The Cloud Atlas

CHAPTER 7

FORT RICHARDSON HID ITS BIGGEST SECRET FROM VIEW in a flimsy, leaking, large Quonset hut, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with rusting razor wire. A single MP was stationed at the gate to the mini-compound, right next to a little wooden placard that read “ 520” and nothing else.

I didn’t have time to take in much more the first morning I reported for duty. Before I could finish studying the outside, the MP on duty told me to move along. I almost did, but instead, gave my name, told him my purpose, and waited while he gave me a long, exaggerated, head-to-toe inspection. Clearly, Gurley had handpicked him. He asked me to repeat my name. I did; he unlocked the gate, nodded me in, and then locked it behind me.

I had to admit: Gurley was doing a good job of intimidating me, and, I assumed, the rest of the base. Sure, everyone said they had top secret jobs, but how many worked in an outsized Quonset hut protected by fencing, razor wire, and a twenty-four-hour sentry?

A yellow bulb above a doorway directly before me seemed to indicate the building’s entrance; the door itself had a small window that was blacked out. Inside, the darkness was almost total. I moved slowly; after our initial meeting in the bar, I was sure of an ambush. The door swung shut. I put up my hands to fend off the attack, but instead it came from below-a steel pipe of sorts to my shins. I staggered, cursed, and fell into a crouch, hands futilely-pathetically-around my head. “Stop!” I shouted, although that is probably me revising: I wailed.

No response. No second blow. At the far end of the Quonset hut, a door opened and light spilled out. I could now sense a vast open space. At the end of it, where the light was, an office had been carved out. The rest of the floor was devoted to all manner of war matériel, much of it unrecognizable. Giant tarps hung in odd profusion from the ceiling. Looking down, I could see that it had been some sort of a metal fitting, protruding from a cage the size of four or five milk crates, that had attacked me.

“Belk!” Gurley shouted from the office doorway. I lifted a cautious hand. “Always doing things the hard way, aren’t you? That’s the back door. The front door is over here.” As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see a door near the office at the far end of the building. But it was still too dark to see how I was supposed to get from where I was to where he was, so I started back toward the entrance I’d just come through, thinking that I’d walk around the outside. But before I’d made the door, Gurley threw some switch that illuminated the entire building. “It’s an easier walk with the lights on,” he called, and then stepped back into his office.

I could see, but I couldn’t move.

Gurley’s Quonset hut looked like the official Army Air Corps circus tent. Ropes and tackle were everywhere. Strange metal-crates, for lack of a better word-lined the walls. Piles of sandbags appeared at regular intervals. And those tarps I’d seen-with the light, I could tell they were much more than that: great fabric teardrops, upended (or balloons, once I’d thought about it), all of them limply hung from on high.

GURLEY’S OFFICE WAS an even stranger sight. Tyrannically neat, of course. Everything was gunmetal gray-the desk, the lamps, the filing cabinet, and a locker against the wall. Even the walls themselves were covered in gray metal paneling. My first impression was that the army had stuffed Gurley into a giant footlocker. I later decided that the metal fixtures and smooth walls resembled something else: I had picked my way into a bomb.

Along the back wall, a series of clocks, each labeled with a Roman numeral-up to VII, I believe. But much more interesting was the map below the clocks. It stretched across the entire rear of the office. It was a map, mostly of the North Pacific-except that it extended all the way south to Hawaii, and as far east as Michigan -and it was the only untidy thing in the room. Bright pushpins spread across the map’s rinsed-out blue, brown, and green like a virulent disease, appearing singly and in clumps.

“Fifty,” Gurley said.

“Looks like more than that, sir,” I said, still staring at the map. The truth was, it would have been impossible to count the pins. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. At first I took them to be army bases, but dismissed that idea. Then I decided that Gurley had marked the map wherever he’d struck a man. White for where he’d wounded them, red for where he had killed them. There was a cluster of red just outside Anchorage.

“Fifty men,” he said. Maybe I was right.

