Escape

  So they tried cooking over the bonfire. This was a huge blaze — it was intended to alert passing planes and ships to their presence on the island. The sizzling sound was instant, along with a delicious smell of cooking meat. A split second later, half the bird was ablaze.

  Lyssa beat at the fire with a plastic rain poncho, but that only fanned the flames, which spread to the sticks in Luke’s hands.

  Luke looked around in alarm. “Quick! Grab the chicken!”

  “Are you crazy?” exclaimed Charla. “It’s on fire!”

  Lyssa held up the pot of freshwater from the dismantled still. Luke deposited the bird inside and dropped the burning sticks to the sand. A plop and a hiss, and Will’s birthday dinner was extinguished.

  Luke blew on his hands. “Thanks,” he told Lyssa.

  “Hey, why don’t we just boil it?” suggested Charla. “You can boil anything, right?”

  Lyssa hung the pot by its half-hoop handle over the fire. Since the water had just been boiling, it began to churn and bubble almost right away.

  “How long do we cook it for?” asked Will.

  “Better make it a while,” put in Charla. “Nothing is grosser than raw chicken.”

  Leaving the birthday dinner to boil, they went about their business. Ian’s mission: find taro, a potatolike root vegetable that would make a good side dish. Luke went into the jungle with him, to collect firewood. Since large logs were rare, and smaller twigs and branches burned quickly, keeping the voracious bonfire going was a full-time job. Charla went along to help.

  J.J. opted for a swim to wash away the blood, sweat, and feathers of his plucking experience. Only Lyssa stuck around to keep Will company. But there was work to do there too. She had to tend the bonfire and also the smaller fires on the two working stills. From these, she collected the bowls of freshwater and poured them into their keg. It, like most of their conveniences, came from the Phoenix’s rubber lifeboat. Lyssa and J.J. had drifted to the island on this inflatable craft. Seven days lost at sea. The memory of it still brought her chills. But it had been a luxury cruise compared with what the other four had suffered — bobbing around on a tiny piece of the destroyed Phoenix, big enough only for three, while the fourth hung over the side. It was amazing any of them had survived — especially her brother, who was a suburban kid and kind of soft.

  Sharply, she reminded herself that Will wasn’t out of the woods yet. None of them were if they couldn’t find a way off this island.

  Now the covered lifeboat sat just inside the trees, where it served as the castaways’ sleeping quarters.

  Lyssa recorked the water keg and plucked three large snails from the sun canopy. These would go into the boiling pot as soon as the chicken was done.

  The chicken. The position of the sun told her that more than an hour had passed. Surely the birthday dinner was ready by now.

  She ran over and checked the pot. “Oh, no!” she gasped.

  Will sat bolt upright on the raft. “Don’t tell me you’ve burned my chicken!”

  “No,” she managed. “Not burned.” How would you describe it? Pieces of meat and skin floated everywhere. Down in the bottom of the pot rested a small pile of bare bones. They had cooked the living daylights out of that poor little hen.

  Painstakingly, she began spooning pieces of meat onto a plate. “They’re going to kill me,” she told Will.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Will retorted. “Is it ruined?”

  “Not exactly. But it’s not good either.”

  She was about to pour out the water when Will suddenly sniffed the air. “Lyss, I may be delirious, but — I think I smell Grandma’s matzoh ball soup!”

  Lyssa took a whiff, and then a taste of the water she had been about to dump. “It is soup!” she exclaimed in amazement. “We made chicken soup!”

  Bouncing on his bottom, Will managed to “sit” his way over to the fire. He accepted a taste from his sister.

  “Unbelievable!” he exclaimed. “We don’t even have toilet paper, but we managed to cook homemade chicken soup! The others are going to drop dead!”

  As Lyssa took another taste, she caught sight of her reflection in the aluminum pot.

  The girl who thought she would never smile again was already smiling.

  Will ran a fever the very next day.

  J.J. was the first to notice the flush in his face. “Dude, it looks like you’re wearing old-lady makeup. Your cheeks are bright red.”

