The Rainmaker's Sledgehammer (1)
Rumble—rumble—rumble!
A deep, ground-shaking vibration cut through the cold morning air of early January and shattered the silence of Harris Orchard. Where the bare cherry trees would normally have lent the place nothing but a desolate winter emptiness, a massive steel monster had taken up residence.
A thirty-meter drilling tower stabbed toward the sky. The thick diesel engines belched acrid exhaust that somehow carried a strange sense of anticipation. Every time the drill bit tore into the hard surface of the earth, the vibration traveled up through the soles of their boots and set the entire orchard trembling.
“Check the bit temperature! Adjust the mud density!”
The foreman’s rough shout cut through the engine noise. Workers caked in dirt and dust moved with practiced urgency, feeding heavy pipe into the borehole. Brian and Chloe watched from a short distance away. In his hands he held detailed charts of the geological survey data and the depths of the aquifers.
“What are they talking about with ‘bit’ and ‘mud’?” Chloe asked, arms linked tightly through his. The tip of her nose was faintly pink from the cold. Even though it was a mild 8°C—far warmer than a Korean winter—she had bundled up thickly.
“The bit is that giant auger-like blade at the very end of the drill string down there. When the depth increases, the bit grinds against hard rock and generates enormous heat. If you don’t cool it and the bit burns out or breaks, you’re finished—so they keep checking the temperature.”
“Oh… then what’s the mud?”
“See that slurry they’re pumping down the hole?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it. It looks like muddy water, but it’s actually a precisely formulated fluid mixed with minerals like bentonite and chemical additives. It cools the spinning bit, carries the rock cuttings back up to the surface, and forms a thin cake on the borehole wall so the hole doesn’t collapse under pressure.”
Chloe’s eyes went round. She chattered excitedly.
“How do you know all that? That’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Uh… I just know.”
In truth, before his regression he had spent a short stint on a project reclaiming drought-stricken farmland. He had been there to design the crop mix and teach cultivation methods, and along the way he had inevitably learned the equipment used to sink wells.
“You’re really something.”
It was nothing special, but Chloe thumped his chest in admiration, then her expression turned faintly worried.
“But is this going to be okay? We’re already a hundred and fifty meters down and it’s still just dust flying.”
Her gaze never left the point where the drill was biting into the earth. Tens of thousands of dollars in drilling costs and the fate of the orchard rode on the tip of that hard bit.
Brian answered calmly, pointing at the chart.
“Don’t worry. Geologically this area has a first aquifer between a hundred eighty and two hundred twenty meters, but the volume is low. What we’re after is the bedrock aquifer at three hundred meters. The water that comes out of there is purer and richer in minerals than anything Hartford could ever block in that canal. Combined with drip irrigation we don’t use much water anyway—this well alone will be enough. It’ll be the orchard’s new lifeline.”
He had spent several nights digging through the U.S. Geological Survey’s online database—the National Water Information System—to find these figures. Records of exploratory borings the government had drilled in the Brentwood area during the 1970s for highway construction and infrastructure expansion were still public, and that was how he knew.
“I really hope so.”
“It will be. Don’t worry.”
And so Brian and Chloe stood watching from a distance as the heavy machinery thundered on.
At the same hour, inside a private VIP room at the Deer Ridge Country Club in downtown Brentwood.
William Hartford was fidgeting with a cup of cold coffee instead of the single-malt whisky he usually enjoyed. Across from him sat the cooperative’s core directors—Samuel, Thomas, and the others—faces ashen.
“Not even a week after we shut the canal and they’re already sinking a well?”
William’s voice dropped into a low, furious growl. Samuel answered with a look of pure misery.
“That’s what they’re saying. And they brought in a big drilling outfit that usually only works Napa Valley. You can hear the rig from my bedroom. Worse, I found out they’ve got a lawyer named Harry Montis from Napa attached. The papers he filed with the court closed every administrative loophole we had. He framed it as ‘exercise of emergency survival rights due to the cooperative’s deliberate canal blockade,’ and the county officer got scared and stamped the permit on the spot. They say his nickname is the Rainmaker… this guy’s no ordinary lawyer. I’ve seen plenty of attorneys, but I’ve never met one with a nickname that absurd.”
The bad news hit William like a blow to the back of the skull. He clenched his fist. He had been certain that locking the sluice gates would bring Fredrick crawling on his knees. Without water a California farmer was as good as dead. Instead Fredrick had dug straight into the earth right under the cooperative’s nose and opened a new path.
“Idiots… they have no idea how much money it costs to drill for groundwater. If they go that deep and come up dry they’ll have thrown tens of thousands of dollars into thin air. And even if water does come out, how do they think a trickle is going to cover a hundred acres?”
