Twenty miles to the north, Adam Gabriel was moving through the forest. He walked alone through the trackless thickets of pine, past nameless lakes and shimmering groves of white birch. He was thinking about what he planned to do in the days ahead, and how he stood a chance of being killed. It was not fear that reached him now, but loneliness. To keep himself company, he sang:
“Get out the way for old man Tucker,
He’s too late to get his supper.
Supper’s over and breakfast’s cooking,
Old man Tucker just stand there looking.”
The song did not cheer him up, the way it had done when he was a child and he had shouted the first line when he walked home through these woods after a day of fishing or climbing Seneca Mountain. It was a song that all his friends used to know, and if one person heard another singing it, they would join in. He remembered his relief when someone in the distance would sing out the rest of the song. He wondered where those friends were now, and whether he would be fighting against them in the days to come.
Gabriel sang until the words made no sense to him anymore. After three days in the woods, he needed to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was his own. He needed the rhythm of the words to keep himself moving, because hunger had made him weak. It had pushed his senses beyond the confines of his body. It seemed to him that he could feel the stones and branches in his path before he touched them. His canteen, which he had filled from a stream that morning, was almost empty now.
Gabriel was tall and strong without looking muscular. His hair, which he combed straight back on his head, was dark brown with threads of coppery-red bleached in by the sun. His lips were full and chapped and sometimes he ran his tongue over them to moisten the dried skin. His heavy canvas shirt and trousers were dirty from living in the woods. Mud and pine needles had lodged in the laces of his boots.
Returning here alone and after so much time had brought his life full circle. Everything he had done and what he had become all boiled down to these past few days, from the time he had set out into the wilderness from the side of a highway in Canada, smuggling himself across the border. He knew about the sale of the Algonquin and had watched from a distance as environmental groups petitioned against it. He read their well-tuned arguments. He watched them fail and move on to other sales of wilderness land, just as they had many times before. When the Algonquin sale went through, he decided he would have to come here himself and put things right once and for all. Gabriel’s family had been gone from Abenaki Junction for many years, ever since his father was fired as foreman of the Mackenzie Company for complaining about the clear-cutting. But Gabriel still knew Jonah Mackenzie well enough to understand that no amount of reasoning would change the old man’s mind about clear-cutting the wilderness. Other methods were required. The more he thought about this, the more extreme his plans became.
When Gabriel took off his canvas backpack to rest, he saw an arch of sweat darkening the cloth between the straps. He had been sweating so much that he’d lost track of where his skin ended and his soggy clothes began. When the clothes dried, the salt tie-dyed them with white powder. It had been a hot day, even under the canopy of trees, where the still air filled his lungs with the fragrance of earth and pine needles and the faint sweetness of white birch. In places, the pines grew so thick that nothing but poisonous amanita mushrooms grew between the trees. When he came to the stands of birch, the bony pillars seemed to shift around him.
The only thing Gabriel had now to guide himself with was a compass. There were no paths except the narrow trails of moose and deer, which he followed when he grew too tired to make paths of his own through the face-scratching branches of pine. Every hour, he took out his compass and took a bearing. Then he began walking again. Often there were mountains in the way. He climbed them, feeling the ascent in his calves and his thighs, leaning into the slope so that his face was no more than a couple of feet from the path. His arms went numb from the digging pack straps. When he reached the stony skull of the mountain crest, he would stop, let his pack slip from his shoulders and sit down on it to rest. Blueberries grew among the ripples of the rock and he would pick as many as he could, the pale-blue and the dark-blue, almost black berries disappearing without inspection into his mouth. He would crush them with his tongue and swallow, feeling the sugar jump through his body.
It was dusk before he even realized it was growing dark. The light had faded so gently that he’d barely noticed it. The first stars popped out of the blue. He walked on a while longer, seeing color fade from the trees until he was in a world of black and white and the navy of the sky. He began to stumble on roots. Then he knew it was time to stop.
Gabriel found a patch of soft earth. He walked around the place where he would put his tent, the way a dog circles the ground it chooses for a bed. When his tent was pitched, he cut a two-inch-deep hole into the trunk of a birch tree. As the sap started to run, he folded a piece of birch bark into a tube and set it in the hole to act as a funnel. Then he pulled the lace from one of his boots and tied a blue-and-white-speckled enamel mug to the tree to catch the dripping sap. He touched his finger to the drop-by-drop trickle and brushed the clear liquid across his lips, tasting the sweet pepperiness of the sap. He checked that the mug was secure and crawled inside his tent.
