“Don’t lie to me! I know you did it, you bastard! Tell me where my son is! Where have you hidden him? What have you done to Tristán?”
Roberto froze. The last time he’d seen Tristán, the kid had been heading home just after saying goodbye to him and Helena Freire. For some reason, he’d never reached the Docampo house, and the boy’s family thought Roberto had something to do with his disappearance.
“I don’t know where Tristán is.” He shook his head. “The last time I saw him, he was heading home. That’s the truth.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s all I know. I’m sorry.” Roberto stood up, defiant. He’d seen enough situations like this to know that his death sentence had already been signed, no matter what he did. If he was going to die, then at least he would do it standing upright, with dignity.
“Tell me where my son is.”
“I swear I don’t know.”
Luis Docampo looked at him, his eyes blazing with pain and rage. “If you aren’t going to tell me anything,” he said, spitting out the words without taking his eyes off Roberto, “you can tell the devil.”
He shoved Roberto, a hard, direct jolt to the sternum, winding him. Trapped in a sensation of absolute panic, Roberto staggered back, as if in slow motion, and toppled over the low barrier.
Finally, with a scream of terror, Roberto Lobeira plunged into the shaft of the Devil’s Hole.
32
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 blast, which could easily have torn the roof off a house, made almost no impact on the thousands of tons of water that constituted the wave, other than to slow it down momentarily, enough to ensure that the next wave hit it, at a precise angle of 120 degrees, not a single degree more nor less, and with a speed differential of less than five knots. If it had hit in any other way, the two waves would have collapsed, like thousands of other waves that collided chaotically in the fury of the storm, but in this case it was different.
The two waves merged to form a single, much larger one, loaded with their combined inertia. Advancing more rapidly, it swallowed upthe 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. Thecoast, 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.
33
Waking Up
As if churned up by the waves, his mind feverishly mixed memories of the night spent adrift in the Mediterranean with his fall into the hole. Huge waves picked up the lifeless bodies of the migrants and dashed them against black walls made up of ravening mouths that then ground them to pieces. In the midst of it all, he was a powerless spectator, his trauma finally unleashed, freed of all controls and restraints.
It was the pain—a stabbing sensation in his chest every time he breathed—that made him regain consciousness.
