9 HALLUCINATION

Near Ostional, Costa Rica

May 17

0700 hours

“Does that beach look weird to you?” Mike asked.

I focused on the horizon, squinting into the rising sun.

Mike and I had been trading shifts steering the life raft east all night, although Mike had taken the bigger share, as I was wiped out from nearly dying. I had caught sight of land on my shift, and when I had roused Mike to inform him, he had leapt to his feet and danced with elation. It was a gorgeous stretch of coastline, rolling hills covered with green jungle, but it was only now, as we got closer, that we realized something was wrong with the beach.

“It looks like it’s moving,” I said.

“Oh good.” Mike heaved a sigh of relief. “I thought I might have been hallucinating. Like from scurvy or one of those other pirate diseases.”

“Maybe we’re both hallucinating.” I kept my eyes fixed on the beach, worried about my own mental health. The entire stretch of land seemed to be alive. It was shifting slowly, a thousand different pieces moving in different directions at once, like a jigsaw puzzle that was assembling itself.

I was pretty sure you couldn’t get scurvy after only a few hours at sea, but I was wondering if some other trauma from the night had fried my brain somehow. Or maybe it was my eyes that weren’t working properly. They were definitely stinging from all the exposure to salt water. I had hesitated to use any of our drinking water to rinse them, fearing that my calculations might be off and that we’d be drifting at sea for weeks. But now that we were in sight of land, I felt we could spare some fresh water, so I poured it into my cupped palm and flushed my eyes with it. Then I looked back at the beach.

It was still moving.

By now, however, we were closer, and I could see it a little better. Enough to realize that it wasn’t the sand moving around on the beach at all. Instead, it looked like individual rocks were moving around by themselves. Rocks the size of Thanksgiving turkeys.

This didn’t make me feel any better about my mental state.

Mike seemed equally concerned. “Where do you think we are, exactly?” he asked.

“I’m guessing northern Costa Rica.”

“I don’t know too much about Costa Rica. Is it usual for the rocks to wander around here?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Rats. I think we’ve gone loopy.”

I nodded agreement—but then realized what we were looking at.

“They’re turtles!” I exclaimed. “Sea turtles! They must be coming ashore to lay their eggs!”

“Whoa,” Mike said, realizing I was right. “There must be thousands of them!”

That was my estimate as well. Part of the reason I’d had so much trouble grasping what was happening on the beach was that I had no idea that so many sea turtles could be in one place at one time. But there they were. The beach was literally crawling with turtles.

The closer we came, the better we could see them. Their shells were smooth and brownish green, while the beach was an unusually dark brown. Since the turtles were built for swimming, they only had stubby little fins instead of legs, which made it extremely difficult for them to move on land. And yet, they needed to come ashore to lay their eggs, so they were slowly dragging themselves out of the water, fighting their way up the beach, digging holes, filling them with eggs, covering them up, and flopping back down into the water again. The whole process looked like an ordeal, every inch of ground a struggle. The turtles were as slow and awkward on land as I had been when floundering in the water.

Now I noticed that the ocean around us was also full of turtles, some making their way to land, others heading back to sea. It was like sea turtle rush hour. So many shells were poking through the surface, it seemed as though we could walk to land atop them.

In the water, the turtles were far more graceful and considerably faster—although just about anything was more graceful and faster than a sea turtle on land.

However, as amazing as the spectacle was, what we really needed in that moment was civilization. We had to find a phone, get some help, and figure out how to return to our ship. But as luck would have it, we had come upon the least-inhabited span of coastline I had ever seen. There was nothing but sand, jungle, and turtles.

“Maybe we should head south,” I suggested. “There must be a town somewhere close by.”

“I hope so.” There was a touch of worry in Mike’s voice. “We’re running low on gas.” He turned the boat down the coast, and we motored slowly along the shoreline, trying to conserve our fuel and avoid running over any turtles.

We had only gone a few minutes before the motor conked out. It gave a cough and a wheeze and then sputtered into silence.

“Aw, come on!” Mike pounded the motor angrily. “Don’t leave us stranded here in TurtleTown!”

“Look!” I exclaimed, pointing ahead of us.

