“Hey, I say let’s leave it up to the FBI now,” Briggs said. “My bosses at ISA are screaming their heads off, asking what the hell I’m doing flying support for the local yokels. No one has any sense of humor anymore.” Patrick kept flipping through computer records. “What are you doing there?”
“Just trying to figure out what Townsend’s men were looking at. They were obviously accessing all our Internet stuff, trying to find a way to access our company network, looking for passwords, downloaded messages, journals, notes, that sort of thing. I should be able to backtrack and find out what they were looking at.”
“Say what?”
“They were looking for clues about where users stored their passwords,” Patrick explained. “Remember when you could look around the doorsills and inside desk drawers around any combination safe in the Air Force and find the combination to that safe? Guys had trouble remembering the combination, so they wrote it down near the safe itself.”
“Now, that’s stupid.”
“Stupid but commonplace,” Patrick said. “Computers can do the same thing, but they do it electronically. You just need to know where to look.”
“Can you see if they broke in to your system?”
“The security offices in Arkansas should be able to tell us that when they do a security audit,” Patrick said. He called up several Internet-access programs and browsers. “Judging by how much they hurt Helen, they weren’t able to get in.” He paused, lost in thought. “They were definitely looking at the engineers’ individual Internet-access applications, looking for stored passwords. The company prohibits storing passwords and our applications don’t allow it, but some guys get careless or lazy and program them in anyway, using macros.”
“You lost me, man,” Hal Briggs said. “That computer stuff is for the birds. Give me a gun and a chopper any day, and I’ll solve all the problems of the world.” But curiosity got the better of him, and he peeked over Patrick’s shoulder. “You got something?”
“Not about our network, but something else,” Patrick said. “This is an Internet browser program, for accessing articles on the World Wide Web-that’s the global network of computers, all linked together. Browsers save pages in files called caches, which allows the pages to load faster. You can look back through the cached pages and see what they were looking at. Pages accessed from secure sites aren’t cached, but articles accessed over nonsecure sites are. Look at this.”
Hal studied the screen. “That’s weird,” he remarked. “What’s CERES? The name of a town? You think that’s where Townsend is?”
“No,” Patrick replied. “CERES stands for California Environmental Resources Agency. They do studies on the use of land, water, air… holy shit, look at this.”
“I’m lost, Patrick,” Briggs said, shaking his head. “This is more environmental stuff. The Bureau of Reclamation? Why would they be looking up all this?” But Patrick flipped to the next cached page on the browser, and he started to understand. “Hey, that’s the dam right near here, right?” he asked. “Folsom Dam? What’s all this about?”
“Never mind!” Patrick shouted. “Get the MV-22 ready to fly right now! We’ve got to get out to the dam!” He hit the print button on the keyboard, printed out a copy of the diagram, and raced out onto the flight line.
Near Folsom Lake,
twenty-five miles northeast of
Sacramento, California
a few minutes later
“This is the forensic-summary report on the Gate Number Three rupture back a few years ago at Folsom Dam,” Patrick said on interphone. He and Hal Briggs were sitting in the rear of the MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, heading northeast toward the large concrete dam. “The support structures on one of the spillway Tainter gates broke and sent half the volume of the lake into the American River. The river canyon contained the water from that break…”
“So you think Townsend is going to blow up these Tainter gates?” Briggs asked. “Heck, why not just blow the dam itself?”
“The dam is concrete, probably thirty feet thick. How much dynamite would it take to blow that wall?”
“Probably ten thousand pounds of TNT.”
“It would probably take a lot less trouble and explosives to duplicate the 1995 accident and blow those struts on the Tainter gates,” Patrick said. “That forensic report they downloaded from the Internet spelled out exactly where they could set the charges to dislodge those gates. And if more than two or three of those floodgates let loose, with a nearly full dam it would cause a massive flood downstream. Christ, it could wipe out a half-dozen towns along the river and inundate most of downtown Sacramento. The lake is near capacity right now from all the rains and runoff.”
“But I still don’t get it,” Briggs said. “Why do all this? Is he just plain crazy?”
“I don’t know,” Patrick replied. “But we’ve got to stop him first.”
“You ever think about the possibility that this might be a trap?” Hal asked. “What if he planted that information on the computer so you’d find it and chase him out there? What if this is another diversion?”
“We’ve got nothing else to go on, Hal,” Patrick said. He put on the suit helmet, activated the BERP system, then clicked open the radio commlink: “Drop me off at the top of the dam,” he said to the pilot over their command channel. “Then get as close as you can to the face of the top of the dam. Watch out for power lines.”
“We’ve got the power lines on radar,” the pilot reported. The MV-22 used a millimeter-wave radar that could detect power lines as small as a half-inch in diameter in time for the pilots to steer over or under them.
The big aircraft settled into a hover just ten feet above Folsom Dam Road atop the huge concrete dam. Patrick, fully suited up, jumped out of the right-side cargo door. He could see the level of the lake on the northeast side of the dam-it was just a foot from the top, 465 feet above mean sea level. No doubt about it: If the dam let go, it would create a monumental disaster for miles downstream on either side of the American River.
Patrick landed on the road, climbed over the guardrail, and jumped down onto a catwalk. The catwalk ran across the top of the spillways, eight steep concrete chutes that plunged 340 feet down into the American River gorge. All the spillways appeared dry, with no more than small rivulets of water running down the steep faces. That meant that the entire discharge from the lake was being diverted to the hydroelectric turbine chutes to make electricity.
Right below the catwalk were the tops of the eight Tainter gates. The Tainter gates were huge curved steel doors fifty feet high and forty-two feet wide, with support struts in the middle that attached the gates to trunnion pins on each side; the pins were mounted on the concrete supports on both sides of the spillway. Each gate had two large chains, resembling huge bicycle chains, that lifted the gates when necessary and allowed water to flow down over the spillway to relieve hydrostatic pressure from the reservoir side of the dam.
From the catwalk, Patrick could look down the back of the Tainter gates at the chains, using the infrared scanner visor on his helmet. Everything looked normal. He ran down the catwalk and inspected the top of each gate. Still nothing. “I don’t see anything yet,” Patrick radioed to the MV-22. “You guys see anything?”
“Not yet,” Briggs replied. The pilots were using the infrared scanner in the nose turret to scan the face of the dam. “We’re getting as close as we can, but those transmission lines will keep us at least two hundred feet from the dam. We’ll see if we can slip in between the lines and the dam, but it’ll be tight. We’ve got dam inspectors and National Guard on the way to secure the dam. Their ETA is about fifteen minutes.”