White Plague

by James Abel

  I snapped, “You want us to leave them on the ice? Walk away? Is that what you’re saying? How about us then? You and me? The Marines? Everyone here? We were all there. Because if it’s what you’re saying, have the guts to outright say it instead of making stupid jokes.”

  He looked hurt. “That isn’t what I was saying.”

  “No? Then you tell me, Doctor, what were you saying? Leave them on unstable ice near the ship? Throw them in the water? Inject them with too much morphine? Just what the fuck were you saying? Half these people won’t last till tomorrow, we do that.”

  He lowered his eyes.

  “Not a word about this,” I ordered. “We don’t even know what it is, and we’ll beat it. They didn’t have antibiotics in 1347, they didn’t have one percent of what we do—and their medical world was about as efficient as America’s health care plan. We’re going to save these people. That’s all I want to hear, so otherwise shut up.”

  He said nothing, but I knew what he was thinking.

  “Eddie, this has nothing to do with what happened in Afghanistan. I’m not making up for that now.”

  “Sure, One. I know that.”

  “I would do the same thing either way. In Afghanistan, we knew what we were dealing with. Here we don’t. That’s the difference.”

  “I know. I do. Absolutely.”

  “You’re not the one making the decisions.”

  “And I’m glad of that.”

  “Then make it easier instead of being an asshole.”

  He dropped back. He skied alone. Later I saw him tending to the sick, and he did not flinch or pull back or spare them any attention. He was a good doctor. He knew he was in harm’s way. We didn’t speak for the next few hours. I felt bad that I’d snapped at him. He’d only been sharing things, not trying to make me change my mind. He had every right to be terrified. He had every right to share his thoughts with his best friend.

  Thirteen forty-seven, I thought, pushing forward and gliding, pushing and gliding, hearing the hacking men over the swoosh of runners on snow. The storm was lessening again, although by now, having been through several false endings, I fully expected the wind to rise up again at any moment.

  Del Grazo knelt, back to wind, and picked up the radio locator signal from the Wilmington, and it turned out that we’d gone off point, but only by a few degrees. Clinton had been taking a generally accurate path.

  “Two miles to go, Colonel. We’re just about there.”

  I looked into his eyes. I saw black irises, cooperation, hope.

  “Thanks, Del Grazo.”

  “Hey, no problem, sir.”

  A New York phrase, not Chinese. Well, I thought, if he’s a spy for China, he’s not going to run around saying things like, As Confucius said and my spymaster stressed, he who learns but does not think is lost!

  “Two-hour rest behind those ice ridges, out of the wind, then we push through the rest of the way!”

  Del Grazo said, “I’ll try the sat phones again.”

  “Knock, knock?”

  Dr. Vleska’s head poked around the ice boulder that I leaned against, lee side of a pressure ridge, giving us cover from the wind. We’d broken out hot chocolate. It would be too involved to get the sick into tents, too laborious to unload and load them again, so we’d broken out the portable propane heaters and fired ’em up and circled sleds around them, or clustered in groups, like bums of the Arctic around trash can fires.

  The privilege of command. I had my own private heater.

  Her eyes looked big inside the slit of the black balaclava, ice blue and touched with white, a dime-sized patch of frostbite forming above the left brow.

  “I have only three boxes of Girl Scout cookies left,” she said. “Well, that’s what I used to tell people at every house, when I was a kid, till all the boxes were sold. Effective sales technique. If I said one box, they just ordered one. But if I said three, they ordered them all. I tried four once, but that was too much. Interesting question. Why does three work and four fail? Harvard will jump at the cookie study, ten-million-dollar grant.”

  “Got mint chocolate?”

  She nodded approvingly. “Popular item, especially in the Arctic. It’s that cool sensation in your throat.”

  “I’ll take three boxes.”

  “Can I sit down?”

  “You already have.”

  “Who’s the spy?”

