Save the Dammed Salmon

By Mike Sherack

With Pacific salmon runs endangered and losing ground, rogue military pilot Brett Hendricks uses his warplane to launch an attack against Snake River dams in Hells Canyon and eastern Washington.  By the time the Air Force realizes what has happened, Hendricks and his jet have disappeared.  The next morning, the Earth Liberation Front claims responsibility.  As the FBI joins the search for Hendricks, and dam supporters immediately seek legislation to fix the dams, news spreads that the broken dams will soon become deathtraps for migrating salmon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Sherack
• Release date: Feb 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386236474

Book preview

About SAVE THE DAMMED SALMON

With Pacific salmon runs endangered and losing ground, rogue military pilot Brett Hendricks uses his warplane to launch an attack against Snake River dams in Hells Canyon and eastern Washington. By the time the Air Force realizes what has happened, Hendricks and his jet have disappeared. The next morning, the Earth Liberation Front claims responsibility. As the FBI joins the search for Hendricks, and dam supporters immediately seek legislation to fix the dams, news spreads that the broken dams will soon become deathtraps for migrating salmon.

SAVE THE

DAMMED SALMON

MIKE SHERACK

SAVE THE DAMMED SALMON

Copyright © 2019 by Mike Sherack. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraphs

1 • Revolutionary Savior

2 • Canyon

3 • Brownlee

4 • Departure

5 • Reunited

6 • Damage

7 • Paradise

8 • Guardian Angel

9 • ELF

10 • Culture

11 • Enhancement

12 • Seagulls

13 • Crow Wing

14 • Miranda

15 • Blackened

16 • Atlas

17 • First Light

18 • Orange

19 • Democracy

20 • Boundary Waters

21 • Fishing Cat

22 • Obstruction

23 • Remote Lake

24 • Extinct

25 • Passage

26 • Trunk

27 • EnviroWolves

28 • Logjam

29 • Wallowa Mountains

30 • Marina

31 • Spokane

32 • Traveling

33 • The Same Mistakes

34 • Bulldozer

35 • Trail

36 • Pancakes

37 • Cash

38 • Final Journey

39 • Kennewick

40 • Alert

41 • Border

42 • Anchorage

43 • New Year

44 • Fishing

45 • Radical

Afterword

About the Author

For the many people who have fought to keep our native salmon around. May their work and their dreams of salmon recovery not be in vain.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Ted Kunz, Tom L’Allier, and Chuck Castlewood for their review and feedback. And I am grateful for the numerous others along the way who helped me better understand fish biology and dams.

We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the works of eons are stolen from under our noses.

Aldo Leopold

Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?

Aldo Leopold

1

Revolutionary Savior

With raised eyebrows, the mechanic shook his head as he looked down at the two fighter pilots. The repair would take a while.

Just go without me, while you’ve still got some light, Ryan Bachman, a first lieutenant, said. His voice was dull and crestfallen, but he knew his plane wasn’t ready to fly.

Okay, Brett Hendricks conceded after a pause, feigning disappointment. I’ll see you later, then.

An Air Force captain, Brett turned and walked to his plane, parked a short distance away. Bachman stayed behind to quiz the mechanic about what needed to be done. The mechanic first needed to get the plane towed into the hangar.

Brett climbed back up the ladder into his F-16, then looked around at the air base as he strapped himself in. It would be the last time he would fly out of Mountain Home. The same with his plane—it wasn’t coming back.

Feeling some nostalgia, and a touch of nervousness, he exhaled and told himself to focus on his mission. He distracted himself by thinking about how his life, about to take a violent turn, had changed.

He had grown up a privileged rich kid in Marin County, north of San Francisco. By age 18 he had seen more of the world than most people saw in a lifetime: the East Coast and New England, Aspen and Vail, several trips to Alaska and Canada, much of Europe, Africa, Buenos Aires, Chile, the Galapagos, Australia and New Zealand, and a monthlong trip to Asia. His father worked hard but his mother was a free spirit traveler.

Likewise he had great educational opportunities. After progressing through expensive private schools, he had opted to attend a public high school. Maybe the education wasn’t as good but it was good for him. Then, after applying to half a dozen prestigious colleges on both coasts, he realized they weren’t what he wanted. Acceptances came back from Ivy League schools and he made airplanes out of them. What he wanted was a more normal life, and more purpose than money could buy him. He wanted to attend college but wasn’t sure what to study or where.

