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‘A few hours ago we picked up an emergency beacon from a sailboat in distress.’
The crew chattered excitedly.
‘We know that the vessel’s owner was rescued by the United States Coast Guard off Kaua’i during a storm five years ago. So either this boat has been adrift for five years, or it came aground on the island south of us even before then, or someone else is on board it now. We tried hailing the vessel on emergency frequencies but got no response. Since search-and-rescue aircraft don’t carry enough fuel to reach this location from the nearest airfield, we have been asked to respond.’
A chorus of ‘Wow’s rose from the tables.
Glyn cleared his throat. The biologist was visibly nervous now that the cameras and lights turned to him. ‘The good news,’ the Englishman announced, ‘is that the signal seems to have come from one of the world’s last unexplored islands.’
After twenty-one miserable days at sea, the distress signal itself was cause for celebration. But the opportunity to land on an unexplored island inspired thunderous applause from all.
‘The island is only about two miles wide,’ Glyn said, encouraged. He read from cue cards Nell had prepared for him. ‘Since it is located below the fortieth parallel, a treacherous zone mariners call the “Roaring Forties,” shipping lanes have bypassed it for the last two centuries. We are now headed for what could well be the most geographically remote piece of land on the Planet Earth. This empty patch of ocean is the size of the continental United States, and what we know about it is about equivalent to what can be seen of the United States from its interstate highway system. That’s how sparsely traversed this part of the world remains to this day. And the seafloor here is less mapped than the surface of Mars!’
Glyn got an appreciative murmur out of the crowd and he charged on.
‘There are only a few reports of anyone sighting this island, and only one report of anyone actually landing on it, recorded in 1791 by Ambrose Spencer Henders, Captain of the H.M.S. Retribution.’
Glyn unfolded a transcript of Captain Henders’s log entry. This had been the remarkable glimpse into the unknown that fired Nell’s undergraduate imagination nine years earlier. Without stumbling too badly over the archaicisms and nautical abbreviations, he read:
‘Wind at WSW at 5 oClock in the AM, with which we hauld due West, and at 7 oClock spotted an Isle 2 miles wide that we could not find on the Chart, which lies at Latitude 46° S., Long 135° W. There is no bottom to catch anchor around this island. We rainged along its shore in search of a suitable landing but high cliffs gird the island completely. Our hopes frustrated and not wanting to spend more time than we had, I had every body to stations to put about, when at half past 4 oClock in the PM a man spotted a Fissure from which water streams down the cliff, staining it dark. Mr Grafton believed it could be reached by Longboat, and so I emmidiately put down one boat, and the men took some Barrecoes to fill.
‘We collected Three Barrecoes of freshwater from a trickling waterfall inside the Fissure. However, we lost one man dear to us in the effort, Stephen Frears–a true man, and strong made, whom we shall all terribly miss, and judged the risk of another man too great.
‘Upon the urgings of our Chaplain, and having determined that the island was neither habitable nor accessible by the blackhearts of HMS Bounty, we departed with haste and heavy hearts, our heading due West to Wellington, where we all are looking forward to a friendly harbour.
–Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders,
21st August, 1791’
Glyn folded the worn printout Nell had given him. ‘That’s it–the only reported landing. If we can find a way inland, we will be the first to explore Captain Henders’s forgotten isle.’ Glyn nodded and smiled at Nell.
There was a rowdy round of applause, and Copepod barked.
‘So the storms served a good purpose, after all,’ Captain Sol told them. ‘Poseidon has put us on a course to help a fellow mariner in distress. And we’ll have a chance to visit one of the final frontiers on Earth, where no man has gone before!’ Captain Sol raised his fist skyward, a ham at heart.
7:07 P.M.
‘God bless Captain Sol,’ Cynthea muttered in the control room, jabbing her pencil eraser at different screens as everyone cheered and toasted. ‘We’ll have to lay in some music behind Glyn’s speech and edit it way down.’
‘Yeah, that nearly killed us,’ Peach agreed.
‘Find some sea shanty thing, like something from Jaws when Robert Shaw is talking about sharks and battleships. Lay it in behind that speech and it’ll be a thing of beauty. Then can it and zap it, Peach. Get it to those bastards in L.A. before the assholes in New York can say no.’ Cynthea spoke through her headset to her camera crew. ‘OK, boys, we’re done. Eat some dinner. Nice work, darlings!’
7:08 P.M.
Spirits soared following the announcement, and when the annoying lights and cameras finally shut down everyone cheered again, sarcastically.
Nell glanced over at the next table.
