“All right,” Billie Shears said as she looked at the two men in the communications center back in Cold Storage. Off on the horizon the lights of the prison were a bubble rising up into the night. “I am authorized by the president of the United States to release both of you. That’s both, if just one of you takes us to the missing warhead. Right now. This deal is available right now, and right now only. You have as long as it takes for me to explain it. If you both say yes, you can both go free if the bomb is found. If one of you says no, you both go back to the prison right now and don’t go free no matter if the bomb is found or not. Right now, gentlemen.”
She took a moment and retied her hair. She was met with silence. In the distance helicopters chuffed through the night with their lights blinking. Waves washed under the wharf. Ali Wild Horses was sitting quietly, looking down at his shoes. Blood dripped down his face from some fresh injury. He looked up at them, his eyes watering from the smoke; his shirt was ripped, and there was matted blood in his hair. Everyone looked at him for a long moment that clung in the air until at least a minute had passed.
“All right, let’s go. Back to the boat.” Shears looked at one of the dozen guards behind them. “Cuff them up. Their old cells will be cleared in a matter of minutes and ready for both of them.” Jasper was standing behind her, looking rumpled with his shirt untucked and his pants ripped out at both knees. His tie was loosened down to the middle of his unbuttoned shirt. His glasses were on crooked. He had no coffee cup in his hand and he did not look happy.
One of the officers put cuffs on Gloomy and Wild Horses, but in front, indicating there was more talking left to do. Neither of the guards jerked the prisoners to their feet.
“Yes,” Gloomy said, “all right. Yes. I don’t believe you, but I’ll take a walk around. I have no idea where to find anything but . . . yes. Only, I want my cousin moved to a good hospital. I want him part of the deal, too. Otherwise, no.” Gloomy looked at Shears. “You are responsible for fucking him up. If he was conscious he would be offered the same deal and you know it.”
Wild Horses cleared his throat and spoke: “He should be moved to the head trauma unit in Bethesda, Maryland, where the US government and Harvard University are doing the most cutting-edge work on neurological repair: nanotechnology and embryonic cell regeneration. They do extensive neurotherapy. Best in the world. That should be his deal. As if he were a hero of your great war against the Koreans.” Wild Horses looked at Shears, then at Gloomy. “Make that part of the deal.”
“Yes. That’s what I want. All that,” Gloomy said without pausing.
“Okay . . .” Shears said, “I’ll authorize it, but only when we find the bomb. Now, what about you?” She was looking at Wild Horses.
“I want the record to reflect the truth.”
“You are a terrorist. You are a murderer.”
“None of that is true. I wanted to keep the weapon out of the hands of the Iranians.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t care what you believe. That is the truth. The Iranians infiltrated your prison population long ago.”
“What did they want with the bomb?”
“I think they were interested to know if it would blow up. They designed it for the Koreans in the first place.”
“What were you going to do with a bomb?”
“What does anyone in the twenty-first century do with an unexploded thermonuclear bomb? I was going to establish a free state. Maybe I was going to establish the free state of Palestine? Maybe I wanted to establish the free state of the Lakota people in the Black Hills? I didn’t have time to think about it. They literally just fell into my lap. But I never detonated a bomb. I never killed anyone. I never planned a kidnapping. The Iranians and the boat crew did that. I want a full pardon. You say yes to that, and we will go. If the bomb is where I left it, I will take you to it right now.”
“When did you find out about the second bomb?” Billie Shears asked.
“My brother Ishmael came to me with the first bomb. He said his cousin had found it. He took us to where he found it. Ishmael had dug it up and out of the muck. We moved it down into the woods. Later I went back to cover our tracks. I didn’t want anyone following the drag marks. I was mucking around in the lake and on my last pass, my stick hit a metal object, and it was some strapping that led to the mother.”
“What did you want with the mother?”
