Naked, running, seeing the blood on his naked body, he knew there was too much of it to be solely his own. He felt the lingering stab of pain from the bullet they had put in his back; he sliced his bare feet on the gravel road. Brain fogged, vision blurred, he peered into the searing sun and sharp blue sky, trying to piece together direction. North, south, east-he was headed east. He couldn’t be sure-he didn’t know where they had taken him-but if they’d kept him imprisoned anywhere within miles of the assassination team’s drop point, then he knew there was a chance, going east, to reach the Sulaco. Río Sulaco-his promised land, that river a highway to his freedom.
He barreled into the jungle, never slowing, feeling the whip and sting of branches, of vines, thorns, nettles, the itch of insect bites-and still he ran, measuring the sun through the trees. Continuing east. East, to the Río Sulaco.
He ran for hours. Nothing remained within-nothing. There was only exterior pain, throbbing, sharp; if he’d been able to see himself he’d have given up, Cooper a swollen mass of red welts. His naked, blistered, bleeding feet had lost their skin, propelling him eastward as little more than raw, seeping stumps.
No river came. No highway, no power lines, no homes, no crops. Only jungle. He fell at least a hundred times, flying headlong over logs, roots, stumps-anthills-each time rising more slowly than the last. After a particularly rough tumble, he felt death’s cool breath on his hot neck.
Enough, he remembered thinking. I’ve gone far enough.
They couldn’t be following him, not after the hours he’d spent running, his journey taking him across tens of miles of all-but-impenetrable jungle. He set his face into the dirt, closed his eyes, and slumped. It was time for sleep, the fatigue too great for consciousness. Even, perhaps, too great for life.
He heard birds, and insects, and wind.
Wind.
It was a steady wind-too steady a wind, so steady that he knew it was not wind. It was water. Moving water, rushing like the wind through the trees.
He rose again. Scarcely capable of standing upright, he shuffled forward, attempting to run but managing little more than a crawl. Soon, he smelled it and, finally, saw it-that wide, lazy road of black water-and he stumbled, plodding down the muddy riverbank, tripping again and falling head-first, plunging, and then he splashed, his head sinking beneath the surface and bobbing up like a float at the end of a fishing line. He had found his salvation, his escape-he would ride the current a hundred miles, a thousand if he could.
The river was warm. It stung the welts, the bites, the blisters and sores, but it felt good. It felt like freedom. The mosquitoes came off his skin, drowning in droves, and a short-lived euphoria consumed him. The excitement robbed him of the last remaining energy in his body, and he found himself slipping beneath the surface. The current began to sweep him downstream, and it was all he could do to keep his mouth out of the water, and then he could no longer manage even that, and he went under. His consciousness faded, the world blinking out as it passed by, the banks of the river moving past with greater and greater velocity in shorter and shorter flashes.
In a section of whitewater, one of his legs struck a rock and snapped like a twig, and he felt his head crack against something hard. He lost his bearings, suddenly forgetting how he’d come to be here. He tried to gasp but couldn’t find any air; there was only water, which he’d inhaled and could not expel. Panic struck him, but there was no physical strength remaining for him to tap into. He struggled, flailing, trying in vain to push his head above the surface-sucking, heaving. The world began to fade around the edges, then crumble to blackness, and finally, with no remaining hope, he felt a deep sense of calm.
Cooper always welcomed the calm. When it came, he knew the second of the three dreams in the cycle had finished. He would open his eyes and find the welcome confines of his bungalow, surviving to await the third dream.
When he opened his eyes tonight, though, he found that he hadn’t awakened in the bed of his bungalow. He hadn’t been pulled from the delta of the Río Sulaco by a kindhearted fisherman, either, in the way that his third dream usually began.
Instead, he saw rocks. He reached for an object that was hard to see, buried as it was beneath a set of smaller stones, and as he pulled on it the object broke free, and he saw that it was a plank of wood. He looked up, frantically now, in hopes he wouldn’t see what he suspected he would-but, to his horror, he saw precisely what he knew he would see.
Standing around his broken body, doing their little dance, were Cap’n Roy’s band of Marine Base cops. They kept on with the show as Cooper watched them from his nook in the rocks, Riley and the others doing their best to distract any wandering eyes with the illusion that work was being done out here, so that the wandering eyes would fail to notice the pile of rags and rotting flesh and bone that had washed ashore.
19
One year before the USS Chameleon was sunk by the Vietnamese mine, a group of London businessmen each kicked in five thousand pounds sterling and purchased one-half of a private island in the British Virgin Islands. Another twenty-five-hundred U.S. dollars built each partner a two-room bungalow, and the partners had themselves a nifty investment property. Part vacation time-share, part tax shelter, it allowed its owners to split up the high-season calendar among themselves and rent out the rooms for the remainder of the year. On paper, the resort lost money; in reality, it provided the partners a small but undeclared cash dividend at the end of each year.
To manage the property, the investors found a suitable candidate when a graduate student named Chris Woolsey applied to the ad they’d posted at Oxford. At the end of his first summer of work, Woolsey accepted the investors’ offer and dropped out of the two-year masters program he’d beat out thousands of candidates to attend and opted, instead, to turn his first few months spent at the place called Conch Bay into an endless summer.
It didn’t take much of Woolsey’s time or energy to tend to Conch Bay’s guests. Woolsey made a daily run to Tortola on a rickety skiff, retrieving enough in the way of food and supplies to keep his charges drunk and fed; he cleaned the outhouse seat every night, turned down the cots, and threw the old set of sheets in the wash and hung them out to dry in the sun each afternoon. A cistern collected and filtered rainwater for the showers; a septic-tank service boat came to do the dirty work every three weeks or so. After his supply run in the morning, Woolsey, meanwhile, spent the remainder of each day one of three ways: on the beach, at the bar, or in the water. He read virtually every literary classic still in print.
Easily the oddest of the many odd guests ever to stay at the rustic resort was a visitor who’d arrived about three years into Woolsey’s tour of duty. The guest introduced himself with only one name, arriving one morning on a water taxi and renting one of the ramshackle bungalows by paying six months’ rent up front, in cash; he added five thousand on top of the rent to cover whatever meal-and-alcohol plan Woolsey could muster for the same stretch of time. He then, to Woolsey’s amusement, proceeded to do little more than stay in his room, sleep on the beach, and get schnockered for three months running. The guy didn’t talk once. Still, Woolsey provided him with a plastic cooler, ducking into the man’s quarters whenever he went out to the beach, Woolsey keeping the cooler loaded with tuna sandwiches and whatever fresh fruit he’d brought over on the skiff. The man always ate all the food, so Woolsey kept filling it up.