The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  Tahir nods to himself and says, “How many times have you experienced this thing that Gloria says: There is never time to do it right, but there always is time to do it over? This time, Farley, we get only one chance. By preparing we reduce risk; we make the clock work for us instead of against us.”

  Farley shakes his head, grinds his hands together. “Okay. What have you got? I need to do something.”

  In a matter of seconds, Tahir throws the gun back together, puts a few rounds in a magazine, inserts it into the rifle, holds the barrel up to his ear, pumps one into the chamber, and hands the rifle to Farley, stock first. “Learn how to use this.”

  They spend the night camped out at the airport. Farley can’t keep his eyes closed. He knows the value of sleep and he understands the value of experience, but he also hears the clock ticking. He watches the quarter-moon set. It’s just past midnight. There ought to be more stars visible. The haze is as thick as it is in Los Angeles and they’re hundreds of miles from civilization. He yawns and realizes how short his breath has been all day. He leans on his side and watches Tahir. The wiry old man is curled in a knot, sound asleep.

  Farley takes another deep breath and concentrates on relaxing each part of his body from his toes up to his neck. His thoughts run back to the beginning. The day he met Gloria, then farther back, the day he met Chopper. He loves them both. He can’t shake the notion that there is a mistake. There has to be. No way would Chopper hurt Gloria. It doesn’t fit. No one is more loyal than Chopper. He combs his memory and time jogs on. No, it doesn’t work. If Gloria is in trouble, Chopper is trying to save her. The data is being misinterpreted. He releases the breath.

  Now he hears the background noise: beneath the insects’ buzz there’s an owl asking its eternal question.

  Tahir rolls out of the sleeping bag, instantly awake. The sun is just rising, but that’s not what has wakened him. In the distance he hears an engine. He sits upright and hopes. They need this pilot, Van O’Reilly. They need him right now. He doesn’t blame Farley for wanting to move out with the other pilot, but the man’s rosy nose screamed alcoholic and his countenance defined a man accustomed to stealing from tourists. He blames Farley’s lack of experience. Though had Farley not been angry, Tahir would have been offended. It seems like a test, another test. When will God stop testing him?

  Maybe this is the last test.

  The plane curls in from the south. It’s red and has a single wing over the fuselage like a Cessna or Piper, a personal aircraft with a single propeller on the nose. Rather than wheels, it’s fitted with pontoons for water landings.

  The plane sets down on the river and, before it’s reached an appropriate speed, the pilot cuts a sharp turn into the harbor. The resulting wake sends waves into shore. A flock of birds complain their way into the sky.

  “Is it him?” Farley asks.

  “It better be,” Tahir says.

  “Yeah, I remember them,” O’Reilly says, pushing back his Indy hat. “What a pair. Was she a retard or somethin’? Didn’t say a word the whole time.”

  Farley and Tahir shoot glances at each other but continue loading their packs on the plane.

  O’Reilly continues, “I liked the guy, really knew what he was about, a pretty tough hombre, seemed to me.” He points at Tahir and adds, “Probably like you used to be.”

  “They’re caught in the fire and—” Farley starts to say.

  But Tahir interrupts him: “We will need logistical support the whole way.”

  O’Reilly rubs his thumb and fingers together.

  Farley says, “We’ll pay a thousand US dollars a day.”

  “A thousand, huh? I guess five thousand wouldn’t be out of the question?”

  Tahir says, “One thousand.”

  O’Reilly tips his hat. “Okay then, let’s fly through some flames.”

  Tahir asks, “Do we need special equipment?”

  O’Reilly shrugs and says, “Fire extinguishers. Great, big fire extinguishers.”

  Tahir sits on the strapped-down piece of plywood that serves as a backseat. He hooks his feet under the seat in front and braces himself with a hand on the ceiling. Farley takes the copilot seat.

