Read Dead Reckoning for Free Online

hole. The leaders frantically circled the work party, shooting in and out of the hole and planning out each move, and communicated the plan to the workers. What they could not see was that the roach was too big to be turned into the hole. It had to go in straight, which would have required it to float in midair, a feat that even they could not engineer.
    I was so fascinated by the spectacle that I didn’t hear another word of the briefing.  When the meeting ended, I stood and walked over to the wall. How had they carried the roach up the wall? It seemed to me like the equivalent of a football team carrying a school bus up the side of the Empire State Building.
    Guilt overcame me and I pushed the roach into the hole myself. The ants scurried about frantically and then stopped in unison—as if to pay tribute to the invisible, incomprehensible, and apparently benevolent force —and then carried on through the hole. I imagined the day that God reached out and helped them bring home the grand feast as going down in ant lore, the story retold many generations later around little ant campfires.
     
    7:00 AM, KWAJALEIN
     
    After years on the island, I had developed a number of ways to gauge the wind without instruments: the sound it made in the palm trees, the amount of work required to ride my bike into the office, the violence with which the flags over the memorials flapped as I passed. All my senses told me the wind had increased overnight, but when I rounded the turn at the southeast end of the island and found the wind sock standing erect, I knew; it took twenty-five knots of wind to fully inflate it. The uncharacteristically dark sky to the east threatened rain, and with the rising sun obscured behind a gray overcast, the normally turquoise ocean churned black.
    Before jumping into the frying pan that would almost certainly cook me until the conclusion of this disaster, I decided to stop and clear my mind at my favorite place on the island: a little turnout nea r the edge of the golf course at the east end of the runway.
    The crumbling, overgrown old landscape reminded me of an ancient ruin. The entrance to the turnout was overgrown with plumeria, pandanus, and breadfruit trees, which during the rainy season, flooded the area with a sweet fragrance. A rock wall gently curved from the entrance toward the back with dense plumeria completing the enclosure on the opposite side. Other than some scattered trash and a fire pit near the rock wall, there was hardly any indication that anyone ever visited the place.
    Towering coconut palms normally cast shadows that seemed to converge somehow at the center of the expanse like an ancient time dial. The rest of the area, including the rock wall where I liked to sit, was well shaded from the relentless tropical sun that normally baked the island. Given my Scandinavian heritage and low tolerance for the heat and humidity, shade was a luxury I did not take for granted. But this morning was comfortably cool and cloudy.
    The Pacific Ocean rumbled on the reef just behind the rock wall. Seas were a little higher than normal, five to seven feet or so. Even small waves like that packed a lot of energy, and they pounded the reef relentlessly, as they had done for millennia, and sent perceptible vibrations through the ground.
    As I climbed awkwardly to the top of the wall, a palm frond dislodged from a tree and crashed to the pavement behind me giving me a start. The wind had picked up. From atop the rock wall I could feel the vastness of the ocean. On Kwaj in general, and in that spot in particular, one’s own insignificance was palpable. I am but a tiny, insignificant organism on an immense, water-covered world.
    As I had on so many other mornings, I sat and stared out over the ocean, my mind adrift. In summers past, I sa t in that exact spot and took comfort in the fact that this very body of water extended uninterrupted to where Kate and the kids were on Whidbey Island, WA, north of Seattle.