White Plague

by James Abel

  “I thought it’s not legal to kill whales,” Eddie said, out of curiosity.

  DeBlieu nodded. “We only take samples if we find a dead animal and need to figure how it died. Believe me, if we ever hurt a whale, Clinton Toovik would have our heads. The Iñupiats took oil companies to court and stopped them from drilling offshore until they agreed to stay away during hunting weeks. The whole culture up here depends on whales. The locals have millions of dollars from taxing oil on their land, and they use it well in Washington.”

  “Having Clinton looking over your shoulder must be a pain in the ass,” Eddie said.

  “No. Marine mammals are protected, and even if Clinton weren’t here, we’d have observers on the bridge—private company provides them. Usually college kids. If we’re on a collision course with whales, they can order us to divert.”

  Eddie was always irritated at civilian meddling. “You’re telling me a college kid can order you around?”

  DeBlieu shrugged. “Part of our job is to protect the environment.”

  “But the only thing up here besides animals is you.”

  “No, every year there are more ships: seismic ones, oil company ships, tourists exiting the Northwest Passage . . . we don’t even know they’re coming until they show up.”

  Eddie flared, hands on his hips, “So if we get into a firefight, we need some kid’s permission before we shoot, in case we hit a walrus?”

  DeBlieu laughed.

  “Somehow I know you’ll do the right thing,” he said.

  I liked this captain, the way he didn’t engage when it was pointless, the way he stood up for things when he was right. I interrupted him as we dropped through a hatch, donned noise-suppressing headphones, and eyed the ship’s two immense shafts turning, operating screws out back.

  “I’m posting a guard here. Also in the engine room,” I said.

  By now the captain clearly regarded my security concerns as excessive, and his answer came immediately.

  “They don’t touch anything. I don’t need an overzealous Marine doing damage. Unless they see someone actually starting a fire, they’ll leave my crew alone.”

  “Fair enough.”

  My tiredness was creeping back, and my coffee mug was empty. Boots appeared in the hatch above, and Major Pettit climbed down to report that his men had found no listening devices in any of the spaces they had checked.

  “All clean.”

  DeBlieu smiled. “What a surprise.”

  The bridge stretched port to starboard and was a large, comfortably lit space, its windows providing views in all directions. A twenty-foot-long waist-high console dominated the area, manned by the three-person bridge crew, constantly monitoring a plethora of screens: wind speed, temperature, latitude and longitude, and frozen, the last satellite image received of sea ice ahead, a white mass, but I was too far away to see how many miles separated us.

  Clad in fire retardant Kevlar suits, an emergency drill crew of four stood around in back, doing nothing. Their job was to extinguish fires here, and since there weren’t any, they waited for the drill to end.

  Another half dozen men and women clustered around a large chart table, peering at a map. One officer was plotting a route.

  The crew, most in their late teens or twenties, wore standard-issue dark blue uniforms, black lace-up boots, some in hooded sweatshirts with WILMINGTON in white letters, some in peaked caps, or blue stocking hats, or woven red hats with gold lettering.

  “Red for ‘polar bears’—Arctic veterans,” DeBlieu said.

  My eyes went to the vista outside the slanted windows. It was astounding and I caught my breath.

  I looked down on an expanse of black ocean and a few bits of bobbing ice—small from seventy feet up—amid whitecaps, like scouts probing for weakness in the hull.

  Despite the urgency, I was awed. So this was the southern Arctic Ocean, which had smashed ships to pieces for centuries, and those ice dots were growlers, remnants of the once mighty ice sheet. They seemed to tumble in slow motion, white on top, bottoms the turquoise of a Caribbean bay, or the green of a dollar bill. I saw a spout of water erupt from the surface about a hundred yards to starboard, then two more, beside it, all three heading away from the ship.

  “That’s a pod of belugas,” the captain said.

  The more murderous ice that could smash bulkheads awaited us north, in a place where survivors of a submarine fire hopefully still struggled to stay alive.

  “It’s gorgeous.”

  “Colonel Rush, these shots of the storm were taken three hours ago,” DeBlieu said.