The military was an option because he loved to fly. He had earned his pilot’s license, and owned his own plane, since he was 16. Upon considering some time in the military, he realized that the discipline, something he tended to avoid, would be good for him. His grades weren’t good enough to get him into the Air Force Academy, so he looked into ROTC. It appealed to him as much as anything, and he ended up applying to Oregon State. There he could fly more, while irking his parents and avoiding the pretentious veneer of money by going to a state school. His parents couldn’t brag about him attending Yale or some such place, and he knew they would be humbled telling their rich friends where he was going instead.

The decision to go ROTC at a public school gave him a sense of working toward something on his own, not just getting everything handed to him. Indeed, many people had wondered why he was doing it, inferring that going to Oregon State had been a wrong thing for him to do. The nature of the repeated questioning, frequently with a confused look, had annoyed him but made him more dedicated to his rebellious choice. He had wanted to prove, to himself if no one else, that he was more than a rich kid with no real bearing in life.

His career choice also had clashed with his parents’ desire that he maintain the family’s newfound wealth. Now, a decade later, money mattered little to him. He had more than enough income to live a good life, and if someday he ended up living in a shack he was okay with that. Oddly, his sister, two years older and now finishing her medical residency in Los Angeles, hadn’t felt the same expectations, though she had become duly committed to the ways of money. Brett felt like a black sheep.

In addition to money, his parents also enjoyed good health. They had it all. And they were stingy with the money. Rather than donate a chunk of it to any good cause besides their own family, they seemed focused on what they had coming next, as if in the world’s grand scheme something more was still owed to them. It made him want to revolt against all the more.

They did donate to a handful of causes, but given their net worth even $100,000 a year was a pittance. Money was suddenly worth more to his mother when she was giving it away. It was like they contributed to get noticed, or for bragging rights, and sometimes his mother sounded like she was donating a kidney.

His mother spent money with impressive speed as she tried to retain her fading youth and keep up with her uber-material, jet-set friends who were even richer. It seemed she was either spending money, obsessing about it, or feeling inferior in comparison to others. She was a good person, but you had to look past her plastic surgery, wealth blinders, materialism, and shallow worldview.

In his father Brett saw a sharp business executive, but one who worked too much. He was worth at least $30 million, maybe more for all Brett knew. He owned several businesses and had investments and property all over the place, yet he continued to work for a successful technology company he had helped found. For years his father had talked longingly about how he should walk away from work, to focus on his businesses and investments, which would still largely consume him. But he never did. He was a victim of his own success.

The really sad thing was that his parents had once been hippie types, happy and free, but now money had taken over. Brett believed they’d be happier if they took 90% of their assets and gave them away.

Coming of age with money all around him, for Brett it had been almost nonstop fun. Yet ultimately it was artificial to be coddled and pleased and spoiled by a wealthy mother, and the day came when he decided he didn’t want an easy life riding on the tails of his family’s money. His relatives on both sides of the family were of modest means and seemed happier.

When he had figured these things out, that his biggest disadvantage in life was having too many advantages, he had started himself on a new path. He was a junior in high school when he began to seriously question what money did to people. It was like a cancer they didn’t realize they had. Money couldn’t substitute for love, happiness, or purpose, but it could lessen them as human beings. And yet rich people blindly clung to it and built their identity around it, like castles in sand.

So he had taken up a campaign of rebelling against money, usually in a low-intensity battle to stake some high ground and try to reform his parents, but sometimes openly and heated. When he turned 18 he had promptly sold his Corvette, bought a used Toyota 4Runner, and demanded that he be permitted to donate the thousands of dollars left over to an environmental justice group. After a short battle of wills, his parents had reluctantly agreed, thinking it was just a phase, and he respected them for letting him go his own way.

To his surprise, his parents had supported his college choice, too. Even though it was clear they wished he had gone elsewhere, they hadn’t tried too hard to dissuade him. They were good people at heart, and he thought more of them for that. Later, his becoming a fighter pilot had meant sufficient status in their social circle, soothing their disappointment. In recent months, though, they had begun asking what he would do after the military: go to graduate school, fly commercial planes, dig ditches? He appreciated their concern and sense of humor. They would need the latter now, because by morning they would know what he was going to do next, and it was no laughing matter.

• • •

His daydream broke when the ground crewman signaled that he was clear to go. Brett waved back and started the plane up.

His official plan that evening was to go out for a live-fire training flight to the nearby bombing range, then fly over into eastern Oregon a bit before returning to base.

No one knew it, but Brett was responsible for the malfunctioning of his wingman’s plane. The engine thrust problem had been slower to manifest than he expected. Brett was preparing to delay their takeoff when Bachman finally spoke up about it, when they were nearly down to the end of the runway. When the problem didn’t quickly abate they turned around and came back in.

Rolling off, Brett now headed back down the runway, alone.

