Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  “What happened to you?” I said, taking in the outfit.

  “The admiral paraded me before the governor,” Eddie said. “The governor wants details. So does the world. Lotta nervousness out there, Joe, as in: Will this thing come back?”

  “Tell me details.”

  “Bottom line, we don’t know! Ranjay saved you. Brought you back. It was touch and go for a while, but we airlifted you out when you stabilized. You’ve been here for a week.”

  Merlin hung back, shyly, out of character for him. He was a quiet man, but he was not shy. Eddie tilted his head at Merlin, brows up, as if to say, Tell him. Merlin pulled a chair close. “Eddie told me about your deal with Homza. You’re a hell of an actor, Joe. You convinced me not to trust you. What can I say?”

  “I need to tell you that I called Homza when the breakout happened. To ask him to stop people from leaving Barrow. I tried to stop it.”

  Merlin chewed that over. “I’m fine with that. You did what you had to do. You were trying to stop the spread. If it had been contagious, if those people had reached other villages, only God knows what would have happened. We alerted them, too. A couple of snowmobiles reached Wainright, but they were held up. Later choppers brought them back. No charges filed. Enough is enough.”

  “Thanks for understanding.”

  “I owe you, Joe. Lifetime offer.”

  “In that case, one of you tell me about this,” I said, raising my bandaged, throbbing left foot.

  My whole body hurt and the hammering was worst at the extremities; right hand, left foot. I was familiar with the sort of constant pounding that came from serious bruising. But this sharp burning was one I’d never felt before.

  Eddie let out a deep breath. He said, “Who needs all ten toes, right? Like the appendix. Eight toes work fine. Hell, couple of tips gone. Big deal.”

  I glanced down at my feet, lumps under the lightweight white hospital blanket.

  “Two toes on the left foot, Joe. Little therapy, few weeks of new moves, you’ll be dancing again.”

  “I can’t dance now.”

  “See what I mean? This will improve things.”

  Truth was, I couldn’t believe that they’d saved me at all. I remembered my brief conscious time in the snowbank as a cold dark, a dark that surpasses anything living, a sensation that—if you have a choice, if you can trade a toe or two to keep it away, seems worth it. I would not have thought previously that the loss of a couple of toes could seem small, but compared to the enormity of what had happened, and what I’d lost, they were beside the point. They were not the point at all.

  “Eddie, tell me about Jens.”

  He nodded and swiveled back in the hospital chair and came back with an attaché case, opened it and extracted eight by ten magnified aerial photos. The first showed the Alaska pipeline, the lifeline flowing north-to-south from Prudhoe Bay, atop the North Slope, to Valdez, in the south. Not so long ago, 20 percent of America’s oil flowed through that pipe. These days it ran one-third full. Land-based oil was drying up. That’s why Dave Lillienthal at Longhorn wanted to drill offshore, where they’d estimated lay several billion barrels of crude.

  But I understood that Eddie’s showing me this photo just now had nothing to do with fuel. He was showing me a border, which Jens would have had to cross if he wanted to reach Canada.

  “You stopped him at the pipeline?”

  “We spotted him there.”

  He’d avoided a direct answer. I saw a shot of a snowmobile heading out of the left side of the frame, churning snow, toward the pipeline. Next the snowmobile was zigzagging, trying to evade whoever was above. It was like watching a silent film frame by frame. The snowmobile stopped. A figure crouched beside it. Yellow bursts, shots, erupted from the muzzle of the rifle. This last photo had been taken at a steep angle. Now the chopper pilot was trying to evade.

  Eddie said, “Homza had the pipeline manned as soon as he got your message. There were already troops there, beefed up because of the quarantine. I’d told Homza that Jens might be headed in that direction.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “You. It was clear that you hadn’t dragged those bodies into the fire. Someone else did, so there was another survivor. We knew you were after Jens. We knew whose snowmobile you’d stolen, and it wasn’t there. So I figured Jens was running, he’d taken yours.”

  I nodded. The logic was right on.

