The Cloud Atlas

CHAPTER 18

THE CLOUDS RETURNED, THIS TIME TO STAY. A SLOW, STEADY rain seemed to follow us down the Kuskokwim, and no arrangement of tarps and ponchos could keep us all from getting soaked through.

Occasionally, the rain would lift, but then the mosquitoes would descend. They took a particular interest in Gurley which I enjoyed except for those times when he had his gun out. He’d been obsessively removing it, cleaning and polishing it with the handkerchief, then replacing it and starting again thirty minutes later. But whenever the mosquitoes wreathed his head, Lily and I would be treated to the terrifying display of him wildly swatting at them, gun in hand.

Gurley had put his faith in Lily to lead us through the delta, but ever since then, she had grown more hesitant and unsure. She would point us one way, then another. She let her hand drift along in the water outside the boat. She studied the skies. And with each passing hour, she grew more anxious.

When Gurley suggested we stop for lunch, she just shook her head. Gurley looked at me and rolled his eyes-a standard gesture of his, but darker, somehow, out here alone in the bush. He and I tore into some C rations that had been stowed, and we continued on.

About one o’clock, the engine sputtered, coughed out a few mouthfuls of smoke, and died. While Gurley and Lily looked on with great concern, I uncoupled the gas line from the primary tank and inserted it into the reserve. Then I started the engine again. Miraculous. My passengers turned away, satisfied. I thought to joke that we’d need Lily to use her powers of divination to find us a gas depot eventually, but it wasn’t a joke-we would.

I was the first to see it. I had been following the contortions of an ever-widening waterway, wondering if we’d made it back into the main channel of the Kuskokwim. Even though it was wet, Gurley was slumped in the floor of the boat, sleeping or pretending to. Lily was looking at him, and I was trying to catch her eye when something downriver caught mine.

Of course, I thought I was hallucinating. There had been the strange appearance of that fire balloon my last night in Anchorage, but to actually see a balloon, in flight-that hadn’t happened since Shuyak, and that whole episode had seemed like a kind of dream anyway. But now, here one was, drifting along, not fifty feet above the ground, bright as the moon.

It was beautiful. I mean that. I knew these balloons had killed people and that one might someday kill me. But they were spectacular all the same. They were the most gorgeous thing the war produced, and again, I know that’s a horrible thing to say, given their intent. But they couldn’t help it, even if their makers could. Nothing else soared the way those balloons did. They even elevated the quality of that pokey training film that Gurley had made me watch. Before getting down to the dirty business of charts and diagrams and the stolid reenactment of disassembling a balloon, the film lingered over a long, sweeping shot of a balloon in morning flight along the Pacific Coast. The balloon seemed to be moving incredibly, effortlessly fast. Part of the thrill came from thinking how lucky the filmmakers must have been to actually capture one in flight, but even if they’d just reinflated one and sent it aloft for filming, it was still extraordinary. It felt like the beginning of an epic. There are films I see today that have such aspirations, but, honestly, none matches the power that film’s balloon had sailing through that sunny, black-and-white landscape.

Such memories have made me biased. Balloons were mankind’s first aircraft, and I do not think we have improved upon them. Planes are noisy, metal things, all angles and exhaust, that require you to tell them where to go. Balloons are a much purer kind of flight; they go where they will and leave you little say. I wondered then and wonder still what it would have been like to travel aboard one of those bomb balloons. What would the sky have looked like from up there, or the ocean, or a man on the ground like me?

If you’ve ever been that man on the ground, you know there is something about the silence of a balloon in flight that consumes you, that renders everything around it silent, as if the balloon’s magic included not only flight but the ability to swallow sound. Accept that, if you like, as my reason for not shouting, for throttling back the engine and just drifting, watching as the balloon seemed first to come toward us, then turn away, and then float closer once more.

Lily was silent as well. But as the balloon drew closer she began to rise in the boat, steadying herself with one arm and reaching up with the other. Gurley on the other hand, might never have awakened had the balloon not begun bleating.