His jet was fully armed with six 500-pound bombs and its fuel tanks were topped off with 7,000 pounds of fuel. He had enough fuel for his real mission, provided nothing went wrong.

As to military life, Brett had lived it long enough. Yes sir this, no sir that, keep the hair short, follow orders. As a pilot and officer he had ample privileges yet was ready to be free of all the rules. The discipline that had been good for him at 20 was getting old as he neared 30.

After waiting years, he had finally reached an historic point, a chance to initiate a watershed event. Whatever the sacrifice or consequences, he was making the choice willingly and was as determined as ever. His environmental brethren would declare him a hero, a valiant revolutionary savior of Pacific Northwest salmon. Once the dams were removed, and imprisoned silt began to wash downstream in a natural current, normal riverine ecology would begin to return. For the awe-inspiring fish and humanity’s environmental credentials it would be a leap forward. With any luck the salmon would soon flourish again, as they had for millennia.

The original crazy idea had been hatched a decade earlier among four close friends as a marijuana-inspired teenager thought, and now at 29 it was Brett’s goal. The environmental awakening that inspired him and his friends to move away from lives of privilege and silly consumption had had staying power, at least for three of them. Now Brett tried to get by modestly, and do something useful with the rest of his money, like give it to environmental causes or poor folks. The exception was Kyle, who now was a college professor. Brett hadn’t talked to him in several years. Eric and Paul had retained their stringent environmental bearings and like him were impassioned disciples of the salmon cause. They had helped him plan.

Back in their teens, in the late 1990’s, they had begun their environmental journey by sacrificing a little bit. They didn’t actually forego much of anything, it was for fun and to rebel against their parents. After a while, though, the hook of environmental sensitivity and commitment began to set deeper, in spite of their wealthy families. Within a year they transformed from carefree spendthrifts and thrill seekers who didn’t care about much of anything beyond having fun—four spoiled shitheads with new Corvettes—to decent young men who envisioned lives where virtue trumped money and protecting the environment was a worthy religion. What had started as rebellion became their lifestyles; they had stumbled onto purpose and it somehow stuck.

Evidence of environmental stupidity was out there and easy to find if one looked and had any appreciation for ecology. For Brett it went back to the early 1990s, when he was 10 years old. He remembered seeing the news about logging harming spotted owls, and his class had talked about it. Eric’s little sister cried about the owls and all the trees being cut down. His class also talked about Pacific salmon declining, and some controversial dams believed to be a major contributor.

The woes of both animals had left a big impression on his young mind, which still remained. Before he really understood economics and big business he had always wondered why society wouldn’t just take the necessary steps to fix the problems and help the salmon. A forest owl was important enough, even though society needed wood, but salmon were food and highly sought as a sport fish. They just needed to travel to the ocean and back home again, yet there were all manner of dams in their way.

Their first environmental good deed had occurred along the northern California coast, after the four of them had come across a tiny dam on an obscure branch of a coastal creek one late spring afternoon. It was two days after they had finished their junior year of high school and they were on a hike out in the forest.

An old length of waist-high concrete had been situated across the picturesque creek, creating a lovely, shaded, clear pool several feet deep, but some migrating coho salmon were struggling to jump over the structure.

Their presence spooked the fish, which were staged in shallow water just below the old dam, so the four of them retreated, sat down, and waited quietly.

Within a couple minutes the cohos returned and began leaping again. After several tries all of them made it over the dam except for one, which went downstream to the next pool to rest. Two of the five successful fish had landed on a slightly submerged section of the concrete, with only a couple inches of water to soften the blow. The little dam, about a foot wide on top and perhaps 20 feet long, had been the work of some long-gone settler, and it required a spirited leap for the salmon to clear. It was wrong that the dam was ever put there, and outrageous that it still existed.

They returned two evenings later with dynamite that Kyle had taken from his family’s construction company. With a shovel they dug underneath the dam, forcibly inserted a short length of PVC pipe capped on the inside end, inserted eight sticks of dynamite, and lit almost two feet of fuse. Then they hastily shoveled in small rocks and gravel, piled rocks on the outside end of the pipe, and ran to a large nearby conifer and hid behind it.

The explosion fractured the middle of the dam, sending water, concrete chunks, and rocks and debris flying. Immediately the pool of water began draining through an eight-foot gap, solving the salmon migration problem.

On the hike back to two of their Vettes, parked a couple miles away near the beach, they had drunk beer, passed around a joint, and laughed at how awesome it would be to someday take out a big dam and really save some salmon. Kyle, an avid fisherman, was especially pumped. Saving salmon would also help the web of aquatic life humans ultimately depended on.

