by James Abel
Soldiers moved between huts. Smoke whirled from stovepipe vents. Someone approached Hess and told him that sleeping arrangements were changing. All the civilians would sleep in two huts, or in town, if they had friends there. Soldiers needed the other huts.
My fists were clenched. My jaw throbbed. I felt blood coursing in my arteries, trying to burst out; a fury that was pure and directed and craved outlet. I was filled with the rage of a man who had, through his pride and maneuverings, killed his future.
In our hut I retrieved one of two F-drive copies I’d made of Kelley’s diary files, and gave it to Hess. He didn’t see me shove the extra one in my pocket. He probably saw the spittle that I made sure hung from a corner of my mouth. Joe Rush, half drunk, in a rage.
A rabbit’s foot. A talisman. An answer, I hoped.
If Homza came through on his promise, I’d be transferred off base—suspended from the investigation.
You’ll be alone, General Homza had warned me.
Well, I was already alone. I was more alone than I’d known possible.
Watching Hess drive off, I spoke softly, out loud, to thin air, to whoever had killed her. Who, I now believed, had wiped out Clay Qaqulik and the Harmon family, and then eight others in town.
“Come and get me,” I said.
SIXTEEN
The first quarantine death occurred three days later. It was not from rabies.
Whynot Francis, hunter, father of three, whaling captain, stood twelve feet beneath the earth in his ice cellar, behind his one-story Barrow home, that morning, enraged at the soldiers who had sealed off the town; at the growing fear, at the lines of panic-stricken people flooding the hospital, coming in with any symptom at all; normal coughs, normal aches, normal fevers, imaginary pains. Everyone waiting, holding their breath, waiting for something terrible to occur.
They will not keep me here, he thought.
Whynot was a stocky, balding, pigeon-toed man, plain faced, with a bowlegged walk. He had a masters degree in geology from the University of California, and worked for the Iñupiat-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, advising the board on which tribal land could be leased to outsiders, which should be retained.
Whynot took an annual spring trip each year to Philadelphia, where his college-age daughter was an English major at Penn. His wife was an anthropologist, who studied the psychology of nonnative scientists who came to the Arctic.
That morning Whynot considered the hacked-off chunks of raw seal, musk ox, and caribou around him—and a diminishing supply of bowhead. It not only fed his family and in-laws, much of it went to the old folks’ home, the Presbyterian church, and to Uncle Glenn and Aunt Flo, after Glenn broke his leg in July.
There was not enough food. Whynot’s anger crested.
“We’re going out. To hell with the soldiers,” he called up to the four faces peering down at him through the wooden trapdoor opening. Above that was thick fog.
The cellar was fifteen by ten feet. Its permafrost walls gleamed with ice. Permafrost went down eight hundred feet in Barrow. Many homes had these cellars. Whynot’s meat lay in piles, not neatly cut as in a butcher shop, but in hacked-off chunks, ribs rimed with frozen blood, white bones protruding, ice crystals coating it, nature’s freezer burn.
Whynot climbed up the aluminum ladder. Up top waited his two favorite cousins, Lewis and Aqpayuk, his brother-in-law, Edward, and his best boyhood pal, Walter Aiken, who had played tight end for the Barrow Whalers state champ high school football team when Whynot was quarterback.
Whynot told the others, “I served my country in Iraq. I fought for the United States. These soldiers have no right to keep us here.”
Three of them nodded agreement but Edward looked nervous. He was a shy, heavyset, kind man whose bad eyesight required the use of thick-lensed glasses. He tended to sweat when nervous, and he was sweating now. He was a reliable and highly efficient crew member.
Edward said, doubtfully, “That general said the Coast Guard will stop boats from going out.”
“We’ll go the long way around. The ships won’t see us in the fog.”