  For most of the afternoon, Will had been asking if the weather was getting colder. This close to the equator, the weather never got any colder, and the humidity stayed permanently at sweat-bath level.

  “Chills,” was Ian’s diagnosis.

  The thermometer in the first-aid kit confirmed that, yes, the patient was running a temperature of 99.8 degrees.

  Will tried to treat it lightly. “Impossible,” he wisecracked. “A person can’t get sick after eating Grandma’s chicken soup.”

  Lyssa took Luke and Ian aside. “That’s not a high fever. It’s okay, right?”

  If she was looking to them for reassurance, she didn’t get it.

  “He’s only been off the antibiotic for a day,” Ian said nervously. “If there’s an infection already, it could spread very fast.”

  Lyssa swore them both to secrecy. “I don’t want Will worrying about this. He’s such a wimp that he could make himself even sicker.”

  Luke looked thoughtful. “Maybe he was like that in his old life. But your brother’s been through a lot in these last few weeks. He’s not a pushover anymore.”

  But she was adamant. “Let’s not play with his head — at least not until we know we’ve got trouble.”

  If they were fooling Will, they certainly weren’t fooling Charla. “We should go back to the army base,” she urged quietly. “They had alcohol and bandages. Maybe they’ve got some pills or something.”

  It was decided that Luke and Charla would go over to the other side of the island and raid the dispensary.

  This was a trip the castaways didn’t make very often, although it was less than two miles. The foliage was so dense, the vines and underbrush so tangled, the insects so relentless, that it wasn’t a very pleasant walk. Even under the best of circumstances it took an hour and a half, but it could easily be double that. Since there was no trail, every journey was different, climbing over new-fallen logs, squeezing through new stands of ferns, ducking under new low-growing branches.

  Luke hated these island crossings, and it wasn’t just because of the mosquito bites. If the smugglers returned to their meeting place at the old base, there couldn’t be any clue that there were others on the island. The slightest sign — a misplaced footprint, a fallen button — could alert these dangerous criminals to the castaways’ presence. Luke had already seen them execute one of their own men without mercy. They would not hesitate to kill six kids to protect their illegal operation.

  There was such a sameness to the rain forest that Luke and Charla clung to the few landmarks they knew. First came the crumbling concrete. It had once been the air base’s runway, but now it was overgrown with jungle. From there, they became more careful because they knew the bomb pit was near. Luke had always assumed that nuclear devices were stored in high-tech containers. But back in World War Two, the atomic bombs had been kept right out in the open, in shallow pits just like this one. They had it on the authority of Ian and the Discovery Channel that this was true of Fat Man and Little Boy, the weapons that had actually been used. Junior, the third bomb, had been so top secret that the history books said it had never been built. But it made perfect sense that Junior would be housed the same way.

  Luke and Charla grew quiet as they drew close. Of course, you couldn’t set off an atomic bomb by talking too loud. But they still felt a certain fearful respect for the awesome power of the device and the terrible destruction and death that had been brought about by its two brothers.

  They exchanged a knowing glance as they passed a little notch on
the trunk of a palm tree. Luke himself had made that mark. It told them that the pit was here, hidden in what looked like an unbroken expanse of jungle floor. He’d been unwilling to risk more obvious marking. There could be no greater disaster than having the smugglers find Junior. These men made money from the blood of endangered animals. They would not think twice about selling an atomic bomb to the highest bidder.

  Charla put it on a more basic level. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Amen,” Luke agreed.

  At this point, the jungle was so dense that progress came closer to wading than walking. They pushed through ferns and twining vines. It still amazed Luke that the building remained invisible until he was practically close enough to touch it. The foliage was so thick and overgrown that there was a leaf here, a frond there, to obscure every inch of a hundred-foot Quonset hut.

  Feeling their way along the corrugated metal, they headed for the rear, where two smaller huts were located. One of these showed a faded sign: DISPENSARY.

  The door was off its hinges. Luke shoved it open and they stepped inside.

