White Plague

by James Abel

  The general knew the course that the Wilmington was committed to, and the speed it had been going before the satellites lost view. So he should be able to locate the ship whether or not it lay dead ahead.

  He thought, We’ve got a tanker up here somewhere if I need a bit more time, need to refuel in the air. But if there are no problems, thirty minutes maximum. Thirty more minutes and I’ll circle while she burns, to make sure the ship goes down, and then I’ll go home, and resign and get drunk.

  The Zodiac flew left and righted itself and smacked down into the ocean again as the prop bit into the water. The craft spun left. I fell back in. Kukulka lay on the bottom, facedown, in water, as another wave towered overhead.

  I crawled to the wheel and managed to right us. We were climbing a wave, me at the wheel, fighting the pull. We topped it and sledded downward. In the trough, I cut speed, knelt, and turned Kukulka over, got the helmet and balaclava off. His head was bloody but he was breathing. His eyes looked glazed. I heard a rattling sound in his chest. Broken ribs.

  “John? You with me here?”

  No answer.

  There was nothing I could do but make sure he was free to breathe. I took the wheel and continued south. Was it south or had we turned around? The engine fought me like an animal. The waves came sideways, and remembering what Clinton had said about snow, and wind lines, I aimed at the same angle into each wave, hoping this meant we were continuing in our prior direction. There were no stars. The compass needle swung left, then right. The bursts of explosions—more disturbances in the low clouds—pockmarked the heavens. The clouds seemed about to drop on our heads.

  The turbulence let up and the engine sputtered but kept going. Kukulka was sitting up the next time I looked, then lying down again, but faceup, at least. The things you recall. The things you remember. I was a kid in Massachusetts. I used to stay up late on Sunday nights and watch black-and-white horror movies on our rabbit-ear TV with Dad. One creepy one, which I loved, was The Incredible Shrinking Man, and this old movie, ridiculous as it sounds, came back to me now. I recalled how in the film, a man in a motorboat—out for a weekend pleasure cruise—drives through mist on the ocean. A few days later the guy starts shrinking, losing weight. At first he likes it. He’s trim! Healthy! Then, as he keeps getting smaller, he worries that he’s sick.

  By the end of a month the guy is the size of a midget, then a six-year-old, a two-year-old, and finally he’s so small he lives in a dollhouse, but he keeps getting smaller, and in the end he can’t even be seen with the naked eye. He’s so small that he slips out of the house through a mesh screen, to stare in wonder at the multitude of stars above, and decide that however small you are, you are still part of something great, something larger.

  Bullshit. I never felt as small as I did on that Zodiac, bumping through blackness. Time seemed suspended. There was only horror in feeling helpless and disconnected and mute.

  The ocean changed. Without ice to blanket down waves, swells grew larger. We jetted up the side of a wall, and coasted down, corkscrewing. Sideways, we hit a wall of water coming out of nowhere, but somehow I kept us afloat. We passed through soaking icy spray. In the bottom of the Zodiac I saw a flopping, gasping fish. I reached down with one hand, holding the wheel with the other. I picked up the wriggling, suffocating creature. I dropped it into the sea. Let something here stay alive.

  Without stars, I had no bearing. I could have been driving in any direction, through hell, the world a weightless, directionless intensity, our speed immeasurable, the velocity of despair. The speedometer had jammed. I looked at my watch. Were we moving at almost thirty miles an hour? If we were, and we’d been eighty miles from shore when Kukulka hit the throttle, surely we’d be getting close to the north coast of Alaska by now.

  I tried the radio. Nothing.

  I tried again. It was soaking wet, like everything here, but DeBlieu had said the thing was waterproof.

  Then I heard a rumble in the sky. I thought, Shit, thunder, another storm. The roar came from directly ahead. It seemed to sweep toward us. The sound grew enormously and then there was a mighty whoosh above and I knew I’d been wrong about the source as the fighter plane swept past, leaving a vague ghost of contrail from its massive nozzle.

  I tried to reach the pilot on the radio. Maybe on flight band it might work. I shouted into the set that he should leave the ship alone, that we’d found an antidote, that the sick were getting better, that he should check with Washington, tell them the news.

  I heard scratchy static in my ears.

  Had DeBlieu changed course?

  I hoped so. But there was no way, even if he had, that the Wilmington could evade that monster for long.

  The engine sputtered . . . and caught, slowed, and surged ahead.

  I thought in prayer. Please God, let him miss the ship.

  Kukulka groaned and rolled onto his side, but his face remained above the water that sloshed in the Zodiac.

  “This is Lieutenant Colonel Joe Rush of the Coast Guard icebreaker Wilmington. Is anybody there?

  “Mayday! This is Lieutenant Colonel Joe Rush of the icebreaker Wilmington! If anyone is listening, please respond!

  “This is an emergency. If you can hear me, I cannot hear you. Please call the following phone number in Washington and tell whoever answers that you’ve heard from me and to call back the plane!”

  No answer.

  I said out loud, “Hey, Clinton, are you sure this business about direction is right?”

  Up was down. North was south. Maybe I’d turned us completely around, beneath the skyless heavens, and headed back toward the North Pole.

