The Tourist Trail

by John Yunker

  She gave him a quick smile, and in the end, she accepted the envelope. As she walked away, she looked back at him—briefly, but it was enough to give him hope.

  * * *

  Memories fade with time. Unless, of course, they are captured on tape, digitized, transcribed. Like an audio recording of the lecture, submitted anonymously to the judge, and entered into evidence. When Ethan returned to the witness stand, ready to forget everything that happened that night, or any night, the prosecutor handed him a transcript. He then pressed a button on a laptop connected to a speaker.

  Ethan’s heroic act was nullified by a tape recorder. Ethan could fault his brain for forgetting, but how could he argue with his voice on an MP3 file? And how could Adam Cosgrove argue with Ethan’s testimony?

  After the guilty verdict was delivered, Ethan tried to reach Annie. He left voice mails, sent emails. He told her of the guilt he was feeling—the one thing they now had in common. Eventually, she sent him an email. She said she needed time to sort things out, that she would get in touch when she was ready. He sent her one last reminder about the cruise.

  The best he could do would be to leave her be and meet her onboard the ship. There was nothing more left to do but wait. And he now knew that, faced with a life without her, he would wait as long as necessary.

  Robert

  During that first week on the boat with Noa, somewhere in the North Atlantic, Robert spent most days on his knees at the toilet. When he wasn’t there, he was alone in bed, wishing he had never come aboard, never joined the FBI. His body heaved with convulsions, as if trying to repel some strain of virus, in vain.

  Noa took pity on him, this runt named Jake who should never have been on the ship to begin with. She promised that he would adapt, that his body was only reacting to a force it did not understand. Eventually it would make peace with the motion, she told him.

  She wiped his forehead with a sponge, cleaned his face. She gave him a fresh t-shirt. She forced him to drink water every two hours. In the dark, she was a soothing voice, a warm hand on the back.

  She still believed he was nothing but a young idealist, a twenty-four-year-old with a passion for animals and the planet, and for her. At least that much was true: That first night, in the cramped bunk, legs intertwined, he threaded his fingers through her thick, dreadlocked hair and wished he never had to leave their bed. In her arms, his body found its peace, though he knew it couldn’t last.

  When he awoke the next morning, he wondered how he’d suddenly grown so frail. A man trained to kill other men, laid prone by a few waves.

  When he was Jake, his life was simple, and once his stomach stabilized, he found that he liked it. He was traveling to Norway to do battle with whalers—a crew member on the Eminence, the CDA’s first ship, financed by wealthy donors and outfitted with a helicopter to harass the whalers from above. As soon as he felt better, he joined the other five deckhands, all younger than he was. There was Tommy, a brooding, bearded loner with a smoker’s voice. Brandon, a carpenter and boyfriend of Carrie, the chef. The other three were buddies from the University of Illinois whom Noa called the Three Amigos, freshly graduated and looking for an adventure, or maybe an excuse not to get real jobs. She was the boss of all of them: Every day, she told them which decks to scrub, which walls to repaint. Once the others learned about Jake and Noa, they ribbed him every chance they got. And as Jake, he didn’t care. At night, under damp clenched sheets, her hips and back salty to his lips, he didn’t care about anything else.

  But when he was Robert, life was not so simple. First, there was his assignment—identify and arrest Darwin, an alias for the terrorist who had torched three mink farms in Idaho, after releasing the farms’ unwilling inhabitants. Dry winds had turned one of the blazes into a five-hundred-acre firestorm, taking down an entire subdivision and nearly killing two firemen.

  His boss, Gordon, was certain that Darwin had been a crew member on the Eminence—they had tracked an email linked to Darwin through a satellite data network—and he hedged his bets on Darwin sailing with the Eminence again. Norway was prepared to fast-track Darwin’s extradition to the U.S. on arson charges; all they needed now was a face to go with the alias, a body to go with the handcuffs.

  Robert had traveled light: his thrift-store clothes, a handgun hidden in his army duffel along with Jake’s authentically phony passport. The night before he boarded the ship, he’d contacted Gordon for what would be the last time in weeks. Gordon didn’t ask exactly how Robert got into the CDA, and Robert was not about to volunteer it. The Bureau did not permit agents to become intimately involved with those they were charged with investigating, although he learned years later that this rule wasn’t always enforced. The more close-knit the organization, the more difficult it was to infiltrate, and tactics were localized to the situation.

