White Plague

by James Abel

You could search for a week and not find someone who knew the layout. You could search for two weeks if that someone kept moving, staying one cabin ahead, I thought.

  If we find him, afterward we’ll try to disinfect. They must have bleach on board. We can wash down every wall, every cabin. But odds are we won’t get everything. Odds are the thing is out among the crew now.

  Then my thoughts were interrupted. The ship’s alarms began ringing, as in the drills we’d practiced, except this time I had a feeling that Del Grazo was behind the alarm.

  “Fire in the chief’s mess,” the overhead voice said. And then, sharply, no surprise, “This is not a drill.”

  The chief’s lounge, most comfortable cabin aboard. The break room for lifers, petty officers. They’d had me in there once for a poker game. Best coffee. Best music. Plushest Barcalounger furniture. Either a football or a baseball game seemed to be playing at all times.

  He’s not just hiding. But what is he doing?

  Distraction? Sabotage? Escape?

  Passages and stairwells filled with rushing, shouting figures in fire retardant suits, masks on, axes out, any panic on board previously now magnified. The danger was real now, and all anyone had to do to appreciate the extent of it was to see Marines, formerly quarantined, moving among the healthy crew.

  Another announcement burst forth, five minutes later. “Fire in the radio room!”

  Site of the long-range communication equipment and the cables running to the bridge.

  The ship was a maze of machinery, electrical works, condensers. Fuel. Wiring. All vulnerable to fire. What had he done, I thought as I searched. Planted incendiary devices beforehand? Because the radio room was on a different deck entirely from the first fire.

  It was always locked, but Del Grazo would have had a key and the combo to get in.

  Four figures in fire-fighting gear unrolled a hose at the entrance of the science lounge. I glimpsed a sofa in flames, billowing black smoke. There was water on deck. The passageway smelled of burned foam. Maybe hell smelled that way also.

  But I already knew that we’d sailed into white hell.

  We’d done drills for accidental fires on the Wilmington. Drills for collisions and oil spill control, drills practicing fast boats down to evacuate a tour ship. Drills for ice hits, drills for heart attacks.

  There were no drills for sabotage on the Wilmington.

  I ran, Beretta out, down the main deck passageway, which connected—if you passed through a series of hatches—both ends of the ship, fore to aft. It passed the commissary and deck machinery equipment room and main generator room and auxiliary boiler room. There was a fire now in the engineering control center, up on level one.

  SNAFU, situation normal all fucked up, as Eddie would say. At Quantico when we do searches we’re always in three-man teams. Watch your partners. Never go into a room alone. Always wait for the corner men to go in first.

  Heart in my throat, I went into each room alone.

  I was the corner man and also the main man. I opened the door of the commissary. I shoved it into the wall to make sure nobody was behind. I flicked on the light and advanced forward, pulse slamming. Inside were stacked shelves of logo T-shirts and sweatshirts, Wilmington hats, and red wool caps for designated “polar bears,” who had gone through the Arctic hazing. There were shaving kits for sale, and feminine hygiene products. There was no Peter Del Grazo crouching behind a stack of long-sleeved shirts showing a grinning walrus.

  I continued aft, along the passageway. It was quiet at first down here, no footsteps, no shouting, but then I heard people coming and two burly white-suited figures with fire axes approached. I stared at the faceplates. It was impossible to see inside due to the sharp reflected overhead light.

  I tightened my grip on the pistol. The figures came abreast, passed, disappeared. They were probably also checking compartments.

  I kept going.

  Ahead, on the right, three minutes later, I came upon a small bathroom, a head, in an isolated turn of corridor just before the hatch leading to the science area. I reached for the knob. The door creaked open. It was dark inside.

  The light flooded on and I jumped. Five feet ahead I saw a figure but it was me, scared as shit, pointing a Beretta at a mirror.

  But suddenly there was a white-suited figure behind me in the mirror, too, maybe one of the two guys who had passed earlier, except now his ax was raised, swinging down, toward me.

  It was too late to turn around. Reflexively I dropped as the ax swished past my ears. I heard the metallic smack of steel on steel, saw the blade bounce off the door frame as my body slammed into the deck and pain exploded inside.

