CHAPTER 77.

--------------------- 16 FEB 08.

orged with fruit, the wicker cornucopia seemed to stare back at Cameron and Justin from its perch on the table in the waiting room. The gla.s.s tabletop had broken in a recent tremor; it had been replaced temporarily by a piece of plywood. Next to them, a new mother bounced her baby on her knee, its little hands opening and closing, grab-bing at nothing. The baby hiccuped and giggled as the mother leaned forward. They rubbed noses.

Justin held Cameron's hand as they waited side by side, his shoulder bandage bulky under his shirt. Cameron shifted a little in the chair, ignoring the pain in her hip. Toying with her necklace absentmindedly, she noticed that the clasp had worked its way around to the front. Justin extended his hand, wiggling his fingers and flexing, testing out his muscles. The reconstructive surgeries had restored to him full control of his arm. Using cutting-edge technology, the doctors had even managed to repair the plexus of nerves that ran down the arm.

Fiddling her wedding ring on her finger with her thumb, she gazed blankly at a Child magazine sitting under the curved bra.s.s reading lamp. On the cover, a pudgy, grinning boy of about two sat with his legs kicked wide out in front of him. He smiled proudly at the tower of colorful blocks he had stacked between his legs.

Despite her apprehension, Cameron forced herself to stare at the dark, solid door to the right. The door without a peephole. She thought of the choice before her should the fetus turn out to be healthy. When she turned back to the yellow door, she felt better, almost empowered.

The Darwin virus had not appeared in her or Justin's bloodstream, and Rex, Diego, and Ramoncito had been cleared as well. Because Cameron was pregnant, Samantha had asked that she have a full workup six weeks after the end of the mission, including a prenatal intake, chori-onic villus sampling, and a set of ultrasounds. The results awaited.

Diego had returned to Sangre de Dios, further sanitizing everything that had been in contact with the virus-the specimen freezer, the ves-tiges of the two camps, the areas where the mantids and larvae had been burned. He'd also set three more GPS units, finally completing the net-work.

Next to Cameron, the mother whispered lovingly to the baby as she burped him. Evidently he had spit up, because she dabbed at her blouse with a little white towel. The towel was decorated with cabooses.

Some footsteps sounded down the corridor, shoes clicking on tile.

The mother gazed at the cheerful yellow door ahead, then turned a kind smile to Cameron.

"So exciting, isn't it?" she asked.

Cameron looked at her, expressionless.

The door swung open, and the stocky Italian nurse filled the doorway, hunched slightly at the shoulders. The rings under her eyes looked dark, even darker than Cameron had remembered. Her hair stood out in gray-ing wisps.

"Kates," the nurse said, her teeth discolored and crooked. "Cameron Kates. Your results are in. The doctor would like to discuss them with you."

Cameron felt Justin squeeze her neck rea.s.suringly. She rose calmly. Justin kept his hand on her back to steady her as they followed the nurse back.

The room was small and claustrophobic. Cameron slowly undressed, put on the gown, and slid up onto the exam table, crinkling the paper. A small notch of a scar crested her deltoid where her transmitter had been removed.

When she heard the doork.n.o.b turn, Cameron felt panic spreading through her, but she fought to quell it. Dr. Birnbaum entered, a bearded man with kind blue eyes. He glanced down at a chart, scratching his cheek with a pen. Cameron and Justin stared at him, eyes wide, too nervous to speak.

"I just got off the phone with Dr. Everett at the NIH," he said. "And together we concluded that your results are totally normal. It looks like you have a healthy baby on your hands." His smile lessened when he looked at Cameron. "Should you elect to keep it."

Cameron had thought she'd feel nothing, so she was completely unprepared for the wave of emotion that swept through her. Her mind danced across a landscape of memories, spinning with images. She thought of the larva, bucking and squealing and dying. She thought of the gnarled little creature on the floor of the Estradas' house. She thought of Derek and Jacqueline and their baby girl. She thought of all the frightful things she had seen-so many reasons to be afraid, so many reasons to pull back into herself where everything was neat and safe.

"Baby?" Justin was asking. "Do you want to? Do you think you're ready?" His eyes were as soft as they'd ever been-brave yet intensely vulnerable.

She could barely hear him because she was so far down in herself, swimming in fear and excitement and sheer elation. The answer was there like a bright beam of light, and with it came tears, hard and unremitting. She was pressing her face against his chest, weeping with joy, and from somewhere far away she heard herself saying yes over and over like a prayer.

