White Plague

by James Abel

  Sachs seemed shocked. “That’s absurd! Take some responsibility! If you tell your people to stand back, they’ll stand back.”

  The director said coldly, “It’s our people, our sub. We’re not the ones who will stand back.”

  “Even if you start a war?”

  “Don’t be dramatic.” The director sighed. Sachs was trying his patience. But the director was a political animal and clearly knew he was talking to the Secretary of State himself through Sachs. “Like I said, excessive zeal by officers, human error, soldiers shooting blind in a storm, et cetera et cetera. It stops short of war.”

  Sachs stared. “You’re setting this up for a fight.”

  “I don’t consider forethought a setup.”

  I asked, eyeing the Chinese icebreaker, “Those projections you’re showing us, sir, are they actual ship locations or computer guesses?”

  “Last known position, coupled with current, wind, floe direction.” The director brightened. “Conditions are pushing our sub in your direction. But reaching her first may depend on ice. So! Marietta! Where are we on that?”

  Ice, I thought morosely. It looks hard; it has the geometry of rock. You can walk on it and climb it, but it is always moving. Sometimes you see the movement. Sometimes you don’t. Imagine a city block constantly drifting. You walk outside and the supermarket is a hundred yards north of where it was yesterday. Then it drifts back fifty yards. Then the block splits in two, and the traffic light goes one way, and you, across the street, move the other. The landscape has viscosity. Solid is a lie, one more mirage.

  Now, Marietta typed on her keypad and the picture on screen split: director on the left, sat shot on the right, a jagged white peacock shape; a grid superimposed over it, like a wire fence. The grid, she said, divided three thousand square miles into pixels. I saw a few patches of black spilling across lines. I saw a blotchy gray area containing darker speckles. It was like looking through a microscope at virus growing in a specimen of mold.

  America’s foremost ice expert fingered an unlit cigar, worrying it like prayer beads. She still wore the baggy clothes she’d been in when we met. “This is our last projection, nineteen hours old. We’ve had problems with reception because the sats keep dropping into standby mode due to solar flares. They shut down during periods of intense activity to avoid damage. So! Aqua, our most advanced eye, uses microwave scanning. Each pixel represents a six-by-six-kilometer area; good overall, but when we get close, problems start. You see, if Aqua picks up sixty-five percent ice cover in one box, the computer turns the whole pixel white. Less than sixty-five percent, black. So if we’re heading for an area with only sixty percent cover, but it’s big, ship-killing stuff, the computer thinks it’s ice free. In the end, we need human eyes or the drone to know exactly what lies ahead.”

  I said, “Then how do we pick the best route?”

  Her mouth was a tight line of frustration. “Using luck. And Clinton.”

  The director asked, “What are those gray masses?”

  “Gaps in information due to the solar disturbances.”

  Eddie sniffed. “This is the best we can do?”

  “If we had more money, we could do better,” she said bitterly. “Also, Aqua sends photos every five hours. So even when everything is working perfectly, it’s possible that we’re making decisions based on hours-old information, since the ice keeps moving all the time.”

  Captain DeBlieu raised a finger, like an engineer worrying a technical question. “Can you change the speed of transmissions, get them at, say, thirty-minute intervals instead of five hours?”

  “No, that ability would have cost more. NASA was ordered to streamline costs during Iraq and the fiscal crisis. They ate up all kinds of capabilities. Don’t get me started.”

  The director’s lips were a hard line, and I knew that he was cursing inwardly. I’d had this discussion with him plenty of times over beers. We’ve been warning Congress for years that we need better equipment, Joe, and they never give it. Washington’s gridlocked. Sooner or later something like this had to happen.

  “Thank you, Dr. Cristobel,” said the director.

  She smiled unhappily. “For what?”

  Thinning light seeped in through the cabin’s portholes. DeBlieu’s walls were hung with photos—mug shots of the Arctic that would have been lovely in an art gallery, but were daunting just now. One old shot showed a snow-swept ice sheet, jagged icebergs, in sepia, nature’s pillars, trapping a twin-masted steamer between them, circa 1931, like massive pincers.