The night brought silence, except for wind moving like a scavenger around the trunks of trees. Inside his tent, he felt the quiet cup itself around him. He switched on his angle-headed flashlight. It had a red filter over the bulb to help him keep his night vision. He rooted in his pack, taking out the plastic-bagged bundle containing his clean clothes, smelling the perfume of detergent from a Laundromat in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he’d washed them a week ago. At the bottom of the pack was a tan canvas holster. From it, Gabriel pulled an old Webley revolver. Its blue-black, hexagonal barrel showed him back the red light of the bulb. There were no bullets in the gun now. He kept those in an airtight plastic tub, which was itself wrapped in plastic. He was careful with the bullets: they were .455 caliber, which was hard to find, and he could not afford to go buying handgun ammunition now. Suspicion would follow him out of the shop. He put the gun away and sniffed the oil on the tips of his fingers. Each time he brought out the gun and looked at it, he felt reminded of how far he was beyond the point of turning back.
The last thing he looked at from his pack was his wallet. It was made of black nylon with a Velcro closing strap. From it, he pulled his American driver’s license and social security card. It was a New Jersey license, with a red band across the top that said Operator. The name on the license was Adam Gabriel. The first name was his, but not the second. He had been given the forged document six weeks before, out in Idaho.
Gabriel switched off the flashlight and lay down in his tent. He looked out through the mosquito-netted opening. A meteor shower cut arcs above the trees. He imagined the night as black paint on the glass vault of the sky, the meteors scratches across it, showing the sunlight beyond. “Get out the way for old man Tucker,” he whispered. Then he stayed silent, as he used to do, but not even his daydreams called back.
One year and six months earlier, Adam Gabriel had bailed out of an F-14 jet fighter at three thousand feet over the Iraqi desert. He had been flying bomber escort from the USS Pendleton.
Gabriel was banking to cover a second run over the city. As he turned, he saw tracer fire like huge pearl necklaces moving slowly through the sky. Parts of the city were burning. He could make out sections of road in the downtown area, where a number of the bombs had fallen. These smooth paths vanished into shadow-filled craters. Rubble lay in giant crumbs across the streets.
He was leveling out of the turn when he heard a slamming noise from somewhere behind him and to the right. It was exactly the same sound that the kitchen door in his parents’ house used to make when someone swung it shut. For a moment, the noise stunned him. Then he waited for the first sign of damage—lights on the instrument panel, or no response from the controls. His mind clattered through the bailout procedure. There had been no missile-tracking alarm. No hurricane blast of air through the cockpit, as he’d been taught to expect when the canopy shattered. No desperate bleep from any of the aircraft sensors. He banked slowly through a second turn. Then the fuel warning light went on.
Gabriel radioed that his plane was hit, but he did not know how badly. Sweat from his upper lip smeared on the helmet microphone. He called into the dark that if his engine began to fail, he would try to land his plane at one of the supply runways in Kuwait. If he could not make it that far, he knew he would have to bail out over Iraqi territory.
He disengaged from the bombers and headed for the nearest runway. Another fighter accompanied him, piloted by a lieutenant named Casper Wright. Flying from the aircraft carrier to their rendezvous with the bombers, Wright’s plane had banked with him, in and out of turns, as if the two machines were joined by invisible wires.
Wright reminded Gabriel to tighten all his straps as hard as he could take it and to prepare his cockpit for bailout. It was a comfort to hear Wright’s voice. Wright was from Tallahassee, Florida. Gabriel could make out the Panhandle twang in his voice. Gabriel’s mind still plodded back and forth along the question of what could have hit him. He had seen no tracer fire. There had been only one slamming noise, not several. He knew what the other pilots would say when they heard he had been brought down. They would say he had lost out to the Golden BB, one stray unaimed bullet wandering through the sky.
All through training and all the way out to the Gulf, Gabriel had worried that he might not behave correctly if something went wrong in the air. He’d been taught the procedures. It was not about that. He was afraid that dread would cloud his mind. But now here he was, the fuel alarm flashing tiny rubies in his eyes, and his thoughts were as clear as they had ever been.
Gabriel played the game of placing odds on his chances of making it home. He wrote them on the notepad that was strapped to his right knee. He played the game to concentrate his thoughts, in case panic reared up and caught him by surprise.
Wright asked him to check the fuel gauge. The reading was lower now. Gabriel realized he would probably never find out what had caused the damage. He tried to remember how much he had been told these planes cost. Gabriel was surprised to feel embarrassed at having been brought down. He had not expected this emotion. Then he wondered if his own negligence had put him in the line of fire.
He was losing altitude now. He looked up and saw the belly of Wright’s jet, set against the navy-blue night sky. A web of stars fanned out around the plane. The yellow-orange exhaust flame was like a comet, chasing and always just about to catch the F-14.
Gabriel told Wright he was going to have to bail out and asked if he knew whether they were over Allied territory yet.
Wright said, “Not yet.” They were near the Kuwaiti oil fields, which were just inside Iraqi lines. That area was expected to be a heavy combat zone as soon as the land assault began. Wright was quiet for a minute, his voice replaced by the soft rush of static in Gabriel’s headset. Then Wright said he would radio in the coordinates of the bailout and would make sure a rescue helicopter was deployed immediately. He told Gabriel to lie low and get his distress beacon going as soon as he hit the ground. Gabriel knew all this. He knew what he would do and what Wright would do, because they had all been trained in it until the moves were chiseled into their minds like some kind of genetic coding.
