The Cloud Atlas (11 page)

“But you said it
spoke
Japanese,” Gurley said. Father Ioasaph nodded and led Gurley around a small rise.

Here lay the being's skeleton, or what remained of it, twisted and charred. For all the damage the payload had done, Gurley said, it was surprisingly intact. Dangerously intact, but he didn't know that. Father Ioasaph drew him close and pointed to various elements in the wreckage. Indeed, to judge from the markings, the being did “speak” Japanese.

A sense of wonder, and then, an even greater sense of greed, consumed Gurley. He had found his prize, his ticket back into the OSS 's front ranks. Not even Bob Hope could dismiss this discovery.

Father Ioasaph had a hand at his elbow. “I do not know what this means,” Father Ioasaph said. “Through prayer, I hope to come to know, and I will let you know when I do. But now, we must leave it be.”

“Yes, Father,” Gurley said. “Leave it be. Leave it to me.” Father Ioasaph looked confused.

Gurley said he barked at the man:
Leave.
And the change in Gurley's demeanor must have been so sudden, so sharp, that the priest did immediately as he was told. Gurley had frightened him. Still, Father Ioasaph pleaded with him even as he moved away. “Pray with me,” he said. “We must leave to God what is His and His alone…”

But Gurley did not. He turned his back on Father Ioasaph, smiled, and began to lift a piece of the wreckage with his foot. “Speak to me, O Lord,” he muttered.

Whereupon, Gurley said, He did.

The blast was not deafening, not blinding. But it was sudden. One moment his lower left leg and foot were there, the next moment they were not. One moment Gurley was there, on Father Ioasaph's island, the next moment he was not.

He was, instead, lying down, in a hospital, eyes closed, listening to two men talk about him.

Incredible he survived.

That priest saved his life.

Not his leg.

Nothing to save, I'd imagine. Unless you wanted a souvenir.

How many days did it take to get him here?

Three.

A miracle, indeed. He should thank that priest.

Convert.

Then Gurley felt a surge of pain in his left foot. Pain, and then an equal surge of relief. He hadn't lost the foot, the leg. They were talking about someone else. He opened his eyes. The two men, doctors, it seemed, were standing beside him.

“He's awake,” one said.

The other turned to Gurley. “You made it,” he said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.” Gurley said nothing, just looked at him. “How do you feel?”

Gurley told me it took him a moment to decide he was awake and not dreaming. Then he answered the doctor's question, as truthfully as he could. He told the man he felt okay. Weak, but okay.

Then, without looking anywhere except into the doctor's eyes, he said, accurately, “My left foot's a little sore, though. Really sore, kind of a sharp, shooting sore.” The two doctors looked at each other, then they looked at his left foot, or where it should have been. Then Gurley looked as well.

“That'll happen,” said the doctor who'd first spoken to him. “Usually it's an itch, and your brain is telling you it's there. But, in your case, it's not. Nor much of anything below the knee. Now, your brain's also going to tell you the other leg hurts, and it'll be right about that. Kind of unbelievable it's still there. Or that you're here. But you are. And you'll walk, eventually. Couple weeks, they'll be by to fit a prosthetic. Two, three weeks. They've been busy, of course.”

Gurley finished his story, looked at me. “ ‘Busy,’” he repeated. “It took three months.” He looked down at his leg and shook it gently. “Then again, it took more than a quarter century to grow the one I'd had.”

GURLEY RETREATED behind the desk. “Let's finish.” He dropped into his chair, pulled forward, and then folded his hands over the small book that he'd pulled out when I'd first arrived.

“Exhibit C,” Gurley said. He opened the book, riffled through its pages, closed it, and then slid it across the desk to me with both hands. I didn't pick it up. He took it back.

The leather cover had been dyed a dark green and was well worn. There were brown smudges in several places.

“Blood,” he said. I just looked at him. “Old blood,” he added, and smiled. He flipped it over. On the back was more blood, and you could almost see, or imagine, where a bloody hand had raked across it. If Gurley hadn't said anything, though, I would have taken it for mud or grease. But that was one of his talents: to make everything sinister.