  To be an undercover, you must be good at telling lies, Gordon always said. And Robert was good, perhaps too good, especially when it came to lies of omission.

  Noa was not his usual type. Robert had grown up dating blond cheerleaders, prom queens. The ones who knew their way around the cosmetics counter at Nordstrom. But he was not Robert on this boat. He was Jake. Jake the vegan. Jake the nonconformist. And Noa was Jake’s type. She wore tunics and loose-fitting hemp dresses, the swaying fabric encouraging Robert’s imagination. Dreadlocks falling past her shoulders. Her skin a light brown and without defect, the skin of her mother, she said, who was from India. She’d been with the organization since its founding, and had made every mission once it acquired its ship: traveling to Iceland to battle the whalers, to the Galapagos to battle the longliners. She oversaw the deckhands, from menial chores to raising anchors to dropping Zodiacs in the water. She had the toughest job on board. While the bridge officers and engineers worked in shifts, the deck was always on call, and people always called on Noa first.

  She was as strong and sturdy as anyone on the ship, and bore all the stubbornness of her father, a onetime professional hockey player from Montreal. She drank and smoked, as comfortable at sea and with the crew as if she’d been born on board. Jake would have followed Noa to every corner of the earth she planned to visit.

  But Robert had a job to do, and once he gained his sea legs, he reluctantly went to work. He narrowed down his list of suspects: the mechanic, Randy; the first mate, Hudson; and Tommy, his primary suspect. Tommy was the explosives expert at CDA, and, after a long night of drinking, he told Robert why.

  “I was in charge of the Iceland operation,” he said. “We snuck on board and deposited Molotov cocktails in the storage holds of the four largest whaling vessels while the ships were in harbor and their crews asleep on land. By the time the coast guard arrived, it was too late. In one hour, we had taken out a third of the fleet.”

  Right then, Robert could have arrested Tommy, called the Norwegians, and gone home. But he wanted to be more certain that Tommy was Darwin; he wanted more evidence. At least, this was what he told himself. In truth, Robert didn’t want to go home. Not yet. And it wasn’t as if Darwin was going anywhere either. What would be the harm in waiting?

  Most of all, waiting meant few extra weeks with Noa. Robert felt himself steadily, inevitably slipping deeper and deeper into character. One evening, Aeneas joined everyone in the galley with a bottle of whiskey. Until then Robert hadn’t seen much of Aeneas, but he could tell that he was in a mood. Their helicopter pilot, Aeneas grumbled, had the flu. “Guess I’ll have to take her up,” he said.

  “Like hell you will,” Noa said. “You can’t fly that thing.”

  “I can fly it,” Robert said.

  “You?” Noa asked. “Where did you learn to fly?”

  “My dad was a pilot. He taught me years ago.”

  Aeneas squinted at him. “Did he teach you how to land on the back of a galloping ship in thirty knot winds?”

  The next day, the crew gathered around the upper deck to watch Rob
ert’s audition. The bird was an aging Robinson two-seater, suitable for covering traffic in L.A., but highly questionable for navigating the high seas of the north Atlantic. Yet Robert had little trouble lifting off the deck and landing again—and days later, he was the one, on a clear windy morning off the coast of Spitsbergen, who sighted their first Norwegian whaler, the MV Nørstad. The ship, loaded down with two whale carcasses, one hanging from each side, appeared to be close to killing a third.

  The crew went into battle mode and quickly caught up to the whalers. Although the Nørstad was twice their ship’s size, Aeneas brought the Eminence diagonally in front of its path, both ships blaring horns. As long as the Nørstad changed course, there would be no collision. But the Nørstad did not change course.

  The moment of impact seemed to happen in slow motion, with the deck of the Eminence heaving to the left as the Nørstad ground into it. Tommy manned a water cannon and drenched the Nørstad’s bridge while Robert and the others tossed smoke bombs onto their deck. The Nørstad veered right and pulled away, taking along with it an indentation and blue paint chips from the hull of the Eminence. The Nørstad fled at full speed, and the chase was on.

