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caught on a boulder and twisted, driver's side down. His prisoner's screaming was swallowed by the roar and tumult around them.
    Tom hooked onto the door post between front and back and reached into the window to grab Caspar's seat belt, following it underwater to the buckle, doing his best to avoid the other man's thrashing upper body as he fought his restraints in a burst of fading energy.
    The car shuddered again, almost throwing Tom free, but not before he'd slipped the buckle loose and grabbed Caspar's shirt, pulling him halfway out of the window to where he could breathe.
    Caspar coughed and spat and threw his head back, gasping for air, as Tom continued extracting him from the tossing car.
    "Oh, my God. Thanks, man. Holy Mother of Mary."
    The two of them were finally thrown free in one final, explosive encounter with a boulder, Tom clinging to his prisoner as to a long-sought-after lover.
    Now separated from the vehicle, but weighed down by his gun belt and his manacled companion, Tom slipped an arm around Caspar's chest in a lifeguard's grip and struck out in a clumsy stroke for a passing tree, catching one of its limbs like the baton at a relay race.
    In itself, it was no solution, but the tree caught something along the edge of the bounding river, and swung them around into a small island of more vegetation, bobbing within the relative calm of a temporary eddy.
    Tom clawed them farther into the tangle, away from the water's grasping embrace, dragging Caspar Luard as if he were a duffle bag filled with rocks. He cursed all the way, as Luard's clothing and chains got caught in the branches, or as Tom's feet slipped through holes on the shifting matting beneath them.
    "Who're you yelling at?" Caspar complained. "You got us into this."
    "Shut up," Tom ordered him. "Or I'll throw you back. Use your feet."
    Slowly, they worked their way to the top of what appeared to be a makeshift hummock of debris, perhaps crowning firm ground but surrounded by the fast-snaking tendrils of the caramel-colored river they'd just left.
    At the far end of it was Al, Tom saw, stretched out like a beached whale, bleeding and torn, but alive enough to offer a feeble wave. Too tired to resent his abandonment of them earlier, Tom merely returned the gesture.
    "Hey, Chief?" Caspar's plaintive voice brought him back.
    "What?" he asked almost peevishly.
    Caspar jangled his chains. "Do I still have to wear these?"

Chapter Three
    Joe rolled to a stop in the middle of the road. Ahead, the Whetstone Brook was arcing over the Route 9 bridge, the railing no longer retaining errant vehicles, but instead acting as a launching ramp for a continuous rooster tail of liquid mud fountaining through the sodden, gray air like a broken water main spewing across the road.
    "Gee, boss," Willy commented. "Not gonna go for it?"
    Joe didn't respond, craning to see to their right through the streaming water on the glass. "The address is over there. We might be able to get closer to the trailer park using the back feeder road, instead of the main entrance."
    "We putting a lot of effort into this?" Lester asked from the back. "I mean, not to be coldhearted . . ."
    Joe held up his hand. "I know, I know. They had no idea what was out here when they assigned us." He put the car in reverse and began turning around. "Let's just give it a vague look around. We may not even get out."
    They'd barely engaged the road in question when Sam announced, "There, to the left. Two guys in a tree."
    The rest of them turned to stare.
    "Idiots," Willy said.
    Joe cast him a look. "You don't know that's them."
    "Yeah I do," the old sniper assured him. "The one on the upper branch is Zach Nee-ley. Worthless piece of crap. This is totally his style. I don't know the other one."
    "Thank God for that," Sam muttered.
    "It's gotta be one of his new recruits," Willy finished. "Nobody's dumb enough to do more than one job with Zach."
    "They look comfortable enough," Lester said hopefully.
    "They look