  Eddie continued, “The police had been alerted to watch for incoming at the seven villages. He didn’t show up. Airports closed. No roads to block. Everyone cooperating for a change because no one wanted a contagious disease spreading. So where was he? He had to be heading east.”

  I saw it as he described it, and picked up the thread. “You checked and found that the Twin Otter hadn’t originated from anywhere in Alaska. You figured the plane had come in low, over a border. What did he tell you when you got him? Tell me what you learned when you caught Jens.”

  Eddie blew out air and sat back and the posture and expression gave me an answer. The next photo showed a black-clad figure lying in the snow, left arm thrown back, rifle nearby, dark blood by the head. He looked like a dead man half trying to make a snow angel. I felt a hard, angry knot form inside. They’d not talked to Jens at all.

  “They shot him?”

  “He shot himself.”

  “Then who was he, Eddie?”

  Merlin sighed. Eddie stood up in agitation. “We don’t know. No ID on any database from fingerprints or DNA. Nothing from national security. Dental records, zilch. Documents, immigration, forget it. That coast up there is the most porous entry point in the country. There’s no customs agent on the entire North Slope. The FBI checked back. So did Amanda Ng and Hess. He didn’t come from where he said, even in America. So far, he’s a total blank.”

  A hollow frustration filled my belly. “What about the bodies pulled from the fire? Prints? Clothing? Anything?”

  “Burnt up. Teeth smashed. Fillings generic. What I want to know is why, if he’d escaped, he wasted time going to that cabin? He could have reached Canada if he headed there from the get-go. What was at the cabin?”

  “Whatever was there isn’t there anymore.”

  A sudden stabbing in my leg made me shift position, and the move shoved photos off the bed so they separated and drifted onto the floor. There they lay, clues without answers, dead men, charred sites.

  “We have nothing then,” I said, bitter.

  “No, One. You found the vial, which we took from your pocket. You enabled them to end the quarantine. You found rabies. All Jens had to do when he wanted to infect someone was stroll over to the supermarket and put a few drops in a food. If it wasn’t for you, it would have worked. The phony outbreak would have ended. We all would have gone home.”

  A pretty red-haired nurse appeared. She told Eddie and Merlin that they had to leave. She said I needed rest. She said they could come back in a few hours.

  “We’ll be nearby,” Eddie said.

  Merlin said, “Eddie sleeps in the hall, Colonel. He won’t leave here.”

  When they were gone, the nurse fussed over me and gave me more orange juice and said I needed fluids and said that I must be important because of all the reporters downstairs and all the VIPs who kept calling and asking how I was, telling the doctors to treat me like royalty. She said that yesterday night, when she stopped at a bar after work, a reporter from a Los Angeles–based rag sheet, Creeps and Celebs, had offered to buy her dinner and slip her a thousand dollars to take a couple of photos of me in bed.

  She said, “I turn on the TV and every channel says something different happened. What did happen, sir?”

  I’m going to find out.

  • • •

  “LET’S GO OVER IT ONE MORE TIME,” SAID AMANDA NG AS HESS TOOK notes. “I know you’re tired. I really appreciate this.
Did Jens . . . the man who said he was Jens . . . did Jens ever mention anything about the Mideast, or a connection with a foreign terrorist group?”

  “I told you. No.”

  “Domestic, then. There are several groups in rural Alaska that concern us.”

  “He didn’t mention any connections.”

  “You said that the men who got out of the plane were speaking Russian.”

  “No, I said I thought it was Russian. Jens said it was Russian. I don’t speak Russian. It could have been something else.”

  “Did Jens ever say anything to lead you to believe that whoever did this intended to do it again, elsewhere?”

  “No.”

  “Did he make even any casual mention of another U.S. location, even in passing?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever get the impression that this infection in Barrow was a kind of test run?”

  “Test run?”

  “You know, try it out in one place, do it in another.”

  “What’s the point of a test run? If you have an infectious agent and you use it, the whole world knows it instantly. Test run? It wasn’t a test run. He told me what it was.”

