White Plague

by James Abel

  Yes, it was going to work, I thought. It was. But, of course, just when you think that, things go wrong. The ice cracked somewhere, a single, high-pitched snap that sounded, quite unfortunately, to me, like the firing of a bullet.

  And once the first “shot” was fired, the real shooting erupted, all around.

  SIXTEEN

  The Arctic murders by illusion. Refracted light forms a rescue ship you rush to meet, only to plunge into frigid water. Floes seem solid but you better not step on one. A ridge of ice snaps off, quick and loud as a bullet.

  “Ground fire! Ground fire! Ten o’clock!” a voice on the Marine band radio yelled.

  In the storm, it sounded like a whole army was fighting. The cacophony included the thump of Marine M203 grenade launchers, the three-round bursts of M4s, the crack of Chinese bullpups, and always, like low rumbling laughter beneath it, the straining field of ice.

  The radio net was alive with voices of men groping and calling out through the storm, shooting blind, trying to pinpoint the origin of enemy gunfire.

  “Bowhead one-two, bowhead one-two. This is bowhead three. Do you hear me? Over.”

  “Shots coming from Sierra echo, that’s a bull.”

  “Go! Go! On the left, take him out!”

  “I got hoofprints in the snow, bowhead one-two.”

  I shouted, “Cease fire! Cease fire! It was the ice breaking off!”

  The echoes rose, fell. There was no way to know where anyone was located.

  “For Christ’s sake, cease fire, Marines!”

  I had a sickening flash of the injured and sick from the submarine, torn apart by fire. The tents, Eddie, the grouped sleds, caught in a cross fire or mowed down by the Chinese. The sick, strapped down, were too weak to free themselves and crawl away to seek even bare cover.

  “Get down!”

  I did not know if the combatants knew the location of each other. The likelihood of being hit by a stray bullet was as great as being struck by an aimed one. I shouted over the Motorola for Chief Apparecio and Karen Vleska not to fire a torpedo!

  Did they even hear me?

  Major Pettit and his squad leaders directed men to spread out, crawl toward the pressure ridge, or the sleds. They’d be humpbacked forms, wriggling toward the last place they’d seen the Chinese, who would naturally be somewhere else by now.

  On the Chinese set I heard another stream of shouts.

  Andrew Sachs bore up well, considering his civilian status. He remained rational, and seemed horrified. “Now someone’s yelling about a bear! A polar bear! Is that what started it? A starving bear and . . .” He was laughing now, but not sanely. “A damn bear! This place!”

  “Tell me everything they say.”

  “Now someone is warning them that we’ve got one of their radios. Saying we’re monitoring what they say.”

  The Chinese radio went silent.

  There came the cr-ack of rounds overhead, and then a zipping noise, which meant that whoever was firing had adjusted angle so that the bullets came level with my head. I pulled Sachs down. A barrage slammed into the bridge. My M4 was up but I didn’t fire back. It was possible that a Marine was shooting out there. I shoved the Chinese radio at Sachs and bellowed for him to tell them—yell into the set no matter what—that we hadn’t started it, to stop firing, to say I was trying to get our guys to stop, too.

  “This is Colonel Rush! Cease fire, Marines!”

  Sachs said that the Chinese had probably switched bands. But he kept turning dials and babbling into the set. Maybe he’d been the one to tell them to switch bands in the first place. I had no idea what he was really saying.

  “Doc! Doc! Freed is down!”

  “Enemy incoming! Rapid fire!”

  Then I heard Major Pettit. “If you keep firing, Crowley, that handset of yours will get shoved up where the sun never shines. The colonel said to shut it down!”

  Nobody likes being shot at. If you hear the other side stopping, you tend to do it, too.

  The shooting—at least the U.S. side—seemed to be slackening, or was it my imagination?

  The bullpups fell silent.

  All the firing stopped.

  There was only wind now, like laughter, and the groaning of men, and someone screaming.

  I tried to reach Eddie. “Major Nakamura?”