  Falling onto a steel deck is like being hit with hammers. An electric current jolted into my left kneecap. A fiery torch had been thrust into my right shin. My elbow was numb. I saw the Beretta drop to the deck, heard it clatter away, beyond the looming figure storming in from the corridor. I rolled left, slammed into a wall, just as the ax hit the spot where I’d lain a moment earlier. The room was too cramped. Each leg motion sent streaks of agony up my spine. He jabbed the ax at me. I rolled as it glanced off the sink and sliced through a toilet paper roll, easy as skin.

  He went for my head, staying far enough away so I could not reach him. My ankle made a popping noise when I pushed back. I tried to scramble up but a giant seemed to tear in two the tendons on my ankle. I kicked out with the other leg, kept him back, but a fifty-ton truck must have rolled over my leg.

  Why did he come back for me? Maybe he thought I recognized him through the faceplate.

  His face inside the shield was bulging and white and streaming sweat. The formerly pleasant features were twisted with rage. Perspiration flooded my eyes. There was no room to back up. I gathered all my strength and, when he jabbed again, swung the bad leg in a roundabout kick, making contact with the side of the ax head with my boot, pushing it left as I screamed from the pain.

  The momentum swung him off balance. I tried to lunge past him and reach the Beretta, and actually touched it, actually felt fingers brush steel, but then he was on me. His hood fell off. His breath smelled of garlic. His eyes were huge and furious. I saw veins in his nostrils, and dandruff caught in an eyebrow. His fingers were vises, pressing into my throat.

  “You . . . should have . . . killed them,” he said.

  I could not breathe but I pulled the trigger, heard the M9 go off. Nothing. I fired again, heard ricochets in the corridor. I felt a sting at the edge of my ear. The ricocheting bullet had winged the marksman.

  He straddled me. I was losing consciousness. His right knee pinned my left hand on deck, his hip blocked movement of my right. I needed all my remaining strength to push the gun three inches toward his belly. I pulled the trigger, and with my oxygen cut off, sound seemed louder.

  He was still there.

  Maybe the noise had attracted attention, because I heard running, and someone shouting, “Hey! Hey!”

  I could breathe. He was running off. A woman’s face was bending over me. I recognized the small blonde, an Alabaman, an officer who worked night shifts on the bridge.

  “Colonel? Are you all right? Colonel?”

  I gasped for air. I forced out, “Where’d he go?”

  “Into the stairwell. Look, he left something in the sink. It’s another one! Carla! Call the incendiary crew!”

  Two minutes later, limping, I found the other white-suited figure who had been with Del Grazo, crumbled, around the corner, blood spurting from a wound opening his left side. Ribs caved in. Just a kid. An eighteen-year-old who’d not known the figure he was running with was the man for whom he’d been searching.

  “Colonel, we’re fighting four fires now! He left devices all over the place!”

  As for Del Grazo, he was, once again, gone.

  His words a drumbeat in my head.

  You should h
ave killed them.

  By the time the ship exec spotted him, the radio room was wrecked, the fires were under control, but the Zodiac was overboard, and he was inside, pulling away in the dark, hoping to be absorbed into the inky blackness, natural color of the Arctic sea in summers these days, not white, as it had been for centuries until now.

  With satellites blocked off and the radio room burned, the only two means of communication remaining with the outside world were the line-of-sight handhelds, good at a measly six miles . . . and the long-range radio from the bridge, that is, if atmospheric conditions cooperated, and if, the huge if, the cable running from the radio room had not melted.

  But if the cable was out, we had no way of reaching the mainland, or any ships, or anyone at all more than six miles away.

  Del Grazo was waiting for darkness to get away. He was using the fires to give him time, and distract the crew.

  He’d needed only a few minutes to manually release the Zodiac, climb in, ride it down to the sea, and disconnect the hooks.

  Del Grazo turning black also, man blending in with sea.

  “Night vision,” I snapped, watching Del Grazo disappear.