Whynot kissed his wife, Violet, good-bye and made sure his eighteen-foot-long powerboat was secured in its hauler to his Durango. He loaded the whaling dart gun, harpoon, and whale bombs. The crew piled in and they bumped through semi-deserted streets toward the beach. Normally small boats were launched from a protected point, a small cove north of the old Navy base. But the road was blocked, so Whynot figured he’d just back the rig up in town, onto the black beach.
Almost all the soldiers were out at the barricades. So no soldiers spotted the truck hauling the boat.
Bowheads were enormous compared to the small aluminum outboard boats. Normally this time of year, scouting crews would go out, range around as far as thirty miles away, and report back to Barrow by radio. When the migration began, all the other crews would go out, too.
But all radio reception was jammed just now. Whynot knew that if he got lucky today, if he spotted whales, his crew would be alone.
The whales were much, much bigger than the little boats. Normally several boats would haul a floating carcass home. Whynot’s elders had told him to go for the young ones, as they are plumper. Bowheads could live for over two hundred years. Some had been harvested with harpoons in their hides dating from President Andrew Jackson’s day.
“Cold,” Whynot told Edward and Aqpayuk, in the cab with him, as he backed onto the beach. “I haven’t felt cold like this, this time of year, ever.”
“The sea will freeze soon,” said Aqpayuk, a backhoe driver.
“The whales must be coming,” said Edward.
“If this cold settles in for a few more days, soon we can ride our snowmobiles away, around the soldiers.”
Edward said, as they backed the boat into the water, “The general said the quarantine might end soon.” Meaning, Let’s wait and not go out today.
“No! The ocean will be solid by then. No hunt!”
Whynot’s friend Walter guffawed from the cramped backseat of the extended cab. He was a good spotter, an alcoholic who sometimes disappeared for weeks on Nome’s Front Street, its row of bars. He’d fly off. Later, someone would get a phone call. Someone else would go fetch Walter, and bring the sick man home.
“Once the whales pass, they are gone,” he said.
Edward kept at it, as they bounced off in a thick fog. “The general said the Coast Guard has a chopper, snipers.”
But any reference to threats hardened resolve. Lewis, a teacher at the high school, growled, “The Whaling Commission. The duck in.”
These were references to other times that outsiders had imposed their will on Barrow. The International Whaling Commission, which regulated global whale hunting, had ordered it all to stop in the 1970s, when scientists said the species was on the edge of extinction.
“Only six hundred left, they said,” Lewis said. “We said there were more. The commission said we were wrong. Turned out there were thousands of bowheads. The ban was lifted. If we would have gone along, hunting would have stopped.”
Walter agreed. “And the duck in. Those federals said we couldn’t hunt ducks. Too many ducks shot down south, by sport hunters. We didn’t listen. We eat those ducks. We killed what we needed and, together, took the ducks to their offices and dared them to arrest us. We were too many. Civil disobedience worked. It will work now.”
“What’s that?” interrupted Aqpayuk, quietest man in the crew, shielding his eyes, gazing west. They’d left the fog area. They were in the clear. He gazed in the direction of the Coast Guard ship, which was not in view.
“Where?”
“That speck.”
“It’s a drone!” announced Edward.
Their parkas were powder blue. The boat was white. Whynot manned the steering console. To hell with the drone, he thought.
Despite the speck growing closer in the sky, Whynot felt a surge of excitement. Hunting!
The drone—it looked like a big model plane—came closer and began circling as they reached an area of slush, and began powering through, rocking as the hull made contact with more solid area. The drone flew about a hundred feet up. Whynot pushed the throttle forward. The boat surged ahead. The drone fell back but sped up. The boat—now more than a mile out—hit a completely ice-free area and reached more turbulent waters where the Chukchi Sea met the Beaufort. The drone stayed with them, like a prison searchlight tracking an escape.
Whynot moved the steering wheel left to right, left and right, zigzagging to see what the little drone did.
It adjusted.
“I don’t like that thing,” Edward said.
“Do you think it is armed?” asked Aqpayuk.
