First Light Read online

  She knows what I’ll say next, because I’ve said it before, more times than either of us can count: If we can’t speak for them, then who can? We are the living witnesses, the survivors, but we’ve always known this story belongs as much to the dead as to the living. We owe it to them to tell their story as truthfully as we can.

  She rubs the cover of the black journal and gives me a wan smile.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “We’re in this together.”

  She reaches over and takes my hand, gulping in air. It’s clear I will have to begin. Looking into the rearview mirror at our son, who’s reading a book, I say, “Hey, buddy. Jackson. Your mom and I want to talk to you a minute.” He leans forward, between the two front seats. “Do you remember your mom and me saying something about a plane crash?”

  I can feel him sit up a little, pay more attention. “You said you’d tell me all about it on this trip. You said I was old enough now to understand.”

  “Maybe he’s still not ready,” Kerry says, so quietly I wonder if Jackson hears.

  I reach over and grab her hand, feeling how badly it’s shaking. “He is.”

  “Understand what?” He furrows his brow. “Like secrets?”

  Secrets. The one word we were being so careful to avoid. “Not exactly. But parts of the truth we were waiting to tell you when you were old enough.”

  “So . . . secrets, basically.” The kid is too smart for his own good sometimes.

  His mom looks at him, then at me. “They might seem like secrets, but we don’t think of them that way. It’s just some things we’ve been waiting to tell you when the time was right. Grown-up things, I guess you could say.”

  I’ve rehearsed this speech over and over on nights when I couldn’t sleep, starting when Jackson was a baby curled in his crib. You have to understand, I always start, in my imagination. We all thought we were going to die. Some of us did die. And the things we did in order to live . . . none of it will ever be completely understandable to someone who wasn’t there. But I have to try to make you see why it matters. Because if I don’t, then what was it we were trying so hard to live for?

  Next to me, his mother takes a deep breath and blows it out slowly. Her face is white. “Mom,” Jackson says, “are you all right?”

  She fixes a smile onto her face and says, “I will be, honey.”

  Outside the windows the miles of corn and the little farms go by, the cows chewing their cud in the fields. Tomorrow we’ll cross over into Canada, leaving behind the familiar world. There can be no more excuses, no more delays. Let him know that everything we did was for him, and why it all matters so much, still.

  Every child deserves that. To know. To understand.

  And so we begin.

  2

  It was December, two weeks before Christmas, and Daniel Albrecht could not remember the last time he’d been warm.

  Listening to the groan of the hotel-room heater trying to keep up against the cold, as well as the constant hiss of the channel changing as his fiancée flipped around looking for the news, Daniel burrowed under the comforter. Kerry put her cold feet on Daniel’s leg, making him yelp and pull away from her. “Hey!” he said. He rubbed the spot on his calf where she’d warmed her toes. “What did I ever do to you?”

  “Come on. I’m miserable here.”

  “We’re all miserable here,” Daniel said. “Don’t make it worse than it already is.”

  “Please? I’ll let you watch football.”

  “No way,” he said. She stopped her channel-flipping at ESPN for a moment, but as soon as she put down the remote, Daniel picked up her frozen feet and rubbed the warmth back into them. “Wow, they are cold.”

  “That feels good,” she said, lying back and closing her eyes. “Do you know what time it is?”

  They had been in Barrow, Alaska, for nearly two weeks, and in all that time they had not seen the sun—two weeks spent pummeled by snow and freezing wind, working twelve-hour days entirely in the dark, never knowing if it was eight in the morning or eight in the evening. Daniel looked out the darkened window at the street beyond—at the flat, low buildings of Barrow, at the flakes of snow tapping restlessly on the window—and said, “Around ten at night, I’d say.”

  “What day?”

  “Monday. Give or take a week.”

  Daniel and Kerry were both part of the crisis-management team at Petrol, Inc., the world’s biggest oil company. Two weeks before, an explosion on one of the company’s oil platforms off the Alaska coast had killed three workers and spilled two hundred thousand gallons of crude oil into the pristine waters of the Beaufort Sea. The CEO had dispatched the crisis-management team to Barrow before the bodies had even been recovered. The team’s job: shut down the leak, help the families of the dead employees settle their affairs, offer the company’s assistance to the local authorities to clean up the mess and minimize the environmental impact, and handle the company’s public image in the media.

  All that was easier said than done when the crisis was happening in Alaska in December, the darkest month of the year, and one of the coldest. Daniel was director of operations for the crisis-management group; his job was to get the leak shut down and the spill cleaned up, a job that was proving difficult because of a colder-than-usual cold snap in the area. Conditions for sending the submersibles down to the seabed, to the source of the leak, were bad—the waves rough and frigid, topped by sub-crushing floes of ice on the surface, murky with oil and silt below, making the descent dangerous at best. Daniel felt he couldn’t risk their people in these conditions—it could mean further loss of life. Daniel told his boss they would need to wait until conditions improved before sending their people down to the sea-floor to clamp the leak. “I’ll send my guys down when it’s safe to do so,” Daniel had said, “and not before. We don’t want more bodies in this situation.”

