White Plague

by James Abel

  “Everybody out,” I said.

  With the hatch open, snow blew in. Outside, we helped the Marines unload sleds, piled on the medical supplies, explosives, and propane—heat—for any survivors.

  “Stay close. Pay close attention to the person in front of you. Obey Clinton or Dr. Vleska, whoever is leading at that point. Lieutenant Del Grazo, can you stay in contact with the ship while we’re outside?”

  “Do my best.”

  We started into the maelstrom. The Arktos—our magic carpet—disappeared. Clinton knelt and peered down and adjusted course and slid north, cutting diagonally across wind lines in the snow.

  I looked behind me at the straggling, jagged line: the Marines, Karen, Eddie, Andrew.

  Who’s the spy? I thought.

  What will you do next?

  ELEVEN

  Plant your pole, push and glide; that’s the way you’re taught to do it. But it was impossible in this shrieking violence, especially when we hauled Kevlar sleds on which were piled up to—depending on the hauler—two hundred pounds of supplies.

  Three steps and glide became two, then one, then we were stepping forward as if through heavy water. The rubbly plain became a field piled with close-packed ice boulders. The sky tilted sideways as, linked to the sled like a horse, I pulled it into a gap, and there it stuck. Pettit materialized beside me, reached wordlessly to help me.

  “Together, Colonel. One . . . two . . . pull!”

  The group was roped together like a slave caravan. The ice went spongy suddenly, and I saw Clinton’s shoulders drop, felt a sickening lurch as the surface gave way. I was falling, expecting to feel seawater, but I’d merely dropped into a small ice ravine. Shaken, still standing, I stepped out, slid back, pushed forward, and froze as I heard a vast rumble beneath me. Then came a long cracking sound above the screech of wind, as if solid rock were tearing apart down there. As if sped-up plate tectonics ripped at granite seams. It was the sort of sound that sent coal miners scrambling for exits.

  The echo stopped. I never thought I’d be happy just to hear a screaming wind.

  Clinton slogged away into the dark, a half-visible figure in my yellow headlamp beam.

  We carried salt pills against cramps, burn salves, and medicines. We carried military rations that self-heated if you tore open the pouch. There were tents, if we had to stop. There were vaccinations and aerosols. There were hydration packets. There were waterproof blankets. There were splints, hazmat suits, goggles, chemical sample kits.

  How much time passed? An hour? Two? The cold wind elongated each second. I felt the sled working against my upper arms and thighs. The wind lessened; was it stopping finally? No, no, it was only teasing, and it sped up again.

  Suddenly Major Pettit pushed past me up to Clinton and the forms came together in the semidarkness, and from Pettit’s angry hand gestures, I gathered he was shouting. His gloved hand jabbing left. Clinton’s parka hood shaking back and forth, no! When I skied up to them, they were arguing over Pettit’s ice-rimmed compass, which he wielded—shaking it—like a prosecutor producing exhibit A.

  “You’re going the wrong way!”

  Clinton calmly knelt, traced a gloved finger along the almost invisible line of a wavelike snow, sastrugi.

  Pettit shook his head. “That’s east, not north.”

  The earth was a monumental tuning fork. The hideous tearing noises started up again. I felt the ice shuddering and rumbling, a metal animal. Clinton’s face was before me, eyes oval, features hidden by the black balaclava, lips white, nose white. Clinton assured me, “It’s just moving down there, but not breaking up. Still, we’ll circle around that flat area ahead.”

  “But that will slow us.”

  “If we don’t, we’ll fall in.”

  Our ski trails filled with blowing granules. Karen moved easily, head down, bulling forward. Eddie slipped but kept up. Pettit traveled up and down the line, making sure his men kept going, like every line of sailors which had disappeared into the polar void for the last five hundred years.

  Peter Del Grazo materialized beside me, having conferred with Pettit. “It’s Clinton, Colonel. He’s taking us the wrong way!”

  His eyes were fierce in his balaclava, and his voice, that Brooklyn accent, had lost all trace of the good humor marking it previously. “He goes where he wants on the ship. He doesn’t report to anyone. He could just ski off.”

