White Plague

by James Abel

  DeBlieu said, “Hey, feel free to answer.”

  With unreal slowness, I pulled out film. I needed many frames just to see an elbow shifting, a leg lifting. I said, “They’re packing now. They’re filling knapsacks. They’re going on a journey.”

  Maybe I should have stopped as the director had ordered, but by now I was too excited and frightened at what I suspected would come next.

  I narrated to my transfixed audience. “They’re inside a building now. A warehouse. I see stacked Springfield rifles. Machine guns. Other soldiers help them load it onto trucks. Wait! Someone’s inserted captions now. Handwritten. Eddie, you ever hear of U.S. Army Project White?”

  “No.”

  “It says ‘part two.’ Do you think that first section, the busted-up one, was part one?”

  “I’ll take part two if we can get it.”

  The pressure of the eyepiece against my face seemed to penetrate my sockets. Eddie groaned. “They’re only loading rifles, right? Arms, right?”

  DeBlieu repeated, as if we’d not heard his previous plea, “What about Fort Riley? This is a hundred years old. What does this have to do with us?”

  I held up a hand to let him know I’d heard. It was too early to answer. The film must have been developed on the old boat. As I kept rolling, and the strip started dangling off the table, Eddie scrounged around behind me and created a way to roll up the film as it uncoiled . . . He cut a knife groove into a wooden dowel. He inserted the film edge into the slit. He rolled film up as it unspooled. I figured—when we were done, we’d spool the film back up, if we could.

  There were bare frames and that was so frustrating. It was like watching an old movie but only seeing every fourth or fifth frame . . . sometimes nine or ten in a row before a strip broke off.

  Then the film seemed to stabilize enough so that I could pull it, frame by frame, beneath the hand magnifier.

  I read out loud, peering down from a century ahead, to the century behind, “OFF LIMITS. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.”

  Little figures moved jerkily. The soldiers were on a dock now, in civilian clothing, loading the crates of grenades and Springfield rifles onto a boat. Time leaped in jerks. The gangplank seemed to bow with weight as men went back and forth onto a small, private, forty-foot-long boat, and there was a long shot of the name, Anna. The clown guy, the one who had acted like Napoleon before, did a sailor jig on the dock, hands on his belt.

  “Now we’re at sea,” I said, seeing gray rolling waves, which were still out there, unlike the men who had shot this. A whale spouted. Then there were three whales. I said, “Shit,” as a whole section of film tore off, and when I resumed, the men were in a rocky forest. “Whole bunch of new guys now with them, and mules, and the crates are on the animals. They’re moving through a trail cut through high fir trees.”

  DeBlieu said, “Project White. Delivering arms.”

  It was like some old Charlie Chaplin movie. Real humans didn’t move like this. Now the clown guy was standing on a stump, watching the mules go by, pretending to be an ape, hunched over, swinging his arms, scratching his armpits, beating his chest.

  “He just broke out coughing,” I said.

  “You want to tell DeBlieu? Or should I?” said Eddie.

  I felt a wave of devastation sweep over me. Now the clown guy must have had the camera, because the other guys—long overcoats on, rifles over their backs, military caps on—had paused for a group photo. The coughing wasn’t the point of the shot. Clown guy had just happened to cough when they were rolling. The camera panned away, and there was a gap in the forest, and through that I saw a fuzzy moving blob in the distance.

  “Guys coming on horseback. About thirty of them. A village there, too. Thatched roofs. Timber walls. The riders wear fur-flapped caps and baggy trousers and have rifles on their shoulders. Small horses, skinny. Bandoliers . . . these guys look like Cossacks. Man, handlebar mustaches!”

  The Americans waved. It was an arranged meeting. Close up, the riders seemed to stare at the camera, angry that it was there. Their clothing was a ragtag collection of peasant patchwork, some foreign military uniforms, and one man even wore a stylish bowler, low brimmed, above a coat more appropriate for the theater, long and hemmed with fur.

  “Colonel, where are they?” asked DeBlieu.