It sounded like a bird and I assumed it was, but the closer we drew, the more distinct the noise became: a whistle, the kind air raid wardens frantically blew, the kind you might have mistaken for a cricket, except the sound went on too long. Still, I was ready to chalk it up to a bird or some strange way that the wind moved through the balloon’s rope-work, until Gurley startled awake. He saw the balloon and scrambled shakily to his feet. Without taking his eyes off the balloon, he snapped his fingers at me. “Glasses, Belk. Binoculars. My God-Lily. My God.” I found the binoculars in a case beneath the seat and handed them to him.

The balloon had crossed our path, and the river’s, and was now making a slow descent to the tundra. As the river carried us past, Gurley shouted at me to hold our position and then cursed, fumbling the glasses. He caught them, but when he raised them again to his eyes, he had one hand on his holster.

“Find and load your sidearm, Sergeant Belk,” Gurley said. “Lily, get down. Lie down.” Lily didn’t move. “Bring us ashore here, Sergeant. Lily, down.” Lily crouched down, but put a hand on Gurley’s pant leg as she did.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

“It’s landing!” Gurley said. “It’s going to crash! Beach us, Belk, dammit, land!” He dropped into a crouch, and I sped to the bank. Luckily, we tangled in some grass, or I think I would have sent us all flying out of the boat in my haste to execute Gurley’s order.

Gurley splashed out into knee-deep water and began pulling the boat onto the shore. With one last tug, he beached the boat, and then turned to face Lily and me with delight. “The enemy!” He looked up. The balloon seemed to be hovering with indecision about a hundred yards off, about two stories off the ground. Then a gust of wind pushed it toward us, and lower. Gurley ducked down.

“Sir?” I asked. It all seems so inevitable now, but at the time, I had not figured it out.

Gurley was checking his gun, so Lily answered for me, with bit lip. “There’s a man-there’s someone inside.”

Gurley looked at her with some surprise. “Perhaps you possess some magic powers yet, dearest. I would have thought one needed the binoculars to know that.” I stared at Gurley, unable to speak. “Belk, with me. Miss Lily, stay here.” He checked his gun one more time. “Finally,” he said.

Lily grabbed for him, but Gurley darted ahead, and then waved me after him. Lily caught me before I got away. “Don’t let him—” she started.

“I won’t,” I said.

“Don’t—”

Then the blast came.

My first thought was that the balloon had exploded, but when I looked up and saw it still there, I realized that the noise had come from Gurley’s gun. Leave it to Gurley to shoot at something as big as a balloon and miss. He was just a few yards in front of me, holding the gun with both hands, head cocked to the side to help his aim. I came up behind him.

Once he sensed I was beside him, he lowered his gun and turned to me. The wind had picked up again and the balloon began to drift away from us. Gurley cursed, looked at me, and then raised the gun again. I put a hand on his forearm as gently as I could.

“Sir,” I started.

Gurley yanked his shooting arm away. “Don’t ever,” he said, glowing red. Lily crept beside us and Gurley looked at her for a moment. “Get back in the boat, Lily.”

“Sir,” I said carefully. “Aren’t standing orders now to, well, to not shoot them down? For fear of what the balloon might release?” Gurley wasn’t listening. “I mean, even if it was a regular balloon-the explosives? If we fire at it from this close, we could—”

“It’s not a regular balloon,” Gurley said. “And I’m not about to let some little Jap fire on us at will. Give me the goddamn glasses.” The balloon was still a hundred yards off, but just a few feet above the ground now, drifting slowly. A rope trailed along behind it like a tail. A rope, or perhaps that long fuse, the one that was supposed to ignite the balloon itself. But with the balloon so low to the ground, the rope or fuse kept snagging in the grass. Then the wind would pull it free, the balloon would bounce, and the rope would snag again. Finally, a clump of alderwood caught the fuse, and the balloon was trapped. Now, when the wind blew, instead of breaking free, the balloon pulled to the ground. As it did, we could see the man inside grow agitated. Gurley had the glasses, but it was still clear to Lily and me that the man was standing, peering about. Moreover, he looked drunk-or weak. As the basket pitched back and forth, he seemed unable to keep his balance. He would topple and disappear from view and then struggle up once more. Sometimes he wouldn’t even stand; we’d only see his head, peering over the side like a little kid.

