Category: Stories

For as long as anyone could remember, the songs of the wood thrush had been all the rage, top of the charts — played on the radio, sought by songwriters for inspiration, and used for background sounds in movies and television. Their records invariably went platinum, and wood thrushes had won more Grammys than any other bird. 

Then one day their music changed and they fell out of favor. Even hard-core fans were put off by the alternative style, so they turned to classic bird tunes. The kids all started saying canary is the new thrush.

A client came to us wanting to know what happened. We invited him in and I made tea while you got him settled. We sat around the table and listened to his tale of woe.

“The wood thrushes, they’re not singing the old songs anymore. They’ve got some new thing going, and it sounds terrible.” 

“Maybe it just takes some getting used to,” you said. “How different is it?”

“It’s unrecognizable. You’d hardly call it music.”

“That’s what our parents thought about the stuff we listened to,” I said. You nodded. We’ve all been through this. But he wouldn’t be consoled.

“Go see for yourselves. Go hear for yourselves. Listen to that noise and then tell me I’m crazy.”

We hadn’t said he was crazy, but he seemed desperate. “What can we do?” you asked.

“You know all about nature and stuff, things in the forest, right? Find out the cause. They sound kind of hoarse — maybe they’ve caught a cold. Maybe they need voice lessons. I don’t know. But my business depends on recording pretty bird songs. What if all the birds start singing this way? If you can call it singing.”

We agreed to visit the birds and discreetly inquire about their new tunes.

“Okay, thanks,” he said. “Try giving them a throat lozenge.” We declined that suggestion.

The next day we headed out into a part of the forest where wood thrushes tended to gather — to seek companionship, share news, or get up a game of checkers. 

“What is that?” I put my hands over my ears.

A screeching cacophony assaulted us from the branches above. If I hadn’t seen the thrushes belting out their songs with beaks wide open, I might have thought someone was cutting sheet metal with a drywall saw. Instead of the delicate flute-like ee-oh-lay followed by a lovely trill, they were producing staccato, guttural noises like ech-ug-och-oh and other compositions not suitable for print.

“These are definitely not the old songs,” you said with a grimace.

“Probably fledglings on some new kick,” I said. “Kids these days and their new-fangled music!”

“But those are all adults.”

That got us worried. If nature can’t be depended on to uphold its own traditions, we were all doomed. We recorded some sounds then practically ran out of there, vowing to bring ear muffs next time we visited.

“He’s not crazy,” I said of our client, once we were safe at home. “There’s something wrong.”

“If nature can be wrong.”

We considered that for a moment while gazing out the window at the scenery, then both came to a conclusion at the same time: “Yes, nature can be wrong.”

We called our client and told him we’d take on the project. By this time the calamity had spread throughout the country, and complaints were coming in from all over, including the District of Columbia, which had chosen the wood thrush as its official bird but was reconsidering that decision.

I asked you: “How does a bird voted Most Beautiful Avian Performance suddenly start singing like, well…”

“Like a raspy-throated chipmunk on mushrooms.” You were being perfectly serious, so I just said yeah.

Before doing more field work, we thought we should investigate recent natural phenomena.

“They’re reacting to something,” you insisted. “It can’t just be spontaneous.”

We both got online and pulled up charts showing phases of the moon, particulate matter in the atmosphere, sun spot activity, weather patterns — anything that might have influenced the thrushes. You made a graph showing the geographical spread of their new singing style, based on bird-watching reports, then we looked for correlations.

It was no good. After two days of running into dead ends, I started grasping at anything.

“Here’s one,” I said. “Sales of orange soda in rural towns match the spread of new thrush vocalizations. But to get the graphs to line up I had to change the scale on one and shift it by three months, then I turned the other graph into a five-day moving average and voila! — a near perfect correlation.”

You weren’t amused. I went back to work.

Too often I found myself going down some rabbit hole of information, learning something I didn’t really need to know. For example, one young celebrity — famous for no known reason — decided to adopt a catchphrase based on the latest thrush sounds: Eech-oh-wugh-uh. No one knew what it meant — or whether to put the stress on the first syllable or the third — but it had the desired effect of annoying everyone over twenty with an IQ in positive territory.

Armies of teenagers immediately conformed and spent hours practicing it, but other kids with even more time on their hands started a protest movement, claiming that imitating the sounds of nature is a form of appropriation that exploits oppressed forest animals. A storm erupted on social media and the celebrity tearfully apologized, but all her online accounts were suspended anyway and her cable show was canceled, so the catchphrase phenomenon lasted only about six hours, shorter than the reproductive lifespan of a mayfly.

