Nate scooped the cassette tape off the desk. “I’ll get right on it.”

###

The breeze blew into Nate’s face and he wrinkled his nose underneath the surgical mask. The island smelled of charred decay, unburnt gasoline, and dead fish. It seemed as if the military guys—or whoever had done this—had been pretty liberal with whatever cocktail they’d used to burn the place to the ground. Amid the charred disaster that had once been a forest of palms, a small concrete structure in the distance was the only sign of civilization.

His six agents were making faces of disgust. “What the hell?” said Eric Meadows, the youngest agent on the team. “This place smells like a gas refinery.”

“Not gas,” said Mike Anderson, a former Marine infantryman. “I’ll never forget that smell. The gas and detergent and death. I don’t need the forensic lab guys to tell me someone Napalmed this place all to hell.”

Shaking his head, Nate remembered this smell from his days in the Special Forces. He glanced at the surf along the rocky beach and noticed the pockets of dirty bubbles.

“All the more reason for us to get this all over with,” Nate yelled over the squawking seagulls, facing his team. “I don’t plan on ever coming back to this hellhole, so gather as much evidence as you can. Anderson, Sanchez, and Smith, you survey the east flank of the island. Johnson, Liu, and Meadows, you take the west. I’ll go straight up the middle, and we’ll meet on the north end. Everyone keep their radios turned up. Understood?”

The agents nodded, and Nate began trudging through the post-apocalyptic terrain, the burnt remnants of foliage crunching beneath his boots. Every once in a while, something caught Nate’s eye and he pulled out an evidence bag, labeled it, and placed some burnt remnant of a dead tree, coconut, or crab into it.

As he neared the structure at the center of the island, he encountered a large palm that had fallen over but wasn’t too badly burnt. It had blown asunder—likely from boiling sap—but large pieces of it remained mostly intact, and when he kicked the trunk, it didn’t break apart.

Grabbing an iron bar from his pack, he levered it under the palm and grunted with effort as he shifted the tree, revealing some crushed but unburnt vegetation. As he added new things to his growing collection of samples, he spotted a bright color inside the trunk. He took out his tweezers, fished around, and extracted a red, downy feather. It was the first sign of life on this island, besides the dead seagulls and crabs on the beach. He put the feather into a baggie and moved onward.

He frowned as he approached.