Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  “Mikael was right about one thing, Joe. You ought to eat.”

  We’d planned a romantic evening; frozen sirloin from the AV Center, California burgundy, ten-dollar-a-bunch asparagus, microwaved Sara Lee apple pie, my fave.

  We weren’t hungry now.

  We went into the bedroom and laid down, said nothing, held hands and, at length, undressed and made love, the slow kind, that goes with grieving, with wanting to feel human connection, to feel life in the face of something bad. Her flat, muscled belly rose and fell and moved in muscular circles. I saw tendons in her thighs bunch and release. I kissed the three-freckle constellation decorating her left hip. Later, with the light fading outside, her hair on my face, I smelled her perfume in the fresh linen. And in the little mirror on the wall—with the sled-dog logo on top, Souvenir of the Arctic—I saw two naked people lying there, lovers framed.

  Mirrors. What is it about mirrors?

  “Joe, you need to get used to Mikael. He’ll be around in Boston, too, after we move.”

  “No problem,” I lied.

  “Did you know that he comes from White Russian nobility? His ancestor actually sailed under Vitus Bering and was given a land grant in Alaska by the czar. Not far from here! Thousands of acres.”

  “Fascinating man,” I said.

  “Mikael said his family would have still owned part of the North Slope if Russia hadn’t sold Alaska to the U.S. That’s so weird, isn’t it? That this town, this place, would be part of Russia? During the Cold War? Russia!”

  I asked, more interested, “So the weasel’s family lost their fortune when the communists took over?”

  “Don’t call him a weasel. One minute they owned farms, and serfs, and even a small palace in St. Petersburg. The next minute, they’re on the run, barely got out. They moved to Shanghai, and then fled to San Francisco when Mao took over. Mikael goes to Harvard. He doesn’t brag, but he was nominated for an Oscar for his dolphin-killing film.”

  If he doesn’t brag, how do you know? I thought.

  We both heard the knocking at the door. It was now dark outside.

  “Does Mikael still have family in Russia?” I felt her stiffen beside me, rise on one elbow and stare.

  “Joe, that was a century ago, okay?” she said, getting up, beautiful, pulling on lace underwear—she wore it even in the Arctic—and black cords, pulling a white turtleneck over her hair.

  The knocking came again. She said, “The New York Times called Mikael a ‘visual poet.’”

  “He touches you and he’ll be a visual dead guy.”

  She giggled. “Short of that, Colonel, play nice. Now let’s see who’s here.”

  • • •

  IT WASN’T MIKAEL BUT OTHER NEIGHBORS, SUMMER FRIENDS. WHAT HAD been planned as a romantic evening turned into a wake, as people drifted in to talk, to remember, to grieve.

  Still, I could not help but wonder, thinking of Clay Qaqulik as more than just cook and mechanic: Is someone here not who they seem?

  “OhmyGawd! We heard about it in the post office!”

  First to arrive were the brother-and-sister team—Dave and Deborah Lillienthal—employed by Longhorn North Oil Company, of Houston, which was expected to bid on undersea leases, up for auction soon by the U.S. Interior Department. Oil companies believed that a mini–Saudi Arabia existed fifty to a hundred miles away from Barrow, and it was expected that Shell, Longhorn, and Conoco would go head-to-head in bidding, trying to obtain rights.

  In the interim, each company was conducting last-minute seismic surveys offshore to pinpoint areas in which they had particular interest, and to help them plan how much money to bid—billions would be offered for undersea land.

  “The Harmons had such terrible luck all summer,” Deborah said. “First their truck busted up, then their computers went down. Then they had that records snafu, remember, Dave?”

  “Right, the closet that caught fire.”

  Dave and Deborah ran Longhorn’s exploratory efforts: seismic ships, engineers, and archaeologists employed to select inland pipeline routes, bypassing Eskimo historic sites protected by federal law; water experts to avoid locations where groundwater might be polluted by construction.