“What I am about tell you, no more than fifty men in the country now know.” I started to believe him, but wondered, as he took a deep, melodramatic breath, if Gurley had not delivered this line dozens of times before. I could see him savoring the moment; he had that slight suggestion of a smile I now know steals across some actors’ faces before a favorite speech. If I were mapping my own path in the war, I would stick a pin right there to mark that moment, in that office, in the light of that smile, because that’s when I should have seen how helpless Gurley really was. It was as though he thought of the theaters of war as theaters, and that his role in the war was exactly that, a role.

He had paused after his “Fifty men” preamble, and now leaned forward to deliver the coveted secret. “The Japs,” he intoned, “have reached North America.”

I sat back: I think I was supposed to be frightened, but instead, I was confused. “The Aleutians, you mean?” A lot more than fifty people knew about that debacle.

Kiska and Attu, two brutally wet and cold islands at the end of the Aleutian chain, had been occupied by Japanese troops in 1943. The islands were of little strategic value, except in the sense that Roosevelt was enraged that the Japanese were occupying American soil. The U.S. had stumbled in its initial response; America ’s Army, Navy, and Air Corps all fought each other for a while before turning their attention to the Japanese. Then the weather set in. Then the Japanese dug in. Three thousand Japanese on Attu held off an American force triple their size for days. The Japanese eventually lost, but they fought to the last man, or just about. Just twenty-eight of the three thousand Japanese soldiers on Attu survived to be taken prisoner. Most of the patients in their field hospital committed suicide. Those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, were killed by their doctor before he killed himself.

After the bitter slog on Attu, the U.S. brought in even more forces for the assault on Kiska, where the main Japanese garrison was located. Tens of thousands of Americans stormed ashore, guns blazing, only to discover that the Japanese had abandoned Kiska two weeks before. More than one hundred U.S. soldiers still died, all from friendly fire.

So, if the Japanese had returned-well, I couldn’t speak. This is why the colonel back in California had laughed when he heard I was being taken to Alaska. The Aleutians! It was where the world ended, careers ended, lives ended. Suicides were rampant. So were courts-martial. GIs sent there weren’t even told of the destination until they were safely aboard ship and through the Golden Gate, a practice Gurley himself surely approved of.

“The Aleutians?” he said. “Good God, Belk. This means you’re literate-you do read, and read the papers, to boot—” He feigned awe, and then resumed. “But no. Hell no. I’m not talking about the Aleutians -the islands or the swarthy Lilliputians who populate them. I’m talking about the fucking homefront, my brother-in-arms. The watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.” He started tapping the map. “ Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana.” His eyes grew wider, his voice deeper. He was a prophet. A leader. The Wizard of Oz.

I should clarify: recognizing his theatricality wouldn’t have immunized me against it. I think I’d have to be as unconscious as Ronnie here to have resisted Gurley’s performance. But I wasn’t unconscious, I was alive, and I shivered- the enemy is here! Japs all around!-and you know what? It was wonderful. It was wonderful the same way it’s wonderful to flinch at some frightening point in a book or a movie; there’s a certain dizzy pleasure that comes with knowing you’ve succumbed, you’ve been duped.

And, back then, it was a lot more than that: it was wonderful to know the war was real. You had to be young to think this; the country had to be younger, too. But that’s the way it was with kids like me: it was wonderful to know that this enemy we’d read so much about was really out there, that I would finally get to fight, and that Gurley would somehow wave a magic wand, take me through a back door, and usher me right into the middle of all of it.

All of it: Japanese soldiers, hiding in trees, leaping out of mailboxes late at night. Bombs in the sky. Balloons in the clouds. A giant red rising sun on a white field, strung between the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. But gradually, as Gurley rambled on, talking more to himself now than to me, my excitement began to give way to a kind of panic.

What he was talking about was preposterous. Evidence of Japanese activity in a dozen states or more? And nobody other than fifty men (fifty-one now?) knew about it? I looked around the office; I looked at Gurley as he stared at the map with red-rimmed eyes. I wondered if fifty men now knew what I thought I knew: here, in this lonely Alaskan outpost, Captain Thomas Gurley U.S. Army Air Corps, had gone mad.

