The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  Ordinarily the algorithmic order of presenting a fact, confirming that fact, and moving on to the next would comfort Ringo, but right now it tore at his patience. He told Tahir that Gloria was trapped in a forest fire. The noise on the line forced him to repeat it three times, and still Tahir didn’t confirm. Finally, speaking each word individually, Ringo said, “What phone do you have?”

  “It is a fancy smartphone, like a tiny TV.”

  Ringo relaxed. He could work with this. He said, “Why didn’t you just say so?” But he said it at a normal conversational tempo that was drowned in noise. He followed with one word at a time: “I am sending you video.”

  “I can barely hear you, how can I receive video?”

  For a second Ringo actually considered explaining that packet transmission and forward error correction made it much easier to transmit data than voice. Voice obviously requires a real-time connection, but stale video can be sent piece by piece and reassembled at the receiver, and corrupt pieces can be resent as many times as necessary. Describing it would have taken longer than reducing the resolution of the video and sending it.

  He waited for Tahir to confirm that he had received a message. Then he instructed him on how to watch it. It took Tahir a few minutes of grappling with the user interface. Ringo could tell that Tahir had seen it when he heard the reaction: a moan of pain, a gasp of recognition, and a snarl of anger.

  Tahir growled each individual syllable: “Where is she?”

  “In Brazil, somewhere in South America.”

  Ringo started to describe the software he was writing to calculate her GPS coordinates based on the time of flight to and from the transmitter and DAQ systems.

  “How long will it take you to determine the exact location?”

  “I’ll have the uncertainty down to a hundred feet in an hour, maybe two.”

  Tahir had a decision to make. Should he try to rescue Gloria by himself or assemble a force? He had no idea how long Gloria could survive. Time was the enemy—or at least it seemed to be. He put the café proprietor’s cell phone in his pocket. The simple action helped calm him and, as his heart rate slowed, experience reminded him that while time could be a deadly, devious opponent, it never fired live ammo. He needed information, he needed power, and he needed help. His next thought was that he needed an army and a commander. He needed Farley.

  Under cover of night and with little regard for the armed, mostly uniformed, partially legitimate “government” troops, Tahir sprinted back to the ruins he’d called home for the past two weeks. He’d accumulated three AK-47s but only six rounds of ammunition. Two of the guns were functional, the third hopelessly jammed. He began rolling the two working guns into a tarp, then stopped. With that much ammo, the guns were only props anyway. He grabbed the jammed rifle and rolled it up with the others. He took a sack of adzuki beans and began the hike south to Sayyid Hassan’s kingdom.

  Tahir made it from Mogadishu to the ridge over Sy’s camp in two days by balancing reckless and prudent behavior against the ticking clock. At one time in the distant past, he’d been capable of shutting out all concerns to quiet his mind. Now, every time his eyes shut, he saw Gloria calling for her father. The truth of it was that if Gloria died, he had no desire to continue living.

  He stepped onto the ridge as the sun rose. He circled to the south, working his way around the camp and across the plain to the spot he’d found three weeks before, where he had an unobstructed view of the clear zone, the ridge, and the prison. The prison’s newly constructed steel gate reflected the sunlight like a well-lit billboard that said: There’s no way in and no way out. Tahir tended to believe the opposite of what billboards said. The gate would instill false confidence in the people who had built it. Two bored-looking guards leaned against the gate.

  He switched his attention to the terrain up on the ridge. Another pair of guards paced a regular rotation along the ridge, down to the plain, in front of the prison, and then back up the ridge. The circuit took the better part of an hour. The guards’ schedule hadn’t changed in Tahir’s absence.

  The tiny river irrigating the crops that fed Sy’s camp flowed southeast down the ridge and onto the plain. The land above the ridge was littered with boulders that disrupted and split the flow of the river into the series of small creeks that, over centuries, had carved a hundred paths from the ridge to the plain and provided the natural irrigation system that was the ultimate reason for the location of Sy’s camp.