  In person, they were usually jovial corporate ambassadors; their hut, number six, was the party hut stocked with liquor and tonight they deposited two liter-sized bottles of Tito vodka on the table, along with tomato juice, a semi-fresh lemon, quinine water, and orange juice. Alcohol could not be sold in stores or restaurants in Barrow. It could, however, be flown in, if buyers paid for a liquor tax and air shipment, and bought a city license to drink. They could then pick up bottles at a hut by the airport.

  As a result, a can of Bud might cost twenty dollars in Barrow. A bottle of vodka was worth hundreds. The Lillienthals carried a thousand dollars of alcohol in their arms.

  “Figured we’d all need this,” said Dave, pulling out logo mugs from above our sink; Sandia labs, Woods Hole cup, National Science Foundation glass, leavings of former visitors. No mug said, SPY.

  He was a big, round ex-fraternity president at Texas A&M, two years older than his sister, and he was a ferocious eater and dedicated gym rat, with a Johnson City twang. The pudgy features gave him a cherubic air accentuated by the thick, curly hair cut close to his head. The red face said drinker, eventual heart attack, or both. The eyes were merry but the mouth was not. Dave was an engineer by training and his mission was to drill.

  Deborah, mixing vodka and tonics, was small, skinny, and had the same facial features, except on her they were squeezed into a narrow face—big blue eyes, slightly bulgy midsection, small mouth but striking cheekbones—and she moved with a sexy walk that drew glances in town. She ran the daily morning phone tree conferences—from their hut—between company copter pilots, Eskimo elders in outlying villages, and headquarters. The elders would alert the company if fishermen or hunters were in an area, to keep copters away that day. The pilots were freelancers out of Anchorage. Longhorn had two seismic ships going back and forth offshore, looking for likely oil finds.

  Dave took a long draw of Tito. “We’ve used Clay Qaqulik as a mechanic.”

  Deborah’s voice was low, as if the dead could hear and take offense. “It could have been one of us.” She smelled of Shalimar perfume and violets. She wore a moose logo sweater, background cobalt-blue, the animals white, over tight, faded blue jeans. Visitors took their shoes off usually when entering a Quonset hut, so as not to track in dirt or mud. Her socks also had a moose logo. She had small feet.

  “Joe, I hear you’re not just a colonel anymore,” Dave said. “Now you’re a gen-u-ine North Slope dep-u-tee, too.”

  “Merlin asked me not to talk about what happened.”

  Dave made a noise in his throat. “That would make you the only one in town not talking about it.”

  “Legal reasons,” I said, accepting a beer, taking a draught. “You know, if there’s a trial.”

  Deborah perked up. “Trial? Of who? Isn’t Clay dead?”

  “Good beer,” I said.

  “I heard they had rashes all over their bodies,” said Deborah. She had a habit of idly raising and lowering one leg like a ballerina when in conversation. Eddie believed she’d taken dance training. She had the posture for it. Eddie also thought she slept with lots of guys, or at least was always seen in town hanging on to different ones. Visiting politicians. VIP visitors. Eskimo leaders. She liked putting herself on display.

  Dave said, “Clay Qaqulik. What kind of past does this guy have? He was in the military, right? I mean, people get in trouble elsewhere, and no one asks questions here. Another beer, Joe?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Purple rashes,” Deborah said, opening the refrigerator. “You got any cheese? Rashes with little bumps all over. Is that true, Joe?”

  They were grilling me. They wanted answers. Which m
ade them normal. A knock interrupted their questions and our second visitor walked in—an enemy of the Lillienthals.

  • • •

  DR. BRUCE FRIDAY WAS A RETIRED PROFESSOR TURNED ENVIRONMENTALIST from Rutgers University, in New Jersey. He was a sixty-two-year-old ex-researcher of ecosystems who Karen believed had the hots for Deborah. He grew nervous around her, fumbling during arguments with Dave, losing things: his glasses, a book. Karen always speculated, “Something happened between those two. Or he wants it to.”

  “Hell of an age difference.”

  “Maybe he came on to her, and she shut him down. It’s like he loses control of his thinking when she’s close.”

  Bruce was divorced, had lost his wife and two sons twelve years back to his passion for work. The wife had remarried. The boys were in business school, as if to reject his idealism, and never spoke with him anymore. He kept their photos in his hut; cracked, fading reminders of family.

