“Doesn’t need to,” Bray said. “Goats have an excellent sense of smell. Eyesight, too. Those rectangular pupils give it crazy night vision.”
The goat cocked its head to the side, flaring its nostrils. Then, with a sharp bleat, it trotted to Bray and began nibbling on the end of the crunchy snack. Bray pet the goat’s back. “Good girl.” He looked to Hawkins. “She won’t move until the bar is gone.”
Hawkins wasted no time inspecting the collar and quickly confirmed his suspicions. “Same red plastic. Japanese text, too, though the characters are different. Definitely doesn’t say ‘broccoli’ again.”
“Broccoli?” Drake asked.
Joliet knelt next to the goat and stroked its side. As her hand passed over the goat’s fur, the skin beneath it rippled, as though twitching with excitement. “It’s what Kam said was written on the plastic band we took off the turtle.” She gave the goat a gentle scratch behind its ear and it paused eating to let out an ecstatic bleat. “I don’t think this goat has ever been petted before.”
“Let me have a look,” Drake said, stepping up next to the goat.
Something about Drake put the goat on edge. It shifted away from him, but the granola bar kept it from fleeing. When Drake stood still, hands on knees looking at the collar, the goat relaxed and focused on its meal.
“Goat three hundred fourteen,” Drake said.
Bray turned to the captain. “Huh?”
“That’s what the collar says,” Drake explained.
Bray looked doubtful. “How well do you speak Japanese?”
With a sigh, Drake explained. “Passable, but not fluent. I met my wife in Japan. Learned the language so I could speak to her parents. Ask her father’s permission. Do things right.”
“Didn’t know you were married,” Bray said.
As soon as the words escaped Bray’s mouth, Hawkins saw the subtle change in Drake’s expression and knew the truth before the man spoke. “I’m not. She died ten years ago. And before you ask, it was cancer. The fast, merciful kind. If there is such a thing, but it took her just the same.”
Bray lowered his eyes to the ground. “Sorry.”
“Ten years ago,” Joliet said. “That’s when you became captain of the Magellan.”
Drake gave a nod. “Called in a favor.” He looked at Hawkins. “Needed to escape.” He stood and stepped away from the goat. “Now, if we’re done with our trip down memory lane, what’s the big deal about the collar, other than the fact that it confirms the island is populated by people with access to the outside world?”
Hawkins hadn’t thought about the ramifications of the people here having plastic. Drake was right. Whoever lived here hadn’t been isolated since World War II, but that didn’t mean they weren’t off-their-rockers crazy. “I’m not sure.”
“I know what it means,” Bray said, petting the goat. He waited for the others to look at him and then said, “It means Kam lied. The band around the turtle didn’t say ‘broccoli.’”
Joliet scoffed. “There’s no way to know that.”
The goat finished with the first of the two crunchy granola bars. Bray offered it the second, which it happily accepted. “Why would a plastic band that matches the one around this goat, which is accurately labeled ‘goat,’ identify a loggerhead turtle as ‘broccoli’?”
“There’s probably a hundred different possibilities,” Joliet said.
“Including that Kam lied,” Bray said. “You agree that the turtle had been experimented on. The tracker in its gut was proof of that. Given what we found on the beach, the presence of the dracos, and now a matching collar makes a pretty air-tight case that whoever screwed with the turtle is, or was, on this island. If they took the time to accurately label a goat, why call a turtle broccoli?”
“Could have been to throw off anyone that found the turtle,” Drake offered.
Bray nodded his agreement. “One of the hundred possibilities. But whoever experimented on the turtle didn’t expect the tracker to fail. They might not have intended it to live more than a year or two before recapturing it. Even then, I doubt they expected it to survive into adulthood. Just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s … unscientific.”
“Experimental science is full of code names,” Joliet said. “Especially those born out of the Second World War.”
“I’ll give you that,” Bray said as the goat finished the second bar. He stood up. “But I’m not sure ‘Project Broccoli’ has much of a ring to it, especially if we’re talking about Unit Seven thirty-one, whose members subscribed to the bushido code just as much, if not more so, as the soldiers who eviscerated themselves after losing a battle.”
Both sides of the argument made at least some kind of sense, but everything was based on pure speculation and Hawkins knew that did no one any good. “How about this? We’ll ask Kam when we find him.”
“Works for me,” Drake said. “It’s time we got moving and our guide is waiting for us.”