  Kukulka was groaning, sitting up a little, and trying to get my attention. His face was a sheet of blood, but he was able to shout. I heard him over the engine.

  “What, Chief?”

  “How far away would a ship have to be, Colonel, for us to hear an explosion?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’d hear it, right? Or even see something, a light, a spark, something?”

  I kept going.

  I drove up and into the side of a massive, heaving wave.

  “This is Joe Rush of the icebreaker Wilmington. Is anyone listening?

  “This is Joe Rush from the Wilmington. If you can hear me, please call the following number . . .”

  What’s the point? I thought.

  I heard a different kind of static, a burst that sounded like someone talking.

  “Buzzzz . . . static . . . buzzzzzz . . . Seth!”

  It sounded like a woman. Or a kid. I said, “Please try again. I cannot hear you. Hello?”

  “Buzz . . . buzzz . . . my uncle Elmore . . . he said . . . buzz.”

  “This is Lieutenant Colonel Joe Rush. Who am I speaking to?”

  “Seth Itta! At the rescue squad office. My uncle said to . . . crackle.”

  Three minutes later I was talking to an adult, telling him who I was, telling him where to call, telling him, as I saw lights ahead, low, flickering, yellow streetlights, a curve of shore . . . Barrow, who we were.

  He understood right away, and clicked off, and minutes dragged by as we closed on the shore. I had no idea if he had any luck reaching Washington. It seemed like hours ago when the Raptor fighter had flown past.

  Maybe they’ve got the landline to Washington. Maybe they can reach the F22.

  He was back. He was nervous. He told us to stay offshore and not land, “Because you might be contagious.”

  I said, “I have a man here who needs a doctor.”

  “Aren’t you a doctor, Colonel Rush?”

  It started raining.

  Rain in the Arctic. It was over. It had not worked. The fighter had destroyed the ship, the sick, the healthy, the crew, the Marines.

  We drifted offshore, cold, wet, locked in our own failure, watching headlight
s move along a coast road a half mile off. I saw telephone poles, a garbage truck, lights on top of an office building. All of it might as well have been a thousand miles away.

  Failed.

  Kukulka was propped against the side of the Zodiac. Concussion, I thought. He drank lots of water. He weakly pointed and I saw the pinprick black dot approaching in the sky again, only this time it was coming from the ocean side, not the land side. It was the Raptor coming straight at us, low, over the water, as if it had a homing beam fixed on us.

  Kukulka’s lips forming words, “Oh, shit.”

  The thing grew enormous and the sound was a blast, an explosion, as it swept over our heads, circled, and came back, low, as if to make a run at us. It had blown up the ship. It had killed Eddie and Karen, DeBlieu and Pettit. It had done what I’d done in Afghanistan, sent more than two hundred people to the bottom. Washington had waited until the cloud cover blocked view, kept the sinking secret, and now, as we sat there, the F22 would open up on us with machine guns or cannon.

  The predator-like form seemed to slow, its wings to open, belly up, as it drifted above like a bird of prey. Then I saw what the pilot was doing. His doors were open. There were bulky kayak-sized shapes inside. I saw Kukulka’s big face upturned in wonder, his lips moving soundlessly, as he counted the bombs that the pilot was showing us, as if we watched an innocent air show.

  “One . . . two . . . Sir, sir, he didn’t bomb them!”

  Kukulka’s shoulders started moving.

  The big man was crying.

  “You stopped it,” he said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was hot in New Mexico during the day, cold at night, but still toasty compared to the Arctic. The Army guards stayed outside the fence, and we could take long hikes on the mesa and still remain in the forty-square-mile ex–Air Force base where we were quarantined. Two electrified barbed wire fences surrounded the place. Cameras looked down along the periphery. The twenty-foot-wide strip between the fences, we were informed in stern but kindly tones, contained mines.

  Please remain in the camp.

  First came the doctors, looking more—in their bulky suits—like radiation cleanup crews after an accident.

  As soon as we settled in, they coptered in and we got more blood tests than astronauts. We were CAT-scanned and X-rayed, and fMRI-machined. We underwent stress tests and eye exams. We spent hours with psychologists who wanted to know—in fifty ways—about tension levels on the ship, or post-traumatic stress.

  When the doctors left, the FBI arrived for debriefings, the agents using specially set up interrogation booths—protected compartments—for interviews. We sat behind thick glass but still the agents wore surgical masks.

  When they weren’t grilling us about Peter Del Grazo, they started in on us: bank accounts, drug use, family history, clubs we belonged to, e-mails we sent, former jobs, and political affiliations.

  They asked me exactly when I decided to scuttle the submarine Montana. Before the Chinese arrived? Or after? They asked if I’d ever visited China, or had friends there, or had gone to college with people from China. They asked if I blamed my job for my divorce. They wanted to know if I was angry at Major Pettit for living with my ex-wife, and if that situation had affected my judgment.

  “I see you wear a wedding ring,” I told the agent, a man named Mulcahy. “Who’s your wife sleeping with these days?”

  “There’s nothing personal in these questions, sir.”

  “Or in my responses either, asshole.”

