Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  The fingers in those tubs were probably numb by now.

  At body temp 97F, the father seemed to pause, and I knew that inside, he’d gone into a pre-shiver, the body’s expectation of near convulsions to come.

  Fat Nazi doctor said something to skinny one, pointing to his own ears, then Dad’s ears, keenly observing, fascinated, probably saying something like, “Und now ze ears vill begin to hurt him!”

  At 88F, the doctors were looking at blood in a test tube. “Thicker blood,” Fatso probably remarked. “At zis temperature, ze blood thickens into natural oil.”

  By 87F, I knew from the reading, even oxygen was being sent from the outer surface of the bodies into the interior. The three victims were convulsing with shivers. Any air or warmth would be fleeing to the core.

  The father clapped his hands over his ears. He was probably trying to block out his jackhammering heartbeat.

  The woman moaning, pleading. Let my son out, at least!

  Tears streamed down the kid’s face, as he lifted both shaking arms to his parents. They could not help him. Fat, happy doctor took notes. Skinny doctor spoke to the boy, with a kind expression, as if reassuring him, as if any minute he’d give the kid a lollipop. Doctor with the limp just watched, left elbow cupped in right palm, right hand stroking chin. Hmm. Very interesting.

  The soldiers remained expressionless, on the side.

  At eighty-five degrees, freezing victims start to think they’re hot, not cold, as I now felt, lying in the snow. I had to get my parka off. I was burning up. But my fingers refused to grip the zipper head.

  Someone was looking down at me. I gazed up. At an eighty-five degree body temperature, I knew, people dying of cold actively hallucinate.

  The stranger said, in Jens’s voice, “I found your snowmobile, Joe. I gassed it up. Thanks for the loan.”

  He added, “Feeling chilly, guy? Wish me luck. Off to Canada!”

  The stranger—or hallucination, more likely—was gone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Major Edward Nakamura, USMC, sat on the right-hand front seat of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter as it raced south by southwest out of Barrow. It flew low. The aurora borealis had ended and a thick cloud cover had returned. The lights of the copter shone in an arc below, sweeping across a white blanket of unrolling, undulating tundra. Major Nakamura tried to batten down the rage and fear and consider what he needed to do.

  I hope that Joe is at that cabin.

  But the whole attempt to get there had the heavy feeling of too late. Five heavily armed Rangers rode behind. Add Nakamura, that made six. He settled back and felt the fury as a knotting in his neck and jaw, and a line of tension that made his back into a steel rod. His teeth hurt. His eyes throbbed. He could not stop flashing back to the way that General Homza’s adjutant, Major Garreau, had refused to listen when Eddie had burst into headquarters, trying to reach the general.

  “Your friend just attacked two Rangers,” Garreau had said.

  “Just let me talk to General Homza for a minute! He’ll explain! We made a deal!”

  “The general is busy. If you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a mass escape underway.”

  Homza was out on the ice, Garreau said. Homza was personally watching the last few yards of open space closed up out there. Homza was directing his field commanders. And after that he was talking to Washington, discussing the situation with the secretary of defense himself.

  “You’ll see him when he’s free,” Garreau said.

  And then, when Homza had finally walked in, exhausted, and spotted Nakamura in the glass room, he’d raised his eyes inquiringly at the adjutant, cocked his head to listen to Eddie’s tale, and as it came out Homza had slumped and looked blank for some moments, turned to the adjutant and said, simply, “Give him what he needs.”

  Eddie thinking, I need to take back the last hour that you just wasted. That’s what I need.

  Why had Homza kept the arrangement with Joe and Eddie secret? Maybe he wanted credit. Maybe he was playing it safe.

  Ten miles to go, Eddie Nakamura thought, eyeing the odometer, calculating distance backward since they’d lifted off from Barrow Airport, less than a half hour ago.

  If Joe isn’t there, if I figured this wrong, if I misread what he was telling me, I have no idea where he is.

  The pilot said, pointing, “Should be ahead!”

  There would be no lights to announce the place. They flew by instrument. The spotlights swept over snow and for a moment some animal was there, scurrying away, wolverine, looked like, nature’s mass of warm-blooded fury, a fierce creature but one that knew when to run, not fight, knew when to play it smart against bad odds.

