by James Abel
I tried to remember the phone message. “Kelley said something about Clay seeing things. Hallucinating.”
Outside, Merlin and his deputies walked the perimeter of the camp, checking for people or evidence.
“I’m thinking Fort Hood,” Eddie mused as we got out the Ziploc bags and tie-on masks, forcing ourselves to start the awful collecting: fingernail clippings, blood samples, hair bits for a toxics test.
Eddie said, “He wouldn’t be the first vet who went around the bend. Kills three. Turns on himself. Alcohol . . . drugs . . . plenty of that up here . . . Or maybe being sick made everything worse.”
I thought about it. I shook my head. “It doesn’t explain the call. She said they were all sick. She was terrified because they were all sick. She didn’t even mention a shotgun. Don’t you think, if it was just about Clay, that the whole call would have been about him?”
Eddie sat back on his heels. He showed a lot of white in his eyes when he was concentrating. He shook his head. “This won’t have anything to do with us, or our mission. Don’t look at me like that! I’m just saying.”
“She called us, Eddie. She needed help. The mission? Who cares about the goddamn mission! What the hell happened here?”
“She’s scared. Disoriented. Babbling. I can think of drugs or chemicals that would make you paranoid as hell.”
“I want to test these bodies,” I said.
Despite the cold, I felt sweat in my eyes. There was a quick, small movement to my left, and I instinctively moved sideways, grabbed for my Mossberg, only to see a miniature mammal, a rodent-like vole, scamper from under the bunk and out the open doorway.
I said, rapid breathing subsiding, “She said she kept a diary of symptoms. Book diary? Or computer?”
“Laptop’s my guess. Or some new super mobile device that only kids and tech geniuses know about.”
“Take the laptop. And,” I said, eyeing two items on the night table, “that little voice recorder of hers.”
We forced ourselves to start looking for a diary, whatever form it took.
I knew that shock and grief would come later, when we got home—and later still, would be added to the roll call of Marine bad dreams.
Eddie found another busted mirror in the honey-bucket room. Just a little six by six thing that had been hanging on the wall, and was now shattered, its glazed pieces lying on the floor.
I stared at it. Mirrors . . .
Something about mirrors?
• • •
I’VE SEEN DEATH ON BATTLEFIELDS, AND EXPERIENCED THE VIOLENT deaths of friends, but even after many years of service I’d never witnessed anything up close approaching this level of violence on an American civilian family. The carnage mocked the normal setting: the set table, three places for dinner, plastic fiesta-style plates, three plastic tumblers with bowhead whale logos, the massive mammals etched in black on the sides.
I saw a four-burner stove in the corner, attached by hose to a propane canister on the floor. There was a larger tank outside for heat even in summers, when temperatures could drop into the twenties this far north. The cabin was not insulated enough to be used by researchers in winter. That was when most scientists, along with birds and whales, migrated south.
Gas leak? What are the symptoms of a gas leak? Light-headedness, yeah. Blurred vision. Paranoia? I don’t think so. Mold? Is there mold here?
“Four people. But only three settings,” Eddie said.
“Meaning, Dr. Holmes?”
“An argument? A grudge? Three against one over something that set Clay off.”
“She called before that. She never said Clay was the issue.”
The camp emitted the stillness of a battlefield when the death-dealing is done. Gradually normal sounds returned to the world. I heard the hiss of wind outside, and the vague attentive scratch of a hail pellet at the window. I heard the creak of Eddie, kneeling, Ziploc bag out, rubber gloves on, beside Clay Qaqulik. I heard a half dozen harsh, grating barks from that owl outside. One . . . two . . . three in a row . . . like it was counting bodies.
Four . . . Like the animal was mourning.
Six. Predicting more?
Deputy Luther Oz’s voice reached us from outside.
“Chief. Over here! Four-wheeler tracks! Someone else was here!”
• • •
LUTHER OZ STARTED UP AN ATV AND HEADED OUT ONTO THE TUNDRA TO try to follow the tracks. Deputy Steve Rice strung yellow crime-scene tape, pounded steel stakes into the ground, and wrapped the camp perimeter. It struck me as ridiculous. What would the tape keep away? Wolves?
