by James Abel
“You’ll help. You’ll ask the general for permission to take a borough copter. You two are cooperating, right? You’ll say it’s part of your investigation into the Harmons and Clay. Rangers can come. You’ll say there are no villages near lake number nine, so we can’t infect anyone. We’ll come right home. That chopper is big enough to carry a small augur.”
“It will be fifteen below tonight. Temperatures are still dropping. The Harmons would have quit by now.”
“Maybe that was the whole point, to stop them.”
“And what do I tell Homza is the reason I want to go?”
“You’re investigating four possible murders. All four victims were slated to go to that site. You want to eyeball it. You want to check the cabin for prints or evidence, in case someone else was there.”
This time when his gaze moved I followed it. Outside the glass wall, Deputy Luther Oz was standing there, eyeing us. Oz saw me notice him, and joined the officers clustered around the desk.
I had another thought. “Merlin, you said lodge buyers can’t go after minerals. Does that mean the ASRC can sell mineral rights to someone else, if the lodge is there?”
Merlin stood, back to me, looking out at the road, where three Army Humvees suddenly shot past, fast, heading for the airport. Something was happening. Merlin said, “No. That’s part of the deal. We leave everything alone. But before we agreed we had our geologist take samples, see if there might be minerals there. Negative report. Everybody wins.”
“You mean the Harmons won? Karen won? Clay?”
“I’m surprised you’d trust my guys to come with you,” Merlin said coolly, turning back to me. “After what you said about me being involved. Remember? Me taking oil money?”
“I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
“The thing about being drunk,” said Merlin evenly, “is that you may not know what you’re saying, but you mean it. And there’s nothing out there but ice. There’s never going to be enough vaccine for everyone in Barrow, is there?”
“No.”
“You knew it all along. You lied by omission. Again.”
“Yes.”
“Good-bye, Joe. I have to get back to work.”
Suddenly alarms went off in the building. I saw cops putting on body armor and throwing on parkas, rushing for the exit. Luther Oz burst into the office, snapping on a Kevlar vest. “The airport,” he gasped. “Shooting at the airport.”
I followed Merlin and Oz as they ran from the office, both carrying heavy shotguns. Outside it was snowing lightly. The cold hit us like a fist. I heard shots now, from a distance, the steady snap-snap-snap of M4 carbines. Merlin rolled down the passenger window. Oz was driving.
“Stay out of it, Colonel. Stay away. I don’t owe you anything anymore. I see you there, I arrest you,” Merlin said. Their Ford disappeared into the falling snow. The shooting in the distance picked up. I heard lots more weapons now.
NINETEEN
The Rangers manning the roadblock trained their M4 carbines on me as I slowed the Ford. I did not know them, and to them I was in civilian clothing, driving a civilian vehicle. They looked tense and angry, eyeing my Marine ID, as if they refused to believe that I was really the person on the card. Ogrook Street was a gauntlet of small homes, with frightened faces pressed to many windows. The airport, my destination, was a quarter mile away.
“Can’t let you through, sir. Please turn around.”
The quarantine plan called for defensive zoning if violence broke out, to try to contain it. These twenty-two and twenty-three-year-old Rangers had quickly and efficiently blocked key roads, but from their tense attitude I had a feeling that the source of the shooting had not yet been identified.
The lieutenant at my window—a tall, chisel-faced Creole from Louisiana—would brook no argument. The privates at his side, their carbines trained on me and on an approaching snowmobile, were ready to fire. They seemed more angry than scared. Someone had shot a Ranger.
I said, pushing it, “Lieutenant, let me through.”
“Sir, you are not my commander. My orders are to arrest anyone who will not turn around.”
He’d do it, I saw. Argument was useless. “At least give me an idea what’s happened.”
He considered for a moment as wind whipped up a gust of diamond-like specks, hard, granular snow in his face.
“Sniper, sir. Shot two guys at the wire.”
