Montaigne disliked wining and dining local officials while surrounded by the pomp of his office. He much preferred unannounced inspection tours conducted from a workaday survey boat with no one but himself, Captain Giraud and his crew on board. Without distraction, he could study firsthand the workings of the revetments laid along the levees to reduce erosion, the condition of the levees themselves, the rock jetties and navigation locks leading to and from the river.
Why is the Army Corps of Engineers in command of the never-ending war against flooding? They launched their attack to tame the Mississippi River in the early eighteen hundreds. After building fortifications during the War of 1812 along the river to keep out British forces, it seemed expedient for them to turn their experience to civil works, and the Military Academy at West Point had the only school of engineering in the country. Today the organization almost seems like an anachronism when one considers that civilians who work for the Corps outnumber Army officers by a hundred and forty to one.
Frank (his birth certificate read Francois) Montaigne was born a Cajun in Plaquemines Parish below New Orleans and spent his boyhood in the French Acadian world of southern Louisiana. His father was a fisherman, or to be more exact a crawfisherman, who built a floating house in the swamp with his own hands, and made a great sum of money over the years, hauling his catch and selling directly to the restaurants of New Orleans. And, like most Cajuns, he never spent his profits and died a rich man.
Montaigne spoke French before he learned English, and his classmates at the academy called him Potpourri because he often mixed the two languages together when speaking. After a distinguished career as a combat engineer in Vietnam and the Gulf War, Montaigne was rapidly promoted after receiving several academic degrees in his spare time, including a Ph.D. in hydrology. At the age of fifty-five he was appointed commander of the entire Mississippi Valley from the Gulf up to the Missouri River where it joins the Mississippi near St. Louis. It was a job he was born for. Montaigne loved the river almost as much as he loved his wife, who was also a Cajun, the sister of his best boyhood friend, and his three daughters. But mixed with his love for the flowing waters was a fear that someday Mother Nature would turn violent and wipe out his efforts, sending the Mississippi raging over the levees and flooding millions of acres while cutting a new channel to the Gulf.
Earlier in the morning just before dawn, the Larson, named after an Army Corps engineer long deceased, had eased into the navigation locks that were constructed by the Army Corps for flood control and to stop the Atchafalaya from capturing the Mississippi. Giant control structures that are basically dams with spillways were built fifty miles above Baton Rouge at an old bend in the river where a hundred and seventy years before the Red River once entered into the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya flowed out. Then in 1831 a steamboat entrepreneur, Captain Henry Shreve, dug a channel across the neck of the bend. Now the Red River bypassed the Mississippi and flowed through remains of the bend that became known as the Old River. Almost as if it was a siren enticing an unwary sailor, the Atchafalaya, with only 142 miles to the Gulf versus the Mississippi's 315, beckons the main river into its waiting arms.
Montaigne had stepped out on deck as the gates swung and closed off the water of the Mississippi and watched as the walls of the lock seemed to rise toward the sky while the survey boat descended to the Atchafalaya. He waved to the lockmaster, who waved back. The waters of the Atchafalaya run fifteen feet lower than the Mississippi's, but it only took ten minutes before the west gates opened and the Larson moved out into the channel that led south to Morgan City and the Gulf beyond.
"What time do you estimate our rendezvous with the NUMA research ship below Sungari?" he asked the Larson's captain.
"Around three o'clock, give or take," answered Giraud without indecision.
Montaigne nodded at a big towboat pushing a string of barges downriver. "Looks like a cargo of lumber," he said to Giraud.
"Must be heading for that new industrial development near Melville." Giraud looked like one of the Three Musketeers with his hawklike French features and flowing black mustache waxed and twisted at the ends. Like Montaigne, Giraud had grown up in the Cajun land, only he had never left it. A big man with a belly seldom empty of Dixie beer, he possessed a sardonic humor that was known up and down the river.
Montaigne watched as a small speedboat filled with four teenagers darted recklessly around the survey boat and cut in front of the barges, followed by four of their friends astride a pair of watercraft.
"Stupid kids," muttered Giraud. "If any of them lost their engines in front of the barges, there is no way the towboat could stop the momentum before running them over."
"I used to do the same thing with my father's eighteen foot aluminum fishing skiff with a little twenty-five horsepower outboard motor, and I'm still alive."