CHAPTER 78.

--------------------- he island's last remaining feral dog nosed through the ash and debris of the base camp, looking for food. Her paws were ragged, one of her nails torn off from a fight with another b.i.t.c.h. She'd caught a masked b.o.o.by chick the previous day, which she'd eaten right in front of its squawking mother, sliding down to her belly and savoring the meal. But the hunger had returned again quickly, greeting her in the morning with the rising sun.

Maybe it was because she was pregnant.

She tugged on a scorched edge of canvas, searching for something edible beneath, but there was nothing, just a warped cruise box and a dented canteen. Finally giving up, she trotted toward the road, her head barely protruding from the high gra.s.s.

Leaping gracefully among the fallen balsas, she nosed her way through the cracks of the trunks, but again there was nothing. She was just about ready to head to the forest when she caught a whiff of some-thing faint, lining the southern wind.

She jogged up the road toward the source of the smell, her nose ele-vated and twitching. Stopping at the base of the watchtower, she sat, peering up its length.

In the shed at the top, the desiccated body of the larva lay beneath the dangling hook, protected by the shade of the shed. The abdomen and thorax had long rotted away in the sweltering heat, but the sclerotized head had just begun to crack. Green hemolymph oozed out, working its way slowly down the side rail of the dilapidated ladder, its pungent odor thick in the air. The b.i.t.c.h sat, head c.o.c.ked, watching the ripe fluid slowly descend.

In the distance, the dot of a boat appeared on the horizon, Diego on the deck, Ramoncito laughing and swinging from the boom. It was still a good few hours away from sh.o.r.e.

The hemolymph pooled momentarily above a crooked 2 x 4 that served as one of the ladder's steps before spilling over and snaking the rest of the way down the side rail.

The dog stepped forward and began lapping.

Mission to Darwin's Backyard: An Interview with Gregg...

From his apartment in Los Angeles, the author responded to questions from Perfect-Bound on May 14, 2001.

PB: Minutes to Burn is a broad-ranging novel that incorporates numerous genres and fields. How would you label it?

GAH: Well, that's the problem, really. The book has a strong military component, but it's certainly not a straightforward military thriller. A virus plays a key role in the plot, but I'm not focused exclusively on that either. One of my aims in writing this book was to incorporate those aspects of thrillers I like-the military thriller, the Crichton science thriller, travel-adventure books in the tradition of Into Thin Air-and create something wholly new. Minutes to Burn is really an eco-thriller because it's not about the location alone, or the virus, or the animals of Galpagos, but rather the way all these things come together at a particu-lar time within a specific environment, to form a stressful and dangerous series of events. Ozone depletion, scorching sunlight, earth-shattering quakes-these aren't even the main concerns our protagonists have to contend with, they're merely the backdrop of this mission on which they embark.

PB: And though it features a creature, it's not a "creature book."

GAH: No, it's not. Most projects of this type with which we're famil-iar-Them or Aliens, for instance-feature these horrifying creatures that we know immediately are trouble. We know the right decision is for the protagonists to kill them. Here, I wanted to present a conflict closer to how it might occur in the real world. If a new species of animal was dis-covered in the Galpagos, one of the most important protected parks in the world, how would events really proceed? How would we treat this scientific phenomenon? I wanted to capture some of that excitement. Now what if you hypothesized that this animal might grow predatory, and what if you were alone on an island with it? That's a real problem with no easy solution. There's a legitimate environmentalist argument to be made, but also a legitimate protect-your-a.s.s argument. If you were an ardent preservationist, but you were stuck alone in a room with a gun and a hungry panther, all of a sudden your options and convictions change. Perhaps.

PB: And the debate between the group on the mission-a squad of Navy SEALs and several scientists-progresses from there.

GAH: Yes, but I would hope in an unpredictable fashion. I wanted to portray a sufficiently ambiguous scenario so that members of both camps-the SEALs and the scientists-could make arguments for either side. So we have some unusual allegiances and some instances of perceived betrayal.

PB: There seems to be a variety of personalities among the Navy SEALs alone.

GAH: Well, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with a broad range of team members, from old-school guys who'd been in for twenty years, to younger members who'd done a three-year stint, then gone into another line of work. The differences and occasional friction among old-and new-school was really interesting to me, and I made a point of repre-senting it in the book. William Savage is a hardcore, old-school, un-PC, take-no-prisoners warrior, yet he finds himself under the command of a younger, more politically aware, perhaps less operationally gifted crew.