And he’d dreamed himself up a new front line in the process. Even as a work of insanity, it was impressive: his line stretched clear across North America-through Canada and into Michigan. He rattled on, and I marveled at the performance, and at the magnitude of the fiction. I began to wonder which would come first: my transfer away from Anchorage, or Gurley’s? Who would assume his post, and its attendant, if imaginary, duties?

What a world this was, wartime Alaska. Half-naked palm readers, rampaging drunken sailors, lunatic captains raving in darkened Quonset huts, and me. If I had been older, I would have been too scared to speak.

But I was young, stupid, and, once the panic subsided, bemused, so what I finally said was “Incredible.”

Gurley frowned, furious. I was not as good an actor as he. “Not enough for you,” he said.

“No, no, it’s-incredible. You’ve-you’ve come up with quite a, a map.” I tried furrowing my brow, but it was no use-I don’t even think I knew what the word furrowing meant back then.

Gurley would have known, though, and he knew I was mocking him. He scrambled across the desk, right over the top, growling and sputtering.

For a minute, I feared (even hoped) that I had provoked the inevitable and total breakdown. I calculated whether I could get to the door before him and raise the alarm with the MPs. I decided to jump clear. He jumped after me and then fell horribly short. I took a moment to take in the scene: he was sprawled at my feet, while the better part of his left leg was separated from him, dangling off the desk.

He extended a hand, and I hesitated, unsure what horror had just happened and what horror would now follow.

“You didn’t hear a word I said, did you, you sanctimonious shit?” he hissed. He closed his eyes for a second; I could see the mask fall, instantly. But then his eyes opened, the mask was back, and it had all happened too quickly for me to see what had been revealed. He extended a hand to me, and I automatically hauled him up. He teetered back to the desk and leaned on it. On the floor behind him lay two red pins that had fallen from the map.

Gurley recovered his artificial leg and regarded it for a second. “Maybe I should just beat you with this instead of going through it all again.” I stared at the leg, then at Gurley. What part of him would fly apart next? “Here’s the short version: the Japs are bombing North America. Believe the map, or believe this, you insolent fuck.” He hiked up the pant leg that was missing a leg below the knee and revealed a stump that looked more rock than human-angry purple and brown, mottled with scabs. He spent a moment trying to get the leg back on, and then gave up, letting it clatter to the floor. He hobbled around to the back of the desk and fell into his chair.

I slowly bent down and picked up the leg. It was heavier than I imagined, and it took two hands to place it on the desk with any care.

“Exhibit A,” he said, nodding to the map. “The past.” He dragged his leg back across the desk. “Exhibit B, the interminable present.” Then he took out a small key, unlocked a desk drawer, and drew out a small, leather-bound book, about the size of a priest’s breviary. “Exhibit C,” he said, brightening again. “The future.” He looked at the book for a full minute. He didn’t open it. Then he looked at me.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” he said, and with that, began to recount the history-his history-of the balloon program to date. The first, mysterious explosions and fires. The eventual discovery of an intact balloon. The determination of the balloon’s origin. The recovery of ever-growing numbers of balloon shrouds and payloads, evidence of which sat just outside the office.

“And the most recent chapter, August 1944, wherein a certain bomb disposal sergeant looks on, dumbstruck, while a balloon sets fire to a golden hillside. Said fire roasts alive several men.” He sat back. “Sergeant? Am I missing anything?”

“Sir?” I asked, but even as the word was coming out of my mouth, my mind was finally making the connection. It seems odd to me now that it took that long, but of course, the balloons-as patent an impossibility as there ever was-were still new to me then.

I almost leapt from my chair: “The weather balloon! Fort Cronkhite! Sir, I—”

“Failed in your first encounter?” Gurley suggested, somehow managing a face that was half sneer, half sympathy. That wasn’t what I was going to say-I had no idea what I was going to say-but his words had all the effect of his having reached over and pulled the pin from a grenade I hadn’t known I was carrying.

What a cruel thing to put on a child-sure, I was a young man, a soldier in uniform, but I had the wild conscience and boundless shame of a Catholic kid, one raised by nuns, no less-and how sinister of Gurley to attempt to make the death of those soldiers on the hill my legacy, my burden.