The seas grew calmer as they left the junction of currents. Glass. Perfect for hunting. The whales, if they were out, could come up at any time. They could be five miles from shore or thirty. The men started to see solid ice bits. Suddenly a message came over channel six, the international channel. They’d passed beyond the area being jammed.
“This is the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Wilmington to the boat which has just left Barrow. Please turn around.”
“Well, it was a good try. Let’s go home,” said Edward.
Walter snorted. Lewis asked, from the prow, “How long can that thing stay in the air anyway?”
“I’ll shoot it,” said Walter, hefting his rifle.
Whynot told him to put the rifle down. Destroying property was not something he wished to do. “It will go away,” he said, although he was starting to doubt this.
The radio started up again. “This is the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Wilmington to the boat which has just left Barrow. You are violating quarantine. You are ordered to turn back. Please acknowledge.”
Whynot mimicked the tone. “‘Please acknowledge.’”
They rode along like this for a while, the drone sometimes dipping, sometimes making a wrong move but adjusting, sometimes disappearing into low mist but reemerging. The ice bits became more numerous. The whole sea was starting to freeze. Edward ducked his head, as if that would make him invisible. Whynot eyed the thing. Walter gave it the finger. Aqpayuk said that back in Barrow, probably lots of people knew they had gone out. They’d be on landline phones. “Hey! Did you hear! Whynot’s crew went out!!!!”
This gave Whynot more resolution. Iñupiat means “the real people” and the people were with him, urging him on.
Edward groaned. “Look! Here comes the helicopter.”
This time the thing in the sky was bigger, red, coming fast, a swiftly moving bubble.
Edward said, “You think there’s a sniper on board?”
Walter scoffed, “What are they going to do, shoot us?”
“I heard those snipers are trained to shoot out engines on boats. I read it in Parade magazine. They clip on a harness, hang out the door. They shoot up drug boats.”
“Drug boats?”
“Yeah, those fast-moving ones—faster than us—that come up from Colombia, heading for Mexico, with cocaine.”
Whynot was outraged. “You’re comparing us to a cocaine boat?”
“I’m just saying the snipers are good.”
Whynot barked, “You’re saying that whaling—our families have been whaling for a thousand years—is like selling cocaine!?”
“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” said Edward as the little drone veered off, made a wide U-turn, summoned back toward its launch point. It passed the incoming chopper. One craft grew smaller, the other larger.
So Whynot increased the zigzagging. His anger was cresting. That these people would barricade his town! That they’d treat citizens like prisoners! That they’d send a sniper to try to stop him from whaling! That they did not even send vaccine to cure people of a disease they claimed was fatal!
“We should give up,” counseled Edward.
Walter and Aqpayuk didn’t say it, but Whynot could see from their bland expressions that they now agreed. And his own more logical side said that perhaps it was time to give up. But his fury grew. He did not want to back down. Perhaps if he pushed this confrontation a bit longer that red helicopter would turn around.
Except it wasn’t turning. It was getting lower, and now, looking up, Whynot saw the door was open and someone was harnessed to the side, one boot on the runner, and the person was positioning a rifle of some sort, aiming at the boat.
“It’s a girl,” Aqpayuk said in wonder.
“A girl!”
Those who would survive today would learn later that the sniper had been trained at the Guard’s facility in Jacksonville, Florida. Her name was Gail Mullen. She was twenty-five years old. She’d proved her marksmanship several times over during Coast Guard drug interdiction patrols off Panama. There, during 2 A.M. chases in the Pacific, against boats moving twice as fast as Whynot’s, she’d brought her .50-caliber rifle to bear on an engine, and, after drug runners ignored warnings, put a round into that engine, made the boats stop, the crews give up. She’d trained to shoot out engines, not to hurt people.
She was a little nervous this time, though, because she knew that the people below were not drug smugglers, but just whalers. These men had not been confined to town because they were evil, but because they might be ill. Gail Mullen hated her job at that moment. The boat below cut right, and left. The figures in baby-blue parkas looking up at her. No drug bales aboard. Just five guys.