  “Contact, roger, and all that shit,” O’Reilly yells over the engine. “If you’re not battened down yet, you’ll be bouncin’ out soon.” O’Reilly guns the engine, hits a rudder, and the plane makes an abrupt U-turn to face into the wind. He hits a few levers on the dash and taps the altimeter, which had been stuck at a thousand meters but now registers less than a hundred. A long, slow, flat boat drifts into their path. He leans into the yoke. The plane leaps forward and zooms up the river, bounces on the wake of the barge, and takes to the sky. It clears the barge by twenty meters.

  Tahir has never liked airplanes. He looks down at the barge, wondering if he left his stomach on it.

  The plane emerges above a smoky, low-hanging haze. From a few thousand feet, the terrain takes shape. Most rivers Tahir has seen are just another feature of the landscape snaking down from mountains and foothills to the plains. This river is different. It dictates every structure. At some points it looks deep and navy blue, more like a lake than a river. Where it narrows the current rushes with relentless zeal, boiling foamy white. Mostly, though, the Amazon is a rich greenish brown. To Tahir it looks muddy. When Gloria was a toddler, Tahir fought in a battle near a seasonal river between Iran and Iraq. It was spring and the river ran strong. The battle raged for weeks, and every day that river turned a deeper shade of red until it was nearly black. He catches himself staring down at the muddy green.

  As they fly farther from civilization, it is as though the land below moves back in time, from cultivated fields and open pasture to thick green forest. The river looks more like an artery distributing nutrients. He’s never fought in a jungle before. A calm comes over him, a calm built of resolve.

  He grips Farley’s shoulder. Farley turns around and says something Tahir can’t hear over the engine. He sees the fear in Farley’s blue eyes. But he sees something else, too. For an instant he sees in Farley what Gloria must see in him. Farley is at once strong and afraid. Tahir recognizes courage when he sees it. He feels an unspoken communication with the man: they will rescue Gloria or die trying. Tahir feels that he has conveyed to Farley his willingness to kill Chopper or any other man who threatens Gloria. Their stare extends several more seconds. He hopes that Farley is also willing.

  Tahir breaks the stare. Farley turns back around. Tahir rubs his eyes. How many times has he looked a man in the eye and wondered if he has the resolve required to kill a friend?

  An hour into the flight, the landscape changes. Now there is dead jungle and living jungle with a sharp, black smoky boundary between them. It is as Ringo said. The land farther from the river is much more quickly ravaged by the fire. The result is a long peninsula of doomed life in a sea of death.

  O’Reilly elbows Farley and points at the GPS. The coordinates are zeroing in on the note jammed into the dash. Farley holds out a notebook where he wrote down the position Ringo conveyed by satellite phone a few minutes before takeoff. Though the sets of numbers look similar, Tahir doesn’t understand the scale well enough to know how close they might be. Still, he scans the ground for his daughter.

  O’Reilly drops altitude, taking a wide arc that passes through a column of smoke a few hundred feet above the flames. As the GPS coordinates align with those scrawled on the paper, he points to the bank of the river where the ruins of a village still smolder. The flames have crossed the bank, converting the forest into ashy smoke.

  They fly concentric circles over the village. No one is there. O’Reilly increases altitude. He takes the notebook from Farley and continues farther up the river. When the numbers on the GPS device coincide with those on Farley’s notebook, Tahir widens his eyes. It’s a technique that increases his ability to detect motion in a wide field of view. Gloria was here at least hours ago. The smoke is thick, but Tahir can see that the land directly below
is still green, though he can’t see through the forest canopy.

  O’Reilly climbs to a higher altitude and again makes concentric circles of increasing diameter. The river structure is different here. The land below is an island. A hundred-meter sliver of jungle that the river forks around in its path from the Andes in the west to the Atlantic in the east.

  Tahir taps O’Reilly on the shoulder and points his index finger straight up. O’Reilly pulls back on the steering wheel/yoke and the plane shoots up in the sky.

  O’Reilly banks the plane into a circle that allows them to look straight down.

  There is a problem.

  Yes, the island where Gloria was this morning—and probably remains—is surrounded by the river firebreak. However, great tongues of orange flame lick the banks of the river from every direction. Just below the downstream edge of the island, maybe thirty meters from where the two forks rejoin, the river takes a sharp turn. The sharp turn presents an eastern, downstream boundary where another wall of flames approaches.

