The screech of tortured iron was deafening, a high, metallic shriek that echoed off the stone cutwaters and set every timber in the weir platform shivering like a dry reed in an autumn gale.
Six feet above the churning foam, Jon Hale hung from the bending five-foot iron crowbar, his boots scrabbling frantically for purchase against the wet greenheart maintenance catwalk. Beside him, Alden Bram was gasping for breath, the old mason’s arms locked straight, his shoulders shaking with the terrifying, inhuman strain of holding forty tons of greenheart oak against seven feet of river head.
Beneath the gantry, the emergency wooden brake blocks—eight-inch blocks of seasoned ash that had been wedged beneath the counterweight crossheads during the evening watch—were splintering into kindling. They crushed with a dry, popping series of reports like musketry, pulverized into pale sawdust and matchwood under twenty tons of downward shear.
Every time a brake block gave way, the main gate descended another three inches toward the granite sill, biting deeper into the black river water.
“She’s walking, Jon!” Bram screamed, blood spraying from his chapped lips into the freezing mist. “The tooth is shearing! The cast iron is turning to meal under the pawl! My knees are buckling!”