  Daniel’s boss, Bob Packer, had humphed into the phone, clearly disagreeing with Daniel’s assessment, but at the time, he’d been back in Chicago, keeping track of the situation from afar. A day later, almost like clockwork, he’d flown in to oversee the operation in person, and every day since then Daniel had felt him growing restless, wanting to get the job done and get their team out of there. Every minute the mess wasn’t contained cost the company money, not to mention kept the leak in the public eye.

  And Bob Packer was not a man who took no for an answer. The mercurial senior VP of the crisis-management department famously blurred the lines between his personal and business lives. Extremely competent, accomplished, and driven—“driven to insanity,” Kerry liked to joke—Bob had headed the department for twenty years. For the last two of those, Daniel had traveled with him all over the world, from the Middle East to the Gulf Coast to the North Sea to the Alberta tar sands to Alaska and everywhere in between. Not once, in all that time, had he ever seen the man relax. Bob never stayed in the bar to have a beer with his team after hours, never offered a word of encouragement or congratulations on a job well done. The joke around the office was that he didn’t sleep, either, that he was really some kind of vampire, feeding on corporate earnings reports. He was famously quoted as saying that he’d taken the job at Petrol because crisis management was the only real challenge left in the corporate world, and Daniel didn’t exactly disagree with him—he’d taken the job there himself, after all—but the longer Daniel worked under Bob, the more he wished that he’d retire and let someone else take over the department. He was well past sixty, though, and showed no signs of wanting a quiet retired life.

  “Because his wife won’t let him,” Kerry always said. “She doesn’t want him around any more than the rest of us do.”

  And Daniel had laughed even though he felt sorry for Bob’s third wife, a pretty but dull woman he’d met exactly once at an office party. She’d looked miserable the whole time, staring off at the ceiling while Bob talked business with every person
in the room and ignored her. Just last month, a Forbes headline had declared Bob “Married to the Job,” a piece that had become required reading among his employees. Twice divorced, working six days a week, more than three hundred days a year, Bob Packer demanded as much perfection from his team as he did from himself. The fact that other people didn’t want to live on such a schedule never seemed to enter into his thoughts.

  ESPN went to commercial, so Kerry started flipping channels again. As the director of the media-relations team, she managed press inquiries for the company during a crisis, acting as a go-between for the senior executives and various media outlets. She and her people monitored the media coverage of the event and worked to influence the way the story was being told to keep up the company’s positive image.

  “Where’s the damn newscast?” she muttered, still flipping. “I can never keep the hotel channels straight.”

  Daniel looked over at his fiancée, wearing fleece pajamas now and two layers of socks, her red hair soft on her shoulders, makeup off so that all her freckles showed. It was so different from her workday look, the pencil skirts and killer heels, her hair tied up in a neat if somewhat severe twist to keep it out of her face, though since they’d been in Alaska she’d been wearing heavy coats and sweaters and boots. He leaned over to kiss her, trying to distract her from thoughts of work. She turned to kiss him back, but then just as quickly she turned back to the TV, and Daniel sighed. God help the man who came between Kerry Egan and her work. There was a reason Bob Packer had hired her, after all.

  Media attention on the Beaufort spill had been quiet so far, and Daniel knew that fact was making Kerry a little nervous. Either she and her team were doing their jobs extremely well, or events were about to blow up in spite of her best efforts—the company name smeared across the 24-hour cable-news screens, the newspapers, the snarky news Web sites. If that happened, the media coverage could very quickly go from bad to disastrous, and Kerry would have her hands full in a hurry. He supposed he could understand her concern: the longer it took him to get his people down to the seafloor to stop the leak, the harder Kerry’s job became. It did sometimes put something of a damper on romance.

  So far, though, coverage of the explosion had been limited to an occasional mention of the bare facts on a couple of the 24-hour cable-news networks in the States, a third-page headline each in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and only fifteen seconds apiece from two of the four major network broadcasts. The international press was tougher, offering a few more detailed and critical pieces on the possible causes of the explosion and the damage to the local ecosystem. None of this was unusual.

  What was unusual was that the Russians were starting to make serious noise about the environmental impact of the oil spill so close to their own coast, and taking their case to the international media—the BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters. Daniel knew Kerry was worried that the trouble for Petrol was really just beginning, that the longer the crisis went on, the more reporters would start digging around for an angle. If the families of the dead men started going around the company to talk, if the Russians started making more noise to further some of their own causes in the court of public opinion, reporters could start landing in Barrow by the dozens from every country and continent, and then she and the rest of the team would be stuck in Alaska through New Year’s at least. And Daniel knew that Kerry wanted very much to be home for Christmas this year.

  Her mother was bugging her about the holidays, as usual, asking why Kerry had to work such long hours, why wasn’t she ever home with her family, and when were she and Daniel actually going to set a date for the wedding? Though she wouldn’t say so, Daniel knew all these things were weighing heavily on her.

  Daniel glanced over at her face—brow furrowed, deep in thought—and wished he could get her to turn off the TV for the night. But one of the producers from a Big Four newscast had told her they were finally running their piece on the Petrol accident that night. Since Kerry had put the producer in touch with Bob himself for the piece, she wanted to see the angle they were going to take on it.