Gabriel’s fuel marker bounced off zero. He could feel the power fail, the smooth rush of the jet becoming choked. Any second now, the engine would die. Then the plane would move into a free fall.
Wright said he would see him real soon.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said. Then he switched off the intercom. He checked his straps again, breathing as slowly as he could in the last few seconds before bailout. He looked down and saw dozens of fires burning in the dark. The flames were thick and yellow-orange, obscured by coal-black smoke. Gabriel knew the wellheads had been blown and the oil was burning out of control. He knew this meant that the Iraqis might have pulled back, leaving the burning wells for the Americans to deal with. The plane shuddered slightly, and then a steady tone from the fuel-tank warning system reached his ears, like the sound of a TV station when the programs are finished for the night. With the first cough of the dying engine’s thunder, Gabriel blew the cockpit canopy. Cool desert night air rushed around him.
The nose of the F-14 dipped. The horizon rushed over Gabriel’s head and out of sight. He closed the visor on his helmet.
He fired the bailout charge. His blood drained from his skull with the roughness of sand and slammed into his feet. The visor shattered as something smashed against it and in the fraction of a second that he could keep his eyes open, Gabriel saw the plane hurtling away from him. The heat of the jet’s engine surrounded his face, stabbing through the broken visor. It felt as if his flesh would melt like wax. Then the heat was gone and only the pain of having been scorched remained on his face. His flameproof Nomex suit and gloves protected the rest of his body. He was upside down and then right side up. Blood zigzagged across his face. He could feel wind chilling the blood across his forehead. He didn’t know how badly he’d been cut.
Gabriel cartwheeled through the air. The chair rockets that had launched him from the plane still hissed. Then the rockets quit and he found himself surrounded by nothing but the sound of rushing wind. Gradually his head stopped spinning. He understood that he was falling sideways.
The chutes popped and jolted him upright. He felt a tug in his neck. Blood plowed into his head. He was blacking out.
Suddenly the ground was very close. Gabriel did not know if he had fainted. The desert filed away beneath him. He could see the ripples of dunes and cracks where the sand had blown away, exposing hard-packed earth. The oil-well fires blazed in the distance.
The chair straps were bands of pain across his shoulders and stomach, digging into his flesh. Dizziness rocked in his skull and he wondered if he had been badly hurt. The cuts sent pain in streaks across his face. His burned flesh felt tight and stretched across his cheekbones.
Gabriel looked out into the dark, hoping to see where his plane had landed. But he saw nothing, and he knew that since the plane had no fuel in it, the jet might not burn, leaving no smoke to trace. It would not leave the enemy anything to follow, either. He had seen no vehicles on his way down, no towns or roads. Just desert. Wright would have called in his position by now. He was grateful for Wright’s company. A daydream sputtered through Gabriel’s head of himself going to visit Wright when they both reached home again. He imagined a house surrounded by palm trees and cypresses draped in Spanish moss. Strange to be thinking this, Gabriel thought, while I’m drifting through space like sad old Major Tom.
The ground climbed up to meet him. The snakes of wind-rippled dunes. He smelled the earth now, the heaviness of it. The chill of the Arabian night against his face.
He wondered if he was going to die. He felt strangely calm about it, as if the outcome had been decided long before and he was only going through the motions.
The earth seemed to rise, gaping like shark jaws.
The jolt of landing slammed Gabriel facedown. He felt grit in his eyes and his mouth and up his nose and then he felt nothing. He did not even have the time to wonder if he were dead.
Dawn woke him. The first thing he saw was grains of sand a few inches from his face. The top of the jet seat had prevented him from being plunged into the dune, where he would have suffocated. He crunched sand between his teeth when he bit down. Some of the grains were in his eyes and he wiped them away with his aching fingers. They ached as if he had arthritis. He was aching all over. Each joint seemed to have been prised apart and popped back together. He could feel bruises where the straps had held him in place, down around his shoulders and across his waist. They would be the kinds of purple ones that take months to go away. When Gabriel twisted his head to one side, nerves in his spine cracked in sparks of pain across his shoulders and down into his arms.
He released his straps and crawled slowly out from under the chair. The hugeness of the desert sky hung over him. He had never seen anything like it. Stars reached from one end of the horizon to the other. All his life until now there had been a jagged line of trees to mark the distance of his sight. He knew that soon the sun would rear up from the dunes and scorch this place. Gabriel took a deep breath and coughed at the dead-fireworks stench that came from the underside of his seat. The bailout rockets had blackened his boots and melted the rubber soles. From where he stood, he could not see the oil fires, but their smoke massed in the sky like the iron-gray clouds of an approaching hurricane. Through breaks in the darkness, Gabriel could see the silhouetted outlines of skyscrapers—the blacked-out towers of Kuwait City.