  I felt sorry for him, but he seemed at home on the base—a permanent expatriate. “Ecology is a science, not a social movement,” he always said. At Rutgers he’d studied the way that all life-forms in an area— animal, vegetable, and microbial—interact. After retiring he’d signed up with the Arctic Warrior Fund and now studied the demise of polar bears. He gave speeches attacking oil companies, which he blamed for global warming. Usually, when in the same room, the talk grew heated between Bruce and Dave.

  Bruce Friday was the oldest resident of the base. He’d been coming to Barrow for thirty-two years. These days he lived on a small grant from the Warriors and testified at government hearings about offshore drilling. You can’t clean spilled oil under ice, so don’t allow any drilling! Tonight he just held up his hands and said to Dave, “Truce?”

  “Truce,” Dave replied. “Beer?”

  “Vodka.”

  “Tell me when to stop pouring.”

  “Don’t,” said Friday, looking wan and ill. “What a horrible day, Joe. Horrible, horrible day.”

  Visibly, he seemed poorly equipped for the rigors of Arctic research, with a hook-shaped body, skin that was the kind of white that erupted with cancers if exposed too long to sun, a mop of chestnut hair, more boyish than donnish, and round wire-framed out-of-date glasses, that enlarged his gray eyes and gave him a permanently startled air.

  But his appearance was misleading. Dr. Friday spent weeks on the ice alone, seeking bears and measuring snowmelt. He was an expert snowmobiler. He routinely went out solo to the bone pile, to gather polar bear hair, DNA. One time, I’d heard, he’d camped out on pack ice, and in the middle of the night it broke off and floated into the Chukchi. Rescued four days later by copter, the pilots found him dozing in a parka, the bones of an eaten fish beside him—and a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce.

  Friday got me in a corner, pumped me with questions.

  “Do you think Merlin capable of figuring this out?”

  “He’s a good policeman.”

  “I can’t believe that replacement dispatcher spread the story. If someone poisoned their water, the guilty person could just leave town, run away!”

  “You heard about the water, too?”

  “I heard it at the research center. I heard it at the Mexican restaurant. I heard it when I gave Luther Oz’s sled dogs a run this afternoon.”

  Eddie should be here by now.

  Bruce Friday went over to talk to Dave and Deborah. I noticed, as he got close to Deborah, that the liquid topping his glass began to shake. Deborah held Bruce’s wrist, steadying it.

  Where’s Eddie? He should be here by now.

  Without knocking, the diamond hunter walked in next.

  • • •

  CALVIN DEROCHERS CAME FROM ARKANSAS, THE ONLY PLACE IN THE U.S. where commercial diamonds are found. He was a home-educated geologist who insisted that, as in Arctic Canada, a huge cache lay somewhere beneath Alaska’s North Slope.

  “Canada’s pulling out billions,” Calvin always said. “I aim to find those kimberlite pipes.”

  His family had been slaves two hundred years ago; sharecroppers after that, then chicken-factory assembly-line workers. He was a short, powerful man, fullback more than cyclist, clothing bought secondhand, to save money for his project, and through sheer diligence he’d raised funding from a Chicago hedge fund—talked his way into their president’s office—to pay for the rental hut, a copter pilot, geology supplies, and gear. But his time and money were rapidly running out as autumn began. He’d not yet found any evidence of what he sought.

  “I’m sure some of those lakes were formed by meteors,” he’d told me at one of our Monday night sausage grill outs. “Meteors did it in the Yukon, and the same shower could have easily hit here. Hell, man, you know what diamonds are? They’re scabs on a sore. The meteor slams in. Then Mama Earth repairs herself and that kimberlite pipe is the bandage, and the scab shows up ten million years later as a Tiffany necklace. Uh-huh! They laughed at Chuck Fipke in ninety-one when he drove out to Lac de Gras, Northwest Territories. They laugh at DeRochers today.”

