Conviction

16

If not for the BMW’s six liter, 537 horsepower engine, Fisher’s escape attempt would have ended before it started, when the car’s front bumper hit the guardrail. But the engine, combined with fine German craftsmanship, was no match for the waist-high rail and the abutting suicide-prevention hurricane fencing — a bit of irony that didn’t escape Fisher’s attention as the BMW tore through the fence and plunged toward the river below. The drop was fifty feet, but trapped inside the car, listening to the banshee wail of the engine and watching horizon and sky and water turn to a smudge before his eyes, it might as well have been a thousand feet.

As it had hundreds of times before, Fisher’s training took over when every muscle of his body wanted to freeze up. He rolled over and threw himself over the seats and onto the floor in the back, atop his backpack. Most victims of bridge collapses die in the front seat, arms braced against the steering wheel or dashboard, every muscle in their body tensed as they stare, transfixed, at the water’s surface rushing up to meet them. Whether being in the backseat would provide any great protection, he was about to find out. He took a deep breath, let it out, and commanded his body to relax.

The BMW stopped dead, as though it had hit a brick wall, which, in terms of physics, was more true than not. From fifty feet up, the car had gained enough momentum that the water’s relative solidity was equal to that of concrete. Fisher was thrown against the seats, and the seats tore free of their floor mounts and slammed into the dashboard and windshield. He felt the BMW porpoise — the hood plunging beneath the surface, then breaching again as the rear of the car slammed down. With a prolonged sputter the engine died.

Fisher groaned, tried to push himself off the seat backs. White-hot pain arced through his chest and he gasped. Having experienced the sensation before, he knew he’d bruised a rib, perhaps more. He craned his neck and peered between the seats. The windshield was intact. He could feel the car settling lower, could see the water boiling up over the windshield and side windows. He heard the gurgle of it pouring through the nooks and crannies in the engine compartment. Water began gushing through the vents. Fisher felt a flash of panic. Words and half-formed images flashed through his mind: trapped, drowning, tomb, slow death… He pushed the panic back and focused. He was sinking, but he wasn’t trapped, not yet at least, and he’d be damned if he was going die trapped in a BMW 7 Series at the bottom of the Rhine River.

People who survive bridge collapses only to drown in their cars invariably make one fatal mistake: They try to keep the water out, realizing only too late that it is the water pressure that’s keeping them from opening the doors or rolling down windows. Panic sets in, the mind freezes up, and they drown.

Most modern cars are equipped with thick and precision-fitted weather seals, and Fisher’s BMW was no exception. While water was gushing from the vent slats, the door seals were holding, save dozens of rivulets streaming down the glass. These would get worse as the water pressure increased, but he still had time. Teeth set against the pain in his chest, he rolled over and looked out the back window. Light from the surface was fading rapidly; he estimated the car was dropping past twelve feet. The current, which ran at an average of four miles per hour — a walking pace — had taken hold. It would be ten minutes or more before rescue craft arrived on the scene. By then, provided the Rhine was as deep here as he’d guessed, he and the BMW would be a half mile downstream.

Ninety seconds later he was passing thirty feet, and the BMW slipped into complete darkness. Fisher dug an LED headlamp from his jacket pocket, donned it, turned it on. The backseat was bathed in cold, blue-white light. The water pouring from the vents had reached the mangled steering wheel. All around him the car popped and squelched as the exterior pressure increased. Occasionally pockets of air in the engine compartment would find their way out, then bubble past the windows and disappear into the gloom.

Almost time, Fisher told himself. Gear check.

Working under the headlamp’s beam, Fisher unzipped the backpack and pulled out a black aluminum cylinder the size of a Pringles potato chip canister. Modeled on the commercial version known as Spare Air, this DARPA-modified miniature scuba tank had been named OmegaO by some long-forgotten techno-geek with a dark sense of humor. Omega for “last,” and O, the symbol for oxygen—the last breath you’re likely to take. Despite its diminutive size, the OmegaO was something of a marvel, able to hold 2.5 cubic feet, or 70 liters, of air, which translated into roughly forty-five to fifty lungfuls. For an experienced diver this could mean as much as five or six minutes underwater, enough for a strong swimmer to cover a quarter mile or more. Fisher was a strong swimmer.

Fed by spring snowmelt, the water was shockingly cold but not so much so that hypothermia was a worry. Not yet at least — not as long as he got out of the water within the next half hour. Fisher wondered how Hansen and his team had reacted. Whether they believed he was dead was a toss-up, but he wasn’t counting on that but rather on the mess with which he’d left them: a high-speed chase ending in a car plummeting off the bridge into the Rhine. If nothing else, his pursuers would be occupied for the next hour or more.

