by James Abel
“I heard you’ve got frostbite cases.”
“Three Rangers didn’t cover up their faces enough. We warned them. I gave a lecture to them when they got here. They didn’t listen.”
Bruce told a story about his first winter in Barrow, about going out into a garage and picking up an ice ax without gloves on. The next day, his fingers turned blue. The blue crept up his forearms, in his veins. It was poisoning. Frostbite. It had come because he touched metal. Just touching metal had almost killed him. “But antibiotics did the trick,” he said.
Then he asked Ranjay, “How long before Homza—if there are no more cases—before he bags the quarantine?”
“I do not know,” Ranjay said.
Bruce and Ranjay made eye contact. A silent message seemed to pass between them. Ranjay rose abruptly and said he had to go to the bathroom. Bruce said, jokingly, “Don’t let it hang out too long in there, or it’ll freeze, man.”
After Ranjay left, Bruce pulled his chair closer and said, sympathetically, “You’re a quarantine in a quarantine, Joe. I can’t believe Homza kicked you off the base. That they even think you might be responsible.”
“Thanks.”
“What are you going to do when they lift the quarantine, if they lift it? I mean, no new cases in three days. It can’t go on forever?”
I answered truthfully. “I haven’t thought about it.” I had no vision of a future, just Karen, these walls, the pistol snug against my back, the laptop.
“You could work with us,” Bruce suggested. “We have bear people in Canada, at Resolute Bay, and in Norway in Svalbard. Helping the planet, Joe. Sounds corny, but it’s not bad work. It gives a feeling of accomplishment. When my divorce went through, I felt a void, and those animals helped fill it. You could do worse than that.”
I heard a shuffling noise behind me and turned, but no one was there.
Bruce leaned closer, drawing my attention back, “It’s not a lot of money. But Karen said you were quitting the military. Maybe it’s too early to bring this up?”
“No. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Lots of people get the bug. That Tilda Swann, the Greenpeace woman. I heard she’s staying on to work here.”
I remembered her fired-up expression, her rage, her face in mine. “You mean, she’s quitting Greenpeace?”
“Keeping a hand in, another way. She might give lectures at the eco lodge. You know, Joe, I had a feeling that time in the roller rink that she had a thing for you. You’ve had a loss. A terrible loss. It’s never premature to think about building a new life.”
“What?” I grew hot. “Premature? Karen’s not even dead a week.”
I heard a whispery noise and turned. Ranjay had come into the room, and stood just two feet behind me. I hadn’t heard him enter, hadn’t heard until he was close.
Bruce gazed up at Ranjay. “You make out in there, Doc, without losing man’s best friend to the cold?”
Ranjay approached the table. I heard Bruce’s chair scrape closer.
“You know, Joe, we, Ranjay and I, that is, feel . . .”
Then there came more knocking at the door.
• • •
BRUCE AND RANJAY EXCUSED THEMSELVES, MUMBLING HELLO AS LIEUTENANT Colonel Amanda Ng and Captain Raymond Hess entered. The polar spa was a regular Club Arctic today. I didn’t offer coffee. I didn’t offer anything. I said, “Back to check what I say against what Eddie said?”
Hess said, “Sir, Drs. Morgan and Cruz completed their DNA run on the rabies.”
Ng watched and waited. She wanted to see whether I looked frightened or curious, guilty or alert. Hess watched Ng watch me. It was a watch-athon. I was tired of their relentless insinuations.
“I can wait if you can,” I said.
Amanda Ng sighed. “Colonel, looks like we’re dealing with something that came from a lab.”
• • •
HERE’S THE THING ABOUT RABIES. IMAGINE THREE PEOPLE CATCHING IT, one from a bat bite, one from a dog, one from a raccoon, each case thousands of miles from the others. The first victim is a seamstress in Jakarta, the second a kid in Des Moines. The third is a farmer in Yakuta, Siberia. All three fall ill after a short period of incubation. All show the same general symptoms. All, untreated, die.
