White Plague

by James Abel

  We’d halted just inside a newly constructed ghost town. No creaking wooden doors left open to wind or looters, no shutters banging, no whiff of human shit marking the community ditch, not even any chicken droppings.

  Just the hiss of sand scouring walls.

  “Eddie, from the air, this place would look like a typical village. It’s a set!”

  My guys went in, house to house, and in the very first one found that people had lived here, all right, but they hadn’t been peasants. Army cots, empty weapons racks, electrical appliances and generators, and the dirty rags of villagers hung on hooks . . .

  “Troops disguised as villagers, but for what?”

  Then, inside the third hut, we found what they’d protected, the entrance to a bunker, a steel doorway built into rock. Twin surveillance cameras aimed down on us.

  “Engineers!” I shot the cameras out.

  They blew the door with C4 and sent it flying. Eddie’s squad raked the entranceway with fire, and when there was no response, I told my guys, “Watch for booby traps. Go slow.”

  We entered a tunnel, angling down into the earth. It was wide as three Humvees, with an arched roof fifteen feet high. The walls were blasted-away limestone. Bare bulbs overhead remained dark—but everything glowed green from the night goggles. Ahead, the tunnel turned right.

  We wore bulky, tough-fibered two-piece camouflaged chemical suits. We carried M16A2 rifles, firing 5.56 mm rounds. I heard our equipment jangling. My heart seemed loud inside my chest, and my breathing was audible.

  Lower, ten feet down, fifty. We shot out more cameras, dead eyes, maybe someone watching, maybe not, and after about three hundred feet we found ourselves spilled into the complex. Lights were on and bright.

  At first, it could have been a hotel subbasement, with pipes and wiring, the part of the building the guests never see. Cool air down here. I saw an official warning sign in red, in Arabic, a cartoon drawing of an Arab man with a Saddam mustache—it must have been the law here for all guys to wear them—the guy in a yellow hard hat, air filter over his mouth, finger in the air as if to say, “Danger!” Beside the man was a skull and crossbones, but none of us could read the words. I cursed. Our translator had been sent away, to help in the main attack.

  Maybe one of my guys hit a tripwire. Maybe the place had been wired and a timer set. All I knew was that suddenly the ground began trembling. Then shaking. “Down!” I yelled as a chain of explosions went off below. Blue smoke poured from the vents.

  “Masks!” I yelled.

  We donned the bug-eyed masks. Now the smoke was all around us, coming from beneath doors, filling the hallway. But nothing bad was happening—no itching, no catch in breathing, no burning, at least not yet.

  I decided to stay.

  There’s something important down here Saddam does not want us to find.

  Then I saw something moving ahead, something living staggered toward us through smoke. It was small and two-legged, a child. A goddamn kid. A silhouette in agony, hands waving in the smoke, maybe to surrender. Head whipping back and forth.

  I yelled, “Hold your fire!” The figure fell and stood and then continued forward with a crazy side-to-side gait. Up. Down. It was hurt or ill. A voice in my earpiece gasped, “What the fuck is that, Lieutenant?”

  I breathed, staring, “A monkey.”

  The thing began screaming, “Kraa . . . kraa.”

  It had a snout like a dog or a baboon and pink hands like a person. It had a pink face and white fur on its chest. It jerked in crazy circles, not seeing us. Blood was pouring from its mouth and nose, and when it turned sideways, I saw red ooze dripping from its ears.

  Concussion from the explosion?

  The animal took two steps forward, rubbed its eyes, cocked its head, my guys froze, and then it seemed to see us. I could not imagine, in my wildest imagination, what it must be thinking.

  The monkey screamed one long eruption of rage.

  It lurched forward but fell down and began convulsing.

  By the time I reached it, it was dead. It had hemorrhaged out from every possible orifice. Black, clotted, evil stuff spread out, pooled on the concrete floor.

  Shit, shit, what were they making in here?

  Eddie’s voice in the earpiece was saying, “We’re coming in, One, behind you.”