Still puffed up from his starring debut, Glyn had seated himself across from Dawn. He seemed terribly interested in what she was saying.
Nell stifled a giggle at the almost inconceivable coupling. Dawn looked like she would eat Glyn alive.
Zero sat down across from Nell at her table and commandeered an unclaimed plate of food. Gouging a bite out of a filet of orange roughy, the lead cameraman looked at her. ‘So what made a gal like you want to be a botanist?’ He broke off a chunk of fish and fed it to Copepod.
Nell sipped her ice water as she mulled over his question. ‘Well, when my mom was killed by a jellyfish in Indonesia, I decided to study plants.’
Zero lifted a forkful of fish to his mouth, surprised. ‘For real?’
‘Of course, for real!’ said Andy, who was sitting next to Nell protectively, as always, though it was usually she who protected him.
Nell had persuaded Andy to leave his cabin after his earlier tantrum, and he had changed into a more subdued blue plaid flannel shirt open over a yellow T-shirt with a smiley face on the chest. The vintage shirt said, ‘Have a Nice Day!’ with no ironic bullethole in its head or anything out of the ordinary–just a smiley face waiting for the world to deface it.
Nell squeezed Andy’s wrist and patted Zero’s hand, instantly charming both men with her brief touch.
‘My mother was an oceanographer,’ she explained to Zero. ‘She died when I was a kid. I never saw her much, except on television. She was abroad most of the time, making nature documentaries in places that were way too dangerous for children.’
‘You’re not the daughter of Janet Planet, are you?’
‘Um, yeah.’
‘“Doctor Janet explores the wild planet!”’ he said, mimicking the show’s intro perfectly. ‘Right?’ A wide grin spread on the cameraman’s face as he remembered the early color TV series, to which he had been addicted as a boy.
Nell nodded. ‘Yeah. You remember the show?’
‘Hell yeah! It brought full-color underwater photography to TV for the first time! It’s pretty legendary among my kind. So, why isn’t your name Nell Planet?’
Nell laughed. ‘Our last name didn’t play well on television.’
‘So you’re following in your mom’s footsteps.’
‘Except that I chose botany,’ Nell protested, parrying with her fork. ‘Plants never eat people.’
‘Right on.’ Zero snagged a glass of iced tea from the tray of a passing server and raised a toast to her. ‘Conquer your fears, right?’
Nell toasted him with her water and frowned at the dark horizon. ‘Something like that.’
August 23
6:29 A.M.
She sat in the blue glow of the TV screen, holding a strange flower in her hand.
An image of her mother coalesced on the swollen fish-eye lens of the television, dressed in khaki and a pith helmet–Saturday morning cartoon clichés in degraded 1970s color stock, a sick subconscious rerun remarkable for its budgetless detail.
Behind her mother swayed a cartoon jungle of leaves, thorns, fur, eyes, pulsing, breathing, all of them melting together in a running liquid of anatomy. The jungle congealed into a giant face, and the face seemed like it had always been there. Her mother kept waving while the mouth in the jungle face opened behind her like a midnight sky. Just as it always did.
Nell screamed, soundlessly–the whole dream was profoundly silent, except for the clicking sound of her nails on the glass. Her mother always reached out to her, but she could never touch her through the screen. Suddenly, Nell knew she could break it…
Nell swung the flower in her hand at the screen like an ax, and the Monster howled in rage as its voice shrank into the clock radio alarm, beeping beside her.
Nell jerked awake and bashed the beeper off, irritated at its complicity.
She rose on an elbow and squinted at the dim rays streaming through the portholes of her cabin. Her neck and chest felt cool with sweat.
So, she thought, recalling the dream, she’d had a visit from the Monster.
Nell hadn’t had this dream for many years. Yet it still crushed her under the same debilitating fear she had felt when she was ten and dreamed it nightly.
Today, on Henders Island, she would find a new flower–and she would name it after her mom. And she would finally lay her to rest, in a private ceremony so appropriately far from home.
And with that flower she would finally slay the Monster, too–by giving it a new, and beautiful, face.
12:01 P.M.
A sliver of shimmering light appeared on the horizon, and then the guano-crowned cliff began to rise from the ocean like a snow-capped ridge.
Nell and the others gathered on the mezzanine deck to watch the island as it was raised.
‘What a wall!’ exclaimed Dante De Santos. The muscular twenty-three-year-old cook’s assistant had Maori-style tattoos on his tanned arms, and jet-black hair combed back from a pugnacious face and tiger-opal eyes.
Nell remembered that he was an amateur rock climber who had been itching to pull out his gear and give it some use.
