White Plague

by James Abel

  She nodded. She’d been at enough Naval war games to know variations. “No problem. By the way, if you really want an ice expert, talk to Clinton Toovik.”

  “Who is Clinton Toovik?”

  “Our Iñupiat Eskimo observer. The North Slope puts a marine mammal watcher aboard every cruise. Clinton’s a whale hunter. He reports back to the community on animal conditions, and truth is, he’s more the ice expert than me. He can tell from watching clouds what kind of ice is ahead. Mist, whale movements, wind, currents, even light reflection, to him they’re clues.”

  “Where is Clinton?”

  “He hardly ever sleeps,” she said. “He’s usually up on the bridge, watching and writing in a little book. The Iñupiats have a hundred words for ice. The National Weather Service only four. To Clinton, it’s alive, like some kind of animal,” she said as a loud argument began in the corridor outside, and a man shouted, “I don’t care what your orders are. I demand to see him instantly!”

  Marietta recognized the voice and rolled her eyes. She said, “Those Iñupiat words don’t just describe conditions. They describe safety. One word means ice you can walk on, another is ice you better walk on fast, a third is ice that looks safe but isn’t. It will turn on you, trick you.”

  The man in the corridor yelled, “Do you know who I am?”

  “That’s our friend from the State Department,” Marietta said, standing, giving me a look of sympathy. “Oz the great and powerful. Assistant Deputy Secretary Andrew Sachs.”

  She let herself out. I called out for the Marine to send the shouter in, and a thin, red-faced man stormed through the open door.

  Andrew Sachs was supposed to have gone home with the scientists. I’d vetted him, crossed his name off the passenger list. Clearly, he’d had other ideas, found a way to stay here, hidden, and had now come out.

  “I don’t take orders from you. Do you have the slightest idea of how much trouble you’re in?” Sachs demanded, refusing a seat.

  “You were supposed to go ashore on the copter,” I said.

  He was tall and thin, balding off both sides of the front slope of his forehead, dressed in thicker versions of the Arctic clothing Marietta had worn, heavy fleece vest, cords, lace-up Merrell boots, but in his case everything was new, while hers were comfortably worn. He wore a blue Coast Guard Wilmington cap, the kind that the captain presents to VIPs. His watch was thin and gold, the waving hands fragile white, the angular face purple with rage. The surprisingly deep voice combined the nasal consonants of old New England breeding: Groton to Yale—with the in-your-face attitude of a Bruce Willis character. The cheekbones were sharp; granite specks floated in the iron-colored eyes like mines. A small swath of boyish chestnut hair flipped over the otherwise balding high forehead. I judged him an unhealthy forty.

  “You,” he said, “don’t tell me what to do. I insist on phoning Washington! Your men are jamming transmissions!”

  My ex-wife once took me to the National Gallery in Washington to see a Botero painting exhibit. The artist had captured South American leading families as collections of pudgy childlike figures; innocent looking and dressed as dolls, bunched in groups, archbishops and admirals, presidents and little fat children. Botero used circles to depict privilege, greed, and inbred ignorance. Picasso chose parallelograms to show Spanish peasants in their sharp complexity. But an American artist, showing Andrew Sachs, would prefer long thin triangles, like a dowager’s dangling earring, a ropy geometry spanning generations of his DNA.

  “What the fuck are you up to?” he hissed.

  Clearly, breeding lapsed when it came to language. He did not wait for an answer. His finger was a rapid pendulum, his bobbing nose a divining rod assigning blame.

  “A drill?” he snapped. “You canceled important research for a drill? I didn’t hear anything about that. Nobody at State knows about it. I checked on the way in.”

  “It will only take a few days, sir,” I said, wondering how much force I could use with an Assistant Deputy Secretary of State.

  “You will cancel it now. You will call your superiors and tell them that the exercise is off. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have interrupted a crucial scientific mission that has immense strategic importance to the United States. The researchers who you cavalierly kicked off the ship were conducting bottom surveys, to be used by the State Department to apply this year for vast tracts of undersea territory under the Law of the Sea Treaty. Trillions of dollars are at stake. Stop the research, you set us back a year!”