He should have noticed us by now, but there was no sign he had. He seemed too intent on the rope that had snagged to pay attention to anything else. “What are you going to do?” Lily whispered, angry. Gurley kept staring through the binoculars and said nothing. Every now and then, he’d shake his head, whistle low. Finally, he lowered the binoculars.

“Well, Sergeant,” he said. Then he turned to Lily and nodded. “Ma’am, if you’ll excuse us.” He looked back to the balloon. “I’m not going to take the chance that he somehow gets that snag free and takes off again. There’s no way we’d be able to keep up with him across this sodden mess. We’re going to have to take him, or the balloon, or both, down. Sergeant?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what to do. The war had proceeded so slowly for Gurley and me. It was partly a function of our quarry: whatever the balloons were, they weren’t speedy. Elsewhere, rockets flew, airplanes dove, bullets raced. But the balloons: you could watch them move. You never saw a bullet in flight, just the aftereffects of its stopping. A balloon let you see the whole progress of death, from anticipation to impact.

And though I didn’t have the words to say it then, I knew Gurley was tampering with this measured, preordained pace. It was as though he’d placed the alderwood there, he’d arranged the snagged line, he’d frozen the balloon like we’d reached some crucial point in the training film that he had wanted me to study carefully. But I’d frozen along with the film.

Gurley was about to smack me back into motion when the film lurched forward of its own accord. A quick shout from Lily drew our eyes back to the balloon, where we saw the figure crane out of the basket and work at the snagged rope. Gurley shouted, too, and now the man looked up at us. I’m not sure what he saw, but it obviously frightened him enough to work at the cord more frantically.

Gurley fired a shot. The man looked up again.

Lily stood, and moved toward Gurley. As he took his second shot, she grabbed his arm. The shot went high. I saw something tug at the top of the balloon, but didn’t take time to figure out if he’d actually hit it. Instead I scrambled to get myself between Gurley and Lily. But I was too late; he’d backhanded her with the gun. She fell, hands to her face, the too-red blood of a new wound leaking through her fingers.

I could have avenged Lily then; I could have finally struck Gurley myself, or better yet, found my own gun and shot him. But I did not. I suppose cowardice was part of the reason, but it wasn’t the only reason. Because before I could do anything, before Gurley could even spit out an apology or added insult, another sharp report cracked across the tundra. Gurley and I dropped. Gurley cursed and muttered something about how we’d given the balloonist all the time in the world to fire upon us. But when I looked, I didn’t see a gun, but rather, a tiny figure of a man dangling from the balloon by his right arm, which was caught up in the rigging. A tiny puff of smoke was already dissipating. His legs were limp and his feet dragged along the ground as the balloon continued its feeble struggle against the alderwood. I thought he was dead, but then saw his head move. I grabbed up the binoculars for myself this time and focused while Gurley continued his sputtering.

“Enough of this,” Gurley said, just as I brought the glasses into focus. That’s when I saw the man lift his head, that’s when I saw the tears stream down his face, and that’s when, finally, I saw who he was. Not Saburo. Not some other Japanese spy who’d flown here from Japan.

He was, more incredibly, a boy. A Japanese boy.

I saw his mouth open before I heard his screams, but then we all heard them, high and jagged, and then we all knew what we’d found.

“Don’t shoot,” cried Lily.

“Sir,” I said. “It’s a-it’s a boy.”

“Good Christ,” Gurley said. “I don’t care if it’s an octopus. Now duck. I’m bringing this tragicomic chapter of the war to a close.”

