Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

They would enter the clinic together, she as the pregnant young girl with an accidental burden, he as the concerned and supportive partner. The slight bulge of her belly would not be a four-month-old fetus, however; it would be a girdle of C-4 or TNT, the detonator tucked just under her breasts. By the grace of God, they’d take down a half dozen of the modern-day Philistines and their vile priests, bringing down the roof on their false idols and strange gods, the butcher shop of their wicked beliefs.

Grinning, he sped on, toward the rushing water below.

They’d made the foot of the falls just before dark, right on schedule. The group had unpacked and set up their tents (from the ProVentures Pup series), started a fire, and gathered around for a meal of energy bars, instant coffee, soy jerky, and banana chips. Bowie checked their faces as the flames danced in their eyes. They showed no signs of exhaustion, except for Travis Lane, the ProVentures rep. Bowie made a note to keep an eye on him. Chances were good the marketing whiz’s creativity was limited to tricky words and behavioral psychology, and didn’t extend into the skills necessary for backwoods endurance.

Lane had removed his boots and was busy rubbing his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Farrengalli said to him. “They sold you on the wrong pair of footwear?”

“The ProVentures line is perfectly suitable for this type of hiking,” Lane said. “Add a little fur and an extra lining, and you could hike the Antarctica with these.”

Farrengalli had produced a silver flask from somewhere, and it glinted with firelight as he tilted it against his lips. He wiped his lush Italian lips and said, “That sounds like a good gimmick for next year. You gotta cut me in on that action.” He glanced at Bowie and flashed those big incisors that could probably cut his leg out of a steel trap if necessary. “Maybe even let me lead it.”

Bowie didn’t rise to the bait. The embers were deep, orange, and hypnotic. Soothing, the way he imagined hell might be after you got used to it. He’d probably find out one day, but not too soon. He still had a lot of misery to endure, a lot of memories of Connie, a lot of years left to waste.

“Sounds like a job for snowshoes,” C.A. McKay said. He looked unfazed by the evening’s exercise, as if compared to pedaling an uphill stretch in the French Pyrenees, the long hike was the equivalent of a kid’s second week on training wheels.

“It would be a good opportunity to promote the Igloo outfit,” Lane said, not knowing when to clock out. “Insulated with goose down, double-layered with an advanced synthetic blend, guaranteed at twenty below.”

“Let’s worry about tonight, not next year,” Bowie said, noting that all five faces turned toward him when he spoke. Even that beautiful one that made his eyes hurt.

“What’s the worry?” Farrengalli said, voice louder than necessary even given the roar of the falls. A fine spray filled the air, adding an extra chill to the September night. The fire did a good job killing the moisture, but Bowie knew they would all wake up damp and stay that way until they reached the end of the run.

“Maybe ‘worry’ isn’t the right word,” Bowie said. “Maybe it’s ‘concern.’”

“Look, we got the best equipment money can buy, except we got it all for free, we’re getting paid, we’re going to have our pictures in a national ad campaign-” Farrengalli paused, gave his gleaming grin to Dove Krueger, and said, “Hey, sweets, don’t forget to make this mug the poster child of the trip.”

Krueger, who’d carried the added burden of eight pounds of advanced photography equipment, winced at Farrengalli’s crude endearment. Like Bowie, she didn’t acknowledge the man’s attempts at irritation. She reminded Bowie of his wife, and No, he couldn’t go there now. Wait until the safety of the sleeping bag, the disturbed dreams, the persistent image of her hand reaching through the snow “The Muskrat may be new, but the principles of river rafting are pretty well established,” Bowie said.

“Come on, we went through all this in orientation,” Farrengalli said, hitting the flask again. The liquor, or whatever was in the container, had flushed his face. But it could have been excitement, or maybe the warmth of the fire. Farrengalli displayed an easy familiarity with the flask, as if they had ridden the same currents for years.

“That was on paper,” Bowie said, keeping his voice steady, letting the tumble of water over the rocks add its backing beat. “The river isn’t paper.”

“The rapids range from Class V to Class III,” McKay said. “Big deal. We can take it like a rubber ducky takes a bathtub.”

Easy for McKay to say, but McKay had trained with world-class athl etes. White-water courses were rated on a scale of difficulty ranging from one to six, with Class I being the easiest, the water so gentle t hat you could almost walk it faster, assuming the depth wasn’t too gre at. Class VI carried the real risk of death.

“Thirteen miles, with an altitude drop of two thousand feet over t he entire run,” Bowie said. “The most difficult hair run in the easter n United States. We have long stretches of portage where the river spr eads out into shallows, and when we’re not carrying gear to the next p ut-in, we’ll be bouncing around on short falls, eddies, undercuts, and troughs. You already see the hiking is no cakewalk. The rafting is ev en worse, and a paddle won’t make much difference if you get caught in a sinkhole. Assuming the equipment holds up, we’ll be tested to the l imits.”

“The equipment is fine,” Travis Lane said. “The Muskrat’s been on the drawing board for four years already. It’s undergone every laborat ory test in the book.”

“This isn’t the laboratory,” Bowie said.

“ProVentures has a lot riding on the expedition,” Lane said. He wa s the closest one to the fire, stooped over and rubbing his hands as i f wanting to pocket the heat for later.

“Not as much as we do,” Bowie said. “ProVentures would pay with a tax write-off. We’d pay with our lives.”

“Ooh,” Farrengalli said. “Major drama. Did you write that down, sw eet stuff?”

Krueger, who had been taking notes by firelight, wrinkled her nose as if smelling a skunk. She was examining the climbing gear, coiled r opes and steel pitons that glinted orange.

“We wanted a difficult launch to prove a point,” Lane said. “An ou ter shell of polyurethane-coated nylon. A single-chamber inflatable ex terior, resistant to abrasion, stitched seams reinforced with the most advanced epoxy. The interior layer features a series of separate cham bers so that the raft functions even after a puncture. Screw caps with a hand-pump accessory means you can break it down and pump it up agai n in about two minutes.”

“I bet I can pump it in thirty seconds,” Farrengalli said, curling his arm and showing biceps the size of a swollen grapefruit.

“I’ll bet you can pump a lot of things in thirty seconds,” Krueger said. “But I bet you never last a minute.”

Farrengalli’s eyebrows, which actually ran together in a single fu rry strand, rose on his forehead. His mouth rounded into an idiotic O, as if he couldn’t decide whether he was being ridiculed.

McKay laughed and gave Krueger an affectionate slap on the shoulde r. He was sitting closer to her than necessary. Bowie wondered if the cyclist would cause trouble of a different kind. Farrengalli was an ob vious prick, but McKay might be a subtler one. And Krueger was attract ive by any standard, even his, perhaps made more so by the fact she wa s the lone pussycat in a pride of lions.

Having only one woman in the group had been a bad choice. Dove as that one woman was even worse.