Reasonable or not, I took the offensive. If I was going to die by their hand, I wasn’t going to die running.
I backed the throttle slightly when my skiff began to push sixty-five; then slowed again when I saw the first ski buoy sweep past. I stayed low, using the front of my boat like a gun sight, aiming it directly at the black vacancy that marked the terminus of the bass boat’s expanding white wake.
They would be there in the blackness.
We would soon meet.
Once again, I spotted their boat in the panning car lights of the adjacent road. I closed within forty yards before they saw me. Maybe they thought they’d scared me off, or hit me with one of their wild rounds.
I saw their vessel fishtail, and recover-a measure of their surprise.
I wasn’t done, nor were they.
Off to my left, two abrupt geysers of water kicked spray onto the deck. Shooting again as they tried to accelerate away.
Ahead and to my left, I could see the vague outline of the ski ramp. Did they see it?
Yes… but only at the last second. I was close enough to watch them veer sharply, ramp to their right, then swerve back on course. They would soon pass directly in front of the ramp, with me only a few yards behind, if I continued at my current speed. But our intersecting angles, I realized, gave me an unusual attack option.
A ski ramp at an intersecting angle…
It was an option too crazy, too lunatic risky to deserve rational consideration. But I wasn’t rational, so I didn’t pause to think about it. I just did it. Let it happen, watched it play out as if from a higher aspect, making up the moves as I went.
I touched the dead man’s switch to make certain it was still attached to the ignition and my belt. I removed my glasses and jammed them securely into the baggy front pocket of my fishing shorts. Then I pointed my skiff at the base of the ski ramp where the ramp’s incline entered the water. As I did, I used the throttle switch to tilt my engine upward, moving the angle of the spinning propeller toward the sky. Gradually, instead of pushing the hull only forward, the propeller’s thrust was also pushing the back of my boat lower in the water while raising the bow.
I had plenty of speed. With my hand fixed on the throttle, I gauged the bass boat’s speed and angle, trying to time it just right. I continued to steer toward the ramp, determined to hit the thing dead center.
Spend time around Florida’s waterways and you’ll acquire all kinds of useless information that may become useful if you live long enough. I’d seen boats go over ramps at boat shows, which was maybe where I’d learned that the standard competitive ski ramp is several boat widths wide and five or six feet high. The ramps have a gentle, engineered pitch that can vault a skier, or boat, a couple hundred feet through the air.
But what was the optimum safe speed? That figure was buried in my brain somewhere. Had I heard that boats towing ski jumpers travel at forty miles an hour? Or was it fifty?
I couldn’t remember. A troubling lapse.
To compensate, every few seconds I glanced at the speedometer, aware that if I hit the ramp too fast I might not have time to bail out before my skiff nose-dived back into the water. Watched the needle read 50… 45… 48… 45… figures varying with my indecision as the ramp grew huge before me… the bass boat out there in front now… maybe going faster than I thought.
I’m going to miss them, damn it…
Which is why I panicked, burying the throttle forward as I hit the ramp bow-high. It added a final rocket thrust of acceleration that sent me careening toward outer space-stars bright up there-as the deck beneath me listed wildly to starboard, accompanied by a terrible screeching of fiberglass on fiberglass.
I was on the ramp for only a couple of seconds, but it seemed longer… and suddenly my boat straightened itself as we went airborne. I was floating, weightless, holding the steering wheel, fighting to steady myself like some novice astronaut experiencing zero gravity for the first time.
Intense concentration can add to the illusion that things are happening in slow motion. From high over the water, I turned my head to look. I could see that the bass boat was directly beneath me-a circumstance I hadn’t anticipated. If I bailed, and landed on their boat instead of in the water, the impact would probably kill me.
Slow motion or not, I knew I had very little time to react. Yet, I now had to wait a scary, tilting instant longer before throwing myself out of my skiff.
The sense of weightlessness continued as I shoved myself away from the steering wheel and floated out into the dark and spinning stratum that partitioned sky from water…
5
In the instant before I plunged through the lake’s surface, I could see my skiff above the bass boat, falling toward it in a ponderous arc. It looked as if I’d timed the intersection perfectly.
In the silence of that micromoment, I heard a woman scream. Or maybe it was the man: a shrill, atavistic sound so energized by fear that it was without gender.
They saw my boat, too. They knew they were about to be crushed.
Then gravity slammed me earthward.
My body had been traveling over the water at more than forty miles an hour. Add another twenty-five miles an hour to that, because, if you jump from a plane, that’s the approximate speed attained during the first second or two of free fall. Mitigate the impact slightly because of the trajectory created by the combined forces of gravity, air drag, and velocity. But it was still one hell of a collision when I hit the lake’s surface. I skipped over the water like a rag doll, and then was augured deep into blackness.
I’ve jumped into dark water many times. Jumped from fast boats, helicopters, and parachuted from planes. But there is only one other time when I’d experienced a water landing as violent-and that was not so long ago on the headwaters of the Amazon.
I tried to swing my legs beneath me but hit hard on my left side, shoulder first. I knew enough to have arms and elbows pulled in tight against my body, chin firmly on chest, both hands shielding my testicles. Hit any other way, arms can be ripped from their sockets, teeth shattered, necks broken.
I didn’t fight it as momentum took me deep underwater. I was aware of burning cold-Central Florida had had a frost or two this December. Was also aware of changing pressure. I let drag slow me before lifting my head upward, hands and arms out, sculling to end my descent. Then I began a slow swim toward the surface, exhaling bubbles as I went.
Surfacing seemed to take a long, long time.
Finally, I was breathing air again; warm, rich air that floated in layers atop the cold lake; my vision blurry because of water and my bad eyesight. Still, I could see sufficiently well to be, at once, disappointed and also relieved.
I expected carnage, the aftermath of a boat collision. I didn’t relish such a sight, but the Russians had invited attack.
But there was no carnage. Nor had they returned to kill me. Instead, all that awaited was the reassuring silhouette of my own skiff floating upright, engine off, not far away.
No sign of the bass boat. For a moment, I considered the possibility that I had hit it and their vessel had already sunk, the two passengers with it.
No. It would not have gone down so quickly.
I searched the distance until I recognized a fuzzy, flickering image caught in the light of the nearby highway: the Russians’ boat disappearing fast, already more than a hundred yards away, still heading south. Somehow, the woman had managed to avoid the unavoidable. Impressive. But why hadn’t they come back to finish the job?
I began to swim, thinking about it. Could the shock of what I’d done scared them into running? They’d managed to scare me into flight. Maybe I’d returned the volley.