Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  No answer.

  “Captain?”

  “Fuck you,” the captain said.

  I hit the throttle and almost toppled off as the snowmobile lurched forward. In the left side-mirror two sorry-looking soldiers stood and brushed themselves off, staring at a disappearing Marine colonel who they regarded as a full-fledged enemy now.

  Pursuers would be coming. I prayed that no one would reach me until I found Jens. I did not know if the Wilmington had drones up looking for the sniper. The pain spiked again with the bumping and the lurching. It was everywhere. It was in my skull, chest, hands, and feet. It kept me alert. I let it fuel me. I was running on pain and hate.

  The early night sky was beautiful. Vega glowing. Polaris the jewel. But I would much rather have had clouds, no vision, no chance of the drone, no chance of a chopper.

  I followed the shallow indentations in the snow, left by Jens’s snowmobile, but they were dissipating.

  You need to get rid of the sat phone. You need to rip off the GPS. You can’t be carrying anything enabling them to track you.

  But I could not do that for a little while longer, because I had to call Eddie before jettisoning the equipment. And I had to get farther away before I could stop and make a call.

  The wind rose and the tracks disappeared, and I traveled after an invisible opponent.

  I navigated by intuition.

  Navigated, truth be told, by guess.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I looped out to sea and, at approximately the place I saw him turn, swung back toward land. The snow here was marked by a mass of crisscrossing tracks left by escapees. They all looked the same.

  I hit land again and turned south by southwest and gunned the engine. After ten minutes I judged myself far enough from the soldiers to take a few minutes to change into warmer clothing and take better inventory of what I’d stolen, what I could use.

  The thermal suit gave warmth instantly, as did the insulated gloves. The helmet cut down on peripheral visibility, but would lessen the abrasive scouring of wind.

  I also found a headlamp, which I affixed to the helmet, and some peanut butter–flavored PowerBars and a thermos which, when opened, gave off steam and smelled of coffee. I drank some for the caffeine jolt. But added awareness ratcheted up the pain.

  Also in the saddlebags was a small, plastic snap-up pouch containing a folded terrain map of the region; helpful, but not much since, to me, the geography here looked basically similar, its differences so subtle that an outsider would miss them. At night especially, there were no mountains or forest, trees or boulders. I could match the map to the GPS for a while, but that was risky. As long as I kept GPS functioning, a sat could find where I was.

  And there were lots of lakes.

  Too many. They call Chile the nation of lakes, and Minnesota the land of lakes, but both pale beside the North Slope, which seems more lake than land half the time.

  I strapped one M4 over my back, tied the other by bungee cord onto a saddlebag. I mounted up and the pain flared. The vista looked flat but, I knew from ATV experience, would not turn out to be flat at all. It would trick any rider with dips and falls and sudden ice mounds.

  Get going. I took a final glance at the stars. I checked the GPS and decided on the approximate route that would take me to the cabin that the Harmon party had never visited. I needed to call Eddie . . . but if I couldn’t let him know where I was, without mentioning specific coordinates, the call would be useless, or worse.

  In short, I needed a landmark that we both knew, and no other listener would know. Great.

  The lakes I rolled over were similarly long and thin. It would be easy to mistake one for another. The map, clipped to my handlebars, helped a little, and perhaps every once in a while some particular feature might stand out, give an extra hint of where I was.

  I headed south by southwest, into the void. I gambled that tracking me by satellite would take time. That the Rangers might not know I had a phone the general had provided, might not know whose stolen GPS unit I carried. And unlike TV shows, where satellites fly around ubiquitous in space, available for surveillance twenty-four hours a day, in real life they’re not always overhead. The entirety of Earth’s surface is not under permanent surveillance. Unless on a preset route, unless a sat is there at the exact time you need it, you have to send it if you want a snapshot from space.

  If the Rangers needed a shot now, it could take hours to get equipment in position. My gamble was that there was no satellite above me at the moment.

