The horses were whinnying and snorting out in the stable behind the house. The quake had spooked them. Lauren went to the back door and looked up at a beautiful, starlit sky.
“Listen! What’s that sound?” Bobby had put on his school jacket and was standing next to her on the porch.
She heard the deep rumble. The pounding of rushing water. She realized immediately what it was. What it had to be. They’d opened the discharge gates at the dam.
It took a moment for that to register. She’d lived near the lake two years and they’d never come close to fully opening the gates, which regulated the flow of water into the Tennessee River and drove the huge hydroelectric turbines.
The river levels were already at flood stage. The Tennessee was dangerously high, so why were they releasing water? It didn’t make any sense. It would only put a lot of extra pressure on the already weakened levees.
Lauren flung on a coat and told Bobby to go back to bed.
“I want to go with you, Grandma.”
“No way, Jose,” she said, scooting him back to his bedroom. “You go to sleep, and that’s an order. I’ll be right back.”
LAUREN drove onto the dam—Route 641 crossed right over it—and stopped at the first overlook, one of several places where motorists could pull off the two-lane road and admire the view of Kentucky Lake. There was no traffic at that hour.
Lauren got out of her pickup. There was a strong, cutting wind off the water. She hardly recognized the lake. Whitecaps were running four and five feet high, the action as rough as during the earthquake two days earlier. Spray flew up as the waves hit the broad, curving wall that plunged vertically to the water. The crashing sound was barely audible over the roar of the water pounding through the dam’s open gates.
The huge gates—a row of twelve, each the size of a tractor trailer stood on end—were on the opposite side of the dam about midway across the lake. That’s where water was released into the Tennessee River, and where the control house and generators were located. At that point, the dam was more than two hundred feet high.
Staring into the blackness of the lake, Lauren saw the lights of the marinas flickering along the far shore. Her own dock and boathouse were up a long cove that ran back about two miles from the dam.
The cold spray stung her face. She got back into the pickup and drove to the powerhouse. To get there, she had to go to the far end of the dam, turn off on a service road, and double back through a series of curves that ended at the parking lot. On the riverside of the dam now, she got her first look at the massive gates. The lake water was ripping through them in long, white plumes, thundering down thirty feet into the wide canal that fed the Tennessee River.
The powerhouse, a three-story building made of gray stone, was built on a shelf close to the riverside of the dam. On the front of the building that faced the highway, the word KENTUCKY was spelled out in big red letters. The facility regulated the flow of water through the locks, which powered the dam’s hydroelectric generators.
Lauren parked. She knew one of the engineers there, Tom Davis. He was a hydrologist with the Tennessee Valley Authority. He and his wife lived up the road from her. They’d built a log cabin with a monster deck. They all went to the same church. United Methodist. Lauren recognized his pickup. Another car was next to it.
The lights were on inside the building. Lauren went into the control house, a room with large windows that overlooked the river. No one was there. She heard someone climbing up the ladder-like stairway that descended to the lower levels, where the dam’s mechanical works were located. She’d taken several tours of the place. You could actually get inside the inner walls.
Tom Davis came up the metal steps. His face was ashen. Mouth slack.
“Tom, what’s going on?” Lauren asked.
He walked past her to a panel of gauges. Spotlights illuminated the open gates and the torrents of rushing water.
“We almost lost her,” he said, leaning on both hands against the control panel. “I swear to God. We almost lost the dam.”
Lauren stared at him. Her legs felt unsteady.
Tom Davis kept talking in the same low, almost sleepy voice. Lauren wasn’t even sure he knew she was standing there.
“I was up here when that last quake hit.” He turned toward her, and Lauren saw the bright glitter in his eyes. “I heard one of the walls cracking from the strain. An inner wall down by the waterline.”
Lauren leaned against a counter and let it hold her up. She wanted, needed, to sit down. The only chair was the raised stool at the control panel. Tom Davis was gripping it hard.
“I opened the gates to get the level down,” he said, his voice soft, almost inaudible. “We’ve got to get the pressure off the wall. I don’t know how much longer the dam can hold.”
Two men hurried up the stairway from the lower level, their boots clanking on the metal steps. They wore hard hats. One of them was talking on a cell phone. They stopped in their tracks, surprised to see Lauren.
“Lady, you’ve got to leave,” one of them said. He wore a windbreaker. His close-cropped black hair was streaked gray at the temples. A big guy in a white shirt and tie at 3:00 in the morning. Broad shoulders. He looked to be in his early fifties.
“I don’t think so,” Lauren said. He reached for her arm, his jaw set. She pulled away from him.
“They’re with the Seismic Safety Commission,” Tom said in that same strangely detached voice. “They’ve been out here looking at the dam since the first quake. They came straight over after that aftershock.”
The man in the windbreaker shot him an angry glance and told him to keep quiet.
“You have to leave,” he repeated to Lauren.
“Don’t even try to lay a hand on me,” she said.
The other man had put the cell phone in his pocket. He was younger than his partner, a little shorter. “He wants the gates closed,” he said. “He wants it done now.” He sounded as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just said.
“Do it,” barked the man in the windbreaker, turning to Tom Davis.
“Who the hell are you?” Lauren said.
“Shut the goddamn gates!” the man shouted at Davis, getting right in his face.
“You want to lose this dam?” Davis said. He was about sixty years old, a small man with glasses and thinning hair. He gripped the back of the stool as if his life depended on it. “You want to take responsibility for that, for what will happen?”
“Shut the fucking gates! That’s a direct order.”
“No,” Tom Davis said in a slow, steady voice. “I want that in writing.”
Lauren saw flashing lights outside. Two highway patrol cars had pulled into the parking lot. Men started piling out. Doors slammed.
Three troopers entered the powerhouse. They wore gray jackets with black belts over the shoulders and Smoky the Bear hats.
“Get this woman out of here!” the man in the windbreaker snapped. His voice was high-pitched and hoarse, almost a scream.
The trooper glanced at Lauren. She knew several state police officers, but not him.
“Are you the guy with the earthquake safety commission?” the trooper asked. The man in the windbreaker showed him an ID.
Turning to Lauren, the trooper said, “Ma’am, you’ve got to leave this building and get off the dam.” Even as he spoke, he was opening the door for her.
“They want Tom to close the gates,” Lauren said, trying to explain what was happening, what was at stake. She felt light-headed, breathless. Then angry at the strong-arm police tactics. “The dam has been damaged. He’s afraid it will give way unless the water’s released to ease the pressure.”
Saying nothing, the trooper led her outside and told one of his men to escort her off the dam. Immediately.
As she walked to her pickup, a trooper was in lockstep right at her elbow. He looked nervous and didn’t say a word. More police cars were driving onto the dam, blocking both ends. They were closing it to traffic.
Lauren opened the door to the pickup and slid behind the wheel. She started to say something, to try one last
