Lisa took absorbed that, then said grimly, “So get up. Only thing we can do is get away from here as fast as we can.”
We hustled onwards in terrified silence. Eventually we reached the river again. It had grown even wider and wilder, roared through a steep-sided canyon carved by its sheer whitewater churning past rocks the size of SUVs; there was no chance of crossing back to the other side. To the west the sun had vanished behind the hills, and the clouds were beginning to redden.
I wondered too late if we should have tried to lose ourselves in the jungle. Our pursuers knew roughly where we were, and probably guessed we would head for the river. But we didn’t have any choice, if we wanted to be rescued. The only way our rescuers might find us in the jungle was if we turned on our phones, which would get us killed. Our only hope was to be seen from the air. It seemed like a thin one.
My bleak mood brightened considerably when we saw the helicopter.
The river was so loud that we saw the vehicle before we heard it, flying just above the canopy trees about half a mile downriver, heading our way. It was different from the one that had carried us, smaller and lighter, more civilian than military. Lisa hesitated, and I could tell we were thinking the same thing: government or narcos? But it had a Colombian flag painted on its side.
“What do you think?” I asked her.
“I think it’s the good guys. The narcos wouldn’t dare bring their own helicopters up here right now, with the air force looking for us.”
I sighed with relief so intense that I staggered. She began to wave her arms, and I did the same. The helicopter’s course didn’t change, but it was moving towards us, flying slowly, obviously looking out for us; they would see us soon enough.
Then I saw a dark blotch in the sky, above and behind the helicopter, moving fast.
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, no, no, no, no.”
Lisa followed my gaze and froze.
The drone stooped downwards like a bird of prey, heading straight for the helicopter and the signals emanating from within. One or more of its passengers had left their phones on, phones that were sending out here-I-am! radio bursts, hoping for a response from a friendly cellular tower.
“Look out,” I muttered, hoping they would somehow notice, if they sped up they could easily outrun it, “come on, look out, look out, look out… “
The UAV flew straight into the helicopter’s whirling blades, and transformed in an eyeblink into a bright flower of flame. It was like watching a magic trick.
A moment later the dull boom hit us, but I hardly noticed, I was too busy staring aghast at the helicopter, groaning as if I too had been struck. The explosion had caused the Jesus-nut that held its rotor to seize. That in turn had instantaneously transferred the angular momentum of the blades to the rest of the vehicle, causing the whole aircraft to spin wildly in the air for a moment like some kind of demented carnival ride. Then it fell sideways, tumbling head-over-tail like a thrown stone, and disappeared into the jungle on the other side of the river. The roaring water swallowed up whatever sound it might have made.
I stared at where it had vanished for what felt like a long time, as if it might yet rise up unscathed to save us. There were no flames or smoke, it had neither burned or exploded, but I couldn’t imagine anyone surviving that crash. Not that it made any difference to us. That other bank was about as accessible to us as Antarctica.
Eventually I demanded, in a voice that sounded worryingly like that of a lost and frightened child, “What do we do now?”
After a long moment Lisa answered in a voice so quiet I could barely hear it over the roaring whitewater, yet so determined it brooked no dissent: “We keep going. We don’t give up. We’ve still got a chance.”
But I could tell that she was just trying to keep up my spirits. We weren’t going to be rescued. The narcos would get us first.
Chapter 12
That was easily the worst night of my life, even worse than the redeye flight the night my father died. The clothes on our back were still damp, Lisa’s jacket was soaked, and we were a kilometre above sea level, the jungle was freezing. A thick cloud of mosquitoes swarmed us, eating us alive. We huddled together beneath a miserable blanket of ferns and leaves, close enough to the river to find it by sound in the morning, distant enough that we would be able to hear oncoming intruders. My head throbbed, my muscles burned, my various contusions ached, and all these agonies and the cold seemed to add to each other’s potency. But worst of all was the fear.
“Breathe deeply,” she murmured to me, as I shivered. We were so close that I could feel her breath against my cheek. “Tibetan monks can keep themselves warm in subzero conditions with breath alone.”
I tried to follow her example. Her whole body rose and fell with every respiration. She was all taut muscle, holding her felt like holding a wild animal. Our bodies lay pressed together tightly, like lovers, but there was nothing even remotely sexual about it, we were just two desperate creatures trying to survive.