  More investigators arrived—from Homeland Security, CIA, the National Security Council, the House Committee on Terrorism—to ask all the questions that probably should have been asked long before anyone ever boarded that ship.

  When each session was done, I usually asked a few questions back, the same ones that we prisoners went over each night, in the dorm rooms we shared, making lists, calling contacts in D.C., gaming scenarios in our heads.

  “How long did Del Grazo work for the Chinese?” I’d ask.

  “We don’t know that,” was always the answer.

  “How did they recruit him?”

  “Ask your superiors.”

  “What exactly did he do for them?”

  “I’m not part of that investigation.”

  “How did the Chinese get the antidote?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  The director was more forthcoming during our daily encrypted teleconferences.

  “Del Grazo infected that whole ship with malware, Joe,” he said wryly. “Laptops. E-mails. Cabins. The whole damn place was a gigantic open mike to Beijing. They were monitoring our research. They wanted advance notice of any plans in the Arctic. He was their man in place when the Montana had the fire. By the way, the icebreaker’s been decontaminated and the Coast Guard is tearing out the whole communication system. It’s a real mess.”

  “Why did he do it, sir?”

  “Oh, money, looks like.”

  “How did they recruit him?”

  “We’re guessing, Joe. He ran up big gambling bills at Seattle casinos. Turns out the Chinese were silent partners in one, probably trolling for useful losers there, you can bet. Horses. Football games. Baseball. Anything you can bet on. He paid cash for a condo, great view of the bay. Cash for an Escalade. Cash in the lockbox we turned up. Joe, it infuriates me. Any half-assed check of the guy would have found this stuff, but the Arctic’s such a low priority, no one did it. Believe me. Red faces all around.”

  I asked, “Director, were the experts at the archives able to get anything from the blank parts of the film?”

  “No. But it’s a good thing you opened it up and didn’t listen to me. Still, next time, pay attention.”

  I asked the biggest question. “How did the Chinese get the antidote?”

  On screen, he looked tired. “China’s where most swine flus originate, so yeah, Jade Pharma is a subsidiary of Pacific-North, but they do their own research, too. A drug they were experimenting with worked. You were their guinea pigs, Joe. And the mislabeling? A mistake, they say, it happens there, but,” he said, shrugging, “it’s China, man. Nothing is what it seems. We’re just happy things worked.”

  While I thought it over, he added, “Can you do me a favor? Can you muzzle your friend Andrew Sachs? His people are being bothersome. A tone-down at State would go a long way here.”

  “Bothersome?”

  “They’re poking into things. Look, the WH wants to talk up this incident as an example of friendship. And pissing in the mouth of the guy who helped you ain’t that. For a change, we’ve got something positive to work with, so let’s encourage it. No sour grapes, Joe. Know what I mean?”

  “Of course.”

  I asked Sachs that night to increase his efforts. I wanted to know everything that his contacts could learn about Jade Pharmaceuticals, the Chinese subsidiary of Pacific-North, of New York City, New York.

  I added, “Tell your guys I asked you to stop asking questions.”

  “Help you cover your ass, you mean? Well, you saved mine.”

  “I want the director to think I’m on his side.”

  I slept in officers’ housing, and shared a suite with Eddie and Andrew Sachs and DeBlieu. At night there was Scrabble and a hundred channels of TV, but mostly we kept trying to figure out what had happened. There were air-dropped books. We took turns giving lectures. We considered a hundred theories as to how the Chinese had obtained the proper drug.

  Clinton bunked down the hall with Pettit, complaining that the base was too hot. The Marines bunked with Montana and Wilmington survivors. Karen Vleska shared a room with Marietta Cristobel, in female officer housing.

  Journalists came next, in an orchestrated parade, to interview—from a distance—the quarantined puppets; that is, after we suffered through a two-hour warning on the penalties of viol
ating secrecy oaths, and a “suggestion session” on acceptable answers to questions.

  The warnings contained words like “Leavenworth” and “the rest of your life.”

  I sat in a booth and eyed a reporter from the New York Times and told the agreed-upon story. That the Montana had taken aboard unidentified frozen bodies recovered from the ice pack, probably foreign, lost since 1918. That the illness that had broken out was from the thawed bodies, and not from any new kind of virus, and was therefore contained. That the public was safe because no other vectors existed. That the Montana had been scuttled to prevent further spread of the disease, and that all aboard both vessels—the Montana and the Wilmington—had acted heroically in the face of danger and death.

  Peter Del Grazo was included in the list of dead from disease. There was no mention of spies. Or silent films.

  The reporter was an attractive, thirtyish blonde who flirted during the interview, and doted on the part about my Zodiac trip in the storm. She asked, legs crossed, skirt tight, voice breathy, pen poised, “Any love interest in your life at the moment, Colonel?”

  “I’m free of foreign entanglements.”

  “And divorced, I understand.”

  “My ex and I stayed friends.”

  “An attractive man like you, no girlfriend?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I’m not a ma’am. I’m a Beth. And here’s my card. Perhaps I’ll be in Anchorage on a story and we can have dinner sometime,” she said.

  You’re not the one I want to have that dinner with.