The sun came up angry from the desert. He walked up to the highest point in the dunes and squinted off toward the horizon, turning himself slowly around in the sand, hunting for signs of life. Before him lay what he imagined hell must look like: vicious bolts of flame shot from spigots where the oil wellheads had been. Already the pale sand was a slick creosote black. There was no sky. There was only the smoke. He could smell it, vaguely sweet and sickly. It felt as if drops of the oil were condensing in his lungs.
Gabriel wondered how long he had been unconscious. He worried that the rescue helicopters might have been out looking for him but had given up when they found no distress-beacon signal. As quickly as he could, he set up the distress beacon, the TACBE, which would connect him with any AWAC planes flying over the area. It was a small metal box with a long aerial and a stand to keep the unit upright. There were two settings for the TACBE, one which would make the unit function as a long-range beacon, and another which would put him in touch with any aircraft in the immediate vicinity. He had been told that once he turned it on, he would be in touch with an AWAC within fifteen seconds. He pulled the long-range tab and heard the swishing sound as the unit engaged.
“Hello, AWAC,” he called into the microphone. I am F-15 down, over.” Then he said it again. “I am F-15 down, over. Can you hear me? Over.” He talked into the machine for fifteen minutes and then switched it off. The battery was good for only twenty-four hours, so he decided he would turn it on and off every fifteen minutes. The routine would keep him busy. He worried about the Iraqis homing in on his signal.
Gabriel dug a hole in the sand under his chair and crawled into the space. Every fifteen minutes, he reached his arm out into the skin-prickling sun and turned the beacon’s on/off switch and called into the microphone. “I am F-15 down, over. Can you hear me? Over.”
He heard big guns firing in the distance. Several times, he heard the sound of jets but could not see them. Once he made out the thin profile of a helicopter, appearing and disappearing through the smoke. It wasn’t close enough to see him. On the morning of the next day, Gabriel saw the red light die on the TACBE’s battery pack.
Loneliness clamped down on him. Gabriel crawled out from under his chair and shielded his eyes from the sun. He knew he’d have to start walking toward Kuwait City, through the oil fields. He set out immediately, knowing that, without food or water, the longer he waited, the weaker he would become. As he walked, he heard a distant rumbling like thunder. First Gabriel thought it was close by and then it seemed to have disappeared altogether. Wind was carrying the sound. As he came closer to the oil fields, he realized it was the sound of the fires, roaring open furnaces incinerating the sky.
The burned rubber on his boots picked up sand until it looked as if the soles were made of the tiny grains. It was harder to walk. Gabriel wound his silk scarf around his mouth and nose. He normally wore it to stop his neck from chafing as he looked constantly from side to side in the cockpit of his plane.
All day he walked toward the fires. They were much farther away than he had thought. Gradually the ground turned black, each grain of sand caught in a sphere of oil. When he looked behind him he could see his own footprints, white like bone and trailing off in a drunken-looking line into the dunes. Scrub brush had become fans of shining black like coral.
Kuwait was vast and silent on the horizon. Gabriel began to feel as if he were the last person left on the planet. It was harder to breathe. He ran his fingers through his hair and the strands were thick with tar. His overalls were as black as the sand. Burning drops of it collected in the corners of his eyes.
The sun went down, bloody through the smoke. Gabriel walked all night, sometimes so close to the fires that he could feel their heat. They glimmered off the low-hanging clouds and by this light he saw old corpses that had been lying there for days. They were sculpture-like now, all features slathered into anonymity by oil.
When the first smudges of dawn filtered yellow through the smoke, Gabriel found himself to the east of Kuwait City. He crossed a deserted highway and saw the ocean in the distance. By ten in the morning he had reached the sea. But it was not the sea. It was oil. The slugglish-arcing waves that slopped up on the black beach were black and the seaweed was a fringe of black at the edge of the waves. Hideously dying cormorants tried to swim in the sea, their wings like black knife blades now, and useless. Turtles like half-constructed toys lay tangled in weeds and oil at the high-tide line or crawled blind and mostly dead onto the black sand and vomited oil and tried to blink the oil from their eyes. The crabs still scuttled on the sand, but they were black and dying. He could smell the rotting fish. Their bodies were gleaming bumps in the slick black water. It was black as far as Gabriel could see. Everything that had lived on the beach or swum in the ocean here was dying or dead. Gabriel moved in a trance along the beach toward the city. He was overcome with horror. He looked down at himself and saw that he had become the same greasy obsidian black as everything else. He rolled up his sleeve and the skin underneath seemed so pale that he barely recognized it as his own.
This entire land had been visited by the devil, Gabriel thought—not a mansized, horned devil who bothered to torment one soul at a time, but a devil who hated all men and the world and was killing everything at once.
These pictures would never leave Gabriel. They would not leave anyone who had seen the oil fires in Kuwait. They would be carried as communal scars by people like him who would never meet again and never return to the desert.