  He had a habit of referring to himself in the third person, had mortgaged himself to the hilt, for more funding, and I wondered how the wife and six kids handled this back in Arkansas. He was a tireless worker, and his hut was filled with books on diamonds, studies, reports from South Africa, treatises from Sierra Leone, maps from Arkansas. I thought him a homespun genius; a bit nutty, but interesting. Karen and I wished him well.

  “I never understood suicide, Joe,” he said, passing up the booze, boiling water for rose tea, his drink of choice.

  “No?”

  “How bad can things get for someone to kill himself? I mean, killing someone else, I get it, you get crazy. You have hate. But kill yourself? Never.”

  “Maybe he didn’t kill himself,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? His finger was still in the trigger guard, right? And the dislocated arm, hell, pulled from the shoulder. Can’t fake that! I took him along once as a guard. He was always quiet. I think that guy had secrets.”

  You don’t know the half of it, I thought.

  I said, “Is there anything that happened today that this whole town isn’t aware of?”

  Calvin DeRochers blew on his tea. I watched the ripples dance across the golden surface, and his greenish eyes came up slowly, met mine and stayed there, keen, smart, probing.

  “You tell me,” he said.

  • • •

  I TRIED TO CALL EDDIE. HE DIDN’T ANSWER.

  Calvin’s rent-a-pilot, Jens Erik Holte, arrived, a boisterous summer presence in Barrow and Norwegian American who spent his winters in Mexico. Then Mikael the weasel. Then the three-person visiting meteorology team from Boulder. And then three more crowded in: Alan McDougal, who ran logistics on the base; his wife, Candida, an anthropologist; and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Deirdre, a serious, attractive girl and casual friend of Kelley’s. Deirdre sat mute in a corner, then broke into sobs.

  I tried to cheer her up, which got her talking a little, wiping her nose with a bunched-up tissue. I asked, “Do you happen to know anything about Kelley keeping a diary?”

  “Just that she had one. I never saw it.”

  “Was it on her computer? Was it a book?”

  “I don’t know.” She blurted out, looking around, making sure all the other adults were in conversation, “Ask . . . ask her boyfriend!”

  “Kelley had a boyfriend? She was only on base for a few days at a time. How did she manage to—”

  “People always say they can talk to you, Colonel. Kelley said you and Karen, you can keep a secret. Help me. I feel awful. I don’t know what to do.”

  I knelt on one knee to be at face level with her. It was something that Iñupiat adults did with children, and with the very old. They did not talk down to them. They always looked them right in the eye.

  “Deirdre, t
his will stay between you and me.”

  The girl looked guilty, miserable. She wanted to talk. “She said she trusted you and Karen.” The pressure in her face was palpable, awful. “She said . . . she . . . You promise not to tell?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  “She made me swear not to tell also. He works at the Heritage Center. Leon Kavik. He’s older. Eighteen. She used to sneak away to see him. I wish her parents had known! They’d have sent her home!”

  Her hands were twisting, and her eyes pleaded for understanding. I said, touching her shoulder, resting my hand there, “What happened wasn’t your fault, Deirdre.”

  If we’d been alone she would have cried out, but her agony came out in a whisper. “It was! She’d lie and tell her parents she was at our hut, but she was with him! She lied! And I lied, too! Oh, God!”

  Everyone stared at me when she ran out of the room and into a bedroom, crying. I shrugged. I did not want to get her in trouble, but we were going to have to talk more. I wanted to see that boyfriend, and talk to Merlin again, first thing in the morning—and not just about the bodies.

  You hid things about your cousin, Merlin.

  Why shouldn’t he have his secrets? Everyone else did around here.

  Report from Barrow

  Received by encrypted satellite transmission.

  I attended a small wake at Dr. Rush’s Quonset hut tonight, where many campus residents were present. So far, no one understands what has happened, what is at stake. But the police emergency operator who spread the initial story has been fired, so it will now be slightly more difficult to gain access to the department.

  The bodies have been brought to the hospital, where they are in an isolated area in the morgue. There have been no other cases so far, not in town, but that could, of course, change and if it does, there will be widespread panic. I may need a way to get out, fast.

  So far, the Eskimo Qaqulik is being blamed for the deaths. With luck, that will be the official finding.