  When she hit on the right channel at last, Kerry put down the remote and sat up, paying no attention to the fact that Daniel was still rubbing her cold feet while the deep-voiced and smoothly tanned anchor discussed the president’s latest poll numbers and his battles with Congress.

  Daniel rubbed her feet more vigorously. “Hey,” he said, “I thought we said no work tonight? That we were going to spend some serious time together tonight?”

  “I know, babe, I just want to see this one story. It should be on any second.”

  “How romantic,” he said. He pushed into the soft spot in the middle of her foot with one knuckle, but Kerry couldn’t take her eyes off the broadcast, waiting to see how the story was going to go.

  Now the news switched to a story about a plane crash in Taiwan, citing the number of survivors and discussing the possible causes of the crash—human error or mechanical malfunction? Kerry squirmed with impatience all through that story and the next one, too, about new FDA regulations of chicken farms. “Why do producers always make you wait until the end of the show to get to the part you care about?”

  “Better for ratings.”

  “Aren’t you clever,” she said.

  The broadcast went to commercial break. The newscast really was waiting until the last minute this time to get to Kerry’s story. She turned to look at him. “I saw you through the window earlier, when I was walking back to the hotel. You were on the phone. What did Bob have to say?”

  “How’d you know it was Bob?”

  “Because you looked pissed off. When you got off the phone, you threw it down and gave it the finger.”

  He chortled. “Yeah, well. He was telling me I have until midnight to get those submersibles to the bottom to shut down the wellhead or he’d find someone else who would. I keep telling him it’s too dangerous to send people down in these conditions, and he told me he’s already got my replacement picked out . . .” Daniel sighed and said, “You know how he is.”

  “I know how he is, all right.”

  “How about you? How’s it going from your end?”

  “He promised Judy we’d be going home in two days,” Kerry said. Judy Akers was Kerry’s deputy director and best friend. She’d been complaining about wanting to go home almost from the moment they’d stepped on the plane to Alaska. Nothing was to her liking—the cold, the dark, the food, the work.

  “And you don’t think so.”

  “No. I think the Russians are going to start making noise soon, and then this whole thing is going to blow up. No way Bob will let us go then.”

  “Can’t I get you to turn that thing off and kiss me already?”

  “Soon,” she said.

  When the news came back on, the anchor immediately launched into the piece on the Petrol spill, staring dramatically into the camera while he read the feed from the teleprompter next to a picture of an oil platform on fire. Kerry sat up straighter. Daniel sighed and dropped her foot.

  “Now a report from Alaska, where three employees of Petrol, Inc., died last week in an oil-platform explosion above the Arctic Circle,” said the newscaster. “The wellhead was damaged in the explosion, leaking nearly a million gallons of oil into the Beaufort Sea and threatening the fragile ecosystem near Prudhoe Bay.”

  “Hmm,” said Daniel. “They got the numbers wrong on that one.”

  Kerry sighed—she’d have to call them to issue a correction tomorrow, but the damage would already be done.

  The anchor continued reading. “Efforts to close the wellhead and stem the tide of oil flowing into the ocean have been hampered by frigid weather and the fact that the area is completely dark twenty-four hours a day between November and January.”

  The photo of the burning oil platform switched to a video of Bob, his prominent brow furrowed, his thick gray hair standing up
bushy from his forehead. He was still, at sixty-seven, imposing and attractive, with the build of the football player he’d once been. His face wore his usual expression of outrage barely masked.

  The anchor went on reading. “Because of the location of the leak so close to Russia’s Siberian shore, authorities in Moscow are monitoring the situation closely and threatening to take action if the situation isn’t resolved. Petrol Senior Vice President Bob Packer, however, said today that the company expects its submersibles to reach the ocean floor by midnight tomorrow to repair the damaged wellhead and stop the flow of oil into the sea, although the platform will be shut down for several weeks to complete repairs and investigate the cause of the accident. Now to Sacramento, where the—”

  Daniel turned off the TV. “Well, that certainly explains some things,” he said. He shook his head and laughed. “He can say anything he likes to the media, but I can’t wave my magic wand and make it safe for my people.”

  “Still, could have been worse,” Kerry answered.

  “Much worse.”

  Already he was feeling better. Daniel slid his hand slowly up her leg, his fingers pressing gently on the back of her knee, the length of her thigh, and pulled her toward him. She sighed and pulled his head down toward her. God, he loved her, and now, with her body warm beneath him, her lips parting gently . . .

  Just then the room’s phone rang, loudly, making them both jump.

  “Hello?” Kerry asked. “Hi, Bob. Yes, we were just watching it. Sure. Here he is.” She held out the receiver for Daniel, who groaned a little and put it to his ear.

  “I’m glad you were watching,” Bob was saying. “You can see the pressure we’re under here. We need those submersibles to the bottom, pronto.”

  “Sir, there’s no way we can get it done on the timetable you suggested in that broadcast. You know that. Our people will be in danger, and I think it’s a mistake to jeopardize more lives until conditions are better. You wouldn’t want to lose a submersible crew . . .”