Hours, days later, when I thought about it, I realized his gambit was only that; I knew nothing about the balloons that day in California. And if I had? I was too far away to do anything. But it didn’t matter. Gurley knew what he was doing. He’d planted a seed, an irritant, deep inside me that I could smother with excuses but would still know was always there. The fact was, I had known-felt-that something was wrong, that it wasn’t a weather balloon. The fact was, I’d gone running toward it. The fact was, I hadn’t made it there in time.

If Gurley’s aim had been to provoke in me an instant and towering resolve to avenge their deaths (while expiating my own apparent guilt), I suppose the ends would have justified his means: my commitment to the war then was naïve and relatively shallow.

But his next words made me think he had another aim altogether. He wasn’t looking to stir up some fight in me; he simply wanted to commiserate.

“That’s okay, Sergeant,” he said. “My first time out, I failed, too.”

GURLEY EXPLAINED that he’d begun his wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The OSS was the war’s headquarters for Ivy Leaguers, spies, scientists, and anyone with an unusual idea for waging war. Poison cigars, exploding pens, buttonhole cameras, and worse. At the bidding of a favorite professor, Gurley had left Princeton a semester early to work in OSS research and development. He should have been a natural. Articulate, cosmopolitan, heir to a fortune (from fountain pens, of all things), he’d also spent his Princeton years studying “the men and minds of the Orient”-in particular, all things Japanese. He was even somewhat fluent. He pointed to an impressively worn Japanese-English dictionary on a shelf behind him.

Yet he’d foundered after enlisting. His ideas-fueled by “ educated insight”-were dismissed. He watched as colleagues championed ridiculous ideas that later turned out to be quite effective, and he watched those colleagues go on to greater rank and glory As the months wore on, Gurley was desperate to find the idea that would make him a star. A huge star: not for him invisible ink or a corncob pipe revolver.

He wanted something spectacular.

He brainstormed and came up blank, and then brainstormed with friends. Blank again. Then he found a memo in a stack of papers that had been left on his desk. A scrap of a confidential memo, actually stamped with a security classification beyond the level Gurley possessed. He should have stopped reading immediately and reported the security breach, but (he admitted) he did not. How could he? The memo referred to a piece of intriguing, if bizarre, research: the enemy- the Japanese-considered blue foxes a bad omen. (I thought, but didn’t ask: Who wouldn’t?)

Gurley took up the case. His first discovery was the existence of an actual animal- “Alopex lagopus” he took pleasure in informing me-a type of arctic fox whose coat turned bluish-gray in winter. “But it didn’t look the least bit frightening-or blue,” Gurley said. Rather, he decided to press ahead in secret with elaborate plans for a truly blue, truly scary fox of his own design, Vulpes livida.

He tested and discarded the idea of air-dropping blue fox leaflets or releasing live, paint-dipped foxes (via parachute? I wondered. Torpedo tubes? Rubber rafts?), and decided on something far more spectacular: projecting a blue fox in the sky above enemy troops. It was bold, theatrical-terrifying. The enemy would panic and throw down their weapons in fear.

It was also impractical, silly, and foolish-but so were dozens of other ideas that the OSS researched, and many of those (including a rotating gun that attached to a railroad car’s wheel) had gone forward.

“The fated day came,” Gurley said. “I was to present to the full committee. Now, word had spread of all the hours I had put in. And while most didn’t know the details, everyone knew that I was hoping to make my reputation. Some might have uncharitably said, repair my reputation.” Gurley looked at the ceiling a moment, as though he were being fed lines from above. I had a slight urge to look up myself.

“Project Hannibal,” he continued. “Foxtrot-the obvious, and therefore fatuous, choice. Hannibal: Sergeant?”

“Sir?”

“Why ‘ Hannibal ’?”

I had no idea. It rhymed with cannibal, which seemed a bit gruesome, even for Gurley. Then I remembered that Mark Twain had grown up in Hannibal, Missouri. I mentioned this.

“Who?” Gurley said. “No, Sergeant. This is a war. Not bedtime stories. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general. Takes his elephants over the Alps. Hannibal: the perfect code name for the deployment of an unusual animal to seek a military victory.” He studied my reaction. “No, no one got it. But I pressed on.”