“I can’t take this anymore,” I said, shutting my laptop. I wasn’t cut out for a lot of detective work indoors, wading through the muck of popular culture.

“I know where we need to go.” You showed me a map of Central America. “Here’s where wood thrushes are taking their vacations these days. Most of them seem to have picked up their new singing habits there.”

“If you can call it singing,” I said, quoting our client.

Some time later we were sitting outside a café in a small coastal town of Costa Rica — after having spent a week tromping through the forest, questioning the inhabitants, and looking for clues. I’ll skip over all that tromping and questioning, which was standard procedure for us, and go straight to where the clues had led us — the aforementioned café, which apparently was a can’t-miss stop for all the visiting thrushes. We soon found out why.

They arrived by the busload to gawk at the latest singing sensation — a brightly-plumed macaw with an Argentinian accent who made his living entertaining the customers. He had brilliant yellow feathers on his torso, turquoise on his wings, and a touch of green on his brow. His curved beak was black and polished, his claws well-manicured, and his long tail feathers swept majestically behind him like a cape as he strutted about on a circular platform set high on a pole near the outside tables. He was marvelous.

A trio of musicians — two gentlemen on guitars and one on conga drum — sat off to the side and accompanied the macaw as he sang of love and betrayal, anguish and heartache, and above all the joy of life. 

The wood thrushes perched all around the café — on rafters, bushes, tables and chairs — sometimes crowding in and sitting elbow to wing with people. No one cared. The atmosphere was casual, the drinks were flowing, and the macaw had everyone entranced as we tapped our feet to the upbeat Latin rhythms.

He had developed a distinctive style, blending native bird sounds with heavily-accented vocals that were just barely recognizable as words.

“I feel I should be able to make out the meaning,” you said, “but I can’t quite get it.”

“Like in The Harder They Come. The Jamaicans are speaking English, but Americans still need subtitles to understand them.”

You turned and looked at me. “What provoked such an obscure reference?”

“Must be the Caribbean air.”

The tunes were so catchy and the performance so smooth, the thrushes joined in with enthusiasm, thinking that because they’re among the best singers at home, they must be good at this too. It was pitiful to see, and even worse to hear. Between the syncopated rhythms, the complex chord changes, the improvisations, and the foreign words, the music was simply too exotic for them to follow.

“I wish they’d just clap along,” I said. “And they’re getting a bit rowdy.”

“They’ve had too much guaro to drink.”

After the show the thrushes sat around in groups, warbling and squawking, trying to impress each other and doing a terrible imitation of the macaw, who’d be cringing in his dressing room if he could hear them. Then they stumbled over to the gift shop to buy t-shirts and tropically-themed knickknacks before packing up and flying home, where they continued butchering the music, to the dismay of fellow forest dwellers.

“All this because of one dumb macaw?” I said.

“You have to admit, he’s good looking, he’s talented, and he’s got flair. I can see why other birds want to imitate him.”

“But thrushes don’t have the right vocal cords. Or the cultural background. Or the flair. No wonder they mangle it so badly. It’s like little kids acting out scenes from The Threepenny Opera without understanding what Mack the Knife is up to with all those loose women.”

You frowned at me. “Not the best analogy.” You thought some more. “No, not even close.”

“It’s on my mind because we might need some underworld character to take care of that bird.” I dragged a thumb across my throat in a cutting gesture.

“We are not handling it that way!”

“I don’t suppose we can simply tell those thrushes they’re no good at the Afro-Cuban thing. Maybe start a rumor that singing this kind of music leads to all-night parties, wearing colorful clothing, and outbreaks of salsa dancing.”

You gazed down at the blue water of the Caribbean. “That may be an idea, but not the way you’re thinking. Let’s go see what’s in the gift shop. We might need a souvenir.”

The shop carried a selection of the macaw’s recordings. He was called Marco Macaw — a stage name — and had several CDs with titles like Feathers in Moonlight, The Bird From Ipanema, and Marco Sings Gershwin. We passed on that last one, but picked up a few that featured his Latin music. Your idea was to play Marco’s songs to the wood thrushes who were trying to imitate him.

“Maybe if they hear the original,” you explained, “they’ll realize just how dreadful they sound in comparison. Or maybe the other animals will say something to them.”

We returned home and took Marco Macaw on tour through North America, or at least recordings of him. We were like roadies — we’d go out to the woods hauling the biggest portable sound system we could carry, set it up near communities of thrushes, then play his music at full volume.

“This could backfire,” I said, the first time we tried it. “What if they get even more inspired to keep singing their awful imitation?”

“Then we think of another idea.”

But it did work. Once those birds heard the real thing and compared it to the version they’d been singing, and once they saw how much the squirrels were laughing at them, they turned red in the face and stopped trying to be Latin cool.