The fight to save declining salmon runs had been raging up in Oregon and Washington at the time, with dams mostly to blame. That night, in front of a campfire, they had discussed whether a properly equipped military jet could damage big dams enough to require they be taken out. If so, and that happened, then the broken dams would have to be torn out because it wouldn’t make sense to rebuild them.

Given their youth, and too much free time, their zeal quickly increased. With little thought or concern they initiated a crime spree and expanded their targets. In addition to salmon, there were threats to old growth trees, mining pollution along waterways, road building in sensitive areas, and whatever else they came across that threatened the environment. Over the summer they vandalized several pieces of earth-moving equipment, left warning notes after randomly pounding a few metal spikes into majestic old trees doomed for logging, dug axle-eating trenches in forest roads, slashed tires of enemies of the environment, or broke their windows or blew up their mailboxes, and other crazy stuff.

Along the way they declared themselves a monkey wrench gang, in honor of Edward Abbey’s story about sabotage carried out to in defense of the environment. Abby’s Monkey Wrench Gang was a great primer on how to rebel against an environmentally amoral establishment. It was even better than rebelling against their parents, and they became more committed knowing that much wealth had been wrongly created at the environment’s expense.

In northern California, where they spent much of that summer camping and roaming, one night they burned a small wooden bridge leading to some timber baron’s empty multi-million-dollar mountain retreat. After they had broken three of the vacation home’s large windows, which they figured could trigger an alarm or security system, they had to forcibly stop Eric from torching the house, too. They then escaped overland through the forest.

It was a turning point.

The next day Eric announced that they should join ELF, the Earth Liberation Front, a radical underground environmental movement. They looked around at each other, both interested and unsure, and when no one vetoed the idea Eric took it upon himself to learn more. Brett remembered being concerned at first, but he was primed for radicalization and his concerns didn’t last long. He rationalized their actions as part of a revolution against environmental tyranny.

It hadn’t been easy to contact the shadowy organization, but a couple weeks later Eric met with some guy up near Redding, returning with new ideas and zeal.

ELF’s goals and antics had a seductive appeal, giving them yet another reason to rebel and destroy. Saving the environment was the most wholesome thing in their lives, even if the means to preservation were wanton destruction.

Their operating mode was to pile into Kyle’s SUV and pass through communities, spending a little time scoping the place for new targets. They likened themselves to tourists stopping for ice cream. Then several days or a week or two later they’d return at night to furtively do the damage and move on. Even though they were gone much of the summer, their parents never suspected a thing and were glad they had fun spending time in the outdoors together. Eric’s father had even proudly told the four of them to go have fun because you’re only young once. It had been fun. Too much fun, in an immature, often high, criminal kind of way.

Northern California media had reported the wave of vandalism, and late in the summer, just before they decided to take a break when school started, Eric anonymously alerted the Sacramento Bee and Chico Enterprise Record that ELF claimed responsibility. Of course the message warned that unless the environmental destruction was halted immediately, further action in defense of the environment could continue at any time. After that, the national news media also noticed, making them feel even more important.

Then the four of them got sidetracked with their last year of high school and their secret ELF activity fell by the wayside. Part of it was they also had realized they faced heightened risk of getting caught. Early on it had been easy when no one was paying attention. They were bold and proud of what they did, but they didn’t want to go to jail.

For a while Eric had urged them to continue on weekends, but then he, too, had relented. To Brett, whose radical nature had waned, it was just as well.

During his freshman year of college, he liked to fly his small twin-engine plane up the Columbia River, where one could get a bird’s-eye view of the big dams: Bonneville, The Dalles, John Day, and McNary. One such flight was on the way back from Walla Walla, where he had gone to visit Eric one weekend. From the air the dams looked small but he still appreciated their massive size. He had pondered what firepower it would take to destroy one. They were so immense, with concrete so thick in order to hold back so many miles of water, that he knew it would take tremendous explosive force. That and a dam failure would result in a devastating flood. The thought of what would happen was far-fetched and scary, yet also oddly intriguing. It wasn’t a question to be asked, at least not of anyone he didn’t trust completely, not when he wanted to be commissioned as an Air Force officer and go to flight school.

As he had learned more about the plight of Northwest salmon in college, he realized that the worst dams for inland salmon, the fish that traveled the farthest to reach the ocean and then return home, were on the lower Snake River in eastern Washington. They were near Walla Walla, in fact, and he and Eric had flown over two of them on Brett’s weekend visit. They were four more dams to cross after the salmon already crossed four on the Columbia. Smaller and shorter than the huge Columbia dams, they sat on a stretch of desert river with much less water in it.