He took his audience through the background first: why this would frighten the soldiers, why it would, in fact, be more deadly than any conventional weapons. American bombs were certainly decimating Japanese ranks-but it was hard to claim that they had caused fear. Indeed, the Japanese fought more tenaciously the more casualties they suffered.

“And I was winning, Belk. I guarantee you. One man at a time. I could see, I could look around the room and watch as their smiles faded into a kind of-not awe, no, not that, but a kind of respect. Maybe that’s even too strong a word. Interest, then. I saw them grow curious, despite themselves, one face at a time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything lovelier.”

Gurley said that he finished his presentation and sat. He wanted to look around the room-he could hear the murmurs of interest and appreciation on all sides-but kept his eyes on the colonel who had been chairing the meeting. The colonel should have been his staunch ally Gurley said: they were both Princeton men; the colonel had graduated some ten years before. But the colonel had rarely deigned to speak with him, nor even meet his eyes, and he did neither now.

Instead, the colonel looked around the room and smiled. “What’s Bob Hope say?” he asked. Gurley’s stomach began to turn, slowly. Everyone’s faces began to warm into smiles-not, Gurley was sure, in anticipation of the joke, but of his demise. Gurley held his breath. The colonel waited before going on. He was enjoying himself. Worse: he was playing to the crowd.

Quoting Bob Hope? What Gurley needed was a minute or two alone with the colonel. Man to man. One Princetonian to another. Some setting where the colonel wouldn’t feel a need to appeal to the base instincts of a base crowd.

Gurley paused his recounting now, as well. At first I thought it was for theatrical effect, an attempt to wring whatever more suspense he could out of his story, but he looked down at his hands for a moment-only for a moment-and I saw something else. He’d left his little stage. He’d been kicked off the stage, in fact, at that meeting, and try as he might, had never quite found his way back on, at least not before audiences larger than, say, a solitary, teenaged sergeant. When he started speaking again, his volume had dropped by half or more, and I would have sworn he was crying. But he wasn’t; I checked, his face was clear.

The colonel continued, Gurley said.

“What’s the most dangerous thing in war?” the colonel asked. The room was already laughing. Gurley wasn’t breathing. “A second lieutenant,” the colonel answered, “with a plan.”

With a map, Gurley told me now, seething. The colonel even screwed up the punch line, Gurley said. And everyone had to know it. Hope must have trotted that joke out every USO tour he ever made.

But if everyone knew it, they didn’t care. In fact, they acted like the colonel’s version was funnier. And you wouldn’t even have said they were acting, Gurley said. They were enjoying themselves. As much as the colonel, who looked-and Gurley worked at finding the right word-a bit relieved at all the laughter. Relieved that his joke had gone over, and even more relieved that he wasn’t alone in thinking Gurley’s plan was poppycock.

“Dismissed, Lieutenant,” the colonel said. Gurley rose and left the room while the laughter rose and followed him, and then shut the door behind him.

A friend-or someone who wanted to twist the knife a little deeper-told him how the rest of the meeting went. Gurley was almost flattered to learn he remained the subject of the meeting for several more minutes. The colonel said that Gurley had fallen into a clever trap, set by OSS internal security to catch people who had taken to reading materials that they didn’t have the proper classification for. A fictionalized, highly classified memo, designed to be outlandish enough to catch a wayward eye’s interest, had been introduced into the office’s paper stream. It was only a matter of time before the blue fox nabbed its prey, the colonel said, and he congratulated all those remaining in the room on their now-validated discretion.

“It was a trap?” I asked Gurley.

“A lie,” he said. “To be more precise. An elaborate and admittedly impressive spur-of-the-moment lie by the colonel himself.” The actor was returning. “For this self-proclaimed ‘friend’ of mine could not help but tell me something else. Something he found so funny and cruel, he could hardly bear not to share it. How could I not have known, he asked, that the blue fox was, in fact, quite real?” Gurley paused and looked at me. “My ‘friend’ went on: ‘Blue Fox’ was the nickname of the colonel’s mistress.” Gurley closed his eyes and leaned back.

“Sir,” I said.

