Once again, the hero survived, and Lester is so relieved, he leaps fully clothed into the water, laughing and yelping at the coldness of it. “You made it,” Lester says, paddling over to him. “You scared the hell out of me, pal.”
Josh floats on his back, coughing and sputtering water through his smile. “I scared the hell out of me too.”
The helicopter has powered down completely. The water laps against its floats. The passenger door rolls open with a clank. Someone—a young woman with Chuck Taylors and skinny jeans and chunky black glasses and a ponytail—stands on the other side of it. Lester assumes she’s a reporter, until he sees the windbreaker shell that reads Titan across the chest, alongside the program’s compass emblem. She tips her head and says, “Remember me?”
Josh straightens his body and scissors his legs and spits out a mouthful of water and squints against the sun’s glare. “Michelle?”
“Surprise,” she says.
“But,” Josh says, “what are you doing here?”
She reaches out a hand and beckons him with a curl of her fingers. “I came to offer you a job.”
A day later, in Mountain View, California, she escorts them into the Atlas boardroom, and they take their seats at the long black table that runs the length of it. Josh, Lester, and Todd. Unshaven, in their outdoor gear and with slumped postures, they look at odds with the sterile environment.
One wall is a whiteboard. The other three are made up of floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on the sunlit campus, which has the appearance of a futuristic college studded with palm trees. A manicured paradise. Every afternoon, Michelle takes a fast walk, following the looping concrete pathways through the rock and flower gardens, until her Fitbit tells her she’s burned a lunch’s worth of calories. She checks it now and sees that her heart rate has elevated to 120, though she’s standing still.
Maybe it’s the guilt over losing her team. Or maybe it’s the fear that these three will turn her down. Or maybe it’s just Josh. Her eyes keep coming back to him, though there are so many other places to look.
She crosses her arms, then remembers the TED Talk she watched, and hurries her hands to her hips instead and broadens her stance to a power pose. Now she’s in control. Josh arches his crowbar of an eyebrow at her and somehow she doesn’t feel reassured.
A laptop sits on the table beside her and she punches the keyboard with her finger to warm it up. “The Last Frontier,” she says.
Todd throws up his arms. “Space?! We’re going to space!”
“Alaska.”
His arms flop down. “Oh.”
Her laptop is connected to a ceiling projector that beams an image onto the wall. The Atlas emblem on a black banner. Below it is a man standing on the summit of a mountain, with the camera unit lodged in his pack.
This gives way to a series of moving images. Starting with the Grand Canyon. The classic sweeping view from above, and then the vantage drops down onto a trail and explores the interior, sliding past scrub brush and sandy washes and the layers and layers of rock that mark the descent.
She explains how, with Titan’s help, you can be a virtual tourist, a student of the world, from the comfort of your home or classroom. And the images shift over to a plaza in Italy and the camera creeps inside of a restaurant, through the seating area, into the kitchen, and then the alleyway behind it. And then the images shift again to churches and bars and museums of Sicily. And again to a white sand beach in Costa Rica that runs up against a pale blue ocean.
Michelle directs the navigation down the beach and then into the water. They slide through a candy-colored reef. Striped fish gather in schools. An eel peers out of a tiny cave. Anemones wave in the current. A sea turtle tips toward the camera curiously.
“Forget Alaska,” Todd says. “We should go there. Hang out with some hula girls and drink some unnaturally blue cocktail out of a giant-ass glass with lots of umbrellas.”
Lester elbows him and says, “Listen to the lady.”
She says, “Anybody can wander a beach with a camera. We tapped you guys for a reason.”
Lester is only half-joking when he says, “Because we’re—what?—the suicide squad?” He has a tic, she notices, on his left cheek.
“We’ve so far mapped every inch of North America. Except …” She swipes at the mouse pad and calls up a map of Alaska and zooms in on a highlighted area that looks like a fanged mouth. “Except for this section of the Alaskan coastline. Which is—full disclosure—known as the Bermuda Triangle of the North. Hundreds go missing there every year.”