  “I’m going to have to ask you for your satellite phone while you’re on board,” I said. “We’ll arrange for you to take a copter back. Sorry. Orders,” I said, curious. Was the man’s rage too profound, I wondered, to represent mere professional ire?

  His eyes mocked me. “Orders? What are you, a Nazi? Very well. I was specifically ordered, ordered by the Secretary, to stay on board throughout this . . . whatever you’re doing . . . get you off as soon as possible, and continue our work.”

  “The chopper should be arriving soon,” I said. “You might want to make sure you’re packed.”

  He sat back and his face changed as he saw that intimidation was not going to work with me. He was probably used to getting what he wanted whenever he said “the Secretary.” He’d probably grown up getting his way. But then the face grew shrewder, and I saw that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted either.

  “The copter,” he said. “You’re going to drag me onto the copter, just kick me off the ship, is that it?”

  I said nothing. I waited.

  “Because if you do, I can’t wait to get back and tell my people, and my friends at the Washington Post, that the Marines have taken over our only working icebreaker, and brought body bags on board—yeah, I saw them when a crate busted during unloading. I was hiding—and we’re rushing north for some secret reason. Scientific equipment? A drill? Don’t make me laugh! What’s in the other boxes? What are you up to? Why are Marines dressed like civilians?”

  “Part of the drill is to maintain secrecy.”

  He smirked. “Well, I guess you won’t maintain it,” he said. “Especially if you send me ashore.”

  The ship’s intercom came on with a crackle, and a voice announced that a helicopter was about to land. That would be my best friend arriving, I thought, with the submarine expert the director had sent. The question was, would the copter carry back to shore this angry load of human dynamite?

  Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Sachs sat back with a prim look that made me want to arrest him, lock him in his cabin. But he was right. He was not under my orders. He had, in fact, been lead voice on the ship until a few hours ago. I was filled with curses inside. I wondered for a moment if the director knew he was on board, and had dumped him in my lap.

  “You’re in big trouble,” he said, bent toward me over the desk. “I’ll tell the Secretary personally about you.”

  “Thank you for your input,” I told him, and shrugged, making my decision. “I suppose it won’t hurt to have you along during the drill.”

  Better to keep him close. At least he won’t be able to use his satellite phone with the jammers on. I’ll decide later if I’ll take away his unit when we turn ’em off.

  He’d gotten part of what he wanted. His lips formed a smile but the rage remained in his eyes. He left and the door whispered closed, quiet as a man tiptoeing barefoot down a hall at 3 A.M., keeping secrets from others in the house.

  Why is he so angry? I thought.

  I needed to meet the submarine expert but first wanted to talk to the Wilmington’s medical officer, who would assist with victims, if anyone from the Montana was even still alive.

  Next into the room was Lieutenant Janice Cullen, looking neat in her blue Coast Guard uniform, her auburn hair cut regulation short, neck length, her name in white script at
the breast pocket. She wore black CG lace-up boots. Coast Guard Academy, her file had read. Originally from Brownsville, Texas; divorced, childless, ex-college gymnast; formerly posted to the Pacific Ocean, on drug interdiction cruises. There was one mention of an “anxiety episode” suffered when her cutter was caught off Panama in a hurricane. After that she’d transferred off.

  She emanated fitness, but I also saw muscle tightness—tension—around her mouth. The face was round and cheeks cherubic, rosy, eyes light undersea blue. She wore small jade earrings, dots of color in the white lobes. A girlish package on the surface, if you didn’t look twice.

  “You’ve done rescue drills before,” I said. “How many victims can you handle?”

  Her voice was low, slightly hoarse, and I had a feeling she was one of those smokers out on deck during breaks. “Well, with more tourist ships coming through the Northwest Passage, we did a drill last year, mock sinking, a hundred and sixty victims. We set up the copter hangar with cots. A hundred and sixty is how many were on board when that cruise ship went down in Antarctica a couple years back,” she said.

  “How did your drill work out?”

