Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  “Christ,” said Eddie.

  “As you know, Japan actually invaded Alaska during World War Two, and temporarily occupied part of the Aleutian Islands. So far there has been no evidence that they used biological weapons in that campaign. Nevertheless, you are to be aware of this history as you undertake the survey.”

  “Next,” I said.

  “Next! The Soviet Union. The Soviets captured Unit 731 after World War Two, and used the documents—Japanese formulas—to augment their own program,” the admiral said, as the big index finger pounded down again, this time in Siberia, western side of the Bering Strait.

  “Sverdlovsk facility,” he said. “Between the 1950s until the ’90s, they weaponized and stockpiled over a dozen bio-agents including tularemia, plague, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, smallpox, and Marburg, a dirty little cousin of Ebola. Fifty-two sites. Fifty thousand workers scattered in an area where winds—on a fluky day—could take anything floating to Alaska. The Russians genetically altered some of these microbes to resist heat and antibiotics and, are you listening, resist extreme cold!”

  “I think you should send us to Hawaii, not Alaska,” Eddie said.

  The admiral wasn’t smiling. “We also know that there’s new interest in Russia in these programs. Their president may have restarted them. Status, unclear.”

  “Yes, Hawaii,” Eddie said. “Beaches. Surfing, you know, Admiral, Colonel Rush’s fiancée is a surfer. Mai tais. Hawaii, sir. Definitely.”

  The admiral’s brows rose. “Hawaii? Well, Major, our own Big Tom bioweapons tests were held in Hawaii.”

  “Where the hell weren’t there tests, sir?”

  “New York,” the admiral said.

  “Yeah, but the traffic sucks there, sir.”

  “Alaska,” I said.

  The admiral frowned. “Alaska! Starting in the sixties and seventies we tested live nerve gasses, sarin, near Fort Greeley, and later, in the ‘Little Tom’ tests, bacillus globigii. But the big bad wolf was Project Chariot.”

  “What was Project Chariot, sir?”

  The admiral stood and walked to his top floor window, which provided a pretty nice view of the Kennedy Center. “This is all public record now. It was the intentional contamination of groundwater near a village called Point Hope, with radioactivity.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because Edward Teller, revered father of the atom bomb, had an idea for peaceful use of atomics. Anyone can google this. Teller convinced D.C. that it was possible to create America’s first Arctic deepwater harbor at Point Hope by blowing up a few atomic bombs at the location.”

  “Give me a break,” said Eddie.

  “Yep,” said the admiral. “The Atomic Energy Commission approved it. It was one of those grandiose futuristic plans that looked good on paper. Re-engineer the planet! Project Plowshare, they called it . . . you know, like in the Bible . . . ‘they’ll beat their weapons into plowshares,’ or something like that. The planet was ‘slightly flawed,’ Teller said. The use of nuclear bombs would dig canals, get rid of obstacles like mountains, change the earth’s surface to suit us, he said.”

  “So what happened at Point Hope?” I asked, finding the little village on the map on the admiral’s desk. It lay due southwest from Barrow, a few hundred miles off, the last tip of land before the Chukchi Sea on the west coast of the borough, the snout of the wild boar.

  “What happened was that the plan was approved and engineers and Atomic Energy Commission people flew into Point Hope. They told the Iñupiats that the use of atomics in their area would be nothing more than a mild inconvenience. They said—while the locals secretly recorded them—that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not really had such a terrible impact on people. The villagers would temporarily leave. The blast—it would be 150 times more powerful than the bomb dropped at Hiroshima—would equal 40 percent of all firepower expended during World War Two—and instantly create a harbor where before had been a small creek. Then the locals would come home. The new deepwater harbor would show the might of America. Everyone would benefit.”

  “But it never happened, so what’s the problem?” I asked.

  “It never happened because the Iñupiats fought it, and stopped it. But before they did, Atomic Energy Commission staff started work.They wanted to know how groundwater flowed in the area, and so . . .”

  I closed my eyes. “And so they put radioactive material in it, to track the flow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Cesium?”

  “You got it.”

  “Didn’t they clean it up, after?”

