of two engines, both starboard, which isn’t good. In a minute, the trickles thicken into plumes. Straub swings the plane into a wicked bank, back toward Thailand and salvation. It’s only a couple hundred clicks. A Hercules can fly on a single engine.
Then they start to drop, like a duck homing in on a lake. Smoke licks out from the back of the cargo bay. The word evacuates Pavlicek’s mouth before he knows what it means: Fire! On a plane packed to the hull with fuel and ordnance. He fights his way back toward the spreading flames. He must get the pallets out of the bay before they ignite. He, Levine, and Bragg struggle with the tie-downs and the releases. A bleeding air duct, ruptured in the blast, pisses molten steam on him. The heat scalds the left side of his face. He doesn’t even feel it. Yet.
They manage to jettison all the cargo. One of the pallets explodes on the way out of the plane. Shit detonates as it falls through the air. Then Pavlicek, too, is floating down to earth like a winged seed.
MILES BELOW and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down the hole at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden inside. Each of the world’s seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it. And this one wasp somehow found the precise fig species of her destiny. The foundress laid her eggs and died. The fruit that she fertilized became her tomb.
Hatched, the parasite larvae fed on the insides of this inflorescence. But they stopped short of laying waste to the thing that fed them. The males mated with their sisters, then died inside their plush fruit prison. The females emerged from the fig and flew off, coated in pollen, to take the endless game elsewhere. The fig they left behind produced a red bean smaller than the freckle on the tip of Douglas Pavlicek’s nose. That fig was eaten by a bulbul. The bean passed through the bird’s gut and dropped from the sky in a dollop of rich shit that landed in the crook of another tree, where sun and rain nursed the resulting seedling past the million ways of death. It grew; its roots slipped down and encased its host. Decades passed. Centuries. War on the backs of elephants gave way to televised moon landings and hydrogen bombs.
The bole of the fig put forth branches, and branches built their drip-tipped leaves. Elbows bent from the larger limbs, which lowered themselves to earth and thickened into new trunks. In time, the single central stem became a stand. The fig spread outward into an oval grove of three hundred main trunks and two thousand minor ones. And yet it was all still a single fig. One banyan.
. . .
LOADMASTER PAVLICEK belly-flops through the blue, faultless air. The whoosh perplexes him. Disaster floats high above him in the cloud, no longer needing to be solved. He wants only to forgive the world, forget, and fall. The wind takes him where it will, halfway across Nakhon Ratchasima Province. As the earth rushes up to meet Douglas, he revives. He tries to steer the chute toward a rice terrace, topped with water and stippled in green bundles. But the toggles tangle, he overshoots, and in the mad collapse of the last hundred feet a sidearm strapped to his thigh discharges. The bullet enters below his kneecap, shatters his tibia, and tears out through the heel of his Leather Personnel Carriers. His scream pierces the air, and his body tumbles into the branches of the banyan, that one-tree forest that has grown up over the course of three hundred years just in time to break his fall.
Branches slash through his flight suit. His silks tangle him in a shroud. Between lacerations and burns, the gunshot wound and his pulverized leg, the airman passes out. He hangs twenty feet above the Earth in friendly territory, facedown and spread-eagled in the arms of a sacred tree bigger than some villages.
A baht bus full of pilgrims comes to pay devotion to the divine tree. They walk through the colonnade of aerial prop roots toward the central trunk, the trunk that crept down around a foster parent it choked to death ages ago. Set into that meandering bole is a shrine covered in flowers, beads, bells, prayer-covered papers, root-cracked statues, and sacred threads.