  “Fine. This crew has excellent training in first aid, evacuating victims by Zodiac, sled, triage, keep ’em warm, get ’em on board. We’re who you want in an emergency. In that exercise, though, we had smooth water. Victims were airlifted to the hospital in Barrow. We’ve got enough food in the two freezers aboard to feed plenty of extra people. The crew ran scenarios with burns, smoke, frostbite, hypothermia.”

  That sounded good, but she was chewing her lip. I also noticed chewed-down fingernails. She added, “But the drill postulated an accident closer to land, and, uh,” she said, turning slightly pale, “better weather.”

  “You don’t like storms?”

  “Hey? Seventy-foot waves? What’s not to like?”

  I didn’t laugh. She said, realizing that her fear showed, “I was in some bad ones in the Pacific, but this one will be worse, the captain said.”

  I agreed. “Things will get a lot worse.”

  I had no idea how much worse.

  FOUR

  AUGUST 1918

  His name was Thorvald Weir, and he was a very good sea captain, but the chase was almost over and he was losing, and he knew, with a sinking feeling, that by midnight he’d probably be dead; leaving a widow in Seattle, two babies without a thirty-year-old father, a family burial plot with no body in it, just a headstone marking the mystery of his disappearance, and any evidence; floating wood bits, oil slicks, bits of blown-up movie cameras and tripods, shot to pieces by the Bolshevik gunship closing from behind.

  I never should have taken the money from the War Department, he thought, fighting the twenty-foot chop, pointing his “fishing trawler,” Anna, north, watching for rocks or floating timber that could smash the bow. The black volcanic beaches of Russia slid by on the left, sixteen miles off, and the ragged cliffs of Alaska were twenty-eight miles to the right, and the cold zone was dead ahead, the frigid Arctic seas of ice and storms. The sun was out at 11:45 P.M., a low-hanging orb spotlighting the Anna, allowing the Red bastards to push closer, with their deadly deck gun. The Anna did eleven knots; the ship behind had to be moving at thirteen.

  A few more minutes and they would be within range.

  Thor crossed himself, coughed from a bad summer cold the crew shared, knew that in another few minutes, if no miracle occurred, all men aboard would be turned into food for the birds, orcas, Pacific cod.

  It was August 1918 and the world had turned upside down: war in Europe, kings overthrown, nations ended, millions of soldiers dead, their corpses hanging on barbed wire in France, men succumbing to mustard gas and bullets, sepsis, poison gas, flu, newfangled weapons like lumbering tanks, and airplanes that actually dropped bombs from the clouds, and on top of all that, American troops were in Russia, Thor knew, battling the godless Reds. President Woodrow Wilson had sent doughboys out of Michigan, big strapping boys off the Ford auto lines and family farms, sent ’em away from the killing trenches of Europe, and seven thousand Michiganders fought with the White Russian army against Lenin’s hordes in the forests of the west, as another three thousand God-fearing Americans guarded the rail lines along the Pacific Coast against the fanatics who had overthrown the Czar, pulled Russia out of the Great War, made peace with the German Kaiser, and sought to turn the rest of the world into a cemetery for decent folk.

  I had to say yes, Thor muttered to himself.

  He was a patriot and a veteran of the Spanish War, where he’d fought with the great Teddy Roosevelt, charged up old San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders, greatest day of his life. So when the men in suits, the men from Washington, had told him that a seemingly innocuous “quickie trip in and out of Russia” would help the national effort, how could he say no?

  He’d lied to his wife about the destination . . . Edison’s making a silent movie about Eskimos, he said . . . and the five-man film crew from Fort Riley, Kansas, had stomped aboard and shot plenty of film, all right, in coves and in caves and on islands, until twelve hours ago, when, as they idled on the Russian side in a seemingly isolated bay, a forty-degree, foggy day, about ten thousand walrus on a black beach ahead, pink and fat and stinking of salt and excrement, suddenly the peaceful part was over. The prow of a Bolshie gunship had jutted from a cloudbank—an armor-plated 237-footer—and the first shell had missed them, splashed into the cove and echoed in the fir forest that thickened the curved black shore, and even as Thor hit the throttle and spun the wheel, he’d seen the enemy, angry men wearing a ragtag collection of uniforms . . . sailors in red caps, civilian troops in red scarves, factory workers and even a gigantic barking dog beneath a huge handmade flapping hammer and sickle flag half obscured by coal dust clouds, men yelling foreign words as the two ships plowed through the walruses, churning them up, turning the sea red.

