He was less than six feet from Trader.
Four feet.
Ryan risked a final glance up and ahead. To his horror he realized that their speed was increasing and they were already entering the crown of the bend. The view in front of them was almost obscured by the curtain of water thrown up by the stretch of jagged boulders that broke up the river’s flow.
He threw himself flat, his right hand reaching for Trader, who clutched at it with his left hand, the right still gripping the precarious hold on the stump of the broken branch.
There was only going to be the one chance. Once they were plummeted into the raging passage of broken water immediately ahead of them, Trader’s chances of survival would drop from five percent to nil.
The deathly strength of the old man’s grip took Ryan by surprise. And nearly brought disaster. His own fingers were cold and numb, and when Trader clamped onto his hand, Ryan nearly let go. But he managed to sustain his balance on the tree, leaning back and hauling upward.
The moment Trader let go of the tree was the most hazardous. Thrown back and downward with his full weight tripled by the powerful drag of the river, Ryan was nearly thrown on top of him.
For a frozen splinter of racing time, it seemed that they hung balanced together, like a classical piece of statuary, motionless in the midst of the whirling inferno of rock and water.
It was muscle-crackingly difficult. Ryan faced forward on the tree trunk, but the full impact of Trader was pulling backward, behind him.
“Move, you bastard!” Ryan yelled, knowing that his old leader couldn’t possibly hear him.
There was a final convulsive struggle, and Trader was up, using the same matted root section that had helped Ryan to clamber onto the willow.
But there was no time for rejoicing.
They were into the maelstrom.
The surface of the trunk had occasional blemishes of burrs and stumps of branches, giving just enough of a handhold to avoid being pitched off at the first spine-wrenching drop.
Ryan couldn’t worry about Trader, hoping that he would be clinging on behind him. If he wasn’t then he was dead.
And nobody worried about a dead man.
There was noise and a turmoil of water and blinding, freezing spray.
The trunk was tossed around like the flotsam it was, actually revolving in its own length, so that Ryan had the illusion that they were traveling backward through the tomblike walls of the endless canyon.
Once they seemed to fall vertically for thirty or fifty feet, plunging deep below the river into a bottomless pit of black, icy water. The breath froze in Ryan’s lungs, and the strap of the Steyr wrapped itself round his neck like the tentacles of some subterranean kraken.
They rolled over through three hundred and sixty degrees, and Ryan was so disorientated that he wasn’t even sure whether he was still holding on to the uprooted willow.
Finally the trunk emerged from the deeps, like a sub-to-air missile, exploding into the silvered blackness, then crashing down again, spinning in a succession of swirling saw-edged pools and shallows.
There was a brief moment of stasis, a beguiling, treacherous few seconds of stillness.
Even the noise of the river seemed quieted and Ryan risked a quick glance behind him, relieved to see the drowned-rat figure of Trader still clinging on, the Armalite still strung across his shoulders.
“How’s it” Ryan began.
It was like being slammed into from behind by a three-hundred-pound pesthole bouncer.
The gentle pool where the willow had rested for a dozen beats of the heart vanished, and they rattled down another series of savage, jolting steps, each of them threatening Ryan’s precarious hold on the slick, wet wood.
Nothing mattered anymore, just to lie flat, the river surging up over his head and shoulders, knowing that at some point all of the suffering would cease.
Either in death or in safety.
IT ENDEDone way or another, everything always didwinding up in a final series of racing rapids, the teeth of the rocks tearing long strips off the bottom of the willow trunk, making Ryan’s and Trader’s fragile hold even more dangerous.