“Going swimming, Trader,” he shouted.
“Could do with a bath. Meant to have a dip in the river this morning, anyway.”
There was another trembling shock, which brought a shower of small pebbles and earth down on top of the two men as they cowered in the lee of the cliff.
“Look,” Trader shouted, pointing upstream. “Coming on down the pike for us.”
It was another uprooted tree, a big willow, most of its smaller, feathery branches stripped away by the tumbling waters and the grinding rocks.
“Too far out,” Ryan yelled.
“Can’t wait for anything better.” Trader didn’t bother to see if Ryan was following him, throwing himself into the muddied river and striking out on a diagonal course that he hoped would bring him up against the tree.
“Fireblast!” Although already soaked, Ryan still got a shock from the surprisingly cold water. The Steyr SSG-70 banged painfully on the back of his neck as he half dived, half fell into the foaming torrent.
The waves were rolling and breaking all around Ryan, making it dangerously difficult to see where he was going or to calculate just what he needed to do to try to make contact with the racing length of timber. Rising and falling, he blinked water from his eye, glimpsing Trader only a few feet ahead of him, and the jagged branches of the willow, less than twenty yards away, moving fast toward him.
Ryan kicked out desperately, knowing that it would likely prove fatal to miss the tree. With nothing to bear him up, he would have little chance of surviving the maelstrom of rapids that he knew waited a little farther down the canyon.
Something brushed against his right arm, and he grabbed at it. But it was only a short, brittle branch off another tree, not even large enough to support a starved rat. Ryan pushed it away and gave it one last, long-bursting effort.
His elbow was jolted and he snatched upward, finding the solid smoothness of the tree. But it was slipping inexorably past him, going faster than he was. Despite all of his attempts, Ryan knew with chilling certainly that he wasn’t going to make it.
Then he felt roughness, with long fronds, as thick as a man’s finger. It was the root end of the willow’s trunk. Despite the weight of water in his clothes, Ryan managed to heave himself up, pausing to draw breath and look around him.
He spotted Trader immediately, face as white as parchment in the stark moonlight.
He had managed to lock an arm around the stump of one of the broken side branches, hanging on helplessly, dragged along, unable to pull himself up onto the main trunk. His mouth opened as he saw Ryan appear above and behind him, but the roar of the river drowned his words.
There was a brief second of recognition in Ryan’s memory, seeing the flickering, scratched remnants of a predark video about men hunting a huge white whale. The captain had been dragged under, caught in a web of harpoons and ropes, tugged through the ocean by the rampaging beast.
For a moment Ryan looked ahead, seeing the vast walls of sandstone towering high above them. They were going unbelievably fast, racing through the solid water. About a quarter mile farther down, the canyon angled sharply to the right. There was a great wall of mist from what had to be a major stretch of rapids. If Trader was to be saved, Ryan had to haul him aboard the willow before they reached that bend.
The only factor in his favor was that the big tree was remarkably stable, showing no sign of pitching or rolling.
He began to work his way forward, half-astride the willow, shuffling toward Trader.
The rifle had slipped and he stopped for a moment to adjust it, pushing it around across his back again. The sound of the river was growing louder and louder, like the screaming of a banshee, deafening him. He closed his eye for a moment, fighting for control. The noise was so loud that it seemed to be sucking all the sense from his brain with its thunderous pounding.