The Storm

CHAPTER 53

JOE ZAVALA WAS RUNNING FOR HIS LIFE. BAD ANKLE AND all, he was charging diagonally across the wet slope of the Aswan Dam in search of higher and safer ground. The major lagged behind, seemingly still awed by what was going on.

“I wouldn’t keep looking back if I were you.”

The major got the message and pressed forward, catching up with Joe.

Joe’s plan was to get to the top, away from the widening breach, and survey the damage.

Upon reaching the crest, Joe stood on the road that crossed the dam. A thirty-foot-deep V had already been gouged out. Water from Lake Nasser was pouring through it and down over the side.

In the garish illumination of the floodlights, Joe could see water scouring away the rocks and sand like a flash flood shooting through a narrow mountain canyon.

As this effect took hold, the damage spread sideways in both directions, and the V widened toward each side of the dam.

As the flood removed the aggregate underneath it, the asphalt of the road held out for a moment, forming a jetty of sorts over the rushing water. But the supporting ground washed away quickly and large chunks of the blacktop collapsed and went tumbling over the side.

Looking back to the lake, Joe noticed something. “The water’s so high.”

“The highest it’s ever been,” the major admitted. “Two years of record storms.”

Joe knew nothing about General Aziz and his dealings with Jinn, but it was these record rains that made Aziz bold enough to break his contract. These same rains would now devastate his country.

“Where’s the control room?” Joe shouted.

The major pointed to the east side of the dam and a new building that sat near the dead center, about even with the peninsula. “The new control room is by the power plant.”

“Let’s go.”

Joe took off running once again and this time the major kept up with him. Behind them, the breach in the top of the dam continued widening by a foot or more every fifteen seconds.

Reaching the control room, the major threw open the door and he and Joe rushed inside. They found the command center in utter chaos. Half the posts were empty. The brave men and women who remained were trying to get a handle on what was happening.

A supervisor spotted the major. “Have we been attacked?” he asked. “We saw no explosions.”

“You have to open all the floodgates,” Joe shouted, not waiting for the major to reply. “Even the emergency spillways.”

“Who are you?” the man asked. There was no real malice in the man’s words, just shock that the scruffy-looking man with the major was giving orders.

“I’m an American engineer. I’ve worked on levees and river projects once or twice in my life and I’m telling you open all your spillways if you want one chance in ten of surviving this.”

“But—”

“There’s a thirty-foot break in the top of the dam,” Joe said, cutting the supervisor off. “It’s just below water level, halfway between here and the west bank. If you get the level down below this break, you might survive. If you don’t, the whole dam will wash away.”

The supervisor stared at Joe for a moment and then at the major, who nodded and shouted, “Trust him!”

Done wondering, the supervisor turned and shouted across the room. “Open all the spillways! Open all gates to full!”

The workers began throwing switches and levers.

“Floodgates opening!” one of them replied. “Blocks One and Two filling. Blocks Three and Four also responding.”

On a wall-sized display known as a mimic board, the indicators turned from red to green. Twelve blue channels in the display represented the twelve generator channels beneath the dam.

“What about the emergency spillways?” Joe asked.

All major dams have emergency spillways around them just in case of such an event. These high-volume bypass channels were rarely used.

“Coming open now,” the supervisor said. He watched and counted: “… twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. All gates are open. Also the Toshka Canal. Within ten seconds, we will be discharging maximum water volume. Four hundred thousand cubic feet per second.”

Joe heard and felt a great reverberation shaking the building from within. He looked out over the Nile down below. The water in the tailrace was churning like world-class rapids.

Thrown wide open, the spillways were dumping enough water to fill a supertanker every fifteen seconds. Maybe twice that amount was already flowing over the breach. Joe had a bad feeling it wouldn’t be enough. If Lake Nasser was full to the rim, it would take hours or even days to lower the water below the level of the breach. In that time, the gap would deepen and the process would continue. Joe feared they would never catch up.

As the flood raged, the multimillion-ton structure shook like a city in the grips of an earthquake. But instead of passing, the tremors held steady and grew worse.

Another huge section of the dam broke off and rumbled down the slope like an avalanche. In minutes the rushing water had swept it away, and now the breach stood two hundred feet wide. The outflow from it had to be ten times greater than all the other spillways combined. It looked like Niagara Falls.

