Seven Silent Men (22 page)

Once out of the car and walking along a dirt path running back through the trees, Yates asked Jez, “Who planted this place?”

“Planted?”

Yates continued to survey the forest about him. Above him. Beneath him. “Who put in the vegetation? Trees, flowers, grass?”

“God.”

“God never allows yellow poplar and blue juniper into the same space at the same time. Look over there. Three different species of cottonwood. Plains, Narrowlead and Black cottonwood trees … none of them indigenous to this part of the country. That one there's a cedar elm … and there are no cedar elms in Missouri. No tawnyberry holly or dahoon or yaupon trees either. Only you've got one of each right behind us. This is some crazy forest. I see all kinds of species that don't belong here. If God grew it, he must have been on pot.”

“You grow up around trees?” asked Jez.

“Nope.”

“How come you know so much about them?”

“Because I used to know everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Absolutely everything there was to know, I knew.”

Jez slowed his pace, cautiously estimated the taller, younger, poker-faced man walking behind him.

“Aren't you going to ask why I knew everything?” Yates said.

“… Why did you know everything?”

“Because I studied everything. Granted, I was slightly weak on minor Peloponnesian deities, but besides that, I knew absolutely everything there was to know.”

Several more steps were taken in silence before Jez asked, “You still know everything?”

Yates shook his head. “Nope.”

“How come?”

“When I knew everything, no one asked me questions.”

Waiting in a clearing directly ahead of them stood several wide-brim hatted, green-uniformed rangers from the Forestry Service. Beyond the rangers was a scattering of picnic tables and beyond that a phone booth. A ranger lieutenant, when introductions had been exchanged, thanked Jez and Yates for responding so promptly to his call to the Bureau office. “The Geo guys discovered something you might want to see.”

“Geo guys?” Jez questioned as he and Yates accompanied the lieutenant toward a red marking flag rising up from the tall grass at the other end of the clearing.

“Geological Survey,” the ranger said. “The group trying to find out what's causing the mud trouble west of Prairie Port. Earlier this morning they ended up here.”

Jez glanced around. “Where?”

“Right under you.”

Despite being marked by a red flag, the moss-covered hatch in the high grass had gone unnoticed by Yates and Jez until they were nearly at it.

The lieutenant said, “I thought there was nothing underneath here except solid rock. The Geo guys say someone else knew better. Knew about this hatch and used it. They say it could have been the bank robbers you're looking for. Check the hinges on the hatch. They've been oiled.”

Jez knelt down, bent back the tall grass. The ground around the hatch was well trodden. The moss had been neatly cut away from the two hinges. Touching the hinges, he felt oil and grease.

The lieutenant pulled the heavy metal hatch open, lowered himself onto the ladder in the circular hole beneath, said this was an auxiliary, or emergency, means of egress and disappeared into the darkness beneath. Yates followed. Then Jez.

A lightless descent ended on a narrow, dimly lit catwalk which wound several hundred feet through a curving crevice in the rock to an iron door. Passing beyond the door, Yates and Jez found themselves on yet another catwalk … this one looking down into an immense six-story-deep chamber cut in the rock heart of Warbonnet Ridge. Crisscrossing the vast space, at various altitudes, were pipes and support struts and other metal walkways and lines of glowing unglazed light bulbs. More lines of glowing lights rose perpendicularly up the rock. On the floor, eighty feet below, lay bare concrete foundations on which electrical turbines once reposed. Moving among the foundations were tiny metal hats of the inspecting engineers and scientists.

The ranger lieutenant reached the end of the catwalk and pulled open the railing gate on a cageless elevator of two seats fastened to a solitary rail which ran eighty feet to the floor below.

“You want us to ride this?” Jez said.

“Or use the ladder over there.” The lieutenant pointed back across the short walkway to metal rungs trailing down the rock face.

Yates, gingerly, moved out on to the far seat of the open elevator. Jez, very slowly, got into the near seat. The ranger lieutenant shouted down. Metal hats far beneath tipped upward. Hands waved. A yellow metal hat crossed the floor to the wall, extended an arm, pulled something. Whirring sounded from an unseen generator. The elevator started down, jerkily.

“What the hell is this place?” Jez asked.