  “They’ve got a flag. It’s the two-headed eagle, the Russian imperial eagle, above a coat of arms. Russia.” I sat back. I looked at DeBlieu. Now I understood. “They’re bringing guns to the White Russians fighting the Reds.”

  DeBlieu looked puzzled. “Wait. America fought against Russia in 1918?” he said.

  “Yeah, Woodrow Wilson sent in troops to help fight the Communists,” said Eddie, a student of military history.

  “He did?”

  I felt DeBlieu’s hand on my shoulder as he leaned closer. “What happened to those soldiers?”

  I snapped, “You want me to explain, or keep going?”

  His hand fell away. I glanced up. He looked angry, but he’d shut up.

  I continued rolling, feeling guilty because I was getting to see the story, not them.

  “They must have transferred the arms because now they’re back on the boat. Mission accomplished! They’re slapping each other’s backs. They’re toasting the mission. Clown guy is really coughing in this one. All done! Except, whoa! Now they’re being chased by a gunship . . . Bolshevik ship . . . I can see the deck gun firing at them . . . a splash . . . the shell just missed them.”

  The Bolshevik ship was getting closer. I prayed for our guys to get away. Now the view shifted abruptly, the camera in front of the boat. The clown guy on the prow, not smiling, pointing forward, as if urging more speed. There was a cloud bank in the distance . . . I imagined the guy shouting, Faster!

  “They’re still not hit.”

  The film tilted. Brown spots, age spots ate up the picture. It was gone. I kept rolling. Eddie kept spooling up the film.

  “They’re back,” I said, relieved. “It’s cloudy all around . . . no . . . they’re in mist. I guess they got away, escaped into it. They’re in front of the boat, looking ahead. There’s a caption: TWO DAYS LATER. Oh, oh, shit, man, they must be really north because they’re in the ice!”

  Only it wasn’t the kind of ice the Wilmington was in, or the kind I’d seen near the Montana. Unrolling before my eye was the monster ice I’d read about in history books, seen in old lithographs. These were ice mountains. This was the Andes, the Alps, of ice. The walls surrounding the little Anna seemed to grow higher, frame by frame. I noticed one of the other men coughing, too, now.

  I sat back. “They sailed too far north,” I said. “Got away, but they’re getting sick.”

  DeBlieu said, “These are the bodies the sub found?”

  “Has to be.”

  The film jumped again and my heart did, too, because I saw it. I’d known we would end up here, but I’d hoped I’d be wrong.

  “Take a look,” I told DeBlieu.

  I held the magnifier in place. He bent down. I resumed drawing the film toward me. I heard DeBlieu groan.

  “They’re all sick now,” he said. “With the same thing.”

  Eddie sighed. “They kept filming, One. Till the end.”

  It was a death film now. At first I didn’t realize that the man I watched in a bunk was clown guy. There was no smile now. No jumping around. A close-up showed him bleeding through his nose, like patients from the Montana. The camera pulled back. Another sick guy lay in an upper bunk, eyes closed, lethargic. The eyes opened. The mouth moved. History consumed his words. There was no technology to capture them. The hand of an unseen man laid a compress on clown guy’s forehead. The camera shook violently. Maybe the man taking the photo was coughing, too, doing his job, distracting himself from what they probably all knew was to come.

  Eddie took over at the eyepiece, de
scribed what came next, which was a foregone conclusion. Three of the men on the boat struggling with the corpse of clown guy, rolling it over the side, in a shroud. A shot of an ice mountain. Then the vessel locked in place, caught by ice coating the gunwales and ice on the ceilings. The deck was slick with ice, the men coughing, throwing up as they tried to chip it away, get free. Cut to the mast, which was now an ice pole. Another body went over the side, and flopped, in its sheet, onto a floe. A bear bent over it.

  DeBlieu commanded, “Enough! You know what it is! Explain. Now!”

  Explain? It’s funny the way you can know something horrible, even be sure of it, but not want to say it because that will be the final step of transforming it into something real.

  I said tiredly, “They called it the Spanish flu.”

  “Even though it didn’t start in Spain,” Eddie said.

  “It broke out in 1918, near the end of World War One.”

