Chapter 42
IN RETROSPECT, I was lucky to have dropped off the pylon and plunged into the Pacific. The cold water stung my face while currents and eddies swung me at the length of the lineman’s rope. I fought to free myself, unclipped the carabiner that held the rope to the belt, kicked toward the surface.
The pier lights were still on. Dark smoke boiled thick in the air to the south, billowing out toward the darkness. Police sirens were gathering from multiple directions. There was enough light for me to see Del Rio hanging from his belt twelve feet up the scorched pylon.
“Rick!” I shouted.
Del Rio rolled his head toward me. “Burned, Jack,” he grunted through the earbud. “Back’s broken, I think. Can’t move my—”
“Don’t move anything!” I screamed. “Don’t move at all!”
My instinct was to swim straight to him, to get him down and in the water. But I held on to my reeling sea sled and shouted into the microphone, “Del Rio burned and injured on pylon below explosion. Probable spinal injury. Rankin, report. Do you see anyone coming from your position? Chief Fescoe?”
But there was no answer, only the soaring chatter of the L.A. sheriff, police, and fire departments being summoned to the scene. Then the Kid came on, choked up. “It’s Bud, Jack. I saw him thrown off the roof. I think he’s—”
In my peripheral vision, I caught a large, swift, dark blur, like some huge bird swooping out of the night just northwest of the pier. He rode a short, stubby black surfboard. He’d kicked his feet into bindings of some sort and was dressed much as I was, head to toe in a black wet suit.
But instead of a lineman’s belt, he wore a full harness that connected him to a taut black sail about six feet by four that bellied out like a spinnaker in front of him. I figured he was traveling forty, maybe fifty miles an hour, some kind of kiteboarding genius; he knifed into the light surrounding the pier, spotted the dry bags, tacked hard toward them, leaned into his harness, and snatched the first bag up. He blew south into the smoke before I could utter a word.
“Pickup!” I shouted at last, scrambling to get aboard the Sea-Doo.
I was straddling the sled, hitting the start, when the second kiteboarder appeared from the northwest and snagged the second dry bag in a move as brilliant as the first rider’s.
The Sea-Doo roared to life. I tugged a knife from a calf sheath, cut the mooring line, drifted, and then hit the throttle. In a split second the sled gathered power, blew seawater through its turbine, and leaped from beneath the pylons like a bucking horse freed of a chute.