Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  “Because we need you, Joe. But if either of you talk, I won’t be able to protect you.”

  I liked the admiral. Unlike the former director, who came from Wall Street and was destroyed by a financial scandal, the admiral was a true public servant: hero of Hurricane Laticia, hero of Deepwater Horizon, he deserved to keep the unit intact and strong. So I stayed.

  “Joe,” he’d said. “You’re the best I got.”

  My memo to the secretary of defense six years ago—which brought me into the unit—suggested that the military should prepare for the possibility that the next big outbreak of human disease might come from a cold climate, not a hot one, not a jungle, as is usually assumed . . . but from a microorganism released by melting ice, after being encased in it for hundreds of thousands of years, or by an enemy who knew where to look for germs—new, terrible weapons—in cold latitudes.

  On the day I received Merlin Toovik’s phone call I had two months remaining in my one-year extension. Then I planned to move east with Karen, and start a biotech company with Eddie, looking for cures in the wild: good germs, not bad.

  That was the plan, at least. But you know what they say about plans. Or at least what smart Marines know. Once battle starts, plans fall apart.

  Eddie and I sealed the dead bear’s brain and tissue samples into Ziplocs. The disease that had killed it was probably something normal, nothing new. We mounted our Honda four wheelers and turned south. We sped over the tundra, and ten minutes later I glimpsed the high cell-phone and radio towers and satellite farms ahead that constituted a first glimpse of town. Then would come the base, where Karen was waiting. She’d arrived two weeks back to train for her next polar trip, and she’d brought along a documentary filmmaker who looked at her in ways that annoyed me, trailed her around constantly, and gave Eddie and me the creeps.

  I’d call her from the chopper. I’d say we’d be late. She’d be crazy with worry about the Harmons, but the filmmaker would probably be happy to have a few more hours with her, alone. The jerk.

  I was thinking, Maybe they are okay. Maybe Merlin was wrong about hearing a shotgun. Maybe they’re too sick to answer their phones. Maybe, even if he did hear a shotgun, someone is still alive.

  I needed to concentrate on driving or the Honda might turn over, but I kept seeing in my mind the fifteen-year-old high school girl, just a kid, who had adopted me as an uncle. I had no children of my own. You could say that I had adopted Kelley Harmon back.

  The Honda skidded on slick tundra, began to go over, but the wheels caught and I righted it. I accelerated.

  The biggest dangers start out small, one of my old instructors at Quantico used to say. Things sounded bad already. Four possible victims.

  I had no idea how much worse things would get.

  TWO

  “Play Kelley’s call again,” I said.

  The rescue squad’s big, twenty-year-old Bell 412 copter rose off the tarmac, spun southwest, and headed for the research camp. I was crammed with four others into the cab, and through the window had a last glimpse of Barrow. The triangular town hugging the last bit of coastline on the continent. The mass of one – and two-story wooden homes sat on concrete pilings to prevent them from heating up and melting the permafrost below. The dirt and gravel roads, at 5 P.M., were alive with taxicabs, kids on banana bikes, a truck hauling a big outboard boat toward the beach and lagoon. Probably whalers going out to scout for bowheads. The fall migration was due to start any day.

  Then the city was gone. We raced over a sea of tundra, and through mist so thick that it felt like flying inside lungs . . . the land rolling out in glimpses, in patches; thousands of elliptically shaped freshwater lakes, there because permafrost kept what little precipitation falls here from draining. Wiley Post Airport was gone. It was named for the American humorist who crashed there a century ago. Barrow’s fame comes from death. The town was named for Sir John Barrow, English lord of the admiralty, who sent a thousand British explorer/sailors to their icy demise in a search for the Northwest Passage, Europe’s quick route to Asia, over a century ago. Some of them sank. Some abandoned ships trapped in ice, walked off in search of rescue, and disappeared. Others died of sickness or starvation or they ate each other.

  “Okay, here goes,” Merlin said.

  When I heard the terror in Kelley’s voice, a fist seemed to cut off the air in my throat.

  “Oh, God, God, no one’s answering. I tried to reach Dr. Rush and Dr. Nakamura, and then your operator couldn’t hear me. Everyone is screaming! I’m scared.”