I turned the Ford around and headed for the military base, encountering no other roadblocks. But on the way I saw a sight that struck me as wrong; a few people, men, women, and children, in their yards, loading up snowmobiles and pull-sleds, as if the day was normal, and they could leave town. They were dumping in knapsacks, food, snowshoes, cross-country skis. Rifles or shotguns went in last, so as to be easily accessible. They couldn’t leave town, so this made no sense. Yet they kept loading, in fact, seemed to be hurrying their families to finish up.
Then it hit me. That’s why those men were out on the ice, probing the thickness. They’re going to break out, just drive off over frozen sea.
Some quarantine. I heard my own bitter laugh over the Ford’s engine, not the kind that comes from something funny.
The coast road was deserted, and at sea, farther off than where it had been yesterday, the Wilmington had turned, a red speck, limping west toward the Bering Strait. The ice must have thickened so much it threatened to trap the ship. It had to leave. Usually ice didn’t solidify so much for another month. But the cold snap had deepened. The Wilmington’s departure meant escape had just become an option for anyone in town who was scared, or blamed the Army for the outbreak, or was guilty, or just wanted to get out. Now they could mount up and disappear into the white while the troops were occupied on land.
Or does the sniper know that? Was the shooting intentional? Is it a diversion to occupy Rangers while people—while Karen’s killer—gets away?
It was all falling apart, I thought, pushing down on the accelerator. All the careful strategy drawn up in warm classrooms at the Navy War College. The fine plans were about to be busted open by plain old ice. I’d been to some of those meetings with Eddie. We’d sat in classrooms with other alleged “experts.” We’d made lists of questions to be dealt with in the event of a quarantine of a U.S. town. But no questions and no strategies had regarded the Arctic.
Because no one in Washington, including me, had thought that a quarantine could occur in such a cold, remote place.
Now Homza would be scrambling to adjust, calling for more troops, more wire to block sea escape, air patrols, more housing, but extra help was hours away at best!
Eddie’s favorite expression came into my head, in his sarcastic voice. “SNAFU: Situation normal. All fucked up.”
At least I was still cleared to enter the base. I drove in as a half dozen troop-packed Humvees drove out, filled with somber-looking Rangers. I passed the Quonset huts and the community college building at top speed. I took the curving road to the lab building, Homza’s headquarters. The car slid sideways on an ice patch, almost plowed into a snowbank. The wheels caught at the last second, and the Ford veered right but straightened and made it to the labs.
That was when my encrypted phone started buzzing. But when I glanced at the screen, I saw that it wasn’t Eddie, or the general, but Valley Girl back in Washington.
Not now, I thought.
I burst into the building. To hell with orders to avoid tracking in mud. I stormed up the stairs to the general’s office. There, amid a scene of controlled anarchy, officers manned phones, snapped out orders, drew arrows on a chalkboard, peered out windows toward the airport, but the windows did not provide a close enough view.
I smelled bad coffee and chocolate cake. The snow against the windows sounded hard, abrasive, constant.
Homza stood alone inside his office, on a landline phone. But before
I could get to him, his adjutant—a major named Garreau—blocked my way. He was a bulked-up Georgian with long sideburns, thinning reddish hair, and the tense, ready-to-leap attitude of a good guard dog.
“Doctor, not now. He said no one gets in.”
“I need to see him. This relates.”
“Perhaps I can help, Doctor.”
You? You don’t even know I’m supposed to report to him. You’re not even addressing me as “Colonel.” You’re talking to me as if I’m a civilian, an outsider, which was what Homza and I agreed to pretend that I am.
Garreau regarded me with a cold politeness. He repeated, “Can you tell me what this is about?”
I stopped dead. What was it about? A theory? One more unsubstantiated speculation? Guesswork? Hope? I was here for Homza’s permission to visit lake number nine. A body of water so anonymous it lacked a name. It just had a number.
“I’ll wait,” I said.
He frowned, preferring that I leave, and not complicate an emergency. He said, “It might be a while.”