I was still staring through the binoculars, so what happened next really did have the feeling of a film, the actions before my eyes operating at some mediated remove from actual experience. And none of it made sense: a boy, dangling from a balloon, a woman, her hands bloody, running toward him, and then, lurching after them both, a U.S. Army Air Corps captain. The woman stumbled into a puddle that turned out to be as deep as a pond, and the captain tumbled in after her. They struggled for a moment until he finally heaved both of them out of the hole and into the grass. She pulled free of him, but he caught her legs. She kicked at him and then he had blood around his face. He caught her again, higher, and this time simply held her until she stopped twisting and turning, until it was finally the two of them lying beside each other like lovers, which they once were. Or always were. I lowered the glasses, and that was better, the details were gone: from a distance, there was no blood on the two lovers, no tears on the boy.

I walked toward them, picking my steps carefully at first, and then, through no decision of my own, began moving more rapidly, tripping, falling, running.

WHEN I REACHED Gurley and Lily, she was crying and he was whispering to her, brushing her hair from her face. Without taking his eyes off her, Gurley told me to go check on the boy, and secure the balloon so that it would be safe to investigate. I tried to catch Lily’s gaze before moving off, but she’d shut her eyes in a grimace. Gurley told me to get moving.

I crept toward the balloon. Either one of Gurley’s shots had punctured the envelope or it had torn previously, because the shroud was wheezing to the earth. The basket had dropped further, and now rested on the ground, occasionally hopping up a few inches whenever the breeze was strong enough. The boy, his arm still caught in the rigging, lay along the side of the balloon like he had leaked out of it. I could see that parts of the usual balloon payload were not present. The antipersonnel and incendiary bombs that usually dangled beneath the basket weren’t there, at least not that I could see. Two cylinders that looked like incendiary devices still clung to the sides of the basket, however, and there were all the tiny charges ringing around the control frame. That last shot I thought I’d heard: it must have been one of those charges popping.

Once I got within thirty feet, I couldn’t move any closer. It couldn’t have been fear: I’d been faced with much more dangerous explosives than the ones before me then. There was no sign of the porcelain germ weapon containers. All in all, it looked as though it would be simple enough to render harmless.

But that wasn’t it, of course. It was the boy. In fact, it took me a long minute or two to realize that I’d paused because some part of my brain was processing the boy as a new kind of bomb, one that lay far beyond the reach of my training. Perhaps he was his own bioweapon container.

He looked up, saw me, and gave a tiny groan. Then he screwed his face tight and, biting his lip, began to struggle to stand. I shouted for him to stop, and his eyes snapped open. I started speaking rapidly, explaining how he had to be careful how he moved, or else he might set off some of the charges. He frowned and replied in Japanese, and the two of us went on conversing like that for another minute, each of us oblivious to our inability to communicate.

Finally, I pantomimed an explosion, and told him, as best I could, to sit tight. He did. I studied things, walked around the balloon, decided on the best route to disarm the balloon and safely free the boy. I told the boy I would be right back, and then returned to Gurley

He and Lily were sitting now. She was staring after the balloon, tears in her eyes, but no longer crying. Gurley was still whispering into her ear, her hands in his. I stood at a distance waiting for them to turn to me. I tried to blot Gurley out of the picture and just take in her eyes, imagine that she was looking only at me, had only ever looked at me, but I couldn’t. Gurley was there, and Saburo before him, and now, somehow, this boy, too. They were all there, all claiming a piece of her.

“Too complicated?” said Gurley, looking up. He began to disentangle himself from Lily while still holding her hands.

“No, sir, I—”

“Because I thought it might be,” Gurley said quickly. He gave Lily a squeeze and stood. He made a sour face and looked at the balloon. “Bastards. Can you believe—” he said, facing me, but really speaking to Lily. “Can you believe people would do this? Send children into war? Tie them to a balloon? And for what ungodly purpose? The cruelty-unspeakable. Cruel to him, but also to saps like us, called upon to witness the slaughter of a child.”

