Killer Dust

by Sarah Andrews

  Time scraped past. I sat in the bottom of the boat watching for the next signal, feeling clammy, trying not to notice the slight swell that constantly reminded me that I was in a boat in the middle of the ocean. I let my mind wander off to one side of my head, ignoring the deep and abiding sense of panic all that water raised in me.

  A half hour passed, perhaps an hour.

  Suddenly, a flash turned my eyelids red. I sat up, opened my eyes, and turned to the east, toward the island, toward the source of the light, just in time to feel the concussion of the explosion thump my chest.

  My body shook with adrenaline. I was terrified and angry all at once, and had nowhere to go with it. Bright shards of light peppered the night, followed by the reports of small arms. In between the flashes, I could see nothing but splotches in my vision. I watched for the signal, but saw chaos instead.

  The shaking in my arms and legs became violent. I told myself that I must be cold. My body cramped from head to foot, and I was terrified that I was about to pee or vomit or both. I heard a boat rev its engines near the island. I reached for Philemon’s night-vision goggles and put them on, turning my universe once again into a tracery of black and electric green.

  Then I saw it: a long boat shaped like an arrow, taking off like a shot to the west.

  The radio coughed into life. I heard Tom’s voice: “Em! Come!”

  I slapped the throttle, and the boat stood almost on end. Crashing back into the water, it took off like a bolt of lightning toward the island.

  Time telescoped. The flashes grew closer and closer, weirdly ghostlike through the goggles. The delay between flash and report shortened, merged. Sound rocketed across space. I began to wonder what would happen if a stray bullet caught me, or the boat, or—

  I could now discern a vague line where water turned more solid, but knew that distances appeared different in the dark. I had to be traveling at fifty or sixty miles per hour. Would I hit the shore? Worse yet, would I strike it in the right place?

  The radio crackled. I said, “Tom?”

  “To your right! Your right!”

  Now I could see men running down the beach, all the same electric-green color. Which were friends? Which foes? My stomach lurched, but a crazed chemistry in my blood took over. I spun the wheel and yanked back on the throttle, skidding the boat. I fought to think thoughts other than those that crashed about my mind, fought to go completely blank except for the tiny point on which I must focus. I became that point.

  Another large flash briefly overwhelmed the goggles, and then I could see men splashing into the water. I counted one, two, three … one man dragging another. That made four. They disappeared beneath the surface. Where was Jack? Not a one of them had his shape, his magnificent size, nor Philemon’s.

  I spun the inflatable ninety degrees, giving them the side, and shut the throttle. The boat careened to a stop. I could see no one. Where had they gone? Had I overshot them in the compressed depth perception of the dark? I glanced at the fish finder, saw nothing.

  Then suddenly a hand rose from the darkness and slapped the far side of the boat. Realizing that they had dived underneath to use it as cover, I lunged to the far gunwale and grabbed at the arm. It was slick with neoprene. A face appeared, distorted behind a diving mask, weirdly glowing with electric-green light. Had I connected with the right people? Was this one of mine, or was it the dreaded other? A finned leg rose over the side, landed in the boat. The man heaved himself up, rolled aboard, flopped onto his back, gasping. “Thanks, Em,” he said. I recognized Brad’s voice.

  More men rolled aboard, each helping the next. I saw Walt flop into the hold and lie panting, his face black with camouflage. Brad got another by the arm and pulled. A fourth. Fifth—

  Philemon burst over the side of the boat, kicked off his fins, and jumped into the saddle, all in one sinuous motion. Without ceremony, he tugged the night-vision goggles from my head.

  Where was Jack? And was Tom one of those who lay gasping at my feet? I groped in the dark, touching faces, arms, hands. Nothing felt familiar.

  I saw Jack running down the beach then, half dragging another man. I watched them scatter into the water, saw Jack heave himself like a plank onto the roiling fluid. I lost him, now glimpsed him again, my vision a flurry of black dots from the flashes. Philemon whipped the boat around and caught Jack on the fly, plucking him from the water with one arm as if he were little more than an inflated tube himself. A half second later, he snagged the final man, then opened the throttle full and swung this way and that, making a crazy line through the water, harder to hit. We tore away from the island, heading full tilt for the next.

