PRECIPICE

by Leland Davis

  Above, he could make out the shapes of the men through the mist, making their way painstakingly back up the shore to their raft. They climbed in and launched into the flow, coming so quickly to the edge of the falls that they seemed surprised. The boat pitched over the drop, and the front hit hard at the bottom. The back of the flexible boat folded over the front on impact, momentarily forming a giant rubber taco stuffed with SEALs and tossing the men in the rear headlong onto the ones in front. Roberts, who had been sitting in the rear of the raft next to Harris, bounced once off Mendez and the rubber raft tube before sprawling into the frothing, icy water. He came up gasping as he was swept into the next rapid just behind the boat. As he had been taught, Roberts kept a firm grip on his paddle and extended its handle towards the boat even as he was swept along in the flood. While Mendez and Duval motivated the raft toward the eddy, Harris grabbed the end of the proffered paddle and pulled the flailing Roberts back alongside the boat, then grabbed him by the shoulder straps of his lifejacket and heaved the huge man back into the raft.

  A few tense moments later they were all standing on the right bank of the river near their boats, the men winded and wild-eyed as they looked with trepidation at the next monster falls. Here the river constricted to about twenty feet wide and plunged over a sheer, twenty-five foot drop into a seething bowl of white foam. It would be like paddling off the roof of a two-story house. The roar sounded like a continuous peal of thunder, shaking the rocky shelf where they stood.

  “You’ll need more speed than you had on the last one,” Chip told them, raising his voice. He didn’t need to tell them that their last effort had been less than graceful. There wasn’t much else to say, so he turned and headed for his kayak.

  Back in his boat, Chip sat for a moment on shore. He closed his eyes and concentrated on slowing his breathing, then visualized the motions necessary for his descent. On this falls he would try to pierce into the water at the bottom like a high-diver to take the pressure of impact off his spine, using it as practice for the bigger falls that he hoped to run soon—wherever the mysterious river they had shown him wound up being. The secret to plunging at the base of the falls was replacing gut fear with patience, and reaction with measured action. The natural instinct—driven by the panic of seeing yourself swept towards the edge—was to paddle harder. This would cause too much speed and result in a flat landing and injury. The trick was to find a calm spot within yourself in the heart of the storm and shut out the madness of the surroundings. Then, staying at the speed of the water, one could execute the carefully controlled movements that would bring success. If he was one with the falling water, he could plunge with it deep into the pool with little impact and then allow the air trapped in his kayak to bring him back to the surface. Or so the theory went.

  Chip dipped a handful of cold river water and splashed it onto his face to bring himself fully alert. There was only so long you could think about a drop like this without it driving you crazy. There came a point where you had to let go of your fears and trust that the skills built through years of training would carry you through—a point where you had to quit thinking and just say ‘fuck it’ and go. Knowing when it was OK to say that was the secret. The ability to make realistic, objective assessments as to whether your skills were actually up to the challenge was perhaps more important than the physical skills themselves.

  Chip slid his kayak into the milky flood and turned deliberately downstream. His breathing was steady. He leaned forward as he rolled over the lip of the falls, and his field of view rotated wildly until the tip of the kayak in front of him lined up on the frothing maw below. He spotted his landing target—right where the plunging water exploded against the pool—then turned his head to the side at the last instant and tucked his body all the way forward, tensing his muscles as the crown of his helmet dove into the water. He disappeared underneath, consumed in a convulsing fist of currents that pried at him from all directions. The roar turned to a low-pitched, hollow booming high above him as he traveled deep into the river’s icy, aqueous womb. He counted silently.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Each second felt like ten.

  When he reached four, buoyancy overcame gravity and he popped to the surface about twenty feet from the base of the falls. He paddled calmly to the right side of the river and hopped out, retrieving his throw-rope to set safety for the others.

  The four SEALs were taken aback by the beast that had just swallowed their friend. Then they nodded in determination and disappeared from Chip’s view. Thirty seconds later the raft surged over the top of the falls. The men leaned forward and dug in with all of their might as the water of the pool rushed up to greet them. One side of the raft was slightly ahead of the other, causing it to go cockeyed as it fell. It bucked when it hit then sprung back up as if landing on a giant trampoline; then it corkscrewed around and alighted upside-down before cycling back towards the base of the falls on the left.

  Roberts, Duval, and Harris swam quickly to the left shore and waded out to corral the raft as it washed past in the swirl of currents. Mendez was thrown farther than the others due to his lighter weight and landed in the water flowing headlong for the next rapid.

  “Rope!” Chip shouted, flinging the bag through the air in a perfect arc. The rope played out smoothly until the bag thwapped against Mendez’s bobbing helmet. After a moment’s disorientation, Mendez grabbed the rope and swung it over his shoulder then held on tight. Chip braced his feet on the uneven, rocky bank and leaned back. The rope pulled taut as the currents carried Mendez away, then he stopped suddenly and swung like a pendulum toward shore. As he climbed out, the others were piling into the raft to paddle over and retrieve their friend, and Chip stuffed the rope back into the bag.

