Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  “Sir, in my opinion they would have found out in the end. It’s better to be up front. That’s been my experience up here, which is why you asked us to come.”

  “Hmph!” Admiral Galli grumbled, but he processed the logic and seemed to accept it, even though it meant he’d have to do a bit of dealing with the legal departments. Then he said, “I thought you said it was a shooting.”

  “After they all got sick.”

  “You think the illness caused the shooting?”

  “Probably not. But if you’re asking whether certain diseases or chemicals can heighten paranoia, the answer is yes. Sir, this location has been the site of many scientific inquiries over the years: digging, seismic, oil. I want to do more work before I sign off on Clay Qaqulik. I want to see the diary. And, sir, would it be all right if I used the research branch to run his social? I’ve got his ID card here.”

  A sigh. “At this point, why not?”

  He clicked off but not before he connected me with his secretary, and gave her instructions to link me up with our research folks, a trio of Georgetown University graduates who spent their workdays in a Foggy Bottom basement, where the only light came from bulbs, lamps, and multiple computer screens. Conceptually as far away from the wilderness as you can get.

  I’d never met our researchers—only spoken to them via phone—and thought of them as The Baritone, Chicago-Voice, and Valley Girl, since all of her statements came out sounding like questions. Valley Girl was the quickest and smartest, although her high-pitched, gum-cracking voice irritated me at times.

  “I’ll run his social? Hold on for ten minutes? This will be fast?” she said. “Or should I call you back?”

  “I’ll hold. Just give me an initial.”

  I sat there in the cab of the Ford with the heater running. The rain had stopped, and the sky was a uniform lead color. The ocean seemed more oily, maybe that was what happened to it before the big ice formed. It was calmer and looked darker, heavier. I saw a lone fin surface out there. Some sort of small whale. Minke or beluga, maybe. Then I saw a half dozen of them. A pod.

  Over the phone came normal office sounds: a sucking noise—her gum, I figured—and keys tapping and a gurgling in the background that sounded like a coffeemaker. I heard music playing softly; something classical, Debussy, I thought. Impressionist. Swelling and ebbing. Maybe Ravel. Ten minutes became twelve, and twelve became fifteen. I might as well drive home while I waited, might as well risk losing the connection, which could happen, up here, at any time.

  Suddenly Valley Girl was back. “Oh, wow! Cool! So Qaqulik is an Eskimo?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “In-teresting! Wow!”

  “Interesting to you because he’s an Eskimo? Or for some other reason?”

  “He’s got one hell of an impressive background, sir.”

  “He does?”

  She told me highlights of Clay Qaqulik’s background.

  I gasped, and said, everything changed now, “He was what?”

  FOUR

  My mind was churning with the news about Clay Qaqulik as I walked into our Quonset hut. A CD of Ray Charles singing “Georgia” was playing and the sight of my fiancée in her neon-blue and black spandex yoga suit made my heartbeat speed up. Then I saw the man who was in love with her across the room. I was in no mood for him and his camera tonight.

  “Oh, Joe. I heard about the Harmons,” she said.

  Karen Vleska was uncoiling on the plush gold pile carpet, from one of those pretzel poses that seem impossible for a man to achieve. She did yoga when she was stressed. Just the sight of her small, lithe body—the toned arm muscles, the petite energy and vibrancy, and her most stunning feature, the head-turning silver hair, shiny and youthful, falling beyond her back and pooling on the carpet—set my heart pounding, even now.

  “Joe, those people. Horrible,” she said.

  Mikael Grandy—award-winning HBO documentary filmmaker from Manhattan—was a lean, broad-shouldered man on the far side of the room. He infuriated me with his constant presence. He was filming her for an upcoming series, Arctic Women Explorers. Mikael was too smart to tell her of his feelings for her, but it was pretty obvious. It was in the way he watched her and held the camera, as if it were part of her, and it was in his voice. Always kind in a certain way, always attentive, and, as Eddie put it, The slimeball is waiting.