  I saw a sign half in Arabic, half in English. AL HAZEN IBN AL HAITHAM INSTITUTE RESEARCH SATELLITE FACILITY.

  “Eddie, it’s a lab down here. Stay out.”

  I kept going.

  The smoke thinned and the screams started.

  It was hell, a tunnel to hell. Now the echoes came through vents all around us. “Kraaaaaaa!” It sounded like hundreds more animals were down here somewhere, grunting, screeching, and there were tearing noises and retching, and I did not think there would be humans down here anymore, but I still could not be sure what waited behind the next bend.

  The toxic gear better work, I thought, and we stayed a couple inches farther away from the walls. We passed a half dozen paintings of the dictator, the madman king of this madman house; Saddam on a white horse, wearing white flowing Bedouin robes. Saddam cross-legged by a desert campfire, reading a Koran, the wise military sage.

  I was proud of my guys. Eighteen and nineteen years old and they held discipline. The point men going in first, the other two behind.

  The first room turned out to be an office. There was a steel desk, wood-paneled walls, and in the flashlight beam, I made out medical certificates in biochemistry. A panel read: DR. MASSOUD AZIZ. He was, in the photo, on a beach with a plump, fortyish woman and two smiling teenage sons. There were lots of reports in blue binders, a TV set in the wall, a pair of backless slippers on an oriental rug, as if the owner had laid them carefully down, expecting to return. I opened a photo album with my rifle. I was looking at photos of dead people, their faces bloated, bleeding, their eyes red from blood.

  The next room was a locker room. Medical whites hung on hooks. There was a break room with refrigerated glass cases filled with orange juice cans, and dishes of what looked to be hummus or baba ghanoush, olives, tomato slices. I saw small bloody tracks . . . animal feet . . . on the linoleum, a loose pile of bloody stools on a table, an overturned sugar bowl. Those tiny hands would have been in there. There were sugar strands on the table.

  The cacophony was growing. A symphony of agony came through the vents, echoed between walls. I heard sobbing, hiccups, metal rattling. I heard hacking and sneezing. I was in Bosch’s hell, and somewhere ahead, behind a door, behind smoke hovering by the floor, were the creatures.

  The smoke didn’t kill them. Or is it killing them now?

  I recoiled as my light beam hit the dead face of another monkey in the hallway; bled out, belly blasted open, ears a mass of clotted blood.

  Did the doctors open the cages before they left? Did they leave because the cages opened accidentally, or because we were getting closer? Are these animals contagious, and if they are, will our suits protect us?

  Each time we opened a door, we stepped back and waited for a charging animal. A pharmacy closet had been looted of drugs. The doctors’ quarters were equipped with DVDs and TV sets, refrigerators, porno and religious magazines.

  The operating room had two tables, a small one for a child, or monkey, I guess, the other one for a larger primate or human adult. Built into both were bloodied iron manacles for hands and feet. There were vials on shelves and an electron microscope. I saw drawers labeled in Arabic. I smelled urine, shit, fear.

  I opened the next door. The screaming exploded.

  At least a hundred monkeys were inside, in cramped cages, on tables spread along four long aisles. I walked the aisles, horrified, disgusted, terrified, hoping the hot air in my suit remained clean. I saw animals with bloated stomachs and blood leaking from their ears, noses, mouths. I saw monkeys dead in cages, popped o
pen at the intestines, flies buzzing by their heads. The live ones panicked, grabbing bars, possibly driven insane by what was going on around them, or by their treatment.

  Monkeys watched me with eyes too sick to care. Monkeys lay in their own shit. Monkeys reached through bars like condemned prisoners, beseeching another species for help, with those pink human-like hands.

  One male, the biggest, went berserk, throwing himself at me, trying to smash through his cage, when I looked into his eyes. Crabeater monkeys, I’d learn later. An Asian variety hunted in the swamps of the Philippines and shipped to labs all over the world.

  I gagged but held it in. One of my guys was puking in a hallway. His mask was off. I sent him up top, fast. I was snapping photos for our major. Panic was trying to get out of my chest, into my thinking. What more do I need to do?