“Beats me,” Yates said.

“I thought you knew everything.”

“Only above ground.”

A willowy yellow-helmeted man in chinos and lightweight safari shirt introduced himself as Henry St. Ives, divisional director for the Missouri Valley Geological Survey and nominal chief of the team of experts trying to neutralize the mud eruptions. Also in the party welcoming Jez and Yates were Chester Safra, a short, doll-faced hydrologist from the Mississippi River Control Authority, and Jamie E. K. Thurston, senior engineer for the Missouri Power and Electric Company.

“Never dreamed this operation existed,” St. Ives said. “Should have, I suppose. Heard rumors of it long enough. Some of the others had too. Only no one we know ever set foot inside. Imagine our feeling when we stumbled in here last night.”

“What is it?” asked Jessup.

Chester Safra held out rolls of dusty, discolored blueprints. “Pump-priming idiocy.”

“That is very clever, Chester. Very double-entendre.” St. Ives applauded once and turned back to Yates and Jessup. “Chester's terminally Republican, which is to say, the initials FDR are poison to his tongue. What we are standing in is New Dealism at its fiercest.”

“It didn't work,” Safra insisted. “
None
of it worked.”

“Not thirty-four years ago, Chester,” St. Ives agreed. “But someone has certainly put part of it back into operational shape and recently. Mister Jessup, Mister Yates, we are gathered at the common crux of everyone's individual problems. Mister Thurston's power shortages, Mister Safra's and my mud … and most definitely, your robbery … stem from in here. Come.”

The party descended a concrete staircase past two more levels of empty chambers, with St. Ives giving a history of MVA. They cortinued down through fifteen feet of solid rock into a low-ceilinged, rectangular room, two of whose adjacent walls were constructed of glass. Glass looking out on utter blackness.

St. Ives slapped a hand against the plaster wall bearing an eight-foot-long, five-foot-high, faded overlay drawing of the Missouri Valley Authority of the early 1930s. “There it is, the entire system. MVA, in all its glory.”

“Pork-barreling!” Safra called it. “Trotting, not creeping, socialism.”

St. Ives turned to Jessup and Yates. “Thirty-four years ago, in 1937, the electricity-producing aspect of the project was closed down without ever having been used. The machinery was moth-balled, and all the chambers above us were sealed shut.

“The irrigation-flood facilities were kept operative and made self-sufficient. Its terminal, where we now are, was equipped with its own power plant and master-control apparatus regulating the water flow throughout the system as well as up here. Should the power plant, or any part of it, fail, plans were formulated for connecting into whatever source of commercial electricity was near.” His finger moved back onto the wall overlay, stopped at a point west of Warbonnet Ridge. “This was another phase of the MVA, construction of a reservoir network in the hills behind the Bonnet to supplement both the city's water supply and the irrigation system. With the hydroelectric capabilities aborted, it was hoped expansion of the reservoirs could make them the primary source for irrigation water. Plans were revised. An underground tunnel was built linking this irrigation terminal in the Bonnet to the reservoirs under construction in the hills. It was the discovery of these tunnels yesterday afternoon that led us here.”

St. Ives checked his notes. “The entire MVA was disbanded in 1938. Work stopped on the incompleted reservoirs. The irrigation-flood control center here in the rock, like the hydroelectric facilities before, was sealed closed. The irrigation tunnels themselves were not sealed, simply left to lie fallow. The water gates in the tunnels were also left to rot. Before long they were pretty much forgotten. All of MVA was.” He went on to say how early in World War II a need for heavy electricity-producing equipment made the government open up the hydroelectric plant above them, and they found the machinery was missing. No one knew where it had gone or who had taken it. “Those chambers were reseated more permanently than before. Nobody seems to have remembered the irrigation-flood control area down here, including the looters.