  The framed shot beside it showed an ice storm, thousands of pellets driven sideways to create a translucent curtain half obscuring a trio of roped-together scientists tap-tapping their way like blind men, with walking probes, over a floe. Astounding beauty, but it reduced humans to insignificance. The scientists in the photo had about as much presence as a lone flake of snow.

  The director said, “Dr. Vleska, your turn.”

  She sat directly across from me, projecting an image of a Virginia-class nuclear sub on screen. The long black tube resembled an immense eel, and featured a jutting egg-shaped mast about a fifth of the way aft.

  I thought that Karen’s lips looked nice.

  She said, “The Chinese know what’s on our sub in theory, because it’s public, but not how it works. So you might as well know, too.”

  Her voice was soft and she’d changed into a red and black checkered flannel shirt over a black wool turtleneck that showed an inch of soft throat. She seemed petite and fresh from sleep. Her hair was worn long, its silvery mass draped over small shoulders, probably brushing her seat cushion. Her hands were small, but rough, strong, an outdoorswoman’s. I saw a pale band of whiter skin on the fourth finger of the left hand. A wedding or engagement ring had been removed recently and left a mark.

  Click. The torpedo was shaped like a large, finned, green baseball bat, tapered from narrow tail to front. “The new prototype Mark 80,” she said, “capable, while closing on a target, of calculating hull mass and detonating at optimum standoff distance, guaranteeing the best chance of destruction. Best torpedo on Earth.”

  Click. Two subs passed each other, underwater. “Our acoustic countermeasures are way ahead of Beijing’s.”

  Her eyes met mine. I had not noticed the gray flecks in the blue before. “The Montana is whisper quiet from electromagnetic signature reduction. The enemy may detect her presence, but has no way to determine which exact unit she is, no way to track specific boats.”

  Eddie piped up, “Any way to do that for people, so I can keep the director from knowing where I am?”

  Marietta and DeBlieu laughed. Sachs rolled his eyes. Karen Vleska smiled. “I know what you mean,” she said.

  “The Virginia class has been modified for combat in littoral waters, shallow ones like those in the Mideast or the areas around Taiwan. She can slip inside the enemy’s air defense and unleash salvos of up to sixteen tomahawk missiles. She’s less detectable on the surface with the periscope gone. She uses a mast-mounted photonics array instead. She’s got hull-mounted mine detection. The acquisition by an enemy of this craft would jeopardize thousands of U.S. military personnel around the world, and our ability to wage war. When we get there, I go in first to check things, and you all wait outside.”

  I started. I’d not envisioned taking her in, or taking her at all if we had to go on foot. “Dr. Vleska,” I reasoned, “you have to understand . . . conditions won’t be optimum. I suggest the Marines and I go first, and once we secure the boat—”

  “No! There are things I need to do before anyone else can enter.”

  The director remained silent. Why didn’t he stop her? I started to say, “You don’t understand . . .” but noticed Lieutenant Del Grazo, across from me, grinning.

  “Do you mind explaining what’s so funny?” I snapped.

  His and Vleska’s eyes met. T
hey seemed to share something amusing. I felt an irrational stab of jealousy, even while I waited to hear what the hell was going on.

  Del Grazo said, grin broadening, “Karen Vleska, Colonel. Vleska. Remember? She’s that Karen Vleska.”

  Marietta Cristobel let out a sharp breath. “That’s you?” she said, staring at the submarine expert.

  I was baffled. But now Eddie got it, too, sat back and turned to me, joined in the grin festival, at my expense. “Colonel, she’s probably got more polar experience than all of us together. She was on that expedition to the North Pole two years ago, the skiers . . . Fifty Nights . . . the documentary. Won the Oscar. All-woman expedition. Remember?”