  Mangosteens.

  Will Greenfield sat up on his raft, working with a knife to cut open a mountain of the plum-sized fruit.

  Mangosteens! In the world of naming foods, who had come up with that one? It sounded like a partner in his father’s law firm: Berkowitz, Greenfield, and Mangosteen.

  They were good, though. Actually, they were delicious. But that was beside the point. Six lives were in danger. Important work had to be done for their very survival. And what was Will’s job? A mangosteen fruit salad.

  Just because he’d had the bad luck to get shot. And now this fever. 99.8 degrees, and everyone was treating him like he was on his deathbed.

  He’d run higher fevers from a bad cold.

  For an instant, a sense of foreboding replaced his irritation. His thigh didn’t hurt exactly, and the numbness was gone now, so that was a good sign, wasn’t it? But still it felt somehow — wrong. There was a strange rhythmic throbbing, almost like a second heartbeat down there. One minute the leg would seem strong enough for him to get up and dance. The next, it would be so weak he wasn’t sure it would even support him.

  No way! It was all in his imagination. And no wonder, with Lyssa moping around, looking at him like he was dying. He was perfectly okay. He could be helping — contributing! Not cutting up some fruit with a name that sounded more like a pediatrician.

  Dr. Mangosteen will see you now….

  He looked around the beach. Everyone was busy. Even J.J. was fishing. Lyssa was fiddling with the lifeboat’s broken radio. If they got off this island, Lyssa was probably going to end up the hero somehow. It was just the way things went for her — Lyssa, the beautiful, talented, straight-A student. And her older brother, the awkward, freckled slug.

  He could picture his sister on the front page of every newspaper. Even on TV:

  “Lyssa, how did it feel when you fixed the radio and made a long-distance antenna out of a banana to call in the marines to save you?”

  After a long interview, the cameras would turn to Will. “Weren’t you shipwrecked too? What was your job on the island?”

  What would he tell them? Oh, I sat around and cut up mangosteens.

  And the reporter’s face would go suddenly blank. “Cut up what?”

  That was the story of his life with Lyssa. Will never had a chance to succeed. What kind of contribution could you make by sitting on a beach staring off into space?

  And then he saw the black speck move. It was just over the horizon and getting larger every second.

  Forgetting his wound, he leaped to his feet and immediately crumpled back to the raft.

  “Plane!” he bellowed. “Plane!”

  On the surface, it looked like pandemonium. But in reality, it was a carefully planned and well-practiced drill. Lyssa and J.J. dropped everything and raced to fill pots with seawater. Ian ran for the tarpaulin in the jungle. It was made of four rain ponchos sewn together and filled with dead leaves. He grabbed it and hauled it over to the bonfire.

  If those leaves were thrown on the blaze and then the water dumped on top, the result would be a column of thick gray smoke that would extend hundreds of yards into the sky — an SOS that would be seen for miles around.

  It was a moment the castaways had played over in their minds dozens of times — their chance at rescue.

  Will had never felt more helpless. This could mean his life — all their lives! And he couldn’t even walk. He got on his hands and knees and crawled across the sand to the bonfire.

  Don’t blow it! he tried to will the others. Do everything exactly right!

  Still, they hesitated. They did not dare signal until they knew for sure whom they were signaling to. If they sent up the smoke, and the plane turned out to be carrying the smugglers, they’d be giving away their presence on the island. And that would be fatal.

  Lyssa peered through the binoculars that had come with the survival kit.

  Will tugged at the legs of her fatigues. “Can you see it? It’s rescuers, right?”

  She shook her head. “They’re still too far off.”

  “Let’s just go for it,” urged J.J. “Get this over with one way or the other.”

  “Don’t you dare!” snapped Lyssa. “Maybe you’ve got a death wish, but the rest of us want to live to grow up.”

  “This is awful,” said Ian. “I wish we could just know.”

  “Wait a minute.” Lyssa squinted into the binoculars. “It’s banking to the side … it’s definitely a floatplane … oh, my God!”