  Thor had not understood the words, but he understood the tone.

  Stop or we will kill you.

  Stop and we’ll kill you anyway.

  I should have never allowed the film crew aboard. They never explained what they were doing with their secret maps, cameras, sure, but also rifles, wooden boxes, nets.

  Going ashore. Disappearing into the forests.

  Shoulda . . . woulda . . .

  Now he was in a race. A miracle. That’s what they needed. A bay or estuary to escape into. An accident aboard the gunship; a spark in the ammunition room. A prop smashing into a gigantic log. An angel swooping down to confuse the Bolsheviks. A collision between the pursuers and an undersea boulder tearing a hole in their hull.

  Thor handed the wheel to his first mate and went on deck for a better view. The Army men stood in a group on the fantail, camera and tripod idle, watching the big ship draw closer. They had Springfield rifles in their hands, and one man held a .44 sidearm, as if those pathetic weapons would be of use against artillery shells.

  Still they were brave, and the ship behind them—far north of any Russian town of note—was bigger every time he checked, single stacked, spewing smoke, an old Imperial Russian Navy boat seized by the revolutionaries, its 130 mm deck gun capable of firing five shots a minute.

  A boom sounded behind him. A high-pitched whistling announced the shell coming, a speck growing impossibly bigger. It was going to hit but instead sent up a tower of water off the fantail, close enough to splash the men on the ship.

  Then Thor’s heart started racing because he’d spotted a chance. Maybe the miracle was happening, maybe Saint Christopher had heard him. The cloudbank a half mile ahead was low and thick and hugged the sea, gray as death, a roiling curtain.

  He headed for it, asked Saint Christopher to hide them. He promised that he’d be a better father, a minder-of-his-own-business, if the great Christopher would mislead those godless bastards behind.

  A geyser erupted ahead.

  The cloudbank g
rowing closer.

  The next explosion came fifteen yards away, rocking them so much that the screws lifted out of the water, screaming and spinning before they bit back into the sea.

  One man on the fantail fired uselessly at the big ship.

  The air getting shockingly, instantly colder.

  The mist reaching out with tentacle-like arms, coated them with a smell like wet earth. They slid into its clammy folds. The temperature plunged even further.

  The ship behind them was actually gone now, at least for a minute, as they seemed to cross some kind of boundary between the upper Pacific seas and what lay in the great High North.

  The Bolshies gone. The air almost liquid.

  Had the miracle happened?

  The little Anna stabilized, and Thorvald zigzagged north and prayed the fog would hide them, and it did, at least for a while, and finally after ninety minutes the mist thinned and they emerged from the cloudbank.

  Five men stood in the pilothouse, two crew, three cameramen, one coughing because he had not brought a heavy coat, thinking it was summer, and he was shivering, all of them peering ahead like Columbus’s sailors gasping at the New World, wondering what sight would meet their eyes with the fog gone.

  And now they saw it, and stiffened.

  “Dear God,” whispered the first mate.

  Holy fucking . . . said one of the men from Fort Riley.

  Thorvald staring, his mouth gaping, his belly churning, his face white with a different, and almost indescribable, terror. It could not be. It was absolutely impossible. He’d heard of these things, but had not truly understood. And now it seemed they had not escaped the fundamental problem, not by a long shot, no, he thought, knowing he’d never get home now. Never see his wife and children. Not at all.

  FIVE

  The helicopter—a Dolphin—swung wildly in a crosswind. Watching from the aft deck, ninety feet below, I felt my intestines clench and feared, looking up, that it would crash, killing my best friend. A twenty-five-mile-an-hour gust slammed the needle-nosed craft, knocking it sideways like a gigantic hand as I held my breath. The pilot—I could see him through glass—fought to steady the bird.