“As I said, what does anyone want with a bigger thermonuclear device that falls into your lap? All I knew is that it meant independence for a marginalized people: a place at the table. That’s what it meant to the Pakistanis, the actual people of India and Israel, of North Korea.”
“Why not give it to the Iranians?”
Wild Horses shook his head. “The Iranians would just sell it to some other repressive state like the North Koreans, and once it was clear their missiles didn’t work the Americans would roll over them like a steamroller.”
“You didn’t have a missile, either.” Billie Shears smiled knowingly.
“It was a big first step, though.” He paused and looked kindly at her. “Ms. Shears, we can sit here and chat as long as you like, but are you going to give me that piece of paper?”
“Yes, I will do that.” Billie pulled out a sheet of paper with a presidential seal. She wrote on the bottom of the page with a heavy silver pen, “With a full pardon of all charges.” She had another letter for Gloomy and took several moments to write out the specifics of Ishmael’s release. Then she handed the papers to both of them for signature.
Ali Wild Horses looked at Billie Shears and said, “I don’t believe a word you say in this agreement, so let me ask you one more thing.”
“You are pushing it, fella.”
“Just this, why a deal for both of us?” Wild Horses stared at her without a smile.
“Saves time. We knew you weren’t in it together but knew you wouldn’t sell Gloomy out if he was going to represent Ishmael. Clock’s ticking,” Shears said, and handed each of the bloody men a cheap ballpoint pen. They both signed the official papers.
“Let’s go.” Billie Shears motioned to the phalanx of men behind her, and they began to move out.
The rain had stopped and the wind was blowing hard up the inlet. The hemlock and spruce trees were waving their limbs around like frantic schoolchildren in the dark. Men surrounded the inmates in their tattered prison uniforms. The prisoners were uncuffed and unshackled. They walked almost like free men, their backs straight and their arms swinging. Ali Wild Horses asked for a flashlight, then asked if anyone had an aerial photograph of the area. Men dug in satchels and several appeared in front of him, then suddenly a powerful light was in the warrior’s hand.
“Thank you,” he said with genuine dignity. He stared at the photograph, then cast the beam of the light around. “That’s north, yes?”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “What are we looking for?”
“You are looking for me to take you there,” the still young-looking man said, and off he walked with the clatter of all the white soldiers following him.
“I’m not going to be any help with this. Can I go see my dad?” Gloomy asked.
“I’ll take him,” Plays with His Face said, and Shears nodded.
The two former cellmates walked down the boardwalk toward Gloomy’s old house.
Ali stormed over past the bunkhouse of the cold storage and into the woods by the road cut near the dump. Back in the 1990s, when the new road to the dump had been built, there was a shortage of shot rock in Cold Storage, and no one wanted to blow a new rock pit down, so they buried container vans along the side hill to support the new road. Container vans transported supplies via rail and truck and then ferried them from the Lower 48 to Alaska villages. They were like the fifty-five-gallon drums of the late twentieth century. They lay scattered all over bush Alaska because they were rarely sent back. So, along the hill beneath the road was a row of partially buried vans that had been used to support the surface of the narrow street to the dump. Each van was made of thick metal and only had one door for loading. One of these container vans had a door that looked accessible. This van, the one you could walk into, blocked the door of the next big metal container. Ali walked into the first container.
“We have checked all through this stuff,” one of the officers said.
“It’s not in here.” Ali jerked the door and walked into the dank container and all the way to the end. At the far back wall, he asked for a crowbar and one appeared. He pried a panel off the back wall, which provided access to a panel to the next container van. “It wasn’t supposed to be Fort Knox.” He looked at Jasper, who was coming along in the shadows. “It was supposed to get vaporized. We worked on this for a while. I had some friends in here for a couple of days. I got things squared away, and when I heard SEAL teams charging up here, I just turned knobs and connected wires, then ran out. Left everything. I was storing it. I left it rigged in case I was captured.”
“Why didn’t you trade for this one?” Shears asked.
