He jumped in the truck, hoping it would start. Thankfully, it did, and he drove back along the dike. It took all his self-control to resist the urge to floor it and speed down the hill. When he finally pulled up to the roadblock, he could feel the hair standing up on the back of his neck. The Bureau guard stepped over to talk. The man had hoped to get waved through.
"What'd ya find out?" the guard said, looking in the back of the truck.
"Dry as a bone, just as I expected."
This seemed to relieve the guard. "I guess that's good news. This dam's likely to get a good work out for the next couple days with all the water headed our way."
The skinny man had a hard time not rushing his words. "Yeah. You know it."
"So ya think it'll hold?" asked the guard.
For some reason, the question caught him off guard. No, it wasn't going to hold. It would explode in eight and a half minutes and counting. For a moment his brain told him to warn the guy, tell him to get away as fast as he could, to not look back. He felt like screaming, "There's a bomb, you idiot! It's going to blow! Get out of here!" But he didn't. Instead, he responded in a calm, clear voice that surprised even him. "Yeah, it'll hold. No problem. But there's going to be a ton of water barreling out of those spillways."
"Unbelievable," said the guard, looking over at the dam itself. "Unbelievable."
The skinny man nodded. "You said it. Things are going to get a little crazy around here."
The guard smiled and stepped back, an unspoken signal that he was free to leave.
Blaine Roberts leaned against a police car and sipped his coffee. They had been turning cars away from the dam for three hours straight and finally they caught a break. Maybe the word was finally getting around that they had closed the road across the dam.
What a night. He'd worked night shift security at Davis Dam for almost three years now. Nothing ever happened during the night shift. Then the disaster a few hundred miles upstream had changed everything. When he arrived at work at 8:30 p.m., the whole place buzzed like a stirred-up hornet's nest. They told him when he arrived that Hoover Dam, just sixty-five miles upstream, was going to try to catch all of the floodwater. Unfortunately for Davis Dam, that meant Hoover was dumping a ton of water, the most in its history — 250,000 cubic feet per second, ten times normal. It was going to get worse, too; when the water started to rise at Hoover, the flow would increase to almost 500,000 cubic feet per second. He summed it up to himself. Unbelievable.
They had told him that in reaction to what Hoover was doing, this afternoon they had opened all the water works at Davis Dam. Unfortunately that wasn't enough. The water in Lake Mojave was still rising over eight inches per hour, targeted to reach the top of the spillways a little after midnight. With full spillways, theoretically Davis Dam should be able to match Hoover Dam's 500,000 cubic feet per second, and the water in the lake would stop rising. None of that had ever been tested however. Unbelievable.
In spite of everyone running around like chickens with their heads cut off, the guy from the Bureau had been the first official visitor they'd had at Davis Dam today. Blaine was more than happy for the guy to go up on the dam and take some moisture measurements. Hell, he could measure all damn night if he wanted to, as long as he gave Blaine a heads-up if the dam was going to bust so he could get the hell out of here. It'd never bothered him earlier in the evening, but Blaine now wished the roadblock wasn't right below the earth dam. He'd prefer a place a little higher or maybe farther downstream.
When the guy from the Bureau returned from his inspection and his measurements, he had seemed calm and cool. He said the moisture tests went well, whatever that meant. The guy had acted like the whole thing was routine, as if he drove around taking moisture measurements every day in the face of dam failures. Blaine wondered if the guy would return later, when the spillways were going full blast. That was when the moisture measurements would mean something. The guy hadn't said anything about returning and Blaine hadn't thought to ask.
He stood and walked behind the police car to see if there were any more good donuts. The pink box sat on the hood of a second police car. He liked chocolate, but the only chocolate one left had coconut sprinkled on top, and Blaine was no fan of coconut. He grabbed it anyway because the sprinkles were easy to pick off. He leaned on the other car and looked up at the dam. He had never seen water in the spillways, not in his three years working here.
He glanced up at the gravel dike, holding back all the water in Lake Mojave, just in time to see the explosion, a gray and black cloud shooting high into the air over the middle of the dike. Blaine instinctively ducked for cover. Looking back out to the dam he could make out rocks and other large clumps of material in the cloud. While Blaine watched, mesmerized, the sound wave hit him like a hammer, knocking him backwards. He dropped the donut. The intense pain in his ears caused him to drop the coffee as well in an attempt to cover them to protect them. He heard one of the policemen swear. He looked up at the dike again and saw that most of the debris had fallen, but a large cloud remained. He looked down at the ground and saw his spilled coffee and donut.
He articulated his feelings. "What the hell happened?" His ears were still ringing so loudly that ambient sounds were muffled.
Blaine looked around. He knew the techs were over by the spillways someplace and he'd seen Billy, the other guard, walk over there too. Ears still ringing, he pulled his radio from his belt and looked at the display, half expecting the thing to be busted. The radio blasted before he tried to talk into it. It was Billy. "Blaine, you okay?"
Blaine heard it, but just barely over the ringing in his ears. He turned up the volume and responded. "Roger, I'm okay, but my ears are ringing like a church bell. What happened?"
The radio squawked again. "We don't know what blew. From the control center, we heard it, but we couldn't see anything."
Blaine looked back up on the dike where the dust had mostly settled and now he saw a thirty-foot-deep, thirty-foot-wide notch in the dike. He keyed the mike. "Unfreakin believable, there's a big hole blown out of the top of the dam."
There was silence after Blaine's description before Billy asked another question. "Blaine, the techs wanna know if there's any water, you know, coming out of the notch."
Blaine looked hard, trying to see through the remaining cloud of dust. "It don't look like it."
There was silence again. Blaine guessed that Billy was talking to the techs.
Finally Billy said, "Blaine, the guys are going up to check it out. You'd better call Hoover and report it." The radio went silent for a second, then, "Maybe you'd better call the cops too."
Blaine looked over at the two cops working the roadblock with him. They both stared up at the dam with they're mouths hanging open. Blaine didn't think he would need to call them. But the call to Hoover was a great idea.
A waitress, probably in her fifties, far beyond the age to wear such a short, revealing cocktail dress, took their menus, then turned and headed back to the kitchen. Grant wondered how the casinos persuaded older ladies to wear those dresses. You'd think they'd go on strike or something. They were unionized, weren't they? Yet you saw it in almost all the casinos, especially the older ones.