“Move!” he shouted. The boat shifted under him and he almost fell, almost pitched head-first into the foaming gap between the bass boat and the barge. He caught himself at the last instant, his heart like a fist in his throat.
The boat thrust its nose out in the current, and with a heave of his arms Nick flung the barge away from him. The bass boat pitched in sudden motion, and Nick staggered and dropped to one knee for balance. The blackened side of the barge swept past. Behind him, Nick heard thunder as the tree crashed like a battering ram into the bows of the barge.
Nick had no time to feel relief. A line of pipes loomed in front of him, and he reached for the pole to fend them off. “Left!” he shouted. “Turn us left!”
The pipes swept past before he could make more than a few strokes with the pole. He had no idea whether the paddling helped or not. The air stank of diesel fuel. Ruptured metal tanks, flame-scorched, loomed above the port. Three towboats, burned to the water line, lay in the heaving water like corpses rolling in the tide. Another pipe swept past, its broken end gushing flame and a stain of black smoke. The boat tried to swing broadside the current. Nick struck the water to keep the boat stern-foremost. Then the boat began to whirl dizzily as it was caught in a sudden eddy, and Nick could only drop to hands and knees and try to hang on. There was a crash as the boat struck floating debris, and then Retired and Gone Fishin’ rebounded, spinning in the opposite direction—Nick’s stomach lurched—
then there was a brassy metallic shriek as the boat struck its starboard side against a pier stanchion. The starboard side heaved up, and Nick clutched the gunwale as the boat tried to dump him out. Foaming water poured over the port gunwale, filling the cockpit and driving the port side farther into the water. Nick looked at Jason huddled in the water at the bottom of the cockpit, the boy’s eyes wide as he gasped for air amid the foam. Jason’s weight was driving the port side farther into the water. In another moment the boat would capsize.
“Up!” Nick shouted. “Get on the high side!” His feet scrabbled on the deck as he tried to heave himself up the starboard side, where his weight would help to stabilize the craft. Jason stared at him from amid the flying foam, and then he stood and climbed up the nearly vertical deck, his feet bracing against the cockpit seats as he threw his weight onto the high side of the boat.
Nick pulled himself up over the gunwale—Jason scrambled beside him—and then Nick threw a leg over the side of the bass boat as he tried to shift his weight still further. Retired and Gone Fishin’ trembled for a long heartbeat on the brink of oblivion. And then the weight of its occupants told, and with a cry of metal the starboard side fell into the water and the boat spun free of the obstruction. Nick had been ready for this, and threw himself back inboard as soon as he felt the boat shift under him. But Jason was unprepared—Nick heard a sudden cry—and he looked up to see Jason pitch almost head-first into the white water, and he reached out a hand and closed it around the boy’s flailing wrist. Jason snapped back to the boat with a wrench that Nick could only hope had not dislocated the boy’s arm. Jason stared up at Nick in shock, his eyes dilated black with terror. Jason’s free hand clamped on the gunwale. The boat spun around Jason’s weight as if it were an anchor. Jason gave a heave, a wrench, and tried to haul himself inboard. Nick tried to get his free hand on the boy’s collar and failed. Jason strained, a gasp of pain fighting its way past his teeth, and then his hand slipped from the slick metal gunwale and he fell back into the water.
Nick sprawled across the afterdeck gasping for air, still hanging onto Jason by the one wrist. Do this right, he told himself. Do this right or die with the boy right now. It was you got him into this. Nick rose to his knees, grabbed Jason under one armpit, then the other. The world spun around him.
“Kick!” he commanded, and heaved. Jason gave a cry and flailed the water with his feet. Pain shot through Nick’s wounded arm as he tried to pull the boy aboard the boat by main strength. Strength failed. Nick gasped in air as pain shrieked through his limbs, and then he let Jason fall back into the water.
He blinked foam from his eyes and tried to think. It wasn’t the right angle, he thought, he was pulling with the wrong muscles. Feet were stronger than arms. He needed to use his feet.
He looked up and saw a blackened metal pier swirling closer. Sharp driftwood daggers brandished in air. With cold horror Nick realized that if he didn’t get Jason back into Retired and Gone Fishin’ he would be impaled on the driftwood spines by the weight of the bass boat.
Nick gave a yell and lurched as he got his right foot under him. Then the left. “Now kick!” he screamed, and as Jason thrashed with his feet Nick lunged backward with every muscle in his body, and pulled Jason from the foaming water to land on top of him.
Jason gasped for breath, his arms floundering. “Hang on,” Nick told him, and then there was a wrenching crash as the boat piled into the pier, as wooden spears came lunging over the boat. And then the boat bounded away from the pier, whirling into safer water. Nick rolled Jason off him and clutched for something to steer with.
The nightmare journey had only begun.
It took half an hour to clear the five-mile-long port channel. There was no time for Jason or Nick to absorb the colossal scope of the damage—there was scarcely time to react at all as the river tried to run them against piers or pipes, burned-out towboats, or whole rafts of barges tangled in steel cable. Nick fended off one obstacle after another, lunging with his stick, sobbing with weariness. All he could see of the port were glimpses caught in the moments between frantic activity: the silhouette of a broken grain tower against the horizon; a blackened crater, half-filled with water, that marked an explosion. In the back of his throat lodged the reek of burning, the reek of chemicals, the reek of hot metal. He hoped that none of it was the reek of burned flesh.
Nick lunged, pushed off, poled, paddled. Water foamed over the jagged steel that lined the waterway. When they passed the port and entered the Tennessee Chute that dumped them back into the main channel, they gave up trying to control their direction and just hung on for dear life. Waves poured over them as they clutched the gunwale of their spinning boat.
They never noticed, as the white water lessened and they found themselves on the calmer surface of the Mississippi, that they had just passed the broken, burned, flooded, and abandoned remains of the Memphis District headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the organization entrusted with the control of water for this part of the Mississippi.
You had to say one thing for the man, Jessica thought: he was tough. Just a few moments after one of the paramedics had set his broken collarbone, given him some aspirin, equipped him with a sling made from a dish towel, and handed him a breakfast MRE, a Meal Ready to Eat, Larry Hallock was back at the helipad with some of his crew, ready to be flown back to Poinsett Landing to make a proper survey of the damage to the nuclear power station. He was flying in a big Sikorsky, with an amphibious hull that could float him anywhere he needed to go.
All he asked was that someone go to his house to make sure that his wife was okay. It turned out that one of his own people could do that on the way to his own family, so Jessica didn’t even have to detail one of her own.
“Good luck,” she said, there being little else she could offer.