The on-again, off-again, sinister thought had ultimately retreated, and Brett figured he was beyond radicalism. He had made new friends, he knew where he was headed, and Eric, Paul, and Kyle were off studying at Whitman, USC, and Yale, seeking their own way in life. The idea of saving salmon was a complex matter; it wasn’t like blowing up a piece of old concrete blocking a coastal stream.

Then after college Brett had suddenly and unexpectedly come to embrace his life’s real cause again. The epiphany came to him on a post-graduation trip to Alaska with Eric and Paul. He had put floats on his plane and off they went, hopping their way up to a remote place on the Kenai Peninsula.

The first day there they had watched massive chinooks swim by in a small river, starting to die yet as alive as fish could be. They witnessed huge grizzly bears chasing the salmon down in headwater shallows, then feasting on them, tearing the fish open like the zipper on a suitcase. It was a sight to behold.

In a matter of hours Brett had rediscovered the essence of wild salmon, as if he had stumbled upon a lost and forgotten love and been overwhelmed by rekindled feelings. There along that Alaskan river, thoughts returned about big dams killing off salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest. He tried to dismiss the thoughts and feelings like before, given his military duty, and not dwell on a resurrected crazy idea, but that night in front of the campfire Eric had likewise dredged up the idea, with a seriousness Brett found hard to avoid. Still radical as hell, Eric was like the Dale Carnegie of the environmental movement, and neither the whiskey nor Paul’s rabid concurrence had helped. Salmon were not some unknown, oddball fish, Eric had argued, they were a major species that inhabited an entire region, supporting a web of life from open ocean to inland mountain ranges. People depended on them, too. Brett had agreed that he couldn’t imagine the Pacific Northwest with only remnants of salmon still around. It was too much to lose, too big of a blow to the ecosystem.

The next morning Brett woke up like he ended the night before, obsessed with saving wild salmon. Everything looked different, changing so rapidly that he didn’t trust what he was feeling. It was like he had been seduced and his judgment was gone. He had been redirected, against every part of his better sense, like a compass needle being pulled true north.

After the trip it had been difficult to return to his military base, where his thoughts made him feel out of place. His conversion, or re-conversion, into an environmental radical had been stunningly fast, like a dream he couldn’t wake up from. The second time around his views were more unforgiving and he felt less restraint. What he saw in Alaska needed to be saved in the Pacific Northwest, whatever the cost. Since he couldn’t escape his military duty, he began to live two lives.

In the next few months his radical sentiment only sunk in deeper. It was buried and hidden from those around him, but inside he couldn’t escape the thought that his life’s calling was to take out some dams. It was something no one else could do or would do, and it would save a species. In time he came to accept it, and with Eric and Paul he eventually found his way into ELF.

From there it had taken years of waiting from afar, with stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, for the opportunity to get himself and a plane within striking distance of the dams. The mission had even required that he reenlist, which had been hard to do. But he had endured the wait, and the day to take action had finally come.

As he neared the end of the runway, the tower told him to hold for two incoming F-15’s.

Brett knew the two planes were out and would gladly wait for them to land. Then he would have the skies to himself.

He braked his plane and gazed out at the mellow orange banner on the cloudless desert horizon. It was a fine evening in late June and the hot sun would soon set.

It had now been more than seven years since his rebirth as a radical, the last several months spent actively planning upon his finally getting transferred from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to Mountain Home, Idaho. Finally he was ready to launch an attack on the dams.

It was a war he would wage in defense of the environment. A part of him still couldn’t believe he was doing it, but he knew he was dedicated and ready to make a statement. He was fully committed to battling the dams, whatever it took. While politicians, bureaucrats, and moneyed interests argued and jockeyed endlessly, confusing the issues and leaving the status quo dams in place, time to save the endangered salmon was running out.

It wasn’t right to attack the dams, but the right thing—saving the extraordinary fish—had been lost. The country lacked the willpower to do the right thing. Good intentions were everywhere, yet the dire needs of the fish were being ignored, so something big was needed to shock the system and provide a new perspective. Facing a ruthless parade of harms, the fabled fish were slowly sliding toward extinction—doing the right thing for them meant doing something bad for the dams. It was time to sound the alarm as loudly as possible, so that the crisis could no longer be ignored or bandied about with words, just wasting more time. The situation demanded courageous and principled action to get past apathy, shift the political dynamics, and break the deadlock that favored the dams. His destiny kept pointing to this task on this night, the night his double life would end.

