White Plague

by James Abel

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2015 by Bob Reiss.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-16893-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Abel, James.

  White plague / James Abel.—First edition.

  pages cm—(A Joe Rush novel)

  ISBN 978-0-425-27632-7 (hardback)

  I. Title.

  PS3568.E517W45 2015

  813'.54—dc23

  2014027519

  FIRST EDITION: January 2015

  Cover design by Richard Hasselberger.

  Cover photos: Submarine © U.S. Navy Photo/Alamy, Dive into the cave © littlesam/Shutterstock, and Abstract radar illustration © IndianSummer/Shutterstock.

  Endpaper map by Virginia Norey.

  Interior art: Under the Artic ice © Hayri Er/Getty Image and Ice floe floating on water © Purestock/Getty Image.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe many people thanks for their generous help during the research, writing, and editing of this novel.

  At the U.S. Coast Guard, thanks to Admiral Thomas Ostebo, to Captain John Reeves of the icebreaker Healy, to Marcus Lippmann, and to the crew of that icebreaker. Thanks for a great trip.

  Thanks to retired General Dana Atkins of the U.S. Air Force. At the Navy, to Robert Freeman, once again, and to Lieutenant Commander Jason Weed, and to David Fisher, retired, all of whom put up with lots of questions. At the U.S. Marine Corps, thanks to Captain Tyler Balzer.

  Several magazine editors gave me assignments in the Arctic over a three-year period. I’d like to thank Daryl Chen and Janice Kaplan at Parade, Carey Winfrey of Smithsonian, Dawn Raffel at Reader’s Digest, and Chris Keyes at Outside magazine.

  In Barrow, Alaska, thanks to Edward Itta and Richard Glenn, and also to David Harding, formerly of Barrow.

  In Anchorage, huge thanks to Mead Treadwell.

  To Bruce Seligman, inventor of the Arktos amphibious craft, many thanks for taking the time to answer my many questions.

  Thanks to Patricia Burke and Charles Salzberg, good friends who gave terrific advice during the writing of the book. So did James Grady and Phil Gerard.

  The list of people I ran imaginary scenarios by includes Jerome Reiss, Samantha Reiss, Marsha Price, Gabrielle Rosenthal, Ken and Ann Smith, Ginny O’Leary and Kirk Swiss, and Dr. Tio Chen. Michael Pillinger at NYU was hugely helpful on the subject of viruses. Thanks.

  Many thanks to Tasha Mandel, and to Seicha Turnbull.

  To my publisher, Leslie Gelbman, and my editor, Tom Colgan, thanks for believing in the book.

  I’m lucky to have agents like Esther Newberg, Josie Freeman, Daisy Meyrick, and Zoe Sandler.

  I’m luckier still to have Wendy Roth at home.

  There is no resemblance between any real person and the fictional characters in White Plague. The real icebreaker Healy is not the fictional icebreaker Wilmington in the novel, and the crew of the real ship has no resemblance to the crew of the fictional one, except that they both have my respect and admiration, as do the men and women of the U.S. Coast Guard for the superb job they do.

  Any factual mistakes in this novel are mine.

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ONE

  The pleas for help stopped coming just after five in the morning, Washington time. The Pentagon staffers cleared for handling sensitive messages sat in horror for a moment and then tried other ways to reach the victims. Nothing worked so they called the director, who phoned me. I was awake anyway, as I often am at 1 A.M., Alaskan time, running a fifteen-miler in the coastal city of Anchorage, where I live.

  I have trouble sleeping. I don’t like the dreams that come when I do.

  The director said, “Joe, the submarine USS Montana is in the Arctic Ocean, five hundred miles north of Alaska, on the surface, on fire.”

  “What started it, sir?”

  “Unclear. Everything happened fast, in the last few hours. Something toxic hit ’em. Chemicals or gas probably. They’re sick apparently. Their air circulation system went out and then the fire started. Or maybe the fire started first. They can’t dive. They can’t move. The Montana carries a crew of a hundred and fifty-four men and women. Last report, one hundred and seven were still alive. Nine are critical. The medical officer burned to death.”

  “Radiation leak?”

  “It’s not radiation.”

  “Intentional?”

  “Possible, Joe.”

  “What’s the surface temperature?”

  “Plus two. At least the sun barely goes down in late August. Darkness drops it another twenty degrees.”

  I blew out air. “Where are the survivors, sir?”

  “Anyone not fighting the fire evacuated. They’re on the ice, in insulated tents and covered life rafts, with portable generators. They’ve got fuel for two more days.”

  I swore. “Rescue helicopters?”

