PRECIPICE (21 page)

The top of the ridge afforded no view through the thick vegetation, but when they crested it they were encouraged to hear the sound of flowing water below them on the other side. The trip down went more quickly, and they found themselves sitting on the bank of the river a little after 9.

Chip was encouraged by what he saw. There was sufficient flow to float the raft easily, but the water wasn’t moving as swiftly as it had been the week before. It looked like they had timed it perfectly. They all began changing into their river gear and packing the rest of the equipment into waterproof bags. Chip had to smile. Amongst piles of alien-feeling military paraphernalia, the Watershed drybags were a welcome and familiar sight. The absolutely watertight bags the SEALs carried were the same thing he’d used for years to keep his warm clothes, lunches, and safety equipment dry on the river.

The raft was inflated from a CO2 canister and topped off with a hand-operated pump, then the gear was loaded aboard and lashed in tightly. Chip carefully stowed his weapons in his kayak before sliding into the cockpit and sealing the opening with his spraydeck. When everyone was ready, Chip slid his kayak into the water with the rest of the team close behind in the raft.

The river started out slowly with small rapids spaced intermittently along its course. A span of jungle trees formed a canopy completely across the slender stream with thick, woody vines dangling from their branches down into the water. Runners had descended from limbs of the bizarre trees and thickened over time into additional supporting tree trunks. Many of the trees had dozens of trunks connected by branches high above, and some even had trunks on each side of the narrow river. The small kayak moved easily through the labyrinthine growth, but the wide raft sometimes struggled to find routes through the tangled mess.

They were all somewhat relieved when the riverbed steepened and the canyon walls closed in toward the sides of the river. The trees thinned, unable to gain purchase in the swiftly flowing stream. The roar of the coming rapids echoed off buttresses of stone towering above the river’s banks. Chip moved ahead, carefully paddling from the safety of one eddy to the next, craning his neck for a view of the rapids below. Until the river became too steep, he would use this method of “reading and running” the unfamiliar rapids on the fly, signaling to the men in the raft which routes were best to avoid obstacles in their path. They fell into a rhythm, moving steadily but cautiously into the depths of the gorge.

As the river’s pace grew, Chip pulled over and removed a waterproof GPS unit from the chest pocket of his lifejacket. He had spent many hours poring over satellite imagery of the river during his time at The Woods and had programmed the coordinates of every major rapid into the GPS. The first waterfall was just around the next bend. He looked back upstream at the raft and raised one arm, elbow bent, and pointed his index finger at the sky. He then moved his finger in a tight circle. It was the signal for them to eddy out—to pull over for a pause. There had been initial confusion with some of the hand signals since the SEALs used many of the same motions to mean different things than they signified to river runners. It had been decided that rather than making up entirely new hand signals for use on the river, the men would learn the conventions that Chip had used for years.

They all stepped onto shore and secured their boats before walking downstream to have a look at the falls. It was a ten-foot-tall sliding cascade that turned out to be no big deal for their skills after the many days of training. Nevertheless, they were glad they had looked—better safe than sorry. They climbed back into their boats and paddled smartly over the edge.

This was the method for the rest of the day. Although it was usually possible to carry the boats around any rapid that they didn’t feel it was safe to attempt, struggling through the thick jungle with a heavy raft and gear would eat up a lot of time and energy. It was better to stay on the water as much as they could. Furthermore, this part was what Chip had come for—he planned to explore as many of the rapids from his boat as he could.

Chip could tell they were getting into the meat of the whitewater when the walls of the canyon changed from limestone to columnar basalt. While limestone was made from tiny silt particles deposited in an ancient sea bed, columnar basalt was formed by the cooling of a prehistoric lava flow. As it cooled, the rock split into hundreds of vertical columns roughly a foot wide. It almost looked man-made. While the relatively soft limestone was eroded easily by flowing water, the hard volcanic basalt withstood the test of time, causing the river to pour over each layer of basalt in a vertical waterfall. At 3 in the afternoon, the team arrived at the first such place on the river and pulled over to scout the falls. They walked along the rim of volcanic rock at the side of the precipice to get a view.