  Jack rolled to his knees. “Give me a weapon!” he shouted. Suddenly seeing me, he roared, “Get down!”

  Philemon grabbed my poncho and threw me to the floor. “Your friends,” he said, “they like a loud party.” His sarcasm was soft-edged, sad. “This is what war is like,” he said, his voice barely audible over the roar of the engines. “Your American war movies make you think soldiers can see what they are doing in the night, but that is not right. At night, war is blind chaos. Then there is an explosion and it blinds you. Someone can come right up to you and you don’t see him until he is close enough to snatch your face from your head.”

  Craning my neck from the awkward position into which Philemon had thrust me, I saw another boat coming after us. It was larger, moving faster, closing quickly, a string of flashes coming off its bow.

  Jack pulled something off his shirt, yanked a pin, hurled it at the pursuing craft. Walt raised a weapon, fired. The following boat suddenly bucked, humped with flame. The wall of noise hit me like a hammer, boxing my ears, rattling my teeth.

  Now we are safe, I told myself.

  Suddenly, Philemon slumped to the side, his hand lazily drawing the boat into a slew as his body crumpled. His warm bulk rolled against me.

  “Philemon’s been hit!” I cried. I struggled to support his head. With one hand, I felt for a pulse, but found sticky ooze instead.

  Jack jumped to the controls. In the pale haze cast by the fire that now engulfed most trees on the island, I could see that he wore a strange gadgetry across his eyes. He looked strange to me, half man, half machine.

  My skin crawled with fear. I rolled Philemon onto his side, putting the wound high, and felt for a pulse. I found one, fast but steady, and his stomach still moved with a rapid breath.

  Brad shouted, “Where’d your target get to?”

  Jack roared back, “He headed west. I’ve got him with the goggles. There! No need for speed. I holed his gas tank. He’ll be stalling any moment now.”

  “There he is!” someone yelled.

  “He’s mine!” Walt hollered.

  “No, mine!” Jack insisted.

  One lone form stood out against the sleek contours of the boat. The man ducked.

  Jack cut the engines and let the Zodiac drift. The night was suddenly silent except for the soft murmur of the waves.

  I heard a voice call out across the waters. “I only worked there!” the man on the far boat shrieked, his voice cracking with hysteria. “I didn’t know! Please, don’t hurt me!”

  “Keep back,” Brad said. “I saw him pack an Uzi onto that thing. Nasty little alley sweeper. Wait, check this out.” He flipped a switch, turning on a spotlight on a long wire, and aimed it toward the other boat.

  “Don’t worry,” Jack said. He raised a rifle to his shoulder. Aimed. Fired. Again. Again. Again. The bullets flew from the muzzle like angry bees. His body heaved with the recoil. Suddenly, between the concussions of the shots, I heard a screech like a wild animal caught in a trap. The man slipped to the deck, a stark pale shape in the spotlight.

  Jack grinned. “Got him!” he whispered.

  There was a cracking sound and a dull explosion.

  “Shit!” Brad howled. “Fucker got the port tubing! He was just playing dead, Jack!”

  “We’ll see how dead we can get him,” Jack hissed. He opene
d the throttle and slewed wildly toward the boat, whipping it to the left at the last moment so that the right side bounced against his opponent’s craft. The man rolled back onto his haunches, still holding his gun. I feared that he was readying himself to fire, but instead he cowered back as if unarmed. He was husky and blond, and his eyes were wide with fear. In a split second’s recognition that etched itself in my mind, I realized that he looked like … Jack.

  Jack leaped aboard the boat and kicked the gun from the man’s arms. He grabbed the man by his head, wrapped it in his arms, and gave it a sickening twist. As bone cracked, Jack roared, “That’s for Lily, you shit-eating bastard!”

  The last look on the man’s face as life drained from him was one of pouting self-pity, his lower lip extended like a child’s.

