would soon fill with silt. Whole sections of Louisiana would be turned into unproductive salt marsh—all the fresh-water plants and animals dying in an unprecedented ecological catastrophe—and New Orleans, the nation’s largest port, would be stranded in the midst of the dying land, its economic raison d’etre gone and its drinking water turned to salt. The river’s weak point was in middle Louisiana, where the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Atchafalaya came within a few miles of one another. Old River Control was a giant engineering project built to straddle the three rivers, sending water east or west as the situation demanded. The Morganza Hoodway, with its 125 gates, could shift 600,000 cubic feet of Mississippi flood per second into the Red/Atchafalaya system, thus preserving southern Louisiana from flood. Or, if the Mississippi was low, water could be shunted from the Red into the Father of Waters, which made certain that New Orleans remained a deep-water port. To take advantage of the water moving from one system to the other, the Murray hydroelectric plant had been prefabricated in New Orleans, at the Avondale Shipyards, and shipped north on barges to take its place in the Old River system, the largest structure ever to be floated on the Mississippi.
What Jessica needed to do was shift a lot of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya Basin. This would lower the level of the river in Louisiana and make its path steeper, thereby draining the flooded lands more quickly.
She would dump as much water as she could while still retaining New Orleans and Baton Rouge as deep-water ports. If Morganza’s 125 gates weren’t enough—and she didn’t believe they’d all been open together at any point in their history—she could open the Bonnet Carre Spillway above New Orleans, which could shift two million gallons per second from the Mississippi into Lake Pontchartrain. That should do it, she thought with satisfaction.
Get this river moving.
They were fond of frying on the Beluthahatchie. Nick, sticking his head into the galley to ask for a glass of water, saw chicken, fish, potatoes, and okra all sizzling away. He took his glass of water and wandered off, stomach rumbling with hunger.
He found Jason straddling the gunwale near the stern, where their boats had been tied up. He was listlessly watching the water as it streamed astern in the growing darkness. Swallows in search of insects skimmed just millimeters above the surface.
“You okay?” Nick asked.
Jason nodded.
It was hard enough, Nick thought, being father to his own child. But it was clear enough, he reflected, that there was no one else here who was going to do the job. He put his glass down on the gunwale and looked at Jason.
“Your father may be in China,” he said, softly as he could, “but I know he’s worried sick about you.” Jason turned away, gazed out at the far bank of the river, the last red light of the sun that touched the tops of the distant trees. “I don’t know how to reach him.”
“He may be on his way back,” Nick said. “I would be, in his place.”
“What could he do?” Jason asked. “I’m here on this boat. He’ll be in China, or California, or someplace else. But he won’t be here.”
“Just relieve his mind, Jason. I know how I felt until I talked to Arlette just now, so I know how your father feels. He’s got to be in agony. Call where he works, call the American Red Cross and give them your name. They’ll get ahold of him—that’s what they do.” Jason looked down at his hands. “If I call,” he said, “I have to tell him that my mother’s dead.” Nick felt a lump in his throat. Nick put an arm around the boy, hugged him for a moment. Jason accepted the touch, but otherwise did not respond. “I’ll call first and tell him about your mom,” Nick offered, “if you don’t want to do it.”
Jason shook his head. “That’s my job, I guess,” he said. He sighed. “I’ll probably just get his answering machine, anyway.”
Nick dropped his arm, looked into Jason’s eyes. “When he plays that machine,” he said, “And finds out you’re alive, he’ll be the happiest man in the world. Believe me.”
There was a sudden glare of light as Beluthahatchie’s lights came on. Not just the navigation lights, but floodlights as well, the superstructure clearly illuminated. The captain was making certain that his stranded vessel was visible to any other traffic on the river.
Jason blinked in the strong light, started to say something, then fell silent. Swallows flitted over the water just beyond Beluthahatchie’s pool of light. Then Jason tried again.
“When you were talking to your daughter,” he said, “you said somebody—I don’t remember the name—the person didn’t make it.” He looked at Nick. “Was that your wife?” Nick shook his head. “Viondi,” he said. “My best friend. He was…” His voice trailed away, and he tried again. “A cop shot him. Thought he was a looter, I guess, but all he was carrying was his own stuff from the car.” He touched the bandaged wound on his arm. “Man tried to shoot me, too, but I ran.”
“I’m sorry,” Jason said.
“Me too.”
“I was kind of mad at you,” Jason said, “because you had a family, and I didn’t. But I guess you’ve lost somebody, too.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you didn’t want to go near the police the other day.” Nick’s nerves hummed to a memory of the terror that seized him then, had clamped down on his mind and made him steer the bass boat away from shore.