  At top speed a snowmobile can cover one hundred miles in an hour. But to go even fifty on this slick, deceptive surface would be suicide. I kept the speedometer at thirty-five, risked thirty-six, thirty-nine. Several times the Polaris threatened to tip over and crush me.

  I mushed over soft spots and skittered across a frozen lake that I’d not known was there until I was on top. The hard ride ended abruptly as the surface grew spongier and I knew I was on tundra again. Mist spread in the sky. The stars were getting dimmer. Uh-oh.

  Then, five minutes later I had a break. Coming up fast was the wrecked remains of a trio of small, lumpy, abandoned sod houses, built a century ago by Eskimos, long unoccupied, probably dens for foxes now.

  I’ve been here with Eddie.

  Basically the homes were dugouts with sod roofs. If you didn’t know what they’d been, you would mistake them for mounds. The entrances were low so you needed to crouch or crawl to enter. Whale jawbone “frames” supported the narrow entranceways. Crawling in, you risked a fox bite, and smelled the cloying wet-wool/fur and urine residue of centuries of wild visitors.

  The sod houses give me a fix for navigation, triangulation, a call.

  I eased up on the throttle. The snowmobile glided to a halt. I checked the location of the houses against the map . . . Got ’em . . . and looked up again at the stars I could still see. Three fixed points! Breathing hurt. So did my head. Here we go!

  I pulled out the sat phone and punched in Eddie’s number, fully aware that someone else might hear everything we said.

  I heard ringing.

  They might have him at the base, having arrested him. They might be grilling him now. They might have his phone. The ringing went on, four . . . five . . .

  “Hey, man,” Eddie said. “Where the hell are you?”

  Translation, if that was his opener: They’re grilling him. They told him to learn where I am.

  I said that I needed to speak to Homza, and Eddie responded, “So do I, man.” I told him that Jens had fled town and I pursued him. I said that Jens had spread the rabies. I spoke through Eddie to whomever monitored me.

  “Uno, tell me where you are? Are you hurt? Those Rangers said you were hurt. We’ll send a doctor for you.”

  Here we go.

  “Remember the place we found those dead foxes?”

  A pause. He was thinking, adjusting. There was only one place where this had happened, back in June. He said, remembering, slowly, “The foxes. Yeah.”

  “Well, let’s say, with fifty miles to go, I’m heading approximately ten degrees south by southwest from the tip of the fat monkey’s tail.”

  Thank you, Karen, for teaching me about the made-up constellations because I shared it with Eddie. He’d better remember that “the tip of the fat monkey’s tail” is the North Star.

  Eddie was silent. Then he said, “What?”

  “Ten degrees south, and thirty degrees from Flipper’s left eye, roughly.”

  Sound grew muffled. Someone’s hand was over his phone. Someone would be demanding of Eddie what I was talking about. Meanwhile, I approximated angles, triangulating, using the horizon’s circle as a compass, assigning values and degrees. It was up to Eddie to get to the general now. I could not waste any more time here.

  I thought, Why didn’t Homza tell his adjutant about our arrangement
? Why did he keep it to himself?

  “You hallucinating or what?” said Eddie. He knows!

  I clicked off, pulled the battery from the phone, stomped on the phone, and left it. With a groan of pain I mounted up. I wished I could jettison the GPS, too, but I was still too far from the lake, and destroying the GPS now was too risky. If the stars disappeared, once the sod homes were gone, without GPS there would be no way to triangulate. So I had to hope that the Rangers who had confiscated my particular GPS from a private citizen did not know which one it was.

  The pain seemed worse when I started off again. Each buck of the snowmobile a fist striking the inside of my head. You know what they say: A physician who has himself as a patient is a fool. But I was the doctor and I was the patient. I reviewed symptoms. The shots that had hit my body armor had caused massive bruising, at a minimum. The parka had cushioned my fall a little, and my shoulders had done the rest. The problem was the head injury, how bad it was, and how much worse it would get.

  I was running on adrenaline, grief, and rampant fury.

  And running out of all three.