“That's what I'm told, anyway, and I choose to believe it. It makes for more of a fair trade. A bloodied book for a bloodied leg.” He considered this and then continued. “I was convalescing when this book was-acquired, let us say, by my former colleagues. As you'll see once you open it, it is a kind of atlas. A book of maps and drawings. And like Father Ioasaph's avenging angel, the book also ‘speaks’ Japanese. Certainly not
Chinese
, as the imbeciles who first showed it to me insisted.” He opened it, found a page. “Japanese.” Another page. “Japanese.” He looked at me. “Seven semesters of Japanese at Princeton, I know Japanese. I am, as they say, something of an Orientalist.”

He handed it to me, and I took it gingerly, trying not to touch the bloodstains. The pages were beautiful-it wasn't a book, really, as much as it was some man's private journal. The Japanese calligraphy was done in a tight, neat hand in the corners or margins of each page; in the center was usually a map or illustration, done with black ink and colored with watercolor paints or a light gray wash. The fire balloons appeared on a number of pages; sometimes in flight, sometimes lying in a wreck on the ground. The pages themselves were unusual; the paper felt brittle and had a slight sheen.

Gurley thought the book's final pages were its most curious. First, several seemed to be missing, which he found troubling. And the pages that remained-well, they looked blank. But when you looked closer you could see evidence of some color-a faint gray wash, nothing more. After a minute or two, I decided that summed up the book: pretty, but useless. I made the mistake of saying so.

“On the contrary, Belk,” Gurley said. “It is extremely useful, in fact, albeit to a small number of people.” He counted them off with his hand, starting with his thumb. “First it is useful to the spy, or spies, who created it. Should we find them and-secure-their assistance, then the book becomes useful indeed. Second, it is, and has been, useful to me. I was able to convince my former colleagues that the book, and by extension, the balloon campaign, was worthy of my personal and total focus. I admit the colonel was uncertain, initially, but I explained that I would be happy to brief his wife on all that I had discovered about the Blue Fox. He turned a shade of red that was indeed close to blue.” Gurley smiled. “He was only too happy to send me back to Alaska.”

Gurley looked at his row of clocks and stood. “It's time to go.” I started to stand as well, and Gurley pointed me back down. “This book, lastly, will prove useful, I hope, to you. I have read it, studied it, translated it, but have yet to find a balloon with it, or predict, precisely, where one will land.” I looked up. “Yes, we're quite good at finding them
after
they've landed. But by then it's too late: a fire has started, or worse, rumors have started among the local populace.” Gurley paused until I looked at him. “So please, Sergeant, find us our next balloon, before some lumberjack does. Find me my
spy.
Find the next bomb in that book, on paper, before I find it in the field, with my one remaining foot.”

He limped quite slowly around the desk to the door. I twisted around to see him go. “I'll not be back today, Sergeant. Business in town.” He smiled, broadly. “But I look forward to hearing the fruits of your labors. Tomorrow, 0700, at the airfield. Do not be late. Nor empty-handed.”

“I don't know what I can do by then, sir. That's not nearly enough time to-”

Gurley cut me off. “Sergeant,” he said, teeth bared in his favorite apparent smile. “You've seen this weapon in flight. You've seen it land. You've seen what happens when you don't move fast enough.” He spun and kicked the door with a violence that no other man who wanted to spare his foot injury could have matched. Which, when I saw his face, I realized was precisely his point.

“Boom,” he
said, just the one word, quiet and slow, and then he left.

I HAD NO IDEA WHERE GURLEY AND I WERE FLYING, SO I packed everything I could think of into a large duffel and hauled it down to the airfield the next morning. I got there an hour early, just to be safe. After a flight left for Juneau and points south at 0630, I had the terminal to myself, with the exception of a surly master sergeant who appeared to be in charge of everyone's comings and goings. I went outside to wait.