“Silence, Belk. Let us both agree that there is absolutely nothing adequate that you could say at this point, other than ‘Captain, shall I fetch you a thermos of coffee?’” He nodded toward the door.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, because I had to. He was pitiful.

“As I said, Belk: absolutely nothing adequate. Now try again: ‘Captain, shall I fetch you…’”

“Sir, it’s just that—”

“Sergeant, ‘it’s just that’… I haven’t even gotten to the sorry part yet. Be gone.”

WHEN I RETURNED with the thermos, Gurley smiled and brought out a bottle. The label, faded, said “vodka,” but the liquid inside was brown. He asked with raised eyebrows if I wanted any, and when I declined, poured himself some in a chipped mug. He topped off the mug with coffee, and then raised it.

“A toast, then, to the Blue Fox. For it was due to her that I was assigned the crackpot casebook, the file containing letters from every asylum escapee who mails the OSS some deranged idea about how to wage war or defend our homeland.” Gurley rose and studied the map. “Dozens of these letters, Belk. And we read them all. Because buried in every hundredth, every thousandth, letter was something useful. A grandmother in Chicago uncovers a Nazi sympathizer. A lobsterman in Maine hauls up a trap full of codebooks and sabotage plans. And the lone inhabitant of a dot-sized Bering Sea island off the coast of Alaska, an Orthodox hermit with the unspellable name of Father Ioasaph, sends word of Armageddon. After a period of intense fasting and prayer, the good Father-whose isolation has driven him quite mad- witnesses the advance guard of the heavenly host descending in flames to his island. Or so he writes.”

Gurley took a sip from the mug and put it down. Then he walked around the desk and sat on the edge, before me. I think the object was to position his left leg for better viewing. “Some people can lose a limb quickly and efficiently, close by, perhaps in a traffic accident right around the corner,” he said. “I had to travel to the end of the earth.”

Gurley decided to go investigate Father Ioasaph’s letter, for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was that it got him far, far away from the office, where he remained the subject of open ridicule. More important, an odd detail in the island hermit’s account of Armageddon intrigued Gurley and made him wonder if, just maybe, the flaming angel that Father Ioasaph had reported might have brought redemption as well. For Father Ioasaph wrote that there was a particular, and curious, reason he was sharing this glorious news with Gurley’s office: “…it would appear, dear sirs, that God’s angels speak Japanese…”

“I KEPT THE LETTER to myself,” Gurley said, rising from his perch to pace. “I took leave. I didn’t want to be mocked once again for pursuing folly, and, should anything come of the hermit’s claims, I didn’t want anyone barging in to steal credit. It took more than a week to get there. Or, rather, to get close. I found myself in a tiny Native village at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River.” Gurley went to the map to show me. “Look, Father Ioasaph’s island isn’t even on this map.” He studied the spot for a moment. “I don’t think it was on anyone’s map. But Father Ioasaph was well known in the area. The Russians had set up missions throughout this part of Alaska in the days of the Russian American Trading Company. And Father Ioasaph occasionally journeyed to the mainland to say Mass. In return, the villagers supplied his meager needs. It took some doing to find someone who would take me out to him-they were fiercely protective of their local loon-but I finally prevailed. I paid a generous fare, and promised even more should the boatman return promptly the following day to collect me.”

Ioasaph’s island was barren and wet. His hermitage was wedged into the rear of a small ravine and looked as though it had been constructed by an animal. And what with his beard and hair forming a wild corona around his face, he might well have been an animal. He welcomed Gurley gravely, and took him on a five-minute scramble across the island to where God’s messenger had landed.

Even someone not in the throes of religious devotion might have ascribed a divine nature to the scene, Gurley said. The earth was scorched; a circle of blackened grass and trees perhaps twenty feet in diameter marked the spot where the “angel” had alighted.

There was a small chance Father Ioasaph had lit this fire himself in a desperate ploy to attract a visitor, Gurley thought, but that seemed unlikely. The devastation was too complete. Gurley pressed him: What do you mean, “angel”? A man with wings? Really now.

Father Ioasaph sighed as though Gurley were hopelessly simple-minded. “No, sir,” he said. “The ways of God are mysterious to us, and this time, his messenger arrived by balloon.”