  • • •

  RABIES FIGURED IN AS ONE OF MANKIND’S EARLIEST ATTEMPTS AT CREATING bioweapons. The disease entered military records in the fourth century B.C., when soldiers in India were advised to dip war arrows in the blood of rabid muskrats. “Anyone pierced by such a weapon will then bite ten friends, and they will bite and infect ten more,” the manual Arthashastra said.

  By 1500, the great Leonardo da Vinci sketched out a “rabies bomb,” and, in 1650, Polish General Kazimierz Siemienowic tried one, having his engineers mix “slobber from mad dogs” in clay artillery shells.

  It didn’t work. No enemy caught rabies.

  But that didn’t stop the experiments. During World War One both sides worked overtime on designing poison gasses and disease bombs, including devices to inflict rabies. By the Cold War, both U.S. and Soviet scientists worked on creating a contagious, fast-acting strain. The reasoning was that even if rabies remained inefficient against humans, due to spread problems, it could be used against cattle, to damage an enemy’s food supply.

  And now I had a vial in my pocket, and inside it I was pretty sure I carried a new lab strain of rabies, which had been spread intentionally, first to a four-person research team on the tundra, and then to innocent people in town.

  But why?

  How far off was lake number nine? Fifty miles? Sixty? That seemed like months or years away.

  My face was going numb. Snow blew inside the windshield. I felt sand-like granules between my teeth. My skin burned beneath the balaclava. My lungs ached with each breath and I wondered if we could add frostbite to the mix. The Polaris threw up geysers of snow, where wind had it piled, and in other spots, rubbed raw by wind, I bumped over dead, matted brown grass.

  Going uphill, the front of the snowmobile rose, and I leaned ahead, adding weight. Going downhill, I downshifted, sat back.

  I heard an erratic clicking and realized it was the engine. Something was wrong in there. But I kept going.

  I checked the odometer. I’d traveled only thirty-one miles.

  I started to see things that weren’t there. I saw a gigantic wolf running beside the snowmobile. Ten minutes later I saw the same wolf, sitting, watching me pass.

  I saw a mass of office buildings ahead, tall ones, white, at least ten or eleven stories high, except they turned out to be more small mounds when I reached them.

  Seventeen miles.

  Eight miles to lake number nine.

  Six. The clacking noise worsened.

  The stars were gone. A fine mist thickened the sky, hung twelve feet above the tundra.

  I passed over fresh bear tracks, huge ones. Monster animal. Maybe not a polar bear. Maybe one of those big hybrids, half grizzly, half polar, that have been showing up as the species mix.

  I was losing vision.

  A good soldier knows when he has to stop for a break, like it or not. I stopped.

  • • •

  ONE MILE TO GO, MORE OR LESS. I ATE THE POWERBAR, AND DRANK STILL-warm coffee, sitting in the snow. Then I destroyed the GPS, shot it, actually, while the wind was keening. I was the Spanish explorer Cortes burning his warships when he reached Mexico, so his troops had to move forward. No retreat allowed, soldiers. No way back now, except by luck.

  I turned the key and the engine roared, coughed, and sputtered. The snowmobile jerked ahead ten feet and died. The gas gauge read half full. I checked the tank.

  Out of fuel.

  Had there been spare fuel stored in the saddle bags? Nope.

  Well, it’s probably a good idea not to get closer with the snowmobile anyway. If he’s there, he’d hear it. This way, I’ll surprise him.

  Which made me laugh. Some surprise.

  I hooked the M4 over my shoulder, and shoved extra ammo clips into my parka pockets. I made sure the carbine was ready to fire. The M4 was a good weapon, and normally I could hit a target with one from three hundred yards away.

  I advanced like a limping ninety-year-old into the wind, head down, scanning my field of vision, which extended a good solid two hundred feet ahead. The snowmobile disappeared. Then so did direction. But I remembered what an Iñupiat friend had taught me last year on an Arctic mission, and it was that in wind, you can use sastrugi, lines created by wind on snow, for direction.

  For the past hours I’d been cutting crosswise through line after line of jagged sastrugi. I continued to cut the lines on foot. Either the cabin would show up soon, or I’d simply wander off into the void.