At the outskirts of the city, Gabriel saw more bodies lying on the roads. One man’s eyes had been pecked by birds, and the sockets were dried brown-red caves. Gabriel walked into a house whose front door had been kicked in. The hinges were wrenched half out of the wall. It occurred to him only as he walked through the doorway that the place could have been booby-trapped. He walked over broken glass in his melted-sole shoes and went straight to the kitchen sink, stumbling in the blue-gray moonlight that had found its way through the oil clouds now that the wind was blowing the smoke out across the desert. He held his head under the tap and turned on the faucet. He stayed, neck painfully contorted, and waited, feeling his open mouth dry up in the cold night air. After a minute, he realized there would be no water. He turned on all the faucets in the house, but there was no water anywhere. It was the same in several other houses. All empty. All ransacked. Things too big to steal heaved out of windows or bludgeoned with gun butts.
As he crossed one street, he saw a body lying in the road. It was a soldier in desert camouflage, tans and yellows and greens, none of which hid the corpse in the moonlight. Instead the blurred lines of color seemed to hover around him, like static. Gabriel walked up to him. The man was not as badly coated with oil as the other bodies had been. The dry air had pinched the skin around the corpse’s face and dimpled the tips of his fingers. At first, Gabriel could see no wound. Then he turned the man over, the body stiff and strangely light, so that when he tipped over onto his face, his open arms made him seem as if he were falling from a great height and trying to slow himself down. A huge hole had been blown through the man’s back. The combat jacket was shredded and bloody around the wound. It looked as if he had exploded from the inside. Stubs of broken rib jutted from the skin. Gabriel did not feel nausea or sadness. The man had been dead too long. Too little remained that he could recognize and pity. The corpse was only a thing now, its teeth bared in hostility against what it once had been. Gabriel took the canteen from the soldier’s belt, splashed a little of the water onto his palm and sniffed and then tasted it. Then he drank. At first, his throat was so cramped from dust and oil that he could not swallow. But he forced the water down. The greasy bitterness of the oil stayed in his spit long after the canteen was empty.
In the soldier’s side pack, he found an ID card written in Arabic and a mess tin. He opened the tin, slicked fingers slipping over the aluminum lid. It was filled with olives in a paste that looked red in the moonlight. Gabriel sniffed at it and the spices made his eyes water. He ate some of the olives and his mouth caught fire from the chili paste. He knew what it was. Harisa. There was no water to wash it down. His lips buzzed painful and raw. He puffed to cool them down. But he was too hungry to stop eating and he finished what was in the mess tin, squatting with his back to the body, looking up and down the silent street in the dingy light.
He kept moving. Now that he had reached the city and found it empty, he no longer knew where he was going. Gunshots sounded in the distance. They echoed across the thousands of broken windows and blast-chipped white walls. Now and then Gabriel came to a road and could see the desert. The nuclear mushroom clouds of burning oil merged in the sky, snuffing out stars as the wind changed direction.
Gabriel walked past the zoo. The animals had been set loose. A hippopotamus walked by him down a sidestreet, swinging its head from side to side. Three giraffes ran, hooves clattering through a park and away down a road lined with burned-out businesses. An elephant walked slowly down the street, knocked softly on each door with its trunk. Gabriel wondered if it was part of some trick that the elephant had learned at the zoo, some man-taught ritual.
Black rain fell on the city. Only pale and darkening shadows remained of places where cars had stood. Gabriel left his footprints in the empty streets, and when he turned to look at them, he had the feeling that he had walked into a parallel universe, where images remained like photographic negatives, all the light in them reversed.
It was getting bright. Now that the dawn was finally arriving, Gabriel dreaded its approach. He had grown used to the night, which he felt convinced had lasted longer than half a dozen nights, and his watch and his eyes had conspired to cheat him of the daytime in between. With oil sweat-welded to his clothes and body and smeared obscenely in his hair, it was as if he had become a part of the darkness and he would never find his way back into the light. He felt pushed past the brink of his own sanity, and knew that even if he made his way to safety, a part of him would always be out there among the oil fires, lost in an atrocity of pollution and waste.
He had stopped in a doorway to rest. He sat on his haunches, arms resting on his elbows. The dawn was gray around him. The colors had not yet returned.
A window above his head burst into slivers and it seemed to Gabriel that the sound of the gunshot came afterward. Glass like hardened rain fell on his head and stuck in his hair. At first he just sat there, looking to see who had fired the shot. Then he scrambled through the doorway and into the house. As he ducked inside, another bullet zipped along the wall, tearing the wallpaper as if a knife had been drawn across it. The bullet vanished into the plaster, leaving a scorch mark. He ran through rooms, jumped over a bed and through a bathroom, and as he ran he heard a strange and muffled engine outside the building. Then voices. Then the thump of footsteps in the house. He heard Arabic being shouted. It sounded as if they were calling to him.