“Balloon?” Gurley asked. Father Ioasaph described a giant balloon, as big as his hermitage, dirty white in color, plummeting from the sky.

“And the angel was in the balloon? A man, you saw a man-a soldier-in the balloon?” This was the crucial question, Gurley said, and he watched as Father Ioasaph considered his answer.

“No,” Father Ioasaph said. “Not a man like men we know.” He went on to describe what would soon become a familiar sight to Gurley: the multilayered payload, the rings of cylinders and the tangle of wires. But Gurley had never heard of such a thing then, and thus could offer little to counter Father Ioasaph’s assertion that this was the being’s strange skeleton; whatever corporeal elements might have existed would have been consumed in the fire.

“But you said it spoke Japanese,” Gurley said. Father Ioasaph nodded and led Gurley around a small rise.

Here lay the being’s skeleton, or what remained of it, twisted and charred. For all the damage the payload had done, Gurley said, it was surprisingly intact. Dangerously intact, but he didn’t know that. Father Ioasaph drew him close and pointed to various elements in the wreckage. Indeed, to judge from the markings, the being did “speak” Japanese.

A sense of wonder, and then, an even greater sense of greed, consumed Gurley. He had found his prize, his ticket back into the OSS ’s front ranks. Not even Bob Hope could dismiss this discovery.

Father Ioasaph had a hand at his elbow. “I do not know what this means,” Father Ioasaph said. “Through prayer, I hope to come to know, and I will let you know when I do. But now, we must leave it be.”

“Yes, Father,” Gurley said. “Leave it be. Leave it to me.” Father Ioasaph looked confused.

Gurley said he barked at the man: Leave. And the change in Gurley’s demeanor must have been so sudden, so sharp, that the priest did immediately as he was told. Gurley had frightened him. Still, Father Ioasaph pleaded with him even as he moved away. “Pray with me,” he said. “We must leave to God what is His and His alone…”

But Gurley did not. He turned his back on Father Ioasaph, smiled, and began to lift a piece of the wreckage with his foot. “Speak to me, O Lord,” he muttered.

Whereupon, Gurley said, He did.

The blast was not deafening, not blinding. But it was sudden. One moment his lower left leg and foot were there, the next moment they were not. One moment Gurley was there, on Father Ioasaph’s island, the next moment he was not.

He was, instead, lying down, in a hospital, eyes closed, listening to two men talk about him.

Incredible he survived.

That priest saved his life.

Not his leg.

Nothing to save, I’d imagine. Unless you wanted a souvenir.

How many days did it take to get him here?

Three.

A miracle, indeed. He should thank that priest.

Convert.

Then Gurley felt a surge of pain in his left foot. Pain, and then an equal surge of relief. He hadn’t lost the foot, the leg. They were talking about someone else. He opened his eyes. The two men, doctors, it seemed, were standing beside him.

“He’s awake,” one said.

The other turned to Gurley. “You made it,” he said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.” Gurley said nothing, just looked at him. “How do you feel?”

Gurley told me it took him a moment to decide he was awake and not dreaming. Then he answered the doctor’s question, as truthfully as he could. He told the man he felt okay. Weak, but okay.

Then, without looking anywhere except into the doctor’s eyes, he said, accurately, “My left foot’s a little sore, though. Really sore, kind of a sharp, shooting sore.” The two doctors looked at each other, then they looked at his left foot, or where it should have been. Then Gurley looked as well.

“That’ll happen,” said the doctor who’d first spoken to him. “Usually it’s an itch, and your brain is telling you it’s there. But, in your case, it’s not. Nor much of anything below the knee. Now, your brain’s also going to tell you the other leg hurts, and it’ll be right about that. Kind of unbelievable it’s still there. Or that you’re here. But you are. And you’ll walk, eventually. Couple weeks, they’ll be by to fit a prosthetic. Two, three weeks. They’ve been busy, of course.”

Gurley finished his story, looked at me. “ ‘Busy,’” he repeated. “It took three months.” He looked down at his leg and shook it gently. “Then again, it took more than a quarter century to grow the one I’d had.”