  I fell to the bottom of Philemon’s boat in horror, my bearings completely lost, my eyes squeezed shut to erase the last look of that dying man. I tumbled up against something firm like a human but as unresponsive as a slaughtered calf. Even in the darkness, in all the chaos of the moment, I knew that I was embracing a corpse. Believing it to be Philemon, I wrapped my arms around it, holding on as if it were my own life that had escaped it. I ran a hand upward, thinking to touch Philemon’s rich hair, but what I found was thin and stubbly. I opened my eyes and looked, only to find that my hand rested in hair that shone silver in the wan light of the GPS. I stared into eyes that stared unseeing into the great beyond.

  Tom.

  – 34 –

  On the television screen in the hotel suite, space shuttle Endeavor loomed like a vague sentinel through the haze. The clock ticked down. A voiceover track announced the progress of the countdown. T minus one minute and counting … .

  Jack shifted from the place where he had been waiting patiently in the shadows. “Let’s step outside, Em. The sky is clear and still dark. We’ll be able to see it lift off.”

  “No. I don’t want to leave Faye.”

  Nancy spoke from her vigil at the other side of the bed, “She’s sleeping, Em. The doctors in the emergency room said she just needs to stay down and rest to hold onto that baby. You’ll wake her with all your fretting. I’ll stay with her.”

  Forty seconds …

  I touched Faye’s hand, listened to her breathe. Sometime in the next few hours she would awaken, and ask me how Tom had fared, and I would have to tell her that I had failed her. That the whole world had failed her, unable to come to peace.

  Jack pulled me gently toward the balcony adjacent to the room.

  Outside, it was clear and cool, the sea breeze ruffling at the palms. The lights of Fort Lauderdale were slowly dulling as the first tinges of dawn crept into the eastern sky.

  Through the open door, I could hear the sonorous voice pronounce the final countdown, that calm recitation of descending numbers, so familiar and yet still stunning after all these years: Ten … nine … eight …

  My heart pounded. All my life our hungering for weightless space had been a scene inside the box called television. But now, in spite of the shock and horror of the long night at sea, pounding relentlessly over the waves as my friend and teacher grew stiff and cold beside me, my heart lifted. I was witnessing the dream, one American among millions filled with pride.

  Seven … six … five … four …

  Tears filled my eyes. Faye, trying to hang onto the tiny life that dwelt within her. War is the tearing of families. War is good-byes left unsaid. I wanted to rise up like Endeavor until I found a vantage high enough from which to embrace, all at once, both the brightness of my hopes and the dark ambiguities of human existence.

  Three … two … one …

  Through the open door, I watched the monitor display the close-up of the ignition beneath the rockets. Streams of sparks spewed out into the blast of fuel. It set off a noise like a string of firecrackers, the reports too reminiscent of recent experience for comfort. I cringed.

  Jack tightened his grip around my shoulders.

  I tensed, uncertain how I felt about being enfolded in an embrace that had so recently extinguished a life.

  Jack read my feelings. He turned to the north and wrapped his strong arms around himself as the shuttle lifted off, a bright streak of intense light and vapor now appearing above the row of buildings and palm trees that formed the horizon, now accelerating, rising, rising, flying up through a cloud that turned incandescent. The craft climbed the hill toward the stars, escaping the bonds of Earth—

  “She did it,” Jack said with satisfaction. “I’ll be damned.”

  Generally the atmosphere is hazy; and this is caused by the falling of impalpably fine dust … The morning before we anchored at Porto Praya [Canary Islands], I collected a little packet of this brown-colored dust, which appears to have been filtered from the wind by the gauze of the vane at the masthead … I have found no less than fifteen different accounts of dust having fallen on vessels when far out in the Atlantic. From the direction of the wind when- ever it has fallen, and from its always having fallen during those months when the harmattan is known to raise clouds of dust high into the atmosphere, we feel certain that it all comes from Africa. The dust falls in such quantities as to dirty everything on board, and to hurt people’s eyes; vessels even have run on shore owing to the obscurity of the atmosphere. It has often fallen on ships when several hundreds, and even more than a thousand miles from the coast of Africa … I was much surprised to find particles of stone above the thousandth of an inch, mixed with finer matter. After this fact one need not be surprised at the diffusion of the far lighter and smaller sporules of cryptogrammic plants.