  The printouts he handed me showed a mass of corkscrewing gray-black inside the Arctic seas, covering an area as big—when I checked proportions—as Nebraska. It was well formed, with a tight, clear center.

  But the view here was pristine, air so clear that I could see three weather systems simultaneously. Directly above, the sky remained pale blue, washed out with cold, that gauzy sun visible. To starboard lay a low, gray mass, the sky of an altogether different planet. To port, a direction which the ship unfortunately seemed to be turning, awaited a ragged, bruised color, a thick, dirty violet that seemed to pulsate with malevolence, smearing the horizon, an advertisement to turn away.

  “Clinton says we’ve got a few more hours before we get into the bad stuff,” said DeBlieu.

  He indicated a tall, broad-shouldered, barrel-torsoed man standing with his back to us, beside an empty captain’s chair by the port-side window. He scanned the sea with large binoculars. He wore no jacket or hat, just faded jeans and an old brown T-shirt reading, BIG MIKE’S ISLAND SAUCES . . . HAWAII.

  Clinton Toovik calmly lowered the binoculars and wrote something in a small leather-backed notebook, in ink. Then he pulled a plastic pillbox from a pocket, snapped it open, removed something small and pinkish with thumb and forefinger, and popped it into his mouth.

  “Pickled muktuk,” he said when DeBlieu introduced us. He held out the open container. “Bowhead skin and blubber.”

  “It looks sweet,” Eddie said.

  “The black part is skin, the pink fat.” Clinton was about twenty-seven, I judged, with a soft voice, short black hair, and intelligent almond eyes set into a large head.

  I tried the muktuk, and found it fishy, not to my taste. “Mmmm,” Eddie said.

  Clinton peered ahead, binocs at his thigh. “I been watching that polar bear,” he said, “on the ice floe.”

  “What floe?” I asked. I saw no ice.

  “There.” I saw, squinting, a series of vague discolored specks on the sea. Or did I see them?

  “What bear?”

  “Right there.”

  I borrowed his binoculars. Now the vague specks looked like ice.

  “Look for yellow,” Clinton coached. “It’s fat under the fur.”

  Finally I saw a pinprick dot which might have been a pus color. The dot moved right to left. Or was there a dot?

  “Big male,” said Clinton. “The female passed with a cub fifteen minutes ago. Males kill cubs. If the cub dies, the female goes into heat earlier. So Mom’s on the run.”

  Eddie sighed. “Horny guys the world over,” he said.

  The bridge smelled of coffee. The helmsman steered the big ship with a small wheel. Some joker had placed a tiny plastic toy, of an old-style inch-wide ship’s wheel, the size of a Cracker Jack prize, atop a joystick. I noticed a wooden handrail running the length of the ceiling, behind the console, and above rubber flooring.

  “You’ll want to hold on to that when the weather hits,” said DeBlieu. “But one advantage of ice is, when we reach the storm, waves’ll be smaller.”

  The bridge was a spaceship traversing another world. The U.S. flag snapped ahead. The planet’s curve was evident on the horizon. I borrowed Clinton’s binoculars, and in the distance, a white city skyline leaped into vie
w; a row of high-rise buildings, white as snow, thrust upward; they had to be ice. “There’s land here?” I asked, surprised. “What the hell is that? An island?”

  Clinton grinned and DeBlieu said, “It’s your first mirage. Wait until the upside-down ships appear. You’re looking at pancake ice, light stuff, not even a foot thick, but from a distance, with the earth’s curve, well, everything’s different from a distance here. You’ll see when we get there in about twenty minutes.”

  The sense grew stronger that we were entering a world where rules were different. Clinton’s smile sank to a frown as he eyed the purple-gray skies. He went outside onto the outer deck, in the wind, then came back five minutes later, none the worse for wearing only a T-shirt. He did not look happy.

  “When I was a boy, our elders warned about that,” he said, nodding at the sky ahead.

  He looked into my eyes. His own were calm, and I saw deep knowledge there.

  “We’re on a rescue drill, right?” he asked.

  “Yep.”

  “An exercise. Make-believe.”

  “You got it,” said Eddie with confidence.

  Clinton nodded. “Then I suggest we turn around.”