  Ice rime hung from his balaclava, his breath was white brume, his anorak matted crystal.

  “Get back in place,” I said.

  How far can the fucking submarine be?

  We stopped for a ten-minute rest on the protected lee side of a huge ice column, a lone formation like a sandstone form in Utah, a tower that shielded us slightly from direct wind. Someone produced cocoa. My fingertips were losing feeling. We sat shoulder to shoulder for warmth and inside my mitten liners I imagined skin turning solid, blood crystalizing, fingers as blood sausages, legs as statues unable to move.

  Andrew Sachs had done surprisingly well, I thought. He’d not complained. He’d shut up. I’d been surprised at his acuity on skis, at his hidden resources, his ability to pull a sled. He sat off to the side, alone. One of the Marines suffered from the freezing together of his lips. His frosting breath puffed out from both sides of his mouth, and his fitful breathing resembled that of a horse.

  The man wordlessly endured the ripping apart of his lips. Karen Vleska advised him to keep his mouth open as he walked, and to turn away from the wind, to keep the running blood from freezing his lips together again.

  Del Grazo pulled the radio from his sled, tried for a fix on the submarine, looked up, and nodded happily.

  “Hey, he was right, Colonel! It’s still ahead.”

  Clinton switched off with Karen, who took the lead for a while, and then they switched back. He probed ahead with his long ice gaff.

  “Weak ice.”

  Gingerly moving, he played out rope. His form grew dimmer and I thought, This is what Pettit predicted. He’ll uncouple. He’ll ski away. He’s leaving us.

  The form was coming back.

  “There’s a way through, but just a small one. If we go fast, we can ski right over the water.”

  “Ski into water?” Eddie gasped.

  “It’s only water on top. There’s ice just under it. If you go fast, you’ll be fine.”

  “That water is what . . . like thirty degrees?”

  “In and out,” said Clinton. “Otherwise, it gets deeper east and west of here.”

  “But thirty degrees—”

  Clinton said calmly, “Just keep moving. The boots are waterproof. If you get wet, the wool socks will keep in heat. What’s the matter, tough Marine? You chicken?”

  “I’ll go first,” I said, to shut them up.

  He was right. It was easy. The water came up to my ankles. But the ice held, and we passed. The socks held the extreme cold off my feet.

  We built up speed, made good time, the wind at our backs for a while, which made no sense, but then, nothing did here. Then the wind dropped and the light turned gray and ahead rose a range of looming shadows. Ice mountains. My heart sank. Ivu, Clinton called it, the upthrust edges of two floes that had collided.

  “We have to climb that?” Eddie said beside me. They had to be at least forty feet high. Forty feet of ice. A four-story building. How do you climb up forty feet of ice, with sleds?

  Wind hissed down from the saddle shape above, whooshed into our faces, and drove ice pellets into our exposed skin.

  Clinton said, “It’s not that hard.”

  “Maybe not for you,” Eddie said.

  “Either way, Jarhead, you do it.”

  “You have a problem with Marines, Clinton?”

  “You have a problem with Army, elitist?”

  The sleds seemed to weigh double poundage go
ing up over the ice. We all hauled and pulled, helping each other, inching them up, and trying to keep them from crashing down, and finally, exhausted, we got over the top.

  One Marine had sprained an ankle. We were beat. We’d been out for seven hours, but had probably suffered an equivalent energy drain of two days of normal athletic activity. The storm had dulled senses and battered bodies and I knew that it might make us careless.

  So I called another rest, a longer one, and two sleepless hours later, we pushed off again and made decent time overcoming a much smaller pressure ridge, pros at this now, pushing through an ice field—and two hours after that, from the top of yet another ridge, and through still falling snow, I looked down, a quarter mile ahead, and glimpsed the long dark form of a nuclear submarine along the edge of a lead in the ice.

  We made it.

  It was like seeing a sub beside the bank of a river, except instead of land on either side, there was solid snow-covered ice, which just looked like land.

  I recognized the configuration of the sub.

  It was the Montana.