  “All good here, Colonel.” I felt some relief that he was okay. “Nobody hurt, but they goddamn shot up the snow, holy shit, son of a bitch! They killed the goddamn snow two hundred times. That snow is deader than Julius Caesar.”

  I switched handsets. “Captain Zhou? Can you hear me?”

  Stiffly, after moving bandwidths, on the third try, I heard an answer, flat and cold. He’d probably turned his radios on again. “I hear you.”

  “It was the ice started it. Or possibly a bear. We did not fire first.”

  Silence. Did he believe me? He had to know I could have torpedoed his vessel, and hadn’t. He must have been waiting for the impact and explosion on his end. He must have heard his own guys yelling about the bear.

  I tried again. “Captain Zhou.”

  The interpreter’s voice said grudgingly, “The captain says he knows about the bear, Colonel.”

  I ordered Chief Apparecio, so that Zhou could hear, “Scuttle her. Open the sea cocks or torpedo tubes. Set explosives. Do whatever you can do as fast as possible and get out.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  I told Zhou, “Let’s continue what we started. Tend the wounded. Take your men aboard. If you still wish to give us medicines, thank you. Then let’s go home.”

  Pettit reported the Chinese soldiers filing back to their Zodiacs, carrying two wounded. Pettit commandeered one of their Zodiacs. The Chinese would get their weapons back when they reached the sub. I knew that combat could still break out again at any provocation.

  Sachs asked me, as we climbed down to the ice, as the roar of water flooding into the sub reached us, as the sub began listing and ice crept closer to the bridge, “Do you really think he’ll go away?”

  “No. I think he’ll submerge and wait for orders. But I’m not about to blow up a Chinese submarine and start World War Three.”

  I told Zhou, feigning bitterness, giving him some bragging rights at home, some face, giving him a recording of the American commander, “If it weren’t for you, we could have kept her afloat, Zhou. Could have saved her.”

  Let his bosses think that Zhou caused us to lose a $2.4 billion submarine. Well, technically speaking, he did.

  But I still have to figure out what is making the Montana crew sick! That sickness may be more dangerous than losing the submarine.

  Maybe my gesture did it. Maybe Zhou would have done it anyway. But he sent over two Zodiacs loaded with crates of medicines, a few of them the same ones we carried, the same ones any prudent doctor would start out with against the symptoms I’d seen in those tents and life rafts. It was funny, I thought, eyeing the Chinese and English logos on the crates, the names of the companies that supplied both countries, funny because our weapons to kill each other were different. But our medicines to save lives were the same.

  Everyone seemed shaken, but glad to be alive.

  She went down slowly at first, tipping forward at the bow, where the torpedo tubes were flooding. Then the long cylinder shape started sliding forward. I watched the eel-like form glide into the frothing lead, sending up spray . . . and then there was only a fin in the air . . . and then that, too, was gone, only foam indicating that the craft had ever been there.

  Two dead Marines lay in the snow. Two others, wounded and bandaged and shot up with morphine, could not pull sleds. Now we had Marine patients. Thirty sailors from the Montana lay coupled on sleds, in various stages of illness, some slack from drugs, some glaze-eyed with exhaustion or fever, the worst hacking up yellow bile, putrid bits of conta
gion that left a trail on the snow.

  As for the dead, I hated giving the next order. Leave them. There were not enough sleds to move them, and we needed every spare second to get the needy to safety, if we wanted them to live. Later—after the storm passed—another mission could be dispatched to collect the bodies or incinerate them, depending on what—in the end—had made them ill.

  The Marines wanted to take their dead, but I told Pettit, in no uncertain terms, that if we did that, we’d have a riot on our hands from the Montana survivors, who would demand the same treatment for their friends.

  No one was happy. But Pettit understood. The healthier Montana crew would help pull sleds. Clinton would lead us back toward the Wilmington, or at least the direction in which our radio locators said she’d be.

  The Chinese sub was gone, at least on the surface. Eddie skied beside me in silence for a while.