He wished he had a gun, at least to take one of them with him. But the pilots had been cautioned against carrying sidearms because if they were shot down over enemy territory, it gave the people who found them an excuse to open fire.
Gabriel ran into a room and there was no way out. Even the window was too small. It was a child’s room, with posters of cartoon figures on the wall.
I’m going to die, he thought. They’re going to kill me. The knowledge came to him as an absolute fact. There wasn’t even a tremor of doubt. When he had thought about death before, he had always imagined it coming in a sheet of fire as his jet exploded, or the screaming free fall of a pilot whose chute has failed to open. But not this. Not dying in some child’s room in an empty chair with his pockets picked, being left to rot like the dead man in the street.
He turned. They would catch him in the hallway. They would shoot him in the chest with their burp guns. He saw it so clearly that it was as if he had already been killed. There was no use running. The hallway or in here. Same difference. He raised his hands and stood there in the dark room, waiting to die and wishing only for it to be over quickly.
The men rushed past the hallway. They were not talking now. He heard the rustle of their clothing and the soft pad of their boots on the carpeted floors. Gabriel knew they were on either side. Any second now, they’ll fill the hallway with bullets and rush me, he thought. Or throw a grenade. Just get it over with, he thought.
A head wrapped in a wool cap jabbed around the corner and swung back again. More whispers. Arguing. Then a voice called to Gabriel in Arabic. But it was bad Arabic, as if someone who didn’t know how to speak the language were reading it off a phonetically spelled flash card.
Gabriel breathed in slowly, the first threads of hope returning cool into his lungs. “Hello,” he said. His voice was thin and he barely recognized it.
“Identify yourself!” shouted a voice in the corridor. It was a nervous voice. Jumpy.
Now Gabriel was more afraid than he had been before. To be killed now. By my own people. By this man behind the jumpy voice. He told them who he was. “I was shot down on the other side of the oil fields. I think two days ago. I can’t even remember anymore.”
The head appeared again. It didn’t disappear immediately. Instead, the body followed it, hunchbacked under ammunition belts and an assault pack. “What base are you off?”
“A carrier. The Pendleton.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m hungry.”
The man started walking toward him. He was carrying an assault rifle with a huge infrared scope attached. “You’re fucking lucky, Mister. I don’t know how the hell I missed you with that first shot.”
Gabriel kept his hands in the air. “Who are you guys? What’s going on? How come there’s only you?”
The man was close to him now. He wore an American flag around his neck. The red and white bars twisted like Christmas candy canes under the desert camouflage. The man raised and lowered his hand to show Gabriel he did not need to keep his arms in the air any longer.
“So who are you guys?” Gabriel asked again.
“We’re kind of an advance unit. That’s about all we can tell you.” The man stepped closer. He sniffed. “Did you get burned or something? You smell like gasoline.”
“Oil,” Gabriel said. He smelled Juicy Fruit gum on the man’s breath.
They led him outside to where three other men were waiting. They crouched in doorways and peered around through their infrared scopes. Parked in the street was a vehicle that looked to Gabriel like a dune buggy. It was all pipes and fat-treaded tires. Gear hung in string bags from the frame. The engine was hooded to muffle the sound. He thought these men must be Delta Force. Or Seals. He knew there was no point in asking.
They put him in the buggy and drove him out of the city, keeping clear of the highways, until they reached a radio post set up in a drained swimming pool on the property of a grand house that had been burned and blown up. Its roof had caved in and the protruding metal beams of the roof structure reminded Gabriel of the dead man’s ribs sticking from the cavern of his wound. A Hessian net had been strung over the swimming pool and the radio satellite dish was hidden in the landscaped bushes nearby. A generator puttered next to it.
None of the men wore any insignia. They seemed only half-aware of his presence. Some were American and some were Arab. Stacks of guns lay in the basin-smooth corners of the room they had created. Lantern light glimmered off the turquoise-blue walls.
A man threw him some camouflage clothes. They were the American pattern, browns and yellows in irregular splotches. The men watched him as he changed, snorting as the paleness of his skin revealed itself against his painted hands and face.
“You look like you took a bath in the stuff, bubba.” The man had sat down at his field desk. He had a flat, midwestern voice. When Gabriel didn’t answer, the man pointed to a canvas-backed chair on the other side of the desk. “Why don’t you tell us exactly what happened to you?”
Gabriel quit the Air Force soon after returning to America. The work it had taken him to become a pilot and the ambition and the pride he had felt in it seemed suddenly to belong to someone else. It wasn’t even something he could understand anymore. In its place was all the horror of the oil fields. The wreckage it made of the land. He began to see the same destruction everywhere, in the forests and the rivers and the air. It was not happening with the same intensity that he had seen in Kuwait. At home, the damage was more gradual, which made it seem all the more sinister.