  Crew lined the railings. Some held binoculars. Others, like me, wore cyclops night vision monoculars, which used ambient star or moonlight to—under normal circumstances on the Wilmington—track whales surfacing in dark, or walrus, seals, polar bears.

  “What is this guy, invisible?” said Eddie, scanning.

  “Where the hell could he be going?”

  “He’s using that berg piece as cover. There!”

  I’d spotted a human figure two hundred yards off, a silhouette actually, at the Zodiac steering console, staying low, knees down, as he emerged from behind a three-foot-high protruding bit of ice, just high enough to shield a man. I heard M4 fire beside me in a three-round burst. The figure kept moving, well within range, but now that we were out of the ice, the open water was choppy. The ship rocked back and forth, the Zodiac up and down. It was hard to hit anything at this distance when both parties were moving in three directions at the same time.

  Del Grazo slipped behind another small ice bit, and must have slowed down, because he didn’t come out.

  DeBlieu ordered another Zodiac lowered.

  Pettit came up and joined the Marine marksman, pointed to where the figure had disappeared. Both men resting elbows on the railing, staring fixedly into the gloom ahead.

  Pettit muttering, “I think he moved behind another piece. See the ice shaped like an hourglass?”

  “The two humps? The camel shape?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait, sir, there’s two pieces camel shaped,” the other Marine said. “The two o’clock? Or the four o’clock?”

  “You think two o’clock looks like a camel?”

  “Well, what do you think it looks like?”

  “I don’t know. Breasts,” suggested Pettit.

  The kid looked up, astonished. “You think a camel looks like breasts?”

  DeBlieu interrupted. “Stop the fucking Rorschach test. The Zodiac is down.”

  Eddie came up beside us, stamping to keep warm. “Do you mind telling me where the hell he’s going, middle of nowhere? Guy’ll freeze to death in a few hours. What is he doing?”

  Del Grazo’s ice shield was a ghost bit beneath a speck of moon, but even that faded as clouds thickened, massed low, cut down on even ambient light. The damn Arctic weather seemed to change every ten minutes here.

  Inside the ship, I knew that crew searched for more incendiaries, moving from cabin to cabin. But the fires were out.

  “I just don’t understand . . . oh shit,” moaned Pettit. “Look!”

  I did and my heart sank as it all came together. I saw—in green—five hundred yards off, a frothing, surging milkshake of activity, foaming water erupting, and then the big sub thrust upward, bigger than a bowhead. Biggest thing under the sea. Welcome to the new Arctic.

  “He’s baaaackkk,” said Eddie morosely. “Let’s hear a big round of applause from the studio audience for Captain Zhou!”

  The sub came out clean, smacked back down, and sent up spray. The black eel-shape positioned itself to block any more shots at Peter Del Grazo. We couldn’t see him anymore. He must have called them. He’d set up a rendezvous with his masters, then delayed until he could get off the ship.

  Eddie said, “Hey, look at the bright side. Maybe he’ll infect them, send them to the bottom, One.”

  “Yeah,” muttered Pettit. “Like the Montana. Goddamn spy. Goddamn turncoat. Hail the conquering goddamn traitor.”

  But that’s not what happened.

  Because ten minutes later, as we watched, stunned at one more turn of events, they shot Del Grazo as he argued with them on their deck.

  TWENTY-THREE

  They shot him.

  It happened like this.

  First we watched the Chinese sub surface, an immense dark moray eel shape with greenish current flowing past, and occasional bergy bits. Then the hatch opened and fur-hatted soldiers climbed out onto the deck, followed by two crew members wearing bulky-looking hazmat suits.

  Eddie saying bitterly, “Looks like Zhou believed you about the sickness on the Montana.”

  Eyeing the suits, I recalled the circular motions of Del Grazo’s arm earlier on the monitors, when his back was turned. I understood what he’d been doing suddenly. I’d seen it enough in hospitals. His left arm—from behind—straight out. His right arm making little circles.

  “He was taking samples,” I whispered.

  Eddie spun toward me. I nodded. “Mucus. Sweat. Blood.”

  Eddie looked thoughtful. “Zhou did ask us to send blood samples over for analysis. Trying to sound helpful . . . but . . . do you really think they believe it’s a bioweapon? That we have a bioweapon that got loose?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. My whole body hurt from the fight with Del Grazo. I limped when I walked. My head pounded.