  Mikael said, “I wish I could make my body do that.”

  Karen said, “Good things come with practice.”

  “Maybe you can show me, Karen.”

  You’re asking for it, I thought.

  A word about our temporary home, the Quonset hut, which was pictured, in an aerial photo last year, for Smithsonian magazine’s cover story, “Barrow, America’s Arctic Research Capital: The Frontier Town That Hosts More Scientists Per Square Foot Than Anywhere Else in the World.”

  The hut sat in an old Navy base, revamped into a research center: two square miles of seaside campus, fences gone, open to the tundra . . . freshwater lagoon to the south, a satellite farm—a collection of golf-ball–shaped geodesic domes—on the western property, where NASA guys from hut six launched weather balloons daily and monitored about five hundred factors affecting Earth’s climate.

  On the far side of the lagoon—accessible by a half-mile-long one-lane blacktop—sat a new twenty-five million dollar Arctic Research Center, where Eddie and I had our lab and freezers, filled with samples we’d collected all summer: a flu from the coastal village of Wainright; a rabies sample from an Arctic fox killed by hunters near Camden Bay; a batch of Arctic parasites—sarcocystis pinnipedi, shaped like crescent moons under the microscope—which were killing seal pups. A dissected brain of polar bear dead of toxoplasmosis, previously a warm-weather disease found in European cats, which had spread north as the Arctic warmed.

  But at the heart of the base—the old cracked runway, the garages that housed snowmobiles and cold weather gear, the rusted conveyer systems and hangars—were four rows of military-style Quonset huts that had become a summer campus . . . roughly thirty huts in all, looking from the outside like dilapidated World War Two–era housing, but inside had been fixed up nicely, and heated by natural gas.

  Other than the curved roof, we might have been in a comfortable middle-class home in Minneapolis. Gold-colored pile spread from the entranceway, through a closed foyer and into the kitchenette, past the four-burner stove and refrigerator and across the spacious living room; in which sat a three-cushion couch and leather Barcalounger, a flat-screen TV, landline phones, and four bedrooms grouped around the periphery, three with bunk beds, one with two singles, which Karen and I had pushed together.

  Until two weeks ago, when Karen flew in, Eddie and I had shared the hut, staying in separate bedrooms. But Eddie had insisted on moving to a hotel so I could have a “pre-honeymoon.” I’d tried to pay for it. But Eddie had refused.

  “Honeymoon gift, Uno,” he’d said. “It’s worth it to me not to have to deal with your grouchiness for two weeks.”

  Now I wanted to tell Karen details, try to figure things out, but not in front of Mikael. He saved me the trouble.

  “Colonel,” he said, turning the camera on me, “how did you feel when you found poor Kelley Harmon?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Do you think the bear guard suffered from post-traumatic stress? I understand he was an Army veteran.”

  “Where did you hear this stuff?” I asked.

  “The checkout girl was talking in the Value Center.”

  “The checkout . . . how did she know?”

  “The police dispatcher temp is her cousin,” he said with pride, as if he’d just won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting. His series on women explorers would run nationally six months from now, and Karen hoped it would help her raise funds for a land trip next winter along the Northwest Passage. T
hat meant the documentary was important to her, and so, by extension, was Mikael.

  Mikael began coming closer, still filming, stuck to the eyepiece. Sometimes I wondered how he communicated with people in social situations with no machine around. He said, “I understand there was illness at that research station. Do you think it was connected to the murders?”

  “No one has called what happened murder.”

  “Accident? Surely you can’t think that.”

  “Too early to say anything,” I replied.

  “Do you think that possible sexual rivalry at the camp set the man off?”

  “I think if you don’t put that camera down,” I snapped, “I’ll do it for you.”

