Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

"But the quicksand-" Claire began.

"Maybe it’s only over there where John is. You and Ray hang on to one end of the coat and I’ll go in holding on to the other. It’s only a few steps to him. If I run into quicksand you can pull me back and we’ll try something else."

Like what, he wondered darkly as he lowered himself down the bank, holding on to a sleeve of the coat with one hand. Let’s just hope Ray had a nice, neat alternative tactical plan all worked out. Above him, the two of them hung on to the coat with teeth-grinding determination, their slight bodies braced as if they had a tank on the other end.

It was a good thing they did. He had prepared himself for a stiffer current than before, but it caught him by surprise all the same. It was no longer the hard, pummeling push they’d waded through a few minutes earlier, but an intense suction that clutched at his heavy, sodden clothes and yanked him to his right like a bug caught by a vacuum cleaner. He lost his footing before he ever found it, and would have tumbled downstream if not for Claire’s and Ray’s dug-in heels and resolute grip on their end of the coat. With his legs drifting like streamers in the current, he held doggedly to the sleeve until he righted himself, turning sideways to the flow to offer as little resistance as possible. The sand under his feet seemed solid enough.

"Sort of grabs you, doesn’t it?" John said, barely audible over the increasing tumult of the water.

"No problem," said Gideon. "Everything’s under control. You ready to be rescued?" He glanced warily to his left. No surges on the way.

"I don’t know about this," John said. "This is going to be a hell of a blow to my ego."

"Gideon!" Claire called. "If your feet are all right, don’t take any chances-try to reach him without moving them!"

That made sense. All they needed was for both of them to be stuck in the quicksand. Keeping his feet planted and one hand twisted firmly around the coat sleeve, Gideon reached out his other hand and leaned across the stream, trembling with the strain of staying upright in the powerful and unrelenting drag of the current. But even with his arm extended to its utmost, so that he was grunting with the effort, his straining fingertips were a foot short of John’s.

On the bank, Ray was going through the contortions of getting out of his tweed jacket without releasing his grip on Claire’s coat. "Gideon, if I give you my jacket, you can let John grab hold of it. If I can just…"

But Gideon doubted that the coat-to-Gideon-to-jacket-to-John arrangement would provide enough leverage to pull John’s 200-pound body out of the sand. And he wasn’t sure the struggling Ray could extricate himself in time anyway. Even in the minute or so that he had been in the stream there had been a frightening rise in the level. It was up to his ribcage now, and very soon it would be impossible to stay on his feet. Already it was almost at John’s armpits, so that he was trying to keep himself upright by paddling his arms like a man treading water.

No, there was no time to wait. What he should have done, he realized now, was to ford the stream where they’d crossed it before and knew it was free of quicksand, and then pull John out from the bank on the far side. But it was too late for that now. He was going to have to take a chance with the quicksand.

Carefully, he moved toward John, "skating" over the surface as Claire had told them to do if they found themselves near it. He inched his left foot gingerly forward, feeling for the quicksand (what did it feel like?), listening tensely for the next surge. His outstretched fingers were within ten inches of John’s…six inches…By God, he was going to make it. Two inches…

John strained toward him. "Just…a little…"

" Unnh…" Gideon slid his foot forward another couple of inches.

At the precise moment their fingertips touched, he stepped into it, and he understood the expression John had had on his face. It felt as if he’d put his left foot into a swaying rowboat, or taken a step on an unsteady trampoline, or an old-fashioned waterbed. Or a huge, wobbly bowl of gelatin that would capsize if he put any weight on it. It was nothing like what he expected, and it was weird, all right.

He teetered, off balance, and leaned backwards onto the leg that was on firm sand. As he did things got even worse. Another surge, a curling, crashing breaker this time, rumbled down the channel toward them, and Claire and Ray jerked ferociously on the coat, dragging him up the bank and out of its way.

"John!" he shouted futilely, scrambling to his feet, safe himself but still able to feel the touch of his friend’s fingers on his own. They had been so agonizingly close…There was nothing he could do but watch, powerless and shaken, as the great swell of water swept by them, burying John for terrible, slow seconds.

"Look, he’s all right! He’s alive!" Ray blurted out when John’s head emerged at last from the settling water.

With his eyes tightly closed, his black hair matted and wet, and his cheeks puffed out from holding his breath, his head looked to Gideon like something that had been stuck on a pike on London Bridge, but after a moment he proved Ray right, sucking in a huge breath and opening his eyes.

"I think it’s time for plan B," he called weakly across the stream. The water, rising more and more swiftly, was lapping at his chin. He glanced apprehensively to his right, looking for the next surge.

And Gideon felt the first sick stab of real fear. What the hell was he going to do? How was he going to get John out before the next wave did him in? Goddamn him for being dumb enough to step in the crap just when they were almost home!

Panting with frustration, practically hopping from foot to foot, he looked wildly around for a stick, a pole, an idea, but of course there was nothing. Ray and Claire stood slumped together, with no suggestions, still pointlessly hanging on to the dripping black coat. John, God damn him, just sat there uselessly, like a bump on a log, up to his neck, with nothing to say. One more surge and-

At the sibilant, rumbling murmur all of them looked sharply up to see the dull, brownish-gray breaker, nudging its scud of flotsam and yellow foam before it, roll smoothly and evilly down the channel towards them, so high this time that it spilled over the sides.

And Gideon had an idea. He ran quickly upstream along the bank, towards the oncoming breaker, only managing to get in four or five strides before pulling level with it. Then, pushing off against the edge of the bank, he launched himself into it in a shallow dive angled back downstream, in

John’s direction. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Claire and Ray staring openmouthed at him.

What he had in mind was to grab John-to more or less tackle him underwater-as the powerful wave swept Gideon downstream, and use the combined impetus of the surge and his own weight to pluck John out of the sand. Not much of an idea in the first place, and half-formed at best, but it was all he could think of, and under the circumstances it wasn’t bad.

Or it wouldn’t have been, except for two things. First, his hurried dive landed him not in the billowing crown of the swell but just in front of it, under the heavy, overhanging curl. Instead of being buoyed forward in John’s direction, he was pounded by the crashing curtain of water and forced downward, sprawling and contorted, to bump hard against the gritty bottom and get most of the wind knocked out of him. Then, before he could raise his head to the surface and snatch a breath, the fat part of the swell sent him somersaulting forward, muddled and strangling, close to panicking because John too was underwater by now, with his legs gripped fast in the quicksand, and Gideon couldn’t see where he was. There would be only one chance to grab for him, and if he missed, then-