This was the falls that Chip had noticed on the satellite pictures which he knew was only a half-mile upstream of the larger falls at their target. He had guessed this one was about fifteen feet tall from the pictures and was surprised to find that it was more like twenty-five. His system gave him a little squirt of adrenaline just looking at it. The last major rapid of the day would be a good one. He was a bit concerned, however. If this falls was almost twice as tall as he’d guessed from the pictures, how tall would the larger one downstream be?

After only a brief look at the roaring falls Chip grinned, flashed a thumbs up at the rest of the men, and walked purposefully back to his kayak. He was stoked—a twenty-five footer that nobody had ever run before! It looked completely straightforward, with a lip that gradually rolled from horizontal to vertical and a large, deep recovery pool at the bottom.

Back in his boat, Chip slid into the water and peeled gracefully into the flow. He lined up for the gut of the falls, leaned forward, and savored the exhilarating feeling as the front end of the boat dropped. His view swung wildly until the tip of his kayak lined up like a gun sight on the point where the falling water exploded into the pool below. He moved his paddle off to the side so it wouldn’t break over his chest or crush his nose on impact and turned his head sideways at the last moment to lead with the crown of his helmet, which crashed into the foamy water a fraction of a second behind the tip of his boat.

He surfaced a short distance downstream, resisting the tremendous urge to whoop with joy after his perfect descent. No whooping was allowed on covert operations, he reminded himself as he paddled to shore and hopped out to hold a rescue rope for the others. Harris waved him over, and Chip scrambled near the base of the cliff that paralleled the falls so that they could talk.

“The raft is pretty heavy for a rapid so big,” Harris called down. “There’s no easy way to walk around the falls, so we’re going to lower the equipment down to you before we run it.”

Good idea. Chip was sorry he hadn’t thought of that himself. They hadn’t considered the possibility in their planning sessions that the falls would be this tall. It took about ten minutes for the gear to be lowered with ropes to the shore at the base of the falls, then Chip went back to his position on the safety rope as Harris and the team took the plunge. Everything went perfectly. This crew had gotten really good. They regrouped on shore at the bottom of the falls.

Most of them didn’t speak as they opened up the bags to retrieve more gear. This is where the whitewater trip turned into a commando raid. They slid on earpieces that attached to their encrypted radios, and weapons were all double checked and left handy. Everyone pulled off their lifejackets and slipped into body armor and jungle camouflage BDUs. The goal was for them to be unidentifiable as Americans if they were caught or killed. Although the other men were all darkly complected and might pass for some other nationality, Chip knew he had little chance of that with his sandy blond hair. They all put their lifejackets and helmets back on over the fatigues. It would be awkward for Chip to kayak in this get-up, but there was no way he wanted to go without it.

Back on the river, it was a bit of a letdown as they paddled the next third of a mile. The lower water level meant the long rapids were much smaller than they had appeared in the satellite images. They arrived at the point which the GPS indicated was just upstream from the large falls, hidden behind the canyon wall at the inside of a bend in the river. They pulled over and found a spot back in the brush where they could conceal their equipment and settle in. The men opened cold MREs for dinner. There was no way they could risk a fire. They had brought enough food for three days as insurance in case something went wrong. Chip prayed that they wouldn’t have to eat this crap for that long. It was somewhere south of Ramen noodles in flavor, although he had to admit that it was probably much more nutritious.

After they finished eating, Duval sat the first watch shift while the rest settled in to get some rest. It seemed to take ages before the sun disappeared behind the towering canyon wall. Chip snuggled into his lightweight sleeping bag, surprised at how chilly it felt here in the misty bottom of the canyon. It had been a long but incredibly fun day. In his excitement he struggled to relax and fall asleep. His mind was spinning with memories of the rapids they had already run, and he played over and over the image of tomorrow’s waterfall that was now only a couple hundred yards away.