“Um,” Todd says, and she hurries on before he can undercut her with a joke.
“Single-engine flights, commercial fishing boats. Hunters, hikers, campers, mining and logging prospectors.”
Outside, a cloud scuds across the sun and the boardroom falls into a gloom.
Josh finally speaks. When he does, Todd and Lester swing their faces toward him. His voice is low, almost gravitational. She hates that he owns them the same as he owns her. “So you think we’re the only ones crazy enough to go there?”
“Or stupid enough,” Lester says.
Michelle eyes Josh for a long beat. She doesn’t want to tell them. She doesn’t want to send them. But she has to. It’s her job. “I don’t think you’re the only ones.” Her eyes drop and her body goes wooden. “We … lost a team there last month.”
Lester’s tic goes wild, his left cheek tightening and releasing, over and over, as if he’s trying and failing to form a smile. Todd leans back and snorts out a laugh. But Josh maintains his steady gaze.
“Lost? As in, they might still be alive?”
“At this point …” Her throat feels too dry for words. “I think that’s extremely doubtful. But I have to hope.”
Lester puts a hand over his cheek to massage the muscle, control the tic. “Oh, this sounds wonderful. Sign me up.”
Josh says, “You couldn’t track their sat phones or GPS units?”
“They went dark. And all recovery efforts by local rescue teams have failed.” There’s a long moment of quiet. “Look. Someone’s going to do this. It’s happening. And it’s not that I think you’re stupid enough to go there. It’s that I think you’re smart enough to get out.”
“So we’re searching while we’re recording?” Josh says.
“Correct. It’s a walk-and-chew-gum deal. To cover the area completely should take you four weeks.”
Lester says, “What Todd said before? About the coconuts? I agree. Let’s go there instead.”
Josh puts a calming hand on Lester’s shoulder. “What do you think happened? To them? To anybody else who has gone missing or died there?”
Michelle shakes her head, unsure. “Brutal weather. Bears. Wolves. No roads. No nautical charts. No cell signal. No nothing for hundreds of miles.”
Todd says, “Bermuda Triangle of the North, man. Supernatural vortex. That’s what did it.”
Michelle says, “You know what they used to write on old maps, at the end of the known world—”
Josh finishes the sentence for her. “Here there be dragons.”
“Yeah.” She tries to smile, but the darkness of what’s promised makes her mouth tremble. “This is where you find the dragons.”
Josh doesn’t look at the contracts Michelle hands out. Not even when Todd whistles long and low and says, “That’s like fifty hot tubs. Full of Dom Pérignon.” The money doesn’t matter to him. It’s the danger he finds appealing, yes, but more so the mission. To save someone.
For whatever reason, ever since the car wreck, he’s been fixated on how he should have died—instead of recognizing that his family should have lived. He can’t go back in time and slam the brakes or wrench the steering wheel in another direction. But he can do this.
“No,” Lester says. “Absolutely not. We’re not doing it.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s not what we do.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Josh says.
“I don’t understand.” A cluster of water bottles sits at the center of the table, like a blue bouquet, and Lester rips the cap off one of them and guzzles. “We’ve got a business model that works. We—”
“We make stupid videos and earn money off endorsement deals from energy drinks,” Josh says, and he can see the hurt in Lester’s expression, but it doesn’t stop him. “I’m sick of it. Let’s do something substantial for a change.”
“But, Josh,” Todd says, his voice uncharacteristically quiet, almost solemn. “Me and Lester … we’re not really equipped for this kind of thing.”
Josh realizes then how parasitic they are. It’s not that they aren’t his friends. It’s not that they haven’t carried him through rough times. But they’ve made a lot of money off him repeatedly failing to kill himself.
A part of him wants to sign the contract for obvious reasons. Dare the wilderness and locate the lost team. And another part of him—a hidden, nasty part of him—likes the idea of putting his friends in harm’s way.
“Then I’ll go alone,” Josh says, knowing they’ll follow him anywhere.
