by James Abel
Eddie?
Karen?
You think it won’t happen to you. You think if it does happen, it will never be today. There is no way to prepare for it. It is the sum total of human fear, love, and mortality.
The general repeated himself, but not with anger, not with the expectation of instant obedience this time. I heard the future in that voice. I heard years ahead.
“Colonel, let’s go out into the hall for a moment, okay?”
FOURTEEN
Steel yourself, General Wayne Homza had said.
I was awake but my body moved too slowly, as if in a nightmare. My legs propelled me toward the cabin and police cars, the floodlights shining out from windows that seemed misshapen to me, manufactured rhomboids, not rectangles. Deputy Luther Oz’s face loomed, broken into pieces, as in a splintered mirror. Deputy Steve Rice’s jaw looked elongated, Pinocchio’s nose. Gusts whipped up snow, made the scene grainy and colorless, interference on an old TV.
Had someone put the hat on my head? Had someone slid on gloves? I tottered through the black gap of open doorway, and into a bright frozen diorama of hell.
A crime-scene tech was taking photos. A medical examiner—from the gray hair and slight form I thought it was Sengupta—was bent over the head. Beyond his back I glimpsed a single denim-clad leg, woman’s or teen’s, from the size of it. I saw the boots—weathered brown insulated Merrells—identical to Karen’s.
It is not Karen, I don’t care what Homza said.
I heard more vehicles, outside, grumbling, rattling, converging on the cabin. And now, looking up, I saw graffiti on the wall. No, not just graffiti but a message. Red paint oozed, dried slowly, ran from a chest-high starting point to the dusty plywood floor.
MURDERER MARINES!
YOU KILL OUR LOVED ONES! NOW WE KILL YOURS!
The police photographer moved left for another shot, revealing her entire body. The thing on the floor, the thing with a face turned away had Karen’s silver hair, Karen’s puffed-up Outfitter parka. I told myself it wasn’t her. That someone had sheared off hair that looked like hers, attached it to an adult-sized doll. A doll which spilled a sludgy pool of blood onto the floor. Camera flashes exploded on the pudding-like surface. I’d seen blood in Afghanistan. I’d tended to Marines on the field of battle. This was different. This was her.
Sight became blurred as sound grew magnified. I heard whispering detectives in a corner, snatches of talk over the scuff of boots on wood, snap of a forensic glove on someone’s wrist, electric buzz of the tripod floodlight.
From the body temperature, it happened within the past two hours.
I disagree. Rigor is delayed in the cold.
The jaw. The eyelids. Rigor’s definitely beginning.
I said to no one in particular, to myself, to hope, to fantasy, to too late, “That’s not her.”
• • •
SOLDIERS GRIPPED ME BY THE CHEST, DRAGGING ME OUTSIDE. SOMEONE was screaming. I heard a man’s screaming, agony and grief. I had to tell her something. It was important to get back there and tell her I was here, with her. My flailing boots connected with someone’s leg, and there was a howl. A Ranger fell back, writhing on the ground. There were too many of them. The doorway and cabin receded. My boot heels formed drag marks in the hard, granular snow.
A calm voice, a soothing voice, in my ear said, “Can we let you go, Colonel? Can we let go of you now?”
“Yes. I’m . . . I’m good.”
“The general wants to see you.”
“Tell the general to go fuck himself.”
“Yes, sir. This way please, sir.”
When had the crowd behind the tape arrived, and the growing collection of small trucks, ATVs, SUVs, even, in the snow, a bicycle? Civilians made death entertainment. They snapped cell-phone shots as police in departmental parkas and flap-eared hats kept them back, at the tape. Someone in front held a better-quality camera. That someone wore Mikael Grandy’s festive red-and-white striped pullover hat. I broke away from the man guiding me. I saw Mikael’s camera lower when I was almost on him. I ripped through the tape like a runner at the finish line. He doubled over as my fist slammed into his solar plexus. Mikael on the ground, gasping like an animal. He tried to kick back. He tried to cover himself. I didn’t care which part of him I made contact with as long as I hit something.
“You were here! You followed her everywhere!”
“I’ll sue you,” he shouted.
“That fucking camera! Even now!”
They pulled me off as Lieutenant Colonel Amanda Ng helped him up, and Raymond Hess picked up his camera, stared at it . . . evidence . . . as I was spun around and marched toward the idling Humvee. The rear door was open and Major General Wayne Homza sat inside, a smoking pipe in his mouth.
“Get in, please, Colonel.”
I brought Karen up here early so we could be together. Then I ignored her. I kept going when everyone told me to stop.
“Colonel, I gave you an order. Get in!”
• • •
HE SAID NOTHING AT FIRST.
We sat there. It seemed like a long time, but probably wasn’t. He watched me, maybe giving me time to collect myself; maybe wondering whether I had anything to do with the death. Lover’s quarrel? Plotters turning on themselves? Homza worrying this murder into his larger problem. Homza deciding things. The windows fogged and blue smoke swirled and a thick, sweet borkum odor filled my lungs. The heater made a growling noise. I heard the rumble of more vehicles arriving from the main part of town.