  Eddie flashed to Homza’s face again, a quick flick to that countenance which, up until Eddie told the story, passed along Joe’s claims, had always seemed so sure. Eddie had seen the animation go out of it as the weight of realization hit. Homza probably knowing that he’d blown it. Knowing, if Joe was right, if Jens Erik was who they wanted, that many of the general’s steps until now had been blunders; the arrest of Valley Girl, the marginalization of Joe, the failure to realize a basic fact of the Arctic, that ice freezes, and then to not have enough troops to handle things when it did . . .

  Game over, General, for you.

  The pilot said, “That cabin has to be here. Where is it? We’re here, but everything looks like everything else. Wait! There.” He pointed.

  And there it was, in the floodlights, a burned-out wreck of what had been some dilapidated shack. A wooden hut. An escape for researchers. Lake number nine’s shelter, now a smashed-up mass of barely smoking charcoal, hissing as the last embers were smothered up by blowing snow.

  “I don’t see anyone,” the voice in Eddie’s earphone said.

  “Circle.”

  “I don’t see tracks.”

  “You wouldn’t, in this wind. Circle, I said.”

  The copter tilted and veered and they began a search pattern. Eddie’s heart beat loud and hard in his throat. Eddie heard the chatter of talk between the pilot and Barrow, and more talk coming in from Rangers out at sea, on ice, manning the new oceanside barrier. No one else could escape from Barrow anymore.

  Big deal. At least eighty people did.

  Now he was startled to spot the wreckage of a small plane, also burned, by the lakeside. He frowned, considered ordering the chopper to touch down, so they could continue looking for Joe on foot. If a plane was here, this was definitely where Joe had been heading.

  The pilot said, “I don’t think anyone’s here.”

  “Then who burned this place?”

  “I don’t know. Whoever did it is gone.”

  “Keep circling,” Eddie ordered. “I see smoke down there. This is fresh. Shut up and look for my friend.”

  • • •

  THEY SAW THE BODY TWO MINUTES LATER. IT WAS A MOUND HALF BURIED in blowing snow, an hourglass-shaped lump of white that ended in something dark, like fabric, the half-removed snowsuit. Eddie was the first one out of the chopper. He kept his sidearm out. He knelt by Joe’s side.

  “Uno?”

  No movement. No breathing. No rise and fall of chest. No warmth.

  “Oh, man. Uno!”

  Eddie thumped on the chest to get the heart moving. He thumped hard. He couldn’t figure out why the thermal suit was unzipped. And the hands. No gloves. Hypothermia victims get confused and take off their clothes. Eddie unzipped the jumpsuit further, tore off his balaclava, lowered his ear to the bone-white chest, above Joe’s heart. Eddie listening. Eddie sitting up and spitting out an order that the Rangers stop making noise, crunching around in the snow.

  He’s dead.

  No, wait.

  Do I hear something? Or do I just want to hear it?

  Faintly, faintly, he heard it.

  “Get him back! Get him in the
chopper! Now, now now!!!”

  • • •

  THE HALF-HOUR TRIP SEEMED LIKE IT TOOK A MONTH. RANJAY WAS WAITING at the hospital, where they landed. Ranjay telling Eddie to stand back, let him get close. Ranjay saying, as they wheeled Joe in, that friends do not operate on friends. That friends make mistakes when they do. That doctors should never work on good friends.

  “You’re a friend. I’m going in, too,” Eddie said.

  “You’re not working on him.”

  Eddie bulled up to the little Indian. Eddie’s face in Ranjay’s. Eddie wanting to punch the guy, except he saw, in those brown eyes, strength and determination. Eddie slumping. Eddie unable to speak. Ranjay turning and, with the emergency staff, rushing Joe into the operating room.

  Ranjay calling back to Eddie, “Come! Major! Come in and see!” Then, as if addressing a child, “But don’t touch.”

  • • •

  THEY INSERTED A LONG CATHETER INTO JOE’S ABDOMINAL CAVITY. THEY wheeled in saline solution, just salt water, but warm, and began the flush. It was like flushing a car radiator. The warm solution was supposed to raise his body temp, but not too fast.