For a moment he thought about Idaho salmon, where they were at that moment, both returning adults and the young smolts migrating out to the ocean. He could picture both. A wild juvenile just several inches long in the lower Columbia, its body changing as it prepared to live in salt water, an environment it knew only by instinct. Or hopefully it was already out in the ocean. It had navigated up to eight dams and a suite of predators to still be alive. The adult he imagined was far out in the north Pacific, in open water south of Alaska. It was a wild Snake River chinook, which in Alaska was called a King Salmon. Weighing more than 30 pounds after living and feeding in the rich ocean for three years, it had recently begun swimming south, guided by instinct and an incredible ability to find its way back to its birthplace in Idaho. It had evaded predators, too, and represented the pinnacle of an awesome species. It had great value economically, ecologically, and spiritually. In time the adult would reach the mouth of the Columbia River and freshwater, where it would quit eating despite the long journey, hundreds of miles inland, that remained. Its sides would begin to turn shades of earthy pink and orange and its body would begin to shrink as it would swim and swim and swim on its marathon journey home, tenacious and committed. If it made it out of the big rivers it would get beaten up by rocks and other obstacles as it fought more current and rapids near its home stream in the Idaho wilderness. Once there it would spawn and then die, giving itself back to nature. Its body would nourish animals, plants, and the next generation of salmon.

Suddenly the incoming F-15s appeared low to his left, roared by as Brett waved to the pilots, and landed well down the runway.

He breathed deeply. Moments later the tower radioed his takeoff clearance.

After responding affirmatively, Brett took another breath, took one last look at his surroundings, adjusted his grip on the side stick controller, and engaged the throttle.

Turning his F-16 onto the runway for the last time, he started down it, the plane bristling with power. Soon it would be in pieces.

Silently he whispered to the fish: Help is coming my friends.

2

Canyon

Once airborne, Brett forced the plane steeply skyward, feeling the drag of its heavy payload. He would miss flying the incredibly powerful jets.

His real mission reminded him of his tour in Iraq, where he had helped initiate a one-sided war based on the presumed existence of weapons. More than a trillion dollars spent, a cruel dictator removed, and yet the nation still struggled and suffered under new oppressive forces.

Afghanistan came to mind, too. Poor, chaotic, long-suffering Afghanistan, where he had feared that his missiles would maim and kill innocent people, some of them children. Like in Iraq, it became apparent that the intelligence, often limited or quickly aged, frequently failed to adequately identify and differentiate the friendlies from the enemy. Or the enemy was situated near friendlies, by design or circumstance, and the civilians were in harm’s way when the target was submitted and quickly approved. In a place where human life was undervalued, the U.S. stood apart, and had the best intentions, but that meant little to civilians blown apart by American missiles that rained down from the sky. Sure, a lot of bad guys were killed, but after 9-11 the bombings were too easy to justify: "We’re fighting a war damn it." Put that many people over there who are trained to fight and told they’re in a war and they’ll find targets to hit. He recalled a quote about not wanting to know what goes into war or sausage.

Tonight some civilians could die depending on how well the dams held up, or not, but the dams were lethal in their own way, causing the slow death of river environments. He didn’t want anyone to die, but it was worth a few human lives if that meant the river lived. Many human lives in Iraq and Afghanistan were worth expending to kill a handful of terrorists, and the value of a few dead terrorists paled against the value of saving inland salmon at home.

Excited about what he was to do, and a little anxious given he had only a short time period, he told himself that he had just resigned from the Air Force. The combination resignation letter and ELF warning note he had left on his kitchen table explained how his actions would help save a species. There was no turning back now, and he was glad to finally be moving on.

Salmon-saving aside, the military was at odds with his environmentalist ideals. It used all manner of big, fuel-guzzling equipment and planes and was ever ready to destroy things. The environmental harm that occurred was just a cost of doing business; the words protecting freedom could justify a lot if they meant addressing threats, even vague ones. And when conflict broke out, environmental considerations were a distant concern or jettisoned altogether—significant environmental harm was perfectly acceptable in support of freedom. If the country were to instead spend a fraction of the war chest money on education, every kid who wanted to go to college could. Spend a tiny fraction on cancer research or roads and bridges and same thing, huge benefits.

Deep inside, it bothered him to his core that few military people cared much at all about the environment. In fact many seemed to relish not caring about it, like it was unimportant or just something that got in the way. The word environmentalist was a bad one to a conservative warrior, and they liked to turn a blind eye toward environmental concerns, apparently until problems got so bad they could no longer be avoided? They patriotically honored the flag but then acted wastefully—many couldn’t even recycle an aluminum soda can. They were uber-patriotic about their flag and country but felt little responsibility to care for the world around them that ultimately sustained them and their flag-waving.

