Killer Dust

by Sarah Andrews

  Once finally through the bridge, we had headed into the lock, cut through the flood-control levee. The concrete walls of the lock had loomed above our heads. Genteel men in uniforms had handed us lines and informed us that we’d be coming up about a foot. Doors had closed behind us, and others cracked open ahead of us, letting in a surge of water that sent us sloshing back like we were in a huge bathtub. After a minute or two, the forward doors had opened further, and we were handed into the canal that ran along the west shore of the lake. It was bordered by a ghost forest of dead trees that evoked the fierce but inanimate ceramic army found buried in China. The bases of their bleached trunks were lined with the lush greenery and bird life that I was coming to know as essence of swamp. Alligators floated somnolently about us like semisubmerged logs, and anhingas slid in and out of the water. The canal hugged the inside of the levee, whose unnatural uniformity and steep bank surprised the eye in this land of subtlety.

  Miles had greeted my presence on his boat with equanimity. He had not seemed dismayed, or even particularly surprised. He had given me breakfast as if I were just some customer dropping by his cafeé, and began to tell me stories of his life in Florida and in the profession. I had settled in surprisingly quickly, rationalizing that I should wait half an hour or so to work my way into his confidence before asking the question Tom wanted him to answer. A cell phone awaited me, plugged into a charger to the right of the wheel. I would ask to borrow it, citing that I needed to reassure Faye. I would take it out of earshot and make my call.

  But a half hour stretched quickly into an hour, an hour into two, and somewhere in there, I realized that he had unplugged the cell phone and hidden it. Where? Clearly, he had read my intentions. A game of cat and mouse had begun.

  I played my end of the game with small talk. “In the Rocky Mountains, there’s a small pool of water in the center of a wide valley,” I told Miles. “It’s called San Luis Lake. Indian myth says it’s the navel of the Earth, that man first climbed up from the underworld through it.”

  Miles returned tit for tat. He chuckled at my story, tapped the key on the autopilot with one deft finger to correct his course by one degree, and leaned back again in his captain’s seat. “I’d believe that easily about this place,” he said. “I heard it said once that in the beginning, the sky loved the ocean, and she gave him children in the form of clouds. Then the sky grew fickle, and he tried to love the Earth, but she did not know how to receive him, and lay barren. Even so, the ocean became jealous, and sent her children to rain down upon the Earth and sting it with their lightning bolts. But she was foiled, because in raining on the Earth, she made her rival fertile.”

  “Is that a Seminole myth?”

  “Nope. I just made it up. Everything’s about sex here in Florida.” He laughed his mischievous laugh, then flared his eyes at me, grinned even more widely, and said, “I love it on this boat. It almost makes me forget how pissed I am.”

  I took this as some sort of opening. “Who are you pissed at?”

  Miles giggled raucously and made a wide circle with one hand. “Everybody. I’m pissed at the Survey, of course. They should be funding this damned project. But more than that, I’m pissed at the whole profession. Things seem to be decaying, going into a state of bureaucracy that’s so far from our original raison d’être that I’m about to scream. It’s all just paperwork now, and justifying our positions. I’m past sixty-five, you know; I was about to retire in plain old disgust when this project developed, kind of caught my interest. I decided, out of sheer cussedness, that I was going to jam it in their faces.”

  I knew that in part I was hearing the trumpeting of a mired bull elk, but I spoke to the kinder side of that equation. “You’re an idea man, Miles. That’s a dying breed.”

  “God, I hope not. I’m too young to die.” He sobered abruptly, and gave me a dark, impenetrable look. “That’s part of it, I suppose. Kids aren’t taught to think anymore. They’re taught to fill out forms. Little answer for each slot. Everything’s digital. Hell, it’s an analog world out here. Look at it! It’s a continuum of interlocking, blended qualities, not discrete little quantities. Where’s the lake stop and the sky start? I mean really. We’ve been taught to think that things have edges, but they don’t. It’s all one planet. Explain that to some bureaucrat with a time card to punch. The damned paperpushers want prepackaged, predetermined results, everything in its separate little slot. I’m not kidding you! When I propose a project I’m supposed to fill out a computerized form that asks what the results of my investigation will be. Well, that don’t work in a world where half the data are missing and another quarter are hiding where we don’t know where to look for ’em. How’re we supposed to get the broad view on things if we think inside of preset slots to fill in? How’re we supposed to quantify ambiguity?”

  I understood what he was saying. His was a world of observation and inspiration, of integration, of simplicity and originality of thought. I had stumbled across genius more than once in my life, and it was always thus, the ability to stand back far enough to see what was simple and obvious in a field of information that seemed chaotic and inchoate to everyone else.

  I moved to the chart desk and began to pick idly through the messy stack of books and charts. “Where are we going?” I asked, wondering where in hell that cell phone had gone.

  Miles laughed, a quick grunt. “I ain’t telling you. Y’all’s getting’ off at Stuart.”

  I closed my eyes. So that was it, he wasn’t upset by my presence because he saw it as merely an odd ornament in the background of life’s occurrences, something with which to amuse himself along the way. He was en route to mess with destiny, and I had fallen fanglessly into his world for a moment, a blink of time.