“Whoa,” Lester says. “No. Let’s just hold on a minute.” He neatens the contract before him and blows out a steadying breath and looks at Michelle and says, “We’ll do it, but only if we retain rights to the footage.”
“This isn’t entertainment,” she says.
“You’re wrong about that,” he says. “People love horror movies.”
She agrees, but before they sign anything, she wants to give them one final chance to say no. “It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to do this.”
That’s how they end up at the Lake Hood Seaplane Base, in Anchorage, Alaska, two days later. On the water, the floatplanes taxi, with hundreds of them docked along the shore. Some of the aircraft are highend, but more of them look like they’re barely held together by duct tape. Rust-streaked with mismatched replacement panels.
Inside a nearby hangar, they stand around a pile of duffels and backpacks and bear bags and scuba gear.
Josh hefts up the Titan pack and swings it onto his back. The giant ball of the many-lensed camera rises from a metal proboscis, reaching two feet higher than his head. He readjusts the beltline, and leans one way, then the other, and pops out an experimental squat. “How does it feel?” Lester says and Josh says, “Like I got a gargoyle on my back.”
“Quit whining,” Michelle says. “Come here.” She tightens the shoulder straps and snaps the chest harness into place. Her hands linger there for a moment, as if she can feel his heart in her fingers. “How’s that? Will you live?”
“Remains to be seen,” Josh says.
At this she flinches and drops her hands. “Don’t say that, please,” she says to him, and then to the group, “You’ll each have your own pack. I recommend hiking twenty yards apart in wooded areas, and swimming ten yards apart in water, making patterned sweeps for total coverage. In addition to the camera, you’ve got a GPS antenna in there to geo-locate all the photos. A fat battery that should last a week before you trade it out. And an SSD on the bottom for storage.”
Lester checks everything over and nods approvingly. “Clunky but cool.” He snaps on a button and the camera powers up and begins to spin and emits a noise like a cricket’s chirping.
“So the camera unit fires every two seconds,” Michelle says, “giving a panoramic view of wherever you hike, swim, canoe, bike, snowmobile, ski.” She holds out a thickly armored satellite phone. “This satellite phone is your lifeline. Anything goes wrong, you let me know.”
Lester snatches this from her, examines it, tucks it in one of his many pockets. “Given where we’re headed, isn’t that pretty much a guarantee?”
Todd says, “We’ll be fine, old lady Lester. I eat a bowl of grizzly bears doused in gasoline for breakfast every morning.”
Michelle claps her hands and waves for them to follow her across the hangar. “All right, boys. Follow me and I’ll introduce you to your bush pilot.”
Josh watches her go. She has such a stiff, precise manner. Even when she walks, she brings down her heel sharply with each step, as if she were stomping ants. He remembers how all of that melted away in the hotel room. She insisted on turning off the lights, and it was almost as if she needed that camouflage to become something else. A wild thing. She was gone when he woke up, but the claw marks weren’t.
Lester turns off the camera and helps him unshoulder the pack and lower it to the floor. “Four weeks of mosquitoes, no showers, no pizza. The threat of a supernatural vortex that eats ships, planes, and people.”
“Sounds like fun?”
“No. It does not.”
“And yet, here you are,” Josh says.
“I wasn’t going to let you go alone. And, I’ll admit, it’s somewhat exciting to think about us belonging to the last generation of explorers.”
“Looking to join the ranks of Magellan, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Lewis and Clark?”
“Or,” Lester says, “maybe we can avoid the whole colonizer thing. Think I’d prefer the company of Armstrong and Cousteau.”
“Good call.” Josh nods at Todd, who at that moment is bending over to zip up a bag. His pants sag with the effort, revealing a pale slab of skin and the crack of his ass. “Armstrong. Cousteau. Now we can add to that list the esteemed Todd Dartman.”
The bush pilot’s name is Cliff Swanson, and he thinks they’re all a bunch of idiots. He tells them as much, even though they’re paying him well. Twice his standard rate. “Hypothermia. Moose attack. Bear attack. Wolf attack. Avalanche. Starvation. Giardia. Drowning.” They follow him as he marches toward the plane, and every few steps he turns to admonish them directly. “Eat the wrong berry, you’re dead. Fall off a cliff, you’re dead. Misfire your rifle, you’re dead. There are a million ways this place will kill you.”
