Chapter 32 Something Exceptional
Something Exceptional
Fifteen minutes earlier, four miles out to sea and far from the sight of anybody, a set of conditions, each of which on its own would have been insignificant, combined to give rise to something truly unique.
The power of Storm Armand shook the surface of the sea, raising waves the size of four-story houses, fully thirty and forty feet high, which began running toward the shore in what appeared to be an infinite succession.
Just then, a blast of warm air, driven by a sudden temperature change, collided with one of these waves, pushing it in the opposite direction from the current that was driving it toward the coast of Ons.
The two waves merged to form a single, much larger one, loaded with their combined inertia.
Advancing more rapidly, it swallowed up the waves ahead of it, in a complex process known as nonlinear compression, and gradually transformed into something else: a behemoth the height of a ten-story building headed for land with all the force of a freight train.
A killer wave, any sailor’s nightmare.
The wall of water, two hundred yards long, its weight incalculable, took twelve minutes and thirty-five seconds to reach land, and struck the cliffs of Ons just as Roberto Lobeira hurtled into the Devil’s Hole, destined for a certain death.
And that was the coincidence that saved Roberto’s life.
He was plummeting into the shaft. The mouth of the hole receded as gravity claimed him. From his throat came a cry of pure, primal terror.
And just then, that whole section of the coast shook as if a bomb had exploded.
The walls of the hole reverberated, and fragments of rock, blasted loose by the impact, rained down.
The water entered via the channel at the foot of the cliff, which was too narrow to accommodate such a great volume all at once.
The bottom of the hole turned into a bubbling, foaming, rising pool.
As the water rose, the distance between its surface and Roberto’s free-falling body became shorter.
What should have been a deadly, 150-foot drop was reduced to a fall of barely a quarter that distance.
When he hit the water, Roberto was swallowed in a crazed pandemonium of turbulent foam.
He managed to surface, and he gulped down some air before he was sucked down into what had now effectively become a huge drain.
He wheeled about helplessly in the water.
Surrounded by impenetrable darkness, he had lost all sense of up and down.
At breakneck speed, the stream of water carried him out through the channel, and he caught one of his knees on the side wall of the rock formation as he passed.
The pain shot up his leg and set his brain on fire.
The sea spat him out on the surface just as he was running out of oxygen. He drew a frantic breath as the battery by water continued. The coast, a line of huge boulders covered with razor-sharp barnacles and mussels, loomed threateningly not a dozen yards away.
Just then, the next wave lifted him fifteen feet up in its final dash to the cliffs. Roberto screamed as he was hurled against the dark reefs that emerged like the decayed teeth of a monster of the deep. There was a brutal impact; he recoiled in pain . . .
And then, nothing.