  “You believe him?” Hess said. Apparently Hess had doubts.

  “My turn to ask a question. You said last time that you’ve put out Jens’s photo on TV. Anyone recognize him?”

  “We’re getting a lot of calls, but no. It’s my father who disappeared! It’s Uncle Ed, the pervert! It’s the slob who lived next door and used to play loud Irish music!”

  “What about the eco lodge connection?” I said.

  Hess sighed. Ng took it more seriously. “There isn’t any that we can see. Why? Did Jens mention the eco lodge?”

  “No, but he was there! I’m tired. I need to sleep.”

  • • •

  “YOU’RE LOOKING BETTER.” BRUCE FRIDAY BEAMED. “WE ALL CAME TO SEE you. Happy birthday!”

  They’d flown down on the morning 737 from Barrow, and they were in the room when I was wheeled back from physical therapy. They’d brought a lemon cake. Deirdre McDougal lit candles. I blew them out, watched smoke drift before their faces. Calvin DeRochers lugged in a suitcase. He was headed back to Arkansas when the visit was over, to begin the next year of planning for a return.

  “Calvin expects to hit it big next year,” he said.

  Mikael Grandy brought a gift-wrapped book, The Eskimo and the Oil Man, about Barrow. He looked incomplete when he wasn’t holding a camera. He stayed back, didn’t talk much. I’d heard that HBO had accelerated the release of his film. It would be coming out in ten days, while Barrow still filled headlines across the world.

  Mikael was booked on an evening flight to New York, with a stop in Minneapolis.

  “Sure you don’t want some New York bagels?” he said.

  “I’m sure.”

  The McDougals brought a care package from the North Slope Wildlife Department; reindeer sausage, caribou stew, and an assortment of homemade fruit pies that we convinced the nurse to store in a staff break-room refrigerator down the hall. They all had business in Anchorage. The trip was not just to see me. McDougal would attend one more Arctic symposium to be held this week at the Cook Hotel. Bruce would speak on “The Great Polar Bear as the Arctic Warms.”

  “All this attention in Washington might benefit our effort to protect these magnificent creatures,” he said.

  Merlin was in town for a meeting of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, and a final vote on whether to support Longhorn’s offshore drilling proposal. Dave and Deborah were back in Anchorage for the year. Leon Kavik had come to scout the University of Alaska campus. The mayor was visiting his sister, who worked in the office of the lieutenant governor.

  “Brought you some Tito,” said Dave Lillienthal, leaving a gift-wrapped package by the window, with a red ribbon on top. He winked. “I told the nurses it’s books.”

  Tilda Swann pushed to the front of the group.

  She looked good in leg-hugging jeans, sharply toed dark leather boots, and a turtleneck beneath a fawn-colored jacket. She wore a silk scarf, moss-green, which highlighted her red hair. Brashness still marked her, but her voice was toned down, at least at first.

  She said, “I came to say how sorry I am for your loss, Colonel.” But her voice was stiff, her eyes, locked on mine, seemed more wary than sympathetic. Of all the people there, she and Leon were the only two who were not friends.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question, Tilda?”

  She seemed surprised. The others watched. She said, “That’s what I’m in Anchorage for today, to answer questions. After you, I’ll be talking with the guy from the New York Times.”

  Somehow, when she said it, it sounded like a threat, or at least a challenge. I said, “You’ve got a job with the new eco lodge, I heard.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I do.”

  “To give lectures.”

  “That’s right. I like Barrow. I like the people. I like the remoteness. And that lodge will show people there’s an alternative way to make money without giving them,” she said disdainfully, nodding at Dave Lillienthal, “carte blanche to wreck one more pristine place on Earth.”

  “Did you meet the owners of the lodge?” I asked.

  Her gaze hardened. Sympathy only went so far. “Uh-huh.”

  “Did they tell you if it’s just a lodge, or whether they’ll be doing anything else out there?”