Merlin and his men picked up shell casings, dusted the cabin for fingerprints, and snapped photos of the bodies. Our collective attempts to control disaster are never ending. In South Sudan once, where Eddie and I searched for hidden labs and Ebola, we spent a week tending Dinka tribesmen wounded in the region’s war with the Sudanese government. We were in a mud-and-wattle hospital near a swamp; no electricity, cots for beds, dank walls lined with silent patients—rebel fighters—awaiting donated prosthetics: artificial arms and legs made thousands of miles away.
Someone from the Red Cross had nailed a poster to the wall above the men waiting their turn to be fitted. RULES OF WAR, it announced to the amputees hobbling on rag-wrapped crutches around a packed earth floor.
You must treat prisoners humanely.
You must identify yourself when taking a prisoner.
Eddie had laughed harshly. “‘Rules’?”
There are no rules, of course, and now in this camp I knew that the tundra had mocked similar efforts over the centuries to apply “RULES” to disaster . . . British sailors walking off from an ice-trapped ship, heading south in a blizzard, in marching order, as if that would save their lives. Missionaries on their knees, sick with influenza, faces raised to heaven, as if prayers were contracts, bargains, rules. Here, Marine doctors Joe Rush and Eddie Nakamura sought order with tweezers—collecting hair, skin, and brain matter.
I noticed Merlin in the doorway, staring at the dead man on the floor. His voice sounded broken. “Clay and I grew up together. Except for his time in the Army, I saw him almost every day. He brings presents to my kids every Sunday.”
“I’m sorry, Merlin.”
“He was on my whaling crew. My dad hazed him good when we both were kids and went out with the hunters for the first time. The men gave us the jobs for the eight-year-olds. Clay took all their shit with a smile.”
Merlin stepped closer, grief stricken. But he was also too good a policeman to be distracted from his job.
He said, looking directly into my eyes, “You’ve been asking elders about new diseases, Joe.”
He stood only a foot from the body.
He said, “You were in Point Hope asking about flu and rashes. In Nuvvuak, you asked details of Jenny Aniruq’s son’s fever. You and Major Nakamura went to Point Lay to take samples of the dead walruses on the beaches, after that airplane spooked them and they crushed pups in the stampede. And the bears. Why are you really here?”
I lied, followed orders. “We’re with the Coast Guard, helping out on their annual med-visits. Of course we ask questions. That’s what doctors do, Merlin.”
He was too smart to buy it. As borough police chief, Merlin’s area of responsibility was a region the size of Michigan. He had more than a hundred officers answering to him; as well as detectives, drug experts, liaisons with federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and FBI. His eyes were almond-shaped dark brown with green-flecked irises. His complexion was olive. His shoulders were broad and powerful, as befitted a harpooner, able to throw a heavy missile far enough and accurately enough to penetrate the thick skin of a forty-ton bowhead whale. His hair was a short, thick brown, balding at both sides of his forehead, with gray streaks in back. His voice was soft but not unforgiving. I’d found during
my brief time here that even the elders in Barrow, seventy and eighty years old, were often powerful men. During a health survey at the old folks’ home, I’d shaken hands with one eighty-one-year-old ex–caribou hunter, holding back pressure so as not to damage his delicate bones. He’d looked offended. Suddenly the strength in him was enormous. He’d squeezed my hand like a Marine in a bar contest. He’d bellowed out, with great satisfaction, “Colonel, you are WEAK!”
Merlin Toovik demanded, “You have something to tell me, Colonel? Tell me, right now.”
• • •
WELL! TWO ROADS STRETCHED AHEAD AND NEITHER OFFERED POSITIVE outcomes.
There had been no written language on the North Slope until a hundred years ago, and even in my brief time here I’d found that words were regarded as contracts. Tell someone you’ll call them next week, and you better do it. Make an offer, you better keep it. The Iñupiats have stopped billion-dollar offshore oil projects in court when they believed that the oil companies lied to them. They shut down the Atomic Energy Commission when the commission lied at Point Hope. They pay top lobbyists in Washington to safeguard their interests in that cesspool of backstabbing arts.
