Snakehead

control, whatever you may think. Just keep paddling and never fight the current because the current will always win.”
    The words of his uncle, spoken a lifetime ago, came to his mind. Alex wished he could grasp some comfort from them. He felt like a loose button in a washing machine. His fate was out of his hands. Gritting his teeth, he tightened his hold on the paddle and charged forward.
    Nothing quite made sense after that. He was struggling, thrown left and right, blind. Water shot past him, smashed into his face, pulverized him from above. He dug down, using a forward sweep to turn the boat, missing a black boulder with vicious, razor-sharp edges by a matter of inches. The green canopy spun around him. The trees had all blurred into one another. He couldn’t hear. His ears were full of water, and when he opened his mouth, gasping for air, water rushed into the back of his throat. Two more sweep strokes, dodging the rocks, then a terrible crash as the kayak slammed into one of the shelves. Mercifully, it stayed in one piece. A huge blanket of water fell on him. He was drowning. He had gone under.
    But then suddenly, somehow, he was through. He felt battered and exhausted as if he had just been in hand-to-hand combat with the river, which, in a sense, he had. His stomach and back were on fire where the broken edges had cut into him. Alex slid a hand under the sodden rag that was his shirt and felt the damage. When he took it out, his fingers were bloody. Behind him, the white water leapt and hurled itself against the rocks, displaying its fury that the kayak had gotten through.
    Alex knew that he wouldn’t be able to take much more. It was only desperation—and pure luck—that had brought him this far. From the moment he had entered the white water, he had lost all sense of his center of gravity, which really meant that he had lost everything. He might as well have been a piece of driftwood, being swept no matter where. It wasn’t just that the kayak was the wrong shape. It wasn’t a kayak at all. It was a float ripped off a seaplane, and if Alex had decided, after all, to steal a coffin for the journey, he doubted he would have had any less control.
    He tried to remember what Dr. Tanner had told him about the river. After the first rapids, it got worse. And then, a mile downstream, came something called the Bora Falls. Alex didn’t like the sound of that. He would have to find somewhere to come ashore and take his chances in the rain forest. He had already covered a certain amount of ground. With a bit of luck he might even have reached the edge of the floodplain on the other side. There had to be some civilization somewhere in the area; a ranger, a flying doctor, somebody! Somehow he would find them.
    But there was still nowhere to land. The banks climbed steeply, with rocks forming an almost-permanent barrier. When Alex looked up, the tops of the trees seemed a long way away. As wet as he was, Alex wasn’t cold. The rain forest throbbed with its own muddy heat. He was moving swiftly, still being swept along by the current. He was listening for the next stretch of rapids—but that wasn’t what he heard. Instead, it was the last thing he had expected.
    A helicopter.
    If he had still been in the rapids, he wouldn’t even have been able to hear the chatter of the blades, but right now he was in one of the straits, where the water was fast-moving but silent. Even so, he had to look up to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. Somehow it seemed unlikely, early in the morning, in the middle of an Australian rain forest. But there it was. It was still a small speck, some distance behind, but drawing nearer with every second.
    Alex’s first thought was that MI6 had finally arrived, almost when it was too late. He looked back a second time and felt his hopes shrivel and die. There was something mean and sinister about the helicopter, the way it was zeroing in on him like an insect about to sting. If MI6 were coming, they would have been here days ago. No. This was something else. And it wasn’t on his side.
    The helicopter was a Bell UH-1D, also known as a “Huey,” one of the most famous flying machines in the world ever since the Americans had sent hundreds of them to Vietnam back in the sixties. Alex recognized the long, slim fuselage with the extended tail. The cargo door was open and there was a man sitting with his legs hanging out and some sort of weapon on his lap. It had to be nothing more than bad