  “What?” squeaked Ian.

  “It’s them! The smugglers!”

  “Are you sure?” Will asked breathlessly. “All planes look alike!”

  His sister shook her head. “Single engine, with a fat cargo hold underneath. It’s them, all right.”

  Her words triggered more frantic action. But if the last drill had been fueled by hopeful anticipation, this one was driven by disappointment and dread. The castaways, even Will, began throwing sand on the bonfire. Soon the flames were smothered to nothing, and not a trace, not so much as a whiff of smoke, remained.

  Will held on to his sister’s shoulders and began to hop toward the lifeboat under cover of the trees. J.J. was hot on their heels. Ian brought up the rear, brushing their footprints from the sand with a leafy branch.

  All four looked up. Through the canopy of the rain forest, they watched the floatplane descend over the island. As it swept overhead, suddenly one of the doors burst open. A dark object fell out and plummeted to the jungle below.

  The castaways ducked, even though the thing was nowhere near them. They stayed down, bracing for — what? An explosion?

  “Was that a bomb?” hissed Will.

  “How could it be?” scoffed Lyssa. “They don’t even know we’re here!”

  J.J. was the first to get up. “We’re such saps. The guy was probably having a Big Mac and he tossed the bag so he wouldn’t have to mess up the air base.”

  All at once, Lyssa froze. “The air base!” she exclaimed. “That’s where Luke and Charla are!”

  Will frowned. “What are they doing way over there?”

  “Looking for medicine,” she replied. “For you.”

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  Luke hacked at the rusty padlock with a sharp rock. With every blow that fell, a cloud of dust and cobwebs swirled up around him, making him cough.

  The dispensary was set up like a doctor’s office, with a single desk and chair, cabinet, and examining table. Nothing else had been needed. This small installation had never been home to more than thirty people. These had been the crew, pilots, technicians, and officers required to do a single job — to deliver an atomic bomb to its target.

  Whack!

  In a shower of rust flakes, the lock smashed and fell to the floor, disappearing in the weeds and rotted planking.

  Luke opened the cabinet. “Jackpot.” On the shelves stood do
zens of medicine bottles.

  Charla grabbed a couple and examined the labels. She looked up, her face blank. “How do we know which of this stuff could help Will?”

  Luke grabbed the pillow from the examining table, dumped out the stuffing, and began tossing bottles into the case. “We’ll take it all,” he decided. “With any luck, the Discovery Channel did a show on medicines.”

  “Right.” Charla joined him. “Let’s hurry up and get out of here. We don’t want to be stuck in the middle of the jungle in the dark.”

  Luke tossed in a box of tongue depressors. It was dumb, he knew. Will had a bullet in his leg; no one was going to ask him to say “ah.” He paused over a tray of surgical instruments.

  Charla read his mind. “God forbid!”

  But they took the tray anyway. They took everything, even the medic’s journal, yellowed and tattered around the edges.

  “You never know what might come in handy,” Luke explained.

  Charla nodded grimly. She no longer argued with any statement that began, “You never know … ”

  They were halfway out the door when the shouting began — loud, furious, and too close for comfort. It was so unexpected that, for a second or two, they froze, right in the open.

  Charla snapped out of it first. She dragged Luke back inside the dispensary and pulled the broken door shut. They dropped to their knees and peered through the mud-streaked window.

  It was the smugglers! While Luke and Charla had been working in the Quonset hut, they had missed the sound of the floatplane landing. And now they were trapped ….

  The leader was a hugely fat man in a pale green silk suit and matching fedora. His nickname had come from J.J.: Mr. Big. He was fatter than ever and in a towering rage about something.

  “I don’t care if he had five aces up his sleeve! You don’t start a fistfight in a moving plane!”

  “I’ll find it! I’ll find it!” promised a gravelly voice with a British accent.

  In an amazingly graceful move for such a huge man, Mr. Big wheeled. As he turned, he pulled a large handgun from his pocket and pistol-whipped his unfortunate associate.