  I felt something land on my shoulder and I whirled and it was Eddie. I felt better for a moment until I saw, behind him, like a ghost, through curling smoke, a man charging him, no, not a man because it was coming too fast.

  My M16 was going up. Eddie saw it, threw himself left. The creature was in the air, canines bared, and it would have landed on his neck but my shots drove it sideways and into the wall and it slid down, whimpering and thrashing, torn and bloody, and a moment later it was still.

  Eddie stared down in horror. “Shit. If it bit me . . .”

  “Get out,” I ordered everyone, having had enough.

  We retreated, all of us, before invisible microbes.

  Then I ordered the place blown up, used flamethrowers on the wreckage, and watched it burn.

  That night we lay by our vehicles below the stars, when they weren’t obscured by smoke from burning oil fields. The temperature had dropped but we couldn’t make our own fire, and risk alerting stray fedayeen that we were here. Tomorrow we’d rejoin the main column. Tonight everyone who had been below was wondering the same thing, and fear floated among my men like airborne germs.

  Private Lionel Pettibone, nineteen, asked me, “Did you see the monkey with the stomach busted open, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m sure you won’t catch it,” I lied.

  “But I took my mask off! I breathed the air! It smelled funny! Was it chemical or germs?”

  “I don’t know, Lionel. The docs will check you out.”

  “Oh man, why did I take that fucking mask off?”

  I wanted to know this new enemy. I wanted to answer his questions. When I’d joined the Marines, I’d envisioned foes as two-legged, but now saw that they might be invisible, yet do more damage, if unleashed, than an atomic bomb.

  I lay awake, thinking about my wife, my beautiful young wife back in North Carolina. I thought about my parents and friends. I saw the crowded cities, Chicago’s Loop and Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, except in my head, the crowds were screaming like the monkeys, bleeding and convulsing.

  “Lieutenant, I’m getting a sore throat!”

  “You had a sore throat yesterday, Platt. Remember?”

  There was no way to know that the knowledge I sought would, in the end, drive me from all the people who, at that moment, I wanted to protect. My wife. My lovely wife. Average people. Poker pals. Kids I’d grown up with.

  Eddie lay a few feet away, in a sleeping bag.

  “We’ll know in a few days if we’ll get sick,” I told Pettibone, who was unable to sleep.

  In ROTC, and at Quantico, I’d learned facts about toxic warfare: symptoms, delivery systems and antidotes and gestation periods. But it had not been real, not like what I’d seen today.

  The sickness was monkey hemorrhagic fever, I’d learn months later, when interrogators discovered the truth. It doesn’t kill humans, but the Iraqi docs were trying to figure out how to make it jump species, mixing it with common colds.

  “I want,” I told Eddie suddenly, “to work on toxics.”

  “Great minds think alike, Number One.”

  “You, too?”

  “Hey, it’s another chance to beat you out.”

  We’d seen a weapon that was so horrible that most people don’t want to know about it, a weapon grown in glass tubes, sought in jungles, farmed by men in white coats. We’d seen up close a possible future that was terrifying. Oh, we’d imagined something before, but it was distant, like a movie. You simply leave the theater when it’s done.

  We’d seen a weapon that generals desire but no one wants to talk about, a weapon that never marches in proud public military parades.

  Eddie grinned. “You saved my life.”

  “Are you kidding, Eddie? One taste of your blood, that monkey would have keeled over, man.”

  We became best friends that day, not just old roommates.

  After all, before that we’d had common experiences and friends, and we’d lived in the same location, but now we had a common enemy.

  What can draw people together more than that?

  I shot awake. Eddie was shaking me. I lay in my bunk on the Wilmington, remembering where I was, remembering the monkeys becoming human in my dream. Eddie’s face looked concerned through the red nightlights. The porthole was closed. The clock read 9 A.M. I’d been out for six hours.

  All the humor was gone from Eddie’s face, the lines by his mouth standing out, tense, drawn, bad news.

  “We heard from the director, Number One, got through to him when the jammers were shut off for ten minutes.”