  He lowered it quickly, Of course, sir, you are upset . . . but irritation flashed in the intelligent eyes. Mikael emanated casual stylishness, a one-day growth of beard on the pale, blue-eyed face, the thick, black, wild hair combed with his hands, the brand-name, tight sweaters that emphasized the swimmer’s shoulders and lean hips, the sense that he was always leaning forward, either fascinated, or hungry. He had the speed-talk of a Manhattanite, the smooth friendliness of a man who made his living by getting along with others. Allegedly he had a wife, but never mentioned her, and he wore no ring.

  And the feeling he had for Karen showed in his lingering reluctance to stop filming. It wasn’t professional. Not to me. He was the tourist gaping at the movie star, wanting to touch.

  Karen had watched our exchange with no expression, which meant she was getting mad. The only disagreements we had recently regarded Mikael, his questions and appearances at inopportune moments. My dislike wasn’t helped by his regular references to me—in their interviews—as “the Marine” or “your boyfriend.”

  I told Mikael, for Karen’s sake, or more accurately, household peace, “Sorry I snapped at you. Tough afternoon.”

  “No problem. Karen, we can get more exercise shots tomorrow, on the tundra. You walking. Looking east, toward the Northwest Passage, contemplating the danger ahead.”

  I groaned inwardly. Jesus Christ!

  Karen said, “Stay for coffee, Mike.”

  But the weasel was smart. He put down the camera and said he would come back later. After all, only fifty feet separated us from his neighboring Quonset hut. He said he’d give us time together, as if it was his to bestow. He said I should “recover from shock,” maybe “lie down a bit.”

  Mikael waved at the door. “Ciao, guys.”

  “Mike, don’t be shy. You’re always welcome,” she said.

  When the door shut, she did not look happy.

  “Joe, you embarrassed me. Are we going to have this discussion again?”

  “He’s in love with you.”

  “So? What’s the problem?”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “I’m supposed to stay away from anyone who likes me?”

  “No, it’s . . .”

  She poked me, angry. “I’m supposed to tell him, go away? I’m not interested in the documentary? I don’t want to raise any more money for the trip? I’ve decided to retire and be a hermit and not talk to other men because my fiancée doesn’t like it? Me Tarzan. Me Joe Rush. My woman stay in cave.”

  “Me in trouble,” I said, smiling despite things.

  “Goddamnit,” she said, but after a moment—things could go either way here—she smiled back. Our relationship was recent enough for anger to go away that fast. But you need to watch it. That happy phase doesn’t last.

  “Karen, I have to tell you something about Clay Qaqulik.”

  She gasped when I did. She said, “Graduated with honors from Vanderbilt? Army intelligence. Two years in the FBI? And then he quits and comes back here and hires out as the guy who cooks meals and fixes engines? I don’t get it.”

  I nodded, frowning, envisioning him, a big, shambling, quiet man, mustached, usually in baggy old jeans and a ratty sweater, who looked like he’d never worn an FBI-style suit in his life . . . and played electric guitar with the Barrowtones at their Saturday night gigs at the roller rink . . . a sometime mechanic on base, fixing snowmobiles or truck suspensions, a handyman available to help out scientists, satellite repair folks, Arctic adventurers, visitor VIPs.

  Now my computer folks had painted a picture of a crackerjack Phi Beta Kappa student, an award-winning FBI agent. A comer in Washington any way you looked at it, who up and left and returned to the North Slope and now used a socket wrench instead of a 9mm Glock.

  Karen asked, “Is there a reason he quit?”

  “They tried to talk him out of it.”

  “Personal problems?”

  “Maybe he just didn’t like it.”

  “Something happened. Cultural differences. Or, just because he was smart doesn’t mean he didn’t have problems adjusting. He just killed three people and himself. I’d say there were mental problems in there somewhere.”

  “I keep thinking about Kelley’s phone call. They were all sick. All of them.”

  “The sickness could have exacerbated pre-existing stress.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s sick. With underlying problems. Add personal differences. Everything escalates. He picks up the shotgun. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “No. It wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Then what’s bothering you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what the ‘but’ is. Maybe it’s that I feel like I owe something to Kelley. Maybe it’s that Merlin never mentioned the FBI. Merlin going on as if Clay Qaqulik spent his life here except for the Army. There’s something else. Maybe the diary will help, if we ever find the damn thing.”