  My mouth felt dry. I looked at the white city that wasn’t really there.

  “Oh, we can’t do that,” I said. “Timetables. It’s all about timetables. It takes months to draw up these games.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. He just let out air. “Any chance I can have a few minutes to call my wife? I’ve got my own sat phone. The borough’s paying. So you don’t have to worry about cost. Can you open it up?”

  I felt a chill. Eddie, over Clinton’s shoulder, had his brows up. Can’t do it.

  I knew that Clinton wanted to say things to the woman he loved that wives need to hear from husbands, and husbands need to say to wives. I especially knew this because I had not said them when I should have. I wondered if Clinton had children. But I also wondered, even as I hated myself for thinking it, whether the call Clinton wanted to make really was to his wife.

  I slapped him on the shoulder. “It’ll be a great story to tell her when you get home.”

  I sounded like a fool, probably like every trader or whaler who’d ever told the Iñupiats a falsehood during their long history. Joe Rush, professional liar.

  But I couldn’t open up the sat lines, not yet, not until we were closer, so close that even if the Russians or Chinese discovered what we were up to, we’d get there first. I needed to keep a fucking piece of inanimate machinery out of the hands of strangers. That was more important than this one man talking to his family.

  I sounded like every sorry bureaucrat who’d ever frustrated logic, hope, desire, or human need.

  “Sorry, Clinton. If we let you call out, we have to let other people do it, too.”

  He took it in stride. He just nodded as if his request would have been too easy. I think he knew we were not really on a drill. I’d tell the crew soon enough, but just now, something fatalistic moved into the Eskimo’s deep brown eyes.

  With a duckish gait, Clinton turned to leave the bridge, shoulders slightly slumped, his cadence as measured as his quiet voice.

  “Where are you going?” DeBlieu called after him.

  “My cabin,” Clinton said. “To pray.”

  I’d given up on God in an Iraqi bunker one day, years ago, when I saw things that changed me and Eddie. But at the moment, I’d settle for sleep, I realized; restful unconsciousness—just for a while—as my personal savior. For what is God if not the voice in your head that tells you to worry, and when trouble is coming, helps you prepare?

  SEVEN

  My Humvee rumbled forward, filled with Marines. I looked out and saw desert sky roiling with black smoke from burning Kuwaiti oil fields, to the south. The world was on fire, the air orange, the color of hell, at midday. Ours was supposed to be an easy assignment, but I felt, looking in my binoculars, a premonition, a claw on my spine, a catch in my throat.

  “Something’s wrong with that village ahead,” I told Eddie over the radio.

  We were thirty miles into Iraq. Our column—four Humvees and an armored personnel carrier, containing my rifle platoon—had been detached from the main attack for special duty, protecting the flank, patrolling outlying villages, dots on the terrain map on my lap. Eddie on the ride-along. “Make sure they’re free of fedayeen, ambushers,” the major had said, sending us out.

  Joseph Rush and Eddie Nakamura, two years into the Marine Corps, both wearing silver bars denoting us as first lieutenants.

  “Nothing moving,” said Eddie’s barely contained voice in my earpiece, from the second Humvee. “What’s the problem?”

  “This road.”

  “What’s wrong with it? It’s just tar, man.”

  “It’s new. Brand-new highway in the middle of nowhere. Why build a four-lane highway out here?”

  My face felt like sandpaper. The landscape was hard desert, prickly hills and rocks blasted by sun in daytime, split open by freezing cold at night, as if the earth here was unable to decide how to torture you, and had become as schizophrenic as the tyrant we’d come to fight. Southern Iraq resembled 29 Palms, the Marines’ high-desert training area back in California—filled with sandstorms, winter storms, blasting heat one day, freezing wind the next.

  Eddie snorted at my worry. “Why a new road? Saddam’s cousin Achmed is a road contractor. So he needed a job.”

  “Then he would have built a lousy road. This is top quality, built for a reason.”

  Fragmented radio reports told us that the main action was south or far north, where coalition forces blasted Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards from their bunkers. Burning Russian tanks and Iraqi corpses littered the main highway. Our smart bombs had hit the power plants and communications centers. The regime was collapsing.