  Suddenly I was knee deep, struggling through drifts that sucked me back. The earth’s gravitational field grew stronger. Invisible hands grabbed my boots. I discarded the helmet to improve visibility, but what I saw was darkness. Then abruptly the sky cleared a little.

  And then I saw the light in the sky.

  It was vague at first, more hint than reality, and that became a yellow glow that morphed into a searchlight. It flew low. It flew fast. It flew in from the direction of the coast, Uh-oh.

  My first thought was drone, but then I saw the running lights and realized it was a small plane or chopper.

  Did Eddie come through? Or is it the Coast Guard?

  As the craft closed, I saw that the running lights indicated a fuselage shorter than the borough rescue squad’s Bell. The light didn’t move as it would if it was a chopper searchlight, either. The rescue guys had a King Air prop plane, but no skis on it. Whatever was coming was too big for a drone.

  And this plane was not searching. No beams or criss-crossing floodlights. No flying in a grid or circular pattern. The craft made a beeline ahead.

  This was not a craft sent by Eddie, the general, or Merlin and the North Slope Rescue Squad.

  This thing was sent to pick up Jens Erik Holte.

  And that was when this destination for him—rendezvous—finally made sense. And so did the sniper shots back in Barrow, that had started the mass escape from town.

  You waited for the right moment, the perfect build-up of rage, fear, and claustrophobia. Then you calmly triggered the break, used that as cover to get away. You’ll load your snowmobile on the plane. You’ll be one more person swallowed up by the tundra, never found, a mystery.

  Who the hell are you?

  The plane made a quick approach and then it lowered smoothly and touched down on the iced surface of the lake. As it closed on shore I recognized the silhouette of a Canadian-built Twin Otter, hardiest craft in the High North. It could carry fifteen to eighteen passengers, cargo, or both.

  Nobody I knew on the North Slope flew a Twin Otter. It had the range to have come from western Canada, across the border. It could have come from Fairbanks or Wainright. Hell, if it flew low, it could have even originated in Russia, across the Bering Strait.

  As it reached shore,
and powered down, I saw, in its floodlights, the figure of Jens Erik Holte standing and waving. Friends! The outline of a snowmobile sat beside him, like a trusted horse. Beyond that, in the beam flashed the small, rickety cabin, barely any shelter at all in winter, a concave structure the size of a multi-seated outhouse, even less inviting than the cabin where the Harmon bodies had been found, and a structure that, if the eco lodge went through, was scheduled to soon be destroyed.

  Then soon became now. Something bright and orange whooshed into life on the side of the cabin. No, not on the side, inside, in a window. It was fire, I realized, from the sinewy tentacles of light, the sense of heat coming off the thing, just from vision, not even feel.

  Not just a rendezvous, Jens. Something more.

  Destroying the cabin! That’s what you came to do! You waited for the plane to arrive, and set the fire.

  I made sure that my M4 was ready to fire. The pain in my head exploded, seemed to expand out and threaten to crack through my skull. I was bleeding in there. I trudged forward on a foot that barely functioned, on a fool’s errand, a fool’s revenge, and I suffered a fool’s punishment, pain so pervasive that was the only thing keeping me moving.

  The cabin would burn for twenty minutes and be obliterated and Jens’s mission would be accomplished! I imagined that plane flying away again, disappearing into the void.

  And then, months from now, a construction company would land here to wipe away the charred remains and burrow into the permafrost with augurs, massive mechanical screws, and up would spring a fine, new hotel, and probably, in the spring, workers would discover a mummified U.S. Marine colonel under snow, maybe half devoured by wolves. Or maybe no one would find the colonel. He would join the centuries-old parade of explorers, missionaries, and scientists who had, for one reason or another, been swallowed up by the Arctic void.

  In the firelight I saw figures jumping down from the open door of the plane, spreading out, military guys, wary figures, one bulky-looking man glided into the light for a moment. He was dressed entirely in black. Black parka. Black furred hat. He carried an automatic weapon with a long banana clip, a bullpup or AK.