  Tahir has fought firefights, but he has never fought a fire. He knows no more about the nature of fire, the patterns of its behavior, than he knows of geography. But he understands. In encircling this small island, the river splits and, in splitting, its width is diminished. The height of the flames is easily three times the width of the river. His lack of experience in the field doesn’t make the conclusion less obvious: the fire is closing in on this island, and the river as firebreak is an illusion.

  The fire will build along the opposite banks and, like a weak dam, the water won’t so much hold it back as encourage it to build and ripen until the conflagration explodes across. He scans the boundary of the island. The distance from the fire to the riverbank is nearly identical in every direction. The flames will leap across simultaneously from every side, and when they do, this island is going to erupt in a matter of minutes.

  “Take us down now!” Tahir yells above the engine. “Down, now!”

  O’Reilly looks to Farley for confirmation. Farley nods and O’Reilly swoops down over the island. Tahir is ready and braced. He leans forward, indicating the wide swath of river upstream from the island.

  O’Reilly yells, “Yee haw,” and the plane splashes into the water.

  From here, the smoke forms walls to the right and left. The daylight is battlefield orange.

  “Okay,” Ringo says, “my estimate of Gloria’s coordinates—”

  “Your estimate?” Farley yells into the phone. He’s standing on the sandy bank of the river. O’Reilly and Tahir tie the plane to a tree. The crackling and crashing sounds of the fire consuming the forest aren’t yet as loud as the living jungle, but they form the backbeat of encroaching doom.

  “Yeah, my estimate—Farley, the sensors don’t have GPS chips, remember? The power budget—”

  “Where is she?”

  “My estimate is a triangulation calculation based on the timing of data acquisition downloaded from two satellites and the DAQ system on Chopper’s PC, mapped onto the image from NOAA’s atmospheric monitoring satellite. It’s accurate to about a hundred feet and is delayed by at least twenty minutes. It’s updating now; give me a second.”

  Farley waits. He looks into the foliage. It’s a dense mesh of vines, leaves, and hanging moss, but there are gaps in the shadows, openings that are cave-like in their darkness. An image forms in his mind: young leaves reaching up for light and older leaves left behind, drowning in darkness and dropping from the trees to form these openings. The way it all fits together brings a hint of harmony to his mood. His heart slows and he wills Gloria and Chopper to emerge from the jungle. He tries to picture them. An image of Chopper comes immediately to mind. Chopper with that wry, cynical grin. Damn it, Chopper, why aren’t you reading my thoughts now? Or are you? In his heart, he knows that if Chopper could, he would bring Gloria to them this instant. His heart goes empty and feels raw. He tries to picture Gloria. He hasn’t seen her in 202 days and it’s hard to conjure her face.

  Ringo’s voice comes from the phone in his hand. “You’re on that island?”

  “Is she?”

  “Twenty minutes ago her position was consistent with the northeast bank.”

  Farley orients himself. They are on the northwest bank. Could she be less than a hundred steps away? Something in Ringo’s voice draws his attention.

  “Farley,” Ringo says, “you guys are fucked. I think you should get the hell out of there.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s Chopper and Glo. What are you saying?”

  “The fire is closing in from every direction.”

  “I know, but it’s okay right now and we have a plane standing by. Give me something I can use!”

  “Last night Bupin got me access to this satellite feed and I wrote a little simulation,” Ringo says. Farley stops trying to rush him. Ringo is the smartest person he’s ever known, and he trusts his attention to detail. Ringo continues, “I downloaded a year of data and calculated burn rates for different conditions and terrains. These fires spread the way that waves travel—in fact, their dependence on wind is almost the same—except for one big difference. Waves flow in trains. Except in weird nonlinear cases, you don’t get a single wave all by itself. The flame front is like a wave front except that it leaves a more-or-less steady state of fire in its wake.”