It took us all autumn to visit the most afflicted areas and shame those thrushes into silence. By springtime, they had completely forgotten about the Marco Macaw fad and went back to chirping the traditional tunes, as nature intended. Our client was happy and sanity returned to the forests, until later that summer…

We were hiking through the woods when we heard a rapid-fire toink-tonk-tink-tonk-toink — like the sound of machine-gun bullets striking muffled bells. Up in the branches a woodpecker was hammering away on a bird-size steel drum. Other woodpeckers joined in on their drums and the air was soon filled with a racket as far from calypso music as the West Indies is from the planet Neptune.

You looked at me, sighed, and slowly shook your head.

“Fancy a trip to Trinidad?” I asked. You just kept shaking your head.

All we wanted was a little peace and quiet when we stopped in a small town just off the highway, rented an inflatable raft, and paddled out onto the slow-moving river that wound its way through the farmland. That’s when the trouble began.

The day was warming up, the sky was free of clouds, and the breeze wasn’t interested in bothering us. In the distance, upriver, was one of those lone mountains that occasionally pop up where the landscape is otherwise flat, just to liven up the scenery.

“Do you think we’ll make Colorado by tomorrow?” you asked, lying back with your eyes closed.

“I suppose, if we don’t make too many stops like this one.” I didn’t care — we had no schedule, it was good to be out of the car for a while, and I was enjoying the carefree feeling of floating on the river.

I put my hand in the water and let it hang there. Something slithered by and I jerked my arm back. I leaned over the side but saw only a few long ripples of water snaking past. The raft wobbled a bit and we were surrounded by a sloshing sound. A swell lifted the boat a few inches and we picked up speed heading downriver.

“What’s happening?” You sat up and blinked in the sunlight. “What’s all the commotion?”

“The river’s getting livelier. I felt some water running by my hand a second ago.” That’s what it must have been. “And it’s getting a lot higher all of a sudden.”

“Yes… A lot higher.”

We looked at each other. “Back to shore!”

We both grabbed paddles and tried to control the raft, but the river carried us along, faster now, churning and rushing all around us. The water had a look of panic about it, like it was running from something. Wavelets curled above the surface and took a glance behind before ducking back down and swooshing away.

The river got careless in its haste. We nearly capsized when it swooped too quickly around a corner, slammed into the muddy slope, then dashed off in fright. It swung wildly from one bank to the other, sweeping away chunks of grass and tearing at the roots of young trees.

“The river needs to watch where it’s going,” you said, as we struggled to keep the raft afloat.

“It’s overflowing,” I said. “The town’s going to get flooded!”

“Where’s this coming from? It hasn’t rained for weeks, and there aren’t any dams around here.”

We bumped along and paddled fiercely, until we made our way to the bank. The water had risen so high that we had to duck under tree branches that hung over the water. We could have escaped the river by grabbing onto a tree, but I wanted to save the raft so we’d get our rental deposit back. We steered toward a grove of beeches that was underwater and found a calm spot where the water was only up to our ankles. We hopped out and waded to dry land, pulling the raft behind us, then tied it up and jogged back to town along the road.

“Look,” you said.

Ahead of us a crowd of locals had gathered, already aware of the situation. They had homes and families and farms to protect, so they had arrived in force with shovels and tractors to fend off the rising water. We helped throw some bags of sand onto the crumbling levee, but felt we needed to do something else.

“We have to find out what’s causing this,” you said to me under your breath. We both looked at the mountain, the prime suspect in a case like this.

The local News at Nine helicopter had landed nearby to interview people about their plight. The raging water made a dramatic background as the newscaster reported on the approaching disaster, microphone in hand. After she finished the segment and the cameraman gave her a thumbs up, we approached them about taking us upriver in the helicopter. 

“This will make a better story,” you said. “Townspeople at odds with nature — go behind the scenes. Tonight at nine.” You announced it like a news teaser that’s played right before a commercial. It was a good imitation, though it could have used a touch more urgency in the voice.

“There may be sinister forces at work here,” I added. “Maybe corruption at the highest level. We need to get to the root of the problem.” News people always like that angle, so they agreed to fly us up to the mountain, if we promised to give them an exclusive. Sure, we said. Not like anyone else wanted the story — CNN wasn’t exactly waving a check in our faces.

Along with the helicopter pilot, the team consisted only of the cameraman and the newscaster, who kept checking her makeup. We sat in the back with her — Jill something, recently from Kansas City — with me squeezed in the middle, since you wanted a window and so did she. You gave her a sharp look when she started asking me personal questions — age, height, marital status — while she twirled a lock of blond hair around her finger. Interviewing, she called it.