  Eddie remembered a story. It was that a capsized boatload of Italian seamen had been rescued from the Atlantic, not from the ocean like the frigid one here, not iced over, but from waters that were only fifty degrees.

  The rescuers had carefully warmed the seventeen grateful victims in blankets and poured them coffee. The Italians had recovered nicely, quickly, in no way in as bad a shape as Joe. They stood up, unaided. They walked together to the ship’s mess. They were smiling and chatting. Within minutes, out of the blue, all seventeen collapsed and died. Heart attacks.

  Can’t warm up too fast.

  My best friend, Eddie thought, going back in memory. Uno and Eddie at college, in Massachusetts, in ROTC. Roommates. Eddie and Joe at Parris Island, competing to see who was the better Marine. Eddie winning the push-up competition, Uno winning on the obstacle course. Eddie in hand-to-hand combat. Uno, earning his monicker, Number One, during war games in the hills, capturing the general of the “Blue” team.

  You were always better at strategy than me, Joe.

  Eddie watched the monitors. They held steady. Joe’s limbs looked less waxy. The pulse rose a tiny bit, and so did Eddie’s hope. Ranjay ordered more saline solution brought in. Joe’s blood pressure was almost nonexistent. Eddie remembered all the piss-drenched clothes they’d cut away, all the sweat, bodily fluids lost in his body’s attempt to warm itself. Eddie saw cold blisters on Joe’s limp hands.

  Ranjay to Eddie, as they finished. “Now we wait, Major. He was badly injured even before the exposure. He needs a CAT scan. He’s got back injury. He’s got bumps on the front and back of his head. Major, even if he survives, we may need to do amputations.”

  “I understand, Ranjay. Christ.”

  “Let’s get some coffee.”

  “Ranjay, you’re a good guy. You’re an honorary Marine.”

  The little man beamed. But then he looked sad. His head wove side to side in the Indian mannerism. We must wait and see and hope for fate to be kind.

  “Tea for me, please,” Ranjay told the cafeteria girl.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The wedding started well but then things went sour. The ceremony was held in the small, white-steepled Methodist church in Smith Falls, the Massachusetts town in which I’d grown up. It was October, peak of New England leaf season, and the oaks, maples, and birches had lost their summer green and taken on crisp, bright hues: pumpkin orange, dazzling yellow, maroons in shades ranging from dried blood to the deep rich of an emperor’s cloak.

  Karen pulled up in a dogsled outside, through a shower of leaves, the huskies puffing as she stepped off the runner, dressed in a clinging white gown that showed her lithe body. I hate big gowns, the hoop kind, that make brides look like they stepped out of an Alabama antebellum ball. My parents smiled at us from the first pew. Behind them sat kids, still ten and eleven years old, with whom I’d attended school, and beside them an old drill sergeant from Parris Island, odd because he’d died of cancer. The admiral sat beside General Homza. It was a happy scene, with sunlight brightening the stained-glass windows. But then I saw that the scenes depicted on those windows were not from the Bible. Afghanistan didn’t show up in the Bible. Neither did a tarp-covered troop truck exploding. In the center window, each piece of colored glass in the mosaic showed a different aspect of the explosion: a shard of metal, a severed limb, roiling smoke.

  And the faces on that window—eyes turned toward heaven, fractured into Picasso-like angles—belonged to eight dead Marines, who I’d blown up. Their eyes were the color of sapphires and their helmets reflected the gold of the sun. I’d never met them. I’d seen photos. Depicted in glass, their eyes followed the reverend, as he took a step toward Karen and I.

  “Do you promise to lie, honor, and obey?” he said, smiling pleasantly.

  “It’s not a lie if you do it for your country,” I answered.

  Karen looked angry at that. Wrong answer. The faces in the pews, when I turned, were sad. Eddie sat in back, trying to tell me something. I heard the sled dogs outside, baying. The air in the chapel grew cold, and my fingers hurt, and I felt the brush of snow on my abraded face.

  Karen was walking off without me, out the church.

