The Storm

CHAPTER 56

JOE WENT INTO THE WATER OF LAKE NASSER IN AN OLD-school diving getup. It wasn’t exactly the old brass helmeted, Mark V salvage gear the U.S. had stopped using shortly after World War Two, but it came close.

A thirty-pound helmet of stainless steel fit over his head and onto the shoulders of the suit. A fifty-pound belt strapped around his waist and heavy, weighted boots made taking a few steps a Frankenstein-like walk.

An air hose, a steel cable and a high-pressure line for pumping the Ultra-Set were attached to the shoulder mounts. They made him feel like a marionette, but once he hit the water Joe was glad for every ounce of weight and the security of the steel cable.

The weight kept him balanced in the swirling current. The cable, which was attached to a dive boat above him, was the only way to ascend with so much weight on. If it snapped, he would sink to the bottom like a stone and probably be excavated in a thousand years or so, only to baffle future archaeologists.

Joe had no desire to be part of the Valley of the Dead. All he wanted to do was to stop the dam from being washed away.

If he and the supervisor were right, the main breach was containable, and while disastrous, especially for those close to the dam, it was not cataclysmic. It would widen, perhaps to the full width of the dam, but the clay core and the gentle slope of the structure would keep it from eroding any deeper.

Eventually, like water spilling out of an overflowing bathtub, the water level in the lake would drop to a level matching the depth of the breach and the flow would slow and eventually stop.

But if the microbots were burrowing into the clay core from the tunnel, the incredible pressure of the water would weaken the core itself. It would eventually fail. A bigger, deeper, more jagged breach would form and there would be nothing to keep the dam from total collapse.

As Joe’s feet touched down on the sloping surface below, the speaker in his helmet crackled.

“Diver, can you hear me?” It was the supervisor. He was up above, risking his life on the dive boat, along with the major and another technician.

“Barely,” Joe said.

“We’re just over a hundred feet from the breach,” the supervisor said. “It continues to widen at a rate of three feet per minute. You have less than thirty minutes to find the entry point or we’ll be caught in the outflow and dragged over the top of the dam.”

Joe figured differently. Within twenty minutes, the breach would be too close for either he or the boat to fight the effects of the current.

“I never wanted to go over the falls in a barrel,” he said, “and I still don’t. Let’s get this done. Start pumping the dye.”

A pump above on the dive boat began to rumble, and a secondary line attached to the Ultra-Set hose pressurized.

Down below, a high-pressure spray of fluorescent orange particles began to jet out of the hose. Joe switched on a black light attached to his helmet. The particles lit up like fireflies as they swirled in the murky water washing slowly to Joe’s left.

At the limit of his vision, Joe saw them quicken and speed toward the surface headed for the breach in the dam. That was the death zone. When that high-speed current reached him, there would be no escape.

Joe moved across the wall, hopping side to side like a spaceman on the moon. He washed the dye up and back across the area where the tunnel’s entry point was suspected to be. It flowed oddly over the uneven surface of the boulders and stones.

Ten minutes and twenty swaths later, they were still without luck.

“We need to go deeper,” Joe said. “Pull us back away from the dam.”

“The farther out we go, the stronger the drag from the break in the dam,” the supervisor said.

“It’s either that or call it a day,” Joe said.

“Hang on.”

A second later Joe felt the steel cable lift him off the slope. From there he was dragged backward perhaps another thirty or forty feet and dropped down again.

As he landed, he could feel the sideways pull of the current tugging at his feet. He pulled the trigger on the fluorescent spray and saw it catch in the crosscurrent to the left. At first it looked no different than the other marking attempts, but this time Joe noticed an eddy swirling in the pattern.

“Ten feet left,” he said.

“Closer to the breach?”

“Yes.”

Joe began to walk. High above, the dive boat moved with him. He pulled the trigger again, aiming the reflective stream of particles right at the center of the eddy.

The glowing particles swirled and the majority of the spray was sucked into a gap between two railroad tie–sized beams of concrete, vanishing in a blink like fish disappearing into coral at the sight of a predator. It happened so quick, Joe had to trigger a second burst of the spray just to be sure.

“I’ve found it,” he said. “The gap is between two concrete pylons in the riprap. I can feel the suction from it.”

As Joe got closer, he felt himself being pulled into the gap. He could see sand and gravel disappearing from around the edges of the beams. A crater was widening beneath them, he could see what looked like a twenty-inch-diameter hole.

He wedged a foot against one of the concrete beams to keep from getting sucked in. As much as he wanted to block the hole, he personally didn’t want to be the plug.

“I’m ready for the mud.”

“Mud?”

“The Ultra-Set,” Joe clarified, awkwardly holding himself back.

“Starting the pumps now,” the supervisor said.

Careful to maintain his balance, Joe managed to jam the front end of the hose into the opening. As the pressure came up, he pulled the trigger.

The Ultra-Set began flowing out at high pressure, some of it escaped into the water, looking like magenta-colored whipped cream as it expanded and hardened. Most of it funneled into the breach drawn down by the suction of the unwanted tunnel.

“How much does this stuff expand?” Joe asked.

“Twenty times its original volume,” the supervisor said. “And then it hardens.”

Joe hoped it would. And if there were any microbots left in the core, trying to widen and expand the breach, he hoped they would be caught in it and frozen in place like insects in amber.

The current tugged him to the left and he heard the rumble of the falls over the motor of the boat and the pump above him.

“Anything?” Joe asked after about thirty seconds.

“Control reports orange dye from the lower geyser,” the supervisor said. “The water flow is unchanged.”

“How much of this stuff do we have?”

“The tank holds five hundred gallons,” the supervisor told him. “It pumps two hundred gallons per minute.”

Joe hoped it would be enough. He held the nozzle and reset his feet to fight the crosscurrent.

The major came on the radio next.

“Mr. Zavala, we’re awfully close to the breach. We’re running full power just to keep ourselves out of the fray. If you could hurry …”

Joe looked up through the window in the top of the huge helmet. He could see the lights on the underside of the boat and the swirling turbulence where the propeller was churning full speed.

“I’m not exactly taking a lunch break down here,” he said.

Joe shut the nozzle off for a moment, climbed up on the boulder field and, using the leverage of his feet, pushed a boulder down the slope and into the gap. It plugged somewhat, leaving a much smaller fissure.

Joe jammed the hose back into place and pulled the trigger again. “Go to full pressure on the hose,” he said. “We either fill it or we don’t.”

Joe held the trigger down and the Ultra-Set surged forward. As it did, he felt the current changing around him. The pull from the opening in front of him was lessening, but the side load dragging him toward the breach was picking up steam.

“Control reports the flow lessening. Ultra-Set spewing from the geyser!”

Joe’s left foot slipped out from under him as the side current intensified and suddenly he was surrounded by red foam. The tunnel was packed and the Ultra-Set was spewing out of the now blocked hole like a bottle of carbonated soda that had been shaken and then opened.

Joe caught himself and then stumbled again. He shut off the valve.

“Bring me up!” he shouted.

The steel cord yanked him off the slope and then dropped him back down again, but it wasn’t a vertical tug, it was a sideways one that almost tipped him off his feet. For a second Joe was confused. Why was he being pulled sideways?

A call from above straightened it out. “We’re caught in the current!” the major shouted. “We’re getting pulled into the breach!”