  DeBlieu looked pensive, riveted.

  “Nineteen eighteen,” I said. “Imagine it. The world at war. Millions of men in trenches. Chemical bombs. Fighter planes for the first time. Tanks for the first time. And then, out of the blue, on top of everything else, a new disease appears.”

  “At Fort Riley,” said Eddie. “Kansas.”

  “Wait, I heard of the Spanish flu,” DeBlieu said. “It started in Kansas?”

  “Just like the Wizard of Oz,” said Eddie.

  “I thought it killed millions in Europe.”

  “Oh, it did. But that’s not where it started. We learned this on our first week in the unit,” I said. “That flu was the worst disease outbreak in history.”

  “I thought the black plague was that.”

  “No. The story—the theory—is that soldiers enlisting at Riley, guys from pig farms nearby, came in already infected. Then it spread. Doctors had never seen anything like it. It hit the younger people the worst, the healthier ones, ramped up the resistance system like crazy, so a more vigorous person, those guys were more likely to die. Victims fell ill in the morning and died that night.”

  “Like on the Montana,” DeBlieu breathed.

  “Yeah. And like on the Anna. Those guys probably didn’t know they were infected when they sailed off. Other Riley troops got sent to Europe. The disease amplified there, in the trenches,” Eddie said. “But it didn’t stay in the trenches. In the end, five hundred million infected. Twenty to fifty million dead, some estimates go as high as eighty million. It changed the war, altered battle plans, killed more people in one year than the black plague did in four. Fifteen thousand dead in Philadelphia. Theaters closed across the U.S. Schools closed. If the war hadn’t been on, taken up the headlines, every schoolkid in the U.S. would know this story. But it was downplayed at the time. Oh, you knew that people in your city were sick, in your family, but no one outside of governments knew the whole picture.”

  I said, remembering photos we’d seen, “Crowds, people were too afraid to congregate. Cops and firemen stopped going to work in places. In some countries the dead were bulldozed into pits. The flu burned across earth. Hell, go to a New York Yankees game in September 1918, half the people in the stands wore masks. Neighbors avoided each other. In parts of Alaska, Eskimo villages suffered a ninety-five percent death rate. Alaska—the Eskimos—got it the worst.”

  DeBlieu said, aghast, “How did they stop it?”

  I shook my head. “They never did. It just ran out. It morphed into something less lethal. But the fear has always been that it will come back, in the original form. The question . . . we got this at the unit, in seminars, we read papers about it, it comes up at conferences. If it didn’t have a name like flu, if it had a name like plague, believe me, you’d have heard of it. The question is, the fear has been, for a hundred years, if that flu comes back, can we stop it this time?”

  DeBlieu said, “But it died out, you said?”

  And Eddie said, “So did the black plague. First it appeared in 600 A.D. in Turkey. Then it came back in 1347, in Europe. Then it died out again. Then it returned in 1890, in China and India. Each time, millions died.”

  “And now the Spanish flu is back,” I said.

  Eddie said, “The White Plague.”

  DeBlieu fell into a chair. For a moment nobody spoke. Then DeBlieu said, struggling with hope, “Well, we’ve got better medicines now, right? I mean, in 1918, doctors didn’t know a lot compared to now.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Like those sprays and pills you’re treating patients with in the hangar. All new. Wasn’t even penicillin in 1918. So you can’t compare now and then.”

  “Definitely,” Eddie said. “You’re right.”

  “So this time,” DeBlieu said, fantasizing, “tell me that even if it’s the flu, this will be like other diseases that once were dangerous, but aren’t anymore. Polio. Cholera. Terrifying in the past, but now pretty much gone. You can beat it. That’s why you took the sick aboard. You have a whole arsenal of medicines. We’re just looking at something scary in the past.”

  Eddie was expressionless. I sighed. What we faced downstairs from the lab represented precisely the prediction we’d made to the Defense Department that had brought me to the director’s attention five years ago. That a disease would erupt in the High North, not the Tropics.