  Now I did. I remembered the ads for it. Shots of four women in a blizzard, on cross-country skis, hauling sleds. I’d not read her file on the way up, figuring she was already security-cleared since she’d helped design the sub. Now I envisioned a different sort of body beneath those thick clothes, tight and muscular, like the hands.

  Karen Vleska ignored the looks. She said reasonably, “Look, we’ve got a security leak, and I will not take the chance—however remote—that the person responsible is among us. So I go down first. I cover up anything sensitive. Then you gentlemen are welcome to drop in and have a big cocktail party, do whatever you want.”

  “There’s something toxic in that sub,” I argued. “There will be bodies in there.”

  “I go in first.”

  “How about we discuss this later?” I suggested.

  “If by that you mean after I go in, Colonel, fine.”

  There was a coughing sound from the intercom. The director was fading like Marley’s Ghost, but he was still there, a pale outline, a consciousness from afar. But his voice came out strong and clear. “You’ll go in together.”

  That convinced me. He’s not running things.

  He was disappearing as if his essence were being sucked away to be deposited in whatever Situation Room, Pentagon room, State Department, or task force room he’d be reporting to next, to face the usual round of Washington high-level second-guessers. You should have sent more Marines! We should have asked our allies for help!

  The director was gone.

  “I’m going, too,” Andrew Sachs said.

  All eyes went to the Assistant Deputy Secretary, who had drawn himself up in his chair, fortified by a satellite phone call with the Secretary of State.

  “She’s going. The Marines are going.” He sounded like a ten-year-old to me. “The Secretary has instructed me to go, too.”

  Sachs sat taller, the overhead light gleaming off the bald spot on his narrow head. His thin lips were tucked together. He was the stern New England schoolmaster or preacher. The iron gray eyes dared anyone to disagree.

  Sachs was one of those men who lecture rather than talk. “The last thing we want is an international incident. There’s going to be a U.S. claim to territory up here and we’ll need all the support we can get. Negotiation may be required. You are not trained to do it. The issues are greater than the fate, however important, of one submarine. To be honest,” he said, using a phrase that in my experience identifies consummate liars, “confrontation must be avoided at all costs.”

  Karen bristled. “Meaning, give them my submarine?”

  “Meaning no trigger-happy posse, Wild West style.”

  Eddie said, aghast, “What about the sick crew?”

  Sachs’s lecture finger was up, wagging. He answered to one God and it was the Secretary of State, and he had spoken from his C Street Mount Olympus. “The fate of one hundred and fifty people versus three hundred and twenty million. You are not to fight.”

  “That’s not what the director said.”

  “The Secretary assured me, that’s what the President said, and your director, last time I checked, doesn’t run Washington. If we get there first, fine, do what you want, recover the sub, sink it. But if we . . . I’m coming along!”

  It was a surprise voice beside me that spoke up. Clinton Toovik, the Iñupiat marine mammal observer, said softly, very calmly, “May I ask a question?”

  Sachs glared at the interruption. “What question?”

  Slowly, he said, “Well, what if we don’t get there ahead of the Chinese because, well, because of you, sir?”

  “Me? What? Me? Ridiculous!”

  “Mr. Secretary,” Clinton asked, unperturbed, “have you ever been in an ice storm?”

  “If she can do it, I can.”

  “I’m sure that is true. I’m just saying. We might need to climb ice ridges thirty feet high. And wade through seawater ponds . . . That wind peels skin from your face. My uncle Dalton, he likes his vodka, and he came in too late once and had no skin left on the right side and had to be airlifted to Anchorage.”

  “Your uncle Dalton? What does he have to do with this?”

  But I noticed that Sachs, envisioning a different sort of future, had turned slightly paler, as he said, “I’ll wear heavy clothes, like everyone else.”

  “Uh-huh. Also, anyone could fall in. The ice looks safe. You might even see a bear walk on it. Then you walk on it. Down you go. It’s all about weight distribution. But don’t worry. We’ll be roped together. We’ll move extra slow for you. And then, when we report back, we’ll explain how we had to go slow—lose time—because we didn’t want anything to happen to you.”