  Tommy lowered a Zodiac into the water. His goal was to toss a length of barbed wire in front of the Nørstad, disabling its propellers. The idea of attacking a three-hundred-foot ice-strengthened vessel with an inflatable boat and some sharp wire seemed nothing short of martyrdom. Yet Robert was first in line to man the bow and toss out the prop fouler. At that moment, he wasn’t sure whether he was simply authenticating his role, or whether the adrenaline he felt was due to something else. The more time he spent with Noa, the more blurry the lines between crime and mercy became.

  Robert held the heavy gauge, razor-barbed wire in his gloved hands as Tommy piloted the Zodiac. They careened off the wake of the Nørstad, but Tommy kept the nose on target. They soon pulled parallel with the ship. Water drenched them from above; the Nørstad also had a water cannon. When Robert looked up he saw the whale, dangling by a chain around its tail, its nose underwater, blood streaming from its belly and jaw. Its eye was still open and a flipper trembled.

  “They let ’em bleed out first,” Tommy said.

  At that moment, everything disappeared: the FBI, the job he had to do, even Noa—everything but the whale struggling before him. Robert wished he had his handgun on him; he wanted to put this poor animal out of its misery, and even take a few Norwegians with it.

  Tommy swerved the Zodiac into the path of the ship, and Robert threw out the prop fouler. They followed the ship for a few minutes, but the Nørstad continued on without pause. The device had failed.

  And when Robert returned to the ship, he was no longer playing Jake, the environmental activist; he was Jake, the environmental activist. He climbed up onto the helicopter pad, put on his helmet, and started the engine. He could see Noa waving him down from the lower deck. She would be saying that it was too windy, that the waves were too high to land safely, and she would be right. But before she could get to him, Robert had cranked up the blades until the helipad shook. The noise was deafening. He had taken up the helicopter just twice on this trip, in calmer waters, but he could not let that whaler alone. He waited until the Eminence crested a large wave before pulling off the pad, careful to ascend quickly.

  It took Robert just a few minutes to catch up to the Nørstad by air. He circled the ship like a hawk, looking for a weakness of some kind, trying to figure out what he could do to slow it down. He moved up a few hundred yards ahead of the ship, descended and then ran straight for the bridge—as if he were on a suicide mission.

  As he got closer he could see the men in there, mouths shouting, eyes wide. For a second Robert considered following through, taking this dicing blade right into that bridge and taking as many bodies and arms and legs as he could—fitting retribution for their torture of that whale. But then he thought of Noa, and he veered right at the last moment. And even as he returned to the Eminence, even as he struggled to land while the ship bounced over strong waves, he could see only the whale’s large unblinking eye gazing at him.

  Once Robert was back on board, they tried to return to the Nørstad, but the whaling ship had disappeared, and its size and speed was no match for the Eminence. Aeneas tried for several hours to locate it again, to no avail.

  So they headed farther north, well past the northern reaches of Norway, hoping to locate other whalers, to interrupt another hunt. They circumnavigated the islands of Svalbard without any luck, refueled at Longyearben, Svalbard’s only port, and continued north, with nothing but ice between them and the North Pole.

  The journey was long, and in the rare moments when neither of them was working, Robert and Noa would escape to her cabin, stay naked in bed for as long as they could, slivers of the midnight sun breaking through the porthole.

  “You’re kissing infinity,” she said when he placed his lips on her right wrist.

  “Why’d you get this tattoo?”

  “To remind myself every day that anything is possible,” she said. “It’s so easy to be depressed when you see the things we see. You can be a vegan to save the world, or you can be a vegan to make the world a less sucky place to live.”

  It was moments like these in which Noa talked the most. She told him everything about CDA, about the crew, about Aeneas. Robert worried that the FBI agent in him was all too obvious as he asked question after question: What were the histories of the first mate, the second mate, the chief engineer, the head chef, the nurse? Yet Noa must have seen all his questions as innocent curiosity, or passion for the cause; she answered every one.

  Robert had begun to hope that Tommy was not Darwin, that Darwin was not on board at all. If Darwin were revealed, Robert would have to make the arrest, turn the boat around—and Noa would exit his life as quickly as she’d entered. So many ifs, with seemingly no way to avoid the inevitable, the heartbreaking inevitable.