You don’t get two chances here if you lie.
Barrow, the little town eighty miles to our north—with its small houses and rural, tilting telephone poles and gravel roads and roller-skating rink—was run by leaders more sophisticated than half the VIPs I met at Washington cocktail parties. They spoke more quietly. They were more self-effacing. They wore Levi’s and anoraks and sealskin boots. Yet, they were just as quick and brutal—when necessary—in getting things done.
I felt Eddie watching me sideways, wondering what I would say. And probably thinking that I’d already disobeyed orders twice in the last few hours, first when I’d come along on the trip, then when I’d allowed us to be officially deputized, which I’m sure had unpleasant legal consequences back in Washington.
I told Merlin Toovik our true mission.
His voice remained soft afterward, but there was no hiding the accusation. “You’re here to check consequences from germ experiments and dumped radioactivity?”
“It happened seventy years ago and everyone on the North Slope knows about it and there’s been no evidence since then of any damaging consequences, not here. Merlin, the likelihood is that your cousin went crazy and shot these people, and then he shot himself.”
Merlin sighed, subsided. “Clay was not that kind of person.”
I knew that the police chief was too experienced to believe this, that nobody was ever not that kind of person. I asked, “Did he take drugs, Merlin?”
“No.”
“Drink?”
“As a teen. But his father shot himself while drunk. Clay never touched alcohol after that. He coaches . . . coached . . . girls basketball and made it a point: One drink and you are out.”
Eddie suggested, “Maybe he hid it from you. I mean, you being the police chief and all.”
Merlin said, “You can hide being a drinker in the city where you come from, but you can’t hide here. Everyone finds out who you are.”
“We had to ask, Merlin.”
“No problem.”
“We’ll run the samples. I’ll tell you everything. But right now we need to find Kelley’s diary.”
Merlin’s eyes showed red, with moisture at the edges.
The sky was growing darker. It smelled wet and violent, like a sudden storm was brewing.
Merlin’s voice cracked. “Oh, hell. What will I tell my aunt?”
• • •
TEN MINUTES LATER THE PILOT ANNOUNCED IN OUR EARBUDS THAT THE weather report had turned worse, and that we had at most thirty minutes before we needed to get out of here.
After that, the gusting winds would rise to sixty miles an hour, and the chopper couldn’t fly. Hail was falling in Barrow. We’d be stuck here for at least the night.
“Which would be no problem normally,” I said. “But we don’t know if the Harmons and Clay absorbed something toxic here.”
“I wish we could find that diary,” Eddie said.
We searched fast, under mattresses, in kitchen drawers, in the supply area stocked with canned tins of Dinty Moore stew and baked beans and Spam, Sailor crackers, PowerBars, and several dozen gallon-sized jugs of bottled water.
Someone put something in the water, Kelley had said.
So we took a few gallon jugs for analysis.
We found no diary. We found girl things: her summer reading assignment from high school, For Whom the Bell Tolls; a backpack filled with pink sweaters and logo T-shirts; a suitcase under the bunk, which held mostly hip-hop music selections; a paperback dictionary; a small, stuffed bear with a red ribbon on its head; a selection of Nordic sweaters; cords and jeans and girlish undergarments.
“Maybe it’s in her laptop, One.”
“Power up the laptop. Does the battery work?”
“I see lots of files here, but no diary.”
“Take it along. Hurry up.”
There was no book-style diary in the cabinets or desktop. Or wedged beneath overstuffed chair cushions. And certainly not among her parents’ gear, by the outhouse, the samples cooler, which seemed filled with seeds and other plant and lake life: algae, flowers, dried mud.
With ten minutes to go until we had to leave, Luther Oz returned on the ATV to say, baffled, that the tracks he’d followed had begun in camp, all right, and went out for half a mile, but then began making crazy circles, looping, carving Z shapes in the grass, leaving skid marks that turned back into tracks that eventually ended up where they started, back here.
“I don’t get it,” Oz said, scratching his head. “Nobody else was here. Someone went out, drove around in circles and came back. What gives?”
