Operation Redwood Read online

  John and Patricia Beatty Award, California Library Association

  National Green Earth Book Award

  Carol D. Reiser Book Award

  Green Prize for Sustainable Literature Awards (Youth Fiction Award)

  National Outdoor Book Award (Honorable Mention in Children’s Category)

  “One of the finest children’s novels of the year.”—A Fuse #8 Production

  “[R]eminds readers that everyone, no matter how large or small, can take action on issues that are important to them.”—School Library Journal

  “Teachers will be able to use this novel for Earth Day discussions and can foster conversations on environmental activism of all types.”

  —School Library Journal

  “A highly enjoyable read.”—Kirkus

  “Operation Redwood is a book that makes the reader believe that anyone can make a difference if he or she is willing to take on a challenge and overcome the hardships that will be encountered along the way.”—ALAN Review

  “Young readers will learn how courage and passion can make a huge difference, especially if you have good friends and good intentions. It’s also about friendship, fitting in and loyalty to a cause. And for adults who care about diversity, French’s inclusion of kids from varied backgrounds adds another compelling layer to an already good read.”—Cincinnati Parent

  “The book has a modern multicultural feel that balances the pastoral nature scenes.”—Horn Book

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  French, Susannah T.

  Operation Redwood / by Susannah T. French.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In Northern California, Julian Carter-Li and his friends, old and new,

  fight to save a grove of Redwoods from an investment company that plans to cut

  them down.

  ISBN 978-0-8109-8354-0 (alk. paper)

  [1. Environmental protection—Fiction. 2. Redwoods—Fiction. 3. Trees—

  Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Grandmothers—Fiction. 6. California—

  Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F889153Ope 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008030724

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8109-9720-2

  Text copyright © 2009 S. Terrell French

  Book design by Maria T. Middleton

  Originally published in hardcover in 2009 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. Paperback edition published in 2011. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  www.abramsbooks.com

  For William, Clara, and Nathan

  “THE BATTLE WE HAVE FOUGHT, and are still fighting, for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it. . . . So we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for.”

  —John Muir, Sierra Club lecture at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, November 23, 1895

  “EVERYBODY NEEDS BEAUTY AS well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”

  —John Muir, The Yosemite (1912)

  CONTENTS

  1: WAKING UP

  2: ROBIN ELDER

  3: THE NEXT DAY

  4: BACK & FORTH

  5: HOME WITH DAPHNE & SIBLEY

  6: THE PLAN

  7: DETAILS

  8: JULIAN’S JOURNEY

  9: UNWELCOMED

  10: HUCKLEBERRY RANCH

  11: BRAINSTORMING

  12: INTO THE REDWOODS

  13: CAUGHT

  14: THE VOW OF SILENCE

  15: QUANTUM

  16: FROM BAD TO WORSE

  17: AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

  18: OPERATION BREAK-IN

  19: STUMPED

  20: GOOD NEWS

  21: THE REDWOOD CLIMBER

  22: INTO THE TREETOPS

  23: INTRUDERS

  24: THE STORM

  25: THE CONFRONTATION

  26: REMEMBERING

  27: UNDER ATTACK

  28: THE INTERROGATION

  29: THE CHILDREN’S EVERLASTING REDWOOD GROVE

  30: TO BIG TREE GROVE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ulian Carter-Li opened his eyes and immediately knew he was somewhere he’d never woken up before. But his dream wouldn’t let him go. His eyes closed and he was running again, along an abandoned beach, beside a black ocean, searching for someone he couldn’t name. He stumbled, and as he fell, a voice inside his head reminded Julian that he was dreaming, and he wrenched himself free from his dark dream world, sat up, and looked around.

  A glass wall faced downtown San Francisco. The bright lights of the Bay Bridge shone against the night sky and a computer screen glowed from a massive desk against the far wall. The only sound was the computer’s low hum. He must have been sleeping for hours, Julian thought, and he wondered when his uncle would be coming back.

  He had never been in Uncle Sibley’s office before today. He looked around at the desk, the clean, uncluttered surfaces, the black leather sofa, the eagle’s eye view. Even in shadow, everything about the office said “I’m rich. I’m powerful. Don’t mess with me.”

  The echo of the wind in his ears and the sense of dread left over from his nightmare had begun to subside. Julian stood up and walked across the room. Except for a few fluorescent lights shining in the hallway, the floor was dark and desolate.

  Now that he was fully awake, Julian remembered why he was here. It was, of course, because there had been nowhere else for him to go. The assistant principal had been unable to reach Aunt Daphne. When he’d finally gotten through to Uncle Sibley, after being placed on hold for a full five minutes, his already foul mood had grown worse.

  “Of course somebody’s got to get him,” the assistant principal had barked into the telephone. “The kid can’t just sit here all day with a fever of a hundred and three! He’s infectious! Excuse me? No, we don’t call taxis! Our students generally don’t travel around by taxi. If you want a taxi, you’ll have to send one yourself!”