At 7:10, the sergeant poked his head outside the door and asked if I'd seen a Captain Gurley I said no, and he ducked back inside before I could say anything more.

At 7:30, the sergeant poked his head outside again, saw me, frowned, and then disappeared once more.

At 7:55, Gurley bounced up in the back of a jeep driven by two sailors. None of the three looked like they had bathed, changed, or slept since the day before. Gurley climbed out of the back carefully, but quickly, exchanged a laugh with the driver, and then turned to face me. The jeep lurched away.

“Who's late, Belk? You or me?” He looked at his watch, and then caught sight of my bag. “What's this?” he asked, kicking it. “You packed me a lunch?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I-well, I wasn't sure where we were going, so I packed everything I-” Gurley looked completely confused, so I tried something shorter: “That's my gear, sir.”

“Lovely, Belk, but why-oh dear,” he said. “You assumed-but of course you did, what with your feeble brain and eager youth. You thought you were going
with
me. That's charming.”

Gurley walked us away from the building-he was concerned about eavesdropping; I was concerned about a fight-and then turned me around, put his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Before we begin, Sergeant, let us be absolutely clear on one point. What you learned yesterday is extremely secret. You are to tell no one. If you do-” Now, it would have been clear enough for Gurley to draw a finger across his own throat. But, as always, he'd devised better. Whether it was improvised or practiced, I can't say, but this is what he did: he put a thumb to my neck, just to the left of my carotid artery. And then he slowly drew his thumbnail across-carotid, esophagus, jugular- before lifting it, before I quite knew how to react, before I'd started breathing once more. He smiled. “There, now,” he said. “It might just be better to pretend-and this may not be too difficult to do-that you learned nothing, not a single thing.”

He was right. That would not be difficult at all, because this was Alaska.

During the war, the entirety of Alaska was declared of strategic importance. Press censorship was so tight, soldiers returning Outside sometimes weakly joked that their whole horrific Alaskan experience may have taken place in their imaginations. They'd been to this strange and wild place, after all; many of them never saw the enemy (nor the sun). Once they were home, they discovered that no one had heard or read a single word about what they'd done. Daily dispatches from the South Pacific appeared in the press, but the Alaska news blackout was almost total. Maybe nothing had happened there at all.

And if Americans thought that, if the enemy thought that, it was fine with Gurley. He fought his war on two fronts, as he now explained. On one side were the Japanese, their balloons, and the prevailing winds. On the other side, the American press and public, whom he feared and loathed even more. The greatest danger these balloons posed, Gurley insisted repeatedly, was not that they would kill a few civilians or set ablaze a few acres, but rather that they would be discovered by the wrong sort of people-in particular, members of the press, who would inevitably sensationalize the issue. And why not? Japanese bombs were raining down on North America almost daily now, and not many Americans-though surely more than Gurley's supposed fifty-knew what was happening.

Although there had been a few brief mentions of the balloons in the
New York Times
and elsewhere early on in the campaign, very little was known about the balloons at the time, and officials had quickly moved to smother any further coverage. Gurley told me his superiors had initially proposed sending out a general bulletin to editors nationwide, alerting them to the story, and then demanding that they not cover the story. Report any information they uncovered to the Army, but publish nothing.

As it happens, just such a blanket agreement was later struck. But when I told Gurley that this sounded like a sensible plan, his reply was quick.

“The best way to keep a secret is to tell as many people as possible?” Gurley said. I tensed for a fist or foot to come flying. “Tell as many
journalists?”
he pressed. “We all have a job,” he said. “Our job is to beat the enemy to a bloody pulp. Their job is to sell papers.” I stared at the ground. “So newsmen can choose. They can either be on our side or the enemy's.” Gurley had concocted his own response plan for balloon sightings. Get a recovery team there as quickly as possible and collect or destroy any piece of evidence that the balloon had arrived. If the initial spotters or witnesses were military, the follow-up was easy. Gurley ordered their silence and made job-specific threats to ensure it.