  The plane is tied down now. O’Reilly sits on one of the pontoons watching the opposite bank burn. Tahir stands with his hands on his hips staring at Farley, waiting and not approving of the wait.

  “Like waves,” Ringo continues, “the fire experiences interference. The combination of wind, geography, and available fuel can form nulls that the fire misses, passes right by, but it also can interfere constructively, adding together in a way that doubles the amplitude of the flames. I just ran the simulation. That island is a peak, a constructive interference peak. Okay, here’s something you can use: the flames will converge at about a foot per second and there will be a time lag of no more than five minutes before it crosses the river. I don’t have any data like this. I mean, dude, you’re in the worst possible place. Listen to me: when the flames start burning on the opposite shore, you need to be in that plane lifting off or you’re going to die.”

  “I’m not leaving without Chopper and Gloria.”

  “Did you hear what I said?” Ringo yells into the phone. “The location I gave you is twenty minutes old and accurate to no more than a hundred meters—the location is consistent with her being safe and sound on the other side of the flames!”

  “It’s also consistent with her standing a few feet away from me,” Farley says.

  “Chopper is hunting Gloria and the girl. She told me so.”

  “Told you?”

  “Yeah, she’s got all the sensors on and knows I can see and hear everything she can. Chopper drugged her and now he’s using her to record the rain forest experiential database.”

  “No,” Farley says, “there’s gotta be some mistake, a huge miscommunication. Chopper would never—”

  Tahir steps forward. In a flash of motion, he takes the phone from Farley, wraps it in its nylon case, and jams it in Farley’s pack.

  Farley coughs and shakes his head. Then he describes Gloria’s most likely position. “She must be on this island. If she were safe on the other side of the fire, we’d have seen her as we flew in. We have to assume that Chopper and Gloria are together, or at least that when we find her she’ll know how to get to him.” As he speaks, he sees the doubt on Tahir’s face.

  Tahir says, “You work along the shore; I’ll go inland. If you find her, shoot into the air, one round every five seconds until we rejoin. If I find her I’ll do the same.”

  Farley says, “Let’s go.”

  He steps along the bank of the river, ducks under a branch, steps into the water, and lets the current push him to the next patch of open shore.

  Gloria and Iara have been hiding on this island for three days. Since it is bordered in every direction by wat
er, Gloria thought it was safe, but she’s starting to doubt. They haven’t seen Chopper in those three days, so why does she know to the marrow of her bones that he’s closing in on them?

  It’s one of the most fundamental decisions in life. She’s made it a thousand times before, metaphorically. Do you hide out and hope for the best? Or run for it? Do you risk being found or submit to the chase? In business, she’s always demanded of herself that she not let fear shade her decisions. Passion, yes; fear, never.

  She doesn’t know that the island will soon erupt like a pissed-off volcano. If she did, the decision would be easier.

  Iara is a six-year-old orphan, and she does not want to stay where they are. She points up in the trees where the monkeys who led them here are now swinging in frantic circles.

  Iara takes Gloria’s hand and pulls her back through the brush along the shady trail that leads to the river. It’s a short walk. The river is no more than twenty meters wide here and the current is swift. The fire exhales its hot breath in a blistering wind from the opposite bank. She can’t yet see the flames but knows they’re closing in. The wind has already withered the broad leaves on the tree branches that lean over the river.

  They have to get out of here, and there’s only one way out.

  Chopper herded her to this island and has been watching ever since. The contrast will be perfect. The island Eden will explode in hellfire. Every sensation of the experience will be recorded, and it will teach them. All of them.

  He follows Gloria and the kid through the brush. Working his way through the trees, from canopy to canopy, he only touches the ground when he must. He likes it here and plans to stay. It’s perfect for him. There’s so much shade and wildlife, and up in the hills, the air will be clean and the water fresh.

  He climbs a tree over the riverbank where he has a well-concealed view of Gloria and the kid. Gloria’s still wearing the equipment. It looks as though she’s straightened it. Chopper believes that, deep down, Gloria understands her role. She might not like the immediate and imminent pain, but she knows that if Farley were alive, this is what he would want them to do.