  Once again, the on-again, off-again storm was lessening. The thermometer was up to a balmy four degrees. I’d taken my turn at hauling a sled and now felt sweat drying, bad idea in the Arctic. I sipped hot chocolate and stared at her, my question obvious. How do you know?

  “Give me a break,” she answered, sitting, baggy snow pants akimbo, like a girl attending a yoga class. Her back was straight. She probably did go to yoga. She said, “That Chinese captain knew you were a colonel. He knew how many Marines we had. Who told him, do you think?”

  When I just smiled, she held out her wrists.

  “Oh, it’s me? You going to handcuff me?”

  Is she flirting? Or just probing? When in doubt, always answer a question with a question. I said, “Who do you think it is?”

  “You.”

  I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was the relief that I needed. Just a great big circle, being out on the ice, I thought. Let’s just all kill each other. Let’s sit around like an old British drawing-room play and figure out who’s the one.

  “Well,” she said, “no one checks on you, do they? You have the best access to communication. You get information first. You had that one-on-one talk with Captain whatever his name was. You magically stop the shooting. And,” she said, leaning close, “you sank my sub.”

  “As in, the whole crazy thing was coordinated?”

  “Plans can work once in a while.”

  “How do you explain the bear showing up?”

  “If you were a spy, you’d say that very thing!”

  “What can I say? You nailed me.”

  This time when we looked into each other’s eyes, I felt something different. We held the gaze for longer than politeness or accusation allowed. Whoever said, Eyes are the windows of the soul, didn’t know what he was talking about. Eyes are curtains to prevent you from seeing. They’re rabbits that climb out of a magician’s hat. Eyes are the last thing you see smiling before a bullet slams into your midsection. I’ll take pulse rate over eyes as clues any day of the week, and my rate was up.

  She slid closer. There was a wet wool odor over the granular snow smell, and the oily propane, and the whiff of bad electronics. The hint of sweat-tinged perfume had to be the part manufactured in my head.

  “I’m going to close my eyes a bit,” I said, meaning she should go away.

  She rose and her sigh came out as a thin cloud that expanded and dissipated. Her breath, if solidified, would resemble an icicle pointed at my throat.

  “Well, if you’re not the spy,” she said, “then what you did back there was pretty remarkable.”

  I raised my brows.

  “You didn’t fire the torpedo. You stopped the fight. You prevented a massacre. You put everything on the line.”

  We watched each other.

  “Surprised?” she said. “That I care more about the people than the submarine?”

  “Your bosses hear that, they’ll dock your pay. Two billion. That’ll take a few years to work off,” I said.

  The way her hands hung for a moment conveyed a vulnerable awkwardness. She said, “Sometimes I have trouble saying the nicer things. I’m better at the other.”

  “My ex-wife was like that. Is it all women? Or just ones I know?”

  “I don’t understand why the Marines call you Killer. It doesn’t seem right. It seems cruel. You’re not a killer, are you? You can do it, but you’d rather not. So what is that
about? They seem to have the wrong idea about you.”

  “Excellent interview technique,” I said. “You ever leave Electric Boat, I can find a good berth for you at the unit, as an interrogator.”

  “Well, if you’re not the spy, I guess I can give you this,” she said, smiled, reached into her parka, and when I saw what she pulled out, the force of it pulled me to my feet. I could barely believe what I was seeing.

  “The XO brought it out of the Montana when they abandoned ship. It was on one of their sleds. I found it while poking around, looking for rations. The man who had it—he was unconscious when we got there—woke up. He said the exec told him to get it to the rescuers, if any came.”

  The canister was old, all right, about a foot in diameter, olive colored, the universal hue of military issue. It was battered and dented and stamped on the metal container were the words PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY.

  “Pretty old,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Nineteen fifty?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  After she left, I sat staring at the canister, heart beating rapidly, but whether from her visit, or the object in my hand, I was unsure. I slid off a mitten. Instantly the air closed around my fingers like a cold vise, and I knew that even to touch frigid metal could stick skin to it, and bring on severe frostbite.