“Yes, I understand. I’ll sit here. I give you my word. It’s important. You’ll tell me when I can go in.”
He nodded and turned to attend to more pressing business. My phone started up again, tinny and insistent. I ignored it, trying to get an idea of what was going on in town by listening to conversation. Sniper shots—from a single shooter, it was believed—had hit two Rangers thirty minutes ago. But no one had heard the shots. It was believed they were silenced, which made sense, as some hunters in town used suppressors, and any good sniper would have known that—especially in such a small place—the sound of firing would have pinpointed his location.
“One critical. One dead,” I heard someone say.
“No one on rooftops, sir.”
“No shell casings found so far, Major.”
“Shooting’s stopped, sir. It’s possible whoever did it got away into that utility tunnel, that fucking Utilador, sir. He may be moving to another spot.”
I heard a lieutenant call the Wilmington, now twelve miles away, asking the icebreaker to dispatch drones to scan the city rooftops. Or a chopper and Coast Guard sniper.
My phone began ringing again.
I might as well answer. Valley Girl sounded back to normal, each sentence—even the mundane ones—ending in a question. She sounded proud today, and the accent was extra irritating. She cracked gum, chewing, between words.
“I did what you asked me to do, Colonel?”
“Get to the point, Sarah.”
But she did things her own way. She repeated what I knew already, confirmed the business arrangement between Prezant College and the university in Norway, confirmed that Professor Ted Harmon’s original grant application said that his research was precisely what he’d claimed it to be. Go to nine lakes. Take samples. Gather up everything indiscriminately. Freeze it and ship it back.
Nothing new about this. Why did you call?
Valley Girl said, “Colonel, I also went back? I took another look at people you asked about? On the base? And I found a funny thing?”
I sat up straighter.
“What funny thing?”
“Well, that Norwegian guy? Jens Erik Holte? The helicopter pilot who works for different people?”
“Don’t make me keep asking!”
“I checked his social security info? It was fine. Birthplace? Jobs? Voting? Credit? Then I went to get a pizza? With mushrooms and peppers? I was in the car and I was thinking? I have this friend I went out with? At Interpol? Like he has my job there? I was waiting for the pie? They always take long if you want extra peppers, like, I don’t get it, it takes the same amount of time to put on regular peppers or extra ones. You put peppers in your hand and sprinkle them on the pie, right?”
“Get to it, damnit!”
“You’ve been so nice to me so I asked my friend to check that pilot. But in Europe, see? Like, I figured, all his records won’t just be here since he came from somewhere else.”
“And?” My heart was slamming in my chest. “What about Jens Erik Holte?”
“Well! That’s the thing, Colonel. Everything is fine with him here, in America? Just perfect.”
“But in Europe?”
“He’s like this retarded guy in an institution? Same age, but like, IQ down the drain! Like, he’s been in hospitals since he was five years old! Same ID. Same name. Same little village birthplace. See? But it’s another person! So who’s on your base, claiming to be him?”
• • •
I HUNG UP AND TRIED TO GET TO HOMZA, WHO WAS ONLY TWENTY FEET away, yelling into the phone. Major Garreau blocked me and had his Rangers push me out. I tried to explain. But Homza had played his part perfectly with his men. Garreau “knew” that I was out of the investigation, a suspect. The adjutant was not inclined to listen to anything I had to say.
I ran out of the building and got into my Ford. I took the road back to the Quonset hut area. I left the Expedition running in front of hut thirty, the last one on base, the one in which all my summer friends now resided, and in which Jens—who bunked in town with a girlfriend—often hung out—drinking coffee, making small talk, hearing information, during the day.
The campus looked deserted. He doesn’t know you know.
I made sure that my Beretta was ready, but kept it in my holster, the snap loose. I walked directly into the living room. My throat was raw and I felt my heart beating. Normally the place slept eight but now it held more than twenty. The smell of too many people hit me.