  “Say it.”

  “They know. They found out. Washington’s picked up something moving toward the sub.”

  EIGHT

  “The Chinese,” the director said.

  Like an armed torpedo zeroing in on us, the red blip on screen turned slowly in our direction, and aimed just north of our yellow boat shape, to intersect. I watched it begin sliding over grid lines superimposed over the Arctic Ocean.

  “The Snow Dragon is their first icebreaker. The second should be in operation this year,” the director said over the intercom box on the captain’s conference table.

  The pressure in my chest mounted as I eyed another blip, this one green, pulsating in the sea.

  “It is also possible that the Chinese have a Jin-class nuclear-powered submarine somewhere in the Arctic, but we’re not sure. They’re not usually up there with subs, but last we heard, it was headed in that direction, weeks ago.”

  The somber-eyed group of ten around the conference table included Eddie and me, Dr. Karen Vleska, Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Andrew Sachs, Marietta Cristobel, and Clinton Toovik, our ice experts. On the crew side, with DeBlieu, sat his executive officer, a competent-looking fortyish man named Gordon Longstreet, and his communications officer, Brooklynite Lieutenant Peter Del Grazo, who managed to seem cheery despite the danger. Major Donald Pettit sat on my left. It was time for the key players to know the big picture.

  The screen changed to the actual Snow Dragon, its hull red, its superstructure white. Arctic ships tend to be painted colors that stand out. The icebreaker was smashing through three-foot-thick ice, pushing chunks the size of boulders left and right, seeming to bull off the screen and drive straight at us.

  The director briefed us dryly. “The Chinese are not an Arctic nation but they have huge interest in new shipping or attack routes around the top of the continent, and in access to seabottom oil. They’re investing in a deepwater harbor in Iceland. The Snow Dragon may be carrying troops for ice maneuvers, although usually it’s just scientists. Their top speed roughly equals yours.”

  “So it’s a toss-up who gets there first?” Eddie asked.

  The director sighed. “It could come down to minutes. Get as close as you can. If the ice blocks you, send a party on foot, or in those vehicles, depending on terrain.”

  My mouth was dry. Major Pettit had switched off our jammers for the conference, after an announcement went out prohibiting unauthorized calls or e-mails from the ship.r />
  In the brief window we had now, Marietta had checked in with Maryland for updated ice information. Sachs had called Washington. He had a look of anger on his face. It probably related to why, with an international incident possible, the director was on screen, not someone from State.

  The director just glanced left, so someone else is in the room with him. Someone higher up, I bet.

  The director, on H Street, went in and out of focus, as if the storm ahead infused itself onto the screen. Snow-like interference drifted across his face, which degenerated into lines resembling wind-pushed current; as the High North played with us, just as it had teased sailors for centuries. You’re not so different from hundreds of others. They were as confident as you.

  I asked, “Sir, do we know how the Chinese found out?” I hoped to eliminate the Wilmington as a source.

  The blocky head—ex-college fullback—shook side to side. “We got word that they know, that’s all. You. Electric Boat. Washington.”

  Button up your ship, he was saying.

  I asked, “Has Beijing asked to help?”

  His smile was half visible through the interference, and sour. “Oh, we’re both pretending that nothing is going on, so in a worst-case scenario, it stays private.”

  That’s why State isn’t the lead. Is someone from the White House with the director, then? Homeland Security?

  Andrew Sachs spoke up shrilly. “Worst case? Combat?”

  The director sounded exhausted, leaned left, and seemed to consult someone, then was back. “Our Navy and theirs are facing off more regularly in the South China Sea. And you, Secretary Sachs, know better than anyone that a Chinese sub collided with one of our destroyers during Pacific maneuvers last month. We had no idea they were there until then. But they said we did it on purpose. They lost twenty-eight crew. So . . . under these circumstances, things can go wrong. Big storm blowing. Tempers hot. Our sky eyes blind. Then guns go off. The apologies come later, and diplomats make nice, and the scapegoats who were positioned all along to take a fall go down, but they have the Montana.”