  I put the mitten back on and considered using one of the ski poles to pry the can open, but in a storm, with wind blowing, I knew that old film—if it was even stable—could easily crumble or be destroyed by such savage elements. I shook the canister. Something rattled around inside, all right. Was it cellulose nitrate? Was it even a clue?

  Don’t get so excited. You’ll do something stupid. You’ll ruin it before even seeing it.

  Karen Vleska seemed to be watching from twenty feet off, where she knelt beside a sled and an injured man. I wished I could see inside the canister, wished I had x-ray vision, like Superman did in movies I loved as a kid. PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY. It was the color of uniforms, vehicles, canteen covers. It was an announcement confirming that the film inside related to death.

  Reluctantly, I put the canister in my pack. It would have to wait for opening on the Wilmington.

  Twenty minutes later we saddled up again, and moved out.

  I saw an upside-down ship in the distance, hanging in the sky. It looked solid as the sun emerging through gray, at 4 A.M., to reveal the gigantic inverted icebreaker, a steel piñata. I gaped. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of solid metal floated upside down; decks, antenna, escape boats, winches. Everything else was inverted here. So why not logic itself?

  As we got closer, the upside-down antenna seemed to lower and then I saw a second Wilmington, right side up, beneath it, on the sea. Two ships of equal size, identical images, yin and yang, foot by foot.

  Closer still, the mirage started to merge with the real ship, and then the sun broke out, and suddenly an enormous prism filled the sky, like a pipe organ in a cathedral, a shining rainbow that made the two ships less distinct. Then the two ships blurred, and then abruptly, the one in the air vanished. The welcome form of the red hull was dead ahead, at about a half mile, and it was coming toward us, breaking ice.

  Eddie came up beside me.

  “Murphy’s Law,” he said. “As soon as you reach the stuck ship, it’s able to move again.”

  With binoculars we could see men and women lining the prow, waving. They seemed to be celebrating that we were alive, and their joy made my plan for them crueler, more dangerous, but I pushed that notion away.

  I was thinking that Eddie had been right earlier. In less than twenty minutes, when we rejoined the Wilmington, I would take the biggest risk of my life. Because it involved more than just my life, but the lives of others.

  Am I doing this because of what happened two years ago?

  I was going to put the sick aboard the Wilmington, and gamble that we could figure out what ailed them and at the same time prevent the thing inside them from spreading.

  I would gamble that we were smarter than a germ, and that the thing inside them was smaller than our ability to stop it.

  The ship got closer, and the image I saw merged into some other version, a past one.

  I saw a memory all too clearly, and it was one that I wished had been the mirage.

  SEVENTEEN

  Majors Joe Rush and Edward Nakamura looked down from the open door of the Chinook helicopter taking them and twenty Marines south from Kandahar Air Base toward one more alleged hidden biological laboratory, this time near the Afghan border with Pakistan and Iran, in the southwest.

  The base commander had been taken aback by two officers from Washington appearing out of nowhere, irritated at the “special orders” requiring cooperation, and reluctant to release the copter. He’d argued that the aircraft was needed for a raid on the Taliban, to the north.

  “We’ll need Marines, too,” Rush had replied.

  Joe and Eddie had been chasing rumors, a whisper in a village bazaar, a prostitute’s boast, a tip from a beggar, a monitored e-mail, a voice fragment on an NSA phone snag. This time the “information” had come from a bloody man strapped in a basement chair, screaming for the Afghan security officers beating him to stop: “They’re mixing chemicals!”

  Eddie said, as the copter hit an air pocket, “Another wild-goose chase, want to bet?”

  After all, the “hidden lab” in Teyvareh had turned out to be nothing more than a filthy pharmacy the size of a closet, its cracked glass shelves filled with ten-year-old aspirin, and dried seaweed that the “druggist” called Viagra. The “cave of equipment” near Daulet Yar had been deserted, burned charcoal as evidence that the Taliban had once used it. They’d found a pile of gnawed goat bones, and a latrine area crawling with rock rats, but nothing else.