Downriver, the flood swept onward, dragging boats and docks and anything in its path along for the ride. Barges and riverboats that took tourists on Nile cruises were torn from their moorings and flung downstream like children’s toys in the bath.

The water raced along the banks of the Nile, scouring out the walls in places, undercutting the rock and sandstone and causing landslides and collapses reminiscent of glaciers calving in the arctic.

It surged up over the banks and swept around the hotels and other buildings. Smaller buildings were obliterated as if they were made of toothpicks. One moment they were there, the next they were gone, replaced by rushing water. And this was only the beginning.

The supervisor stood silent. The major stood silent. Even Joe Zavala stood silent. They were powerless to do anything but watch.

Ninety percent of Egypt’s population lived within twelve miles of the Nile. If the whole dam gave way, Joe could see a disaster counting its victims in the millions. Even as the water spread out over the valley, sparing victims downstream from the destructive force, the aftermath might be worse than the flood.

Millions would be homeless. Half of Egypt’s farmable land would be flooded and at least temporarily destroyed. Dysentery, cholera and all the diseases that come with unsanitary conditions, and those spread by mosquitoes and other insects, would become epidemic.

It would only add insult to injury that the dam provided fifteen percent of Egypt’s electricity. But when piled on top of the nation’s other problems and its precarious political state, Joe feared a governmental implosion. He could see a nation of eighty million people falling into anarchy in one fell swoop.

“How long before total collapse?” he asked.

“Difficult to say,” the supervisor replied. “It depends on whether the core can hold.”

Joe noticed how the topside breach had widened substantially but hardly deepened at all. It was no longer a V shape, more like an extremely elongated U.

“What’s the core made of?” he asked, remembering how it had appeared to be a different material in the cross section of the model.

“Semiplastic, impermeable clay,” the supervisor said. “Concrete down below.”

If Joe was right the rushing water had scoured down through the aggregate and reached the core. The erosion rate had almost stopped. “Does it run the whole width of the dam?”

The supervisor nodded. “It’s dug into the rock on either side.”

“Can it hold the lake back?”

The supervisor thought about that for a moment. “The core won’t erode like the aggregate does, but as the back side of the slope is scoured away the amount of rock and stone keeping the core in place will be reduced steadily. At some point the weight of Lake Nasser will simply shove the core aside like a bus might push a small car.”

Joe looked out past the breach. The water was cascading over the top, plummeting and spreading. But the gentle thirteen-degree slope and the stone covering seemed to be helping, the covering was holding its own at least for now.

“I think the surface lining is holding up,” he said. “If the water level drops far enough, the core might save the day. And with the breach as wide as it is, that shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

The supervisor nodded. “It’s possible,” he said, sounding like he didn’t want to get ahead of himself.

Major Edo pointed to something else, something Joe hadn’t seen before. A small geyser farther down below. All but lost in the greater flood, it was blasting outward like a water feature in some ornate garden. The spray soared and fanned into a fine mist that caught the illumination from the floodlights.

“What about that?” Major Edo asked.

Joe’s heart dropped. He remembered the mock-up in Yemen. The higher flood had come first, but the lower tunnel had caused the core to fail and the entire dam along with it.

“That’s a bigger problem,” Joe said.

“How did this happen?” the supervisor asked.

Joe tried to explain about the microbots and how they burrowed through things, including concrete and clay. No one questioned him this time.

“Could they still be down there?”

“Possibly,” Joe said. “Maybe burrowing into the clay to widen the tunnel in ways the water can’t.”

“If it widens too much …” the supervisor began. He didn’t need to finish.

“Do you have any way to seal something like this?” Joe asked.

The supervisor rubbed his chin. “There may be one way,” he said. “We have a compound known as Ultra-Set. It’s a polymer that bonds with clay, expands many times over to fill small gaps. It becomes impervious in a matter of seconds. If we could pump it into the tunnel that those things you’re talking about have drilled, it might block it up. If the topside holds and the water level drops fast enough, we might avert a total failure.”

A new wave of tremors shook the building.

“What’s the drawback?” Joe asked.

“There’s only one way to get the Ultra-Set into the tunnel,” the supervisor said. “We have to pump it in under high pressure. To do that, someone has to find the entry point on the lake side of the dam.”

Joe looked at the supervisor and the few others who remained at their posts in the shuddering control room. “You need a diver,” he guessed, finding it hard to believe his fate. He smiled anyway. “How lucky for me.”