Falling. Half in the water, half in the air. Faster and faster.
Try to aim for the white. That’s where there’s the most air in the water, and the air will cushion your fall. Don’t shout. You have to hold that breath.
How much farther could it be? And how deep was the basin? God—he would be smashed to pieces if he hit a rock. Too late to worry about that now. He closed his eyes. Why watch his own death?
The kayak hit the cauldron nose first and was instantly sucked inside. Alex’s legs and stomach took the full force of the impact before the water overwhelmed him. It pounded down on his shoulders, crushing him. His head was thrown back, and he felt the whiplash twist his neck.
The paddle was torn free. And then he was floundering, scrabbling desperately with his hands, trying to free himself from the kayak, which was now dragging him into the depths below. His elbow struck a rock, almost breaking the bone. The shock made him release his breath, and he knew he had only seconds to reach the surface. But his legs were trapped. He couldn’t pull them free. The kayak was sinking, taking him with it. Using all his strength, he twisted his lower body, and somehow his hips cleared the edge of the kayak. He pulled. First one leg, then the other.
He was swallowing water. He no longer knew which way was up and which was down. His feet were free. He
lashed out once and then again. The water spun him, throwing him violently from side to side. He couldn’t take any more. One last try . . .
His head and shoulders burst up into the air. He was already far downstream. The Bora Falls were behind him, impossibly high. There was no sign of the kayak. It had surely been smashed to pieces. But as Alex sucked in fresh air, he knew that he had done everything right and that by a miracle he had survived. He had taken on the falls and he had beaten them.
The current had slowed down. Alex’s arms and legs were completely limp. All his strength had gone, and the best he could manage was to keep himself afloat, tilting his head back so that his mouth stayed in the air. He felt as if he had swallowed a gallon of water and vaguely wondered about cholera, yellow fever, or whatever else this tropical river might contain. ASIS hadn’t bothered giving him any injections before he flew to Bangkok.
How far had he traveled? Dr. Tanner had said that the falls were a mile from the camp but he felt he had gone twice that distance. No sign of the helicopter, though. That was a good thing. They thought he was dead. So they’d leave him alone. He had never felt so weary. The water was now a cushion, and he wanted to lie back and sleep.
Some time later, he found himself lying on a riverbank made up of gravel and sand. He had been washed up without even noticing it and must have nodded off
S N A K E H E A D
since the sun was now high in the sky. He allowed the warmth to creep into him. As far as he could tell, none of his limbs were broken. His neck and back were bruised and hurting—his spine had taken the full force of the impact—and there were cuts and scratches all over his waist, his hips, and his legs. But he knew he had gotten off lightly. The chances of his surviving the waterfall must have been about fifty to one . . . but to have done so without a major injury would have been considerably less. He remembered what Ash had told him about his father. The luck of the devil. Well, that was something Alex seemed to have inherited.
Ash.
Reef Island.
The tsunami heading for Western Australia.
For the last few days, Alex had been so worried about himself that he had lost sight of the bigger picture. How long did he have left before Major Yu set off the bomb that was going to have such a devastating effect on the earth’s tectonic plates? Was he already too late? Alex forced himself into a sitting position, warming himself in the sun and trying to get life back into his battered frame. At the same time, he worked it out. Yu had spoken of three days.
At midnight the earth was going to be in the grip of some sort of gravitational pull and the fault line deep down in the seabed would be at its most vulnerable.
Three days. Alex had spent two of them as a prisoner in the hospital compound. So it was going to happen
today! Right now it couldn’t be much later than ten or eleven o’clock in the morning. So Alex had only twelve hours to prevent a terrible catastrophe, the murder of eight people on Reef Island and the deaths of thousands more in Australia.
And that was when the complete hopelessness of his situation hit him. It was true that he had managed to escape from the horrific death Major Yu had planned for him. But where was he? Looking around him, Alex saw that he had left the rain forest behind him. He was on the edge of a floodplain with mountains in the far distance, perhaps thirty miles away. He was surrounded by stubby, dwarflike trees that he couldn’t name, a few boulders, and some termite mounds. There was a sweet smell—
something like moldering wood—in the air. And that was all. If nowhere had a middle, this was it.
There was nothing he could do. Nobody was going to operate on him, but he would die anyway—either from starvation or disease. Assuming, of course, that a saltwater crocodile or a snake didn’t get him first. Alex wiped a grimy hand across his face. It seemed to him that from the moment this mission had begun, nothing had gone right. He had never been in control. He cast his mind back to the office in Sydney and Ethan Brooke outlining what he would have to do. He was there to provide cover, that was all. It was going to be easy. Instead of which, he had been thrown into the worst two weeks of his life.
God! He should have listened to Jack Starbright!
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He looked again at the mountains. It would take him forty-eight hours to reach them at the very least. Too long.
And why should he assume anyone lived there? He hadn’t seen any roads or houses from the plane. If only he could get in touch with MI6. He glanced at his wrist. Miracu-lously, despite the battering it had taken, the watch was still in place. The question was—why hadn’t it worked?