PB: You portray the SEALs and the military-relevant aspects of the mis-sion very convincingly. Do you have a military background?

GAH: Not at all. I have the opposite background in some regards. I'm from a very liberal family and community and grew up having very little exposure to the military. And all of a sudden, I was immersed in this other world, eating MREs [meals, ready-to-eat], shooting MP5s on SWAT ranges, and practicing hand-to-hand combat-much to the deri-sive amus.e.m.e.nt of my SEALs friends.

PB: How'd you do at the hand-to-hand?

GAH: I got my a.s.s kicked convincingly. [Laughter]

PB: How'd you get access to the SEALs, by the way? Did you just phone them up and say you wanted to write a novel in which SEALs featured?

GAH: Well, the first SEAL with whom I worked was a friend of a friend, so that was easy enough. I took him to dinner and laid out what I was trying to do and he thought it sufficiently interesting to help. Then, as various issues arose during my writing, he introduced me to a sniper, who introduced me to a breacher, who introduced me to a 60-gunner. These guys are notorious for being protectively silent to the media-like most high-trained operators in secretive fields, they don't like to talk. I was fortunate to be brought into the loop by a friend, but I still had to earn the trust of every new frogman whom I interviewed. It took months for some of the old school guys to really open up, and then I had an agreement with them so they could talk on-the-record or off-the-record. PB: In the book, several of your characters are female Navy SEALs. In real life, are there female Navy SEALs? GAH: Besides Demi Moore? No-no there aren't. And this was cause for an argument between me and one of my old-school SEAL friends, who was irate that I'd put females in my fictional squad. I took care not to make the material preachy, and I also took care to portray the other mentality but I wanted to have these strong women present in the narra-tive. They're tough and physical, but they're also flawed, just like any other soldier.

PB: Cameron is really the center of the book, in certain regards.

GAH: Yes, she is. More than anyone else, she's the active protagonist, trying to process all these arguments and perspectives and a.s.similate them into a course of action. She's got Savage, bloodthirsty and perenni-ally combat-ready on the one hand; Diego, the Galpagos ecologist, advocating an apparently more sophisticated argument on the other hand; and the rest of the crew falling somewhere in between. When the extremists are banging heads, Cameron's the one gathering information, and eventually she has to come into her own and start making the kinds of decisions she was previously unable to.

PB: And she's pregnant going into the mission.

GAH: Yes, though she's only just found out, and she's unsure if she wants the baby. So she carries this burden into the mission, and it adds another level of concern and tension to her actions and decisions. Since her husband, Justin, is also present, she's feeling pressure from all angles.

PB: It seems you take an unusual amount of care when dealing with characterization for a book that's so plot-driven.

GAH: Yes. This book really came alive for me with my characters. In my conceptualizing stage, I deal with characters first, and let the plot follow. Minutes to Burn really started coming together when my characters reached a level of development that the scenes became about them as much as about what they were facing. That's when you're hooked into a character, as an author-when your character acts distinctively in the face of a dilemma. Authentic fiction, to me, is about a particular character acting in a distinctive way in the face of a particular conflict. And so each scene in Minutes was about Cameron-or Savage, or Samantha-in a particular conflict. The scenes weren't just about the conflicts themselves.

PB: You've created this array of locations, all of them vividly rendered. Though the majority of the book is set in the Galpagos, we also get taken through earthquake-rent Guayaquil, the Fort Detrick virus labs in Maryland, and the New Center for Ecotectonic Studies in Sacramento. Was it difficult keeping all these b.a.l.l.s in the air?

GAH: It was, first of all from a pacing perspective, because I didn't want us to fall out of any one world when we enter another. I wanted to check in occasionally on these other locations at key moments, when I could keep ratcheting up the action and suspense, and bring greater tension to the narrative. Guayaquil in particular was rewarding to write about, because I spent the better part of a week there, and it's a simultaneously an appealing and off-putting city-dirty, humid, overcrowded, and mag-ical all at once. I remember the first time I saw La Ciudad Blanca [a vast cemetery, filled with white marble monuments], I was blown away. You cross this foot bridge from a run-down part of town and all of a sudden, you're in this incredible white marble world that's a testament to the losses the country has endured through its history. And at once, my imagination started going. There were so many possibilities here, if major earthquakes struck this city. And I knew I'd have to take my squad through here.

PB: How about the other two locations? Fort Detrick and the New Center?