“Look!” you shouted, to distract her. “The river! What’s that?”

“Where?” Jill turned away from me and pressed her nose to the window. I was sure it was nothing, but the cameraman — Carl something, from Omaha — hoisted his video camera into a ready position at his shoulder.

“Thank you,” I said in your ear. Flirtatious women get on my nerves. I wish it happened more often, though, just to keep my nerves in shape.

I leaned forward and looked out the front window. The main tributary flowed into the river from between two spurs of the mountain. I tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed, indicating that we should head that way. He banked to the left and Jill was thrown practically into my lap, which seemed to amuse her and annoy you.

We landed on one of the foothills, a field of dry grass with barely any scrub brush. We started walking to where the mountain steepened into a slope covered in scraggly pine trees, and noticed the ground was muddier than normal for that time of year. 

“Where’s all this water coming from?” you asked. “There isn’t a spring anywhere nearby.”

“And there’s been no rain… no snow melt…” I shrugged.

“Um, guys.” It was Jill, struggling to follow as she slogged through the mud. “It’s a bit, uh… Do we have to go this way?”

Carl the cameraman was also hesitant, and took long leaping steps to avoid the puddles. The pilot just leaned against the helicopter with folded arms, enjoying the scene. He was chummy with the news team, but in a way that didn’t preclude laughing at their expense.

You turned to Jill. “Why don’t you two wait in the chopper? Work on the story. Fix your hair or something. We won’t be long.”

“You can follow us in the helicopter later. Wait till we give you a sign.” I didn’t know what that would be, smoke signals maybe, but we wanted to keep them around to take us back to town.

Jill took a couple of halting steps toward me, watching where she put her feet, then giving her shoes a close inspection that warranted a frown. “Call me when you want us to come. I’ll give you my number.”

“Well…” I didn’t know if that was practical. Or desirable.

“I have a better idea,” you said, and strode back to the helicopter. You briefly spoke to the pilot, who opened the door and reached in to grab something. You took it and walked back. “We’ll use this.” You held up a flare gun.

“Right,” I said. “Watch for the flare. That means we’ve found something newsworthy.”

Jill seemed both disappointed and relieved. She gave me a sad look, then perked up as she and Carl went back to join the pilot.

Once rid of our companions, we made good time up the slope. We followed the muddiest trail, since the key to the problem was water: Where was it coming from? We soon found out when a squirt of clear water shot from under a rock, saw us and squeaked in alarm, then rushed away down the hillside faster than anything would flow under the influence of gravity alone.

“It seems in a hurry,” I said.

“It’s panicking. Like something’s after it.”

“That’s what the river was doing.”

We looked across the slope and saw hundreds of rivulets streaking out of the mud, like a frightened herd stampeding away from a predator. They fled down a gully and into a stream that eventually fed the main watercourse. If the whole mountain was like this, we could see how the river had been overwhelmed.

“What scares water?” you asked. “Something that makes it go dry. Or…?”

“Or keeps it from being free to do what water does — such as flow wherever it wants, associate with whoever it pleases, attend the school of its choice — that kind of thing.”

“Flow,” you said with a nod. “Something’s threatening to stop that, I bet. There are some springs farther up. I saw them when I was here a few years ago. Maybe one of them will give us a clue.” 

We hiked through a stand of pines, then dropped into a hollow populated with oaks. We followed that uphill, along a rocky streambed that looked as if it had recently flowed with water — the ground was still wet, but the moss on top of the rocks was drying out. We thought it odd that there wasn’t even a trickle, given that the stream here was fed nearly year-round by the spring just up ahead.

We pushed aside some brush and came upon a windowless building that straddled the pool where the spring came out. Solar panels covered the roof and the structure had a pre-fab look to it, like it was snapped together in minutes. A mechanical chugging sound came from within. We approached and saw a stack of unlabeled cardboard boxes next to the door.

“This wasn’t here before,” you said.

“Are they pumping water down to the valley?”

“There’s no pipe coming out.”

“And these boxes…” I tore one open and saw that it was a case of bottled water. Another box contained empty plastic bottles. That was our clue, and it didn’t make us happy.

We had heard about these pirate water bottlers who set up temporary operations in the mountains, tapping springs to fill a couple million bottles, then slipping away in the night to sell their ill-gotten loot to unsuspecting consumers.

The trouble is, nothing in the wild likes to be captured, shoved into a bottle, and hauled off by the boxful. So rather than exit the mountain by way of the spring, as is natural and proper, much of the water here had eluded the bootleggers by filtering its way past and sneaking out lower on the hillside, as we had witnessed earlier. We figured the thieves must have recently started things up, perhaps that morning, which is why the water had panicked and run so quickly down to the river, causing it to flood right when we were on it. We’re just lucky that way.

