I’ve never paddled along the nighttime Orinoco in a dugout canoe and had a thirty-foot anaconda drop from a tree, wrap a coil around my neck and start constricting me to death and what’s more I don’t have to go there now to describe the experience for I know exactly what it feels like. The sheer animal power, the feral ferocity of the pair of huge hands that closed round my neck from behind was terrifying, something I’d never known of, never dreamed of. After the first moment of blind panic and shocked paralysis, there was only one thought in my mind: it comes to us all and now it has come to me, someone who is cleverer and stronger and more ruthless than I am.
I lashed back with all the power of my right foot but the man behind me knew every rule in the book. His own right foot, travelling with even more speed and power that mine, smashed into the back of my swinging leg. It wasn’t a mane behind me, it was a centaur and he was shod with the biggest set of horseshoes I’d ever come across. My leg didn’t feel as if it had been broken, it felt as if it had been cut in half. I felt his left toe behind my left foot and stamped on it with every vicious ounce of power left in me by when my foot came down his toe wasn’t there anymore. All I had on my feet was a pair of thin rubber swimming moccasins and the agonizing jar from the steel deck plates shot clear into the top of my head. I reached up my hands to break his little fingers but he knew all about that too for his fingers were clenched into iron-hard balls with the second knuckle grinding into the carotid artery. I wasn’t the first man he’d strangled and unless I did something pretty quickly I wasn’t going to be the last either. In my ears I could hear the hiss of compressed air escaping under high pressure and behind my eyes the shooting lines and flashes of color were deepening and brightening by the moment.
What saved me in those first few second were the folded hood and the thick rubberized canvas neck ruff of the scuba suit I was wearing under my coat. But it wasn’t going to save me many seconds longer, the life’s ambition of the character behind me seemed to be to make his knuckles meet in the middle of my neck. With the progress he was making that wouldn’t take him too long, he was halfway there already.