So you’d think they all had the same exact thing, but that is not true. Sample their brain tissue, strain out the virus, get it under a good microscope, an electron one, one that really shows the spirals and tracks of DNA, and you discover tiny differences. Extra spikes on Indonesia. Fewer coils in Des Moines. Slight discoloration in Siberia.
Those CDC docs from Atlanta, I knew, had brought along with them a thumb drive library of rabies DNA variations . . . a thousand across the planet, each as identifiable as a fingerprint is to the FBI. Ng was saying that the strain here was different, new, probably man-made.
Hess pulled up a chair now. They’d given up the good cop/bad cop routine two days ago. They looked as tired as I felt. I admired their persistence and resented it. I wished they spent more time on other things, but I supposed that, in their shoes, I’d check out Joe Rush, too.
Hess reasoned, “You’re sent up here specifically to look for new strains. And now, that’s happened!”
“If it’s lab born, it doesn’t mean it came from us.”
Amanda Ng leaned back. “Who then?”
“I have no idea.”
“Colonel, Major Nakamura has told us a very different story.”
“Cut it out. If you even talked to him at all, he said the same thing I’m saying.”
“You’ve been briefed on old military programs. You were warned against disclosure. I can guarantee you immunity if you tell us anything relevant, right now.”
“Immunity? From what?”
“From retribution of any sort should you disclose to us a secret program. This comes from the SecDef himself, get it? A personal guarantee. Did you discover a connection, some old program? Were you ordered to bury information?”
“How many times are we going to go over this?”
Ng stared at me. “So you insist that it’s coincidence? You looking for new strains and one occurring?”
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“Someone trying to get you blamed, then?”
“I am being blamed. And you,” I said, “don’t know for sure it came from a lab. It could have evolved.”
They rose. They pulled on their parkas. I had a sense of the cold deepening outside, of the heater inside coughing fitfully, ready to expire.
Ng said, “Chew our offer over. Full amnesty. Hess, let’s go.”
• • •
I SHOT AWAKE. IT WAS 3 A.M. EDDIE WAS STILL GONE AND I’D HEARD footsteps. I turned on the lights, breath frosting once I left the bunk area and went room to room.
No one was there. Jesus!
• • •
THE NEXT DAY THE SUBMARINE WAS GONE. APPARENTLY THE ICE WAS freezing up, putting the sub in danger of being crushed. Soon the icebreaker would depart.
I returned to the beach on a walk and saw a sight that amazed me, a large polar bear on his belly, wriggling forward on ice one hundred yards offshore, spread out, hauling himself by claw. An enormous bear can move on ice so thin that a human would plunge through it. It has to do with weight distribution.
Sometimes a thing that seems impossible at first glance stands there right in front of your face, I thought. Go back and look at the old stuff on the F drive again.
I went back inside the polar spa and back to the F drive—the written part of the diary—to the first reversal the Harmons had suffered, a car accident.
Dad says no matter how long it takes, we’re not going home until we finish up at all nine sites. Dad says . . .
I went back to May again, reread her entries about her crush on a high school English
teacher named Mark Wong, her musings on whether her parents were as boring when they were kids as they were now, read about her pet beagle who was too fat, and how cool Mini Cooper cars looked, how Mom and Dad pulled out maps of the North Slope, and pointed out the lakes they’d be taking her to this summer.
B-o-r-i-n-g.
Mom going on about lake number one, and the oil pipeline proposed to cross it. Lake number four, where, in 1839, Russian fur trappers had planted an Imperial flag. Lake number eight lay inside the National Petroleum Reserve, designated a strategic area during World War One, when the nation feared a cut off of Mideastern oil. Bigger lake number nine, Dad had said, and the surrounding tundra, final site they would visit, might one day house a new eco lodge, where tourists would sleep, eat, and view the Arctic tundra on big, heated, rolling glass-sided carriers.
I started to scroll away and stopped.
Eco lodge? Lake number nine?
They never got to lake number nine.
I read:
Dad says that Merlin Toovik and the ASRC board will vote next month on whether to allow the pipeline near lake number one (that he hates) and the eco lodge by lake nine (that he loves).