We had just rounded a bend in the shoreline, revealing a whole new stretch of beach. About a half mile away was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen: a seaplane. It was docked in the ocean beside a speedboat at the end of a long, lonely pier that extended across the beach. At the opposite end of the pier, perched atop a thickly jungled cliff, was a large, modern house. There were no other homes, or any sign of civilization at all, in sight. The house was as secluded as houses could be.

Between us and the pier were a few thousand more sea turtles.

The walls of the house facing the ocean were mostly glass, allowing us to see that the lights were on inside.

“Someone’s home!” I exclaimed. “We can get help!”

“You might want to put your clothes on first,” Mike advised me.

I was still wrapped in the emergency blanket, as my clothes were wet and briny. But Mike had a point; when seeking the help of strangers, it was always a good idea to not be naked. So I pulled my wet and tattered pirate outfit back on. I had no way to see my reflection but suspected that I looked like someone who had recently been keelhauled. But that was still slightly more presentable than I had been when naked.

The water was shallow below us, so we hopped out of the life raft, dragged it ashore, and dropped its anchor on the sand to keep it from floating out to sea. Then we started across the beach, wending our way through the swarm of sea turtles.

This took some time, as I was battered and tired, and it was really hard to avoid stepping on turtles, because they were everywhere. Furthermore, the turtles weren’t trying to avoid us at all. I had expected that our presence would make them skittish, but they didn’t seem to care about Mike and me in the slightest. They kept flopping right into our path, forcing us to take a serpentine route. It was like walking across a minefield where the mines were actively trying to get in our way. Plus, we couldn’t walk over any of the newly laid eggs for fear of crushing them. Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to see where the nests were, as they were covered with little mounds of freshly turned sand. So we cautiously wove around them all.

The turtles themselves weren’t showing each other nearly as much respect. They clambered right over the sand mounds and one another, even if the others happened to be in the process of laying eggs, with no respect for anyone’s privacy at all.

“What do you think our plan should be?” I asked, zigzagging through a phalanx of sea turtles.

“Let’s just be honest,” Mike suggested. “We knock on the door, tell them we’re CIA, and say that we have an emergency and need a ride on their plane to get back to the ship.”

“They’ll never believe that. We’re only teenagers.”

“We have official badges.” Mike fished his out of the folds of his costume. “I’m sure this will work. Costa Rica is a peaceful country. They like Americans here. In fact, tons of Americans retire in Costa Rica. For all we know, the owner of this house is one of them.”

I realized Mike had a point. Some of my parents’ friends from our old neighborhood had recently retired somewhere in Costa Rica, claiming that the land was cheap and the country was wonderful.

As we neared the house, it became evident that whoever lived there had a lot of money. The house was bigger than I had realized and looked as though it must have been quite expensive to build. It was all windows and balconies and was cantilevered over the edge of the cliff. There was even a swimming pool built directly into the cliff face, so that one side was a wall of glass, apparently so that they could even have a view of the ocean while swimming. A long, switchbacking staircase descended to the beach from the house, although there also turned out to be an elevator built into the cliff.

Three men emerged from said elevator at the far end of the pier. They were all big men, wearing suits, which seemed wrong for the weather and the location. They looked like locals, rather than expatriates, and they made a beeline toward us. Or as much of a beeline as one could make across a beach filled with turtles.

“They don’t look happy to see us,” I observed.

“We’re on their property,” Mike reassured me confidently. “They’re probably wondering what’s going on. Relax. We’ve got nothing to worry about.”

The men had either overheard us speaking English, or they simply assumed that we weren’t locals, because the biggest of them spoke to us in English as well. He was almost as brawny and imposing as Bjorn Turok. “Hey!” he barked as they approached. “Be careful around all those turtles! They’re endangered!”

“We are being careful!” Mike responded pleasantly. Although in that moment, he was so busy watching the men that he stumbled over a turtle that had blundered into his path.

“Doesn’t look like you’re being careful,” the big man said. “What are you even doing on this beach? This is private property!”

“We didn’t mean to trespass. This was an emergency.” Mike held out his CIA badge for the men to see. “We’re CIA, and—”

That was as far as he got. Because the moment the men heard “CIA” they snapped guns out of their belts and aimed them at us.

“Oops,” Mike said quietly, his confidence draining. “I guess we might have something to worry about after all.”