  Tahir settled behind a rock to concentrate. If he had enough ammo he could put an AK-47 on automatic and blow away the guards, but with six rounds he’d have to pick off the guards one by one. Two guards, six bullets, two functional rifles, neither of which he’d ever fired. He couldn’t tell if they were true without firing at a fixed target. Plus, he didn’t even know if either of the guards held the key to the prison gate. It seemed like a good bet, but this plan had a long chain of weak links. He listed his resources again. This time he included the fact that twenty-four navy and marine veterans were in that prison. With three AK-47s to show off, there had to be a way to break them out.

  At this point, age, or lack of sleep, or wear and tear from carrying the hardware fifty miles in two days became a problem. Using a stick in the dirt, he sketched the geography around the prison. The shade was soothing, the dirt soft. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. Hours later, after the sun had washed away the shade, he awoke in a sweat. His first thought was of how much time had passed; it was nearly evening. His second was that fortune was smiling on him. Falling asleep so close to the route of Sy’s guards should have gotten him killed.

  He peered over the rock to the ridge. Something was missing, but this time, his eyes held their focus. Something. Something right in front of him. He looked down at the cartoon he’d drawn in the dirt and back up at the ridge. Trees slightly larger than shrubs lined the course of the small river. He could tell where the creeks split into tributaries by the shrubbery. There was an anomaly, though. A fallen tree lay off to the side, about fifty meters north of the prison, where he knew that no creek ran. He’d used that very tree for cover the night of the raid. It was the only tree or substantial shrub that he couldn’t associate with a creek bed. If he drew a line from the opening of the prison-cave straight to the river, it would pass under that tree.

  Tahir relaxed to his knees and smiled. He was no geologist, but he was no idiot either. The water that had formed the caves, probably during an epic flood, must trickle below that tree and into the prison.

  He moved west to the point from which he had watched the tent explode. As the sun dipped below the horizon, he became all but invisible from the camp and prison. The progression of guards was consistent in the way that all poorly schemed security designs are consistent: the patrols were so regular that identifying a pair of guards, along with their direction and speed, presented a security hole for thirty minutes at least.

  The camp shut down for the night. Tahir waited a few more hours. Every second spent inactive tightened the muscles at the base of his neck. Finally he moved out. He searched from the fallen tree to the closest leg of the creek. Finding no vegetation or hint of moisture, he moved to the creek’s primary tributary and worked back to the fallen tree. Same story. He wished he were a geologist, and even took a few seconds to gaze at the stars and ask God for the wisdom of education that he didn’t have. Everything hinged on a guess.

  The tree was on its side. The roots at its base had been wrenched from the earth, probably by a great wind that had accompanied the lightning that killed it. He felt around in the dirt between the roots still stuck in the ground. It was rocky. On either side of the roots were regions of impenetrable ground—boulders buried in the dirt like huge tiles, with the loamy soil playing the role of grout. He tugged on the cluster of roots and some came free. He unrolled the tarp, took out the jammed rifle, and used it to pry the dirt-grout from between two of the boulders.

  What was he doing? Gloria needed him. With just a few hours
left until sunrise, here he was, gardening.

  He jammed in the barrel and tried to pry open a gap. The loam loosened easily enough, but the boulders themselves seemed to be granite. They didn’t give. Prying bent the rifle and scraping made noise. Almost a foot below the surface, his fingertips felt moisture. He dug along the line between boulders. The pile of dirt he pulled away grew and the gap got deeper—but not wider. Finally, about the hundredth time he worked the barrel toward himself as if using a hoe, some dirt fell deeper into the gap. Tahir worked faster and the dirt around the boulder began cascading down the crevice.

  He crawled forward and listened. After several seconds he heard something but couldn’t make out what it was. The main thing, though, was that it wasn’t quiet. The longer he listened, the more it sounded like the grunts and snorts of sleeping men. The problem was—and this was a lesson Tahir had learned the hard way—the longer you listen for something specific, the more likely you are to hear what you’re listening for, regardless of what is there. He raised his head from the hole and took a deep breath to settle himself—but that breath didn’t settle him at all. The scent was unmistakable: sweat and shit.

