Trigger Point

Chapter 5

3

3The sound of the Zodiac"s outboard ripped the shroud of silence over the reservoir.

As one, the saboteurs turned toward the froth churned up in the lake. On cue, every floodlight on the causeway came blindingly on, turning night into day. They gasped, clamped their hands over their eyes.

Caught!

The boat drifted on its momentum.

A bullhorn blared, commanding them to surrender or risk being fired upon. The Wolf’s tone betrayed his wish that the ducks would disobey. Oh, how he wanted to use his g*n!

His wish was granted.

Realising their predicament and seeing that their target was about forty feet away — so close — the saboteurs made a desperate bid to finish their mission.

The saboteur closest to the transom dipped the outboard into the water and tugged on the starter cord. The old but trusty motor sputtered to life a final time. The boat lurched forward. Another saboteur swept up an AK47 and emptied the clip at the Zodiac. His wild aim was enough to make the Zodiac"s pilot dither and gain the saboteurs a tiny lead. By the time the AK47 ran dry and the Wolf had berated his spineless men, the saboteurs had closed to twenty feet from the dam.

That was when the soldiers on the causeway, hidden by the glare of the lights, opened fire. A volley of gunfire from the Zodiac joined the defence. Under two superior converging arcs of fire, the saboteurs did not stand a chance. The humans were shredded. The boat was peppered with hundreds of holes and began sinking. But not fast enough. Miraculously the outboard survived the brunt of the storm of lead and propelled the boat on a collision to the upstream wall.

Where it smashed into pieces.

There was no Hollywood-imagined explosion; it simply shattered and began leaking fuel. The Zodiac arrived to survey the scene. The Wolf regarded the two bodies grimly.

But the thermal cameras had detected four threats!

The Wolf was livid. He screamed in anger and panicked fear, gesturing to the disturbed waters of the reservoir, now stained with the fuel slick. His men scrambled to obey, rocking the Zodiac, pointing their QBZ-95-1 assault rifles at the reservoir and letting rip at the liquid, punishment for sheltering the enemy.

The pair of saboteurs who had leapt overboard under cover of the sacrificial distraction of their brave brothers swam powerfully toward the dam. The floodlights gave them enough underwater illumination to see the looming wall. But would they reach it? Their lungs were on fire and their progress was hindered by the weight of Semtex strapped to their backs. They passed into shadow where the slick from their boat obstructed the light.

Suddenly the water streaked with contrails of bubbles as a fusillade of bullets rained into their underwater retreat. The water would dampen the sting of the projectiles but would not render them harmless.

The trailing saboteur had time to take evasive action. Exhausted as he was, he jack-knifed deeper. His companion was unlucky. Bullets struck him, puffs of blood erupted from his torso and leg. The two saboteurs shared a last look. The stricken man"s eyes were wide at the realisation of his death. A flurry of bubbles escaped his mouth in a final goodbye. Weighed down by the Semtex, his body began to sink. The survivor"s eyes, too, were wide, from oxygen deprivation and fear. If he didn"t surface soon, he"d join his friend. The body of the drowned saboteur slipped past, disappearing into the inky blackness. As the survivor contemplated surfacing another volley of lead broke the reservoir surface.

If he surfaced, he would die, and the mission would truly fail.

trulyBut if I reach the wall… we will have died for something.

But if I reach the wallwe will have died for somethingBut he did not have enough explosive to finish the job.

Thus, clinging to fumes of life within, the survivor channelled all his will into his final act. He dived after his dead companion; fingers outstretched for the backpack of Semtex.

The Wolf’s men pointed excitedly when a body broke the surface, inside the slick. For good measure, he and his men pumped entire magazines into it before the Zodiac came alongside the corpse. Using a body hook, the soldiers rolled the body, face up and beheld the expression of agony on the saboteur"s countenance. Death by drowning is horrible. The Wolf was unhappy it hadn"t been his bullets that had killed the man. His gaze raked the water searching for the fourth saboteur and he pointed to where another lumpy form bobbed to the surface, face down. Yes! But as the Zodiac powered over, the Wolf wondered, why am I not feeling victorious?