“I think we can—”

“I assume it’s booby-trapped, Sergeant,” Gurley said, fixing his attention on me more sturdily now.

“Well, sir, it looks a bit like—”

“I mean-my word,” Gurley said, more confident with the direction his performance had taken. “Is it more humane to shoot him and then detonate the balloon, or-?”

Lily gave a half-cry and rose. “There has to be a way,” she said, looking at Gurley and then me. I looked at Gurley, too, unable to decode the strange signals he was sending. He wanted to do the bomb disposal job himself, for once? He wanted to impress Lily.

“Well, I think-sir, I think there is a way,” I said. “Some of the worst stuff you find on these balloons-well, on this one, it looks like that’s all gone already, never put on or maybe dropped in the ocean.” I stopped. “As you know,” I quickly added. “All that’s left are a couple of firebombs, the little charges, maybe the flash bomb on the balloon, but—”

“You trust there’s no booby trap, Sergeant?” Gurley said, looking at me very carefully now.

If Sergeant Redes had been quizzing me, I would have said hell no, never trust a bomb about anything, especially a Japanese one, but instead I said, “This looks as safe as safe gets.” Then I looked at Lily, eager to win her favor. “And, well-the boy. Sir. It’s worth a try.” But Lily was staring at Gurley waiting to hear what he would say.

“The boy,” Gurley said. “Well.” He looked around the tundra, as though searching for other balloons, other boys. Then he looked at me. “I wonder if you’d be so quick to dismiss a booby trap if it were you who were doing the disarming.” He gave a tight smile, and when I started to protest that I would be happy to help-I wanted to impress Lily, too, and moreover, I didn’t want Gurley to kill us all-he waved me away. “Officers’ work, Sergeant,” he said. “You know that,” he added, pinning me with a look that I’m sure he hoped would keep me from mumbling something about all the previous times I’d done the work of an officer. He stood, hands on hips, and surveyed the balloon. “Get the kit,” he said, “prepare the site.” Lily looked at him with such renewed fascination I almost felt ill; in the next moment, I almost grabbed for his damn gun.

PREPPING THE SITE consisted of checking it once more for any obvious booby traps-which, Sergeant Redes forgive me, I now dearly hoped to find and keep secret. I dug a small pit not far from the balloon to place the bombs in for safe detonation. It quickly filled with water, but there seemed to be no other option, so I let it be. I said what I could to calm the boy, tried to explain that Gurley would soon come to free him, and then laid out some of the tools from the kit. I made sure not to unpack the explosives, blasting wire, or hell box, afraid of what Gurley might do with them.

I then returned to Gurley and Lily and explained what I had seen. He nodded with a practiced weariness: yes, yes, Sergeant, you have told me all you know, which is, of course, so very little. Then he nodded to Lily, told me to take her back a safe distance, and proceeded toward the balloon.

I don’t think Lily could tell how nervous he was. She didn’t know his walk the way I did; she’d probably never seen him scared like I had. But I could see, in the hunch of his shoulders, his broken gait, that he’d wished he’d dispensed with the bravado and let me do the work. Replaying the conversations from earlier, I realized now that he’d simply wanted to fire at the balloon, its bombs, and the boy from a distance and be done with it. We’d lose a tremendously valuable prize, but, so what, his thinking must have run, we have other balloons.

We saw him speak to the boy and the boy speak back.

“Gurley knows Japanese,” I told Lily, as though she didn’t know this and needed to. “He’s a Princeton man,” I added, as a kind of dig, but I had little idea what I was saying and neither did Lily. We looked back toward the two of them.

We were too far away to tell, of course, but I was sure he’d frightened the boy, and I hoped Lily could see or sense this. But she just watched in rapt silence. I found the binoculars and handed them to her, hoping that her seeing Gurley close up would expose a bit of his ersatz heroism.