  The opening where the dirt fell through was no more than an inch wide. He lowered his face to it. He coiled his legs, ready to vault out of the hole if something went wrong.

  PART 0: NOW

  Tahir whispers, “Farley, are you down there?” He listens but doesn’t hear a response. He tries again, louder each time until the stage whisper seems loud enough to carry down the ridge to the guards posted at the prison gate. He digs a handful of pebbles and throws them into the hole. “Farley, get Farley.”

  Certain he hears something moving, he says, “Can anyone hear me?” There’s more movement but no answer. This time his frustration drives his voice above a whisper. “Damn it, Farley, are you there?”

  “Tahir? They said you were dead.”

  He settles into a comfortable position and says, “I’ve been reported dead many times, and to the best of my knowledge the reports have so far been false. What delays your escape?”

  “The steel gate, for one thing,” Farley whispers. Then he asks Tahir to go to the lab at the center of Sy’s camp to fetch VR recording equipment.

  Anger seizes Tahir. His daughter is being driven into flames and Farley wants a camera. He turns on the cell phone, retrieves the video Ringo sent, and tosses the phone down the hole. “Here’s the only data you need. Catch!”

  The phone display lights the cave below, but the gap isn’t wide enough for him to see anything. He says, “Hurry, we have no way to recharge it.”

  He can hear Farley’s breath catch. Tahir says, “Shut it off.”

  Then several voices echo around the cave. Farley says, “Quiet!”

  His voice is too loud. One of the guards hits a rifle against the grating at the opening of the cave, maybe thirty meters away. In Arabic, the guard also says, “Quiet.”

  Tahir whispers, “Attention from your captors will not help my daughter.”

  Farley’s whisper makes it up the crack in the earth. “Where’d that video come from?”

  “They are in Brazil. Gloria is in danger; can you help me, or shall I go alone?”

  “But she’s with Chopper?”

  “Chopper is the source of danger.”

  “No way,” Farley whispers. “Chopper will protect her.”

  “Are you coming?” Tahir asks. It’s quiet for several seconds. Tahir appreciates Farley taking seconds to consider, not minutes. Urgency is necessary, but rashness generates unnecessary risk.

  Finally, Farley says, “I’m coming,” as Tahir had known he would.

  “You’re certain you can escape?”

  Another whisper, this one with a Mexican-American accent, says, “No problem, man, we’ll, like, tear down the gate with our teeth, then we’ll eat the fuckin’ pirates for lunch, man—meet you at Starbucks. Dude, what the fuck?”

  Tahir relaxes between the dead tree and the small pile of dirt. They are Americans and, as with every opportunity he has had to work with Americans, he is overwhelmed by the profound lack of wisdom that accompanies their innate ability to succeed.

  “I can help you escape,” Tahir says. He tells them about the three rifles, one jammed and bent, and the six rounds. “If we exercise precision, the appearance of weapons can be effective whether or not they are loaded. If I can widen this hole and provide you two of them, then I can approach from the front, you from the back, and we can disarm the guards.” He takes a breath and asks, “Does one of the guards at the gate hold the key to the lock on the gate?”

  There is a pause, and then another voice, one that Tahir has not heard before, says, “Yup.”

  Then the man who spoke before says, “Yeah, man, the dude with the shiny boots has the keys. He’s got ’em in a little snap-down on his fuckin’ utility belt. The dude with the nice shoes always holds the fuckin’ keys.”

  The plan is to widen the hole, drop the guns in, and then wait until the following day. They’ll act just before sunset, when it’s still light enough for the guards to see that the prisoners have guns, but dark enough, as they make their way to the beach and Sy’s boats, to make them difficult to target. The strength of their plan rests on the assumption that, as long as they don’t threaten the safety of Sy’s village, his guards won’t be much of an obstacle. The weakness is that stealing boats from Sy’s navy does threaten their safety. If Sy orders his guards to shoot, some of Farley’s team will die. The Terre Mer Gestion goons will certainly fire their weapons, but there are only six of them, three shifts of two guarding the prison.

