"You see it, right?" he said to Reese.
"See what?" Reese joked, although none of the passengers laughed.
Agent Williams leaned forward, grasping the dashboard to get a better look. "Don't get too close. Stop about here." She didn't look at Reese, but kept her eyes on the crater.
Reese eased the truck to a halt. "Here?"
"Yeah, that's fine," she said.
Reese shut off the truck and all four of them hopped out.
The agent looked at Blaine. "How many people have been over the site since the explosion?"
Blaine responded, "Billy and two technicians."
"Did they drive up here or walk?"
"They walked. They came over from the generation plant. " He pointed toward the concrete structure that housed the turbines.
"So no other vehicles have been up here since the explosion?"
Blaine shook his head. "No. We're the first."
"Did they touch the wires?" she asked. Her presence was much more powerful than Grant would have guessed when he first saw her.
Blaine hesitated. "Yeah, I think Billy said they picked up the wires when they saw them." He looked around at Grant and Reese for support. "Sorry," he added.
Grant thought he saw her grit her teeth again.
"Don't worry," she said. "Hopefully we can still get a few good prints off the wires."
She started off toward the crater and stopped abruptly, turning around to face them. Although none of them had yet moved, she told them to stay put and give her a few moments alone on the site.
After she walked out of earshot, Reese spoke up. "Bossy little thing, ain't she?"
Grant guessed that in Reese's line of work, he seldom ran into women in powerful positions. He defended her. "At least she seems competent. Let's hope she gets some fingerprints or something else to catch our bad guy."
Reese lowered his voice. "Is this the same guy that wiped out Lake Powell's dam this morning?"
The question surprised Grant. He shrugged his shoulders. "Hey, I'm not the FBI. I'm just a guy that works on the dams. But yeah, that's the speculation."
"Unbelievable," Blaine said from behind.
DAY THREE
Wednesday, June 23
CHAPTER 27
Grant, Reese, and Blaine watched the FBI woman meticulously walk the area around the crater. She stopped occasionally, and with a huge set of tweezers, retrieved small objects and placed them in zip-lock bags. After she had spent a few minutes covering the area, she stood straight and glanced back at the men.
"Can we come over there yet?" Grant yelled.
She scanned the area under her feet, then looked back up and waved them over. "Bring the shovels," she yelled.
Reese grabbed two shovels out of the back of his truck, then the three men walked toward the crater and the waiting agent. The crest of the dam had been just over fifty feet wide. However, the explosion had carved over thirty feet away on the downstream side. At first glance, Grant guessed that there had been a line of explosive devices, and that one had not detonated. When they reached Agent Williams, she crouched, holding something. Grant saw two green wires sticking out of the ground, which the agent had wrapped in plastic to prevent further contamination. She asked for one of the shovels and immediately started trying to dig next to where the wires came out of the ground. The wires extruded from a hole drilled into the asphalt road, and the shovel made no progress. She swiveled around the wires, looking for a better angle, but the asphalt wouldn't give. Grant wondered what she would do next.
Reese walked up behind her. "That ain't gonna work."
She glared at him and Grant could tell she resented the man, but she stopped digging. "What do you suggest?"
Reese lifted his hat and swept his hand over his balding head. "I have some other tools, chisels and stuff that would work to widen the hole a little, but it'd take too long." He pointed from Grant to the crater. "We can't wait around for a couple of hours while you bring up a spoonful at a time." She glared at him, but he continued. "Why don't we just pull the thing out of the hole?"
She looked at Reese and frowned. "It's an intact detonator. I don't want to pull the wires out of it or I might damage it."
The comment made the construction man hesitate. "It ain't gonna blow up, is it?"
She shook her head. "No, but I need to get the detonator undisturbed if possible, especially if it's homemade, and we need to get a clean sample of the explosive material, which I'm assuming is ammonium nitrate fertilizer. That's what they used at Glen Canyon."
"Assuming it's the same guys," Grant added from behind.
Agent Williams and Reese both looked at Grant, but neither said anything.
Reese motioned toward the hole. "I got some long screw drivers and stuff that we can poke down there. If we can loosen all that stuff on top, you might be able to pull the detonator out without screwing it up too bad."
She gave in and nodded.
Reese scrounged around in the back of his truck and returned with the tools and a section of galvanized pipe. Reese knelt down to dig, but the agent handed him the wires, took the long screwdriver and began the excavation herself. In order to see better, she pulled a long metal flashlight out of her case, and shined it down the hole. She dug only a few inches, before she became excited.
"Definitely ammonium nitrate," she said enthusiastically. She carefully scooped small amounts into another zip-lock bag.
Reese watched her zip a bag closed. "You need that for evidence?"
She resumed digging. "We should be able to get a chemical signature off these samples. It could show whether it was the same batch as Glen Canyon." She glanced at him for a second. "We might even be able to figure out where it was manufactured."
Reese turned around and winked at Grant. "If I was married to her, I don't think I'd be sneaking around behind her back."
Grant noticed Agent Williams grunt a small laugh. It was the first sign that she might actually have a sense of humor. Somewhere behind, he heard a rumbling sound. He turned to see a large flatbed semi coming through the security gate with a huge bulldozer on the back. He saw two more trucks behind, one carrying a second smaller bulldozer, and the third with the front loader. He wondered how much longer Agent Williams would need.
"Hold it." She stopped Reese who was scooping debris away from the whole with his hand. She took the wires from him and gently tugged in various directions. "It's coming." She jostled it again, then carefully withdrew a black metal tube from the hole.
"Got it," she said and they all watched as she carefully coiled the wire and the detonator into a large plastic bag, trying not to handle it any more than necessary.
"Unbelievable," Blaine whispered from behind.
She retrieved a small dipper out of her case and scooped up more of the white pellets. These she put in a smaller plastic bag. She went down for two more scoops before she felt satisfied. She started packing the two bags back in the case when Reese interrupted her.
"Is that it?"
She looked up, obviously not as stressed as when she arrived. "Yeah, sure." She hesitated, staring at what she had in her hands, then looked up at Grant. "You guys can go ahead."
Reese walked back to his pickup to radio the truck drivers below. Special Agent Williams spent a moment measuring the hole with a small ruler, then retrieved a camera from her briefcase and shuffled around the hole taking multiple pictures.
With the explosive issue taken care of, Grant turned and studied the crater for the first time. At thirty feet wide, it covered most of the width of the top of the dam, leaving only twenty feet where they had dug up the explosives. It made him hesitate to step too close to the edge, afraid the bank would collapse and he'd fall into the crater. A glance upstream where the still, black water inched higher by the minute more than convinced him to count his lucky stars that the bomb in question had not detonated. If the explosion had gone as planned, water would be flowing over the dam and they would have lost Davis Dam.