“In 1954 the State of Missouri, with federal funding, resumed construction of one of the reservoirs abandoned in 1938, an immense basin more than a mile deep in places that today is called Tomahawk Hill reservoir or lake. The state engineers had no information or interest about where the old water gates in the original basin led, even though there were two sets of these gates—some ten small ones built directly into the reservoir's eastern wall and two enormous slab gates built directly into the basin's floor near the eastern end. The state engineers even ignored the fact that every gate, floor or wall, was counterweighted and hydraulicized. They let all this be and installed a new system of gates miles away at the other end of the reservoir, on the western side …

“And those old gates are what was opened over the weekend, Mister Jessup and Mister Yates, three of those original gates. The two enormous slab gates in the basin floor and one of the small wall gates. That is what caused the flooding and the mud. The fact that three thirty-four-year-old gates were opened is startling enough. How it was accomplished is even more amazing.

“This, where we're standing, was the nerve center of the irrigation-flood system abandoned in the 1930s.” He played his penlight on a wooden counter running the length of the dark glass. “The electrical equipment controlling water flow throughout the tunnels rested here.”

The light beam shifted onto a faded line-rendering thumbtacked to the counter surface. “It's a 1937 electrical wiring chart for the whole system. For everything from the tunnel's diversionary locks twelve-point-six miles south of here to the forgotten gates in the reservoir a mile and a half to the west … and someone has rewired part of this system … rewired it in the last few weeks.”

The beam moved back and in tighter on the electrical wiring chart. “If you look closely at the plan you'll see pen markings for what areas the connected wires are controlling … it's everything in the main tunnels between here to right there.” St. Ives's finger tapped at a distinct check mark on the faded paper. “The tunnel directly under Mormon State National Bank.

“The crucial element, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, is behind us.” St. Ives's penlight swept along to the wall at their backs, stopped on a large, rusty iron box imbedded in the plaster, with two forked switches, one on either side, in the down or “off” position.

“That is your culprit,” St. Ives told Jessup and Yates. “The aider and abettor in the robbery at Mormon State National Bank … Mister Thurston is better qualified to provide specifications.”

Jamie E. K. Thurston, senior engineer for Missouri Power and Electric, went to the wall with his own, more powerful flashlight on. “This is the original fuse box/circuit-breaker. It wasn't a standard make even in the 1930s. I would say it was manufactured specifically for this operation, as was most of the other equipment down here.”

Thurston opened the door of the box. The fuses within were thick and glistening and a half foot high. “These are not the original fuses,” he said. “They are far more resistant than the specifications on the old chart, and as you can see, they are brand new. They were handmade. Expertly made.”

The light beam played on a thick cable descending from the bottom of the box, new cable. “This lead line was recently installed as well. Tracking it down through the floor, you'll find it stretches a mile and a quarter through a side tunnel and ties into the main power line near the highway. Only a suicidal son-of-a-gun would try splicing into that much voltage midline. The splice was made hot and midline. That's one reason we hadn't found it till now. He did it midline and hot.”

“Is that what caused the power failures?” Jessup asked. “His splicing into the main power supply?”

“Not by itself. This had more to do with it.” Thurston seized the forked switch on the right side of the fuse box. Pushed it up and on.

Moaning resonated. The control booth shook. Whirring replaced moans. Shaking ceased. Dim-burning electric light bulbs grew visible in the blackness beyond the glass walls of the room, became brighter … jumped in intensity. Illuminated below the shorter of the adjacent glass walls was a vast room in which stood two massive generators and six large engines. The view through the longer glass wall was of brightly burning light bulbs in an enormous square concrete chamber. Twenty yards in was a large wood-and-metal water gate. A closed gate, five feet high.

“Only one of the two generators has been activated,” Thurston said as he moved up to the shorter glass window overlooking the machinery. “Everything you see down there is original equipment, the same ones installed back in 1936. Whoever put them into working shape was something of a wizard. Those are old-fashioned contraptions, old-time power-guzzling machines. They're guzzling three times what they did back in the 1930s because the two generators were not only reactivated, they were converted into motors as well … and connected to the high-voltage line out west. Instead of creating electricity, they were using it. Everything you see down there was sucking power out of the city's electrical supply. The generator running now and the two engines nearest it are the power sources for the tunnel between here and Mormon State National Bank. Most of the water-control gates in the tunnel are operated by it. If the criminals used any sort of electrical devices … air hammers, drills, lights … this system would more than provide the power. The two engines and generator by themselves probably are responsible for the power losses and dimouts in the earlier part of last week. But not for what happened on Friday or over the weekend. Help was required for that.”