The Cloud Atlas (14 page)

By the time we reached Shuyak, it was just before six. During the last forty-five minutes of the flight, I had come to my senses; that is to say, I had realized that I had endangered my life and the lives of a brave, if surly, crew because I had a-what? A hunch? Based on a woman's whisper? Or a hand's promise?

From Anchorage, we'd flown southwest over the waters of Cook Inlet, skirting the coast of the Kenai Peninsula. Looking out the right side of the aircraft, I watched a series of volcanic peaks stretch along the coast. Snowy and distant, they looked like mountains you might visit in a dream. I wondered if Lily's island lay beneath them.

A crew member elbowed me and then handed over his headset. As I fumbled to put it on, he shouted something above the plane's roar that I did not understand.

The sudden arrival of voices via the headset brought on a flash of recognition. Voices in my head: now,
this
was madness. “We're here, Sergeant,” the pilot said. “Now, just where on Shuyak is this balloon going to land?” I had, of course, assumed that Shuyak was an island as big, and featureless, as a soccer field, and that it would reveal its secrets to us in a single flyby

It did not. Shuyak was not an island but a wild, tiny continent. It was, in fact, flat as a soccer field-flatter than any other scrap of land in sight-but its surface was a dense paisley of Sitka spruce and pothole lakes. A half dozen balloons could land here and never be found.

Suddenly short of breath, I pulled my head out of the blister, only to see the entire crew staring at me, expectant. I crouched in the narrow space and, so I wouldn't have to look at them, pretended to be studying some emergency ditching instructions printed on the cabin wall.

Before I could respond to the pilot, I heard another voice on the radio: “Whaddya know, balloon, two o'clock.” Everyone darted for one of the blisters; I managed to wedge my head in alongside another man's.

I stared at my balloon.

The pilot brought the plane into a wide swoop, and we all watched, transfixed, as if we'd just entered the orbit of the moon. This balloon looked precisely like the one that had crashed into that California hillside, and for a moment, my mind insisted it
was
that balloon, resurrected and airborne once more.

I wanted it.

“Not too close now,” I muttered, and then realized I was speaking into the headset's microphone. “They're armed with explosives,” I said, speaking up. “There's no telling what sets them off.”

“Trees,” said a sarcastic voice.

“Rocks,” said another.

“Bomb disposal sergeants,” said a third.

“Remember, Sergeant, we've been on this patrol for a few months now. We know what kind of animal this is.”

“Which explains why you've had such success figuring out where and when they're going to land,” I thought, and without thinking further, said.

“Okay, folks, let's take her down,” the pilot said. I looked around to see where we might touch down, but saw nothing. One of the crew tapped me on the shoulder and nodded to a small canvas sling seat that folded down from the wall. Once we were seated, I asked him via hand gestures-he didn't have a headset-just how we would land. I understood the concept of floatplanes, but the island's coast didn't look hospitable to us bobbing alongside and hopping out.

My seatmate shook his head, and then pretended to shoot me with his thumb and index finger. Boom. The balloon exploded between his hands.

“We need to save it!” I shouted. Part of me wanted a scalp to bring back to Gurley; part of me was curious what magic had wrought: an island, a balloon. This was Lily's prize as much as it was mine.

The pilot came back on. “Thanks, Sergeant, we'll take it from here.”

“We have standing orders, don't we, to recover all we can?”

“I have standing orders to preserve the lives of my crew,” he replied.

“But this is a big chance for us-it's in excellent condition.” The pilot didn't reply, and then I heard a burst of gunfire. The entire plane shook, and for a moment, I thought we had been hit.

“Bad news, Sergeant,” the pilot said. “It's in lousy condition.” I went to the blister. The balloon had already dropped from sight; a surprisingly thin plume of smoke was all that remained.

“Did you hit the basket or the balloon?” I asked. There was still a chance we might recover something.

“It's not that big a target,” said the pilot. He banked so I could see the balloon, which had plummeted into lighter-green waters just off the island's coast. “I can't really say we were aiming for one or the other.” The plane pulled up. We were heading home.