GAH: It took a lot of research to get down the realities and specifics of the Biosafety Level Four labs at Fort Detrick. That location really came together for me around a character, the Chief of the Disease a.s.sess-ment Division, Samantha Everett, this 5'2 pistol, who is competent and brilliant and slightly off-kilter. She was one of the easiest characters to write because she was so distinctive when she first came to me. The New Center for Ecotectonic Studies is entirely fictional-both the New Cen-ter itself, and the actual field of study. I spoke to several geologists and marine biologists, and started to see some possibilities in the direction contemporary research is moving in both fields. If the type of environ-mental crisis I write about in Minutes to Burn actually occurred, there would be a need for a field such as ecotectonics. And even without a cri-sis, I think there's a decent possibility that ecotectonics will be a real field in the future, though probably under a different name.

PB: Do you have natural proclivities toward science?

GAH: No. I spent much of high school chemistry and physics trying desperately not to make eye contact with the teacher. But I always had an interest in biology, particularly evolutionary biology, so I was drawn to narratives that play with related ideas. When I started thinking about writing a book such as this, I figured what better place to set it than in Darwin's backyard? So I read everything related I could get my hands on, loaded up on notepads and pens, and headed down to Galpagos. But the science-the science was definitely a challenge for me. I had to gird my loins before some of those conversations with my scientist consult-ants, and do double-time on my own reading and research to make sure I could keep up with the answers to my questions. I worked with everyone from a geologist out of Berkeley to an entomologist stationed in the heart of the Amazon basin, so it took a lot of effort to stay on top of things.

PB: But maybe that provided you with an advantage, not being totally up-to-speed on the science.

GAH: I'd like to think so. Even though I get into some pretty in-depth science here, I think I was able to convey it clearly and concisely, because I'm not steeped in years of scientific argot. And I tried to deploy the information dramatically, through action, so I never subject the reader to blocks of regurgitated research. No one wants to read an extensive trea-tise on the waved albatross courtship dance in the middle of an adven-ture thriller.

PB: It's clear from the book that you fell in love with the Galpagos.

GAH: It's almost impossible not to. It's a completely bizarre, entirely unique place. You swim with turtles and penguins and sharks, then walk up on these barren lava plains covered with marine iguanas. As you move upslope, you cross through distinct ecological zones-literally dis-tinct, in color even-each with their own individual environment and forms of life. And since there's such a dearth of fly up and land on your head. It's like being in a Disney cartoon.

PB: I wasn't aware that the Galpagos had dense forests, like the Scalesia forest where you set much of the book's action.

GAH: Only at two to six hundred meters elevation. And most of the islands don't reach that alt.i.tude-you really have to go to Isabela, Santa Cruz, or San Cristbal to see the Scalesias. Santiago used to have a more extensive Scalesia zone, but most of it has been destroyed by goats.

PB: The Scalesia forest is a haunted place in your book.

GAH: Well, the Scalesias are up at this higher alt.i.tude, away from the sounds of the waves and the tourists, and there's a real quiet to them. A gara mist sort of settles over the trees like a shroud. And there are lava tunnels beneath the ground, and dead vines twisting around branches, and the occasional whistle of a hidden bird, and you really start to think that this is not somewhere you'd like to spend the night alone.

PB: You mentioned that goats have destroyed much of the Scalesia forest on Santiago. You really tackle the issue of introduced species in the book.

GAH: Well, it's an essential concern to Galpagos. All sorts of foreign plants and animals have been brought over, and they've begun to aggres-sively out-compete some of the endemic species. The balance of the islands' ecology is immensely fragile-life took hold there in tiny, meas-ured steps. Turtles floated out, aided by the pocket of air beneath their sh.e.l.l, light spores of plants blew out from the continent, birds brought plant seeds out caked on the mud on their feet. Spiders even got sucked up in wind currents and were carried out there from the mainland. The short of it is, you can't all of a sudden have a bunch of settlers bring pigs and goats and elephant gra.s.s. Because there's very little in the islands' ecology system to oppose such introduced species, or halt their prolifer-ation. At one time, there were 80,000 goats on Santiago. They just kept reproducing and reproducing, and there was nothing there to stop them. They chewed the island's vegetation down to the lava. Park officials finally had to go out and just start shooting them. In the 1970s, a pack of wild dogs attacked a land iguana colony on Santa Cruz and killed over five hundred of them. Five hundred! The bodies were just lying around rotting. And that's because the species has never-through natural selec-tion-had traits selected that would allow them to contend with a preda-tor such as a dog. So they just lie there and get slaughtered.