Yes!why am I not feeling victorious?Then it struck him: the body had an empty backpack strapped about its shoulders. And as they neared the fourth body… it too, shouldered an empty backpack.

emptyHe felt the weight of foreboding settle eerily upon his shoulders. Quietly, acknowledging his gut, he issued a panicked command: Away from the dam. Now!

Away from the dam. Now!A flash of light from the depths momentarily lit up the slick a dirty yellow. The surface of the reservoir trembled. There was an almighty BLOOP-WHOOSH as a monstrous air pocket erupted in a geyser of water. The Zodiac rocked violently in the backwash, everybody grabbed for handholds.

And then… nothing.

Silence. Drenched soldiers. After an uncertain minute, a chortle escaped the Wolf"s lips. He burst into a relieved cackle and one-by-one his sycophants mimicked him. The men on the causeway also joined in. Laughter rang out in the night by the wall of the dam.

Was that all? Really? Did anybody think the dam could be compromised by a few pathetic pounds of explosives?

anybodyThe Wolf never had patience for the engineering of the dam but now he believed Chinese engineering was the best in the world.

Of course, the design would be bomb-proof! Nothing short of a —

The reservoir heaved! Like, literally, moved!

There was a burst of sparks and all the lights were doused, blanketing the entire area in an unnerving pitch black. The Zodiac lurched… violently enough to toss everybody out. Frightened for their lives, the floundering men swam noisily for the capsized boat, climbing onto its exposed keel. And then, with a numbing, earthly moan that emanated from the depths, the reservoir shuddered.

Screams pierced the night. The upturned Zodiac was snatched away from the dam. And not only that, incredibly it seemed that the dam was rising, rising, rising and the men in the water were dropping, dropping…

SMASH! With a bone-jarring jolt, the Zodiac and the men were deposited… in muck. Momentarily, everybody was stunned into silence. The Wolf recovered first, his hands and knees sinking into the ooze. He was surrounded by rivulets and puddles. A stranded fish flopped before him, its mouth opening and closing. Craning his neck, he beheld the immense dam, soaring toward the heavens, a darker form against the night.

SMASH!Fully exposed.

And the earth was quaking. And an ungodly roar reached his ears and filled him with unimaginable terror. He turned.

An undulating line of white reared into the air, cresting atop a mountain of water.

The Wolf was rooted to the spot. He was dimly aware of the stranded Zodiac, of men running away, darting amid the ruins of the village he had drowned. He stoically closed his eyes and accepted his death.

The violence of the reservoir was beyond words. The Wolf"s bones were pulverised. The water collected every human body on the lakebed and churned them about in a hellish maelstrom. Nobody noticed because like the Wolf, they were all dead. The wave pulped their corpses against the upstream dam wall. A torrent of water surged over the causeway sweeping away everything in its path — floodlights, soldiers, the bunker…

Human and man-made debris overflowed the causeway and rained hundreds of feet to the valley below, pounding the earth and the shallow river like mortar shells.

And that was before the final act of vengeance by the Amber River.

To the accompaniment of thunderous, resounding CRACKS, a series of fissures materialised in the dam. High-pressure jets of water scythed out of the tears, propelling chunks of concrete like missiles. The face of the dam undulated.

And then, all hell broke loose.

The dam collapsed. A towering wall of water surged free like the most fantastic battering ram ever, carrying entire sections of the dam and its innards. The downstream river swelled, empowered and endowed with months of backfill. The frothing, roiling liquid monster reclaimed its glory and punished the drained valley. Trees were swept away, the riverbank vanished, the rockface was sheared clean, the hydroelectric plant was destroyed; its parts tumbled in the mayhem. The resulting erosion added more destructive power to the water. Boulders and trees and generators and walls of buildings and high-tension, heavy-duty cables whipped at, and tore up the valley. The effect was worse at bends in the river, where the sides of the valley were chomped away.

At one such turn, a cliff was so weakened that it collapsed, bringing down with it a blocky building that reposed upon its precipice. The disaster was so sudden that none of the building"s occupants escaped in the helicopter parked on its roof. The big Mil 17 joined the flotilla of waste and was coerced into the bidding of the turbulent river.

It was hundreds of kilometres before the fury of the river was spent. Thousands of kilometres to the east and south, entire towns and factories, ground to a standstill.

The river rose to its natural level, as it had been before man had tried to trap her for his benefit.