‘I could make that ascent, no problem, if we can’t find a way to land, man!’ he bragged. ‘Remember to tell the captain for me if we can’t get ashore, OK, Nell?’
She smiled. ‘OK, Dante.’
Nell watched the wide wall of Henders Island rise more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty from the horizon. It seemed so lonely out here in the middle of nowhere. She was reminded, with a pang of uneasiness, how very far away they were from everything.
5:48 P.M.
Revving boat engines echoed off the rock face of a cove as four Zodiacs raced toward a crescent beach.
Two 150-horsepower Evinrude outboards powered the large Zodiac that took the lead with Jesse at the rudder. Jesse’s passengers feared for their lives: Nell and Glyn clung to the edge rail as the inflatable jumped the breakers, its dual engines whining as they launched from each crest.
The cliff around the cove rose seven hundred feet straight up, swirled with faded bands of color like pigments in an overturned bucket of paint. Centered in the cliff, a dark crack had spewed broken rock over the beach down to the water. Judging from the fresh red and green color of the rubble, the crevasse had opened fairly recently.
Washed aground on this outpouring of jagged rock, the hull of a thirty-foot sailboat lay on her side like a swollen whale carcass.
‘That crack looks new,’ Glyn shouted.
Nell nodded, grinning. ‘It may give us a way inland.’
The Trident rolled on swells in the cove, anchored to one of the few submarine ledges their sonar had picked up around the island. They had nearly circumnavigated the entire island before locating this inlet, which they could have found in a few minutes had they circled in the other direction.
Now they had no time for setup. They had to dive into the boats and go live.
Peach got the camera feeds up as he counted down to the satellite uplink in the control room.
The three cameramen marked Peach’s countdown in their headsets aboard the speeding rafts. They carried waterproof videocams and backpack transmitters with a thousand-meter range.
Cynthea looked from the stern of the Trident and fired off orders to her camera crew. ‘OK, this goddamn island has a beach after all, and we’re in at 5:49, Fred! We’re going hot right now! Peach, tell me you’re on top of the uplink!’
‘TWO–ONE–ZERO. I’m there, we’re live,’ Peach said, cuing Zero’s feed first.
Cynthea ran down a passageway belowdeck, toward the control room in the starboard pontoon. ‘Glyn! Glyn? Can you hear me, Glyn?’
5:49 P.M.
Glyn wore a wireless earmuff transmitter on his right ear and carried the SeaLife flag at the prow of the Zodiac. The British biologist sported an orange SeaLife T-shirt, shorts, and Nikes, the last thing Nell thought she’d ever see on him. ‘Yes, Cynthea,’ Glyn said. ‘I hear you!’
Nell could hear Cynthea shouting through Glyn’s earphone: ‘Plant the flag on the beach!’
Nell grinned with excitement as she gripped the edge rail of the speeding boat and scanned the beach. The adrenaline pumping through her veins made her want to leap out of the boat and fly to the shore.
5:50 P.M.
Cynthea crashed through the door into the control room, where three camera shots zoomed toward the shore in the bank of monitors above Peach’s head.
The small Zodiac landed first. Zero and Copepod jumped out into the surf. Copepod barked excitedly and darted up the beach. Zero sidestepped out of the water to cover the other Zodiacs landing.
The rest of the crew watched intently from the decks of the Trident.
Andy ran to the ship’s rail in striped pajamas. ‘I can’t believe they didn’t WAKE ME UP!’ he yelled. ‘They give me the night watch and then they don’t wake me up? God damn it, I’m tired of getting SCREWED all the time!’
Andy turned to see a camera recording the moment and noticed some of the uniformed crew laughing nearby. ‘Screw you!’ he screamed.
Cynthea cut back to Glyn planting the SeaLife flag in the sand.
‘I claim this island for SeaLife!’ Glyn cried.
Fans cheered in their living rooms and dorm rooms across the globe; Glyn had just become an instant star.
The network chiefs smiled, and for the first time in a month leaned back in relief as they watched their screens.
Millions went ‘Ooo!’ as Cynthea caught Dawn flashing a look at Glyn and Nell squinting at Dawn.
Cynthea winked at Peach.
He nodded. ‘Drama.’
5:51 P.M.
‘Right! Let’s have a look at the boat!’ Glyn said.
The landing party scrambled over the avalanche of rock.
Zero and the other cameramen were shooting through Voyager Lite wireless television cameras with transmission backpacks feeding signals to the Trident. Peach switched the shots and beamed the signal to satellites that bounced it to relay stations that fed hundreds of cable networks and millions of television screens downstream.
