The Amur River — Siberian Wilderness | August 8, 2011 | 00:17
He fell through ninety feet of blizzard in approximately three seconds, which was long enough to know he was going to hit water rather than rock, and not long enough to do anything useful with that information.
The Amur was not a forgiving river at the best of times. In August in a storm with runoff from the eastern range still cold in its tributaries, it was a different category of problem. He hit it at an angle that was more car crash than entry, the impact driving the air from his body in a single involuntary expulsion, and then the river had him.
He sank. The current took him immediately — not with any concern for his survival, the way currents don't have concerns, just with the physics of water moving faster than a body at rest. He was tumbling. Rock contact on the right shoulder, the left knee, a glancing blow to the head that his helmet absorbed most of. His eyes were open and seeing nothing useful — black water, black silt, the pale suggestion of the riverbed below.
He was aware, in the specific way that extreme physical crisis produced awareness, of the biological process beginning again.
The C-Virus aerosol from the cargo car had entered his respiratory system before he went through the door. He had felt the initial penetration — that burning pressure of something trying to rewrite what it found — and had felt the Progenitor sequence begin its counter-response, the cellular-level conflict between an engineered intruder and a biology that had been built around resistance to exactly this category of threat. He had been in the middle of that process when the impact came.
Now he was underwater, in the dark, with the current carrying him downstream at a speed he could not estimate, and the biological process was continuing without any input from him because it did not require his input. It simply required time. His heart stopped — genuinely, completely, the electrical signal disrupted by the combination of cold shock and cellular demand — and then started again twelve seconds later. Then stopped a second time. Then started.
The tactical vest's emergency buoyancy bladder activated automatically at two meters below surface, which was what it was designed to do. He rose.
He was not conscious when he broke the surface. He was not conscious for a considerable time afterward. The river carried him as debris — face-up in the gear's buoyancy, arms loose, the current doing with him what the current was going to do regardless of his preferences — for the next four hours in the dark and the snow, downstream of the bridge, downstream of the wreckage, deep into the part of Siberia that does not appear on the kinds of maps that operational briefings are built from.
His heart beat. It was not regular, and it was not strong, but it beat.
That was enough.
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Chapter Thirty-Six follows...