You left her alone, Joe. But you couldn’t leave the Harmon deaths alone.
“Colonel Rush?”
I thought, If you go down now, you lose the opportunity to find whoever did this.
I saw the abyss in front of me. It was waiting and it was an abiding blackness, an eternity more real than any Leavenworth cell. Grief was becoming rage and the only question was how it would consume me. I could plunge in now or hold myself back a little longer. I could make a deal with it. I could use it for clarity in exchange for self-destruction up the road.
All you had to do was go along with everyone else and call the deaths suicide/murder. We all would have gone home.
“Colonel!” Homza packed and relit the pipe, drew in smoke and said, watching, “Under other circumstances I’d release you now, give you time off.”
“I don’t want time off.”
Everyone you love, you destroy.
His brows went up. He puffed smoke. “You’re a singular person. I’m not unaware that you’re the only one so far who seems to have any idea of what is happening. Everything you’ve predicted has occurred. Now Dr. Vleska is killed.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences, General.”
“Me neither.” The general’s eyes swept the cops, soldiers, crowd, bored back into me. He said, “Locals getting back at big bad government? You heard that shouting in the school. Accusations. That would explain the message. That?”
“Looks like it,” I heard myself say, using every ounce of discipline to achieve a semblance of normal voice, to speak from a place of focused, rational thought. “One of George Carling’s relatives maybe. Someone close to someone who died. They know she was my fiancée. They couldn’t get to me. So, yeah, looks like. Looks.”
“You know, the mayor made some points in there. I need five times more people than I have. He was right about the freeze coming. He was right when he said our scenarios were never designed for the Arctic. Now, a murder,” Homza said.
“Murder takes up manpower. Murder diverts.”
“Give it to the police? Local problem? What do you suggest I do with this?” Homza said.
“I don’t know what you should do.” My head hurt. I said, “But I know what I want to do. Permission to speak plainly?”
He made a wry face and blew out smok
e. “Considering what you say when you don’t have permission, this ought to be enlightening. Go ahead.”
“You don’t much like me and everyone knows it.”
“Correct.”
“Let’s use it.” I told him what I wanted to do. I explained it in some detail. It was important to sound rational. In control.
He said, considering, “You’re serious?”
“Why not? If I screw up, I’m blamed. If it works, you get credit. If I’m guilty, Colonel Ng still finds out. You can’t afford to miss an opportunity. You’re on a clock. You don’t want to have to explain in Washington later if I could have helped out now. And the best part for you . . . I’m gone in six months, either way. Expendable.”
“I do like that part.”
“This is exactly what I told Karen that I wanted to do this morning. Exactly what I said when we were sitting in our kitchen and . . .”
My mouth slammed shut. I thought back to the early morning, before the quarantine began. I went over our talk, starting in the bedroom, moving into the kitchenette, rambling over my theories. Laying it out, just as, in the privacy of that hut, I’d been laying out thoughts for days.
No, no, no, no, no.
There’s no way someone could have heard, I thought.
Then I thought, A four-digit combination lock to the front door. Hell, half the time the neighbors would just walk in when we were there. How long does it take to install one of those stick-on mikes? Thirty seconds?
Homza said, “If I give you what you want, you’ll need some backup, some way to talk to me.”
“Major Nakamura. But that’s it. You, me, and Eddie.”
Homza said, “If I do this, Colonel Ng will still be all over you. This isn’t a pass. You’re a cover-up suspect until you’re cleared. All three of you, actually. Her, too.”
“I lost it back there, but I’m over it.”
“No you’re not.”
“For now, I mean.”
He stared at me, making up his mind. He hummed softly for several seconds. Not a tune, just a single flat note. He was a humming thinker.
I pushed. “Sir, Atlanta will analyze the samples. Police on forensics. So give Amanda Ng what she wants. You were probably going to take me off investigations anyway. We both know that whole chat back there with her was an act.”
Homza turned red.
“My condolences,” he said. “Okay, do it. Now get out.”
• • •
IF YOU’RE IN CHARGE OF QUARANTINING AN AMERICAN CITY, AND IF you’ve ordered electronic jamming across town, you’re going to give yourself the ability to call the White House. A spot free of jamming. Encrypted override equipment. A way to phone home if no one else can.
My two Ranger babysitters stood twenty feet off as I punched in numbers. I had no doubt that Homza would have Lieutenant Colonel Ng double-check whoever I called. I was on the weather tower three hundred yards beyond the lab building, on a steel platform twenty feet above the tundra. At my back was an unmanned trailer-cabin filled with passive electronics enabling NASA and NOAA to monitor Arctic weather at four altitudes, as well as tundra methane release, incoming ultraviolet light, outgoing albedo effect (heat radiation back to space), and probably about nine hundred other streams of information normally forwarded to Washington, New Mexico, the Pentagon, the Energy Department, or Woods Hole.
“Prezant College Science Department! Melissa speaking.”
I turned my back to the wind to make reception clearer. I told the secretary—she sounded about fifty—that I was a Marine colonel phoning from Alaska, that this call constituted an emergency, that I needed to talk to the head of the department right away.