  Mendez stood bent over with his hands on his knees, took a few deep breaths, and looked up at Chip. The prompt rescue was something he would expect from one of his fellow SEALs, but this was the first time he had received that kind of life-saving help from a civilian. His level of respect for the river guide had just risen several notches. This was a guy you could count on when things went down. It was starting to feel like they were a team of five instead of four.

  Reunited, they took a moment to assess.

  “What the hell happened?” Roberts was shaking his head, stunned by the way their run over the falls had unfolded.

  “You got a bit sideways is all.” Chip downplayed the incident, wanting to keep morale as high as possible. “You can work on straightening it out next time.”

  “Shit howdy, what’s next!?!” Duval shouted, slapping his knee and looking off into the canyon downstream.

  “A couple more miles of good action,” Chip grinned.

  6

  Wednesday, October 26th

  WESLEY CRAIG EASED his portly frame into the narrow crevice between the weathered wooden table and the straight-backed, wooden booth seat. The senator from Texas was not impressed by the quaint, one hundred-fifty-year-old diner. He found that “quaint” around here usually meant uncomfortable, and this place was no exception. He sat toward the outside of the booth, while the man he was meeting sat near the wall; there was not sufficient room under the thin strip of table for both men’s legs if they sat directly across from one another. Nonetheless, he was happy to be out of the noonday press of bodies here for the lunch rush, and happy to be surrounded by small-town, working-class people who were unlikely to recognize him. Sutherland had insisted that discretion was key, and this location was as far out of the way as was practical. It almost made up for the roughness of the surroundings, which were far below Craig’s usual standards. The drive from the capitol had taken him about an hour, and he was starved. He had barely picked up the menu when a girl arrived to take their order.

  “What’s good?” he asked his companion, who was hidden behind a laminated menu. Then without waiting for a reply he blurted, “Just bring me a burger.”

  “Drink with that?”
r />   “Yeah, I’ll have a sweet tea.”

  Sutherland ordered a tuna salad sandwich and passed his menu back to the waitress then pulled his glasses off and placed them in his shirt pocket as she moved away.

  “So where do we stand, Rich?” Craig made no effort at a greeting.

  Sutherland reminded himself not to be fooled by the senator’s brusque manner or his physical appearance. Even though he looked and talked like a wealthy Texas good-‘ol-boy, he was one of the smartest manipulators of the system in all of congress. Not only that, he was Sutherland’s new boss.

  “The team is finishing up some specialized training in the Northwest. We’re sure they now have the skills required to get the job done.” He was leery of telling his financier that they had brought in a civilian. Craig didn’t need to know, and Sutherland wasn’t in the habit of ever telling anyone something that they didn’t need to know.

  The big senator nodded. He wasn’t concerned with operational details anyway, just results. The details were Sutherland’s job, and Craig was already committed to trusting that everything would be handled properly. It was the same job that Sutherland had done at the CIA for a quarter century. The man possessed a unique ability to see the big picture without losing sight of all of the individual moving parts. It was that ability which had helped him make history by supervising the location and elimination of terrorist number one, after which he had retired from the CIA. He didn’t have the political skills to climb any higher, but his logistical skills were beyond reproach. He was ready for a new challenge, and the men needed him. After all that they had done for their country, he wouldn’t let them down. He just hoped that Senator Craig was the right sponsor. It was well known that politicians caused leaks, and leaks had to be avoided on this project at all cost. However, Craig had been the only one to pony up the money, so his involvement was a necessary evil. There was no way they could have gotten things up and running this quickly without him.

  “How soon can they go?” asked Craig.

  “They’re ready now, but we’re waiting for the right environmental conditions. They fly back from Seattle tomorrow, and we’re going to brief them on the details of the mission on Friday. We should be able to get a read then on when the conditions will be best.”

  “Best guess?”

  “Best guess with what we know now is two to four weeks.”

  Craig furrowed his brow in frustration but nodded. He had a lot invested in this and was impatient to see results. “Is the money enough?”

  “Right now it is. It should get us through the rest of the initial setup and this mission. The cover business costs orders of magnitude more than the operation, of course, and it was a lot more work to organize. It should grow to support itself eventually, but we’re only in the third month and are planning accordingly. Hopefully we’ll be able to maintain cashflow without any more investments.”

  Craig couldn’t believe that he was getting a cashflow estimate for a private entity whose main purpose was covert operations. It always came down to dollars and cents, and he had finally put his money where his mouth was. Tired of spending inordinate amounts of time romancing Langley to try and get things done—or worse yet butting heads with his colleagues in congress, especially the ones across the aisle, for approval and funding—he had invested three million of his own money to get this “company” off the ground. This was the mission he’d primarily had in mind, although he was quietly searching around for other suitors with pet projects to keep it going. The first step was to have a successful mission, then other doors should open to keep the thing running. It would allow Craig to maintain a unique tool not possessed by most of his peers in congress. He would be able to get things done without having to sidestep committees paralyzed by partisan politics and uncompliant political appointees who had no concept of how the real world worked. But the immediate problem was that the border was a mess, and his state was suffering. Something had to be done, and it had to be done now.