  I said, “I wish I could tell you that, Captain. But if we’re seeing bodies from Fort Riley, we’re dealing with the original strain. And we have no idea if people in the last hundred years have built up resistance to it, or whether, you know . . .”

  Eddie added morosely, “Or whether we’re looking at an even more lethal mutation.”

  DeBlieu argued doggedly, as if trying to change fact, “But if you’ve all been expecting it, why hasn’t anyone worked on it all these years?”

  “How can you work on it when you don’t have samples of the original strain? Look, Captain, just in the last two years researchers have unearthed old corpses, flu victims, in Alaska, Russian Eskimo villages, trying to reconstruct the virus. It’s been controversial. Some scientists fear that could start an outbreak in itself. But the benefits were supposed to outweigh the risk, and truth is, some virus has been reconstructed, but not the original strain. Not what we have here.”

  Eddie said, glancing down, as if he could see through the deck to the makeshift hospital ward in the hangar. “Now we’ll find out, I guess.”

  DeBlieu, horrified, was reeling from the impact. He said, in a low, enraged voice, “You brought it onto my ship?”

  “We didn’t know that’s what it was until five minutes ago. And we weren’t going to abandon U.S. sailors on the ice. Look, we keep watching the film,” I soothed. “Maybe there’s something here that tells us what to do. An antidote. Something they didn’t even know but we’ll know when we see it.”

  “If they had an antidote, don’t you think they would have used it?” DeBlieu demanded, backing away.

  “Maybe they didn’t know they had it. Maybe they only got seventy percent of the work done, but we can do the rest. Meanwhile, like you said, we’ve got new medicines. And we’ll try them. We’re using them right now.”

  “Maybe,” DeBlieu repeated, as if the word, the doubt in the word “maybe,” represented an affront to his sense of right.

  “Maybe is the best we can do,” I told him.

  The enormity of the revelation seemed to suck air from the lab. DeBlieu absorbed the blow physically. He stood absolutely still, a vein throbbing on his forehead. He was an engineer by training, the commander entrusted with keeping the nation’s lone icebreaker safe. The competing pressures inside him had to be enormous—the responsibility to his crew, the training stressing rescue. DeBlieu stared down at the bits of film, as if the celluloid itself crawled with a mass of microbes.

  I’d expected to see fear on his face. Or hardness. But not sadness. That was what entered the brown, intelligent ey
es. “No, the best we can do, Colonel, is that I’m pulling my people from the hangar. I’m sorry about the patients. I’m sorry they’re sick. I have a different responsibility. You will remove every one of those patients and put them back on the ice,” he said.

  Eddie said, “What ice? We’re past the tough ice. We’re closing on Barrow. What do you want us to do, put them in a life raft?”

  DeBlieu stood straighter, moved back a step. “Do what you have to do,” he said with disconcerting decisiveness. “But get them off. Meanwhile, Colonel, I’m afraid I’m going to have to relieve you of command.”

  I jerked up sharply.

  He said, “My orders—as you know—were to relinquish control to you unless I felt there was a danger to the ship.”

  “Captain, we don’t have time to argue over—”

  “I agree completely. So we’ll find a stable area of ice, or even if we can’t, we will—no, sorry—your Marines—will remove the sick from the ship, unload them onto the ice, or rafts, along with whatever provisions will make them more comfortable. Medicines, tents, heating, whatever you need, if we have it, you’ll have it.”

  “It’s a bit late for that,” I told him.

  As if to punctuate the point, Del Grazo appeared suddenly in the doorway, looking disheveled, looking as if he was trying not to seem afraid. It wasn’t working.

  “Colonel Rush, you better come. Clinton is really sick,” he said.

  TWENTY

  FIVE VOICES IN WASHINGTON

  “Do you think Colonel Rush will watch the film?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.” The director nodded. “He’s too dedicated not to do it, orders or not.”

  It was dusk in Washington, and the lights remained off in the third-floor corner office of the four-story townhouse, diagonally across from the White House, on the north side of Lafayette Park. Outside, temperatures topped ninety-two degrees, and a gray, smoggy urban light—part sun, part rush-hour effluence—filtered in through mesh curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows.