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Cole switched on his transceiver and coded for Mingo. “Is this about even with the top of the dam?”
“From what we can see,” said Mingo, “it could go ten feet higher. But the line is absolute. Everything below it soaked, everything above it as dry as normal. Benny has me for ten that this lake has been fifteen feet higher within the last twenty-four hours. Which is impossible and/or weird.”
“You bet against him, though.”
“Somebody had to,” said Mingo. “It’s how he pays for food.”
“Anything else on our side?” asked Cole.
“Nothing.”
“And we’ve seen nothing on yours. Anything near the dam?”
“Just the old road 20, where it dives down under the water. The new road’s on our side, but it’s already overgrown with grass and saplings. Nobody’s using it.”
Cole sat and thought for a while. This obvious change in the water level was weird, but it was hard to see what the point of it would be. Why would they have released so much water, so rapidly? The lake was small, as reservoirs go, but it was still millions of gallons of water. By now Mingo had probably figured out approximately how much. He asked.
“If it was all released in a single flow, it would be enough to cause flooding downstream,” said Mingo. “The valley floor is populated. The neighbors would complain. Cole, this water was here, no more than a day ago. It went somewhere.”
Mingo was a civil engineer and it was his business to be able to make guesses that were worth something.
“Any sign of it draining right now?” asked Cole.
“No,” said Mingo. “In fact, it’s at the usual waterline right now. Where the vegetation changes. The high level seems to be the rare condition.”
“Heavy rainstorms here lately?”
“No,” said Benny. “Dryish summer for this area.”
“Rain heavy enough to raise the water level this high, you would have seen it on the news. ‘Washington State washed out to sea,’ that would have been the story.”
“Somehow they’re raising and lowering the water level of the lake by massive amounts,” said Cole, “and I can’t think of a single reason why.”
“I’m still trying to think of how,” said Mingo.
“Anybody get close enough to the shoreline on Chinnereth to see if it does the same?” asked Cole.
“Drew here. We reconnoitered the shoreline while we were waiting. Nothing like what you describe. The shoreline was the first wet area. No flooding higher up.”
“Load here. Ditto. If the water level rose fifteen feet on Chinnereth, it would flood that cabin.”
Cole sat and thought for a long moment.
“Maybe they dumped a huge amount of rubble in here,” said Mingo. “That would raise the level. But that wouldn’t explain why it went back down.”
“No roads where they could dump the rubble,” said Benny.
“While we’re complaining about what they don’t have here,” said Load. “I don’t remember seeing any power lines running away from this dam.”
“No, there were power lines,” said Benny.
“And a power station? Lots of transformers? Where?”
“No. Nothing like that,” said Benny. “But definitely power lines. No, wait. They ran along Highway 12. But I never saw them link up with the dams. Sorry.”
“This was officially a hydroelectic project,” said Cole. “There are turbines in the dams.”
“So maybe they use the power right here,” said Cat. “In their vast system of underground factories and training facilities.”