  Julian had waited in the office for what felt like hours until at last a bright yellow taxi pulled up in front of the school. Julian had never ridden in a taxi. At first, he had enjoyed the smoothness of the red leather seats. It was almost like having a chauffeur. And after years of taking buses everywhere, it was a treat to have the wide backseat to himself.

  But as he’d sat, staring at the python tattoo that snaked its way up the fat pink neck of the taxi driver, it had occurred to Julian that he’d just gotten into a car with a stranger and was completely at his mercy.

  That was the trouble with grown-ups, Julian decided. How many times over the years had his teachers lectured the class never to get into a car with a stranger, under any circumstance, even if the stranger claimed to be sea
rching for a missing puppy (it was always a puppy). And yet, a taxi pulls up in front of the school with a complete stranger driving it, and he is expected to hop right in. He could have been cut up into little pieces and put in the trunk. Or kidnapped and held for ransom.

  Of course, there would be no point trying to get any ransom money from his mother. For one thing, she was five thousand miles away. But even when she wasn’t traveling, she was always scrimping to get by. It wasn’t just that she didn’t have any money, she didn’t even believe in money.

  Uncle Sibley, on the other hand, was rich. Julian wondered how much his uncle would be willing to pay to release him from the kidnapper—taxi driver. A thousand dollars? A million? He imagined his mother calling frantically from Beijing, begging his uncle to meet the evil taxi driver’s demands. His uncle would frown, shaking his head: “Five hundred dollars and not a penny more!”

  In the end, though, the taxi driver had merely delivered Julian to the gleaming gold doors of a towering skyscraper. There he had been met by some underling, whisked up a sickening fifty floors to the IPX headquarters, and deposited like a piece of lost baggage in his uncle’s elegant office. Sibley had motioned for him to sit down. Then, for the next fifteen minutes, he’d spoken into the phone in a voice of such cold fury that Julian could only be grateful it was not directed at him.

  “You need a haircut,” was the first thing Sibley had said to Julian. His own blond hair was plastered rigidly to the side. He gave Julian another appraising look and added, “You look terrible. Daphne’s on a field trip with Preston. Apparently, it’s the nanny’s day off.” Helga, the nanny, had been on duty for two weeks, but Sibley still hadn’t learned her name. “Listen, I’m already late. I don’t know how long this meeting’s going to last. There’s soda in the refrigerator. You have homework?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Julian had said, gesturing at his backpack. But by the time he’d finished the sentence, Sibley had pulled on his suit jacket and was already walking toward the door.

  The moment his uncle left, Julian had realized how tired he was. His head was aching, his bones felt like they were being poked by sharp little needles, and his face was burning hot. He took a ginger ale from the small refrigerator at the back of the room and sipped it slowly as he stared at the photographs on his uncle’s desk. There was Aunt Daphne, with the frozen-looking smile that she usually wore when talking to him. There was his cousin Preston’s third-grade school picture. And, finally, a black-and-white portrait of the three of them, all smiling wanly from the porch of their old house in Boston.

  Julian had almost dozed off in the chair before dragging himself over to the leather sofa. There, he’d watched the tiny sailboats scuttling under the Bay Bridge until the bright sun forced his eyes to close, and he drifted off to sleep.

  Now Julian sat in the darkness, with an empty, sickish feeling in his stomach. He’d barely touched the school lunch—congealed cheese enchiladas and fruit cocktail in a slimy syrup—and it was now past dinnertime. In the dim light, he walked over to his uncle’s desk and drank a few sips of the leftover ginger ale. It was lukewarm and flat, but at least it washed the mucky taste out of his mouth.

  Sibley’s enormous chair sat empty. Julian walked around the desk, plopped himself down onto the cool leather seat, and swiveled around. It had a smooth, silent, satisfying swivel, and he turned himself all the way around three and a half times before he began to feel dizzy.

  Facing the wall of glass, Julian looked out at the city lights and the cars crawling along fifty stories below. In the window, he could see his own dark reflection—the wide, slightly upturned eyes, the black hair curling over his ears. Behind him the computer screen glowed in mirror image. He swiveled past a list of e-mail messages, and he was swiveling back toward the window again when he stopped abruptly.

  Most of the subject lines said things like “Confirmation of 5/30 meeting” or “Respond ASAP” or “Lunch on the 5th.” But it was the last line that had caught Julian’s attention, and that was because the subject line of the last e–mail of the day, set out in capital letters, was “JULIAN.”

  The sender was “awcarter.” But the only Carters he knew were Sibley and Daphne and Preston—nobody whose name began with an “A.” For a shimmering moment, Julian considered the possibility that the e-mail was from his father—that there had never been a motorcycle accident and his father (“W” for Will) was in hiding, secretly corresponding with his brother Sibley by e-mail. But Julian dismissed the idea so quickly, it was almost as if he’d never thought it at all. His father was dead. He’d been dead for five years and was never coming back.