  Nearby, on the ice, sat a motley collection of oblong-shaped covered black life rafts, with tented roofs, and a couple of orange Arctic tents. The survivors would be inside. The small generators running the heaters inside the shelters sat on the ice, rumbling and sending up thin plumes of grayish smoke. I saw no people.

  My spirits lifted, but as we started down the rubbly incline, the ice began shaking. There was a sound like a railroad train, and the deep vibrations began again, from below. To me it sounded the same as before, but Clinton stopped abruptly, cocked his head, and held a hand up to halt us. He began scanning the ice plain spread out at the foot of the pressure ridge. And we waited with him.

  Suddenly I heard a deep ripping noise, a shredding sound reverberating inside the wind, low, alive. It echoed far in the distance, thunder exploding many miles away, except sound was all wrong up here, I knew. So maybe it wasn’t far. Maybe it was close. And then I saw, with horror, only four hundred yards from the collection of tents and rafts, a jagged shadow appear on the surface. It ran quickly toward us for a quarter mile, from the open water right up to the rubbly hills where we stood, watching.

  “It’s breaking up,” said Karen. “My God!”

  The crack had missed the tents, but it was widening. It stopped suddenly, as if an earthquake had ended.

  It’s going to start up again. This ice is unstable.

  We climbed down, hauling sleds, in a different sort of race now. At bottom, we raced toward the tents, as men, Montana crew, several upright, in parkas . . . or on all fours, began emerging into the snow.

  They moved like apes, half hunched over, swaying, cavemen, Neanderthals, evolutionary throwbacks. One man fell down. Men waving. Burned, sick men. Now a woman, coughing, half bent.

  These were probably the healthier ones.

  The ice underfoot was a shattered mirror.

  Sick or not, I’ve got to get that crew out, fast.

  TWELVE

  Captain Zhou Dongfeng, commander of People’s Republic of China nuclear attack submarine type 094, its newest Jin-class underwater craft, lowered his periscope, and ordered the vessel backward, quietly, away from the American Marines skiing toward the crippled USS Montana. He was a medium-sized, thickly black-haired, superbly postured thirty-three-year-old, and he was furious that they’d beaten him here, but he also knew they had no idea he was present. This meant he still might be able to complete his mission.

  I have never failed and I will not now, he thought, recalling the admiral’s call to him, a day ago, as he cruised north of Alaska, west of the cyclone. The admiral was a well-known leader in the Chinese Navy, whom Captain Zhou admired, and studied, but had never met.

  “The American submarine is carrying the prototype Mark 80 torpedo, most advanced underwater weapon in the world. It is also possible that they carry some bioweapon that released. We have heard there is a strange deadly illness aboard. This sickness greatly troubles me.”

  Captain Zhou Dongfeng had beaten long odds since he was ten years old, son of a poor farmer in China’s arid northwest. He’d hated pig farming and had excelled at school, and then at Naval entrance exams, driving himself to succeed, working, sleepless, while all around him, privileged sons of government or military officials rose through the ranks with assisted ease.

  Now his ceaseless work had paid off. He had been entrusted with one of the People’s Republic’s newest submarines, dispatched to the High North, a region that Beijing believed would be crucial to the twenty-first century. When the call came, he had been patrolling new ice-free areas, which Beijing believed would soon become shortcuts for Chinese commercial vessels. He was carrying forty crack Marines. Captain Zhou knew that the United States had stationed long-range missiles in Alaska, aimed at China. If war ever came in the future, and more than a few officers he knew believed this a possibility, knowledge of northern routes and undersea terrain could make a difference. Jin-class subs carried nuclear missiles.

  “As you know, our relationship with America is bad at the moment,” the admiral had said. “Two weeks ago one of their ships hit a Chinese submarine in the South China Sea, during their war games. The Americans claim this was an accident, that our vessel ran so silently they did not know it was there. Twenty-eight Chinese died. The sub was lost.”

  The admiral’s fury was palpable. “Beijing has chosen to accept the U.S. explanation.”

