Deluge (The Best Thrillers Book 2) by James Best (ebook reader with built in dictionary .txt) 📕

They watched the billowing smoke. Minutes passed. Evarts occasionally gave all clears for radiation in a normal voice. Tens of minutes passed. A half hour passed. Still, they could see nothing. Just smoke. Evarts tried listening, despite knowing he couldn’t hear running water from over a mile away.

An hour passed. Nascent light made the cloud glow. It looked eerie, but Evarts knew it was only dawn breaking. Still no visibility of the bottom of the pass.

“How long can that second flight of bombers stay on station?” Evarts asked.

Without responding, O’Brian used his radio to inform the flight leader that there was no visibility of the pass floor. After a few more comments, O’Brian informed Evarts that they had enough fuel for an extended stay over the area.

Still no abnormal radiation reading. The B61-12 bombs exploded underground and had been engineered for minimal fallout. They had detonated the bombs at four in the morning because the winds at lower altitudes were forecast to be calm. The hope was that the rain would beat the cloud back to earth before radiation was carried eastward by the atmospheric river.

Evarts noticed that he could see more of the hill on the opposite side of the valley. The cloud was receding. Gravity pulled the debris-laden cloud down while the rain relentlessly pummeled it back to earth. He felt relief.

On the radio, Gleason harangued O’Brian for updates continually. Evarts had to grin when he heard O’Brian repeat, “nothing to report” over and over again. Gleason’s frustration became clear as he tried to ask specific questions that required a more elaborate answer. O’Brian handled these with a curt yes or no.

In another half hour, the nuclear cloud had dissipated, and the sun had risen above the horizon. Despite heavy cloud cover, the light was good enough to get a halfway decent view of the pass. Evarts switched to daylight binoculars. He saw a ragged earth, with no remnants of the highway. He also saw no water cascading toward the ocean.

It hadn’t worked.

“See anything?” Evarts asked.

“No,” O’Brian responded.

They kept watching. In another fifteen minutes, Evarts pointed to a trickle of water meandering through the pass about a half mile east of their position. It didn’t look like much, but it was a long way away. The flow didn’t continue far. Soon, it started to pool behind some dislodged boulders. In another fifteen minutes, the trickle had formed a pond.

Evarts peripherally saw that O’Brian had picked up and aimed a computerized laser rifle, which could determine precise coordinates for the conventional bomb run.

Without taking his eyes away from the binoculars, Evarts asked, “Do you think that will make a difference?”

“It’s our only target.”

“Unless the flow gets larger, knocking those boulders to smithereens won’t do much good.”

Evarts kept watching. He wasn’t sure, but it appeared that the pool was increasing much faster now. He scanned eastward and saw that the trickle had become a small stream. But it didn’t look like water. It looked like a band of chocolate casually winding its way through the pass. A band that was getting wider by the minute. He panned back to the pool and saw that it would soon flow over the top of the boulders. Then the muddy water threw cascading waves over the top of the obstruction, which told Evarts that this stream wasn’t meandering, it was roaring toward the ocean.

“Do you see that?” Evarts asked.

“Yes. That goddamn water’s obscuring my target.”

Surprised by the comment, Evarts pulled away from the binoculars to look at O’Brian. He didn’t see the taciturn O’Brian he expected. Instead, what he saw brought joy to his heart. O’Brian was smiling. Broadly.

“Let’s keep the B-1s circling,” O’Brian said, “but I don’t think we’re going to need them.”

Evarts let out a yelp of victory and returned to his binoculars. The stream had washed over the boulders, and a torrent rushed down the canyon toward the sea ten miles away. The pool had been overwhelmed by the breadth of the stream. Evarts wondered what was bigger, a stream or a creek. Whichever it was, the flow of water had certainly become large enough to warrant the bigger descriptor. He panned up the pass and saw no discernible wave of water, but the width of the stream/creek broadened the further east he looked. It was getting bigger … and the bigger it got, the more it carved its own path through the pass.

“Do we get to name this river?” Evarts asked.

O’Brian offhandedly said, “Already named. Pacheco Creek.”

“That was a creek; this is a great river.”

“Pacheco River then,” O’Brian said.

“I can’t name it after my wife?”

“No.” O’Brian sipped coffee and watched the river for a while. “You don’t want this named after your wife. We’re not out of the woods yet, and even if the radiation dissipates harmlessly and there’s no seismic activity, this will be a political football. You don’t want to be anywhere around it. Go home. Tell your wife to low-key her participation. When the press and politicians start to bloviate about might-have-beens, people will get in an uproar. Especially after the rains stop and the mud dries. People have short memories, and this country has a history of punishing its heroes. Do what I’m going to do—pretend you had nothing to do with this.”

Evarts didn’t respond, because he knew O’Brian was right. His elation with the success of the action had lulled him into thinking people would appreciate their efforts. He knew different. In his youth, he had been a beach lifeguard. When he saved someone’s life, a frequent reaction was anger. The victim claimed that they had never been in danger, and he had interfered needlessly. People have short memories, but limitless hindsight.

“We need to take a helicopter ride,” O’Brian said.

“Leave everything?” Evarts asked.

“Yes. We’ll be back soon.”

They ran over to the UH-1Y Venom and clambered aboard. After helping set up camp, the pilot had returned to his ship in case they needed to evacuate in a hurry. He had put the