  Julian bent his head and studied the screen more closely. All the other messages had a little check along the left–hand column. But the last one had a circle. His uncle must not have opened it yet. It must have come in while he was sleeping. Could there be another Julian? It didn’t seem likely. What if he tried to open the message and Sibley came in? Or what if he accidentally hit some key that erased the entire hard disk? Things like that happened. His uncle was an important man. Maybe there was some kind of iris scanner or fingerprint recognition that would sound an alarm if he even touched the computer.

  Opening someone’s e-mail was just as bad as opening a letter with somebody else’s name on it, but this e-mail had his name on it.

  He touched the mouse. No sirens. No alarms. He listened for any footsteps or voices. Silence. Finally, his curiosity grew larger than his fear. He dragged the little arrow over to his name and clicked.

  Instantly, a block of text appeared:

  Julian squinted and read the message again. It reminded him of the school tests where the sentences are scrambled and have to be reordered into a coherent paragraph. But even after he’d read the cryptic sentences three times, the e-mail still didn’t make sense. Who was being sent away? Who was Billy? What did Aunt Daphne have to do with it? And why was it all under the subject line “JULIAN”?

  Julian scrolled down the page and discovered a second e-mail:

  From the opening words, Julian’s unease only grew. Presumably, this “awcarter” was some kind of relative. But who? And how could his uncle talk about him this way? How could Sibley call him “undisciplined”? Julian had done his homework every night without being reminded and had even gone over Preston’s math sheets. What did Sibley mean he lacked “social graces”? It was true he barely spoke at meals, but only because he was afraid of inadvertently triggering one of Daphne’s tantrums.

  As he read on, Julian’s discomfort at prying into his uncle’s private correspondence turned into indignation. What did Sibley know about his mother’s “lifestyle”? Nothing. He didn’t know the first thing about her.

  Julian quickly scrolled back to the first e-mail. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place. “Billy” must be his father. It was the nickname that had thrown Julian off. He’d never heard his father called anything but Will. And nobody ever talked about him in the sneering tone Sibley used. Everybody loved his father. His mother was still in mourning, her friends said, even after all these years.

  Sibley never spoke of his little brother, and now Julian understood why. Apparently, in Sibley’s eyes, all of Julian’s bad qualities—not just rude and undisciplined, but “sullen” too—came from his father.

  Although Julian had been staying with Daphne and Sibley for nearly a month, he had seen very little of his uncle. If Sibley had seemed cold—his questions too pointed, his eyes too calculating—Julian had simply assumed this was part of his character. He hadn’t taken it personally. But now Julian realized it was personal. Beneath his polite veneer, his uncle hated him. Hated him like he’d hated his father. Hated him so much that he was planning to banish him for the entire summer.

  Of course, maybe this was all Daphne’s idea. “Daphne has her own way of doing things,” the first e-mail said. Well, that was a fact. Like her endless rules governing the proper placement of elbows and feet. Like the elaborate point system
she’d thought up, in which Julian found his score sinking further and further below zero with each passing day. Like dinners of carrots and peas (“I can’t be expected to come up with a separate menu for him every day just because his mother raised him to be a vegetarian,” Daphne had scoffed). He could already sense Daphne counting the weeks until his mother’s return. Not that they didn’t have plenty of room for him. Even with Preston and him in their own rooms, and Helga, the live-in nanny, they still had two spare bedrooms. It didn’t matter how little room he took up or how carefully he tried to follow her rules, Daphne just didn’t like having him around.

  And they couldn’t send him somewhere fun, somewhere with sailboats and Jet Skis and rock climbing. No, they were sending him to math camp.

  Julian already had plans for the summer, involving a bonfire at the beach with his best friend, Danny, and a basketball league at the Rec Center. Even he and Preston had plans. Of course, Preston was just a little kid, but he wasn’t bad. He liked to watch Julian draw, and Julian had taught him how to play rummy and Chinese chess. He hardly ever made stupid mistakes, and he never cheated, which was pretty good, Julian thought, for an eight–year–old. They were going to convince Helga to take them to the Santa Cruz boardwalk. And Julian was going to teach Preston to construct a wallet out of duct tape and make origami ninja stars.

  Julian couldn’t bring himself to stare at his uncle’s words any longer. They made him feel queasy, as though he’d opened a gilded casket and found a rotting corpse inside. With a click of the mouse, he closed the e-mail. A siren started wailing, and Julian swiveled the chair around toward the window and watched a tiny fire truck and a tiny police car flashing their red-and-blue lights through the narrow streets below. Then he swiveled back around to the desk and took a large swallow of ginger ale.

  The computer beeped. Julian glanced at the screen, and saw a message so astonishing that he sprayed ginger ale out his nose and all across his uncle’s computer screen.