On Jon’s count, Alden Bram and young Tobin threw their combined body weight downward onto the bending five-foot iron crowbar.
The steel lever groaned under twenty tons of vertical shear, its chiseled tip digging deep into the root of the ninth gear tooth on the drive drum with a harsh, ear-splitting screech that sent iron sparks flying into the sleet. The forty-ton oak gate, poised on the edge of catastrophic freefall into the riverbed, shuddered, lifted two agonizing inches against the rushing water, and hung suspended in the sleet-swept dark.
“Now, Jon!” Bram screamed, his face purpling under the strain, blood bubbling from his nostrils into his gray beard. “We have the slack! Two inches, no more! My shoulder is giving out! The lever is bending!”
Jon did not wait for the lever to slip.
He swung his legs out over the thirty-foot drop, hanging from the oak gantry beam by the grip of his thighs, leaning down into the freezing cataract of brown spray that roared beneath the deck. His boots found no foothold; they dangled in empty air above the boiling weir apron where jagged limestone boulders waited to break a man’s bones.
Behind him, two hands clamped onto the heavy leather belt at the small of his back—rough, youthful hands that dug into the hide with desperate, unyielding strength.