“I was informed it had been found by the Iranians. When it didn’t detonate, I assumed that was the truth and they had it.”
The last panel had some holes around the edges. When he pried it open, a wet, acidic smell of nitrogen and mold wafted toward them: rotten food, urine, unmistakable animal funk. “Gentlemen . . . this is where I left the North Korean bomb.” He gestured like a maître d’ toward the entrance.
Technicians with lights and toolboxes walked past him. Shears and Wild Horses followed. Men with guns stood by protecting them, for some inexplicable reason.
“Jesus Christ,” Jasper said.
Wild Horses walked toward the cylinder he had left behind in the makeshift crate so many years ago. Mouse shit and dead squirrels covered the ground. There were moldy humps on the floor that had once been loaves of bread, desiccated rotten fruit, and perfectly fine-looking cans of processed meat. Ali looked over Jasper’s shoulder at the shrunken corpse of a bloated mouse. The fat mouse had bitten into the plastic and wires, where someone with greasy fingers had wrapped a connection, and the battery had fried it to perdition and shorted out the timer, causing it to connect only intermittently.
The timer was stopped at five hours and twenty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds. As they watched, a little spark flashed and the fat mouse jiggled when the timer advanced one second. As if out of pure spite, two more seconds ticked off, then the timer stayed still.
“Why, that little pig!” Ali Wild Horses said aloud.
Nix had lost track of time. The box was collapsing down on top of her and the smell of her urine was sweet to her now. It was something other than intertidal sand.
She had begun to feel drops of water on her face, and gradually there was a steady trickle down the air hole. She heard waves close in, and her chest heaved as she sucked in air.
She hadn’t even dared to consider that the sound she heard was digging. She assumed the chomping clatter above her was rocks rolling loose in the waves. She was approaching the calmness that overtakes the nearly dead, when she heard the voice so clear it almost seemed a familiar friend:
“There is nothing to worry about. There is no need to fear or struggle. Life is exactly as long as it is. All the rest is desire and imagination. Hush. You will not suffer. Hush. You will feel the light soon enough.”
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the face of Christ. His dripping-wet beard standing in the waves above her. His strong hands digging into the wet sand. What would she say to Jesus in those first moments? She had no idea, but her eyes were full of warm tears. She felt, she supposed, the way He must have felt before He left this earth. It was a wonderful feeling, as if she were lifting out of this box and into a bright rotunda.
Then she heard the metal ring of a shovel hitting stone and felt the pressure of something scraping on the top of the collapsed wooden box. Then the air pipe moved as someone wrenched it back and forth.
Here is Jesus, she thought. Here He is, the Son of God, and I will rise up and He will hug me fiercely and we will be in that place where there will always be enough time . . . and enough room.
The top of the box broke away. Water and mud gushed down on top of her dress. Her hands pushed up reflexively. Daylight spilled down on her chest. Air, water, and mud began filling up the hole. She raised her arms to Jesus. She raised her hand, wanting to be borne up into heaven. She was crying out in a language she didn’t know. She was spitting sand and water from her mouth and uttering unformed words of praise and gratitude.
His hands pulled on her forearms. His large, strong hands, the savior’s hands, pulled her up out of her box and into the light of a beach on a small island. She was crying and shaking, and she wanted to hug the body of Jesus Christ, her savior. She wanted to tell Him how much she loved Him and how grateful she was that He had finally come. But when she did, she opened her eyes and stared in disbelief.
“We made it, Auntie,” said the man with the gasoline on his clothes. “I’m sorry I made you wait.”
She wiped her tears and the mud from her eyes and looked at the man who dug her up.
It was Ishmael Muhammad, and standing next to him was her husband, Clive McCahon. Ishmael had left the yacht before it blew up, found Clive, and found the air hole in the tideflat before the tide had reclaimed the beach.