  With this insight came an electrifying realization: I had observed him observing me. The student had just surpassed the teacher. I knew something he did not.

  Or perhaps, with our differing angles of observation, he saw one field of data and I saw another, and the two fields overlapped. Yes, that was it, because he understood the dust business from a height and breadth of vantage I could only guess at; he saw time and space as only four of perhaps ten dimensions that turned in concert; I saw perhaps five or six, if you counted one or two modifying processes that affected the march of time through space or space through time. And here we hung together, immersed in a time and space both fluid and sticky, caught like two flies in the amber of a vast ecosystem that was both lushly sensuous and dying. In that moment, I perceived the slowing of time always ascribed to the South; it was not a lassitude, but rather a surrender to the march of events, whatever the pace. Miles had cursed the bridge man for making him wait unnecessarily, but once moving at maximum speed, eight knots was what there was available and therefore plenty.

  So the puzzle took on a new character. It was a matter of divining the overlap between two fields, mine and Miles’ s.

  As the far shore of the lake began to resolve itself from a smudge to a blur, Waltrine brought another round of iced teas up to the pilothouse, and I said, “Tell me more about the connection you made with the astronaut who’s about to go up on the shuttle.”

  “Lucy?” Miles asked. “Why, she’s a friend of your Molly Chang’s, that’s how I got to know her. You knew Molly wanted to be an astronaut.”

  Oh my God, yes … . I had forgotten that. Our conversation seemed long ago, almost in another lifetime. Knowing that the astronauts were human beings who had friends pricked at my conscience. I had gotten this far by thinking of them as mere cultural icons, so much Spam in a jumpsuit. But now one astronaut in particular was entirely too real to me.

  Miles said, “No, I’ve never met her. We put a proposal across her desk to get her involved in the program. You can see the headlines: ASTRONAUT TRACKS KILLER DUST CLOUD FROM SPACE.” He panned a hand across an imagined page of newsprint.

  “I suppose that would help publicize your cause,” I said dryly.

  “Our cause,” he said,
smiling, giving me a wink. His attention wandered. He stared out at the shoreline, which had now sharpened from a blur to a line, something drawn with a blunt chalk on a sidewalk. “I was on this lake when Challenger exploded,” he said. His gaze shifted to the north, toward Cape Canaveral. “You could see it right out there, clear as anything. It was cold that morning, real cold, and I was listening to the countdown on the radio and thinking, they’re going to go up in this weather? And they did, and that was that.”

  I said, “You could see it this far away?”

  “Sure. It was cold, so it was clear, and there’s no mountains in the way nor nothing. You can see a long way. We’re not much more than a hundred miles from the Cape here. But hell, if conditions are right, you can see them lift off from most anywhere in the state, clear as a bell.”

  Waltrine snorted. “This state is so flat.”

  Her sardonic humor clanged against my skull. This time, I did not find her wisecracking funny in the least. Like the rest of America, my brain had become imprinted by the image of Christa McAulliffe and her ill-fated fellow crew-members being blasted from the sky by a leaking O-ring, the scene ground into my memory by an overzealous news media. And, inextricably part of a nation in grief and trauma, I still reeled from the image of jet aircraft crashing into tall buildings in New York City, forever expunging from our hearts our naïve sense of safety.

  And I knew something Miles and Waltrine did not. In my mind’s eye, the great wall of sky had once again filled with a disaster that yet could unfold if I did not help Tom find the right island.

  “Tell me where you’re going,” I demanded.

  Miles laughed unkindly. To Waltrine, he said jokingly, “Lock her in the hold.”

  “It’s important.”

  Miles did not even bother to make eye contact with me as he replied. “You want to swim home from there, or do you prefer being put off in Stuart, where you can at least rent a car?”

  We came out the far side of Lake Okeechobee through locks that stood open at both ends, but the railroad bridge just beyond it was down, and we had to stop and wait for it to be lifted.

  “Lake’s down two feet,” Miles informed me. “No need to drop us into the canal, we’re already at the same level. Okay, here comes the train. Damn, another load of limestone.”

  I peered ahead through the front windows of the pilothouse, watching the gondola cars rumble by. When they passed, the section of track over the river began to rise as counterweights descended to either side. Like every other object sticking more than five feet above the surrounding terrain in Florida, it had cell-phone antennae on it, a nasty reminder that I wasn’t doing my job.

  Miles noted my interest in the bridge. He said, “Even with that clearance, some sailboats can’t get their masts under. So there’s a guy makes his money coming out here with a couple plastic barrels he’ll tie to your mast, and he pumps water into them so’s the boat heels over enough they can squeeze it under.”

  Waltrine muttered, “Here in Florida, everybody’s got a scam.”

  I could see no signs of civilization other than the lock and the railroad bridge. Everything else was a solid bank of green jungle down both sides of the canal that now stretched east of us.