  Now through the monocular I saw a head—Del Grazo—appear above Zhou’s deck on the far side, body shielded from us. The Chinese must have thrown him a rope ladder, and he’d climbed up, and now stood.

  I made sure the Marines had all weapons lowered. The sub was Chinese territory, not to mention that it carried torpedoes, and a pissed-off Captain Zhou.

  “Nobody shoots,” I said.

  “Why did he do it?” said DeBlieu, as if unsure to be enraged, baffled, or both.

  “Who knows? Money? Sex? Who the hell knows? But I’m sure there will be one heck of an investigation to figure it out when we get back.”

  Del Grazo, on deck, seemed half bent from his exertions, getting his breath back, I imagined, as he glanced our way, and I also imagined him feeling a surge of triumph, relief, maybe superiority. I remembered the rage in his face as he tried to choke me. I wondered if he felt trapped, his options over, his traitorous dreams in shambles. Del Grazo left with a life, but one he’d live far from home, in a foreign land.

  I watched him pull something from his parka pocket. I adjusted focus, trying to see better. Larger images like his body grew blurry. But the object in his hand crystallized into what looked like a ziplock bag.

  Meanwhile, the Chinese stayed back from him except for the hazmat guys, but even they approached gingerly, stopped ten feet away, and extended a metallic retractable arm, mechanical pincers to grab the bag, and bring it back.

  “They’re disinfecting it,” said Eddie as the hazmat figures started spraying the outside of the bag, then wiping it off, with great rigor. Then spraying again.

  Del Grazo took a step toward them, clearly wanting to reach the protection of the inside of the submarine. But the soldiers jerked up their bullpup assault rifles, as if to pantomime, Stay back.

  The Del Grazo silhouette halted in the shadow of the tower, looking lik
e one of those Indonesian shadow puppets, a figure half hidden by translucent curtain, arms out, frozen, mid-step.

  Eddie narrating, as if we couldn’t see it anyway. “He looks like he’s arguing, Let me aboard! I did what you wanted! You promised!”

  Two figures appeared on the bridge of the sub, the high point, looking down at Del Grazo, like priests atop an Aztec ziggurat. I adjusted focus again. I saw fur hats with red stars pinned in front, faces beneath them. I’d never seen Zhou, at this particular angle, but I was pretty sure I was looking at him and his British-accented translator. Yes, it was the translator, because I saw the guy’s thick-framed glasses. Fat face. Fat frames. Zhou was smaller, features tight.

  Del Grazo’s movements growing more agitated.

  Zhou—looking down, listening, then shaking his head.

  Del Grazo took two quick steps toward the hatch and the guns came up. And now he was shouting in pantomime, waving his arms, body bent into his screaming as the hazmat guys disappeared into the sub, with the ziplock, then all the Chinese soldiers but one filing down into that hole, to safety, then there were only four figures out there. Zhou and his translator up high. Del Grazo and a single soldier below.

  Eddie gasped. “They’re going to leave him.”

  I shook my head. “No. If they leave him, we pick him up. They won’t leave him.”

  “Then what are—”

  Del Grazo must have panicked. He lunged forward. Later I’d try to figure out what had happened. All the pressure he’d been under—the spy normally assigned low-key missions, a computer hacker, not a saboteur. A sneak, not a warrior, suddenly pressured to do more as the stakes shot up.

  We saw the gunfire before we heard it, blossoms of light in the dark before the snapping sound, a faint pressure on the eardrums over the humming idling of the icebreaker.

  He crumbled. He was on hands and knees. I felt sorry for him for a moment. He crawled a few feet toward the edge of the deck, and then he toppled, disappeared, dropping into the sea.

  Back to Zhou now, through glass. Zhou, on the bridge, riveted, eyeing the spot where Del Grazo had disappeared. Zhou, motionless for what seemed a long time. Then Zhou’s right hand came up, and he saluted the spot where Del Grazo had been last with that stiff, palm-up motion favored in the People’s Republic.