Free of the bomb canoe, Jake took two immense strokes and found himself back at the floating iron barrier. He climbed atop, pausing to cough as much of the river water from his lungs as possible.
Though the thunder and lightning had faded, cannon fire on shore and from the Dependence took up the slack. Pandemonium echoed around him, the gunshots joined by shouts and cries from the wounded. No longer hampered by the rain, fires broke out with vengeance all along the river below. It seemed as if he had swum from the Hudson directly to the mouth of the river Lethe at Hades' gate.
The bomb canoe was floating downstream, carried by the current. Jake had no idea whether it was still close enough to damage the chain if it exploded; indeed, he had no idea how long it would be before the bomb went off. Both matters were out of his hands — his best course now was to run like hell for the shore.
Under any circumstance, running along the chain, with its floats moving back and forth with the waves, would have been a daunting if not impossible task. Given the churning of the river due to the storm and Jake's tired and bruised condition, however, it was not even conceivable. He took one step and fell flat on his face, dropping his arms barely in time to break his fall. Groping forward, he managed to reach the end of one float and climb to another. He made the next one before slipping again, this time hitting his chin on the heaving iron. River water filled his mouth and he began coughing so hard he fell over. Some action of the river or the storm punched a link up into his ribs so severely that he nearly rebounded into the air. He began flailing about, as if under attack from some monstrous creature of the deep. For a moment, blinded by the pounding of the water into his face, Jake thought he saw the chain rise up and tangle itself around him, as if it were a giant ray or eel, trying to strangle him.
The monster Despair, more powerful by far than any denizen of the river or sea, loomed at his back, its icy grip pinching the strained muscles in Jake's neck. With a start, the patriot realized he had slipped off the logs and was completely under water.
He opened his good eye and thought he saw two figures below him, worm-eaten corpses with their arms extended to him, hair flowing in the current and dresses billowing with the river's movement. He muscled every last ounce of strength into his arms and pushed for the surface, kicked his legs and struck his arm on one of the barrier's supports; despite the pain, he used it for leverage and lurched away.
And then in a second the storm vanished completely, the wind finally pushing the clouds so hard against the surrounding mountains that they were drained of their liquid in one last torrent, and had nothing left. The Hudson in that brief moment went calm as glass, and Jake made strong progress toward shore.
Free of the chain, free of the monsters of his imagination, the patriot saw the dark outline of St. Anthony's looming overhead. In that instant it turned from demon to protector, a natural barrier that helped the Americans form their line against the British tyrants. The river and her eddies helped now, with a current that pushed him toward land. Jake felt a sudden burst of speed, and as he stroked for the riverbank shook his head clear of the mucus that had accumulated during his struggle.
And then the Hudson was lit by a fireball unseen since the Earth's creation.
The water was rent in two. Huge waves welled up in a massive tide, pushed by a force several times that of the greatest Caribbean hurricane. The air itself turned hot from the friction of the blast, rushing against the shore like the hard blade of a carpenter's plane, taking with it whole trees and immense boulders, while burning the unprotected flesh from men's faces. Jake was propelled a hundred yards directly upstream, and then sucked back by the rebounding waves. He was tossed like a cloth sack against the chain, landing directly atop a float.
The patriot barrier shook with the force of the blow, rebounding up and down all across its length as the strong rope of a hammock under the weight of a child jumping on it. But like such a rope, the boundary held — whether because of superior design and manufacture, some trick of the river's reflection, or even Providence herself, the reader may take his pick. An engineer would realize the orientation of the chain was such that it actually rode much of the shock wave, which was largely wasted in the open air.
Even so, the iron and logs groaned so loudly that Jake's first thought was that he had failed. He lay on his back against the logs for a long moment, dark dread once again filling his head. But he soon realized the wood below him was intact, and creaking against its fellows; he sat up and began shouting insane hosannas as if he had been deposited directly into the balmy waters of the Mighty Jordan, en route to heaven.