  Her mouth snapped shut. She shook her head. She was one of those people whose anger appears instantly in the form of blushes, which in her case started at the freckles and burst outward and across the skin, mass by mass.

  “I don’t believe this,” she snapped. “Even now? That lodge is a win-win, and you’re trying to link it to what you guys did? Disgusting! Why don’t you admit there was a government testing program that went wrong! All this bullshit! Phony hand-wringing. A cover-up was what it was!”

  She stormed out. I watched her on CNN that evening, fulminating, her angry face superimposed over a background shot of a herd of caribou, Live from Alaska. Her fury seemed magnified, and her British accent gave weight and heft to the accusations spewing from her lovely mouth.

  “The North Slope is an American Serengeti,” she said. “One of the last unspoiled spots on Earth. We intend to keep it that way.”

  Eddie sat beside me. “Fiery in bed, I bet,” he said with amusement.

  “If she’d shut up.”

  “Hey, you’re back,” exclaimed Eddie.

  I wasn’t back. It was wishful thinking. She’d given me an idea, though. I picked up the phone, called Valley Girl.

  “It’s three A.M. in Washington?” she moaned, even her complaints phrased as questions. “I’m sleeping?”

  “Perfect time to go to work,” I said.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It took a while. But I found him.

  Crises bloom and get replaced in Washington. What seems crucial one day is history the next. Who planned the shooting of John F. Kennedy? Did Franklin Roosevelt have advance warning that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor? Did George W. Bush lie to America when he sent troops into Iraq, saying that country hid weapons of mass destruction? Was the quarantine of Barrow a military cover-up, or not?

  After the hearings, the talking-head speculations and accusations, after my secret testimony in closed hearings before Congressional subcommittees on terrorism and biowarfare, the admiral let me retire early.

  Joe Rush, ex-colonel, at the rural post office, collecting a pension check.

  They say you can’t go home again, but, as is often the case, they are misinformed. You can always go home again. Or rather, what is home is inside you, what you carry from childhood. It gets buried during the rest of your time on Earth, but it never completely goes away.

  Smith Falls didn’t look much differe
nt than I’d left it. The hamlet still ran for three hundred yards along a Berkshire river. The church remained the anchor of town. The mechanics and home repair guys still gathered for crisp bacon, fried eggs, and strong opinions at the general store at 6 A.M., where the Berkshire Eagle carried the news, not the Washington Post. Most of them didn’t know who I was. Then word got around, from a clerk at the store.

  There was satellite TV in town now, and the kids going past on the school bus were hooked to iPhones, or sending text messages. I stayed away from it, and long-distance calls for the most part. At least personal ones.

  I found a small house on a dirt road, a thirty-year-old A-frame built originally for a New York lawyer, and after three decades of life the shabby construction needed upkeep, which gave me something to do. There was a big bedroom downstairs and a small one in the loft up top for an office. The house had propane heat and a woodstove for backup. I was pretty good with the chainsaw. The pile of ash logs grew higher as more trees outside fell sick. Up here, it’s the vegetation suffering from fatal disease.

  I could not see the nearest neighbor, or rather, it seemed to be a clubfooted, ill-tempered moose that, at 5 A.M. some mornings, limped past, and continued out of view, munching leaves, as if punching a clock.

  Most mornings I woke at 4:30 and, in darkness, did the painful exercises I’d learned in physical therapy. Walking was an education. The nature of balance had changed. But soon I was doing a mile a day, then three, and then I ramped it up, walked faster, started running, started running hills, running trails. The toe loss was a stare gatherer at the town beach.

  Not that I cared.

  The front stairs needed a new buttress. A century-old pine tree out back leaned dangerously toward the house and had to come down. I stripped off weathered, ant-eaten siding, plugged a gap by the chimney where rainwater was getting past flashing, stripped off the old and put in the new. That’s not hard if you’re dealing with something inanimate, like a house.

  Word got around town that Joe Rush was back, and some of my old classmates dropped in: fatter, older, redder, but awkwardly, if temporarily, welcome.