Gail heard her pilot over the loud-hailer, urging the whaling crew to change course, using information he’d been supplied with from town. “Captain Whynot Francis, please turn around.”
Below, Whynot grew furious at the mention of his name! The government knew everything about everybody! The use of his name was supposed to make him feel small against their hugeness, make him back down because just by saying his name they were telling him that they knew who his family was, where he lived, they knew his history. He’d learned in college that in some parts of the world, primitive people never reveal their real names to outsiders. They believe that if you know someone’s name, you have power over them.
Whynot saw that this was true. He was an unimportant asterisk to those in that chopper. Those who wanted to stop a four-thousand-year-old hunt.
He told himself to stop, turn around, Edward was right.
He pushed the throttle ahead.
At that moment two things happened. The first was that the copter hit an air pocket and dipped as Gail Mullen pulled the trigger. The second was that Whynot swung the wheel left. In a fraction of a millisecond, the object in the rifle sight stopped being an outboard engine, and became a man.
The bullet slammed into Whynot’s chest with force enough to knock over a man ten times his size. He went over the side, into the freezing water. The crew thought the shooter was going to fire again. Aqpayuk ducked. Walter ran for the steering console. Edward grabbed the gaff, already looking over the side to where Whynot floated facedown in the sea, a spreading mass of red around him.
The boat, released from human control, began swinging in a wild arc, bounced off a piece of ice just as Walter got it under control, and powered down, gliding toward his captain.
Aqpayuk stood up, holding up his hands, like a bank robber caught by police.
Walter, calling Whynot’s name, brought the boat beside Whynot’s body.
Edward roared at the chopper, “You shot him!”
The chopper hovering. The body starting to sink until Edward gaffed it, like a dead whale.
The sniper in shock up there.
The word—a shooting death—to spread in town when the boat returned.
They killed Whynot Francis! They shot him down like a dog! They’re going to kill all of us! They said vaccine would come and they l
ied!
SEVENTEEN
It got worse in town after that, fast. Deep winter arrived early that night. A November-type freeze slammed the coast in mid-October, as news of the accidental shooting death spread. A cloak of ice descended upon the tundra, wire, soldiers stamping to keep warm out there.
Before Whynot’s death, some residents had brought food out to the wire for soldiers. That stopped. Some citizens, a few, veterans mostly, had acknowledged passing patrols with waves of the hand. That stopped, too. A sullen rage gripped the city, a sense of building fury.
General Homza considered sending Rangers house to house, to seize firearms. Merlin and the mayor talked him out of it. Shooting will start if you do.
Previously I’d thought of Arctic seasons in terms of color, white winters, floral summers. Winter was feel. At twelve below zero skin became paper. At thirty below, outerwear did, too. Oxygen was fragile. Breath solidified inside your nose. Teeth hurt. Light had substance. Earth was Pluto, so far from sun that heat was misnomer, legend, memory, grail.
“Hold still, Chase. This will hurt.”
The nine-year-old boy looked scared, watching the hypodermic. His mother carried a sleeping infant on a sling, on her back. The boy made no sound as the rabies vaccination went in, from a supply—two hundred fresh doses—that arrived that morning. I’d been assigned to the airport, where twenty children stood fretfully in line, in the terminal. The room was unnaturally quiet. Most adults present glared at me. I felt them blaming me, the Army, the general, Washington, D.C., for the outbreak.
Making everything even harder was the fact that a preventative rabies regimen, for those who may have been exposed, was four vaccinations over a two-week period.
Eddie was at the hospital, examining anyone coming in with fevers, aches, possible early signs of rabies. We took blood. We were off the criminal investigation, separated so that Amanda Ng and Raymond Hess could question us one at a time, which they did at least once a day. Back in D.C., Ng had told me, our old boss, Admiral Galli, was being grilled to see if he was hiding anything about the origin of the disease.