  “Slow down, Kelley, okay? You’ve got all my attention. What’s wrong? S-l-o-w.”

  We were dressed in zip-up float suits in case we ditched in water. We wore helmets equipped with mikes and earpieces and wore waterproof, calf-high Northern Outfitter boots. In the back we carried stretchers and medicines and sample bags and field surgical kits. Merlin was armed with a .45 Beretta, and he and his deputies wielded Mossberg shotguns. Eddie and I had our bear guns. Now there was a small clicking in my helmet, and over the rotor roar I heard the plaintive, terrified voice of the girl.

  “We’re all sick! Daddy said not to call. Said I was wrong. He said it was just flu. But he can’t close his hand. He fell. He said a good scientist never jumps to conclusions, but I didn’t! I didn’t jump to conclusions! Oh, God! I wrote down the symptoms even before the sticking pains started. And Clay Qaqulik was babbling about little people. And Mom . . . I can’t believe she and Clay . . . And the water tastes bad and . . .”

  My throat closed up. This frantic voice was not the one I usually heard from her when she came over to watch TV, or to ask Karen endless hero-worship questions about being an Arctic explorer. Aren’t you scared when you’re out in a blizzard? How did you get Coca-Cola to sponsor you? I was used to her saying things like, “Why can’t I spend summers like normal kids? The beach. Music. I’m, like, in prison. I mean, it’s not like I don’t like science, but my friends are at parties and I’m stuck here, looking at plants. I didn’t ask to be an intern. They said it would help me get into college. They don’t even pay me. I’m their little summertime SLAVE!”

  My mouth was dry. My head was pounding with fear for the whole family, and I could feel my intestines clenching as the voices went on. It was Merlin now.

  “Honey, slow, please, okay? Focus. What happened and when did it start?”

  It was no use. Kelley was too scared.

  “I saw that redheaded woman in the warehouse, bending over the water bottles! And then the water tasted funny and my throat hurt, but I thought it was just, you know, like when you wake up sometimes and it burns. And Daddy said the redheaded woman wouldn’t harm us, and Clay . . . (zzzzz) and Daddy screamed at Mommy because her underwear was (zzzzz) and I said, ‘What little people?’ And Mommy said (zzzzzzzzzzz)”

  Eddie said, cocking his head, trying to hear, “The underwear was what?”

  “Did she say bleeding?”

  “I don’t think it was bleeding. It was something else.”

  “Merlin, can you try that again?”

  The voice had degenerated into a little girl’s, the use of the word Mommy, like she’d become five years old, like she was cowering under covers, afraid that the bogeyman in the closet was real. I felt trapped in the copter. My mouth was dry. I was filled with a sense of being too late. We still had a good fifty miles of tundra to go.

  “And then I was looking in the shaving mirror and the glass bothered me, the sun was so bright on it, it hurt my eyes so I just . . . just BROKE IT . . .”

  Dr. Sengupta, sitting opposite me, was a forty-two-year-old from Mumbai who’d taken a three-year contract at the hospital because he’d “Always dreamed of ice, since I was a little boy. So when I saw the job description, I felt I must come and see my dream.”

  He said, “Hmm, extreme light sensitivity.”

  Kelley babbling, jumping from
one half thought to another, the words becoming run-on, loss of control.

  “. . . And Mommy coming out of Clay’s tent and Daddy yelling, ‘How could you do that to me! You bitch!’”

  Eddie’s eyes meeting mine across the four feet of cabin that separated the two rows of passengers. Eddie’s brown eyes baffled. I knew he was seeing the same thing I was in his head; the Harmons, two quiet, middle-class researchers who don’t use words like bitch in public, and don’t brazenly sleep with their bear guards, certainly not in a small research camp in front of a husband and daughter. But perhaps we were misinterpreting what we were hearing. Or maybe, as Eddie said, “Maybe they had a dark side, Uno. Virginia Woolf times nine.”

  Merlin trying to slow her down. The girl talked over the police chief. Merlin trying to soothe her, trying to get information. The girl was out of reach, emotionally and physically.