  It was clear that the admiral believed, as Captain Zhou did, that the Americans had no business conducting war exercises so close to China, and that the alleged “accident” had been either a deliberate challenge, or the natural result of American aggressive posturing. Neither was acceptable, and the loss of the sub and so many lives had been a humiliation and disaster.

  The admiral had said, “You will arrive at the abandoned submarine before the Americans. You will offer the survivors medicines and food, both of which will be airdropped to you before you enter the storm area. You will, while assisting the crew, do all you can to learn about the Montana’s systems. You will say you are on a humanitarian mission. You will take control of the vessel. You will wait for the arrival of the Snow Dragon, so the American submarine can be towed, if possible. You will acquire a prototype Mark 80 torpedo, along with any blueprints, plans, and technology available. I want samples. I want hard drives. I want blood taken from their ill, if possible. I want them to know that tender toes will be stepped upon.

  “Also, regrettably, any one of your crew who enters that sub is to wear protective clothing, and undergo full decontamination when rejoining you. Chemical shower. Quarantine. They will transfer to the Snow Dragon later. You, and they, will be doing a great service for China.”

  The admiral had no patience with excuses, and Zhou had seen the man destroy the careers of officers who did not live up to his expectations. A certain captain—a rising star—might be marked for better things. Then, failing the admiral, he would be transferred, demoted, or would languish in the bureaucracy for years.

  Just a vision of the admiral’s bald head, thin eyebrows, set mouth, and stern face—from China’s Naval News—made the captain’s mouth dry. He imagined a tiny room with no windows, a pile of paperwork on a desk, a one-room apartment for his family, a dusty wind blowing and the smell of pigs . . . a lone man and hung head—the fate of a failure.

  Moments ago, through the periscope, he’d treasured the view of the crippled $2.4 billion bonanza that, the admiral had said, “will help us thwart U.S. adventurism!”

  “The bioweapon, sir. Do we know anything more about it?” The notion of toxic gasses and human-made germs made the captain’s skin crawl.

  “It is unclear whether the illness is that at this point. There may be a natural explanation.”

  “Sir, what if the U.S. rescue team arrives first?”

  The question, of course, was lo
gical, but in the silence that followed, Captain Zhou broke out in a sweat. The admiral’s voice seemed cooler when he responded.

  “All cats love fish, but fear to wet their paws.”

  Meaning, fearful people are of no use to me.

  The admiral added, “I am certain, with your speed, this could not happen. In addition, we have an asset aboard their icebreaker slowing them down.”

  Captain Zhou knew that under international law, any ship in danger of sinking, or of damaging the environment, was permitted to be boarded, rescued. But military ships were tricky; the law said they belonged to their host nation. He had asked the admiral, the issue of a fight on the table, “For clarification, sir. If any of their crew is on the sub, you still want me to board her?”

  The admiral provided the excuse. “Should ice crush the submarine, the environmental disaster would be profound, especially if their reactor is damaged. You must prevent this catastrophe.”

  “The Americans may, sir, have other ideas.”

  “Undoubtedly. But their satellites are blind. And thanks to our asset, the American rescuers cannot communicate with Washington. He’s jamming them. They think the storm is blocking communication.”

  What the admiral meant, the captain thought, is that no one else will know what happens on the ice. Just as in the collision in the South China Sea, there will be two versions.

  The admiral added delicately, “If they start a fight, no one can blame you for defending yourself. Remember, defeat cannot be bitter if one chooses not to swallow it.”

  There it was. Give them medicines, look helpful, but get the American sub, no matter what you have to do.

  Captain Zhou Dongfeng had no illusions about the other part of the admiral’s message. If you fail, if anything goes wrong, you will take responsibility, not me.

  The admiral went on, “The Americans are tricky and lie constantly; they are dangerous and dying as an empire. Even their great diplomat Henry Kissinger recently predicted that war may erupt in the future. Our own great naval thinker, Li Zhenfu of Dalian Maritime University, has said that whoever controls the new Arctic routes will control the new passage of world economics and international strategies. Captain, you may save millions of lives through thoughtful action. I have no doubt that you will bring honor to China, and to yourself.”