What the military really didn’t like was environmental demands that forced it to do things. It wanted to focus on its protective mission and not be bothered with environmental matters, so protecting the environment was deemed someone else’s concern, especially when lives and freedom were at stake. The environment could be saved later, once the mission was done and the enemy was vanquished, if there was time for it. The focus had to be on defeating the enemy at all costs, with money no object. But a healthy environment was much more than a nice-to-have, whether they realized it or not.

Regarding salmon in the inland Pacific Northwest, it was a cruel joke that the Army Corps of Engineers was in charge of waterway navigation and dams. The Corps fit salmon needs in where it could, or was required to do so, which compromised salmon needs at the get-go. It was clear the salmon couldn’t tolerate this conflicted arrangement and thrive. The Corps’ first priorities were operating the dams for electricity generation and inland shipping navigation, and the salmon came after. Some runs had been sealed off from historic spawning grounds decades earlier and were confined to hatcheries, while those still allowed to return to ancient grounds struggled to get there. It was one big clusterfuck. How different would it be if an organization like Greenpeace, American Rivers, or the Sierra Club were in charge of running the dams?

But now secretive ELF had a member behind the controls of an armed warplane, and now it was some fish-killing dams that were in trouble. Fish first for once.

Flying low, at 4,000 feet above sea level or about 1,000 feet above the ground, Brett quickly arrived at the bombing range. It was a restricted area out in the desert of the Snake River plain, west of the air base and northeast of the Owyhee Mountains. His official plan was to briefly practice hitting some ground targets there, getting rid of the heavy bombs, before flying over into eastern Oregon and eventually returning to Mountain Home. Recently he and Bachman had taken a training flight over to a range in eastern Oregon, and now they had planned to do a similar flight at night.

But the ELF plan was Brett would be flying down the Snake River alone, with all his bombs. It was war, damn it.

Over the range he flew low past some targets, checking them out. Then he circled back to the east, enjoying the final minutes of sunlight and monitoring his radar to ensure that he was alone. All looked good: clear desert skies and no other military aircraft out.

He gained altitude, up to 8,000 feet, turned west again, rolled the plane a couple times for kicks, then put it into an aggressive dive toward the targets. On his final flight he intended to have some fun. Seconds later he leveled off partially and zoomed over the targets, nothing fired.

This time he continued due west, and moments later slipped down into the Snake River Canyon, a deep U-shaped crack in the earth. There his plane disappeared from radar. The base was expecting him to go west and disappear from radar anyway, so it didn’t matter, but the less it knew about his outbound path and timing the better.

Streaking well above the river, a silvery ribbon at the bottom of the darkening canyon, he leveled the plane’s course and regained some altitude so that he was flying just above the canyon rims. Twilight was near.

Backing off on his speed, he slowed down to mach .4, about 300 miles per hour, and activated the jet’s LANTIRN (Low Altitude Navigation Targeting Infrared for Night) navigation system, which gave him a view similar to daylight.

In normal circumstances, no one would be concerned if he returned a little late. It might in fact depend on Bachman noticing that he hadn’t checked back in and calling the tower to inquire. Then it would take a little more time before anyone got too concerned when he didn’t respond on the radio since he was coming back from eastern Oregon. After a while the base would dispatch aircraft to look for a lost plane. Or since he had flown into a remote area, it might wait until morning to send planes out.

However, once his plane had been seen near the dams and the base learned what his real mission was, he couldn’t count on more than a few minutes delay before the Air Force hastily sent out fighter jets to stop him. Or maybe it would take a while for the base to believe the reports and act. Either way, if things went according to plan it would be too late for the base to stop him.

He followed the Snake River west, flying just above the canyon rims in the final minutes of good light. The Owyhee Mountains, desert mountains with dull yellow grassy slopes below darker-colored timbered peaks, stood off to his left. Boise was nestled below mountains off to his right, and farther out in the Treasure Valley, not far from the Snake River, was Nampa. Oregon lay ahead, beneath an orange-tinted glow in the western sky.

Before the dams, hordes of salmon used to run up the Snake River below him, into southern Idaho and eastern Oregon streams, up desert rivers into northern Nevada, and all the way up the Snake to Shoshone Falls near Twin Falls. Witnessing so many salmon migrating up an undammed, free-flowing river, as opposed to a barely flowing de facto reservoir between stifling, obstructive dams, would have been a sight to behold. It was a tragic loss for a river which now was a mere shadow of its natural self.

As it should be, there was no radio traffic from the base back in Mountain Home. All was quiet, and soon he would slip out of radio range.