It didn’t. Gurley went for the boy first, taking the wire clippers to the cord that held his arm fast to the balloon. The boy shrieked as the arm fell free, all wrong, as loose and slack as a piece of rope. Even without the glasses, I could see it bend in too many places. Lily lowered the binoculars and looked at me in pain. The gun had left a jagged cut that climbed her cheek, a crease of dirt and blood.

Gurley pulled the boy free of the balloon and laid him down. He seemed to be examining the boy, then working on the arm. The boy writhed, Gurley calmed him, the boy writhed again, and finally Gurley stopped what he was doing. He scooped the boy up in his arms, an act which made the boy shrink in size even more. It was hard to believe we’d ever taken him for a man. As Gurley walked toward us, we could see him try to take on a face he felt appropriate to the act-a sympathetic warrior, the soldier with a heart. But Gurley was so consumed with perfecting his walk that he wasn’t paying enough attention to how he carried the boy, who was screaming in pain, shattering whatever pacific image Gurley was trying to project. By the time they reached us, Gurley’s lips were drawn tight and he was sweating. I could tell he was angry furious, and I wasn’t sure at whom: me? Lily? Probably the boy for spoiling the show. I was angry because Gurley had managed to leave the defusing task to me.

Gurley set him down gently enough. Lily’s hands flew about the boy, not quite touching him, as if she didn’t know where to start. Finally, she went to his face and ran two fingers along his cheek. The boy interrupted his crying to study her.

Gurley called me aside, and I tried to anticipate what he was going to say. “Shall we detonate the remaining explosives, sir?”

“What?” Gurley said, watching Lily watch the boy.

“The balloon?” I said. “Clear it?” I looked around. “Not that anyone would ever come across those bombs out here, but-still. Should I save the balloon?”

“Yes,” said Gurley, still not looking at me.

“But blow the explosives?”

“Yes,” Gurley said.

“Or disarm them?”

“Yes,” he said again, kneeling now behind Lily, almost as if he were hiding from the boy.

“Sir?” I asked again.

Gurley twisted around. “Goddammit, Belk.”

“But-sir?”

“Leave the balloon be, and get the damn medical kit out of the boat.” He turned back to the boy. “Jesus. The fiends.” He put a hand on Lily’s back. “Lily,” he said. “Fiends.”

We didn’t have much of a medical kit. Some bandages, antiseptic, a syringe, and a precious vial of morphine. When I returned, I saw that Gurley had broken off a thin alder branch to use as a kind of splint for the arm. He was standing now, hands on hips, surveying the scene.

“Lily,” he said. “Dearest.”

Gurley looked at me briefly, and then back to Lily.

“Lily,” he repeated, but she wouldn’t turn around, so he turned to me. Nodding to the boy, he drew a finger across his throat, trying- unsuccessfully-to appear remorseful as he did. Then he spoke up again. “I think-I think we’re too late, Lily. I’d like to help, but- maybe if we’d caught him… sooner. Maybe if-maybe if they’d never launched him in that damn balloon.” He looked at me, and then off at the crash site.

“Go,” Lily said quietly, so quietly the word didn’t seem to come from her; it was as if it had welled up from the earth or seeped out of the boy. She turned, then stood and stared at Gurley and me. “If you want to leave, leave. Both of you. Leave the kit, and leave us.”

Gurley clapped a hand on my back. “Of course we won’t leave you,” he said. “But Lily, he’s done-I mean, he’s not going to make it.”

Lily looked at me.

“Just a broken arm, Captain?” I said. “We can probably figure out a way to-get him back to-get him somewhere.” I could tell by Lily’s face that I was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out why. “That splint there,” I said, mostly to have something to say.