  “Nothing has the range or space. Plus our closest subs are eight, nine days out. And, Joe?” I heard thick frustration in the director’s voice, and grief. “The satellites are blind. Three days of bad weather and more on the way. Some kind of polar superstorm. We can’t send planes, even those tough little Twin Otters. And nothing can land anyway on that ice. It’s a goddamn rubble field where that sub came up. Might as well be boulders.�
��

  I thought fast, breathing with exertion, standing in running shorts and Reeboks on Treadwell Street in front of the old Russian church, with its hemlock and Sitka spruce trees scenting the air, along with the clean tang of the Chugach Mountain Range foothills, and with dead marble eyes of dew wet statues—saints and ocean explorers, Vitus Bering, watching the solitary runner with an encrypted cell phone in his hand. The yellow cedars were heavy with green. A traffic light blinked red in the plate glass window of Rosa’s Brooklyn Bagels. “Maybe the Russians can assist, sir. Don’t they have twenty icebreakers? They must have something closer.”

  There was a long sigh. The director said, “Can’t.”

  In the silence I heard secrecy and disgust for politics and necessity and all the reasons why our biohazard response unit had been formed in the first place. The director was a rotating public servant—corporate to government for twenty years—and lived in a world of high-level trade-offs. He was far more comfortable in the backstabbing world of high-level Washington than I. I said, the drumbeat of urgency growing, “Why, sir?” and the bigger picture began coming out.

  “She’s a Virginia-class sub, newest thing we’ve got. Most advanced weapons and guidance systems. We can’t have President Topov’s boys getting a look at them, sharing them with their friends in Damascus and Tehran.”

  “So it was a spy mission.”

  “They have spies,” the director said wryly. “We have intel. Joe, get up there.” His voice grew angry. “The United States Navy . . . greatest in the world . . . and we only have one working icebreaker at the moment and it’s used for science, not even under Navy control. The Coast Guard has it. At least it’s only four hours out of Barrow,” he said, naming the northernmost city in Alaska. “It’s been up there doing sea bottom surveys. We’ll jettison the scientists, board you and Marines.”

  “I want Eddie with me,” I said, naming my best friend.

  “He’s on the way.”

  “And an expert on Virginia-class subs.”

  “Yes, yes, with Major Nakamura, coming up from Seattle,” the director said. Major Nakamura was Eddie.

  He added, as if needing to underline urgency, “The new Russian government makes old Vladimir Putin look peaceful as Gandhi. They’ve made control of the Arctic a keystone of military policy. The Arctic is melting, Joe. A whole ocean opening that wasn’t passable before. Oil. Gas. Shipping. It’ll make the Atlantic sub game look like third grade. They’re stronger than us up there. I’ve been trying for years to get more money from Congress for Arctic ops.”

  “You mean intel.” My joke fell flat.

  “Save the ones you can. Secure or destroy that sub. Joe, whatever happened up there, whatever started it, you’ve got the qualifications to handle it. You make the hard choices. I’ll back you up.”

  I felt my pulse go up and more sweat break out on my forehead. One hundred and fifty-four people. A sharp ache gripped my gut. My mouth was dry and a cold shadow seemed to pass over the city, even though it was a hot night for Anchorage, temperatures around seventy degrees.

  The director said, more softly, “I know you gave notice, Joe. I know you only have two weeks left.”

  I’d been looking forward to quitting, moving back East. “Oh, I’ll be back before then,” I said, which might or might not turn out to be the truth, I knew.

  “Thank you.” I heard real gratitude in his voice. “You’ll fly from Elmendorf to Fairbanks,” he said, naming the city an hour away by air where my ex-wife lived with another officer. You’ll pick up Marines and head to Barrow in a Globemaster. You should arrive the same time as the icebreaker, so no time lost. Get me a list of what you need, soon as possible.”

  Christ, help me.

  But Christ, I thought wryly, had not listened last time I needed him. He had not helped at all, so I’d done things that had put the last nail in the coffin of a long-failed marriage, kept me awake most nights now, and made me a pariah among men and women I’d worked with, U.S. Marines.

  The worst part was, I knew I’d do it again if I had the choice.

  The director seemed to guess what I was thinking. “Joe, you were a hero last time. I wish the truth could come out someday.”

  I wasn’t going to give him absolution. So I said nothing.

  “Good luck, Colonel,” he said, and hung up.

  I started toward home. The twenty-minute sprint would be spent planning. No use waiting, calling a cab. In my head I began drawing up a list of what I’d need—antibiotics and antivirals, body bags, burn medicines. I’d take the thumb drive library, a portable case containing just about everything we know about bioweapons. The questions came hard and fast.

  They’re sick? Sick from what?