  “They said they did. They got most of it. But as late as 2010, people were still finding traces in the soil.”

  “Cancer rates in Point Hope?”

  “Slightly elevated.”

  “Proven connections?”

  “No.”

  I thought about it. “Any other deposits of radioactivity in the North Slope, that maybe the locals don’t know about?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” the admiral said, looking uncomfortable.

  “But we don’t know for sure,” I said, envisioning those thousands of square miles of wilderness, tundra, mountains, beauty unparalleled, but also potentially a historic mix of poisons or chemicals deposited over the years by people regarding it as nothing more than a site for tests.

  “Go north. Do the survey. We’ve done these surveys for twenty-five years now, without finding anything to worry about. It’s pro forma. It’s the law. It’s just a study.”

  “Then why do you look worried?”

  The admiral said, “Because when it comes to mutations, one never knows what is possible until it appears. And because your sworn enemy, Wayne Homza, is back. It’s backbiting time in D.C.!”

  Eddie said, “Oh, shit.”

  • • •

  MAJOR GENERAL WAYNE HOMZA HATED ME. HIS OFFICE LAY IN THE WAR plans section of the Pentagon. He managed strategy scenarios relating to bioterror attacks on U.S. troops or towns. He was a formidable antagonist; an ex-street kid from Cicero, Illinois, who’d fought his way into West Point. He was blunt, powerful, and relentless—the kind of man who magnifies minor grudges. He was stuck planning for something that had not happened yet, so he was off the track for rapid promotion. He’d been trying to absorb into his command any Pentagon unit even remotely dealing with germs or toxics. The admiral believed that Homza wanted to become the biowarfare czar. Homza was politically adept, hungry for advancement, and constantly pushing for more responsibility.

  “He’s out to get you,” the admiral told me.

  The reason was, for the past two years, Homza had been converting research units into combat units. “We need fighters, not scientists,” he said. “Guns. Not studies.”

  Homza had actually convinced the secretary of defense to switch our unit to his control a year ago, when I ruined it for him. Recalled to D.C. after my last Arctic mission, Eddie and I were summoned to the White House for a medal ceremony, the kind where the president thanks you personally, but where no one in the media knows, because what you did was secret. The kind where several VIPs are also in the room, since several people simultaneously receive awards.

  The president had shaken my hand, showed me the medal—gold resting in blue velvet—explained that it would be kept in a safe, apologized for the secrecy, and said, “Colonel, this country owes you more than a secret ceremony. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, I hope you will just ask.”

  I’d blurted out, “Sir, don’t close us down.”

  And I’d seen the blocky-looking general across the room start, and stare, and then slowly smile at me. It was not a friendly expression. He smiled, I thought, like a shark.

  “You’re an interesting fellow,” Homza told me that day, out in the hall. I knew then that he would keep watching.

  • �
�� •

  NOW, IN THE COPTER, THE MEMORY DIED AWAY AND I GREW AWARE AGAIN of static in my earbuds. Perhaps the dead were trying to speak. Who could tell? Who can predict science? The pilot was pointing and we all craned to see through the thick white mist and light falling rain, an October drizzle mixing with a few flakes of confused snow.

  Ahead I saw a small wooden shack with a long porch and a concave outhouse, both set inside a tramped down area of grass near a thin, long, elliptical lake, with ripples on the surface from the drizzle. I saw a parked ATV. I saw a pile of canvas-topped gear. I saw two bodies—lumps on the ground—growing clearer in the drizzle as we approached.

  Eddie said, “This is bad.”

  I saw a lone red fox trotting off in the distance, moving in a sideways gait, absorbed into mist.

  My dread for the Harmons was a cold clenching, a grinding in the pit of my belly.

  The copter circled first, in smaller and smaller circles, to check if someone with a gun was hiding in one of the low areas between hummocks.

  Merlin’s voice was in my earbuds, quiet and serious.

  “Those were the parents in the grass. Where are the other two, Kelley and Clay?”

  “The cabin. Gotta be,” Eddie said, staring at the buildings.

  “Unless they left,” said Merlin.