“Do you think they’ll come after us tomorrow?” I asked.
“You mean the narcos or the air force?”
“Either. Both.”
She paused to think. “They’ll send someone after the missing helicopter, the air force, but they might think we got picked up before the crash. If they can even find it. Wouldn’t be the first time a chopper went missing in the jungle. God damn it.”
“Yeah. We were so close.”
“Not what I mean. Harrison would have been on board.”
I flinched, horrified. It hadn’t occurred to me that people we knew might have died in that crash. “Oh my God. Sophie. She might have come along to track our phone signals -“
“No way in hell Harrison would have allowed a civilian on a rescue mission. Don’t worry. That I can absolutely guarantee.”
I relaxed as much as I could. “Did you know him well?”
“Not really. But he was a good soldier.”
That reminded me of her military tenure. “How long were you in the Army?” I really just wanted to keep talking, about anything. It was better than silent misery.
“Four years.”
“Why did you join?”
She snorted. “You ever been to Hondo, Texas?”
“No.”
“It’s famous for one thing, the sign outside town that says ‘This is God’s Country, Please Don’t Drive Through It Like Hell.’ They need it, because people take one look and stand on the gas pedal. If you’d grown up there you’d have done anything to get out too.”
“You don’t sound Texan.”
“I have done everything humanly possible to expunge the stain of Hondo, Texas from myself.”
“Oh.”
“And my mom was Mexican via Minnesota. Anyways the Army seemed like the only way out. Everything else looked like a dead end. And I guess maybe I wanted some structure in my life. Never exactly got much from my mom.”
“What about your dad?”
“Dad who?”
“Oh.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea. She always loved me. She was just seventeen different kinds of fucked up.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But the army was good to me. Straightened me out. Mostly.” I felt her smile. “Paid for my degree, too. And sometimes they let me shoot rocket launchers. You ever fire a rocket launcher?”
“No.”
“You’re missing out.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“What about you?” she asked. “From Toronto originally?”
“Not quite. Small town in Southern Ontario. About a couple hours away.”
“What’s that like?”
I grimaced. “I used to call it the Land of Bland.”
“Right now that doesn’t sound so bad.”
“True,” I admitted.
But at the time it had felt like a prison. I had been a sickly and lonely kid, had spent most of my youth in small-town strip-mall Ontario reading books, watching movies, and playing video and role-playing games, with Jesse my only true friend, both of us frustrated by the interminable dullness of our lives. We knew that somewhere out there was a world of discovery and adventure, where people who mattered did things that mattered. When he and I were teenagers our frustration had sometimes erupted into acts of futile and minor destruction: smashing windows, stealing signs, setting fires.
University had been better, but I had learned there, to my consternation, that being the second smartest person in my high school meant nothing in the real world. Waterloo was Canada’s finest technical school, “the MIT of the North,” and amid that galaxy of talent my star was merely average. After graduation I had drifted from one lucrative but joyless engineering job to another, met and moved in with a perfectly nice and perfectly ordinary girl named Sonia – and been miserable and frustrated beyond description, thanks to the ceaseless gnawing of my thwarted ambitions.
Back then, every time I heard about anything extraordinary, anything done by someone amazing, it made my gut tighten into a knot of angry frustration, made me want to spit. Scientists bursting the frontiers of human knowledge, engineers unveiling world-changing creations, journalists reporting on discoveries and desperate conflicts, artists reshaping their culture, tycoons staking billion-dollar bets on the future: that kind of news just rubbed my nose in the fact that I would never in my life experience anything remotely similar; that all the incredible richness and endless wild possibilities of the world outside my own little bubble of dull comfort would go forever undiscovered.
Or so I had thought, until I met Sophie.
Without her I was ordinary; and what I had always wanted, more than anything, was an extraordinary life.
It was her mischievous grin that had first caught my attention at the party where we met, even before Jesse had introduced us, even before I began to realize just how extraordinary she was. During the one year Sophie had spent in standard undergraduate classes, before she was fast-tracked straight to a doctorate, a strange and sometimes unseemly competition to invent math puzzles that she might find challenging had developed among Caltech’s faculty. When she wore that impish grin she looked a lot like a spoiled teenager, but in truth she was an intellectual titan.
