Sommer looking over his shoulder at Broker, shook his head. Can’t hear. Broker stabbed his paddle through the air to give the angle and direction.
“Angle left,” Sommer shouted. Broker nodded his head vigorously.
A wave battered them every two seconds, the crest pulsing in one direction, the trough pulling in another. As they teetered on the crest, they were shoved back by the stiff-arm wind. Leaning forward, they muscled a hole in the blast and plunged down. The waves clubbed Broker’s arms as he extended his J-stroke, adding a sweep to propel the canoe to the left, to cut an angle across the trough. Then he reversed sides and swept his paddle to straighten up into the wind as they climbed the next roller. He was trying to compensate for Sommer’s reduced strength, and the added torque invited tendon and bone to separate.
But they had the technique, and Sommer settled into a jerky but steady paddle as, wave by wave, with total concentration, they crabbed to the left.
They went blind in the drenching needles of spray for whole parts of minutes and could only cling to the direction of the wind. Squinting into the gray shuttles of water and foam, Broker saw Milt’s canoe heave up out of a trough with Allen, a resolute figurehead, paddling doggedly in the bow as Milt bent with grim power in the stern.
Reach, dig, pull, recover. Reach, dig, pull, recover. They clawed for the point on a parallel course.
Five minutes of progress. Ten. Then another spasm crippled Sommer and he cringed over in the bow. His paddle absent, they wobbled, broached a wave, and took on water. Broker’s arms and shoulders cracked as he redoubled his paddling to plow back into the wind. They were losing forward motion, slipping back into the belly of the wave.
They seesawed in the trough and suddenly it was Broker’s turn. For a long, terrible moment he sat frozen, gripped by vertigo and muscle strain, unable to lift his paddle. His forearms were bowling pins, the muscle and tendon fused in spasms. He couldn’t feel his hands or his fingers. His arms had gone numb below the elbows.
They were going to swamp on the next wave.
Sommer turned in the tossing canoe and saw Broker struggling to raise his stone arms. Broker would never forget the way Sommer’s raging eyes willed themselves calm.
Strict with duty, Sommer faced forward and stretched his long arms to the paddle in a powerful sweep. The canoe nosed up into the onrushing wave. The muscle spasm passed and Broker raised and swung his paddle. But he was mostly on the rudder. Hatless, parka hood cowled at his throat, blond hair streaming, Sommer’s powerful arms dug a zigzag trench up and down the waves.
Broker couldn’t tell the time and his head was a clutter of migraine splinters. He knew they were soaked and freezing and way past complete collapse. Water sloshed in the canoe up to their shins and made the boat handle like an iron barge. But they were close, within fifty yards of shore, in among geysers of spume breaking off the rocks. Then it was thirty more yards, then twenty. The waves played tricks with Broker’s eyes and the rocks heaved up around them like huge pitted molars, salivating foam. But strength was flowing back into his arms. When he heard the keel scrape on granite he knew it was going to be all right.
“Sommer, man; you saved our ass,” he shouted in relief.
Sommer had nothing left but a growl of pain. Spent, he pitched forward and crumpled into a ball.
Then he dropped his paddle.
Broker watched the paddle vanish, a streak of yellow in the gunmetal foam. Now the bow rose, swung around without Sommer’s paddle to nail it down, and they rolled sideways and took on a gunwale full of water, and the next wave crashed over them. A ton of ice water slammed into Broker and squashed the air from his lungs.
And they went under.
Chapter Four
HOLYJESUSFUCKINCHRIST!
The ice water shattered his blood into red pins and needles. But it was ice water ten yards from shore because Broker felt the reassuring slip-slide of mossy stone under his boots. He pushed up and shot the surface. With his heart and lungs booming too big for his ribs, he bit off chunks of glassy air. Then he hugged his life jacket, checked the snaps to make sure they were tight, and blinked up into streaming snowflakes. Couldn’t see where the snow stopped and where the stinging water started.
So he thrashed toward the shore, swung his head around, and located Sommer’s straw-colored hair bobbing on a crest closer in, among the rocks. He punched through one wave, two, reached out, and got a grip on the swamped canoe that heaved up, buoyant with built-in floatation. Gotta think. Survival bag.
He grabbed the red waterproof duffel bag bouncing from the thwart in front of the stern seat, popped the pressure clasp, and yanked it free, as the canoe wallowed deeper. Using the bag for a float, he kicked over to Sommer who rolled up in the water, coughing.
“Hurts,” Sommer cried out.
“Quit whining.” Broker tried for levity through chattering teeth and a voice that rattled like a snare drum. “Not the end of the world. You’re on top the water. You got air.”
“Hurts,” Sommer said again.
Clutching Sommer’s life jacket, hugging the bag, pumping his feet, he surged through the thrashing surf until he felt his boots scuff solid stone. Having terra firma under his feet backed off the freezing panic, and he forced a deep, shuddering breath and fixed on the problem of survival.
Hypothermia made simple demands on humans who’d evolved in tropical savannahs. They needed fire to get warm and dry, and shelter from the wind. They had to stabilize the body’s core temperature.
Or they would die.
Coughing, puking lake water, he manhandled Sommer’s loose body up on the slick granite. He had to get Sommer’s brain and vital organs out of the water. Seconds were precious now.
Sommer was injured and in shock. Broker went the other way and was on fire with adrenalin. For now, he did not feel the cold or even Sommer’s weight. The wind blazed on his sopping clothing and the snow zinged like white-hot sparks. But it wouldn’t last long. So he quickly checked Sommer for broken limbs and bleeding and found nothing. Which meant it was something internal, something far worse.
He dragged Sommer across the granite slabs up to a loose cobble beach, dropped him, and staggered up the shale. He needed a protected nook in the granite bluff, out of the wind. And found one among a jumble of tall boulders. Better, the broken rocky base of the ridge had trapped tangled piles of almost dry driftwood.
He tossed his duffel into a slant of boulders that formed a broad cranny ten feet deep which stopped the wind on three sides and provided some overhang against the snow. He ran back, seized Sommer’s life vest, dragged him to cover, peeled off the life vest, opened the duffel, dug out a space blanket, and quickly tucked it around Sommer. The reflective wrap would hold some warmth until. .
Broker shook his head, getting disoriented.
He should gather wood, start a fire. But he had to look for the other guys. He started shaking. Which meant he was losing his fiery edge to a vast, cheerful fatigue that so loved the shelter. So he forced himself out and ran from the bluff, scanning the wind and snow. Milt wore a red parka, Allen’s was blue.
He clambered up the rocks to gain a vantage to overlook the point. If they’d missed the end of the promontory and swamped, they’d be blown back across the open lake.
But he saw Milt almost immediately, a red blur in the surf two hundred yards away on the edge of the point. Knee-deep in the foam, Milt was trying to land the canoe. Allen’s blue jacket moved to shore and back, carrying packs. The canoe was hard to haul because it was full of water. Broker ran toward them. They needed that canoe.
A surge of waves pounded the two men out of sight, and when they appeared again the canoe was tipped, draining. Milt staggered, fell, stood up, and Broker realized he had wrenched the canoe on its side and shook it out through sheer force. Broker scrambled to them and saw three paddles stacked safely ashore against a pack. Good.