GURLEY RETREATED behind the desk. “Let’s finish.” He dropped into his chair, pulled forward, and then folded his hands over the small book that he’d pulled out when I’d first arrived.

“Exhibit C,” Gurley said. He opened the book, riffled through its pages, closed it, and then slid it across the desk to me with both hands. I didn’t pick it up. He took it back.

The leather cover had been dyed a dark green and was well worn. There were brown smudges in several places.

“Blood,” he said. I just looked at him. “Old blood,” he added, and smiled. He flipped it over. On the back was more blood, and you could almost see, or imagine, where a bloody hand had raked across it. If Gurley hadn’t said anything, though, I would have taken it for mud or grease. But that was one of his talents: to make everything sinister.

“That’s what I’m told, anyway, and I choose to believe it. It makes for more of a fair trade. A bloodied book for a bloodied leg.” He considered this and then continued. “I was convalescing when this book was-acquired, let us say, by my former colleagues. As you’ll see once you open it, it is a kind of atlas. A book of maps and drawings. And like Father Ioasaph’s avenging angel, the book also ‘speaks’ Japanese. Certainly not Chinese, as the imbeciles who first showed it to me insisted.” He opened it, found a page. “Japanese.” Another page. “Japanese.” He looked at me. “Seven semesters of Japanese at Princeton, I know Japanese. I am, as they say, something of an Orientalist.”

He handed it to me, and I took it gingerly, trying not to touch the bloodstains. The pages were beautiful-it wasn’t a book, really, as much as it was some man’s private journal. The Japanese calligraphy was done in a tight, neat hand in the corners or margins of each page; in the center was usually a map or illustration, done with black ink and colored with watercolor paints or a light gray wash. The fire balloons appeared on a number of pages; sometimes in flight, sometimes lying in a wreck on the ground. The pages themselves were unusual; the paper felt brittle and had a slight sheen.

Gurley thought the book’s final pages were its most curious. First, several seemed to be missing, which he found troubling. And the pages that remained-well, they looked blank. But when you looked closer you could see evidence of some color-a faint gray wash, nothing more. After a minute or two, I decided that summed up the book: pretty, but useless. I made the mistake of saying so.

“On the contrary, Belk,” Gurley said. “It is extremely useful, in fact, albeit to a small number of people.” He counted them off with his hand, starting with his thumb. “First it is useful to the spy, or spies, who created it. Should we find them and-secure-their assistance, then the book becomes useful indeed. Second, it is, and has been, useful to me. I was able to convince my former colleagues that the book, and by extension, the balloon campaign, was worthy of my personal and total focus. I admit the colonel was uncertain, initially, but I explained that I would be happy to brief his wife on all that I had discovered about the Blue Fox. He turned a shade of red that was indeed close to blue.” Gurley smiled. “He was only too happy to send me back to Alaska.”

Gurley looked at his row of clocks and stood. “It’s time to go.” I started to stand as well, and Gurley pointed me back down. “This book, lastly, will prove useful, I hope, to you. I have read it, studied it, translated it, but have yet to find a balloon with it, or predict, precisely, where one will land.” I looked up. “Yes, we’re quite good at finding them after they’ve landed. But by then it’s too late: a fire has started, or worse, rumors have started among the local populace.” Gurley paused until I looked at him. “So please, Sergeant, find us our next balloon, before some lumberjack does. Find me my spy. Find the next bomb in that book, on paper, before I find it in the field, with my one remaining foot.”

He limped quite slowly around the desk to the door. I twisted around to see him go. “I’ll not be back today, Sergeant. Business in town.” He smiled, broadly. “But I look forward to hearing the fruits of your labors. Tomorrow, 0700, at the airfield. Do not be late. Nor empty-handed.”

“I don’t know what I can do by then, sir. That’s not nearly enough time to—”

Gurley cut me off. “Sergeant,” he said, teeth bared in his favorite apparent smile. “You’ve seen this weapon in flight. You’ve seen it land. You’ve seen what happens when you don’t move fast enough.” He spun and kicked the door with a violence that no other man who wanted to spare his foot injury could have matched. Which, when I saw his face, I realized was precisely his point.

“Boom,” he said, just the one word, quiet and slow, and then he left.