The great and the good flocked like moths to her searchlight mind. Because of her I had dined with senators and Nobel laureates, met with billionaires planning the future of space exploration, attended the legendary Davos and TED conferences, been flown first-class to the world’s greatest research complexes, experienced a world that people like me could usually only taste in dreams and stories.
But it still hadn’t been easy spending the last three years of my life in orbit around hers. The ratio of people who knew me as Dr. Warren’s boyfriend to those who knew my name was probably five to one. It was like being a 1950s wife, or an ordinary guy dating a movie star. Not that there was supposed to be anything wrong with that, in this era of sexual equality – but there was. Playing eternal second fiddle to my genius girlfriend rankled, a lot. By normal-person standards, I was well above average: smart, athletic, interesting, successful. But from Sophie’s rarefied intellectual eyrie there wasn’t much space between me and mediocrity. The work I did for her lab, building, testing, and repairing, was interesting and nontrivial; but others treated me not as her partner, but more like a subservient assistant who Dr. Warren happened to sleep with.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Lisa said.
I shrugged awkwardly. “Sophie.”
“I’m going to get you back to her. I promise.”
I forced a smile. “Thanks.”
A drop fell on my face. Then another, and another.
“Oh, no,” I said, rolling to look up at the sky. There were no stars visible. “Oh, no, you’re shitting me, you have to be kidding. Come on. This isn’t fair.”
The rain ignored my pleas. It was more gentle than the afternoon downpour, but it was steady and insistent, and it wouldn’t stop.
I thought of all the adventure stories I had read growing up, of Frodo and Sam crossing the endless wastes, Allen Quatermain in Africa, Juan Rico at Camp Arthur Currie, Biggles landing on some godforsaken runway, Huck Finn rafting down the Mississippi, Jim Hawkins in the Caribbean. Too late I was realizing that no one in their right minds would ever want to have a real adventure. There had never been much in those books about endless hours of gnawing misery, gasping exhaustion, and bone-shuddering terror.
I looked at Lisa and saw that her eyes were distant and she was smiling. A real smile, not a grimace; a little forced, maybe, but a little dreamy too.
“What are you smiling at?” I asked.
She said, “I’m trying to enjoy the moment.”
I stared at her incredulously. “What?”
“Happiness comes from within. The Stoics believed it was possible to be happy even as you were stretched upon the rack.”
“Right. I’m sorry, but that’s fucking insane. I have never been more miserable in my entire life than right now.”
“You can’t think of it like that. You can’t compare it to the good times. Times like this you have to remember, every instant is precious, life is short, we could die any minute. Every moment of your life without exception is a gift to be treasured, even this one. Especially this one.”
“You don’t seriously believe that.”
“You don’t seriously not.”
I didn’t answer.
“Close your eyes and breathe deep,” she said. “Just concentrate on that. On how good it is just to breathe, even if it hurts. It helps. I promise.”
“Like meditation?”
“Sort of. But more like a celebration.”
I tried, and in fact, there was something to it. Maybe knowing how close I was to death made every breath, every morsel of life, taste particularly delicious. My aches and pains and the cold rain were awful, but at the same time, somehow, for a few minutes at least, I convinced myself that it was glorious to still be alive.
But only for a few minutes. I was insufficiently stoic to enjoy freezing to death. As we grew soaked my teeth began to chatter, and Lisa began to shiver against me too.
“We have to start moving or we’ll get hypothermia,” she said.
“What happened to enjoying every moment?” I asked nastily. “Isn’t hypothermia a precious gift too?”
“Don’t be an asshole. Get up.”
I felt too weak to stand, much less move, but I made myself totter to my feet and follow her through the darkness. Travelling through the jungle was even worse in the darkness than by day. I let Lisa take my hand and lead me like a child.
The rest of that night was a horrific miasma of total exhaustion. Twice I sat down and told her I could go no further. The first time she cajoled me back to my feet. The second time she had to order me. I didn’t have the strength to disobey.
I had no idea where we were going. In the morning I learned that she hadn’t either; she had simply advanced blindly into the jungle, counting on the natural human tendency to go in circles when lost. It worked. When dawn finally broke through the torn curtains of the rainclouds, lifting my spirits and restoring some semblance of strength, we walked straight towards the sun and reached the river in less than half an hour. From there, after a brief discussion of the wisdom or foolishness of remaining near the crash, we continued downstream.
Around noon we were discovered.