Jack Mars - Situation Room

Jack Mars is author of the bestselling LUKE STONE thriller series, which include the suspense thrillers ANY MEANS NECESSARY (book #1), OATH OF OFFICE (book #2) and SITUATION ROOM (book #3).

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Copyright © 2016 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright STILLFX, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

August 15th

7:07 a.m.

Black Rock Dam, Great Smoky Mountains, North Carolina

The dam sat there, immutable, gigantic, the one constant in Wes Yardley’s life. The others who worked there called it “Mother.” Built to generate hydroelectric power in 1943 during the height of World War Two, the dam was as tall as a fifty-story building. The power station that operated the dam was six stories high, and Mother loomed behind it like a fortress from some medieval nightmare.

Wes started his shift in the control room the same way he had for the last thirty-three years: he sat at the long half-circle desk, plunked his coffee mug down, and logged into the computer in front of him. He did this automatically, without thinking, still half-asleep. He was the only person in the control room, a place so antiquated it resembled a set from the old TV show Space 1999 . It had last been remodeled sometime in the 1960s, and it was a 1960s version of what the future might look like. The walls were covered with dials and switches, many of which hadn’t been touched in years. There were thick video screens which no one ever turned on. There were no windows at all.

Early morning was normally Wes’s favorite part of the day. He had some time to himself to sip his coffee, go over the log from the night before, check the electricity generation figures, and then read the newspaper. Often enough, he would pour himself a second cup of coffee about halfway through the sports pages. He had no reason to do otherwise; after all, nothing ever happened here.

In the past couple of years, he had taken to reading the want ads as part of his morning ritual. For seventeen years, since computers had come in and the control room had gone automated, the big brains at the Tennessee Valley Authority had talked about controlling this dam from a remote location. Nothing had come of it so far, and maybe nothing ever would. Nothing had come of Wes’s want ad perusals, either. This was a good job. He’d be happy to go out of here on a slab one day, hopefully in the distant future. He absently reached for his coffee mug as he leafed through last night’s reports.

Then he looked up – and everything changed.

Along the wall across from him, six red lights were blinking. It had been so long since they blinked, it took him a full minute to remember what those lights even meant. Each light was an indicator for one of the floodgates. Eleven years ago, during a week of torrential rains up north, they had opened one of the floodgates for the better part of three hours each day so the water up top didn’t breach the walls. One of those lights blinked the entire time the gate was open.

But six lights blinking? All at the same time? That could only mean…

Wes squinted at the lights, as if that might help him see them better. “What the..?” he said in a quiet voice.

He picked up the phone on the desk and dialed three digits.

“Wes,” a sleepy voice said. “How’s your day going? Catch the Braves game last night?”

“Vince?” Wes said, ignoring the man’s banter. “I’m down in the box, and I’m looking at the big board. I’ve got lights telling me that Floodgates One through Six are all open. I mean, right now, all six gates. It’s an equipment malfunction, right? Some kind of gauge error, or a computer glitch. Right?”

“The floodgates are open?” Vince said. “That can’t be. Nobody told me anything.”

Wes stood and drifted slowly toward the board. The phone cord trailed behind him. He stared at the lights in awe. There was no readout. There was no data to explain anything. There was no view of anything. It was just those lights, blinking out of unison, some fast, some slow, like a Christmas tree gone a little bit insane.

“Well, that’s what I’m looking at. Six lights, all at once. Tell me that we don’t have six floodgates open, Vince.”

Wes realized he didn’t need Vince to tell him. Vince was in the middle of speaking, but Wes wasn’t listening. He put the phone down and moved along a short narrow hallway to the observation room. It felt as if his feet were not attached to his body.

In the observation room, the entire south wall was rounded, reinforced glass. Normally, it looked out on a view of calm stream, flowing away from the building, turning right a few hundred yards away, and disappearing into the woods.

Not today.

Now, before him, was a raging torrent.

Wes stood there, mouth agape, frozen, numb, a cold tingle spreading across his arms. It was impossible to see what was happening. The foam sprayed a hundred feet into the air. Wes couldn’t see the woods at all. He could hear a sound through the thick glass, too. It was the roar of water – more water than he could possibly imagine.

Ten million gallons of water per minute.

The sound, more than anything, made his heart thump in his chest.

Wes ran back to the telephone. He heard his own voice on the phone, breathless.

“Vince, listen to me. The gates are open! All of them! We’ve got a wall of water thirty feet high and two hundred feet wide coming through there! I can’t see what the hell is going on. I don’t know how it happened, but we need to shut it down again. NOW! You know the sequence?”

Vince sounded eerily calm; but then again, he hadn’t seen all that water.

“I’ll get my book out,” he said.

Wes went to the control panel with the phone wedged in his ear.

“Come on, Vince. Come on!”

“Okay, I got it,” Vince said.

Vince gave him a six-digit sequence of numbers, which Wes punched into the keypad.

He looked at the lights, expecting them to be off; but they were still blinking.