Episode 198 · Under the Ice

He lay on his belly at the broken rear edge and pressed his palm to the ice. The current had taken the Hunter beneath the plate; if he reached for its underside, Soles might feel the contact. In the black water itself he had nothing to search by.

If you’re still alive, you’ll want stone. You’ll reach for it. Reach.

Nothing.

The white line of the dam was a hundred meters off now, and the plate was picking up speed the way a cart picks it up on a slope, without any one moment you could point to. He counted without wanting to. Ninety. Eighty. A minute, at this pace. Less. The man had been under for twenty seconds. Thirty. How long could the man hold his breath if the water would not let him in?

The dam roared. The plate shuddered as its front edge met the first of the current that ran fast toward the drop.

Then, two meters from his hand, under the surface, the ice took weight.

Not on top. From below. A hand, coming up into the underside of the plate the way it had come up through the shelf at the ferry steps: into the ice, not through it. Fingers, then a palm, then a wrist, pushing up into solid gray from the black water below, clutching at the solid ice instead of the water around him.

Soles crawled to it. He put his own hand flat on the surface directly over the place, felt the weight there, a man hanging by one arm inside a sheet of ice, and he did not think about what came next.

He lifted his left hand from the ice, made a fist, and struck beside the place he had felt, breaking it open over the trapped hand.

It came out of the river with the shards, white, bare, closed on nothing. He caught the wrist. It was so cold it did not feel like flesh. He took hold of it with his left hand and set his knees and pulled, and the strength came when he asked it, all of it, and for once that was exactly what he needed. He felt the wrist bones shift under his fingers and eased off a hair, the way he had not managed on the stairs, and kept pulling.

The man came out of the water like something hauled up from a well.

He came out heavy, his coat full of river, and lay on the plate coughing black water, his eyes open and not seeing anything. Then they saw. His bare hand found Soles’s sleeve and closed on it with a grip that had nothing left in it but habit.

— Why, he said. It was not a question. It was the only word he had.

— Later, Soles said. He got him by the collar and dragged him away from the edge, toward the back of the plate, away from the dam, while the front edge of the ice began to rise.

It rose slowly. The plate tipped. The whole sheet of ice started to slide, gently at first, toward the white line where the river fell. Soles dug the toes of his boots into the broken surface and held the man’s collar and felt them both begin to go.

Find something. Anything. You’re a mechanic. Find the one bolt that moves.

The dam was not a straight line. He had seen it in daylight, from the bank, on the walk: at its near end, a concrete pier stood up out of the water, square and stained, with an iron ladder running down its side from the old walkway on top. The plate was going past it. Close. The back edge was going to swing within two meters of the pier.

Two meters. The ladder was the only way off before the drop.

He pulled the man’s collar over his right forearm and wedged him against his chest, clamping him there. His left hand was free now. It would get one chance at the iron.

He let his boots slide. They went down the tilting sheet together, and the pier grew through the spray. At the edge he planted both feet against the last ridge of ice and drove off. The strength carried their weight across the gap; it could do nothing about the rung he still had to catch.

His left fingers caught a rung as his shoulder hit the concrete. The iron stripped his palm; he clamped down harder. The rung held. So did the bolts, old bolts set straight and tight fifty years ago, and he loved them for it.

The Hunter’s weight jerked against his right arm. With both of them hanging from that one hand, Soles felt his fingers begin to slip. He pressed his forehead to the wall and tightened his grip. Below his boots, the plate went over the dam and broke against the concrete.

He hung on the ladder with the man under his arm and the white water a meter below his boots.

Then he climbed.

He did not remember most of it afterward. One rung. The man’s coat catching on a bolt. The rung after that. Something small and heavy slipping out of his own pocket and going down past his boots into the white water without a sound he could hear: the guard’s keys. He watched them go and thought, quite clearly, they’ve changed the locks anyway, and climbed. His own voice, saying something very rude to the ladder. The walkway at the top, a strip of rusted grating with a rail on one side and the whole roaring river on the other.

He hauled the man over the edge of it and they lay there together on the iron in the spray, both of them shaking so hard the grating rang.

Behind them, a kilometer upstream, the town lay dark along its bank. Somewhere in it a kitchen with a drawer of broken things and a woman asleep upstairs who thought he was at a workshop, pointing. Nobody in that town knew where he was. Nobody would know, if he did not climb down from here.

His right hand had begun to shake from holding the man’s weight. He lowered him onto the walkway, flexed his fingers and waited until he could grip the rail properly.