“We can't leave,” I said quickly. “It's in shallow water. What if someone finds it, what if one of the bombs attached hasn't exploded? What if it went off and killed them?”

“I can drop you off, Sergeant.” The pilot laughed. “Answer all your questions.” I heard him radioing coded results of our mission back to base. I was feverish not to return. The balloon I'd seen-it wasn't just a balloon, it
was
magic, or more. Not just my magic. The magic of an entire nation-Japan had managed to send a bomb several thousand miles, from their shores to ours-and the magic of a palm reader in Anchorage, the magic of a whisper, a touch. I did want to see that balloon, and desperately. Not because I wanted evidence for Gurley but because-because it was somehow the gateway to another world, a world I had invented, or that Lily had invented for me. And if I could grasp some piece of that world-that balloon-I'd make the dream real. I would prove to myself that all the rest of this awful dream- Alaska, Gurley, war-was controllable by me as well.

Or I would die in the attempt, which struck me as both noble and expedient. At least God wouldn't take me for a coward, which I was sure was what He thought when I ducked the seminary. (Don't smirk-He watched my every move in those days.) I cinched tight the parachute I'd been issued.

I had never leapt out of a plane before. Parachuting had been offered as part of our training, but few men took the course who were not required to. “Why jump out of a perfectly good airplane?” I heard a flight surgeon once ask. And the PBY didn't make the task easy-it was built to float, after all, and so holes in the fuselage were few. If I wanted out, it looked like I'd have to wriggle out the blister.

But I was invincible now, full of faith and magic. I could escape the PBY, and I could master the art of jumping after exiting the plane. I ducked quickly to read the emergency instructions I'd seen before and then reached up to open the blister.

The crewman at my right pulled at me. I elbowed him away. Another man came from the left. I kicked.

The pilot started shouting in my headset. “Don't go batty on me, Sergeant. You're not going anywhere. For starters, I can't afford to lose that headset you're wearing.” I handed it off. I heaved myself up into the blister opening. The harness caught on something. The wind tore at me. The air was freezing. The men behind me were grabbing at my feet, my legs. I lost a boot to one of them and then the other.

One or two bruising kicks later, the wind snatched me away. The last thing I heard was “Head!” I looked up to see the tail assembly flash past my nose. And then I was flying, as free and fast as a shaman.

WHEN HE LATER HEARD about it, Gurley could not believe that I had jumped out of the plane. Neither could I, nor had I, technically speaking. I had kicked myself halfway out, but the wind had ripped me the rest of the way. It could as easily have been Lily's hand pulling me earthward, as surely as she had pulled me toward Shuyak when she whispered in my ear.

And some spirit was with me that day. As chance would have it, the plane was flying slowly enough for someone who knew how to jump, to jump. And parachutes are not so complicated that a man of great faith cannot come to a decision as to which toggle to pull and deploy his parachute. Had I known a little more, however, I might have been able to actually land myself on the slip of rocky shore. Instead, I plunged into the ocean. Just fifty or so yards offshore-swimmable, were I in the summertime waters of my childhood Pacific Ocean, but here, the ocean was December cold and patrolled by what looked like, at first glance, miniature enemy submarines (they were, in fact, sea lions).

The pilot later told Gurley-who told me-that, all in all, it was a good thing I landed in the water. For one, I had deployed my chute late; I would have broken bones on land. And two, he likely would not have turned back to collect me had I landed on the island. Rather, he would have dropped supplies and called for a rescue mission. Any idiot-here Gurley must have smiled-could survive for a night or two.

But no man could survive in that ocean for more than a few minutes, certainly not one with a chute weighing him down, and so the pilot circled back, landed-a rather skillful, brave act, he insisted to all concerned, and it must have been, because he earned the Navy Cross for doing so, or for saving me. He motored as close as he could and then sent two profane crew members out in an inflatable to collect me, still conscious.