The door was locked, but a swift kick took care of that. We weren’t too concerned about damaging something that didn’t belong here.

The building was about the size of a one-car garage. Along one wall stood a workstation with a machine for filling the bottles and a robot hard at work. It glanced at us when we entered, then turned back to its task of grabbing a bottle, holding it under the spout, letting it fill, screwing the top on, and placing it in a box. The robot was the kind that’s equipped with a wheeled pedestal, two arms, and a display screen for its head, which showed a cartoon face with the bored expression of an employee on the job. It worked quickly, finishing a bottle every few seconds. I was impressed.

The pump chugged away near the back wall, sucking at the spring outside and bringing the captive water into the little factory. All quite efficient and completely automated — the very model of a modern pirate operation.

“All they have to do is bring more empties and collect the boxes from time to time,” you said, “unless they have robots for that too.”

I picked up one of the blue-tinted plastic bottles. The label had a line drawing of a nature scene. On an azure background were printed the words “Mountain Spring Water.”

“At least they’re not lying about that,” I said. Some bottling companies just get water out of a city tap, give it a fancy name, and sell it at a premium price.

“It still amounts to poaching water in the wild.” You were pushing at the robot, trying to get it off balance. It ignored you.

“So what should we do?”

You looked behind the robot and found the switch to disable it. I turned off the bottling machine and the pump. In the silence that followed we heard a gentle gurgling as the spring returned to its normal flow, bubbling into the shallow pool below the structure. Someone would have to get this building torn down, but that wasn’t up to us right now.

“There must be others,” I said. A single operation like this wouldn’t be enough to scare away enough water to make the river rise by several feet.

“There’s a series of springs farther on. Let’s go.”

I stopped to grab a bottle on my way out. The climb earlier had made me thirsty, though I felt guilty drinking it. You practiced twirling the flare gun while you waited for me. 

We followed the trail that led around the mountain, and within twenty minutes had found four more illegal bottling operations, each with the same setup and same type of robot slaving away at a workstation. Each time we shut one off, the spring started flowing at its usual rate, which meant less water fleeing down to the river — or so we hoped.

We had just finished with the last one and were closing the door behind us when a group of five men appeared on the trail ahead. They were probably coming back to check the machines and haul off their loot for the day.

You raised the flare gun and fired into the air. That was supposed to be our signal to the news team, but it immediately alerted the men to our presence.

“Why did you do that?” I asked. A dumb question — you must have had a good reason, and I’d figure it out soon enough.

“Hey!” the lead man shouted, “what’re you doing here?” He hustled toward us. “What was that flare for?”

“It’s a free country,” I said, stepping toward him. “And the mountain is open to anyone.” I figured it was better to confront them and stall, knowing you had some plan in mind. You kept quiet and seemed to be listening for something.

“Yeah? Well we have property rights up here.” He was lying — these were public lands.

The others crowded behind him. They weren’t exactly the kind we’d invite over for Sunday tea — unless tea involved some serious street fighting. A few were armed with knives, but I didn’t see any guns. One wore a tool belt. He pulled out a large wrench and began slapping it against his palm like a tough guy, which was supposed to intimidate us, but I knew three moves that would disarm him and leave him with a sore head. You had taught me those.

“Didn’t you see the No Trespassing signs?” Again, more lying.

“No,” I said, innocently. “We must have missed those. Try bigger signs next time.”

A low thrumming sound was coming from behind the mountain, in the direction where we had started our climb. To keep them from noticing that, I decided to get their minds on something else. 

“Is this your little operation?” I hooked a thumb back at the building. “You seem to be in violation of the Baxter Act, Section Thirty-Four, regarding the employment and housing of non-sentient humanoids in proximity to aquatic conditions.”

“The what?”

“Exactly. According to Rule Seven: Lack of a proper apparatus for dehumidifying the interior atmospheric environment risks causing harm to—”

“What’s that got to do with us?” 

“Hey,” one of the men said, looking inside the door, “I think they shut this one down. The bot’s turned off.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Maybe it’s just taking a rest. Robots are entitled to a ten-minute break every two hours. They’re programmed that way. Union rules, you know.”

A couple of the men looked to the leader, who was stroking his chin, giving my fabricated claim some serious thought. At least they weren’t attacking us.

The thrumming grew to a loud whumping as the news helicopter came into view. The men looked up, startled. Two of them crouched behind bushes.

“Is that yours?” the leader asked.

“What would we be doing with a helicopter?” I said. “We don’t have that kind of a budget.”

