It took nearly thirty minutes to complete the holes. Cabrillo’s pores were like faucets, and he’d drunk nearly a quarter of the camelback water harness he’d had Linda fetch from the boat. He was just getting back to his feet when he sensed movement behind him. He whirled, drawing a pistol in the same motion so that when he completed his turn he had a bead on the man who emerged from the scrub.
He lowered the weapon the instant he recognized MacD Lawless. If anything, the native Louisianan was breathing even heavier than the Chairman.
Juan looked at his watch as Lawless stepped gingerly down the bank.
“Two miles?” he queried.
“I can keep a seven-minute-mile pace for five miles,” Lawless said, blowing like a stallion after the Kentucky Derby. “That slows to ten minutes with a full pack.”
Juan was impressed with both Lawless’s stamina and the fact that he knew his body’s capabilities and limitations. Information like that could one day save an operator’s life.
“Anything up ahead?”
“Just jungle. The good news is, it looks like the worst of the rapids are behind us.” He sucked at the water tube from Cabrillo’s camelback and used a dingy tan bandanna to wipe his face. “Man, it’s thicker out there than the swamps of Lafourche Parish.”
“Get back aboard. We’ll be ready in a minute.”
The Corporation used digital devices rather than chemical timers to set off the explosives. These had an accuracy unmatched by their older brethren and would allow Cabrillo split-second timing. He set the timers and quickly laid the explosive in each hole, frantically shoveling dirt back in to cover the plastique.
He was back aboard the idling RHIB, painter line in hand, with about two minutes to spare. He edged the boat closer to the waterfall to put as much distance as possible between them and the blast. Everyone lay flat on the deck, not even peering over the gunwale because of the debris that would be blown from the beach.
The blasts went off in a sequence that was so tightly controlled, it sounded like one long, continuous explosion. Rock and debris erupted from the earth in fountains of flaming gas that echoed across the river and sent hundreds of birds into startled flight. Seconds later, pebbles peppered the RHIB, bouncing off the inflatable fenders or pinging against the plastic deck. One fist-sized rock gave Smith a charley horse when it hit his thigh. He grunted once but said nothing more.
Before the dust had fully settled, Juan was on his feet, looking aft. The underpinnings of the riverbank had been excavated by the explosion, and, as he watched, the entire mass—nearly forty feet of it—slid ponderously into the river, bulling aside the water, before the leading edge smashed into the far shore with enough force to block the waterway entirely.
“Voilà,” Cabrillo said, obviously pleased with himself. “Instant cofferdam.”
With its outlet cut off by the landslide, the water trapped between it and the falls began to rise. It was now a race to see if the river would erode the temporary dam before the level got high enough to force the boat up and over the falls.
“I’ve got another idea. Linda, take the helm. John, MacD, with me.”
Cabrillo grabbed up the boat’s painter once again and used hand signals to get Linda to tuck the boat directly below the waterfall. It was barely higher than the RHIB’s bow. The three men leapt atop the falls and found footing on a rock poking up from the water like a tiny island.
The area between the falls and the dam continued to fill. But, at the same time, the downstream current was eating at the cofferdam, exploiting any crack or flaw to tear it away. The RHIB’s bow rose higher still until the front of the keel rested on the rock face of the falls. The men coiled the nylon line around their wrists in the most important game of tug-of-war they’d ever fought. Linda kept the engine revs up, forcing the craft higher and higher. Behind them, a trickle of water worked its way through the cofferdam, rejoining the river’s normal flow. The breach was tiny, no more than a few seeping drops, but would expand exponentially.
To make matters worse, the lowest section of the dam, near the bank opposite of where Cabrillo had set off the explosions, was close to being overtopped by the rising water.
“We’re going to have one shot at this,” Juan said, bunching the muscles in his arms and shoulders as they prepared to pull the boat over the falls. “Linda, watch behind you and tell us when.”
Linda peered at the cofferdam and the riverbanks to make sure the water was still filling their man-made lagoon faster than the earthen dam was letting water pour through. She judged it finely. The water level reached its crest, with the falls being no more than a six-inch riffle, when the dam let go in a gush of mud and debris.
“Now!” she shouted, and firewalled the outboard.
The three men heaved back on the line, their bodies as taut as marble statues, the effort playing across each of their faces. The ten minutes it took to fill the basin was washed away in seconds. As the level dropped, more and more weight pressed the RHIB’s keel into the rock and made the load on the men that much heavier.
The river sluiced out from under the outboard’s prop so that it screamed as the blades met air. And still the men pulled, gaining fractions of inches with every strained heave.
Linda idled the engine and jumped out of the RHIB so that she was standing on the very lip of the falls, inky water rushing past her shins. But that last one hundred and eleven pounds of extra weight was all the men needed removed to do the trick. The boat slid over the rocky bottom and then hit deeper water and began to float. The current turned it sideways against the escarpment and gave it a bad list, but it was now too low in the water to be forced back over the falls.
MacD and John Smith both fell back into the river when the boat lurched forward. They came up sputtering, and laughing that they’d done it. Cabrillo had somehow kept his balance, and when Linda cut the boat across the current and brought it up to his little rock island, he stepped over the gunwale as casually as a commuter gets aboard a train.
In turn, Lawless and Smith hauled themselves out of the river and lay panting on the deck, big grins plastered on their faces.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Juan remarked as he took his place behind the console.
“Like hell,” MacD said when he noticed he had leeches stuck to his arms. “Oh God, there’s nothin’ Ah hate more than leeches.” He fished in his pocket for a disposable lighter.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Linda warned as Lawless worked the little flint wheel to dry it out.