Alex Irvine - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Kemp went next, then Foster. Waiting to give them a little clearance so he wasn’t stepping on Foster’s fingers, Malcolm looked from Ellie to Alexander.

“This is the fun part,” he said.

“I’ll start testing some of the switches,” Alexander said. He had a voltage meter and some other electrician’s tools, along with a battery they could use to run test current through parts of the control panel.

“I expect a full report when we get back,” Malcolm said with a wink. He looked to Ellie. “Dam spelunking,” he said. “Life leads in unexpected directions.”

“That it does,” she agreed. “Be careful.”

As he climbed down the ladder, Malcolm switched on his flash, and looked back up at the circle of light. He saw Ellie hold up one hand, fingers crossed. He shot her a grin and then had to concentrate on the rungs. Three points of contact, shift the grip on the rope, repeat. The tunnel was tight, and by the time they were thirty feet into it, the sounds of their breathing and the scrape of boots on metal rungs were the only things they could hear.

The roar of the waterfall was gone. Malcolm glanced down and in the swaying beam of his flashlight he saw that the other three men were already at the bottom, jammed together in a small landing area. He joined them and disengaged himself from the rope.

The next step was to see if they could get through the sealed door that opened from the access tunnel to the much larger penstock tunnel that channeled the water from the dam’s intake down to the power-generating turbines below. The door was set into synthetic rubber seals that in theory should have survived sitting in place for ten years just fine… but they had no idea what might be on the other side of it in the penstock tunnel. Malcolm shot the bolts holding it in place and leaned against it.

It didn’t move.

“Need a hand here,” he said. Kemp and Carver braced themselves against the door. There was no room for Foster. They pushed again, and with a loud peeling crackle, as rubber seals parted for the first time in more than a decade, the door pushed open.

Malcolm leaned through it and shone his flashlight into the much larger penstock tunnel.

“Breathing room,” he commented.

“Good,” Kemp joked. “I was getting to know you guys a little too well.”

The penstock tunnel angled sharply upward toward the flow mechanism, which was far enough away that their flashlight beams didn’t reach it. Malcolm stepped onto a small level platform set into the angled tunnel wall. The interior of the tunnel was concrete, pitted enough to provide toeholds but slick enough that the best way to climb was close to a belly-crawl, keeping enough of your body in contact with the tunnel that friction had a better chance of keeping you in place while you searched for the next place to plant a finger or the tip of a boot.

They climbed, slowly and carefully, until they reached the flow mechanism at the top. Here was a level area, more than large enough for all of them to drop their packs and get a look at the massive shuttered door. It was engineered to open by degrees, regulating the flow, as well as the level of water left in the artificial lake the dam had created. On the other side of those shutters, Malcolm thought, there was a million tons of water wanting to get down the penstock tunnel and get back to the ocean.

The dam operators had shut it down for some reason, and now there was no way to mechanically open it—not after ten years. They didn’t have the time or the expertise to take the control systems apart, clean them, put them back together, and then hope there was nothing wrong with the electronics.

He wished there was a way to make full use of the mechanism, but they weren’t here to be perfect. If they couldn’t operate it from above, they’d just have to force it open, and forget about regulating the amount of water coming through.

“So, you want to blow this?” Kemp said. “Have to be careful not to crack the dam, you know? Be a damn shame to come up here and accidentally breach it.”

“It sure would,” Malcolm said. “Foster. How much do you think we’ll need? Conservatively. I’d rather do this twice than use too much the first time.”

Foster reached into his pack and pulled out a brick of C-4. He flipped open a pocket knife, looked at the flow shutters, looked back at the pocket knife and set it about six inches from one end of the brick. “Give or take,” he said.

“Okay,” Malcolm said. “Conservative, like I said. We just need it open.”

Foster started cutting the explosive as Kemp got a spool of wire from his pack and started unspooling it back down the tunnel. Foster molded the C-4 into a fist-sized blob at the bottom of the shutter assembly, right in the middle where the shutters came together. “I figure if we pop the bottom open, the water and gravity’ll do the rest. Make sense to you, Mr. Architect?” he said to Malcolm.

“It does,” Malcolm said. When Foster had the explosive set the way he wanted it, he took the wire ends from Kemp and stuck them deep into the blob. Then they made their way back down the tunnel, Kemp pausing frequently to unspool more wire. Malcolm was quietly terrified by this part of the operation. He imagined some kind of static buildup setting off the charge before they got back into the access tunnel. If the explosion didn’t kill them—which it probably would, since the focused blast wave coming down the tunnel would probably turn their internal organs to jelly—the force of the water would batter them to death even before they had a chance to drown.

He said nothing about this, concentrating on getting back down the sloping tunnel without slipping. A long tumble down the concrete could well be fatal, too. There were so many ways to die.

But they reached the level pad outside the door to the access tunnel without incident, and laid the wire through the doorway. Then they hauled the door shut and shot the bolts.

“Okay,” Malcolm said. “Time to see if it’ll work.”

In the mechanicals room, Ellie fidgeted with gear while Alexander ran through the tests his father had asked him to complete. It didn’t take him long. The control panel fuses were all intact, and its wiring was in surprisingly good shape. People who built dams apparently over-engineered things like that, since they knew the equipment had to operate in close proximity to water. After a few minutes, he set down his tools.

“I’m done,” he said. “As far as I can tell, everything’s okay. But we won’t really know until there’s water going through again.”

Ellie paused in the middle of going through one of the tool lockers. She was picking out supplies that met two criteria. First, she thought they would be useful, and second, they were light enough for the group to carry back across the logjam and to the trucks. It felt like busy work. She was frustrated, and irritated that the men had gone trooping off to handle explosives, leaving her here.

“We’ll see,” she said.

Alexander put his equipment away. He picked up a book out of habit—she had never seen a kid who spent every single waking moment reading when nobody was telling him specifically to do something else. Then he put it down again.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” he said out of the blue.

This caught her off guard.

“Yeah. I did,” was all she could think to say.

“What was her name?” Alexander asked.

“Sarah,” Ellie said.

She would have been twelve now, no doubt gangly and uncertain like Ellie herself had been at that age. At three, she was small for her age, a tiny bundle of bossy exuberance. She had already learned the alphabet. She could recognize her name when she saw it written down. Her favorite book was… well, there was a tie. She loved making Ellie read the tongue twisters in Fox in Socks , faster and faster, laughing when she stumbled. But she also loved to hear Goodnight Moon every night before bed.