The pilot must have seen us. He banked around and hovered overhead with the news team. You held up a hand to greet them, pointed at the group of men, then made the charades gesture for movie, pretending to crank an old-fashioned film camera.

“What’s he doing?” The leader shaded his eyes and looked up. Carl had his window open, camera at his shoulder, getting footage of the scene.

“He’s filming for the nine o’clock news,” you said. “Do you want to give them a statement?”

“Smile for the camera,” I added.

“Why you—” He started for me. I stepped back and you raised the flare gun at him — empty, but it made him pause and reconsider. He squinted at the helicopter, then looked down and knitted his brows. I’ll say this for him, he could assess a situation and make a wise decision. “Let’s go,” he said, turning on his heel and leading his men back the way they had come. 

We directed the pilot to land on a knoll a couple hundred yards away. Jill and Carl hiked up and we gave them a tour of the buildings and showed them how the setup worked.

“That’s why the river flooded,” you explained. “Most of the water was trying to get away from the mountain, to keep from being bottled.”

Jill was skeptical. “I don’t think our viewers will believe that.”

“Just say…” I groped for the wording. “Just say the illegal tapping of the springs released excess water down the mountain. Let the hydrologists figure that one out.”

So the news team got a good story. We let them take all the credit for discovering the pirate bottling operation and saving the town, all due to their investigative reporting. We didn’t need the publicity.

They wanted to stay for another hour or two to get more video — long shots of the buildings from the air, Jill standing next to a robot while delivering her report, closeups of trickling springs. We didn’t want to wait, so we hiked down the mountain and hitched a ride into town, sitting in the back of a farmer’s pickup truck because the passenger seat was reserved for his two dogs. He had his priorities straight.

The river had calmed down. We got our security deposit back for the raft, but had to pay an additional seven hours’ rental.

“Next time,” I said, “let’s just visit a museum.”

We needed a code name for our operation — an assignment to retrieve a piece of equipment and some uranium ore samples that had been stolen from a research group. The right name should roll easily off the tongue, sound vaguely intriguing, and pique the interest of movie producers looking for their next action hit, in case they wanted to buy the rights to our story.

“How about Operation Redwood?” I suggested.

“This assignment has nothing to do with redwoods,” you said.

“Then it will fool the enemy.” Not really — they were already on to us, which we knew because the guards had caught us breaking in to the lab and subsequently locked us in a small cellar room. But I just liked the name redwood.

“Operation Escape is what we need,” you said.

A bit too literal, I thought, too obvious. “Sure,” I agreed. “This phase is Operation Escape. And maybe Operation Breakfast.” 

We had been left for eight hours without a peep from our captors. The only reason we hadn’t tried anything yet was that we both felt like getting a good night’s sleep — after hiking over a ridge, scrambling through the dense Kyrgyzstan forest, locating the hidden country house, cutting through the chain link fence, disabling the security system, running up to the fourth floor where the owner had set up a makeshift lab, then getting caught by the two guards, which was probably my fault.

Here’s how that happened.

First off, the house was old, built with a lot of stone — almost a chateau but without the charming style. It had been unoccupied for decades before the new owner came along and modernized it, adding a fourth floor with a lab and another room. He was — to put it bluntly — a criminal, but not on the level of evil genius. He had been hounded out of Russia and had recently gotten into the business of minerals and other geologic treasures, including oil extraction, precious gems, and uranium mining.

After we broke in to the house and found the lab at the top of the stairs, you knelt down with your lock-picking kit and went to work. Everyone was away for the weekend — as our contact had told us they’d be — except for two guards. My job was to watch for them.

I went to check the other room for signs of life and quietly opened the door a crack to look in. Difficult to tell in the midnight darkness, but it seemed to be a library, with a sliding glass door that opened onto a patio. I caught a whiff of stale cigarette smoke but couldn’t see anyone and I didn’t want to shine a light around, so I closed the door and went back to check the stairwell, tiptoeing down a few stairs and listening for movement below.

That’s when I heard the library door opening — and voices! 

The guards must have been on the patio for a smoke. I swore at myself for not looking there. In two seconds I was back up the stairs and you were putting away your tools. The guards came into the hall, saw us, and cornered us before we could slip away. They both had rifles and acted like they knew how to use them, so we acted like we knew how to be cooperative. 

There wasn’t any discussion — no yelling “hands up or we’ll shoot,” no interrogation — though we wouldn’t have understood them anyway. They treated us as if we were part of a drill or training exercise, so maybe that’s what they thought it was. They were efficient and polite — firm enough to impress the boss, but not abusive, in case we were someone he had hired to test them. They gave us a cursory search, marched us down to the cellar, and locked us in a windowless room that contained several sacks of grain and a few casks of wine.

