The phone went silent again. Grant looked back at the table and he saw the waitress setting the dinner plates on the table. He didn't know what else to say. "Hey, I better let you go so you can get to sleep."
"When are you coming home?"
He wondered the same thing himself. Realistically, he might get stuck out here cleaning up messes for weeks or even months. "I don't know, honey. I'll call you tomorrow when I get a better idea."
"I love you," she said.
Her comment caught him off guard. The "love" words were not often verbalized in their marriage. "I love you too," he mumbled uncomfortably.
He hung up and wandered back to the table. Fred, already cutting into his steak, looked up and smiled when Grant returned.
"What'd she say?"
"She said all the neighbors saw me on TV."
Fred grinned and stuffed some steak in his mouth and responded while still chewing. "Can I wait and get your autograph after dinner?"
Grant laughed. "Yeah. Sure." He sat down and grabbed his steak knife and started to slice his steak when the cell phone rang. He looked at Fred apologetically. "Probably my wife again." However, when he saw the display, the number showed 702, a Nevada number.
He answered, "Hello?"
"Mr. Stevens?" the voice asked. It was a woman's voice that Grant didn't recognize.
"Yeah. I'm Grant Stevens."
The person on the other end sounded nervous. "You guys better get back here. There's been another bomb."
Grant dropped his knife on the plate. Fred looked up and stopped chewing.
"At Hoover?" Grant asked.
"No, Mr. Stevens. Downstream at Lake Mojave. Davis Dam."
The information made no sense. Grant stood. "We'll get back as fast as we can."
Grant hung up the phone and looked over at Fred. "They blew up Davis Dam." Grant waited for Fred to stand, then turned to leave before remembering the check, which the waitress hadn't left on the table yet.
Fred, one step ahead of him, pulled his wallet from his pocket and pulled a twenty out and tossed it on the table, more than enough to cover the casino steaks.
At the last minute while standing and ready to go, Grant looked back at the steak and felt a huge regret, finally noticing how hungry he was. He reached down and cut a large slice and stuffed it in his mouth. Fred nodded and grabbed the rolls out of the basket in the middle of the table.
"Back to Hoover?" Fred asked, more a statement than a question.
Grant nodded.
CHAPTER 25
As soon as Grant and Fred walked back into the Hoover Dam visitor center, they tracked down the person who had taken the call from Davis Dam. The call had been taken by one of Fred's technicians. The woman explained that the guy at Davis was a security guard named Blaine. Grant dialed the number, and Blaine picked right up.
"Davis Dam. Blaine."
"This is Grant Stevens from the Bureau of Reclamation. I'm calling from Hoover Dam. What happened there, Blaine?"
"He blew the place up. Up on the dike. There's a big hole in it now."
He? The reference threw Grant for a loop, making him abandon his previous questions. "Who, Blaine? You said 'he' blew it up?"
Blaine's answer came back as if everyone should know. "The guy from the Bureau. He was just up there drilling holes in the spot where it exploded. He's the one that must've done it."
Grant was confused. "Bureau guy?"
"Yeah. He drove up here in a Bureau truck, logo and everything. Said he needed to take moisture tests and that he would be drilling into the dam."
Grant wanted to ask a million more questions about the perpetrator, now possibly an insider, but forced himself to focus on the damage. "Blaine, I'll come back to him later. What about the dam? You said something about a big hole. How bad is it?" He was afraid of the answer.
"It's big. About thirty feet deep and forty feet wide."
Grant concluded that the amount of water already flowing through must be incredible. "How fast is it washing out, Blaine?"
There was silence. "Whaddya mean?"
Grant explained. "Water. How much water is going through the hole and how fast is it growing?"
There was a moment of hesitation from the guard. "None. There ain't no water coming out yet, just a big notch in the dam. Hell, you think I'd be standin' here answerin' the phones if the dam was falling apart?"
This confused Grant. How could there not be any water? At the same time, he felt like he had just won the lottery. They might still be able to save Davis, something he hadn't even dared to consider since he first received the news of the explosion. "I'm confused, Blaine. You said there's an opening in the dam thirty feet deep, yet there's no water. That doesn't make sense. How could the water not be pouring out? The dam's almost full, isn't it?"
"I don't know Mr… What'd you say your name was?"
"Stevens. Grant Stevens." Grant could sense the guy's excitement and forgave him for not remembering his name. "Blaine, has anyone gone up there and inspected it yet?"
"They're up there right now, Mr. Stevens."
"Can you connect me with one of them?"
Billy Watkins walked up to the edge of the crater on top of Davis Dam. His nostrils flared at the smell of something he didn't recognize. It reminded him of the air after a thunderstorm, only this air didn't smell as clean. It had the same charged quality, but it was mixed with dust and a chemical smell, some of which still floated in the air. Billy stood tall and lanky in his security uniform. He had ratty, unkempt blond hair that wandered out from under his security hat, and he sported a thin mustache. Billy tried to make up for the thinness by letting it grow longer, but this only resulted in the hairs tending to mat together and highlight rather than cover up the thinness.
He peered down into the hole, bracing himself, not knowing how stable the bank might be. He jumped when his cell phone rang. He saw the others, Dennis the night shift technician and the two day-shift techs, glance over at his ringing phone. He picked it up. "Hello?"
The man introduced himself as a Grant Stevens from the Bureau of Reclamation. He said he was calling from Hoover and that Blaine had given him Billy's cell phone number.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Stevens?"
"Blaine told me that you are inspecting the dam. What can you tell me about the damage?"
Billy looked around, noticing that the crater was concentrated on the dry side of the dam. The notch didn't go all the way through to the wet side, which would have been a disaster. "We just got up here," he said. He described, as best he could, the huge crater and how it didn't reach to the wet side of the dam. While he explained the situation to the guy on the phone, he saw Dennis run over and pick up something. Dennis waved to him, motioning him over to look at what he had just found.
"Hang on, Mr. Stevens. Looks like Dennis found something." Still clutching the phone to his ear, he skirted the perimeter of the crater over to where the notch would have extended to the wet side. Dennis held the ends of two green wires that stuck out of the ground. Billy relayed the find to Grant.
"So one of his bombs didn't detonate?" Billy heard Grant ask into the phone, a conclusion Billy had reached independently.
"Yeah, I'd say that's what happened," he responded.
"Is the dam stable? Does it need to be reinforced?" Grant asked.
Billy looked around. He was just a security guard. How was he supposed to know? He brought the phone down and asked Dennis, "Hey, this guy wants to know if the dam needs shoring up. He's wondering if it might be weak enough to fail as the water rises."
Dennis shrugged, looking down at the water. "Gee, I don't know. Then again, it wouldn't hurt anything to shore it up, would it?"