His life started to take on a different purpose, one that he would never have considered before. He wondered if it had something to do with how close he had come to dying. He had heard about people who had been changed suddenly and permanently at the point of almost losing their lives. He could not trace his feelings to their source, the way his old self would have done, analyzing and rethinking until all facets of the issue were laid bare. All Gabriel could do was act on them. Not long afterward, he joined his first environmental activist group. He quickly used up his savings and his patience in peaceful protests. He attended meetings where philosophical discussions dragged on into the night. He stood on street corners and handed out leaflets to people who glanced at the words, crumpled the paper and threw the leaflets into the nearest garbage can.
Then Gabriel heard about a man named Hannibal Swain, who operated a group out in the Gros Ventre Range in Wyoming. He heard them referred to as environmental terrorists. Others called them radicals. Extremists. There seemed to be any number of names given to this group, which specialized in the spiking of trees and the disabling of heavy logging and road-building machinery. They were the only ones Gabriel had heard of who had actually stopped logging projects from going through.
In his frustration, Gabriel traveled out to Wyoming. For a while, he found it impossible to contact Swain’s people. He began to wonder whether they were just a myth. But in the end, they were the ones who found him.
He had been with the group only two months when Hannibal Swain came to the restaurant in Jackson Hole called the Peppermill, where Gabriel had a daytime job. Swain was the man’s real name, unlike others in the group, who had chosen to give false names. The best camouflage, Swain had said, was not to hide at all. So far, at least, it had worked. Swain sat down at a table. When Gabriel came with the menu, feeling the veins in his neck thump with worry at the sight of the man, Swain told him, “Meet me out front at the end of your shift.” Swain had watery blue eyes, and the sun had withered his skin so that he seemed to be a decade older than he was. His blond mustache looked like threads of straw. Swain handed back the menu and stood up to leave.
Gabriel knew that something terrible was about to happen. Only two days before, they had spiked three hundred trees and were just finishing up when a logging patrol heard the dull sound of their copper-headed hammers. The patrol came charging through the woods and ran right past where Gabriel lay, covered with the earth he had thrown over himself. He realized then that he could not have been what he was now without first having been a soldier for the other side. None of the group had been caught that day, but they all knew it was only a matter of time.
After the shift, Gabriel walked out of the restaurant into the glare of late-afternoon sun. He moved past the huge arch of elk horns at the entrance to the town square and found Swain sitting in a pickup at the corner. One arm, wrapped in the faded indigo of a jeans jacket, hung out of the window and down the glossy, tomato-red door of the truck.
“Get in,” Swain said, and rapped his knuckles on the door.
They drove out of town and over the pass into Idaho. Swain didn’t speak. For a long time, Gabriel waited to be told what was going on. He knew what a risk Swain had taken to meet him in broad daylight. To Gabriel, Swain was a man who often took big risks, but never without reason. Swain allowed no more drama into his life than he had to. He didn’t spend his time in philosophical discussions about whether he was breaking the law. If the subject ever did come up, it was in hope that the laws would be changed and that their work would eventually become redundant.
They passed through smoke from a burning leaf pile in someone’s garden. For a moment, as the smoke stung Gabriel’s eyes, he heard again the roar of blazing oil spigots. Then suddenly it was gone.
After an hour, they pulled up outside the Painted Apple Ranch Café in Victor. The dust of the parking lot blew past them. The rolling plains of Idaho reached out to the horizon. It was more than just a different state. It looked like a different country from the forested hills they had been in only a short while before.
“I’m about to get arrested,” Swain said in a deadpan voice, as if he had been saying it to himself all the way over the pass. He didn’t look at Gabriel as he spoke. He had his gaze fixed on the giant red-apple sign of the café. “Federal agents have traced me to the last spiking we did in the Gros Ventre Range. Traced me and all but one person in the group.” Swain swung his head wearily to face Gabriel. “And you’re it. And you have to get out of here now.”
Gabriel said nothing. The shock had silenced him.
Swain settled back in his seat. He seemed calmer now that he had told the news. Resigned to it. “You weren’t on the Feds’ list. A friend of mine found out. He tried to warn me about the others, but it’s too late.”
“How did my name get left off the list?” Gabriel asked.
“There used to be someone in the group before you arrived. He disappeared one day without saying good-bye. It’s not the first time that’s happened. He looked like he could take care of himself. I didn’t think too much about it.” Swain passed his callused fingertips across his chin, rustling the bristles. “But I guess he was working for the police. That’s what I was told. He got the names of everyone in the group at the time. You weren’t with us yet.”
“I should go home and get my stuff.”
“No, you shouldn’t go home. You should get the hell out of here before they start making arrests and another member of the group gives up your name.”
“But they wouldn’t do that.”
“You never know what people will do.” It was hot in the truck. The windshield seemed to magnify the sun. The dusty air gave no relief. “You can’t stay here. You’ll have to go south or east or up to Canada.”
“But how much good can I do on my own?”