“I’m sorry, but Dr. Willoughby is in a thesis defense. It should be over around noon and then she has lunch with the provost after that.”
“Did you hear me say emergency? Get her on the line!”
The voice that replaced hers five minutes later—she’d had to physically go find Dr. Willoughby down the hall—was sixtyish, female, and southwestern. This voice was heavy with shock and sorrow. I felt sympathy from her, cooperation.
“I’m Eliza Willoughby, Colonel. You’re in Barrow right now? You knew the Harmons then?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Awful, awful, awful. I’ve known Ted and Cathy for more than thirteen years. I’ve had them to my home. Kelley plays—played—lacrosse with my nieces. I don’t know what I can tell you that might help you figure out what happened, but please ask anything you want.”
I asked for a rundown of the Harmon project. She hesitated a moment, then gave the same basic explanation that Kelley had in her diary, and that her boyfriend, Leon, had told me at the Heritage Center. The Arctic was warming. Species were dying out. Scientists were behind the curve in understanding what was there in the first place.
“Not enough studies have been done,” she said. “So the Harmons basically collected everything at their nine sites. Then they shipped samples back and spent the year analyzing.”
“Any practical or commercial applications to this?”
“Like I said. Basic work. To find out what’s there.”
“And the Norway part?”
I heard a soft intake of breath. I was not sure if that constituted surprise on her part, or more thinking.
“Oh, you know about that,” she said.
“Tell me what you know about it, please.”
“Well, I guess you could say there is possible commercial application on that end. We’ve partnered up with the Arctic University in Tromso. Tromso is Norway’s Arctic capital, you know. Ever been there, Colonel?”
I curbed my impatience. I didn’t need a travel log. I said, politely, “No, ma’am.”
“Call me Liz. Well, Tromso lies at the same latitude as Barrow,” she said. “But what a difference! Glass cathedral. Excellent hotels. Fine restaurants and a splendid university. Lovely as a Currier and Ives postcard. Just top-notch.”
“What’s the connection with the Harmon project?”
“The Norwegians are way ahead of us in the Arctic, as is every other northern country. When they collect biological samples—they’re not interested in the DNA yet—they check commercial applications first.”
“Please explain.”
“Drugs. You probably know that many useful drugs—natural substances—have come from tropical rainforests. The rosy periwinkle, for instance, a flowering bush. Those alkaloids upped the cure rate on childhood leukemia to eighty percent. A miracle, really, from the jungle.”
“And in the Arctic?” I said, looking out at the expanse of white stretching south for hundreds of miles.
“That’s the point. Nobody knows what’s there yet,” she said. “So the Norwegians have bioprospecting companies. They go out on the ocean, in big ships. They suck up everything on the bottom and grind it up and test the compounds against all kinds of ailments. Systematic.”
I tried to envision an enormous ship plunging through white-capped Arctic waves off of Europe, 3 A.M., floodlights shining down from A-frame winches, nets hauled from the turgid sea, filled with life.
“They test everything?” I said. “Plants? Fish?”
“Mostly bottom life, but some fish, test it to see if it’s worth analyzing. They grind tissue into compounds they mix in with diseases, bacteria, virus. If they find an application, a possible drug, if the target microbe dies, they decipher DNA. You see in the tropics, researchers have it easier. You’ve got more people there. Folktales or shamans identify cures. When tropical researchers go into a jungle, they find locals, ask questions, track stories, and send samples back to labs.”
“But in the Arctic?”
“Impossible, especially a mile down in the sea. The Norwegians just grid the sea and suck it all up and test.”
“Sounds like a long process.”
I envisioned her nodding, getting into the academics of it. “Laborious, yes. It takes months just to analyze what you pull up on one trip. But they’ve had successes! A herpes drug came out of Tromso last year. They’ve got another compound that shows promise against nerve damage, and a product out now that does a pretty good job against acne. All new! So when they approached us, about sharing our Arctic work, we signed an agreement with them.”
“With the university there? Or a company?”
“It’s connected there. It’s socialist. Better, if you ask me. Look at their health-care system! The best in—”
“Please, Liz, can we stay on point?”
“Sorry. The university and the company work together. Anyway, once the Harmons are finished analyzing samples, we ship ’em to Tromso. That’s what we did last year.”
“Any finds yet?”
“Unfortunately not.”
“Ted Harmon was in a rush to finish up this year, get each site in. Was that because of this deal?”
“No. He’s just diligent. Always has been. Systematic. He hates falling behind.”
I thought about ramifications. “Would the Harmons have gotten a cut of profits if they found something?”
She chuckled. “Well, I would have said yes a few years ago, but if you’ve ever read an academic contract you’d know that his percentage, even then, wouldn’t pay for Kelley to go through one year of college.”
“Low, huh?”
“Microscopic. The trade-off is that a professor gets tenure, security, but you give ninety-nine percent of any discovery to the school.”
“But you just said he wouldn’t even get that now.”
A sigh. “Thank the U.S. Supreme Court, Colonel. Two years ago they ruled that a natural substance can’t be patented. They took the incentive away for medicinal research. Even if Ted and Cathy found something, no, they’d get nothing, we’d get nothing. Many schools have stopped their programs now.”