  “I can’t pronounce you,” said the reverend, and I realized that his voice had deepened and acquired a foreign accent. He still wore vestments but now he’d morphed into Jens Erik Holte. Jens holding a Bible. No, not a Bible, but an advertisement for an Arctic eco lodge.

  Jens said, “Lots to see!”

  I opened my eyes and saw white ceiling. I heard a roar which I recognized vaguely as fighter jets taking off. Through gauzy curtains a low, bright sun flooded in. My fingers really did hurt. They lay beneath clean covers. I turned my head on the pillow and saw what had to be another hallucination, because it was Admiral Galli, in a light gray suit and striped red-and-blue tie, sitting in a visiting chair a few feet away.

  The room smelled of tulips. Tubes ran into my arms. I held my hands in front of my face and saw stained wrappings. The pain was fiercest inside the bandages wrapping my right hand.

  “He’s awake,” Galli said.

  “I’m not, sir,” I said, in the dream. “I’m not awake if you’re here.”

  He stood. He nodded. I smelled the faint aroma of cigars that often came off the admiral. He said, softly, “Homza’s out. I’m back. The administration wants a face that reporters like. The quarantine ended. You’re awake, all right. You’re in Anchorage. Joe, do you remember telling us about Holte? The rabies? The ice cellar?”

  “Now I know I’m up, sir. You didn’t ask how I feel.”

  He smiled. His hand on my shoulder was light, reassuring. “You feel like shit, what’s to ask? And it’ll last awhile. CDC’s confirmed it, Joe, rabies not contagious. We found the vial in your parka, where you said it would be. But we still need to figure out where it came from. Colonel, you did a hell of a job.”

  I closed my eyes. I heard hospital machinery beeping behind me, heartbeat low, blood pressure could be better. I heard a cart squeak out in the hall. The door was open, and a man was weeping copiously somewhere beyond my range of vision. I smelled Lysol and boiled chicken, boiled string beans and packaged orange juice. The ubiquitous hospital meal. Chicken. The least-fortunate creature on the planet, designed for one purpose, slaughter.

  “Yeah, I did one hell of a job,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about Karen.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Joe, you’re going to have to testify on the Hill.”

  I opened them.

  “In secret. We’ve got half of Congress accusing us of a cover-up, hiding some weapons program, thanks to someone named Tilda Swann. We’ve got the other half wanting to double appropriations aga
inst terrorists. The quarantine’s over but what the hell happened?”

  I tried to think. My whole body was a mass of pain. I said, “What story are you putting out?”

  “That the rabies morphed naturally. That it was a rogue strain that just died out. CDC’s going along. Truth is, authorities in Yellowstone did find a strain that’s jumped fox to fox, without bites. So it’s possible that the disease could evolve. But our batch came from a lab.”

  “Jens will know the answer. Did you get him?”

  I was tired. Fading. The weeping in the hall subsided, and the beeping of the machinery grew low. Someone else came into the room, but they looked hazy and indistinct in sunlight. I closed my eyes. I was exhausted. I was too tired to wonder who was there.

  “He’s out again,” said Galli’s voice.

  The other voice said, “Did you tell him about his toes?”

  “When he’s better. One thing at a time. Merlin, are those damn reporters still downstairs?”

  • • •

  NEXT TIME I OPENED MY EYES THE ADMIRAL WAS GONE BUT MERLIN WAS there with Eddie. I was more alert and recognized the unmistakable roar of fighters, F22 Raptors taking off outside, possibly headed north to intercept Russian Bear Bombers. The bombers have started buzzing Alaskan air space recently. They’d stopped after the Cold War. They started again when oil extraction came up as an issue in the Arctic. The bombers never enter U.S. territory. They fly along the border, doing “exercises,” often at times when U.S./Russian relations sour elsewhere on Earth. Recently they’ve buzzed U.S. airspace more and more. I figured I was at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

  Merlin looked shy, an expression I’d not seen on him before. He seemed bigger in the small room, dressed in freshly laundered jeans and an ironed, button-up, lavender-and-white-striped shirt, bowhead buckle design, spotted seal vest, bolo tie in walrus ivory. Eddie wore a light blue dress shirt, tie in solid blue, matching dark blue jacket and charcoal trousers, sharply creased.