The water was roiling now, being forced into the car under ever-increasing pressure. The level reached his chest. One final time, he checked the OmegaO hanging from the strap around his neck.

With a grating jolt, the BMW hit the riverbed; the car continued to slide for another ten feet until the tires sunk into the mud, bringing it to a halt. He could feel the current buffeting the sides. Water bubbled up to his chin. He got to his knees and, head pressed into the ceiling, donned his backpack. He put on the regulator and punched the button to test the airflow and was rewarded with a short hiss. He took a breath; the air was cool and metallic tasting. He closed his eyes and the water enveloped him.

Silence.

He sat still for a moment and listened to the ticks and pings of debris washing over the BMW, then opened his eyes. His headlamp beam was a cone of white before him. He checked the windows but saw only darkness and occasional bits of swirling sediment and plant matter. In which direction had the car settled? He pressed his hand first against the passenger-side window, then the driver’s side; here he felt more pressure against the glass. He scooted back to the other side, lifted the handle, and put his shoulder to the door. It burst open. Fisher tumbled out and landed on his side, buried up to his collarbone in mud. Loosened by the impact, his headlamp slipped off his head and slipped away. He snagged it, settled the straps back on his head, and cinched them down.

He started swimming.

The current, combined with his paddling, doubled his submerged speed. With his vision narrowed to what the cone of light from his headlamp illuminated, he had the sensation one got on an airport’s moving walkway. With no fixed references to latch on to, his brain was telling him he was swimming at a normal pace, but his body knew otherwise. Counting seconds in his head, Fisher swam hard for a minute, then turned left on the diagonal, aiming for the Rhine’s western shore. After another two minutes he felt the current suddenly slacken, and he knew he was clear of the main channel. He felt something soft slide over his chest and belly, and it took him a moment to realize it was mud. The bottom was rising. Twenty feet, he estimated. He was perhaps thirty feet from the bank. He had no fixed plan, but knew he needed to surface close to land, close to cover, lest he be spotted by rescue boats or an onlooker.

The current changed again and he felt his body spiraling left into some kind of vortex. His kicking feet touched mud, and then the water was calm again. He angled upward. The light increased. The surface came into view. Using his hands like flippers, he backpedaled in the water, slowing down until he was hovering a few feet below the surface. Directly ahead he could see trees: fuzzy broccoli shapes silhouetted against the sky. There was a gap between them. An inlet. He turned over, dove to the bottom, and swam on, using only his feet, arms spread wide, until he felt his fingers trailing over soil walls. The inlet continued to narrow and bottom out until his chest was scraping the bottom. He rolled onto his back and used his heels to wriggle forward until his head broke the surface. He blinked his eyes clear and found himself staring at tree branches, so close he could have reached out and touched them. He was right: an inlet. Shaped like an elongated V, it was at least two hundred feet deep. At its midpoint was a wooden footbridge. Someone was standing on it. No, two people. A man and a woman with their backs to him — watching the show in the main channel, he assumed. Moving with exaggerated slowness, Fisher reached up and removed the OmegaO’s mask.

It was ten long minutes before the couple moved on, crossing to the southern bank of the inlet and disappearing from view. Fisher rolled back onto his belly and began crawling.

At what he assumed was the end of the inlet, he instead found a choke point of dead branches and fallen logs draped by low-hanging boughs. On the other side of the natural dam he found a knee-deep creek enclosed in a tunnel of yet more undergrowth and trees. He followed the creek for a half mile, pushing deeper inland, occasionally glimpsing houses and cul-de-sacs through the trees until finally, after forty minutes of plodding through the water, he saw a raised concrete bridge ahead. He heard the rush of traffic, heavy enough that he realized he was near a major road.

He moved to the bank and found a comfortable place to sit down. He shrugged off his backpack, rummaged around until he found the Aloksak containing his iPhone; he pulled it out and powered it up. After tapping into a nearby wireless network, he called up the map feature and pinpointed his location. He was on the northern outskirts of Weißenthurm, the town across the Raiffeisen Bridge from Neuwied. The bridge ahead of him was part of the L121—Koblenzer Strasse. As the crow flies, he was less than a mile from where he’d gone off the Raiffeisen but almost twice that in the water and on foot.

He checked his watch. It was almost four o’clock. Three hours until nightfall.