  “Welcome to the St. Lucie canal,” Miles said. “This vegetation is just a thin wall. “There’s orange groves beyond. Used to be like that all the way through to the coast, but there’s a network of canals and drainage ditches that run all through here like a grid. There’s the outlet for one of them,” he said, pointing to shallower canals that spilled out into the St. Lucie from either side.

  The canal and side ditches were cut into limestone, and in no way resembled a natural river system. The side ditches came in at right angles and dropped over concrete ramps, and the St. Lucie was a constant width, its squared-off banks cut into the rock giving the edge of the waterway the appearance of a curb. The contrast between rampant nature and man’s slice through it was extreme.

  The boat chugged onward, kicking up its coffee-colored wake. “And not all of this remaining fringe of swamp vegetation is native, not by far,” Miles intoned. “That’s Brazilian pepper tree there, a real scourge. Brought in back in the 1930s as an ornamental. Now it’s all over the place, and you can’t get rid of it for love or money. Birds drop the seeds all over the place. Crowds out the natives like you wouldn’t believe. That’s Australian pine. Same kind of problem. Sucks up water. It’s a mess.” He sighed.

  I gazed at him as he sat there expounding on unnaturalness, ensconced in his air-conditioned trawler, sucking down drinks that clinked with ice from the chest freezer in the galley, and I thought, None of us is quite in sync with anything anymore. Or more accurately, not one of us is entirely in synch with everything. I felt sad and discouraged, and wondered if I was catching Miles Guffey’s malaise. He was not only a bull elk caught in the mire, he was an aging elk forced to watch the world proceed into a future he did not wish to inhabit. His was the disease of aging sages everywhere, who look out on the unconsciousness of younger generations and call it madness.

  Our run down the St. Lucie canal took on a sense of stateliness. I got to hanging out at the stern studying the symmetry of the wake that rolled out behind us like static wrinkles. Because all things were constant—the width of the canal, our speed through the water, the angle and amplitude of the waves—the wake was in a constant state of breaking against the curb of the canal. I stared at it in wonder and resignation, surprised and yet resigned to find another layer of Florida just as synthetic and hypnotic as the land of Mickey Mouse.

  The largest of the thunderheads grew steadily toward us. At length, the downpour started, great splooshing drops that bounced and rolled on the waves like glassine pebbles before giving up their clarity and merging into the darkness of the waters of the canal.

  I told myself that I was trying to figure out how to extort the information Tom needed from Miles, but the fight was quickly spilling out of me. I wondered if it was in anybody’s best interest to do as Tom had bidden me. Certainly if I gave him the information he sought, he would be in more danger than if I didn’t. Jack had found the damned missile, and we had dug it up, so the shuttle launch was no longer at risk. Or so I hoped. And Tom would stop the launch if he deemed it necessary. Jack was out there somewhere in the Bahamas gunk-holing about in his borrowed sailboat, and at a rate of 700 islands and 2,400 islets, he’d be at it for quite some time, just as clueless as Brad and Tom. I tried to tell myself that they were just a pack of overenthusiastic puppies and that they’d all come yipping on home when they got hungry enough.

  The only problem was that, just like Jack and Tom, I wanted to know where the man who had buried that hideous weapon in my soil had gone, and I wanted him gone for good.

  So where was he?

  Jack seemed to think he had gone offshore. Why? Because he had the profile of a drugrunner, and drugrunners in these parts zipped about in fast boats or small planes, meaning they were going to another jurisdiction that was not far away.

  The sediments inside the plastic case suggested the weapon had received its crude packaging in the Bahamas, but perhaps even that was wrong. If it was correct, one might suppose he was somewhere in one of the groups of islands closer to the Florida peninsula, but that might not be so. Fast boats went as fast as fast cars, and the distances were not great.

  My mind wandered. There was also the question of Calvin Wheat. How had he gotten to Freeport in a wet tuxedo? Why had he kept his miraculous survival a secret? And precisely what mission had brought him across the Caribbean, and Miles and Waltrine across the state?

  I could not unravel even one of those knots.

  So I stared at the wake. From the back of the boat. Watching where we had been instead of where we were going. And in so doing, figured it all out.

  – 32 –

  I had been trying to figure out where a terrorist would go from Florida if he were trying to hide. Instead, by watching the wake leave the boat, I t
urned the logic around and considered the evidence from the other end of the chain: If I were a terrorist trying to run an operation just off the Florida coast, where would I put it so that I could hide it in plain sight?

  The answer was damned simple when I lined up all the evidence: not just Jack’s, but also Calvin Wheat’s. I mentally checked and crosschecking my idea to see if it held together, starting with what I knew of Calvin Wheat.

  The good Dr. Wheat had embarked on a cruise and had been thrown overboard. (It made less and less sense that he might have jumped; speaking for myself, if I were going to jump off a ship with the idea of swimming ashore, I’d have worn something other than a tuxedo). Wheat was a microbiologist who had a gripe with another microbiologist who had a known expertise with weapons-grade anthrax. That anthrax-wielding microbiologist had last been seen heading offshore, supposedly to the Bahamas. The two men had been scheduled to meet at the conference on Barbados, but only one had arrived.