  I thought, feeling my legs pumping, my heart roaring, that I’d never really understood secrets until I’d joined the director’s unit. Only then did I see that owning one made you a secret. I was a living secret, and I knew with dread, as the darkened foothill houses went by—here a cedar ranch-style home belonging to an Air Force Raptor pilot I knew who was often sent up to the U.S. border to monitor Russian bear bombers buzzing U.S. soil; here a condo in which lived an Anchorage Daily News editor who wrote editorials urging the beefing up of Arctic military budgets; and there, a dark spot a half mile off, an Air Force research lab where I’d done occasional work for the last few months, looking at virus behavior in cold climates—that one day the things that my unit dealt with would kill them, and their families, all of us, in warm beds as we slept, on a lovely night like this.

  My name is Joe Rush, and you won’t find a description of my real job in my dossier at the Marine Corps. It’s been sheep-dipped, altered so that what remains contains—like Washington itself—enough truth to fool a casual observer, and the rest a fabrication designed to protect the Corps, me, and the nation from learning things that people like the director have decided you ought not to know.

  Thirty-nine years old, the dossier says. That part’s true, at least. Six foot two. The photo shows hair as black and thick as my great-grandfather the Welsh coal miner’s, eyes as blue as those of the Norwegian peasant woman, my great-grandmother, who met “great-gramper” on the deck of the coal-powered steamer that brought them into New York harbor 130 years ago. The Massachusetts town they settled in is in the file, too, because I grew up there: the textile mill village of Smith Falls, population 250, a hamlet nestled in the green mountain foothills, ten miles south of the Vermont line on a cracked two-lane rural road.

  There, three generations of Rushes worked on the assembly line of Brady Textiles, making Army uniforms in World War One, Air Force uniforms in World War Two, and Naval uniforms during Vietnam, but by the Iraq War, Brady had moved operations to Honduras, where they paid workers less, and the men and some women in my family had become the electricians, plumbers, and roofers maintaining the second homes of people from Boston or New York who summered in our region, and went home to their condos and Long Island suburbs when the air grew chilly each fall, and I boarded a rusted yellow bus and rode to a country school where, if we wanted to keep our football team equipped, our moms baked pies that we kids sold door to door to the college professors in wealthier Williamstown.

  State troopers and soldiers were our success models. “Be all you can be,” said the Army commercials I thrilled to on TV when I was nine. “The few, the proud,” said the ads for the Marines. I grew up dreaming of the ocean and travel, feeling trapped by familiarity and smothered by love. I wanted far away. I’d never traveled more than forty miles from home. The smells of summer grass and February snows were odors of my prison. The kiss of a girl and even the camaraderie of friends were, to me, tricks to bar escape to the wider world.

  So I left that girl, said good-bye to those friends, and the “education” part of my file correctly indicates that I attended UMass on a ROTC scholarship. The early Marine history is right also: Parris Island, Quan
tico, amphibious duty in Indonesia, and the Philippines, everything right up to the second tour in Iraq.

  But the second tour is not mentioned in that file.

  Under “awards,” you’ll see the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit, and a Navy and Marine Corps medal awarded for actions taken in combat during the global war on terror. True. All true. But you won’t find out what the “actions taken” were.

  Under “skills,” you’ll learn that I can hit a moving target with a rifle at three hundred yards, and can afterward, thanks to my MD degree, remove the bullet, stitch the wound, prescribe proper medications, and run any field hospital or field lab in the world, to hopefully identify chemicals or germs released in combat against our troops.

  I am also qualified to lead an assault on an enemy bioweapons bunker, secure it, decontaminate it, treat injured staffers, and then arrest them, so they can be interrogated, tried, and hung by U.S. military tribunal, under obscurer laws of the Republic. If my skill set seems contradictory, you’re starting to get an idea of why you need access to several files to get a complete picture, why I now live alone and run long distances at night, instead of going to sleep.

  After my wife left, I went through the drunk phase and bar fight phase. I went through the period where you sleep with lots of women, and tell yourself you enjoy it, and the phase where you stop enjoying it, and if you ever saw my “eyes only” psychiatric file, you’d read that I cut myself off from friends, except for Eddie, who knew the whole truth.

  If you have big enough secrets, you can’t have friends.

  For the past year—after getting out of the hospital—I’ve been on partial duty, teaching a few biohazard classes at Elmendorf, several miles from my home, hitting the pistol range three times a week, occasionally traveling to remote Eskimo villages along the Bering Strait with Air Force doctors to study new strains of rabies.

  My memo to the Secretary of Defense—which brought me to the director’s attention five years ago—suggested that the military should prepare for the possibility that the next big outbreak of human disease might come from a cold climate, not a hot one, not a jungle, as is usually assumed . . . but from a microorganism released by melting ice, after being encased in it for hundreds or thousands of years. Or a mutant variety emerging as the region warmed.