  Sachs was blinking more rapidly. Looking at Clinton, the big body, Hawaii barbeque T-shirt, the open, amiable expression, I knew I’d just seen one of the best conference ambushes I’d ever witnessed. I wanted to applaud.

  Clinton said, “It’s not your fault if you’re the one who has never been on ice. I know the Secretary of State will understand if you cause us to lose out.”

  Sachs insisted weakly, “I won’t slow us down.”

  I said, joining in, “Secretary Sachs is right, Clinton. If anyone falls behind, we’ll just leave them.”

  Clinton nodded thoughtfully. “That is for the best.”

  Sachs looked sick.

  I felt a tap on my leg, from Clinton. He pushed a folded piece of paper into my hand. I looked down. He had good handwriting.

  Sachs = asshole.

  Clinton brightened. “Well, if you do come, you can help carry packs, fifty-pounders, well, feels more like eighty in a storm. We’ll suit you up . . . Can you snowshoe? Or maybe we’ll need crampons to get up and down the ivus and—”

  Sachs broke in. “Ivus? What’s ivus?”

  “Mountains of ice that just come, suddenly, out of nowhere. My aunt Martha, once she was out on the beach, and . . .”

  Sachs poured himself water from a carafe.

  Sachs said, pompously and thoughtfully, “You make some points, Clinton. Thank you for providing this perspective, yes, interesting. A need for speed. Speed is crucial. Hmm.”

  He’s going to drop out, I thought.

  “We don’t have to decide right at this minute,” Sachs said, trying to save face.

  The screen remained dark but suddenly the director’s voice was in the room again, amid static.

  “Secretary Sachs is to come along if contact is imminent,” he said, as if he’d heard the last exchange. I knew then that Sachs had been right about one thing. If he was coming, backroom Washington was now fully in the mix.

  As if the director understood my thinking, had given me a moment to catch up, he added, in a tone I understood, and which was also clearly intended for whoever sat with him, “Colonel Rush, you remain in charge, of course.”

  Meaning: I’m sorry he has to come with you. Ignore Sachs if you have to fight.

  Easy for him to say. Sachs would be with me, not him.

  “Last thing. Security,” I said. “I want all phones checked on the ship, see if anyone even tried to call out. I want all deck cameras checked to see if anyone was outside at any time, trying to call out.�
��

  DeBlieu okayed it, but said, “Colonel, the better sat phones can access out from the cabins. You don’t need to go outside to use them.”

  “Do it anyway,” I said, angered at the lapses. “Also, from now on when we open sat channels, the crew goes on the buddy system. Two-man teams. And you’ll announce that anyone trying to call out for any reason will be violating national security laws, and arrested.”

  DeBlieu stared down at the table, and when he looked up, I saw a quiver of anger on his lips. But I’d misread the reason. He had no problem with security precautions. It was my attitude that pissed him off.

  “I don’t know where you got the idea that my crew is not professional, Colonel. They’re every bit as patriotic as your goddamn Marines anywhere on Earth. You tell my people the sub’s in trouble? Well, they’re working at one hundred percent now, but they’ll up it even more. You tell ’em this is high security and they’ll button their mouths faster than my ex-wife used to when I’d call her during the divorce. I welcome the chance to show you what we do. We’re the eyes of the United States in the Arctic. We’re up here in the snow while you’re lying in the goddamn sun in summer. So tell us what you need. But you will not disrespect my crew. Understand?”

  I liked him tremendously, the little engineer with the quivering mustache and dark, goofy military glasses and very real rage. And I saw pride in their captain in the eyes of the chief exec and the communications officer.

  “Captain, I apologize. I’m asking for your help.”

  “For my crew’s help.”

  “Yes, your crew’s help. Thank you.”

  DeBlieu told the exec, in a dry voice I’d not heard from him previously, “Make sure to interview the Marines who came aboard, too. Colonel Rush and Major Nakamura also.”