“You can splint his arm all you like, Sergeant,” Gurley said. “But you can’t splint what’s not there.” He walked over and stood above the boy, who had begun to cry again. Or rather, his face looked like he was screaming, but nothing was coming out, not really. Every now and then, a note or two of his high horrible moan would break through, but otherwise, it was just hiss and breath. I went over to the boy and knelt. Like Lily, I found my hands floating above him, unable to find a place or reason to touch him. I was no judge of kids then-I was a kid-and so I couldn’t tell you his age, only that I knew he was younger than he looked. His face was chapped and creased, burned by the sun and wind. If you studied just the wrinkles around his eyes, you might have taken him for a dwarf grandparent. But if you looked at his eyes, if you looked at what soft, smooth stretches of skin remained, here and there, along his scalp, under his chin-you could tell he was a child. Eight or nine or seven: however old you have to be to find yourself in a balloon floating across the Pacific, or lying on wet ground, hurt, so far from home, and no one like your parents anywhere near.

He was wearing khaki coveralls; they’d been labeled with a number and several Japanese characters on his chest. He had on several pairs of socks, but not shoes. I looked at the arm. It was more than broken. Mangled. Maybe Gurley was right. Splinting wouldn’t help. The boy suddenly broke out of his silent screaming and shouted something at me in a high voice. He lifted his head as best he could and looked down at the arm. I did, too, following the arm and his gaze all the way down to his hand, or where his hand should have been. Instead, there was a giant, bloody ball of bandages-someone’s socks, perhaps a torn piece of a shirt-none of it quite adding up to the tourniquet Gurley must have intended. But even the mound of bandages couldn’t hide the fact that most, or all, of the hand was missing. I turned quickly to Lily and the boy shrieked.

“He-he lost—” Lily said, and knelt beside the boy once more. She laid a hand on his good arm and he quieted.

“Blew off his damn hand when he was trying to get out, must have,” Gurley said. “Probably just one of those little squibs that helps control altitude, but still-big enough. He’s lost a lot of blood. He’s going to lose more.” Gurley broke off, looked back toward the boat. “There are other problems,” he finished.

“Just leave,” Lily said. “And there will be no problems.”

Gurley put on a thin smile. “You make a fine nurse, dear, but no soldier. I don’t want to say it, but it’s true: it would have been better if he’d died when he landed. Now, it would have been even better if he’d never found his way into the balloon, but once he had, it would have been better if everything had proceeded to-the Japs’ admittedly sick- plan. Because-here we are, he’s in pain, he’s dying, and even if he did live long enough for us to get him to-where? The corner hospital?”

“Bethel,” Lily said.

“Bethel,” Gurley repeated. “Okay, we get him to Bethel, and then what, Sergeant?”

“Transport to Anchorage?” I said.

“No, you foolish boy. Think. We bring a child into Bethel, a Japanese one, no less, one who, by all appearances, has flown here in a balloon, and what happens?” Gurley looked at us. Lily turned away. “All hell breaks loose. The entire United States Army descends on the tundra to find all the other Jap miscreants who’ve flown here in balloons.”

“There aren’t others,” Lily said quietly, and looked at me.

“There’s one other,” Gurley said, “out here somewhere. Remember? Or did you lie about that, too? The rapist?”

“He’s not—” Lily began. “Here. That man is not out here. I know.”

“You know because of your hocus-pocus Eskimo magic, or are you just saying this so I’ll give up?” Gurley said, and looked around. “Or do you want me to believe that this little boy is your Saburo? Because the lad didn’t mention you. All I got was some claptrap about his parents. Apologies, regrets, sorry, sorry, and so on.” He studied the boy like he was something he’d found washed up on the beach. “He’s some sort of weird experiment, I figure. Who knows? In any case, he’s not the point end of an invasion force. But—”

“So, bring him to Bethel,” Lily said.

“I think I just explained,” Gurley said to Lily, and turned to me. “Did I explain?”

“Well, sir, I’m not sure the entire army—”

“Jesus Christ, Belk.”

Lily looked at the boy for a long moment and then turned to us. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll camp here for the evening.” She looked at Gurley. “How’s that?”

“That’s lovely,” Gurley said, waving an arm in front of his face. “It’s just lovely here.”