I envisioned a new eco lodge rising out on the tundra. Wealthy tourists coming from New York, Berlin, Moscow, Singapore. Heated bedrooms. Hot showers. Tundra tours in big-wheeled or tracked vehicles, where Mom, Dad, and the kids could snap photos of bears and caribou, while sipping Coca-Cola or premium champagne.
Hmm, I’ve thought about diamonds. I’ve wondered about oil and pipelines. I’ve thought strategic. I considered medicines, personal grudges, land acquisition, bioweapons, cover-ups, even Mikael Grandy’s inheritance.
I’d not really thought about the eco lodge.
Nah. How?
Eco lodge?
EIGHTEEN
It seemed impossible that the temperature could drop further, but the big red needle on the thermometer outside the front door of the polar spa read minus five, a record for the end of October. My breath hovered. A Humvee patrol crunched past. I heard, from across the street, from ice pack that had only a week before been ocean, a hard, steady cracking, as if the last atoms of water there were solidifying into granite, making fluid a memory, a petrified artifact from long ago.
Eco lodge?
The borough police headquarters was in a rectangular two-story building with blue metal siding, across from Borough Hall and the Wells Fargo Bank building and ASRC headquarters. It was Barrow’s power intersection. Blue-and-white Ford Expeditions—four-wheel-drive Arctic patrol vehicles—were tethered by electrical wires to outlets outside, like horses a century ago, connected by reins to hitching posts. The stairway was steel, mud-catching in summer, and the steel was slippery with an ice sheath that made me slide around despite the rubber soles on my insulated boots. The railing was also coated with ice. Overheated air enveloped me when the front door swung shut. Light seemed yellowish, and cops stopped what they were doing to stare as I made my way to the duty sergeant at a front desk. They knew who I was. I was the guy who gave their kids vaccinations, but I was also the one who might have unleashed illness in their town.
“I asked you not to come here,” Merlin said.
His office was glass-enclosed. There were framed eight by ten photos on the desk of Merlin and his kids on vacation in New Mexico, hiking; Merlin and his wife throwing a feast when his crew had brought in the first bowhead of a season. Happy shots. His living room packed with neighbors eating fresh meat, pouring on hot sauce, sipping the peach juice infusion that Merlin had made.
The family scenes were at odds with the opposite corkboard wall plastered over with tacked up eight by tens of the Harmon research camp; the bodies, the angles, the huts. There was a Barrow map, with X marks showing homes in which rabies victims had resided.
My eyes stopped at the shots of Karen, a whole series: her body from a frontal angle, a side shot, a blown up facial showing pale skin and bruises, a shot of the neck where a blade had ripped through.
Merlin said, somewhat more softly, “It’s better if you stay away from my guys. Everyone’s on edge. We had a near riot in the church last night. Luther talked them down.”
“I need to ask you about the eco lodge.”
His head inclined. His eyes narrowed. He sat up straighter and put down the photos.
“Why?”
“The last lake the Harmons were supposed to visit. The one they never got to. Number nine. It’s slated for the lodge, right?”
If I learned something important, my agreement with General Homza was that I’d call him on the encrypted phone. Homza had told me, Even my adjutant won’t know about our deal. That stays between you and me.
Merlin regarded me neutrally for some moments. His eyes flickered to the corkboard. He must have decided that his resentments were secondary to any possibility that I might have stumbled on a meaningful theory or bit of information.
“What about the eco lodge, Colonel?”
Now he calls me Colonel instead of Joe.
“Is the lease sale final, Merlin?”
“It will be signed in a few days in Anchorage. Our signatory was down there when the quarantine began. The quarantine won’t stop the closing. They’re hacking out final details now.”
“Outsiders will own the lodge?”
“The land remains ASRC land. It will be leased out for fifty years to the eco outfit.”
“What outfit is that?”