He had turned around to rescue me promptly, but the approach and landing still took time. I know now that I was only minutes from death. I didn't know that then. I didn't know the water was so cold that sailors who went overboard in Alaskan waters frequently died, especially farther north-even if the alarm had been sounded immediately even if rescuers worked as fast as they were able. The water was always faster. But I wasn't thinking about death. I was thinking about three things, all at once: the knifing cold in my fingers and ears and feet, the way the water tasted nothing like the ocean in Southern California, and most of all: the balloon.

Almost too numb to form the words, I pleaded with my rescuers to collect the balloon as well. I could see the quick calculus cross their faces:
brave or stupid, he's earned at least one favor from us.
Plus, there was the added benefit of knowing I would suffer, cold and wet, while they collected what they could.

“Just one problem with that plan, Sarge,” one of them said. “Who takes care of the bombs? They don't pay any of us to do that. And you don't look in any shape to do it.”

“Just-they're probably missing,” I twisted around to look. “They would have gone off by now.” It was right about the point I saw them silently reach a mutual “What the hell?” that I decided to go myself. “Stay here,” I said. “Better yet, move back a ways.”

We'd landed at a thin gravel beach at the edge of a broad bay. The balloon itself had washed ashore, but the control frame had sunk in the shallow water where it fell. I missed my boots, but I also realized they probably would have dragged me straight to the bottom. I tried wading in after the frame-it was just two or three feet of water-but the shock of the cold water once more was so painful and absolute that I had to retreat. I went over to the balloon and pulled. I could feel everyone watching-the landing crew, the guys aboard the boat-but it was Sergeant Redes I was worried about. I was hoping he couldn't see me from wherever he was, because he would never have condoned something so foolish. A bomb on the shore of a deserted island was not a bomb you risked your life for.

More to the point, you certainly didn't tug on it. I felt a thud in my chest and saw the water suddenly boil, and a plume of water shoot up about twelve feet behind the control frame. I was still so taken with the magic of the balloon's appearance that my first thought was not bombs, but
sea monsters!
-and then I got back to work.

Once the water settled, I looked at the control frame carefully. One of the bombs-the last remaining bomb, it appeared-had fallen off. I hauled what remained up onto the gravel and righted it.

I'd seen one from afar at Fort Cronkhite, and up close in Gurley's Quonset hut, and in the training film he had yet to sit through. But this one seemed extraordinary. Not just because Lily had led me here, but because I
was
here. I had found it. Mine. It was, as Gurley might have said, a beautiful specimen, largely intact. Fresh from the ocean, still dangling fuses and ropes, it looked like a giant mechanical jellyfish, less a product of war than of some mad Victorian scientist.

I waved the guys over; they hesitated. I frowned, I was freezing. I'd found my prize and wanted to go. I turned back to the control frame and thought about how it resembled the one I'd seen in the film. Mine looked nicer, I thought. I could see the expressionless, silent man in the film point out different features of the device while an invisible narrator droned on. The silent man onscreen never showed a trace of emotion, but I remembered how the narrator's voice had speeded up just once:
A good location to look for booby taps is under the
-I looked up. The crew was walking toward me now. I shouted at them to stop.

I carefully took hold of the control frame, noticed my hands were almost completely without sensation, and slowly tilted the apparatus on its side. And there it was. Not a booby trap, but the demolition block. A small tin box, about six inches long and two wide-I've got a breastpocket Bible not much bigger now. Inside would be a paper-wrapped two-pound picric acid charge, enough to destroy any evidence of the balloon. A fire would start in a forest, and no one would ever know how. Or a benumbed bomb disposal sergeant would blow himself up on a rocky shore, and no one would care how. I cut the fuse and removed the block. Then I carefully set it down at the other end of the beach. We could have safely transported it home, and Gurley would have wanted it for evidence, but I knew there was no way I could bring it on board-not after everyone had seen me take such care. Or rather, not after everyone had seen me almost forget to take care of it.

It took a bit of convincing to get the crew to finally come over, but they did. We hauled the control frame into the boat, and then onto the plane.

Within minutes, I was in dry clothes and growing warmer, though the cold I felt remains to this day. Ask anyone who has been rescued from icy waters. One's bones, cells, never forget; they need only the barest reminder of a raw, wet day, even the sight of one onscreen, and the sea's chill comes surging back.