If the witnesses were civilian, the job became a little more involved. Depending on what they had seen-or
thought
they had seen-Gurley would either order their silence (and call on them to consider that silence a patriotic duty) or, more often, he would tell them the balloon was a U.S. Army weather balloon that had gone awry. He wouldn't go into details, or make the balloon's mission seem secret at all, figuring that the more he downplayed its importance, the less likely the witness would be to spread the news.

But now, Gurley's plan-indeed, his whole mission-was in jeopardy. He had been summoned to San Francisco by his superiors to discuss the progress of balloon interdiction efforts. Or rather, the decline of such efforts. Early on, the numbers of balloons spotted had climbed steadily, week after week. Then they had stabilized, and recently, had begun to decline. The question now was whether to scale back American efforts to track and recover balloons. After all, resources were needed elsewhere, especially as U.S. forces drew ever closer to Japan. Instead of soldiers, the U.S. would now rely on local authorities and private citizens to find and report balloons. The press ban would be lifted; a general alert would be issued.

Gurley, of course, disagreed.

“It's not just about me, Sergeant,” he said. “It's not just that I sense dark forces are, yet again, trying to sweep me into some forgotten corner of the war. I have America 's interests at heart.” He looked at me. “This campaign has only begun. These first balloons, what have they carried? Piddly little incendiary or antipersonnel bombs? You don't develop an entire program like this to start a few brush fires. Think, Sergeant.”

I did, but all I could think of was how Gurley really was taking this personally.

“There's worse coming, Belk. That must be evident, even to you.” He looked at me and waited. “A
man
, Sergeant. Manned balloons. An invasion force. Saboteurs.
Spies.
Silently dropped behind enemy lines.” He looked back toward the terminal, as if to make sure no one had overheard him. “Angels, indeed.”

“Where?” I asked, or stammered, honestly frightened-though more of Gurley than of what his imagination had produced.

“Well, I doubt they're in goddamn San Francisco with my so-called superiors.” He turned around, waved broadly at the mountains that formed a backdrop to the base. “Here, Belk. Alaska. In the vast, concealing wilderness. Our backyard, Belk. We have to find them. And damn soon, before we get shut down. So you shall be busy while I'm gone.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, looking up to the mountains, their crowns still scabbed with snow.

Gurley followed my gaze. “Not up there, you ninny. Or who knows, maybe. But we're not going to go hiking around aimlessly- I'm certainly not going to go hiking around anywhere-no, start your search here. Back at 520. Start with the book. I trust you came up with nothing?”

“No sir,” I said. “Nothing yet.” I'd stayed in the office until midnight, staring at the book until the watercolor maps seemed to animate, its rivers flow and grasses glisten after a rain. Which seemed like more than a book could or should do, so I had closed it and crept back to the barracks for sleep.

Gurley shook his head. “Well, of course I didn't expect a child prodigy. Just someone to put in the tedious work of comparing the book's maps to ours, quadrant by quadrant, feature by feature. Tedious work-you can see why I thought of you.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but didn't utter a sound when I saw Gurley's face harden into the one he assumed before delivering a blow. “Sergeant Belk,” he said, low and even. “One balloon, one explosion, one leg. I almost had my war taken from me.” He straightened up. “I barely held on to my commission. I had to fight to even get posted to this godforsaken place. They'd rather have me in a bathrobe and wheelchair in Princeton. If we fail to find more balloons, or worse still, find one and handle it injudiciously-if I lose the second leg-or a hand, or an arm, or an eye, or the skin off my fucking face-it won't matter how much I yell. I'll be shipped home before the blood's even soaked through the bandages.” He took a deep breath. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“I shall close by letting you in on a final secret,” Gurley said. “A trifle compared to all that I have told you so far, but still, a secret, and an important one nonetheless.”

“Sir?”

“Right, then: I know almost nothing about defusing bombs.”

He paused.

“And thus, I shall leave those details… to you.”