Down on the river below him, Swan Falls Dam appeared ahead. Built in 1901, it was the oldest hydroelectric dam on the Snake River. It provided electricity but had started the madness of damming salmon rivers. It had fish passage, but it worked poorly—the first blow to salmon runs more than 100 years prior. Brett wished he had 100 bombs to rain down on it, to break it apart and free a large stretch of river, but it was small-time as far as dams went. The real problems were downstream in Hells Canyon and the lower Snake River. He flew over and hoped the dam would be gone one day.

Soon, past Nampa, the steep canyon walls mellowed into a rugged, scenic valley, which ahead broke further into flatter valley country. He stayed south of the little town of Marsing, flying low along the Owyhee foothills where they tumbled to the river.

Soon he was leaving the valley and its fertile farm country, a land of potatoes, onions, vineyards, and fruit orchards. Ahead the Snake River turned north toward Hells Canyon, where it gathered five rivers: Payette, Weiser, Boise, Owyhee, and Malheur. Salmon used to haunt them all, spanning out into vast habitat in every direction. Thousands of small creeks fed the big rivers, starting high in foothills and distant mountains, everywhere water, snowmelt, and springs began to flow. As the small waterways tirelessly twisted and turned downhill, joining together and gaining strength, they nourished the dry land and its flora and fauna, creating an abundance of salmon habitat. Historically some creeks and rivers were so thick with running salmon that the joke was one could walk across the water on their backs. The salmon carried nourishment from the ocean’s bounty far and wide into the inland mountain and desert country, asking for only a nursery for their young in return. Then humans blocked them from this homeland by building a few large, impassable dams. A heinous environmental crime.

Continuing westward, and staying low, Brett reached mostly empty high desert country west of the Snake River on the Oregon side of the border. He turned off the plane’s transponder, making him invisible to radar, and sped up to nearly mach .9, about 700 miles per hour at that altitude. He wanted to make time but not break the sound barrier, lest he draw unneeded attention with sonic booms.

In a couple minutes the rugged sagebrush terrain flattened out, and he descended to only 500 feet on his predetermined course. Moments later he turned the plane north and skirted west of Vale, a small town in eastern Oregon. A low, miles-long north-south ridge allowed him to stay hidden from local radar as he flew low over rolling sage and the occasional ranch. Still no activity from Mountain Home over the radio.

Soon he crossed Interstate 84 and returned to the Snake River, which remained a tame, north-flowing river with agricultural land on both sides. The middle of its channel was the Idaho-Oregon border. Brett envisioned the river running wild and free again.

The river corridor was quiet except for two boats, their lights visible from afar. It wasn’t unexpected. Farther down he might see a campfire or two along the river, then there would be people in the campgrounds near the dams in Hells Canyon. A fighter jet flying over would be a sight for campers—he’d be seen by people in the campgrounds for sure. But he expected it would be the dam operators who would sound the alarm that would get back to Mountain Home.

Minutes after that he saw the westward-pointing upper arm of Brownlee Reservoir ahead, which meant Hells Canyon was near. His pulse quickened and he felt butterflies in his stomach, something he hadn’t felt in a long time, not since his first flights in Iraq.

He adjusted course from the river’s west side to its middle as the steep hills grew taller on both sides of the canyon. He slowed down and reminded himself of power lines that he needed to avoid as he approached Brownlee Dam. Then he cued up a bomb on his flight display.

3

Brownlee

One thing Brett and his fellow Elves weren’t sure about was how hard it would be to damage big dams.

It was tempting to strike the face of a dam low on the exposed downriver side, like removing the lower support of a wall and having it collapse. But hitting a dam low, where it was considerably thicker and stronger, would be a waste of firepower. Such a blow would do some surface damage, maybe penetrate the concrete a bit and crack it enough to concern engineers. A crack might be little more than scar tissue, though, and wouldn’t help salmon get past the dam. He didn’t need to waste a bomb confirming that it couldn’t blow through the many, many feet of concrete near the base. To break it there would require much larger bombs or repeated strikes.

Physics advised that the top side of a dam had more vulnerability, where it was already holding back the immense pressure of miles of reservoir water. And it was much easier to break there.

During World War II, the British had destroyed some large dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley by striking them on their top sides. The Brits developed and then dropped, at very low altitude, some large, circular, bouncing bombs that skipped across the reservoirs to get past underwater torpedo nets. When the bombs reached the wall of the dam, they stopped and then rolled down the face of the dam, due to backspin, and after they sunk below the surface they detonated. A key finding for the mission was that reservoir water could absorb and neutralize a bomb’s explosive force if the bomb wasn’t close enough to the dam. However, if the bomb was