“Great Arctic Circles, from L.A. They came up here and made an impressive presentation. They showed maps and statistics. Over a million tourists visited the Arctic last year, mostly in Europe. Ships. Treks. Polar bear safaris in Canada. Ice hotel in Sweden. Hunting in Siberia. It’s a booming industry, they said. The annual lease fee is substantial. Low impact use. Other proposals we get involve mining or drilling. This seemed . . . friendlier.”
“Who owns Great Arctic Circles, Merlin?”
He sat back and regarded me flatly. One advantage of working in a small place, I thought, was that in Barrow, things were not as compartmentalized as they are down south. Merlin was not only a police chief, but a whaler, a board member of the ASRC. He was a pillar of the community, a member of the local elite.
“A consortium,” he said. “Hotels.”
“They’ve built other eco lodges?”
“They own two in Siberia. They sent up a fellow by the name of Klimchuk, a lawyer. They’ll put ten million dollars in escrow. If they can’t finish the job, they forfeit it. They’re guaranteeing twenty percent of the jobs to locals. The North Slope will be an Arctic Serengeti, Klimchuk said. He showed profit charts on eco tours in Tanzania. He said Arctic tourism is the future. If they make ten percent of that African haul, they’re ahead.”
I asked him if I could see the plans and he shrugged, Why not, and opened a file cabinet. Minutes later I was bent over a photo of the lake and a ratty-looking cabin that was there now, alongside of an artist’s sketch of the proposed eco lodge. It was a long one-story ranch-style structure, its twin wings enveloping the curved end of the two-mile-long tundra lake. There were viewing platforms on the roof. There were, in the sketch, tourists sipping drinks and watching a herd of caribou pass. Those people, in the artist’s mind, probably came from homes in New York and London, Munich and Rio. They were people who paid to climb Kilimanjaro, to dive for sharks in the Marianas, to go on motorized big game photo safaris in South Africa. People who had killed off even the raccoons in the guarded communities in which they lived. But who paid tens of thousands of dollars to watch lions kill gazelles while they sipped beverages.
In the sketch, I saw big-tired tundra vehicles, glass-enclosed rolling living rooms, parked near the lodge. There was an airstrip. Small boats hugged a dock. Visitors walked from a private plane toward the lodge, with staff carrying luggage. Everyone seemed happy. Huge flocks of migrating birds blan
keted the sky.
I said, thinking out loud, “Do the new owners get mineral rights, too, if they happen to change their mind, decide to dig or drill?”
“No. When you lease land in Alaska, you only get surface rights. Not below.”
“Oil? Diamonds?”
Merlin shook his head. “That would violate the lease. They’d forfeit the bond. They do the lodge, or nothing.”
“What about a rerouted pipeline aboveground.”
“Nope. That would violate terms.”
Maybe this is just one more bad idea. Drop it.
I said, “Number nine is the only lake that the Harmons were supposed to visit that they never reached.”
Merlin’s eyes left mine, slipped outside the office. Lots of police had gathered by one of the desks.
I said, “Is there anything special about this lake, Merlin? At all?”
Now more officers were at the desk. Merlin’s eyes came back. “Not that I can think of. I mean, they’re all different, but nothing particular about nine stands out. It’s on the edge of the Porcupine herd caribou migration. But so are other lakes.”
“I want to go there,” I said.
His eyes widened. Then he frowned. “And do what?”
I looked out the window. The world was white. The lake will be frozen. And not just frozen like ice freezes lakes back in Massachusetts, where people drive cars on them. Frozen like you could drive a personnel carrier on it, full of Marines.
I made up an answer as I went along. “I want to finish what the Harmons started. Fly out with an ice augur, drill a hole. Hell, take samples and send ’em back to Ted’s college, just like he would have done.”
Merlin’s chair creaked as he sat back, put his big hands behind his head, and moved his head slightly, right, then left, as if to encompass the barriers enclosing the town, the Rangers barring exit. Whatever the hell was going on outside his office, it had the cops agitated, I saw.
“Just exactly how would you get there?” Merlin said.
I can’t ask Homza for a copter. I’m supposed to be out of the investigation, out of favor with him.