The night they found the dead mouse that had defused the bomb, Nix heard that someone had seen Gloomy get off a boat in town. She asked every prison worker she saw where he was, and she had gotten no answers. She was furious and desperately agitated with the prison authorities. They weren’t telling her anything.
As she walked up the stairs to see Clive, she took her coat off and threw it in the corner. There was Gloomy standing by Clive’s bed. He was thin, his clothes were torn. Someone, Lilly probably, had given him one of Clive’s old sweaters. It had been seven years since she had seen the thin man with the battered face. The man who was her son, the man who had killed her daughter and had been a part of her being buried in the ground for those interminable hours.
Once it was clear that Gloomy had not actually died in the explosion at the construction site, the DA had come to her. Nix told the district attorney that her house would, in all probability, be the last place in the world he would come. She had not written him, spoken with him, or visited him during the years of his confinement.
One enterprising young detective tried to plumb the depths of her psyche by saying, “You think of your son as dead then?” And Nix had snapped back at him, “No, detective. My daughter is dead. My son is locked away in a place I never want to go.” The detective had changed his line of questioning and had suggested they were in possession of secret communications they would use to implicate Nix if she didn’t cooperate with them in the recapture effort. Nix knew with a certainty that was deeper than the aching in her bones that this was not true. She had not communicated with the man who had been her son after her daughter had died, and she wanted him captured as much as anyone, so she let the police tap her phones and set up surveillance on her house.
In the last seven years Nix had done hundreds of hours of therapy. She was so familiar with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that she could recite them quickly and convincingly. She was restless and she had a hard time with trust, and she resented the presumption of her therapists that a diagnosis could explain a life or a family tragedy. Explain not only the night sweats but the acrid stink her body seemed to give off whenever she heard the crashing of the waves at night.
Nix had always loved to draw, and she loved making music. She loved to draw birds and seashells, and her music reflected the melody of curves. People in cities as far away as Hong Kong and Amsterdam felt that owning one of her drawings of a scallop shell could somehow make them closer to the moment of creation itself. In a world awash in suspect images, Nix’s drawings had become talismans for wealthy urbanites, symbols of the rooted life they would never have, like a second home in the woods they rarely visited but would never sell.
Nix was the kind of beautiful woman whose confidence was banked deep down. She could not take a compliment. If anyone ever said something nice, she would flush red and turn her head away, but in the next beat of her heart she would gaze back with a look that had seared its way into many men’s brains.
She had told the police that she knew nothing of the plot to blow up the yacht, but they were having none of her charms. The detectives asked her in thousands of ways, but she didn’t know anything, couldn’t remember a scrap of conversation or a misplaced notebook or map.
Even before the explosion she had sensed the world was off-kilter because of the narcissism of men. She knew the boys in town had been infected by it. Ideology and anger had overtaken love and caring even in this little town where caring for one another meant survival. In the weeks before the war, Gloomy’s face had looked hard, more like the other men’s. Nix remembered coming home to see him sitting at the kitchen table, staring down and saying nothing as he tapped his fingers lightly on the polished fir top. Even in this little wilderness town, Ishmael and Gloomy seemed to have a premonition that the president was going to take the country to war.
Nix walked into the room where her husband was dying and there he was. There was her boy. Karen stood next to him in the corner of the room. Gloomy looked up at her and then over to his mother. His right hand was holding his father’s left. As he looked at his mother, tears were running down his cheeks. L.P. had his hand on his back, patting him softly. Lilly was wiping her nose. Clive had a smile on his pale and exhausted face.
“He woke up for a bit,” was all Lilly said. “He recognized the boy.”
Nix blustered out a sob with the words that came out of her mouth. “Well, that’s a miracle. The boy looks a mess.” She walked over and put her arms around him, weeping.
“Baby . . .” she sobbed. “I love you so much.”
“Momma,” Gloomy said through his tears. “I’m so sorry, Momma.”
“Quiet, baby . . .”—and she rocked him in her arms—“You are here, that’s all that matters now.”