We didn’t know their names, and spent at least a minute that night arguing over what to call them, so we’d have a shorthand way of referring to them. You liked the name Ivan for the taller one, maybe because he was blond and stoutly built, but I thought he looked more like a Dmitri. 

“We can call the other one Dmitri,” you said. 

“No, he’s more of an Alexey or maybe a Kostya.” Anyway, I said okay to calling the blond guard Ivan and that I’d give the other one some more thought. We made ourselves comfortable and got some sleep.

The next morning we were ready for action. And breakfast.

You initiated Operation Escape by examining the door and trying the knob. Still locked. On to Step Two, in which we gathered anything that might help us pick the lock or pry the door open. 

We had left our packs in a stand of trees just outside the fence and only carried a few necessary tools, most of which had been taken by the two guards, though they hadn’t search us too well, so you still had your ankle knife and I had my reversible belt, which could be flipped over to show either a brown side or a black side — not much use for escaping, but practical in a pinch if I had to suddenly change into more formal attire. I mention it only to provide a complete inventory of our available resources.

You started working on the door with your knife. It was secured with a heavy-duty doorknob opened by a key from the outside, with a deadbolt above it, also locked from the outside. The door was hung on cast iron hinges bolted into the solid wood. I fiddled with those, but had no luck.

We heard footsteps in the hallway and the sound of keys jangling, then the snick of the deadbolt. You slipped the knife back in its sheath and pulled your pant leg over it. We stepped back and acted nonchalant. The knob turned and the door was pushed open. It was Ivan.

He entered with a tray, balancing it on one hand and pointing at it with the other in a friendly gesture. It held two glasses of juice and two plates with eggs, rolls, and a greasy gray pile that may have been sausage. So Operation Breakfast was a success, without us having to do anything. Partial success, I should say — there was no coffee.

You glanced at the door, which Ivan had left wide open, then said to me, “Well, this is the key to a good morning.”

I looked and saw that he’d left his set of keys hanging in the doorknob. We didn’t know if he understood English. Operation Codewords was underway.

“Yes,” I said, tilting my head toward him, “the food looks tempting, almost seductive.” You gave me a puzzled look, then got the message.

Ivan stood in the middle of the room facing you. You had your back to the far wall, and I was off to his side and a little behind him, near the door. You smiled at him and flipped your hair back. He was ogling you, so you put a hand to your throat and gave a coquettish laugh to cover the sound of me ducking my head out the door to check the hallway. Empty. I gave you a sign.

“This is like a fancy vacation getaway,” you said. I nodded.

You directed Ivan to place the food in the farthest corner of the room, and playfully grabbed one of the rolls off the tray as you stepped out of his way. As he bent over to set it down, we both rushed out, shut the door and locked it. I pulled out the keys and we hurried up the corridor, ignoring the pounding behind us. We had no time for amateurs.

“Back to the lab?” I asked.

You tore the roll in half and handed me my share. “Mm-hmm,” you said, taking a bite. We headed for the stairs.

“Too bad this is all the breakfast we get.”

“You could have stayed in the cell and eaten with Ivan, while I went for the stuff.”

“I thought about it.”

Getting into the lab was a cinch now that we had Ivan’s keys, bless him. I had been expecting a slick, ultra-modern facility, but was disappointed to see it was little more than a dusty room with some workbenches and a few pieces of equipment — microscopes, table saw, geiger counters, hand-held UV light, field tools. The shelves were full of rocks, but looked like they’d just been dug up and dumped there without even being cleaned. Morning light streamed in through a large window that overlooked the forested hills.

“There it is,” you said, pointing to a stainless steel cylinder, about the size and shape of a six-liter coffee urn, with a few knobs and a small readout screen. “The detector.”

That’s what we called it, anyway. The researchers who developed the prototype device had given it a long technical name that I immediately forgot. Scientists and engineers are rarely good at naming their creations.

“What does it do?” we had asked them.

“It detects deep deposits of uranium ore more effectively than by looking for gamma radiation because we use a proprietary combination of high-frequency waves and…”

“A detector then.” 

We didn’t need to know how it worked, only what it looked like. It had already proven its worth by helping them collect some ore samples, which had also been stolen. We found those in a lead canister standing next to the detector on the workbench.

“Guess we can just grab these and go,” I said.

“What’s that over there?” You pointed to a table in the corner.

On it was a high-end microscope — the kind that costs as much as a Lamborghini — and a pile of diamonds, many still rough, some cut and polished, a few with pink or pale blue coloration, but each one about ten to twenty carats. We did some silent figuring — everything on the table would sell for enough to furnish a cadre of grad students with a hefty research budget for several years.