“We have light left,” I said, looking at my watch. “We could probably make it a good distance of the way back—”

“He’s not ready to go, Louis,” Lily said quietly.

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve got that splint on him and—”

Gurley had begun to growl after Lily spoke, and now reached a roar. “She means me, you idiot!” He and Lily exchanged a long, silent look. Lily finally broke away and knelt down before the boy.

“Fuck!” Gurley shrieked, and I really mean shrieked-a high, piercing, birdlike noise. He tottered over to the boy and stood over him. “You don’t know how lucky you are, young man,” he said, in English. “You’ve found yourself in the clutches of two-no, three-fools.” Gurley struggled into a crouch. “So here is our deal: if you survive till morning, off we all go to Bethel to face God knows what repercussions.” Gurley then turned to us; the boy turned his head, too. “And if he does survive, that will be evidence indeed of magic. Pretty damn strong magic.”

Lily looked at me. “Stay with him,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she meant the boy or Gurley. “I’m going to get some things from the boat.”

“That’s cheating,” Gurley called after as she walked. “I want to see magic alone get him through the night.” Lily raised an arm and waved off Gurley’s words. It actually relieved the tension a bit; her weary wave seemed less the act of a mortal enemy than a long-suffering but indulgent spouse.

But Gurley quickly ended the respite. “It’s been nice knowing you, Sergeant,” he said, staring after her.

“Sir,” I said, not meeting his eyes. I was busy looking for his hands, his gun.

“I know you think it heartless. Or I think you do. I know Lily does. But leaving the boy here, yes, killing him, would spare everyone a lot of misery.”

“Sir,” I said, not sure if he still had a mind you could reason with, or if I was better off just leaping on him, and sparing everyone a lot of misery. “Just wait. She’ll surprise you. I bet he’ll surprise you. Kids are—”

“He’s already surprised me,” said Gurley. “He flew across the fucking ocean. And that’s not all. Come.” Gurley went to the boy, knelt, and then roughly tore open his coveralls. The boy fought him weakly. When he started to cry out, Gurley raised a hand as if to hit him, and looked to see if Lily had heard. She hadn’t. The boy went silent with fear and looked to me for help. I screwed up what courage I could and stepped next to Gurley. But before I could lay a hand on him, he spoke: “Surprise,” he said.

I looked down. The boy’s exposed chest and stomach were a mottled purple. The skin just above his collarbone was raw and red. I knew what Gurley was doing; he was diagnosing plague. “I saw it when I was working on the crash site,” Gurley said, and stood. “I didn’t look in the groin area yet, but I don’t have to. You’ve got lymph nodes here, too,” he said, fingering his neck. “You see why we have to get out of here? They sent the best germ weapon container possible: a human. A human rat. Which means he was dying anyway. Hell, he’s lost enough blood he may not even survive long enough to die of plague. But we’ve got to get back. Get away from him. So we got a vaccine: like the major said, What if this is a new strain?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know enough about plague or enough about how much Gurley knew about medicine to know if he was lying The boy looked ill, but he’d just come across the Pacific in an open balloon. The rash on his neck could have been from the coveralls. Where were the blown lymph nodes, the buboes? I saw Gurley glance back toward the boat. Lily was walking back toward us.

“You’ve got to tell her, Belk,” he said. “She’s not listening to me right now.”

“Sir, I don’t think—”

“Redo the math, son,” Gurley said. “You thought you were just risking the boy’s life when you sided with her before. Now you’re risking yours. And mine. And hers.” I didn’t answer. I just stared at the boy then at Lily. When she finally reached us, she gave Gurley a look that caused him to rethink whatever he was about to say and stalk off instead. He looked back just once, and then loped away, hands flying about, swatting mosquitoes.

Lily turned to me. I hadn’t had enough time to decide what to say or how. But Lily didn’t wait for me to speak. “Louis,” she said, and we both looked down at our very ill charge. “Can you pick him up?”