Island 731

22.

The goat returned the group’s silent stare, slowly chewing on a long strand of dry grass like a hillbilly named Bubba sitting on a front porch. Hawkins half expected the thing to say, “Git off my land,” but the goat just offered a feeble bleat and went back to chewing, pulling the grass into its mouth, inch by inch, with its tongue. As a child, Hawkins had always felt unnerved by goats’ rectangular pupils. He’d overcome the fear as an adult, facing down far worse than goats, but when this goat craned its head slightly and locked eyes with his, Hawkins felt the childhood paranoia return.

The all-white goat with five-inch-long curled horns stood just three feet tall and sported an impressive potbelly and full-looking udder. Hawkins glanced at the udder and remembered Bray’s story about spider silk-producing goats. Knowing goats could jump great distances from an idle position and having witnessed the flying draco-snakes, he half expected the goat to leap up and swing around on spiderwebs shot from its swollen udder. But it just stood there, chewing.

The goat took a step forward, jangling a small bell attached to a red plastic band wrapped around its neck. Hawkins focused on the collar. It looked familiar. It looked… “Just like the one on the turtle.”

“What?” Joliet asked.

“The collar,” Hawkins said. It looks like the plastic band we found around the loggerhead’s midsection.”

Joliet shifted, but her movement brought the goat’s attention to her and she couldn’t get a better view.

Bray started calling to the goat the way someone might call a dog, with clicks and squeaks. He knelt down on a knee. “My uncle owned a farm in New Hampshire. Alpacas, llamas, and goats. Weird combination, but they did okay.” He opened his pack and began rummaging through it. “Lots of goat’s milk products. Soap. Cheese. Stuff like that. My parents sent me there for a few weeks. To teach me how to work hard. But all I really learned is that I hated farming”—he began unwrapping something—“and that goats have an affinity for oats, sugar, and anything sweet.”

Bray held out the unwrapped chocolate-chip granola bar and started clicking at the goat once more. “Come on, girl.”

“Don’t think a goat living on an island in the middle of the Pacific will know what a granola bar is,” Drake said.

“Doesn’t need to,” Bray said. “Goats have an excellent sense of smell. Eyesight, too. Those rectangular pupils give it crazy night vision.”

The goat cocked its head to the side, flaring its nostrils. Then, with a sharp bleat, it trotted to Bray and began nibbling on the end of the crunchy snack. Bray pet the goat’s back. “Good girl.” He looked to Hawkins. “She won’t move until the bar is gone.”

Hawkins wasted no time inspecting the collar and quickly confirmed his suspicions. “Same red plastic. Japanese text, too, though the characters are different. Definitely doesn’t say ‘broccoli’ again.”

“Broccoli?” Drake asked.

Joliet knelt next to the goat and stroked its side. As her hand passed over the goat’s fur, the skin beneath it rippled, as though twitching with excitement. “It’s what Kam said was written on the plastic band we took off the turtle.” She gave the goat a gentle scratch behind its ear and it paused eating to let out an ecstatic bleat. “I don’t think this goat has ever been petted before.”

“Let me have a look,” Drake said, stepping up next to the goat.

Something about Drake put the goat on edge. It shifted away from him, but the granola bar kept it from fleeing. When Drake stood still, hands on knees looking at the collar, the goat relaxed and focused on its meal.

“Goat three hundred fourteen,” Drake said.

Bray turned to the captain. “Huh?”

“That’s what the collar says,” Drake explained.

Bray looked doubtful. “How well do you speak Japanese?”

With a sigh, Drake explained. “Passable, but not fluent. I met my wife in Japan. Learned the language so I could speak to her parents. Ask her father’s permission. Do things right.”

“Didn’t know you were married,” Bray said.

As soon as the words escaped Bray’s mouth, Hawkins saw the subtle change in Drake’s expression and knew the truth before the man spoke. “I’m not. She died ten years ago. And before you ask, it was cancer. The fast, merciful kind. If there is such a thing, but it took her just the same.”

Bray lowered his eyes to the ground. “Sorry.”

“Ten years ago,” Joliet said. “That’s when you became captain of the Magellan.”

Drake gave a nod. “Called in a favor.” He looked at Hawkins. “Needed to escape.” He stood and stepped away from the goat. “Now, if we’re done with our trip down memory lane, what’s the big deal about the collar, other than the fact that it confirms the island is populated by people with access to the outside world?”

Hawkins hadn’t thought about the ramifications of the people here having plastic. Drake was right. Whoever lived here hadn’t been isolated since World War II, but that didn’t mean they weren’t off-their-rockers crazy. “I’m not sure.”

“I know what it means,” Bray said, petting the goat. He waited for the others to look at him and then said, “It means Kam lied. The band around the turtle didn’t say ‘broccoli.’”

Joliet scoffed. “There’s no way to know that.”

The goat finished with the first of the two crunchy granola bars. Bray offered it the second, which it happily accepted. “Why would a plastic band that matches the one around this goat, which is accurately labeled ‘goat,’ identify a loggerhead turtle as ‘broccoli’?”

“There’s probably a hundred different possibilities,” Joliet said.

“Including that Kam lied,” Bray said. “You agree that the turtle had been experimented on. The tracker in its gut was proof of that. Given what we found on the beach, the presence of the dracos, and now a matching collar makes a pretty air-tight case that whoever screwed with the turtle is, or was, on this island. If they took the time to accurately label a goat, why call a turtle broccoli?”

“Could have been to throw off anyone that found the turtle,” Drake offered.

Bray nodded his agreement. “One of the hundred possibilities. But whoever experimented on the turtle didn’t expect the tracker to fail. They might not have intended it to live more than a year or two before recapturing it. Even then, I doubt they expected it to survive into adulthood. Just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s… unscientific.”

“Experimental science is full of code names,” Joliet said. “Especially those born out of the Second World War.”

“I’ll give you that,” Bray said as the goat finished the second bar. He stood up. “But I’m not sure ‘Project Broccoli’ has much of a ring to it, especially if we’re talking about Unit Seven thirty-one, whose members subscribed to the bushido code just as much, if not more so, as the soldiers who eviscerated themselves after losing a battle.”

Both sides of the argument made at least some kind of sense, but everything was based on pure speculation and Hawkins knew that did no one any good. “How about this? We’ll ask Kam when we find him.”

“Works for me,” Drake said. “It’s time we got moving and our guide is waiting for us.”

The goat’s bell jangled as it wandered to the hidden path at the edge of the clearing. It paused at the jungle’s edge and bleated at them.

Bray zipped up his backpack. “Hold on, Pi.”

“Pi?” Hawkins asked.

“Three fourteen,” Bray said. “Three point one four. Pi. It’s amazing you can tie your shoes, Ranger.” He stood and headed for the goat, which turned and entered the jungle.

“We’re being led by a goat,” Joliet said. “Great.”

“It’s not leading us,” Hawkins said. “Just happens to be headed in the same direction.” He chased after Bray, reclaiming his position on point. He paused at the clearing’s edge and peered into the canopy-dimmed jungle. Once his eyes adjusted, he saw the goat waiting for them twenty feet down a switchback trail. It stood next to a footprint.

Hawkins shook his head and thought, We are being led by a goat. And he was actually okay with that. The bell jangling around the goat’s neck would make it a predator’s first target, and would help disguise their approach to anything or anyone that recognized the sound. In fact, if they could get the bell off the goat, Hawkins thought it might be a good idea to take it. But for now, they’d follow the goat, as long as it didn’t start swinging from spiderwebs or sprout sea snake fangs.