I could only stare at him. He wore the same bomb disposal insignia I did. I'd assumed that when he'd gotten himself assigned to this mission he had picked up the bomb disposal training that went with it. Of course he would have. He'd learned, hadn't he, the price explosives exacted from the ignorant?

“Sir,” I began, searching for the best way to phrase this. He was an officer, I was the sergeant. The way things worked-

“You're incapable of this?” Gurley asked. “I was told you were the best in your class. Now that I have had some time to observe you, I can see that it was not much of a class, but still, I had certain expectations.”

“Sir,” I began, thinking back to Manzanar, the pit, Sergeant Redes, and the “rare” fuze pocket that had simply fallen out of the bomb.
Damnedest thing.
I tried again. “Our training was-I mean, didn't you- well-there was always, you know, an officer who actually did the, well, the last part. That's procedure, proper procedure and all.”

“So I understand,” said Gurley. “And so it was here, until recently. But, as I believe I've said, they've been trying to shut me down. Starve me. I used to have a full detail, including a young lieutenant, planning to read history at Oxford when this was all done.” Gurley's actor's mask fell for a moment, and then he resumed. “I must admit, I took a certain shine to him, although he was given to a younger man's ways. And, of course, he was no good at his job, or I assume as much, because he blew himself right up on the team's second mission.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, sir,” I said, though I was barely listening. All I could think of was:
It s up to me-I'm defusing the bombs.
And then: “
Your Nazis, they build a good bomb…
”

“Well, I was pretty damn sorry as well. Not just because he was a good sort, but-an officer. That's when it struck me, this little swipe of genius:
this
is the work of an enlisted man. Talented, capable, yes, but enlisted. No need to waste officers on such. Surely you agree?”

“Sir, I'm not sure that, well, in training, they-”

“Yes, of course, they're always behind in training. No, no, Sergeant, I'm quite pleased with my proposal, and expect you to be as well. Or… I can… reassign you, if you like.” He looked back toward the terminal. “I'm frequently told that young and able men are needed to clear out caves and bunkers on treeless islands throughout the Pacific. North or south, your choice.” He waited.

“No, sir,” I said quietly.

“No to the north, or south? Aleutians or Philippines?”

“I'm your man, Captain,” I said. “For this mission.” Gurley said nothing for a full minute, and I could feel him staring at me the whole time.

“Sergeant,” he finally said, “I believe that you shall never again find a mission as intriguing-or easy. You are used to digging out half-ton bombs that have plummeted from great heights deep into the earth; these bombs flitter and float to earth via
balloons.
Thirty-some pounds, tops. Carting one off is like carrying groceries, and about as dangerous.”

We began walking back to the terminal. I wondered what Sergeant Redes would have had to say about Gurley's dangerous-as-groceries bombs.
“ Your Jap bombmaker… he's ready to lose a man here and there…”

“And if it weren't all obvious enough,” Gurley said, “there is even a
film.
A training film. Didn't sit through all of it myself, but it looks helpful enough.”

We'd reached the door of the terminal, and he paused. “One more thing, Sergeant. Examine your heart while I'm gone. Examine your hands, for that matter. If you feel you're not up to this task-if you're not up to tackling alone what bombs we do find, tell me when I get back. Because I don't want to face another scene like I did with that Harvard man. He didn't die immediately, you know. Lasted long enough to ask me to put a bullet in him. Put him out of his misery.” Gurley grimaced. “Can you imagine such a thing? Good Lord, there was hardly enough left of him to shoot.”

With that, he opened the door and stepped inside.

THERE IS PLENTY of Ronnie left to shoot.

But they don't allow guns in the hospice. It doesn't matter; I have an equally efficient weapon in my hand. Ronnie's Comfort One bracelet. It is pretty, in its way. A heavy gold chain with a green and gold charm featuring the program's curious logo: the two words, plus two restroom-sign-style humanoids, a gold person standing behind a white one. Is the white one the patient, and the gold the comforter? Or is the white the soul, the gold the body? Unfortunately, what it resembles most to me is a mugging, the gold man about to pounce his hapless white counterpart.