  “You think Zhou’s directly underneath us, or to the right or left?” he said, eyeing the ice rubble field.

  “What I want to know is, who’s talking to him?”

  We looked over the moving figures, the jagged line probing its way back toward the warmth of the Wilmington, if Clinton could help find her again.

  “Sachs?” Eddie threw out a name.

  “He speaks Chinese. He wanted us to hand over the sub. But he did a good job during the fighting.”

  “Our lovely Karen Vleska?”

  “Hell, she knows so much anyway, she could just tell them half the things they want to know. She didn’t need to come all the way here to do that.”

  “Is that logic talking, or love?”

  “Eddie!”

  “Okay, okay. Clinton, then? He’s always there when we need something, always around.”

  “What are you saying? That the most helpful guy is guilty because he helps?”

  “Well, if the truth was obvious, we’d know it by now.”

  Glumly, I concurred. “A lot of the Iñupiats do have relatives in Russia.”

  “And what exactly does Russia have to do with China?”

  “I’m just saying,” I snapped. “You know. They’re both rivals.”

  “I keep going back to Sachs. Or Del Grazo. Mr. Communications. We never think about him. He knows how to fix equipment, so he knows how to screw it up. He looks over everyone’s shoulder, and no one looks over his,” Eddie said. “He could be the one, plain and simple.”

  “I thought of that. Plus, Del Grazo kept pointing his finger at Clinton.”

  “Like you did back there?”

  “Del Grazo was in every meeting.”

  I looked back at Del Grazo, who was skiing beside a sled and talking to one of the wounded Marines, Del Grazo bending to adjust the man’s blanket. He was a constant positive presence. Only in our upside-down world would support constitute a clue.

  “Pettit was in the meetings, too,” Eddie mused. “Hey, that would be great if your ex-wife’s paramour turned out to be a spy. She always did have bad judgment in men. I mean, look who she married.”

  “Not funny. I don’t think it’s Pettit. I think the Chinese had someone in place on the ship before we got there, someone monitoring the original mission. That’s more logical than them lucking out and managing to place someone inside an emergency rescue so fast.”

  “More logical, but not necessarily right.”

  I sighed. We scanned our sled convoy. Ahead looked like behind. The ice rumbled below, as unstable as a tropical volcanic island. I heard a tearing noise, like fabric ripping, and felt the surface heave suddenly. There came a single tremendous lurch and a crevasse ripped open, running past us, widening, faster than we were, a maw a mere terrifying eight yards to our right.

  The ice settled down again.

  “Shit,” Eddie said, awed and horrified and remembering, as I was, how we’d left the Montana site just as the lead closed and the two floes crashed together behind us, a convulsion that pulverized in seconds ice edges that had been solid moments before. The earth was unstable. The groaning never stopped. It occurred to me far to the south, in the marble halls of Washington, men in comfortable chairs called this process “global warming.” There it was academic dinner argument. Here I watched a planet disintegrate before my eyes.

  “Eddie, we need to get these people inside, and warm,” I said, realizing how right the Eskimos were when they gave ice a hundred names, treated it like an animal. “And I wish we could have found that film, the goddamn film.”

  Eddie nodded toward the sleds thoughtfully. “The latency period for spread . . . if we’re going to start getting it, too, I wonder, once we’re on board, how long before—”

  I cut him off, snapped, “I just almost started a war to save these people. I’m not losing any more, not abandoning them to die, or fall in when the ice cracks open again.”

  “Hey, I’m with you, man. I’m just saying.”

  “Well, don’t just be saying. Figure out what made them sick. Be useful, for Christ’s sake. For all we know, the antibiotics will knock it, or weaken it. Two days from now they’ll all be better. Scare over. Welcome home, Marines.”

  Eddie hesitated. “That movie, what year do you think it was made, Numero? It was old, the chief said. Nineteen sixty? Nineteen eighty?”

  “We’ll never know.”

  “Ah, maybe it was old porno. Maybe it was bullshit. Hey, remember those monkeys, One?”

  “I never forget them.”