“It would be nice,” I said, “but…”

You shook your head. “That’s not what we came for. And we have to let this guy know that the only thing we came for was what he stole.”

“Maybe he stole these from somebody.”

“We can’t assume that. Come on.” You picked up the lead casing full of samples, hefted it, then handed it to me. I always get the heavy stuff.

“We don’t really need the container,” I said, “not for uranium ore.” Uranium has a long, long half-life, which means it decays slowly, with low levels of radiation — not enough to worry about for the time I’d be carrying it. 

I unscrewed the container cap and dumped out the samples. They were sort of pretty rose-colored rocks with black and green speckles. Not as pretty as the diamonds though. I found a small canvas bag to put the rocks in and tied it to my waist so I’d have my hands free. You tucked the detector under your arm.

We were about to leave when we heard the guard trying the door, which we had locked when we entered the room. We didn’t know if he was looking for us or just making his rounds. We don’t think he had found Ivan in the cellar, or they’d both be there banging on the door.

“Let’s try another way,” you said.

We crawled out the window and onto a ledge, then made our way around to the rooftop patio that was accessed from the library. Our options were limited. We couldn’t go through the library, because that would take us back into the house where the guard was.

“All right,” I said. “This is where we call our sidekick to come get us off the roof with the helicopter.”

“We don’t have a sidekick, or a helicopter.”

“We need a bigger budget.” I made a mental note.

Beyond the far end of the patio we could see the top of a sycamore tree, four stories high and just within reach. “Let’s see what’s over there,” you said.

We went to the railing and looked down into the courtyard. There was no movement below.

“Here.” You handed me the detector. I was about to ask why, when you hopped up on the railing, stood for a second, then leapt into the tree. You turned around to face me, balancing on slender branches that sagged and bobbed under your weight. 

“What are you doing?” I said, surprised by your move.

“Operation Sycamore.”

“Oh. Well, then… that makes it okay.”

You held out your hands and I tossed you the detector, a little high maybe, but you managed to grab it, then shuffled back to give me room. I got up on the railing and leaned forward, getting ready to jump. That’s when the tree went berserk.

It started thrashing about as if in a windstorm, though the morning was calm. Then it made a high-pitched creaking noise like the sound effects in a haunted house movie, which may have been its version of a warning siren.

“I think the tree is on to us!” You were struggling to hold on.

“It must have been trained to detect intruders. It knows we don’t belong here.”

There was no way I could jump onto the frantic tree now. But I looked back and saw that the guard was inside the library, armed with his rifle. Then I remembered I hadn’t come up with a name for him, so I decided on Alexey. He hadn’t noticed me yet, but he was heading toward the sliding glass door and would be outside any second now.

The sycamore took a swipe at me with a leafy branch and almost knocked me off my perch. You had already started to shimmy down the swaying trunk. 

We couldn’t let Alexey know we had come out this way, or he’d just run down and catch us in the courtyard. I had to get onto that tree. When I heard the sliding door open, I let my simian instincts take over — my leg muscles exploded, my hands shot out, and I found myself in a tangle of twigs and leaves, scrambling to get some kind of grip. A prehensile tail would have been handy just then. 

This wasn’t the first time we’d had to climb down a tree doing its best to get rid of us — for example, that murderous oak in Romania — so we were old pros at this. Not that there weren’t some scrapes and bruises, just that the experience was no longer novel or worth recounting in detail.

You were already on the ground brushing off your hands when I made it to the lowest branch, swung down, and landed on the flagstones with a thump. The sycamore stopped creaking and flailing about, then showered us with a cluster of leaves out of spite.

“What should we call this one?” I asked, thinking it should get a name like the guards did.

“Sashenka. It means she who defends.”

I don’t know how you knew that, but as long as we could call it something, I was satisfied.

Two days later we met with our contact and the rest of his team to deliver the detector and the samples. They were thrilled that we managed to get everything back. We were given handshakes, hugs, and an envelope full of cash.

We mentioned the diamonds we had seen in the lab, and how we’d left them there. The group went silent, then everyone looked away and mumbled excuses about having to get back to work. Our contact took us aside.

“You know those were stolen too? Along with an expensive microscope?”

“It did cross my mind—” 

You shushed me. “From whom? Do you know?” 

“Yeah. This rich dude who deals in precious stones and such. He hires us for consulting and doing tests sometimes.”

“Does he want those diamonds back?”

“Yeah. I mean, they’re worth a lot. A lot.”

“So he’d pay someone to get them back?”

“I can give you his number.”

You looked at me. I frowned, then asked: “Do you think Ivan would be happy to see us again?”

“Let’s find out. I miss him already.”