"Forgive me for saying so, General, but you were even dumber than them."
Montaigne knew that Giraud meant no disrespect. He was well aware the pilot had witnessed his share of accidents during the long years he'd piloted ships and towboats up and down the Mississippi river system. Ships running aground, oil spills, collisions, fires, he'd seen them all, and as with most old river pilots, he was a cautious man. No one was more aware that the Mississippi was an unforgiving river.
"Tell me, Lucas," said Montaigne, "do you think the Mississippi will flow into the Atchafalaya one day?"
"One great flood is all it will take for the river to tear away the levees and sweep into the Atchafalaya," replied Giraud stoically. "One year, ten years, maybe twenty, but sooner or later the river will run no more past New Orleans. It's only a matter of time."
"The Army Corps has fought a good battle to keep it in control."
"Man can't tell nature what to do for very long. I only hope I'm around to see it."
"The sight won't be pretty," said Montaigne. "The effects of the disaster will be appalling. Death, major flooding, mass destruction. Why would you want to be a witness to such devastation?"
Giraud turned from the wheel and stared at the general, a dreamlike look in his eyes. "The channel already carries the flow of the Red and Atchafalaya rivers. Just think what a mighty river will flow through southern Louisiana when the entire Mississippi breaks loose and adds its discharge to the other two. It will be a sight to behold."
"Yes," said Montaigne slowly, "a sight to behold, but one I hope I never live to see."
23
AT FIVE MINUTES before three o'clock in the afternoon, Lucas Giraud slipped the throttles to the big Caterpillar diesels to quarter speed as the Larson cruised past Morgan City at the lower end of the Atchafa-laya River. After crossing the Intracoastal Waterway and dropping below Qin Shang Maritime's port of Sungari, the Larson entered the glassy-smooth waters of Sweet Bay Lake six miles from the Gulf of Mexico. He swung the boat toward a turquoise-colored research ship with NUMA painted in large block letters on the hull amidships. She has a no-nonsense, businesslike air about her, Giraud noted. As the Larson drew closer he could read the name on the bow, Marine Denizen. She looked like a ship that had seen her share of service. He judged her age at twenty-five years or more, old for a working ship.
The wind blew out of the southeast at fifteen miles an hour and the water had a light chop. Giraud ordered a crewman to drop the fenders over the side. He then eased the Larson against the Marine Denizen with a gentle bump, and held the survey boat against the research vessel just long enough for his passenger to step across a ramp that had been extended for his arrival.
On board the Denizen, Rudi Gunn raised his eyeglasse
s to the light streaming in through a porthole of the NUMA marine-survey ship, squinted his eyes and checked for smudges on the lenses. Seeing none, he replaced the rims and adjusted the earpieces. Then he looked down and studied the three-dimensional diorama of the Sungari shipping port that was beamed down on a horizontal surface by an overhead holographic projector. The image was processed from forty or more aerial photographs taken at low altitudes by a NUMA helicopter.
Constructed on newly made land in a swampland along both banks of the Atchafalaya River before it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, the port was hailed as the most modern and efficient shipping terminus in the world. Covering two thousand acres and stretching over a mile on both sides of the Atchafalaya River, it was dredged to a navigational depth of thirty-two feet. The Port of Sungari consisted of over one million square feet of warehouse space, two grain elevators with loading slips, a six-hundred-thousand-barrel-capacity liquid bulk terminal and three general-cargo handling terminals that could load and unload twenty container ships at one time. The steel-faced docks on opposite sides of the river channel backed by landfill provided twelve thousand feet of deep-water berthage for all ships except heavily laden supertankers.
What made Sungari different from most port facilities was its architecture. No gray concrete buildings shaped in austere rectangles. The warehouses and office structures were constructed in the shape of pyramids, all covered with a gold galvanized material that blazed like fire when struck by the sun. The effect was electrifying, especially to planes flying overhead, and its glow could be seen from ships forty miles out in the Gulf.
A light rap came on the door behind Gunn. He stepped across the ship's conference room, used for meetings between the ship's scientists and technicians, and opened the door. General Frank Montaigne stood in the passageway outside, looking dapper in a gray suit with vest and leaning on his cane.