  “I dream about them sometimes, and in the worst dreams the monkeys get human faces. People I love. Then ones I don’t know. One gets sick. Then another. Buses. Trains . . .”

  We skied in silence for a while. There was some small comfort in mindlessness, but then I reminded myself that to do anything mindlessly out here could be fatal. Simple relaxation was not an option.

  Eddie said in a low voice, “Thirteen forty-seven.”

  “You’re filled with happy thoughts today,” I said.

  I halted and our eyes met through the slits of our balaclavas. He’d finally mouthed the nightmare that loomed over this whole mission since I’d found out that the sickness had preceded the fire aboard the Montana, that—with the sailors coughing on the sleds—would have occurred to any doctor in our unit.

  “Marseille,” I said, naming the French Mediterranean port that was famed for its role that year. “Yersinia pestis,” I said, naming the infamous passenger that had come ashore there in 1347.

  I knew that Eddie and I both were seeing the first map that we’d been shown when we’d joined the unit. It was a map of the past—the year that the black plague sailed out of Astrakhan, in central Russia, tacking its way south to Sarai, on the Sea of Azov, and then past the great Turkish port of Constantinople, until the tiny, cramped ship docked at Marseille.

  “To burn through Europe,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Eddie miserably as we stood to the side and watched the progression of sleds pass, pulled by healthier Marines and Navy guys. Del Grazo helped. So did Sachs. Karen Vleska skied up front with Clinton.

  The nightmare of nightmares had started on a ship. One ship that disgorged, along with coughing sailors, a few rats. Black ones, not the brown kind you see in the New York transit system. Rattus rattus. Rats that carried fleas. Fleas that carried bacteria. Bacteria that entered human bloodstreams when the fleas bit a dockside vendor or two, maybe a beggar with his hand out, maybe a fat, fur-clad merchant in his rich home overlooking the port.

  Day one, a scattering of men and women, just a handful, scratching idly at their ankles and wrists, where fleas bite. Same day, a few locals grow feverish and have headaches. By day three, even for the strong people, here come the chills, first like a cold coming on, then chills become shakes and shakes become convulsions, and those little bite marks bloom into buboes, and soon after that, other family members who touched the sick, or breathed air they exhaled, m
aybe fed them a bit of soup, maybe told them a bedtime story, maybe changed a bandage, they began to get fevers, too.

  “We may not know what our guys have,” I told Eddie, eyeing a moaning man being hauled past by a Marine. “But the good news is, it is definitely not the plague.”

  “Ninety-five percent,” Eddie said.

  Which was the percentage of people who contracted pneumonic plague who perished from it across Europe. A kill rate of 95 percent. Add in people who got just regular old plague, black plague, not the pneumonic kind, and you ended up with between thirty and seventy million dead. Clinically speaking, hiding horror with math, the way scientists prefer to do it, that was an overall 30 to 75 percent death rate, all starting with a couple of skinny, hungry rattus rattuses jumping off one ship in Marseille.

  One ship.

  And in those days far fewer people lived on Earth. And there were no airplanes, cars, and trains to spread things.

  “I’m not letting some scare story keep our guys from getting all the care they need,” I said. “Whatever it is, it isn’t going to be another 1347.”

  “Absolutely.” Eddie nodded.

  But, I thought, we were heading for a ship, and that ship would hopefully take us back to Barrow, and Barrow had an airport, and cars, and trucks, and planes that took people—tourists, locals, scientists—all over the world so . . . well . . . you get the picture Eddie was painting.

  Stop being paranoid.

  I told Eddie wearily, “Take off the rose-colored glasses, Eddie. Stop being so positive about things.”

  “Why didn’t the director tell us they knew about the sickness, One? Or the bodies they took aboard?”

  “We’ll ask him when we can. Maybe he didn’t know.”

  “You have some decisions to make before we reach the ship.”

  I stopped and my voice hardened. “No I don’t. I made them.”

  He leaned closer, but I didn’t give him the opportunity to say any more.