  “And we’re certain of the target?”

  “As certain as we can be. With the amount of pressure being applied by their current administration, we assume that he’ll remain secluded in the compound for the foreseeable future. And of course we’ll wait for your confirmation through DHS before we green light.”

  “Make sure you give me a few days lead on that. I’ll bring it up and then start nudging in the right direction to get the satellite tasked, but it’s going to take some time to do this delicately.” With Craig as chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee and Sutherland until recently deeply entrenched in CIA, existing intelligence was relatively easy to come by. Asking that a spy satellite be tasked to get new imagery was a whole different ballgame, and the last thing Craig could afford was for people to learn of his new off-the-books pet project.

  “We should have three days from when they deploy until they reach the objective. I imagine that should be enough time?”

  “Once I present it, I expect things will move quickly from there,” Craig responded with the confidence of a man who knew the system and was accustomed to getting his way.

  They both leaned back as the harried waitress slid plates of food onto the table in front of them, and Craig wriggled his meaty hand between his ample paunch and the table to unbutton the front of his suit coat.

  Their eyes met across the table and both men nodded, satisfied, and then dug into their sandwiches.

  *

  Chip paddled to the side of the river and climbed out of his boat onto the rough volcanic rocks lining the river’s edge. He was exhausted but very happy after a whirlwind week in the Pacific Northwest. Three days on Callaghan Creek in BC had preceded the arrival of more fall rains which had filled up a profusion of whitewater options for them. They had worked their way south through Washington, running several rivers. They were now finishing their week of training on the Green Truss section of the White Salmon River, located on the southern edge of the state just across the wide Columbia River from the town of Hood River, Oregon. The White Salmon had plenty of challenging rapids formed by the same basalt bedrock as Callaghan Creek—and the same as their objective creek in the satellite photos. The “Truss” as it was commonly called, was highlighted by a massive twenty-five foot falls called “Big Brother,” which had taken the life of an Olympic kayaker fifteen years ago. The team had made it look easy today, and Chip wondered if there had ever been a crew of four rafters that had run so many hard rapids. Large waterfalls were usually tackled by rafting teams of only two.

  It was fist bumps and cold beers all around as they deflated and rolled up the raft before changing into dry street clothes. Most of the rain was over, leaving a cold grey mist that clung to the evergreens like vaporous spider webs. Two of the team drove up Highway 141 in the SUV that had been left at the take-out point, headed to retrieve the other SUV in which they had all driven to the put-in. They stopped on the way back down to load the team and the gear into the two vehicles for the drive across the long bridge over the Columbia to find a hotel in Hood River. Chip could get used to this style. Every past trip that he’d taken had found him sleeping in the covered bed of his pickup truck and subsisting on noodles, canned tuna, and PB&J. Every night of this trip had been spent in a hotel, and dinners had all been in restaurants—a welcome change for a dirtbag like Chip. He certainly didn’t miss camping out in the soaking northwestern rain.

  Although the men were mostly quiet about their objective after this training ended, he had gleaned a little bit from their guarded conversations. He knew that they had to get to the compound near the top of the waterfall, and he was now aware that they were not welcome and could expect conflict when they arrived. It was a whole new element to consider when planning a trip, and one that he was trying hard not to think about too much. One of the main lessons he had learned through years of river adventures was that it does no good to worry about the things you can’t control. He would save his energy for performing his job by helping the team stop at the
appointed place, then he would rely on the others to do what they were trained to do better than anyone else in the world.

  He was pulled from his reverie by the rumbling hum of the tires on the metal grate surface of the Hood River toll bridge. He looked ahead to the outline of the town on the far bank, seeing the houses, businesses, and the Full Sail Brewery nestled on the hill in the foreground with the snow covered spike of Mt. Hood stabbing up into a low ceiling of clouds in the distance. He’d spent many good times here and had a lot of friends that he wouldn’t get to catch up with on this quick, low profile trip.

  As they paid their toll and exited the bridge, Chip directed Harris onto the ramp for I-84 West, then immediately off an exit and left into downtown. It was a bit surreal being here in the fall since Chip usually hung out in Hood River during the sunny summer paddling season. The crowds were definitely smaller now; the summertime hordes of windsurfers and kite boarders that frequented the Columbia Gorge had headed south to California or Baja to find warmer spots with good wind. Harris took a right on the main drag downtown, Oak Street, and crept a few blocks up the narrow street to a left turn up the hill on 13th, headed for Chip’s favorite taqueria in town.

  “So where to next?” Chip asked.

  “Back to DC for mission assessment and training.”

  Chip knew the whitewater part of the training was over and wondered what the next phase would be. His apprehension was growing for the portion of the mission that wouldn’t be spent in his kayak. He once again tried to put those thoughts out of his mind and focus instead on visualizing himself making the perfect landing off the huge falls. Focus on things you can control. Close out distractions. Now that the week of river training was over, that was going to become harder and harder to do.