Prologue

Liberia September 2003

There was this … ping.

A single, solitary noise that announced itself in the key of C – ping! – and that was that. The noise came from somewhere in the back, at the rear of the fuselage, and for a moment it reminded Mike Burke of his brother’s wedding. It was the sound his father made at the rehearsal dinner, announcing a toast by tapping his glass with a spoon.

Ping!

It was funny, if you thought about it.

But that wasn’t it. Though the helicopter was French (in fact, a single-rotor Ecureuil B2), it was not equipped with champagne flutes. The sound signaled something else, like the noise a tail rotor makes when one of its blades is struck with a 9mm roundsnaps in half and flies away. Or so Burke imagined. Ping!

Frowning, he turned to the pilot, a Kiwi named Rubini. “Did you –?”

The handsome New Zealander grinned. “No worries, bugalugs!” Suddenly, the chopper yawed violently to starboard, roaring into a slide and twisting down. Rubini’s face went white and he lunged at the controls. Burke gasped, grabbing the armrests on his seat.

In an instant, his life – his whole life – passed before his eyes against a veering background of forest and sky. One by one, a thousand scenes played out as the helicopter tobogganed down an invisible staircase toward a wall of trees.

In the few seconds it took to fall five hundred feet, Burke remembered every pet he’d ever had, every girl he’d kissed, every house apartment teacher friend and landscape he’d ever seen. Candyland and Monopoly. Christmas lights and incense, Chet Baker and the stalls along the Seine. His past washed over him in a wave, and kept on coming. As the helicopter sawed through the air, he remembered the dawn coming up behind Adam’s Peak, and the three-point shot he’d taken against Park High, the way it rattled the rim with two seconds left on the clock – and the celebration that followed. A shit-shot, yes, but … thank you, Jesus!

His mother’s face appeared like a curtain of rain between his seat and the altimeter, while lines of long-forgotten poetry ran through his head and the smell of gardenias – gardenias? – filled the cockpit.

The pilot yelling. Or not quite yelling … screaming. The pilot is screaming, Burke thought.

Not that there was anything Burke could do about it. They were going down fast – plummeting really – and only a miracle could save them. Burke didn’t believe in miracles, so he sat where he was, listening spellbound as a voice in the back of his head recited notes for an obituary:

Michael Lee Burke …

27-year-old Virginia native …

award-winning photographer …

crashed and burned …

50 miles from the border of Sierra Leone …

will be much missed …

As the helicopter’s undercarriage scraped the tops of the trees, Burke saw his future telescope from fifty years to five seconds. Still, the memories came – only now, he was almost up to date.

Last night, he’d gone out drinking with Rubini. And they’d ended up singing karaoke at the Mamba Point Hotel. Burke sang “California Stars” to the hoots of some UNMIL types, but he must have done all right because he went home with a Slav agronomist named Ursula who was reliably said to be the last natural blonde in Monrovia. She was probably still asleep in his room, just as he’d left her, arm crooked above her head on the pillow, like a movie star swooning for the cameras.

As a blizzard of vegetation slammed into the windshield, Burke had an epiphany. A 9mm round wasn’t going to kill him. What was going to kill him was a tidal wave of bad karma brought on by years of photographing people in extremis. Whatever his intentions, however benign they might have been – to expose, to explain – the simple reality was that he’d made his living on other people’s despair.

The more painful the images in the photographs he took, the better they sold. That fact did something to a person. The favelas in Rio, the orphanage in Bucharest, the red-light district in Calcutta – he thought he’d been doing a public service when in reality it had all been a kind of well-intended voyeurism.

And now today, barely a week before his twenty-eighth birthday, he was on his way to take pictures at a refugee camp for children who’d suffered amputations in the diamond wars.

Except … he wasn’t going to make it. He wasn’t going anywhere but down.

The helicopter dug deeper into the canopy of the forest and Burke wordlessly realized he’d never again take another photograph. One way or another, he was done with that.

Jesus!

Something came through the windshield with a crash and Rubini’s forehead exploded, sending a spray of blood and brains through the cockpit. Burke caught a mouthful as the chopper meteored through the trees, bucking, plunging, falling like a box of tools, slamming finally into the waterlogged earth of a swamp.

So this, Burke thought, is what it’s like to be dead … But that didn’t make much sense. If you were dead, you didn’t feel dead. So maybe he was dying. That made more sense because he felt as if every bone in his body was broken. He tasted blood in his mouth. He was shaking. And the world was turning, slowly, round and round.

His eyes flew open and he realized what was happening. The helicopter was revolving on its axis like a bluebottle fly in its death throes. The overhead rotor slashed at the water, the earth, and the trees, then flew apart like a grenade, sending shrapnel in every direction.

The engine coughed, spluttered, and whined, showering sparks through the cockpit.

With great difficulty, Burke fumbled with his seat belt. Even the smallest movement was painful. His body was a bag of broken glass and thorns. And he was covered with blood. It ran down the side of his face, and his shoulders were soaked.

But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t just blood. He took a deep breath, and choked on it.

Aviation fuel!

His fingers tore at the seat belt, but even as it popped open, he realized it was too late. A soft whump announced the fuel’s ignition and, in an instant, the cockpit was engulfed. His shirt went off like a flare and, for a moment, it seemed as if the side of his head was on fire. Stumbling and falling, he erupted out of the cockpit, tearing the shirt off his chest, staggering blindly until a fallen log caught his foot and spilled him into a pool of shallow water.

Where he lay for hours or days, delirious and suppurating. Incredibly, his burns attracted the attention of bees, who fed on the clear liquid oozing from his skin. Occasionally, he rose to consciousness, only to faint dead away. It was the pain, of course. That and the sight of the apiary embedded in his chest.

Bad karma? Oh, yeah …