  “Unless it’s an ambush,” I said, reaching for my gun.

  THREE

  “The shooter could still be here,” I said.

  Look anywhere except at the bodies, and the tundra presented a subtle, sweeping beauty; lovely, quiet, but as mute and indifferent as the huge snowy owl peering at us from fifty yards away. The rotors stopped moving. I had the door open and my shotgun out in case we took fire. The bodies out there, close up, lay in the loose-limbed tangled attitude with which the dead announce themselves.

  Maybe the other two are still alive.

  “Merlin, Eddie, and I should go in first. We have some experience in . . . uh . . . this.”

  Merlin nodded. “You Marines take the door. We’ll spread out, hit the back and side. Stay low,” he warned his deputies, two big, nervous men from Minnesota, cold-weather farm boys who’d found their birthplaces too boring, rule bound, or confining. One thickly dark haired, named Steve Rice; the other bald and bearded, Luther Oz.

  All of us wore Kevlar vests. The deputies had their Mossbergs out. Dr. Sengupta hung back in the chopper, wanting to go but waiting for an all-clear. The pilot snapped off the safety on his sidearm, a Beretta .45, but I told him to stay put. We needed him to get home.

  Eddie and I hit the ground fast, separated, and, communicating with hand signals, stayed low and quick-ran toward the cabin, just like we would have done in a potential enemy village back in Afghanistan, expecting fire. Anyone inside would have heard the chopper.

  Did I feel someone watching from the cabin, or was it my imagination?

  Fifty feet to go.

  I’d not protested when Merlin made us sign some legal paper . . . “cooperation agreement between federal agency X and local law enforcement” . . . on the way here. The admiral would be angry, but I’d taken him at his word when he said, “I value your judgment.” Merlin needed us to have a legal, official role in case later on, he said, “The issue comes up in court, Joe.”

  I was aware of Merlin bending quickly over the two bodies—man and woman—sprawled amid the heather and sedges. He sought a pulse and my heart plunged into my belly when he rose and kept going.

  Ten feet to the cabin. Is Kelley in there? Is Clay with her?

  Something just moved at the window.

  I hit the ground, rolled sideways to avoid a direct shot, and wriggled forward. The ground smelled of rain, voided bowels, and sweetish blood. Cold drops ran off my scalp, into my eyes and off my chin.

  Up to the porch now, slowly . . .

  Fucking creaky porch . . .

  • • •

  THE CABIN—FRONT DOOR TILTED SLIGHTLY OPEN—LOOKED AS ACCESSIBLE as every trap in the world, with that black slit inviting us in. I judged the place an eight hundred square foot rectangle—I hope it’s only one room—built from a conglomeration of weathered wood jutting up like a beached ship on posts hammered into the tundra, to set it a foot above the grass.

  It sat thirty yards from the glassy lake—natural water supply—and another hundred from the shallow creek that probably swelled to monumental proportions in the spring, emptied into the Arctic Ocean, and served as a minor tributary to the Porcupine River, a major Iñupiat hunting grounds.

  The Harmons weren’t soldiers. They were gentle people who collected plants and oohed and aahed over seeds and algae. They fretted about genes, not germs.

  We made it onto the porch. We stood on opposite sides of the slightly open door. I heard a low droning inside, and realized it was a mass of flies.

  You go left, my eyes ordered Eddie. We’ve communicated in battle situations without talking since we were young lieutenants, in Iraq War One. And even before that, at ROTC, in Massachusetts, where we met.

  Eddie’s quick glance said, If he’s in there, he left that front door open. Step in, Marines, and BOOM!

  My hand signals told Eddie, Ready? One . . . two . . .

  We burst in, me in the lead, Eddie taking the corners. Me processing the scene, thinking, Nothing moving yet . . . two rooms: the bunk room and the kitchen area. Corners clear. Body one in the lower bunk. Body two on the floor. Flies. Lots of flies. Clouds of flies. That was what I saw move by the window.

  Eddie came out of the closet-sized, honey-bucket bathroom, and I smelled urine and shit from in there, unemptied buckets.