  There was no doubt in Rush’s mind that Al-Qaeda sought biological weapons the world over—sending buyers to Russia, for stockpiled chlorine bombs; to Syria, wanting nerve gas; to Sudan, where hidden labs toyed with that country’s strain of the Ebola virus.

  Phone calls had been picked up by satellites, snatched e-mails pored over in Virginia.

  Back in D.C., Joe and Eddie had sat with the director, peering at Manila passport control shots of men claiming to be “importers” when in fact they sought germs or chemicals for use against U.S. troops, or targets like London. Madrid. New York.

  “I didn’t know they even had lakes in Afghanistan,” Eddie said now, looking down.

  “They dried up,” Joe said.

  “Look, there it is, a goddamn ship laying in a desert,” Eddie said, as the copter angled down, as the pilots strained forward, nervous, watching for white puffs below, streaking smoke tails marking the flight of shoulder-fired missiles rising from the mud flats, skimpy cornfields, watermelon patches, and refugee camp, the entire vista pathetic remnants of what had once been one of the most magnificent lakes in Central Asia.

  The man strapped down in Kabul had told the Afghan officers, while Eddie tried not to throw up, “The doctor from Pakistan made the ship into a laboratory. They put explosives on the bottom of oil drums, chemicals on top.”

  “I read about this region,” said Eddie, fixing the strap on his helmet. “Used to be otters here, leopards, and freshwater farming. Look at this mess. It’s worse than Secaucus. A thousand-square-mile dump.”

  They passed over a mass of tents, through a gray cloud formed by four thousand cooking fires. The acrid smell of human waste and swamp washed through the open gunner’s door. Nine miles later they set down on a slightly raised area, on cracked hard earth, surrounded by softer clay, from which tall reeds sprouted like the last stubby hairs on the skull of an eighty-year-old with cancer. The Marines jumped out and, to Joe’s orders, rapid stepped through a foot-wide path in the reeds, their brittle straw-colored tops higher than the moving
helmets, toward the now-invisible wreck lying like a dead whale three hundred yards away.

  The only sounds were mud sucking at their boots, and flies. Joe glanced down to see, discarded, an empty canvas sack stenciled UNAID. Something living wriggled inside it. A rat or snake. He saw a mud-spattered Little Debbie snack cake, still in the wrapper, Debbie beaming, probably surprised that she’d landed ten thousand miles from home. He saw a wad of crumpled International Herald Tribune that some smuggler probably used as toilet paper. The whole place was a cornucopia graveyard for manufactured crap from the first world, where Hostess Twinkies and Dallas Cowboys T-shirts go to die.

  The prisoner in Kabul had been a clerk in a hotel, a small, soft man, picked up by Afghan security guys after he left one of their agency-run brothels. Under torture he’d started crying. Eddie had gone outside, after watching what the officers did to him, and had been sick.

  But with his functioning left hand, the prisoner had drawn a map smeared with blood, and later, a passing satellite had confirmed the location of the wreck, but spotted no human movement, then glided away, in the void, where military eyes peer at rooftop laundry, seeking hidden antennas in souks far below.

  “They make the gasses there,” the man had gasped.

  Eddie said, “Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south. Welcome to smuggler heaven. Even if the ship houses a lab, five to one it’s for heroin.”

  The vista opened up abruptly and the ship lay ahead, on its side, as if it had fallen from the sky. Was it rigged to explode? The men sank into mud the color of iron oxide. Flies rode each air molecule. The heat made the ship shimmer, and it seemed larger, the closer they got. Once it had been a fish factory. Its nets had pulled glistening masses of catch from the lake. Now the lake was a thin layer of dirty water hosting bottom feeders and speedboats, but no longer heavy craft.

  Once this discarded rust bucket had provided food and respect for locals. Those days, and benefits, were gone.

  Eddie said, “Boot and sandal prints. At least twenty guys. Truck tracks, too, light here, then heavy. Was it delivering or removing cargo from the wreck?”