Page 37 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

37.

Never be without at least two hundred feet of rope when you go into the wilderness.

His father had meant primarily rope for abseiling or rappelling off cliffs. Ashton Shaw loved his mountaineering, though it was a mountain that killed him (to be accurate, it was one of his enemies responsible for his demise, though the means of death was a fight ending in the man’s tumbling over the flinty edge of a hundred-foot cliff near the Compound).

Rope would not have saved him.

But he insisted the children carry with them a coil, or ideally two. One camo colored and the other bright and easy to spot.

It was an orange nylon braided model Colter now ripped from the backpack. He ran to the cliff the car had tumbled over.

He couldn’t reach Millwood, now clinging to a rock ten feet from the shore, and he was uncertain if the man could keep a grip and grab a line without losing ahold of both. And so Shaw kicked off his shoes and socks and flung aside his jacket, the 5.11 tactical garment falling, coincidentally, upon the Italian designer’s. He left his blue work shirt and black undershirt on. Slacks too. Every bit of insulation helped. The popular idea that open-ocean swimmers used grease or other fat as insulation—and one should do the same in a survival mode—was wrong. The fat was merely to prevent chafing. Serious extreme swimmers wore wet suits or acclimated their bodies to the cold slowly.

Neither of which was feasible at the moment.

He tied a bowline around his waist—the preferred knot for this task—and looped it around a smooth-barked birch. Paying out line, he descended. Colter Shaw was not unaccustomed to cold water. The first half of his daily shower in the Winnebago’s tiny stall was searingly hot, the second nothing but the coldest in the tank. And so the initial shock was not unexpected. The body is a powerful furnace, and his heart began its frantic revving, forcing warming blood to every square inch of skin. The breath vanished from his lungs.

The worst, as anybody braving chill water knows, is when the shoulders dip below the surface.

Now, just do it.

An audible gasp and the shock and pain.

The water, after all, had recently been mountaintop snow.

Shaw considered his priorities.

If Fiona were in the car, which was wholly submerged, she was dead. There’d be no air pocket like what had saved the Garvey family in the retention pond. Nothing could have kept her alive for three hours—and if water in the lungs didn’t kill her, the hypothermia would have.

Save Millwood. His only mission.

Easing out more line, he fought to keep himself more or less upright as he moved downstream.

Their father had taught the children survival swimming—in tidal currents, in frozen-over lakes, in hurricane-tossed open oceans (a field trip, of course; the Sierra Nevadas were not visited by named storms). But, he’d taught that the most difficult type of water survival was in a flood. The water speeds up, slows down, changes direction, drops into basements and wells in a city, and gulleys and caves in more rustic areas. It was generally not hard to stay afloat in lakes or ocean—if you relaxed and didn’t panic. But floodwaters were pure muscle and would slam you into any number of blunt objects: walls, trees, vehicles, debris…corpses.

Or, as in this case, one of the dozens of rocks jutting out from the water and just below the surface.

More line…

He approached the rock that the pale, terrified man was clinging to.

Shaw’s plan was simple. He would grip the man’s belt, tell him to take a deep breath and let go. The rope would act like a pendulum and swing them to the shore. Millwood would clamber up the bank to dryish ground and Shaw would follow.

Shaw was now about eight feet away, kicking hard to remain midstream.

Six feet.

Four…

Three…

He wrapped the loose end of the rope around his left wrist and reached for the man’s waistband.

He was inches away when Millwood lost his grip.

With a choking scream he went under the whitewater and vanished downstream.

Ah…

Being just above the surface himself Shaw had only a limited view ahead. And the river wove in serpentine curves; he could view nothing past the next bend.

Paying out more rope, kicking himself away from the endless sharp rocks.

Soon he reached the end of the rope—two hundred feet of line pulleying around a birch tree gets you only one hundred feet of distance. He climbed out, shivering, and dropped the loose end of the rope and gathered it to him.

Sprinting downstream along the path, under the towering face of Copper Peak, he spotted Millwood clinging to another cluster of rocks midstream.

This also was just out of reach.

And ten feet farther on the walls narrowed, creating a flume, through which the water accelerated to twice the speed it was here. The banks were lined with more rocks and Shaw could see stony steps that water cascaded over through the narrow slot. Slipping into it would mean a thirty-foot ride over scores of jutting razors. And if a rocky blade didn’t slice a jugular, a collision could easily break a neck.

He did the rope trick again, this time using as the improvised pulley a scrub oak. Not the smoothest of barks, but the only option.

Then once more into the water, which had not, he thought acerbically, gotten any warmer in his brief foray onto land.

Millwood was in an odd configuration. His legs were drawn to the left, not downstream. The surface of the water was flowing toward the flume but, beneath, the current was tugging him in a different direction.

Shaw knew why, and the answer was troubling.

He recognized an underwater cave entrance.

The opening was not big enough for Millwood’s entire body to fit through, but it would hold him snug, under the surface, like a swimmer stuck in a pool drain. If he lost his grip now, and was pulled into the entrance, even all of Shaw’s strength could not free him.

Holding the rock as best he could, his knuckles white, Millwood was struggling desperately to keep from being pulled to his death.

Shaw eased closer. Once, his feet slipped and he pinwheeled in the water but finally he brought himself under control. He sucked air and continued toward the man. He didn’t bother to yell, “Hold on,” or the like. Unnecessary or obvious instructions were a waste of breath.

“Please, please! Help me. I can’t—”

Speaking of which…

Shaw shouted, “Quiet!”

He was now five feet from him, gripping the rope with hands beginning to cramp from the cold. He knew his core temperature was dropping and he had only ten or so minutes until hypothermia began its inevitable process of confusion, followed by debilitating exhaustion.

Breathing hard, more rope, and yet more.

Nearly there.

A shout: “I’m going to let go. I can’t keep it up. I—”

And Millwood did, slipping under the surface as he was tugged toward the cavern’s opening.

Just before he got there, Shaw lunged and caught the man by the wristwatch, whose leather band he doubted would hold for very long.

“Grab my waistband.”

Millwood did so, and hand over hand, Shaw pulled them both upstream. Slowly, slowly, in the face of the relentless flow.

They came to a tree whose roots had been exposed by the patient onslaught of water. Using the tough tendrils as handholds, he helped Millwood out. The man in turn offered his hand to Shaw and assisted him to the bank. Millwood dropped to his knees. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I wasn’t think—”

Shaw waved his hand to silence him. “I’m going to check out the car. Call nine-one-one.”