  —Charles Darwin, January 16, 1832, The Voyage of the Beagle

  One popular estimate says the Sahara hurls about 600 million tons of dust into the sky every year. Another estimate puts the annual cloud at a billion tons. At the lower rate a boxcar of Sahara dust would leave Africa about every four seconds. Every minute, sixteen cars. Every hour, a thousand. Day after day, year after year.

  —Hannah Holmes, The Secret Life of Dust

  Florida is an organism, and it is a poem. Both living organisms and poems are complexly evolved to fill a specific niche. They create a condensed system to efficiently transmit energy or a message. With time, they thoroughly organize themselves and slowly, they build a beautiful structure, like a crystal. Florida is a poem, from a scientific description, a technical haiku.

  Sand, clay, carbonate

  Transmit the liquid treasure

  We all drink it in

  —Ann Tihansky

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A disclaimer: Those who know the folks at the United States Geological Survey at St. Petersburg, Florida, might have a field day trying to identify real people from the fictional ones here portrayed. However, while the scientific investigations described herein are based on factual efforts underway at that location, each character is entirely my own invention, as are their personalities, motivations, and quirks. If any similarities occur, it is merely because humans vary only so much, and scientists vary from each other even less than do the extremes of the population at large. I did allow myself a few inside jokes, but please don’t sue me.

  Having said all that, I wish to acknowledge the groundbreaking work of Eugene A. Shinn, Dale Griffin, and Christina Kellogg, the nonfiction persons who discovered that microbes do in fact survive transoceanic trips inside clouds of dust. The author wishes therefore to thank and acknowledge the inspiration, assistance, badgering, and outright extortion wreaked upon her by that same Gene Shinn, geologist, U.S. Geological Survey Coastal Marine Branch, also coral-reef cognoscente, Key West conch, drummer, champion spear fisherman, and mixer of strong drink, whose singular and persistent idea it was that she drag her unwitting heroine out of her precious, arid Western landscape into the swamps of Florida in order to publicize and thereby advance his scientific agenda regarding the impact of African dust on coral reefs and human health. In concert, I wish to thank the sainted Pat Shinn for her gracious hospitality on s
o many occasions while her husband worked his mischief. I am grateful also to the rest of the staff of U.S. Geological Survey Center for Marine and Coastal Geology, principally Lisa Robbins, chief scientist; Ginger Garrison, ecologist; Dale Griffin and Christina Kellogg, microbiologists; and Robert Halley, geologist, for sharing their expertise and astonishingly durable humor. Thanks also to Walt Swain and Ann Tihansky, hydrologists, USGS Water Resources Discipline. May Congress bless you all with abundant funding.

  My deep and abiding thanks to Susan H. “She Who Understands Gardens” Oliver, ace cousin, and research pal, for assistance above and beyond the call and right out into the swamps in gathering materials and understandings for this book. Your instincts were, as always, impeccable.

  My sincere thanks also to Florida Assistant State Geologist Thomas M. Scott, for his memorable three-day crash field course in Florida geology and hydrology, and to Shirley Scott for fueling, housing, and counseling the troops.

  My geoscience thanks go also to Cinzia Cervato, Iowa State University, for her support in my understanding of the prehistory and geology of the Mediterranean region.

  Lifelong thanks go to Walt Whippo, kenetic engineer, lyricist, solver of the O-ring problem, designer of the IBM Selectric typewriter, kite maker, and painter of flying fruit, for illuminating certain engineering feats, and the inner workings and motivations of NASA, and for showing me a view of the box outside of which we all need to think (and which, he suggests, is in fact shaped like a doughnut).

  Munificent thanks go to Nancy Maynard of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for helping me attend plenary sessions on African dust and the launch of STS-100 (space-shuttle orbiter Endeavor), and to Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, former astronaut and currently CEO, COSI. I am awed.