PB: And these issues are all brought to bear, in Minutes to Burn, when a new species is discovered.

GAH: Exactly. You have this fragile place, preserved by scientists and ecologists, and then all of a sudden there are ma.s.sive earthquakes and skin-blistering UV rays, and Navy SEALs tromping around, and just when things are most tentative, this new animal is discovered.

PB: And there are cultural tensions as well.

GAH: To capture this struggle, this debate, I really had to spend a lot of time down in Galpagos and learn the unique culture of the islandsit's its own world, not really Ecuador, not really its own country. Fishermen and ecologists are at war with each other, one group trying to subside, the other trying to preserve. Just this year, a group of fishermen stormed the Darwin Station and kidnapped the turtle hatchlings scientists had been cultivating to revive the dwindling population. It's really nuts. There's corruption and tourism and frustrated locals, and in the middle of it, these ecologists hard at work trying to preserve everything.

PB: Tourism is kind of a sticky issue, isn't it? You were a tourist, so the question is: does tourism take more than it gives? Should "tourism" be limited to the people who can, either through their money (donations) or their work (e.g., writing a popular eco-thriller), account for their hav-ing tromped around the Galpagos?

GAH: Well, tourism accounts for so much of the money that goes into maintaining and preserving the archipelago (in fact, Galapagos tourism is the leading source of money for all of Ecuador), so it is this double-edged sword. And, aside from the town of Puerto Ayora, tourists can't set foot anywhere on the islands without a qualified ecologist guide, who is very careful to keep everyone on the trails, limiting the number of people on any island at a given time, etc. So there are responsible ways to be a tourist, and irresponsible ways. Because of some of the contacts I'd made in Puerto Ayora and at the Darwin Station, I was sort of half-tourist, half researcher, which gave me a bit more flexibility, and attuned me to responsible standards of behavior.

PB: What about the tensions between Americans and Ecuadorians.

GAH: We're not known to be the most environmentally considerate nation on earth, so there is a lot of resentment on the islands for what is perceived as a bunch of gringos taking snapshots and buying black coral trinkets. Then here's this squad of hard-hitting Navy SEALs coming down saying, "I'm supposed to wash the mud from my boots before leaving each island?"

PB: So they don't accidentally transport seeds or insect eggs from one island to another.

GAH: Exactly. This type of thing-"Dispose of apple cores carefully" is not in the list of operational concerns for high-demand operators. It's not like, "Clear and safe weapons." "Jam extra magazines."

PB: Would you like to see this book turned into a movie?

GAH: Absolutely.

PB: Did you write it with that in mind?

GAH: You can't write a book with an eye to a film, or else all you'll wind up with is a fleshed-out screenplay. The rules and demands of the forms are so different that you can't try to accomplish both within one context.

I think my writing style is visual, and inherently suited to film, but that's different than saying that I write with the movie in mind. Does that make sense?

PB: Yes. Why do you think your writing style is so visual?

GAH: Well, to begin with, plot-driven fiction, as a general rule, tends to be more visually oriented because you have more action and less musing. But I also grew up on and love movies, so film forms a large part of my aesthetic. So even when I'm working on a novel, I'd prefer to have a clue represented in a dynamic action-which tends to be visual-rather than have it become illuminated through a character's exposition or thought. This doesn't mean that it will be carried over in the script or movie. So much changes from book to film, it would be foolish to try to predict and write toward that.

PB: And you're currently working on the adaptation for Richard Marcinko's Rogue Warrior for Jerry Bruckheimer films?

GAH: I'm rewriting it, yes. There have been writers before me, and there will probably be writers after. [Laughs]

PB: Rogue Warrior is, of course, the archetypal Navy SEALs project. Did Minutes to Burn land you the job?

GAH: It was a number of things, but, yes, I think the level of my research on Minutes to Burn was essential.

PB: Do you have a preference for writing novels or screenplays?

GAH: Definitely. I'm first and foremost a novelist. I only work on scripts occasionally to take a break, clear my palate. I love writing screen-plays-they present an entirely new set of challenges and rewards-but I think novels will always come first for me.

PB: What percent of your time is spent working on novels versus screenplays?

GAH: I'd say ninety percent of my time is spent on novels.

PB: This book represents a pretty marked departure from your first novel. The Tower is a psychological thriller, and this book is all the things we've been discussing, but it's certainly not a psychological thriller. Why did you decide to jump from one type of thriller to another?