  “I’m in the hut. They’re screaming outside. Clay says Daddy is trying to kill him! This is crazy! This isn’t happening! Lalalalalalalala . . . I’m putting my hands over my ears. LALALALAAAAAA!”

  I heard a clumping on the line, and thought she’d hurled away the phone, into a corner. The lalala sounded farther away. I wanted to shut off the sound. Something awful was building. Dr. Sengupta’s eyes were huge inside his glasses, the deputies were still and silent, and the whole copter wobbled, as if the engine drew in the raw tension coming in with the call.

  Then quiet, and another voice, a new one, Clay Qaqulik’s, I guess, said, strangled, choking . . .

  “I have to stop it.”

  A pause. Then Clay again.

  “I have to. I’m sorry, Miss K.”

  And then I started in my seat because I heard a bark, or a grunt, close to the phone; a throaty animal sound . . . The girl had stopped talking, Clay also. Something else was in there, in that research hut with them, sniffing at the unit. A series of more grunts followed. A flow of unintelligible sound: low and urgent, angry and primitive. Barking almost. Impossible.

  Kelley screamed, “Stop it! Why are you doing that?”

  Followed by the unmistakable BOOM of a shotgun.

  And then nothing . . . zzzzzzz . . .

  Eddie and I and the police chief and deputies bounced in the copter, transported into our imaginations. What just happened? The earbuds emitted static. The mist ahead thickened, to obscure not only air ahead, but earth below. The sky gone. The truth gone. The only sound the steady groan of engines.

  “Play it once more, Merlin,” I said.

  The nightmare voices started up again. I thought back to Washington, to the admiral’s small office on C Street, to the story he told us, to the secret part of our job.

  • • •

  “YOU ARE TO LOOK FOR WHAT YOU PREDICTED, JOE. FOR SOMETHING NEW and potentially dangerous popping up as the region warms.”

  Eddie, the admiral, and I had been sitting in a townhouse four blocks from the State Department in Foggy Bottom.

  “Why send us now?” I’d said. “Did something happen?”

  To answer, the admiral spread on his large desk a map of the North Slope of Alaska. Tinged brown for tundra, it formed the shape of a wild boar, the eastern side, or hindquarters, was the border with Canada.

  “New fish species up there. New birds. Even a new kind of bear: half grizzly, half polar bear,” Admiral Galli had said.

  The western side, or skull and snout shape, jutted west toward nearby Russia across the Chukchi Sea, ending at the Eskimo village of Point Hope.

  “Question is, are there new, dangerous germs as well?” the admiral asked.

  He sat back. “We’ve been assigned a delicate task, and you two have been up there before so you’re going. All this land here, vast space, hardly any people . . . that made it a natural lab for the white-coat guys, in the past, you see.”

  Eddie said, “Weapons testing.”

  “And designing. This started during World War Two, and went through the end of the last century. The bad guys looking for new ways to kill us. Our brightest minds trying to anticipate what might come at us from across the Bering Strait: chemicals, gasses, germs.”

  “Meanwhile, we made some, too,” I said.

  “You want them to be the only ones who have it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Of course not. It was a race. A germ and chemical race. And then, gentlemen, a few accidents started to happen. Montana: Army nerve gas experiment goes wrong, and next thing you know, fifty thousand sheep are dead. Nevada nuclear tests: Twenty years pass and the soldiers who witnessed explosions start to die of cancers. Atomic soldiers, we called ’em. Also a few locals, who drove through clouds of radiation emitted by the tests. You know these stories. If you’re not familiar with all of them, surely you know some.”

  “And in Alaska, sir?”

  “First, by the late 1980s, Congress was pissed off over these accidents, and the public outcry. Plenty of people opposed testing by then. This is before the chemical test ban treaties, big nuclear test treaties.”

  “So they passed a law,” I guessed.

  “Yep. HR-932. An obscure provision in a military appropriations bill mandated a kind of germ and toxics census in areas that had been used for testing. Every five years the secretary of defense is required to send out teams to, quote: ‘Conduct a detailed examination of any general areas once used by the U.S. military for chemical or biological testing, in order to determine whether any lingering negative effects have harmed U.S. citizens, crops, or domestic livestock. If any such organism or public-health effect is found, the secretary of defense is directed to make full restitution for properties lost, both living and realty, and to assume responsibility for related medical costs.’”