  From below, the two tallest men, Farley and Spencer, use rocks to scrape dirt from the ceiling along the crevice. An hour into the process, Farley can feel edges of the boulders. They’re as tight as well-laid bricks—no gap is more than two inches wide, and the boulders themselves are too heavy to pry and too solid to scrape away.

  Tahir works from above, sharing information as he discovers it.

  As the sun rises, Tahir conceals himself under the dead tree and works more slowly. Farley positions most of the prisoners close to the cave opening where they pretend to play word games as they do every day, only louder now. The guards bring the morning rations, and the prisoners maintain an illusion of their daily routine.

  Before noon, Farley isolates a region where two boulders have aligned concavities. Manny climbs up to a rock outcropping where he has some leverage and can reach this key spot. He settles into position and digs in. With one arm braced against the rock outcropping, he rams a stick into the gap. Pebbles stream down. It looks like one dead root is holding the dirt-mortar in place. If Manny can use the stick as a lever to pry away the root, then the dirt should drop away, forming a gap wide enough for Tahir to hand down the rifles.

  A jet of water is the first indication.

  The stick splinters in Manny’s hand. The root falls to the cave floor, then a cascade of dirt, just as he predicted. But then something happens that no one has foreseen.

  The entire car-size boulder drops, swinging like a huge, slow pendulum away from Manny toward Farley and Spencer, who scramble away. Then it swings back. The rock outcropping, on which Manny sits, shifts. Water shoots through the seam between the outcropping and the boulder.

  There is a scraping sound. The jet of water becomes a fire hose. Manny is drenched in half a second. The boulder falls. The ceiling opens to daylight. The rock outcropping turns to mud and he falls. The wall behind him bulges. He can’t get traction in the dirt and water.

  The wall is formed of one giant rock that has sealed the cave from an underground stream. Water now rushes around the giant rock into the cave. Pebbles, loam, and clay shower down and are whisked away by the torrent. Water pressure pushes the giant rock forward. It teeters and then collapses, cracking on the car-size boulder and trapping Manny below water level.

  The entire process has taken less than five seconds, not enough time for the guards to react.
Not enough time for anyone to scurry up the ramp that the boulder now forms. But ample time for Farley to question himself.

  It’s absurd. Everything is absurd. Politics, life, death, especially death. Farley has led them there. Right now, the plight of Earth and Sea somehow doesn’t weigh against the sound of Manny’s concatenated scream.

  Tahir says, “Move, move, move!”

  The guards are yelling and there’s metal-on-metal clanking at the prison gate.

  Now waist-deep in the flood, Farley points at Spencer and says, “Get everyone out.” Then, to Tahir, “We’re not leaving Manny.”

  Tahir and Spencer work at each end of the boulder ramp guiding people up and out, while Farley works his way around the boulder to the back of the cave. Fighting the adrenaline-fueled urge to panic or take flight, he takes a deep breath and examines the collapsed wall from which the river now flows.

  Almost a minute has passed, enough time for the prison guards to respond and a general alert to go out, but there is probably another minute before the guards can assemble a response.

  Fighting the current, Farley reaches into the rocks. The outcropping that had formed the rear wall of the cave is now a mess of mud and rocks. He pulls at the debris. The water rises. He reaches beneath the giant rock, touches clothing, grabs it, and pulls. It tears off in his hand. He reaches farther in and touches Manny’s back, finds his shoulder, and tugs on his arm. Farley loses his balance and the current pulls him under. He hangs on to Manny and holds his breath. He wedges his feet against the boulder and pulls. He loses his foothold and tries to wedge his legs in position a second time. He’ll have to come up for air in a few seconds, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to find Manny a second time. He pulls with renewed effort, aware that his muscles require oxygen.

  He feels someone grab his waist and pull. Farley knows it’s Spencer. He tightens his grip on Manny and brings his knees up to give Spencer a better grip. Spencer pulls and pulls again. Farley’s losing his breath. He’ll gag on a lungful of water in a few seconds.