They had no idea that Fredrick’s cherry orchard used SWP methods married to drip irrigation and cut water use to an extreme. Nor did they understand that the reduced water was exactly what produced cherries with higher sugar and vivid color. So they concluded one well could never sustain a hundred-acre cherry operation. Even so, William Hartford’s expression did not ease. Instinct told him that Fredrick’s future son-in-law—this Brian—was not a man who gambled. Brian moved in a completely different league; he was a young man who had already made a success of the notoriously difficult winery business and was still climbing. Different scale entirely. William could not afford to lower his guard.
“Fine. Let’s say the water ran underground. The roads above ground are still in my hand. Even if they harvest the cherries, without a market that water will just be poison rotting the vines.”
William shoved a sheaf of papers at his secretary.
“Contact the West Coast MDs at Costco, Walmart, and Whole Foods. Tell them next year’s Bing cherry supply price drops five percent. One condition: any store that takes Harris Orchard’s Royal Tioga or Bing gets zero allocation of cooperative fruit. Make that crystal clear.”
“But Chairman, that’s a blatant antitrust violation. If we get caught—”
“Who said put it in writing? Drop it on the golf course, over dinner. Retail MDs aren’t fools. They’re not going to pick a fight with a stable bulk supplier like the cooperative just to take a few pallets from some upstart orchard.”
Once the secretary left, Thomas spoke with open worry.
“Is this safe? If word leaks—”
“Hmph. You think those MDs only take money from us?”
“Ah… right.”
Quiet kickbacks to push product had been standard practice in big-box retail for decades.
“Some contracts may already be signed, but it’s still winter—how many can there be? If they’re ready to walk away from thousands of acres of Brentwood cooperative cherries, they can ignore us. But will they?”
A cruel smile curved his lips. Even if the groundwater gushed, once the market wall slammed shut the orchard would slowly wither. He had no doubt of his victory.
That was when the door opened.
“Chairman, there’s a gentleman outside who insists he must see you right now. He says his name is Herald Harry Montis.”
The name he had just heard. Why was a Napa Valley lawyer here? William made no effort to hide his irritation and jerked his chin.
“Show him in.”
The door swung wide and a heavyset man in tight denim pants and a leather jacket strode in. Harry Montis paid no attention to the opulent décor or the assembled growers’ air of authority. He walked straight up to William, sniffed once, and spoke.
“William Hartford?”
“So you’re the so-called Rainmaker? What’s a man who usually works Napa doing in a backwater like this?”
William’s sneer only made Harry throw his head back and laugh. The sound was loud enough to set the crystal fixtures trembling.
“That’s right. Compared to the cases I usually handle, this barely qualifies as a lawsuit. Just retaining me once would normally cost half your cooperative’s annual budget. Yet here you are acting so relaxed even though you know who I am… I must still have a long way to go. I’ll have to work harder.”
“What?”
Harry continued before William could parse the insult.
“Anyway, the orchard you decided to mess with happens to belong to a very… special friend of mine named Brian. That’s extremely unfortunate for you people. When that friend asks, I promised I’d open the floodgates of hell itself.”
Harry’s eyes went cold. He pulled a few sheets of paper and a statute book from his briefcase and dropped them on the table with a soft thud.
“Mr. Hartford, I came to inform you about the welding job you did this morning. First, this is a public-health violation notice.”
“Public health? That’s a joke. How is shutting my own canal a health violation?”
“California Health and Safety Code Section 116110. Creating standing water through artificial blockage of a waterway and thereby providing a breeding ground for mosquitoes that vector West Nile Virus. The water behind the gate you welded is already pooling and starting to stagnate. Photos and coordinates have already been transmitted to the state health inspectors.”
“What did you say?”
“By tomorrow morning the vector-control authority will issue an administrative order against the entire cooperative. Until you reopen the gate and disinfect, you’ll be fined fifty thousand dollars a day… I wonder how the members will feel about that?”
Harry’s gaze slowly swept the room. Playfulness danced in his eyes, yet not one of the men could meet it.
“One piece of advice: once you knew I was counsel for the other side, you should at least have hired the best lawyer in California. That’s standard procedure in Napa. If you start looking now, maybe that lawyer can find a way to void the fifty-thousand-a-day fine and keep the gate closed. You’ll have to search hard, though.”
Harry stood, patted William’s shoulder twice, and left. William, crushed by the sheer physical presence of the big man, could not even manage a groan.
“Whether you open the gate or not no longer matters to me. I’m doing this only as a warning. If you’re going to use the law, don’t come at it half-assed. Know exactly who you’re dealing with.”
Harry tapped his own temple, flashed William a wide grin, and walked out of the room.
The men left behind understood, with painful clarity, exactly why the lawyer named Harry was called the Rainmaker.