  I’d asked the admiral whether, over the twenty-five years of the bill’s life, so far, any of the secret surveys had located a new germ or toxic effect that had harmed U.S. citizens. Admiral Galli had sighed.

  “Unsure, Joe. In 2005, surveyors found an accelerated strain of hantavirus, a potentially lethal disease transmitted by mice, in an area of New Mexico that had received large doses of radioactive fallout during a series of 1950s tests. Six, seven deaths among local Navaho.”

  “Washington took responsibility?”

  The admiral looked strained. “The bill doesn’t require anyone to do that. It only states that all costs are to be assumed. Remember, this sort of thing, once publicized, even a rumor, usually results in about twelve thousand people filing cases, lawsuits, studies, bills blocked in Congress, headlines all over the world. So the framers of the legislation wanted to alleviate any suffering caused by the initial testing, but also wanted to avoid opening a floodgate of lawsuits. Delicate situation.”

  Eddie quipped, “Yeah, you kill people, tricky problems pop up.”

  The admiral looked irritated. “These tests were conducted a long time ago. The people who carried them out were no more evil than you or I.”

  Eddie snorted.

  “Colonel, this summer your job is to conduct the northern Alaskan survey. You’ll go out with the annual Coast Guard medical team visiting North Slope villages. Coast Guard has been getting ready for the place to open up. They use the visits to get their pilots familiarized, see if equipment works. Your job is to treat anyone with medical needs. There will be a dentist and optometrist along. Look at flus, colds, broken wrists, everything. But I want you to ask questions, especially of the elders. Any new sicknesses? Anything they’re seeing, even in animals? If you find something new, get samples. Those go straight to Fort Detrick. If the conclusion is that we’ve got a link, Uncle Sam sends the case to the green hats in the Treasury Department, and then lawyers, and they’ll start figuring out compensation.”

  “How do you compensate someone for dying?” Eddie said.

  The admiral said stiffly, “What are you suggesting? That we do nothing at all?”

  It
was one of the few times I’d seen Eddie blush.

  “Sorry, sir, my mouth gets ahead of me sometimes.”

  “Only sometimes?” the admiral said.

  I said, “Sir, can you tell us exactly what happened in Alaska that may cause problems to pop up now?”

  He sighed. “Oh, when it comes to the North Slope, that place was a biological dumping ground, and not just for us.”

  • • •

  SOMETIMES I THINK THAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ALLEGED WESTERN civilization and others is that somehow, we got the idea that empty means useless. Silence? Fill it up with earbuds and loudspeakers and TV monitors in airports. Time? Pack every available second with multitasking, another word for attention deficit disorder, with iPhones and BlackBerrys and games where Angry Birds fly around on a screen. Wilderness? Intolerable! Fill it up with condos or tour buses or, if you can’t, drop in a golf course, at the very least flood the open space with experimental chemicals, bombs, drones, or man-made germs.

  “Japan,” the admiral said, sliding his finger on that map across the Bering Strait and onto Asia, northern China to be exact, Manchuria. “In modern times, you’ve got the accident at their nuclear-power facility at Fukushima Daiichi, and winds capable of carrying fallout to northern Alaska. But previous to that, World War Two. Manchuria was where they had their germ facilities. Between 1932 until the end of that war, Japan had the most-aggressive biological-warfare program ever applied at the field level. They set up their infamous Unit 731 in their puppet state of Manchukeo. They called it a water-purification department. It was horrible and brutal; and in that 150-building complex, they amputated limbs of the living, to study blood loss. They infected patients with syphilis: men, women, and children. They designed plague fleas that were dropped on enemy soldiers. Their laboratory experiments alone, inoculating prisoners of war with disease, killed an estimated ten thousand. Their use of toxics in the field probably killed another two hundred thousand. They tried typhus, cholera, plague, anthrax, shigella, a kind of dysentery, and salmonella.”