Snakehead

that now. He closed his eyes. Why watch his own death?
    The kayak hit the cauldron nose first and was instantly sucked inside. Alex’s legs and stomach took the full force of the impact before the water overwhelmed him. It pounded down on his shoulders, crushing him. His head was thrown back, and he felt the whiplash twist his neck. The paddle was torn free. And then he was floundering, scrabbling desperately with his hands, trying to free himself from the kayak, which was now dragging him into the depths below. His elbow struck a rock, almost breaking the bone. The shock made him release his breath, and he knew he had only seconds to reach the surface. But his legs were trapped. He couldn’t pull them free. The kayak was sinking, taking him with it. Using all his strength, he twisted his lower body, and somehow his hips cleared the edge of the kayak. He pulled. First one leg, then the other. He was swallowing water. He no longer knew which way was up and which was down. His feet were free. He lashed out once and then again. The water spun him, throwing him violently from side to side. He couldn’t take any more. One last try…
    His head and shoulders burst up into the air. He was already far downstream. The Bora Falls were behind him, impossibly high. There was no sign of the kayak. It had surely been smashed to pieces. But as Alex sucked in fresh air, he knew that he had done everything right and that by a miracle he had survived. He had taken on the falls and he had beaten them.
    The current had slowed down. Alex’s arms and legs were completely limp. All his strength had gone, and the best he could manage was to keep himself afloat, tilting his head back so that his mouth stayed in the air. He felt as if he had swallowed a gallon of water and vaguely wondered about cholera, yellow fever, or whatever else this tropical river might contain. ASIS hadn’t bothered giving him any injections before he flew to Bangkok.
    How far had he traveled? Dr. Tanner had said that the falls were a mile from the camp but he felt he had gone twice that distance. No sign of the helicopter, though. That was a good thing. They thought he was dead. So they’d leave him alone. He had never felt so weary. The water was now a cushion, and he wanted to lie back and sleep.
    Some time later, he found himself lying on a riverbank made up of gravel and sand. He had been washed up without even noticing it and must have nodded off since the sun was now high in the sky. He allowed the warmth to creep into him. As far as he could tell, none of his limbs were broken. His neck and back were bruised and hurting—his spine had taken the full force of the impact—and there were cuts and scratches all over his waist, his hips, and his legs. But he knew he had gotten off lightly. The chances of his surviving the waterfall must have been about fifty to one…but to have done so without a major injury would have been considerably less. He remembered what Ash had told him about his father. The luck of the devil. Well, that was something Alex seemed to have inherited.
    Ash.
    Reef Island.
    The tsunami heading for Western Australia.
    For the last few days, Alex had been so worried about himself that he had lost sight of the bigger picture. How long did he have left before Major Yu set off the bomb that was going to have such a devastating effect on the earth’s tectonic plates? Was he already too late? Alex forced himself into a sitting position, warming himself in the sun and trying to get life back into his battered frame. At the same time, he worked it out. Yu had spoken of three days. At midnight the earth was going to be in the grip of some sort of gravitational pull and the fault line deep down in the seabed would be at its most vulnerable.
    Three days. Alex had spent two of them as a prisoner in the hospital compound. So it was going to happen today! Right now it couldn’t be much later than ten or eleven o’clock in the morning. So Alex had only twelve hours to prevent a terrible catastrophe, the murder of eight people on Reef Island and the deaths of thousands more in Australia.
    And that was when the complete hopelessness of his situation hit him. It was true that he had managed to escape from the horrific death Major Yu had planned for him. But where was he? Looking around him, Alex saw that he had left the rain forest behind him. He was on the edge of a floodplain with mountains in the far distance, perhaps thirty miles away. He was