They all wear shoulder-mounted GoPro cameras, and Todd runs ahead of Cliff and then turns around and walks backward, so as to film him. “We’ll be all right, big guy. We’ve been to some pretty hairy places.”
Cliff holds up his hand as if to block the camera. “This isn’t some dumb movie. And we’re not headed to some Maui poolside bar or a Bangkok whorehouse or wherever else you’ve been on your party boy vacations. This isn’t even Alaska. It’s the jaws of Alaska.”
“Chill,” Todd says. “We got this.”
Michelle says, “I don’t think you do. Not with that attitude.”
“Listen to the lady,” Cliff says.
“I know this must seem scary,” Josh says to Michelle, “to someone like you. But—”
“To someone like me?”
“Yeah, someone who lives—”
She was walking beside him, but now the distance between them grows and she looks at him with sidelong annoyance. “And how would you define someone like me?”
“Someone who lives … a safety-padded, seat-belted, air-conditioned life.”
Michelle’s face pinches and Todd hurries over to her and says, “He’s mean. That’s why you should like me. I’m nice. And cuddly.”
“Don’t act like you know me,” Michelle says. “And don’t act like you’re too cool to die out there.” She flicks the GoPro camera on his shoulder. “It’s like Cliff says. This isn’t some dumb movie.”
Cliff starts off again, machine-gunning them with his words. “They call this state the Last Frontier for a reason, you know. It’s unconquered.” None of them get it, he says. Nobody from the Lower 48 does. They’re used to conquering. Dirt is something to pave over. Wood is something to split and sand and lacquer into furniture. A mountain is something to ski down. The land here does the same thing to people—owns and consumes them. He was part of the search party for the last group. He doesn’t want to do that again, crisscrossing the skies and hoping for an SOS. Maybe if he puts the fear of God into them, they’ll be more cautious.
He tromps along the dock and approaches his single-engine floatplane. He knows it looks like it’s been t
hrough a few dogfights. Patched and soldered. But it does the job. Has done it for the twenty years he’s been flying. He yanks open the cargo door with a shriek. Motions for them to give him their bags. The Titan pack weighs a good fifty pounds, and for a moment he considers tossing it in the water.
But then Michelle says, “Please be careful with that,” and he seems to remember that she’s the one who writes the checks and so he gently places the equipment in the hold, along with the rest of the gear, before bungee cording it all tightly into place.
Usually Michelle is all business. Buttoned-up, tightly wound. But today she feels rickety and nerve-baked. She doesn’t want to say good-bye. It feels likes too dangerous of a word. So she says, “Okay, boys,” walking backward and giving them a half wave. “Please stay safe? When you touch down, ping me on the satellite phone.”
But before she can retreat any farther, Josh grabs her hand, hooking their fingers together. “Hey,” he says, and she says, “Hey?”
She tries not to pay attention to Todd and Lester as they smile and whisper at each other. She tries to look into his eyes and hold her gaze steady. “Hey?” he says.
“Hey.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“For what?”
“For acting like I know better. But … how often do you actually get out in the field yourself?”
She rubs one of his knuckles with her thumb. This isn’t professional. He works for her. But she can’t help but revel in the familiar roughness of his grip. And she’s glad not to go, to linger a little longer by his side. “Me? No. Never. Not ever. Nature is great, but … I prefer to observe it from a ski run or hiking trail. I’m just the engineer, an office drone. You’re my bravehearted scouts.”
“Why don’t you come?” he says. “You should come.”
“I don’t leave pavement.”
She starts to protest but he cuts her off. “Just for the plane ride. Don’t you want to experience this place as more than a photo?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because …” How to respond? Because she likes things just so? Because she is afraid? There is no answer that doesn’t make her feel like a neatly folded map of a place no one ever wanted to go.
Suicide Woods Page 14
