Jeremy Robinson: Island 731

A loud banging snapped him out of his reverie. “Five minutes!” The voice belonged to Bob Bray, his roommate aboard the Magellan. The Massachusetts native was a high school science teacher, and spoke like a man used to fighting to be heard—very loudly. Despite his cacophonous disposition, he was regarded as one of the leading teachers in the country and had written three books, two of them on what he called “incarceration-style learning” and “experience over textbooks.” He promoted experience-based learning at the high school level and had taken a sabbatical of sorts to join the Magellan ’s crew. His goal was to see how much more he could learn about the ocean and its denizens than he could if he just read the typical high school or even college textbook.

Bray’s third and most popular book, Sinister Science, was a graphic, nonfiction account of science gone awry throughout the course of human history, including sections on church-altered science, torture—both ancient and modern—chemical and biological warfare, and experimentation of all sorts. He’d brought a copy on board for anyone who was interested, but the photos and illustrations turned most people away. The study was intensely dark, which was appropriate given the subject matter, but it caught most people off guard because Bray was generally a pretty happy guy.

“What’re you doing in there?” Bray banged on the thin shower stall wall again. “Wait. No. I don’t want to know.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Hawkins said. “You do the same thing to kids in the locker room?”

“I teach biology,” Bray said. “I’ve never set foot in the locker room.”

Hawkins took his towel from the shower door and quickly dried his upper torso. He threw on a T-shirt and wrapped the towel around his waist before stepping out into the small bathroom known to seafarers as “the head.” Bray stood in the doorway, holding on to the doorframe above his head. In addition to being loud, the man had issues with personal space, but Hawkins had become accustomed to it. “How come you can say ‘room’ just fine, but not ‘locker’? Lockah. Lockah room.”

“You’re wicked funny,” Bray said with a grin. “So that shark was crazy.”

“Shahk.”

“I’m being serious,” Bray said. “You could have died.”

“I didn’t,” Hawkins said.

Bray grinned fiendishly. “You did it for her, didn’t you?”

Hawkins applied a liberal amount of deodorant. It would be a week before his next shower. “You’ve already determined the turtle was a female?”

“Joliet, asshole. She’s a little too flat for me, but—”

Hawkins raised an eyebrow. “Flat?”

“Kind of boyish. I prefer something to hold on to.”

“I can’t believe the next generation is going to be taught by you,” Hawkins said.

“Men have a natural proclivity toward women with wide hips and large breasts. Child-bearing hips. This is like Biology 101 here. The real weirdos are guys like you, who prefer boyish waifs like Joliet. Makes me wonder if you’re not, you know—” Bray raised his eyebrows a few times and gave him a wink.

“Hey, I’m not the one keeping a half-naked man from leaving the bathroom, am I?”

Bray quickly lowered his arms and backed out of the doorway. He was a big man, standing six-five, and while not completely out of shape, he sported a belly he called a “keg-pack.” His short-cut black hair and round cheeks gave him the look of an oversize dwarf, a fact that had earned him the nickname “Eight,” as in Snow White’s eighth dwarf. “You’re not half naked. You’re wearing a T-shirt. Why do you do that, anyway? I’ve never seen you without a shirt on.”

Hawkins slipped past Bray and entered their small room. “Gotta give you something to fantasize about. Keep the mystery alive.”

Bray grunted and turned away when Hawkins dropped his towel, but he didn’t leave. “So are you in the shitter with Drake, or what?”

“Not sure,” Hawkins said, pulling up his boxers.

“He looked pissed.”

“You’re not helping.”

“If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.”

Hawkins quickly put on a pair of cargo shorts. “You’re a man of wisdom if ever there was one.”

“That’s Nichee or something.”

“Nietzsche, and it wasn’t.” Hawkins slipped into a pair of boat shoes. He’d gone barefoot a lot lately, but felt he should dress up for the meeting with Drake. “I thought you were a history buff?”

“ Scientific history,” Bray corrected. “I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur of philosophy.”

Hawkins smiled. “By the way, that wasn’t philosophy. You were quoting Sun Tzu’s Art of War .”

“Really? Awesome.”

“Just awesome? Not ‘wicked awesome’?” Hawkins quickly rubbed the towel over his short brown hair and hung it over the end of his top bunk.

“Funny. Hey, I’ll be in the biolab when you’re done getting verbally spanked. Your boy toy—Joliet, sorry—asked me to prep the loggerhead for dissection. You coming, Ranger?”

Hawkins smiled at the nickname. It had been five years since he was a ranger at Yellowstone Park, but once the crew found out, it stuck. “I’ll be there, Eight.”

Bray opened the room’s door to leave and stumbled back. Joliet stood there, her face serious.

“Shit, ahh, you couldn’t hear us, right?” Bray wrapped on the door with his knuckles. It bonged loudly. “We were having a private talk. Guy stuff.”

Joliet, who was nearly two feet shorter than Bray, leaned her head around his chest. “Coming?”

“You heard, didn’t you?” Bray said, backing slowly out the door. “I’m going to go now.” He hustled away, glancing over his shoulder twice like Joliet might pounce on him, then disappeared around the staircase.

“You didn’t hear a thing,” Hawkins said, “did you?”

“Not a word. Should I be upset?”

“Only if you take him seriously.” Hawkins stepped around Joliet and entered the hallway. “C’mon, let’s get this over with.”

Hawkins stepped into the Magellan ’s pilot house three minutes later. Captain Drake stood at the room’s core, looking out the windows, which offered a full three-hundred-sixty-five-degree panorama. The view, which should have been blue ocean and bluer sky all the way to the horizon, was marred by an endless stretch of bottles, jugs, lighters, clothing, ropes, fishnets, and countless other buoyant, manmade items collectively known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The several-thousand-mile-wide trash heap, while quite spread out in parts, came together in several areas to form more condensed layers of refuse known as plastic islands. The Magellan was smack dab in the middle of the largest such island, a nearly thirty-square-mile slick of garbage brought together by the circular currents of the Pacific Ocean.

The pilot house was a technological marvel. High-tech displays revealed computer-controlled navigation, communications, and environmental systems, not to mention sonar, radar, and weather stations. Even with the lights out, in the dark of night, the bevy of screens and lights illuminated the room like the sun.

“Lovely view,” Hawkins said, trying to start the conversation off with a light tone.

“Isn’t it, though?” Drake said, turning his piercing blue eyes toward Hawkins.

Before Hawkins could speak again, a head popped up from behind one of the computer screens at the back of the room. Kamato Shimura, a young Japanese intern, pushed his glasses higher on his nose and acknowledged their presence with a smile and a wave. The kid wore his typical uniform—dark blue khaki pants and a tucked-in, red polo shirt—the formality of which was balanced by the Red Sox cap on his head.