Rapp was familiar with the technique and thought Saxton’s hopes were wishful thinking. The air pocket the Ranger had created inside his shirt would not survive the fall, let alone the harsh landing that followed. But in survival situations, attitude was everything. If Saxton felt more confident, Rapp wasn’t going to argue.
A blast of air smacked Rapp in the face and the darkness began to lift.
The waterfall.
“This is it!” Rapp screamed. “See you at the bottom.”
Rapp squeezed Saxton’s shoulder and then released the Ranger.
Saxton didn’t reflexively grab for him, but Rapp wasn’t going to press his luck. Turning onto his stomach, Rapp stroked toward the tunnel’s mouth, desperate to put space between himself and his companion. Rapp intended to exit the aqueduct feetfirst. A leg fractured by a boulder was survivable.
The same couldn’t be said for a broken neck or skull.
Rapp churned through the water, counting each stroke. He’d allotted himself ten kicks. Then he’d rotate in the water, pull his legs to his chest, and cannonball out the rock tunnel. Once airborne, he’d straighten his legs, cross his feet at the ankles, guard his face and nose with his hands, and hope for the best.
Ten kicks sounded reasonable.
He made it to eight.
On the ninth stroke, Rapp lunged forward with his powerful left arm, expecting to still feel water.
He didn’t.
CHAPTER 42
RAPP had imagined many potential operational pitfalls while he’d been riding in a truck jammed shoulder to shoulder with a crew of smelly jihadis.
Plunging headfirst down a waterfall hadn’t made the list.
The instant Rapp felt open space instead of water, he cupped his hands over his nose. This was the prescribed method for entering an unfamiliar body of water of unknown depth and assuming a feetfirst fall.
Rapp was not falling feetfirst.
He tried to orient himself into a more suitable entry position in midair, but he was no more a competitive diver than ballerina. After several excruciating seconds of useless flailing, Rapp belly-flopped into the water with the grace of a sack of mulch falling off a tailgate. The impact drove the air from his lungs. He’d estimated the waterfall to be about twenty feet high, but that had been optimistic. The water felt like concrete.
Then the current dragged him under.
Rapp fought the urge to reflexively take a breath even as the turbulence sent him tumbling head over heels. Heeding his advice to Saxton, Rapp didn’t fight the current at first, but after a five-count of getting banged against the riverbed, he flutter-kicked his legs in long, powerful strokes. Though he would have given his left arm for a pair of fins, Rapp’s hours of open-water swimming paid dividends. After several more seconds of getting tossed about, he swam clear of the roiling maelstrom, angled for the surface, and ascended.
Three kicks later, his head burst from the water.
Judging by how the rescue had gone so far, Rapp was going to owe his Ranger friend a beer when this was over. Maybe a case of them. Rapp would put his swimming skills up against anyone not wearing a Trident, but the trip down the waterfall had still been a doozy.
Saxton was going to have trouble.
Unfortunately, drowning was now the least of Rapp’s worries. The anemic moon revealed several black forms standing on the cliff overlooking the pool.
Black forms with AK-47s.
The human eye was attuned to motion, especially at night, but fortunately, Rapp had help. In the same way in which background noise like static or falling rain dampens a person’s sense of hearing, the constant motion generated by the waterfall would help to camouflage Rapp’s movement.
To a point.
The deluge of water thundering into the basin did create a blind spot of sorts, but once he swam clear of the visual disturbance, Rapp’s motion would set him apart from the relatively placid river chortling downstream of the waterfall. But that was a problem for later. Since Saxton had yet to surface, Rapp assumed that the Ranger was caught somewhere in the vortex of converging currents he’d just escaped.
Taking a deep breath, Rapp marked where he would begin his search grid and prepared to swim back into the cyclone. The sound of splashing water stopped him.
Turning, Rapp saw Saxton flailing on the water’s surface.
So did the jihadis.
CHAPTER 43
THE first burst of rifle fire missed.
The rounds cratered the water, raising divots that geysered skyward before splashing back to the churning surface. Perhaps mercifully, Saxton seemed unaware that he was now a target. If the Ranger’s water survival training had helped him navigate the deadly currents earlier, it was failing him now.
Saxton’s hands slapped the water even as his head barely crested the surface.
Then he was gone.
Like he was coming off the starting platform, Rapp freestyled toward the stricken Ranger for all he was worth. The good news about having his face buried in the water was that Rapp could no longer hear or see the gunmen.
The bad news was pretty much everything else.
There was no way Rapp was going to let Saxton drown. Besides, in theory this wasn’t a solo op. While there were days when Rapp found himself wishing that he was still a solo operator hunting his prey across Europe, these thoughts mostly came after spending too much time on Langley’s seventh floor.
Yes, he missed the carefree days of his youth when he’d lived the cover of a traveling computer software salesman, but if Rapp were being honest, there was something to be said for a team of shooters ready to wreak havoc on his behalf. As the bullet-shaped mass of puckered flesh in Rapp’s shoulder could attest, sometimes shit just went sideways. Now when the bad days happened, Coleman and his hitters had Rapp’s back. Hopefully Scott and the crew were positioned in overwatch, ready to intervene.