“There is one place where one person could get something done, but it’s on the other side of the country.” Then Swain told Gabriel about the Algonquin and how it was due to be cleared.
As Gabriel listened, he felt pressure building in his head. It pushed at his eyes from behind. He had not told Swain about growing up in Abenaki Junction, or that his father had been fired by Mackenzie.
“It’s a long shot,” Swain said.
“I’ll do it,” Gabriel told him. He explained that he had grown up there.
Swain got out of the truck. His chisel-toe boots stirred the dust. He had to move around. Nervous energy was sparking inside him. “When’s the last time you were there?”
“It’s been years.”
“Where are your parents now?”
“Oh.” Gabriel shook his head. “My father died in a car crash a year after we left. He sailed over a bump on a dirt road and hit a telephone pole. It split the car in half. The police said there was no explanation for the accident.”
“Maybe it was suicide.”
“Maybe so,” said Gabriel. You never did soften your words, did you? he thought “Mackenzie made it so that my dad couldn’t find work with any of the other logging companies. I think that part of it broke him.”
“And your mother?”
“She runs a bed-and-breakfast in Stonington, Connecticut. She’s never been back to Abenaki Junction either. She won’t even say the name.”
“In some ways, that’s good. They won’t be looking for you. But still, you’ll probably be caught,” Swain said. “If you believe in luck, you can bet you used up all you’ve got right here.”
Gabriel didn’t answer.
Swain pulled off his cowboy boot and shook out a pebble. “I’m driving east tomorrow. It would be too dangerous for you to come with me, but I could drop off some supplies for you, if I get that far, and if you tell me where to go.”
Gabriel gave Swain the directions, using an AAA road chart and then drawing his own map for the last mile. He chose a safe place in the ruins of a cabin down by Pogansett Lake. He hoped the old house was still there.
“Good enough.” Swain pulled on his boot again. His jeans were tattered at the cuffs.
“Where are you going from there?”
“Washington. I’ll turn myself in after I’ve talked to the press. I figure it’s where I can do the most good before they shut me away.”
Gabriel thought about the Navajo Indians, who were imprisoned by the whites and died in a very short time. It wasn’t the prison that killed them. It was the idea of not being free, so alien to them that they could not survive it. Swain might be the same way, thought Gabriel, and suddenly he knew he would never see the man again.
“I have to go now.” Swain walked back to his truck and climbed inside.
“Why don’t you run?” asked Gabriel. “You don’t have to turn yourself in.”
Swain lowered his head slowly until it was resting on the steering wheel. “The truth is I am tired. I’m all tired out. My luck is all gone. And the most good I can do now is hope the newspapers will print what I say in the courtroom. I’ll still go to jail, of course. I never tried to pretend I wasn’t a criminal. But you know”—he raised his head from the steering wheel—“I believe that history will absolve us. The same way it absolved the people who ran the Underground Railroad to free the slaves in the Civil War. Or the people who blew up Zyklon-B gas chambers in Germany in World War Two.” He had one last thing to say: “You’ll be on familiar ground in the Algonquin. You must be careful. No fight is more vicious than the one for your home ground. They’ll fight you with everything they’ve got. They’ll kill you if they think they can get away with it. And the question you have to ask yourself is whether you are prepared to kill them. It’s all about knowing how far you are prepared to go. And don’t expect people to understand why you would risk your life for a bunch of trees. If you have to explain to them why the wilderness is important, with all the information that’s out there, they’re already part of the problem. The time for reasoning is past. But you have to be careful not to lose your humanity in all of this. What use is it to fight for humanity if you lose your own in the process?” Swain started the engine. He reached into the glove compartment, took from it a small manila envelope and flipped it to Gabriel. “It’s forged ID. Driver’s license. Social security card. Everyone in the group has a set of these. Do you have any money?”
Gabriel tapped his belt buckle. It was a money belt. He had $2,200 in rolled-up hundreds inside. He opened his mouth, but Swain spoke first.
“You trying to think of a way to say good-bye?” He had to shout over the rumble of the engine.
Gabriel nodded.
“Well, I guess we just did.” Swain smiled. He nodded one last time, lips pressed tight together. Then he knocked the truck into gear and drove out of the parking lot.
Gabriel watched the truck until it vanished into the hills. For a while he could hear the whine of its engine as it changed gears. Then that faded, too. That afternoon, Gabriel hitched a ride up into Canada. Then he took a series of buses across the Trans-Canada Highway.
Now that Gabriel had arrived in the Algonquin, the more he thought about stopping the clear-cutting, the more of a long shot it seemed. He knew he was walking toward a conflict in which there could be no middle ground. To prepare for it, he had stored away a vast reservoir of strength, a cavern deep inside himself, packed to its stalagtite rafters with weapons for the war. He knew he would probably be caught and what would happen to him then, but it was as Swain had said—the time for reasoning was past. After all he had been through already, Gabriel did not know how much of his humanity he had left, but he was in too deep to care.