  Karen thought about it. “Did you get his tax records? If there’s some other link there,” she said, meaning, like a mission, like his records are like yours, sheep-dipped, “you might see who is paying him.”

  “We’re not supposed to access tax records.”

  “I didn’t ask what you’re not supposed to do. I asked what you did do.”

  So much for protecting her from knowledge that would make her legally culpable. “I told Valley Girl to dig up tax records. That takes time. She has to sneak around to get them in order to leave no computer trail behind.”

  Karen and I met last year on an icebreaker that had suffered sabotage. She was security cleared and no stranger to espionage, or even to spies, one of whom we’d uncovered on that ship.

  She said now, considering, “You’ll talk to Merlin about this.”

  “First thing.”

  “Or the admiral can find out more.”

  “I’ve pushed him enough for one day.”

  I remembered the dead man in that cabin, that lone remaining eye as stiff and lifeless as a marble. I also remembered the admiral’s words back in Washington. That town looks like the end of the planet, but it is less than five hundred miles from resurgent Russia, and along the longest unprotected coastline in the U.S. Military maneuvers coming. Shipping. Oil drilling offshore. You want to know the state of our Arctic satellite technology? Landing points in remote areas? You want to meet scientists whose work will impact national policy? It’s presumed that the other powers want to know what we’re doing up there.

  Karen made coffee, poured, stirred in sugar, gave me a mug, black. She was thinking along the same lines. “And plants, Joe. I’ll be back here in a few weeks planning war games. You’re on microbes. Take a walk around base, hell, look at the people in the other huts. Big oil. Diamonds. If Clay was working on something, why focus on the people studying seeds?”

  “Unless the Harmons weren’t really studying seeds.” Then I laughed at myself. I let it roll out. I was tired. The most obvious explanation was still the first one. A man had cracked up. I told Karen, “Eddie said it’s time to get out of this work when you start thinking that a fourth grader taking selfies on the Metro is really a midget sn
apping photos of you.”

  She drank coffee, cradled her mug as if it could spread warmth into her heart. “Oh, Joe. They took their child along! That girl! The poor mother. The last few moments, knowing that your child is . . . I can’t believe they’d drag that girl into something bad, endanger her. Those parents are exactly who they said they were. They had no idea what was going to happen out there!”

  “There are toxins that go right to the brain, Karen.”

  “And a high suicide rate locally. You know that. And alcohol abuse. Just look at those slogans on trash Dumpsters in town: DON’T DRINK!!”

  “Merlin insisted that Clay didn’t drink. And we didn’t find drugs. Tomorrow we’ll do a more thorough search.”

  Karen laid her hand on mine, leaned into me. I inhaled her smell of vanilla and fresh shampoo and detergent. More, I inhaled us, our mix, togetherness. Her eyes were the color of ice in a crevasse, a lone tear, a glass chip. I felt like I was home with her anywhere—in a Quonset hut, at sea, on ice—and it was this mixture of warmth and excitement that constituted to me the definition of love.

  Her petite body was willowy and athletic, an inverted bow. Her voice was a soft Ozark lilt, but it could be candid to the point of bluntness. Her face was elfin, her movements liquid, her words usually punctuated by flying hands. But her most arresting feature was the silvery hair falling to the pit of her back; not gray, not old, it exuded youthful vibrancy. From the back she looked like a teen. She was thirty-two years old.

  Karen worked as an engineer for Electric Boat, specializing in the operation of nuclear submarines. We planned a December wedding, and after that, when I left the unit, a move to Boston, where she would continue working on subs, and train for her upcoming all-women walk along Canada’s northern border. I’d give lectures at the Navy War College in Newport and, with Eddie, start up a private company looking for new pharmaceuticals in the High North. Cures this time.