  “All clear, Uno,” he said, lowering his Mossberg, leaning against the wall in momentary relief.

  But then the flies moved again as a mass, rising off the form on the bunk, to cross the window, a fast-moving shadow, a hungry buzz, and the relief was over.

  Oh man . . .

  Eddie knelt at the lower bunk. A poster above the upper one pictured a smiling female researcher in a Woods Hole Institute sweatshirt, holding up tweezers and a Ziploc bag: REMEMBER TO FREEZE YOUR SAMPLES!!! A second poster showed a big polar bear, teeth bared, and the caption: LOOK BEFORE YOU STEP OUTSIDE!

  “Oh, Christ, One. It’s Kelley.”

  She lay—what remained of her—in a torn heap of bedding, and I had to force myself to look at the mass of muscle, liquid, and ligature where her head had been. A bare foot protruded from the shredded North Face sleeping bag. The flies were a tropism drawn to the worst kind of luck. The stuffing poked out, soaked with black blood. She’d been thrown into the wall by the blast, smearing the planking with grayish brain matter, a raisin-sized bit of discolored bone wedged between planks, and then she’d bounced off and settled. The limbs showed all the animation of a straw doll’s. A mass of strawberry-blond hair was pasted by blood to the wall. A single yellow strand glowed abruptly in a beam of sunlight coming through the window, flaring and dying as quickly as a soul departs a body.

  That lone hair got to me more than the rest of the carnage. One hair. The strand you find in a teenage girl’s brush, and it went along with the innocent items on the milk crate night table, sitting an arm’s reach from the body; a Head & Shoulders shampoo bottle, a red-banded Mickey Mouse watch, a silvery palm-sized miniature digital recorder, a half-empty pack of Juicy Fruit gum.

  “That mirror is busted over there,” I said, jerking my head toward a part of the cabin otherwise untouched by violence. Something about it stood out . . . a mirror . . . shattered . . . a mirror . . .

  “Shot up?” Eddie said.

  “No. No pellet marks. Someone must have just smashed it.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “How the hell do I know?” I snapped.

  I fought off a wave of sickness.

  The upper bunk was untouched, a sleeping bag unrolled an
d zipped, just lying there. Mom’s probably. The women slept on one side of this cabin, guys on the other.

  Eddie knelt in the center of the room, by the second body. The shooter, from the look of things. Merlin’s cousin Clay Qaqulik. Eddie going through the pockets. It’s funny how, even in the wild, some people carry a wallet.

  “It’s Clay, all right.”

  He lay by his shotgun, but only half of his face looked back, one pale brown eye gaping, slick cheekbones visible on the left side, as in a medical school display. The human male skull. The rest of what had once constituted a face was splattered across the thick planking, with more gray matter glommed onto the legs of a small splintery wooden table, below a tin of canned milk, a box of Trader Joe’s wheat bran flakes, a box of cracker-like Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, a half-played Monopoly game, with a plastic hotel sitting on Park Place, and a bagged half-loaf of Wonder bread—with a lone fly trapped inside, stuck to the condensation in the bag.

  I also saw a pack of Zithromax, a five-day antibiotic, with three of the five pills missing. And an open bottle of Tylenol.

  They were sick, sure, but with what?

  The shooter’s trigger finger—left hand—was still snagged in the guard of the Remington pump action and the left arm was twisted, dislocated. When he’d blown off half his face, the recoil had snagged the finger, torn wrist tendons as the blast pulled the shotgun one way, the man the other.

  Eddie flicked his head toward the door, referring to the bodies outside. “Mom and Dad were on their backs, so—”

  “So Kelley’s still in her sleeping bag, which she would have tried to get out of if she heard shots. You think the first killing was here?”

  “The shooting on the phone call was in here.”

  “So Clay comes in here first, and the parents hear it and run toward the house to help. He steps out and shoots them, too. He comes back in. He shoots himself.”

  In my head, I heard it: BOOM . . . BOOM . . .

  Eddie said, “Or he shoots the parents first, Kelley’s too scared to move. Then he does her. But why?” Eddie said, pulling on rubber gloves.