Satori - Don Winslow [91]
But the raft was spinning like a leaf in the wind.
“Where are the lifejackets?” Nicholai hollered to Tasser.
“The what?” Tasser hollered back.
The current spat them out, but sideways — the starboard side facing the waterfall — and Nicholai saw a large backcurrent, a small wall of water coming toward them.
“Look out!” he yelled.
The backcurrent lifted the raft and pitched one of the aft oarsmen off the starboard side. Nicholai, one hand on the line, crawled back and tried to pull him out of the water, but Tasser yelled, “The oar! Get the oar, goddamnit!”
Nicholai grabbed the oar just before it slipped into the water.
The crewman was pulled back into the circular current and Nicholai saw him try to stay above water as the current spun him around and around like some malevolent funhouse ride.
“Pull!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai sat down and pulled on the oar, straining every muscle and sinew to try to pull the raft around. They were almost straight when the bow went over the edge. This fall was not as high. They landed in a deep pool and the raft bobbed once before it was pulled into the next chute of water.
The flume raced to a narrow fall between two towers of rock. The raft scraped the edge of the rock to the left, bounced off, and then slid over the low fall onto a shallow stretch that rushed over rocks that banged against the bottom.
Downriver he saw a large column of what looked like smoke.
It wasn’t smoke, though. Nicholai knew that could only be mist from a large volume of water crashing over a very high waterfall.
“Pull to the side!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai looked to his right, where Tasser was pointing toward a long eddy. But the current was pulling them away, and they had little time or space to make it over into the eddy, and the crews were already exhausted.
He lifted his oar from the water as the crew on the port side pulled. When the raft was pointed starboard, both sides would row as hard as they could, for their lives. He took a few deep gulps of air and then, at Tasser’s order, started to stroke.
It was only a small bump, but it was enough. Nicholai had pulled himself up on the end of his stroke, and the bump hit before he could settle back down and lifted him up and off the side of the raft.
The first thing he felt was the shock of the cold water as he went under. He pulled himself to the surface, then felt the mental shock of knowing that he was in the river and inexorably headed for the waterfall.
He had been in bad situations before, while exploring narrow passages in caves during his happy years with friends in Japan. Then, the chambers had closed in and seemed to offer no way out. Or he’d been trapped by underground streams, the water hissing below him in the pitch black, and he’d enjoyed the danger, so now he forced his mind to dismiss the terror and focus on survival.
The first thing to do was get turned around, so he struggled successfully to get feet-first into the current. He didn’t know what waited at the bottom of the fall, but it was certainly better to encounter it with his feet instead of his head, smashing his legs, perhaps, instead of his neck or skull. He knew that he was dead anyway if the fall landed shallowly on rock, but honor demanded that he do his best.
Then he pressed his arms tightly to his sides and closed his legs to create as compact a vessel of himself as he could, so his limbs wouldn’t create levers that might tip him sideways and roll him, akimbo, over the falls.
He held his neck and head up out of the water until the last possible moment, then took a deep breath (his last? he wondered) and went over the edge.
The fall was long and violent, the water battering him to try to knock him out of his posture, but he held firm, waiting for the “landing” that would shatter his body, maim him, or offer the next challenge.
Then he felt the stillness of a pool and realized that he’d survived the fall.
He looked back up and realized that he’d plunged at least forty feet. Treading water to catch his breath, he looked