  “What will you do after this trip?” he asked her.

  “Find a job for a few months,” she said. “Until Galapagos. You want to come?”

  He moved his face toward hers, pulled back the worn sheets, and kissed her olive skin from the base of her breasts to the infinity sign and back again.

  * * *

  One night, when things were slow and Robert was waiting for Noa to join him on the rear deck to look at the stars, he heard a noise and looked up. Aeneas stood there, a half-empty bottle of bourbon in his hand. The ship was cruising along at a steady pace, the seas calm, the polar ice cap less than twenty nautical miles to the north. He sat next to Robert and extended the bottle. “Join me in taming the sea.”

  Robert obliged, then handed the bottle back. Aeneas poured a good amount of liquor down his own throat, then stared out at the water, eyes glazed, appearing lost within himself. Noa had said once that Aeneas was best avoided in times of heavy drinking, when his anger toward the world, usually so well directed toward its intended targets, spilled over onto anyone within range. Last year, near Heard Island, south of Australia, Aeneas had been drinking when the Eminence drew alongside a pirate fishing trawler that was pulling in longlines studded with a bycatch of sharks and penguins. Aeneas boarded the ship and grabbed the long line, sending one of the three-inch hooks through the captain’s right hand. The pirate fishermen made a quick and silent exit. Now, Robert could smell the alcohol wafting from Aeneas’s pores and glanced around to make sure there were no sharp objects within reach.

  “You need me to do anything else?” Robert asked.

  “Tell me what the hell you’re doing on my boat besides banging Noa.”

  “I’m just a volunteer.”

  “And I’m just a sailor.”

  “I’m not sure what you want to know.”

  “I want to know what a helicopter pilot with the nerves of a marine is doing on my ship. And don’t give me that wanderlust crap you fed everyone else. Eve
ry person on this boat has a reason for being here. Maybe they’re running from something, or maybe they’re running toward something. Maybe they’re trying to make amends. But nobody is here by chance.”

  Robert took another drink and handed the bottle back to Aeneas. While Aeneas sucked down the last of the bourbon, Robert’s mind raced, desperate for an authentic-sounding story, something to get him out of this situation before it turned dangerous. But he wasn’t prepared, so he found himself resorting to a worst case scenario: the truth.

  “Does guilt count?” Robert asked.

  “Guilt? Guilt makes the world go ’round.”

  “You want to know why I’m here. When I was a senior in high school, I lived alone with my mom and our two dogs. One night, the dogs cornered an opossum in our basement stairwell. The dogs scared it into this coffee can-sized drain at the bottom of the stairs. Only the drain had a cap on the bottom, which left the opossum stuck there with his angry hissing head sticking out. It was late, and the dogs were waking up the whole neighborhood, and here I was trying to play man of the house. I poked at that animal with a stick, then a steel rod, then a sharper stick. Then a knife. I stabbed it three times in that thick back, until blood began to leak out. Nothing worked. It would not move. I should have let it alone and it would have gone on home. But the dogs were driving my mom insane, and I was cursing this thing now, getting angrier and angrier. And then I got this ridiculous idea. I figured that animals were scared of fire. I poured a tiny amount of lighter fluid on its fur and I had the hose all ready to go and I tossed a match.”

  “What happened?”

  “He didn’t move. He just stayed there, on fire. He sat there, ignoring every instinct, burning to death. Perhaps his fear instinct was stronger than his fire instinct. I rushed to douse the fire but by then half his fur was gone, and the whole place smelled like burned flesh. He was hissing and he looked up at me and he turned his head from side to side in slow motion. I kept yelling at him because now he was dying on me and he still wouldn’t leave. I should have put him out of his misery right then. But I didn’t have a gun, and I didn’t have the heart to stab him any more. I found an old trunk in the basement and I put on some old winter gloves and I picked him up, what’s left of his fur still smoldering, the poor thing hissing, and put him in the trunk and put it in a dumpster in an old industrial park near my house. For weeks I had nightmares. I could see him still, hissing, alone, in that trunk, that poor animal. What did I do to him? I tortured him, and I didn’t have the courage to put him out of his misery.” Robert felt tears welling up. “But he had courage,” he added, thankful for the darkness. “He never stopped hissing at me.”