He rolled over and checked the gun that lay beside him for the hundredth time, a strange and foreign companion for him here in the wilderness. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. In fact, he wished he didn’t have to carry it at all. Its presence sullied what for him was not a mission of aggression but a sacred journey of exploration and discovery. He was torn about the reasons for this trip. While he would take any possible opportunity to explore an unknown river like this, the fact that he was here to facilitate the killing of a man weighed heavy on his mind. He wasn’t even sure how he felt about the “war on drugs,” although he realized that he was directly participating on the front lines of it right now.

The other thing that troubled him was concern for his new friends. They had bonded over the preceding weeks, which scared him. What his new friends were about to do was incredibly dangerous. They were the best in the world, but would that be good enough? Daniel had been the best at what he did, but that hadn’t prevented bad luck or fate—whatever you wanted to call it—from snatching him from his element right in front of Chip’s eyes on a creek they had paddled together more than fifty times. If it had happened to Daniel, it could happen to anybody. Would these guys survive the river only to be killed in a firefight in some back corner of a forgotten jungle?

He turned his mind back to the waterfall and used it as a mental buttress against the hounds of doubt and violence that ran unbidden through the recesses of his mind. He wished again that Daniel was here to paddle it with him. Somewhere in the taciturn darkness, he finally drifted into a restless slumber.

*

Samantha sat in the candlelight and used the edge of her student ID to cut three more wide lines from a pile of coke on the bedside stand. She didn’t recognize the smiling college freshman in the picture on the card any more. That girl was gone, and good riddance. Little miss perfect, the straight A student, the senator’s daughter. She was as far from that as she could get.

They had brought her back to the small house farthest from the patio and locked her in a much smaller, windowless room this time. There had been men in camouflage with machine guns running everywhere. Before long the rumbling generator had shut off and all of the lights had gone out. They had passed her in a few candles, some matches, and a few bottles of water. She’d sat there doing lines through the night and the entire day today. The flickering candlelight cast dancing shadows on the white concrete walls that occasionally caught the corner of Sam’s eye, startling her with fear that someone was in the room with her. There were no sounds of anything moving outside, which seemed especially eerie after the chaos of men with guns from the night before.

She snorted back another huge rail of white powder. What the fuck. There was still plenty left, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

17

Monday, November 21st

CHIP AWOKE TO Harris shaking him and had the unsettling feeling that he’d only just gone to sleep. As he opened his eyes in the still-dark canyon, the rushing of the nearby river rose to a roar in his ears. Flowing water always sounded louder in the dark. He could see a sliver of moon rising over the canyon wall to the southeast, its wan light poking ghostly fingers into the mist. He could make out shapes but no distinction in the faint light. He quietly struggled into his body armor, camo suit, climbing harness, and paddling gear, and packed his camping equipment away in a drybag that would be carried on the raft.

Before he knew it, he was sitting in his boat at the edge of the river ready to launch. His MP7 was strapped in his kayak between his legs where he could get to it quickly. It held a loaded magazine, but the ride might be too rough to have a round chambered. His pistol hung from a horizontal shoulder holster under his arm; the confines of the kayak were too tight to strap it on his hip, and Chip didn’t want to wear it anywhere that it might hang up if he had to exit the boat quickly. The climbing harness was uncomfortable, but he would need it for the rappel over the falls. He also had a bag of rock climbing gear secured inside his boat behind the seat, as well as a length of high strength spectra rope. They did one more check to make sure the encrypted radios were working, then the other men gave him a thumbs up from where they stood next to the raft at the water’s edge.

Go time. Chip closed his eyes for a moment and steadied his breathing, consciously relaxing his muscles and clearing his mind. It wasn’t the first time he had paddled in the dark, but his past nocturnal rafting hijinks had usually involved easy whitewater, lots of beer, and hopefully some naked female raft guides instead of a team of commandos, submachine guns, and must-make eddies above sixty-foot waterfalls. He had tried paddling with the night-vision goggles a few times last week, but he found the narrowed field of vision didn’t allow him to read the whitewater well enough. He also worried that the bulky goggles would hinder his ability to roll the kayak back upright should he accidentally capsize. Tonight he would go without them, although they were tucked inside his boat with the climbing gear.