  Overhead, three F-16 Falcon jets shot past.

  We’d taken some sniper fire from behind rocks, nothing major. An hour ago the pings of AK-47 rounds had bounced off my Humvee, and my gunner had killed four teenagers who could not have been older than seventeen, and who we’d left in the dust.

  Now Eddie laughed, high on combat and victory. He was happy-go-lucky, the lone child of two San Francisco accountants who’d been horrified when he chose a military career, and his jocular surface hid a dangerous fighter who could come out if provoked by unequal odds. Back in college, where he’d been my ROTC roommate, I’d seen him wade into a street fight once, to help a small kid. I couldn’t figure the fury. Then he told a story. At age nine he’d been in a plane hijacked by PLO terrorists. He’d been on vacation with his parents, sitting next to a sixty-year-old Jewish lady playing magnetic chess when gunmen took over the plane.

  The lead man had walked up to the boy and woman, spotted the Jewish star hanging from the woman’s neck, and shot her in the face.

  The man had told the shaking boy, “Why sit with kike pigs? Come sit in a cleaner place.”

  Eddie said now, “You’re looking for reasons, Number One? This country is a madhouse. Bridges built over desert, not water. Mansions filled with gold statues of movie stars. Mercedes upholstery of real tiger skin.”

  Looking out, ahead I saw pathetic poverty-stricken architecture dating back to Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar.

  Inside the boxy Humvee, I smelled men after days without baths, dirty feet, cordite, peanut butter.

  I said doggedly, eyeing the collection of mud and wattle huts coming up at the end of the black highway, “No, there’s something more . . .”

  The air was filthy orange through dust goggles, and thick with sand particles that stung exposed flesh like flies. The surface of the planet was the bottom panels of the Sistine Chapel, where tortured figures—onetime men—emerge howling into eternity.

  After three days my thirty-seven guys coughed sand and spit crud out every few minutes, and blo
bs of heat-caked yellow phlegm marked our passage.

  “Come on, man, in and out, like the other villages,” Eddie said.

  This one rolled closer. I saw walls ahead, a dirt village square, a collection of huts each the size of an L.A. maid’s room, shimmering in heat that seemed to throw back the sound of our mechanized advance. The hair on my neck began to stand up.

  “Be ready for ambush,” I told my guys.

  “Hey, Numero,” Eddie said, “little bet. I say it’s nothing. You say fedayeen.”

  We’d started the competition in college. Our race for better grades spread to everything else. Who could drink more beers on Saturday night? Who would win the motorcycle competition, the weapons competition, raise more money for the leukemia walkathon? Name it. It became a contest.

  He won the best rifle shot, the push-up competition by a hair, and hand-to-hand combat, after four ties. I won the hot dog eating, beat him by one and a half seconds on the obstacle course, and I led the Red Team in war games, creeping over a forested western Massachusetts ridge in a surprise assault during a thunderstorm that captured the “general” of the Blue Team. That ranked me number one in the graduating class, hence the nickname.

  We’d lost contact after graduation. Eddie went to Pendleton, I to Lejeune. And now we were rolling those final hundred yards toward Al Rassad, and the rooftops grew clear to the naked eye. I scanned the tops of walls for the glint of metal, a ducking head.

  Nothing.

  We stopped fifty yards short. I looked for the usual buzzards circling. The sky was an empty furnace; a lone smeary cloud seemed glued in place, almost two-dimensional.

  The heat seemed to expand inside my head.

  Now Eddie saw something. “Hey, man, no garbage.”

  “No busted cars. And look at these tracks in the dirt. They’re from big trucks. Heavy treads.”

  “Clean as a Hollywood set, One. No Coca-Cola bottles lying around, no chickens . . .”

  “No dogs,” I breathed. “No damn dogs!”

  That was the crowning touch—no yowling dogs, those big mustard-colored Iraqi canines that seem more like hyenas than domesticated pets. Dogs that make your average Manhattan pit bull look as pitiful as a Chihuahua. The dogs always stay behind in evacuations. They belong to no one. They seem to have sprung to life from rage itself, the yellow desert become flesh and hair.