Sleeping bags lined the periphery of the living room, some occupied, some rolled up during the day. Think London, World War Two, the underground tube, the blitz. I smelled eggs frying. I smelled feet. I saw, at the kitchen table, Alan McDougal playing chess with Deirdre. A poker game was in progress between three base roustabouts. I saw CDC Dr. Janette Cruz fiddling with the TV, don’t ask me why, because it got no reception. Bruce Friday came out of a back bedroom in stocking feet, saw me, and froze, fixing on the urgent expression on my face.
Bruce was in jeans and a heavy knit pullover, a time-faded white sweater. He held a stack of eight by ten color photos of polar bears in his hand.
I tried to sound casual but I doubt it worked. “Hey, Jens here?”
“Why?”
“I just got permission to take a chopper out to lake number nine. I want him to fly it.”
His eyes grew huge. “How’d you get permission to leave?”
“Persistence. Is he here or not?”
Bruce glanced around. “I was taking a nap. I don’t know. Did you hear? About the sniper? My God! I knew if Homza kept the lid on, this place would blow. I told Homza! You can’t lie to people. You have to tell them the truth, especially if they don’t trust you to start with.”
“I know.”
Bruce said, “People have had enough.”
I raised my voice to make an announcement. I told everyone in the hut, “I’ve got permission to take a chopper. Anyone see Jens?”
No one had seen him.
“Tell him I’m looking for him if he comes back.”
Nods. Grunts. Who cares? The poker players went back to their game. McDougal seemed thoughtful. Deirdre looked miserable. Dave Lillienthal came out of a bedroom with a glass in his hand, and a half-filled bottle of scotch.
I left.
Heading back into town, I left a message for Eddie to call me. I thought, Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe he’s got a secret that has nothing to do with rabies. Maybe I’m frustrated so I want the answer to be Jens.
Where to look? If he was the sniper he’d be moving, and finding one man in Barrow—if he did not want to be found—was like finding one flake of snow in a field of drifts. There were hundreds of homes here; the community center, the Heritage Center, and restaurants, all closed, but accessible with a pick of locks. There
was the roller rink. The environmental observatory. The long utilities tunnel. Add in city garages, schools. About two hundred permafrost cellars, a public library—even the old, abandoned, half-buried sod houses near the sea, mounds jutting up from tundra, cramped dark spaces where, centuries ago, humans spent winters huddling to keep alive.
Look for his car.
I passed his girlfriend’s house. No cars there. I knocked. No one home. I started off again. He could be anywhere. He could be crouching in someone’s home or backyard or an abandoned house, amid busted stoves and discarded refrigerators. He could be inside a parked car. On a roof.
Try Eddie again.
Jens had been the pilot who worked with the Harmons after the original flier was hurt. Jens would have heard their plans. He had time and opportunity to tamper with supplies. Jens was the invisible fifth member of their party. Jens, in fact, was the invisible member of at least a half dozen projects here; oil surveys, water surveys, pipeline surveys, even Eddie and me going out.
As I passed the big AV Value Center I caught a fast blur of movement to my left. I slammed on the brakes and skidded sideways and almost hit a snowmobile pulling a sled as it bounced out of a yard, crossed the road three inches in front of me, and zipped toward the beach. A second Polaris followed. Escapees. My heart clung to my throat. The sleds pulled away. Looking back were women and children, huddled beneath blankets. Everyone scared. It was just a question of what you were more scared of. Illness? The Army? Secrets? The North?
Those families believed that the icy tundra was safer for them than here, and the drivers were probably taking their chances heading for the nearest village, a hundred miles away, a three or four hour journey if they were lucky.
I sighed. I pulled out my phone. If any of those escapees were infected, if they were vectors, they could turn a bad situation to start with into a disaster, if they reached another town.
I punched in the general’s number. He needed to know that people were running from the quarantine. There were no good choices here, just gradients of bad. No one answered. I sat for a moment deciding which danger to address. Go back to the base or the roadblock? Alert the Rangers? Assume they knew that people were escaping by now?