Ronnie, doing the dead man’s float, lasts a little while longer. When he is sure he has nothing left, and no one is coming, he faces it like a man. He stops fighting and, drinking as much salt water as he can, slides beneath the dark, cool water, letting it rush over him like a blanket, letting the Gulf swallow him.
Though the three men are dead, the dolphins continue to play. They leap, they splash, they giggle, they frolic and jump.
Seemingly for joy.
Chapter 59
BARBARA HATFIELD DOESN’T know what time it is when she emerges into consciousness on top of the covers of her bed beneath the misty canopy of mosquito netting. Inside the dark, rough clapboard room, and outside the windows, it is gray now. All time, space, matter comes in shades of sad, heavy, leaden gray.
She’s still wearing her shorts and shirt and mud-encrusted jungle boots. She scratches at the hardened pus of a mosquito bite under her greasy hair, scratches the skin on her arms and legs. She hasn’t bathed in four days.
Her eyes fall to the empty side of the bed beside her. She leans over and takes Sylvia’s pillow in her hands, presses it to her face.
The scent of her still clings to the fabric. Sylvia’s smile as she’s coming back from her run, flesh glowing, slick with sweat. Her nimble hands always doing something, fixing the forty-year-old compound’s leaking roof, changing the Land Rover’s oil. Tending the garden—she looked so gorgeous with her arms and legs stained black with dirt up to her elbows and knees and her hair held back, Rosie the Riveter–style, in a bandanna. She’d come through the door in that bandanna and her weathered leather gloves, holding her clippers and a twine-bound bundle of weeds, and Barbara would want to grab her and kiss her so long and deep that Sylvia would have to push her away just to come up for air.
This year-long grant was a once-in-a-lifetime scenario, a golden ticket for a primatologist. It provided enough money to live for a year in Rwanda, working at the mountain gorilla research camp that Dian Fossey had made famous.
Sylvia had thought it would be too dangerous, but Barbara had begged and cajoled and finally convinced her to put the community garden on hold for a year and follow her to Africa.
They’d been returning from doing the yearly UN-required endangered species census of the mountain gorillas when the unspeakable occurred. Barbara was walking up the path to their cabin behind Sylvia when three silverback male gorillas emerged from the open front door.
A moment later, there were gorillas everywhere. Silverbacks and younger males. There was an electric fence around the camp, but the gorillas had somehow penetrated the camp’s perimeter. They grunted, threw debris, leaped off the roofs of the cabins and outbuildings. Cargo crates clattered; the air was a swirl of pounding, panting, huffing.
Barbara remembers running into the jungle, her lungs burning, as leaves and branches crunched and cracked behind her. Then she had looked back and noticed that Sylvia wasn’t with her anymore.
She mustered up her courage and came back to the camp that night—to find everyone gone. All three Rwandan trackers, the four young men from the antipoaching team, and Sylvia. All gone.
In the bed, Barbara moans as she grasps at her throbbing head with her hands, trying to wring the memory from her brain as though it were a sponge. She had been quick to dismiss the fringe-level, paranoid racket about HAC, the absurd buzzing of Internet lunatics. She believed the theory was crackpot because she knows animals— gorillas in particular. But now she is having doubts. The behavior of all mammals, even mountain gorilla behavior, seems to have undergone a meltdown.
She’s in dire straits. The radio and generators have been smashed, along with the guns. The nearest village is thirty miles away, through mountain jungle so impassable they had to be airlifted here by helicopter. The next supply run is forty-eight hours away.
Two more days to get through, Barbara thinks. If the gorillas return, she will have no chance.
She is sitting up in bed, rocking back and forth. In despair.
Then she feels something. It is a distinctly felt presence, as if Sylvia were there in the room beside her, watching, invisible. Not only that, but her lover seems pissed off at Barbara for doing the damsel-in-distress act, panicking, giving up.
Barbara climbs to her feet, ripping aside the gray film of mosquito netting. Sylvia is right. She needs to do something. In a moment she knows what.
Behind the storage shed are barrels of gasoline for the generators. Barbara can fill up some canisters, douse the tree line, set it on fire. She hates thinking about damaging such a precious ecosystem, but it is a life-and-death situation. Her life and death, specifically. Perhaps the smoke will attract attention from the villages in the valley, and perhaps someone will eventually come to investigate. And get her out of here.
She is coming out from behind the shed with two gas cans sloshing tinnily in her hands when she hears the crunch of branches off to her left. She turns. Her eyes fall on the tree line. She drops the gas cans. They tumble at her feet.
Coming through the trees is something that defies imagination.
About two hundred yards away, rhinos are entering the clearing. Half a dozen massive horned rhinos.
Which is impossible. How did they get here? Rhinos graze in the plains. They have to be within walking distance of water. Why would rhinos migrate seventy miles laterally and several thousand feet vertically from their natural habitat? What would she see next? Polar bears?
The animals keep coming. There are more than a dozen rhinos now. The scene is so out there, so upside down—so wrong.
As the creatures approach, a memory comes to Barbara. She is eleven years old, sitting in the front pew of a Baptist church with her family in northern Florida. The fire-and-brimstone preacher points a gnarled finger at the small crowd in the pews as he reads from the Book of Revelation.
“And the first beast was like a lion,” he says histrionically, turning his eyes to heaven. “And the second like a calf. And the third had a face like a man.”
End times, Barbara thinks, watching the giant animals step curiously amid the jungle underbrush. She is in such desperation that she almost begins to pray.
Chapter 60
MOBILIZED OUT OF Fort Drum, New York, Captain Stephen Bowen’s Tenth Mountain Division consists of two four-man fire teams, a small but elite unit.
Arrayed in the standard wedge formation, the men move as one up the wooded hill in their camos. Using hand and arm signals, they are silent, all but invisible. Standard operating procedure for combat patrol.
The fact that their combat patrol runs alongside a bike path in Hapgood Wright Town Forest near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is definitely not SOP, though. It’s more FUBAR than snafu. In Captain Bowen’s opinion, this is about as screwball as it comes.
Bowen knows for a stone-cold fact that what they are doing is illegal. They’re supposed to be helping the cops direct traffic, not going out on a search-and-destroy mission in a public park. And the orders, if you could call them that, are truly out there.
Bowen, though only twenty-seven, was hard-core even before he did his three tours neck-deep in the shit of