It was clear that within minutes the heavens would open up, and any evidence, whatever might exist in the open, tracks, hairs, chemicals, would be washed away.
Merlin suggested leaving the bodies here, the death scene undisturbed, a deputy guard overnight, but that was a bad idea, I responded, if there was something toxic here.
After all, we had not eliminated sickness as an element in this disaster. Or a chemical that could be anywhere in the camp. The cabin. The soil. The lake. The bodies.
“Better take them along, so animals don’t get at them, and return later and do a better search,” I said.
“Imminnauraq,” muttered Merlin in the Iñupiat language.
“What’s that?”
“Superstition. Little people. Jokers. Or, Sinik Tagnailaq. This lake,” he said morosely. “A place where you don’t want to stay the night. Stay and something bad happens. We never did love the idea of a camp set here.”
Eddie said as we wrapped things up, “Why?”
“It goes back to the whaling years. Those New England whalers carried flus which decimated us. Back in 1870, a party of Iñupiat were coming back from the Barrow trading post, heading inland—infected but they didn’t know it. It hit them when they overnighted here. Later their bodies were found, scattered along the trail. The lake got blamed for causing the fever. Then the Navy built this cabin for oil geologists. But there was no oil, so it was abandoned until the scientists came. More bad luck.”
I shivered as the first drops fell, and envisioned a party of Eskimo men, women, and children camped by the lake, 150 years back, maybe a fire roaring. Then the first person started coughing, feeling feverish, and then the party tried to move out the next day, things getting worse, getting bad fast for people with no immunity to the whaler diseases . . . and the sick elders saying, Leave me here. I’ll slow you down. You’ll live if you leave me behind.
I said, “We wrap ’em up. We wear masks and gloves, even in the chopper. The bodies go to the hospital. We’ll do autopsies tomorrow, when we’re fresh.”
“Disinfect the chopper,”
said Eddie.
“Rescue squad does it all the time,” said Merlin.
“Anyone feels ill, after we get back, tell your people, call me right away,” I said. “No matter how late.”
As we loaded up, I asked Merlin, “Your cousin Clay. Any problems at home?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Anger issues? Debts? Psychological history? He was a veteran, right? Grudges? Money problems?”
“Plenty of men in town are veterans. I’ll have my detectives do the police work. Them. Not you, Joe. Thanks for coming. But you two stick to disease.”
The bodies lay covered with plastic.
The rain began pummeling us.
“We need to get going,” Merlin Toovik said.
• • •
WE LIFTED OFF. AS DUSK APPROACHED THE TUNDRA BELOW ROLLED OUT IN multiple variations. Light browns grew darker. Glassy lakes produced whitecaps. Grass bent sideways as sheets of rain slashed at the crowns.
A lone caribou, almost a shadow silhouetted in moving mist, looked up at the passing chopper. The glass of the cockpit was smeared wet, streaming rain.
I saw a single ATV below pulling a small four-wheeled wagon. A hunter drove. A small boy sat on the cart, both people in jackets, hoodies and stocking hats against the wet, heading toward Barrow, hauling fresh meat: probably caribou, bound for the hunter’s ice cellar, the fifteen-foot-deep pit in the permafrost dug behind many Barrow homes.
Like medieval monks looking up inside cowls, man and boy followed our progress, probably frowning. Everyone up here recognized the markings of the rescue chopper. If it was out, someone was injured, sick, or dead.
• • •
AS SOON AS WE LANDED—WHEN EDDIE AND I WERE ALONE IN OUR FORD truck—I called the admiral to tell him what had happened. He was angry that we’d disobeyed instructions.
“I told you not to get distracted.”
“Sir, you told me to use my judgment. We may be looking at something new here, exactly why we came.”
He wasn’t fooled. “Spare me, Joe. You went because of that big damn heart of yours. Perhaps you can tell me what I should say to Major General Wayne Homza when he demands to know why two thousand lawsuits have suddenly been filed by Barrow residents blaming every cough, sniffle, and flu on radioactivity that was dumped three hundred miles away from them, over sixty years ago.”
