Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  They’ll see it. They’ll spot snowmobiles leaving, fanning out on the ice. Someone will see it. Meanwhile, Jens might be getting away.

  I headed for Eddie, at the hospital. I thought, We lied to them from the first. If there’d been serum, if we would have leveled with them, they’d have given us a few more days of cooperation before trying to get out.

  I saw blue smoke puff up in another yard, another family mounting up on snowmobiles. A Chevy Blazer roared past, crunched onto icy beach and reached the sea ice and turned right, toward Prudhoe Bay, driving right over the Arctic Ocean, as if navigating a clear, straight highway, instead of a boundary-less plain.

  If Jens is responsible, he’ll know what this microbe is. He’ll know whether it is contagious.

  If he killed Karen, I’ll do the same to him.

  Three minutes later I pulled up to the hospital. As I leaped out the cold hit me like a glass wall. I found Eddie eating a PowerBar in the corridor outside the emergency room, inside of which Ranjay and an Army surgeon operated on the wounded Ranger.

  Eddie looked exhausted, standing there in medical whites. Eddie saw my face and threw the PowerBar in a freestanding ashtray.

  “It’s Jens, Eddie. Valley Girl called. Bogus name. The real Jens is institutionalized in Norway.”

  “Who is he, then?”

  “No idea.”

  Eddie frowned, thinking fast, thinking what I’d told myself at first. “Phony name doesn’t mean he’s guilty. People hide out here. End of the world. Leave your family, job, divorce, nineteen thousand traffic tickets.”

  “Let’s find him.”

  “You told Homza?”

  “I’m blocked.”

  “Merlin?”

  “He won’t have anything to do with us.”

  “Pain in the ass Ng and Hess?”

  “They’re at the front line and can’t be reached.”

  “You’re just Mr. Popularity, aren’t you, Uno?”

  “Get your goddamn parka on,” I said. “He can’t get around without his truck, not in twenty below zero. His damn truck will be parked somewhere. We find him, we worry about the other stuff after. Meanwhile, people are mounting up, heading out on the ice.”

  “Oh, shit,” Eddie said, eyes wide.

  • • •

  A SATELLITE, IF ONE HAPPENED TO BE LOOKING DOWN FROM SPACE, WOULD see the triangular town, and then a speck, a snowmobile, heading from the populated area into the voidish white . . . and then a second speck, and a third, and then a fan-shaped parade, some Ski-Doos or Hondas turning right, toward the oil fields. Some left, toward the next village along the coast. Some making a wide U-turn to bring them back to land, behind the Rangers.

  Most people will stay, but I bet over a hundred make a break.

  Eddie checked Itta Street and Ahkovak Street and Takpuk Street, looking for Jens Erik Holte or his metallic green Isuzu truck. I took Egasak and Pisokak. Eddie at the library. Me at the quarry. Eddie at UIC Car Rentals. Me at Utilities and Electric and KBRW radio and the Piuraagvik public athletic center.

  Nothing.

  If Jens is the sniper, his car could be inside the blocked-off area, I thought, scanning the elementary school parking lot, going around back, peering into the garage, bumping back onto the street.

  Twice I was flagged down by nervous troops in Humvees, checking IDs of anyone out, telling them to go home. I said I would. I didn’t. I passed a Humvee chasing a snowmobile, which eluded it by slipping into a yards-wide passageway separating two homes. The Humvee was too wide to get through.

  Minutes later I passed a different Humvee whose crew had cornered a snowmobile in a front yard. The snowmobile driver had his hands up. Soldiers advanced on him, carbines out. The driver looked middle-aged, heavy, miserable.

  I reached my own street, Stevenson, which ran along the Chukchi Sea. The shoreline was eroding here, and at several places homes had been abandoned and soon would crumble during winter storms. I headed over to Kongek Street, for a second try at the house where Jens lived with his girlfriend, Michelle Aikik. I pulled up before a one-story shack with a neat front yard, a freshly painted door, a corrugated iron fence, a freestanding garage, open, that had Michelle’s rusty blue Subaru Impreza inside, an electric wire extending from the engine block to an outlet.

  I did not see Jens’s truck there. But I knocked.

  Nothing.

  I banged on the door. I knew she was in there if her car was here.

  Nothing.

  I grew worried about Michelle. She was a slender, observant, cheery presence at the post office, always helpful when inevitable delays kept packages from reaching Barrow from the lower forty-eight. I’d seen her at the Saturday night dances. I usually nodded hello at restaurants. Her brother, Philip, was a roustabout on the research base, working with scientists who tagged bowheads.

  She still did not answer the door.

  Heart in my chest, I tried the knob. It opened. I walked into the cunnychuck, stood amid the hanging parkas, saw no wet marks on the floor, heard a dog snort inside the house. What was her dog’s name? Waggy? Wilmer? It started with a W, I recalled, envisioning a big animal, St. Bernard or Malamute. Northern dog.

  “Waggy?”

  It stood there when I opened the inner door, three feet off, its big gray-and-white tail swishing back and forth. Beyond the enormous head I saw artist renditions of Jesus on the wall: Jesus on a cross, bleeding; another on a cross, not bleeding; Jesus with his palms up, eyes to heaven. There were porcelain Jesuses. There were lots of photos of Michelle’s extended family. I smelled wet dog, pancakes, old electronics, dog food, fresh laundry.

  “Good boy, Waggy. Michelle? Jens?”

  Nothing.

  I stepped into the house. I looked around, leaving mud.

  No one here.

  “Shit!”

  I walked out of the house and heard Michelle’s musical voice from the side of the house. “Doctor?” I turned and saw her emerging from the ground, from the open wooden trapdoor of their ice cellar. She was bringing up meat from below, frozen ribs, moose, from the big size. The ribs looked like a bloody harp.

  “Doc, how are you?”

  It was funny, but her smiling face and normal-sounding voice got to me. She radiated kindness, just as she always did behind the counter at the post office. I felt sympathy coming off her. Karen.

  “I’m looking for Jens, Michelle. He here?”

  “He went out, Doctor.”

  “Do you know where I can find him? It’s important.”

  She walked toward me. Ice bits twinkled on the meat. Her face was a study in sympathy.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  It hit me hard. It got past my defenses. I looked away for a moment and blinked and did not trust my voice to come out the usual way.

  “Thanks, Michelle.”

  “I just wanted to say that. Why do you want Jens?”

  “Oh, a job came up.”

  “Good! He’ll like that. He’s getting cranky sitting around, doing nothing. Hey, do you need any meat, Doc?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She nodded at the wooden trapdoor leading down to her ice cellar. “Jens is as good a hunter as any in town. He had a great summer. We’ve got more than we can use. Caribou. Musk ox. Don’t be shy. That Army food stinks.”

  “By the way, does Jens have a silencer on his rifle?”

  “Sure. Doesn’t spook the caribou that way.”

  I started to say no to her offer but then I turned and stared at the ice cellar. What is an ice cellar but not a huge freezer, I thought. And what else can you keep in freezers?

  I said, slowly, “Maybe I will take something, if it’s really okay. Can I go down, take a look?”

  My heart was going crazy. I borrowed a flashlight and declined her offer of help, trudged to t
he gray, weathered wooden door and reached down and pulled the heavy thing back on its rusted hinges. There was a jury-rigged system of electrical wires down there, a freestanding light switch. I flicked it. Dull yellow illumination gleamed on earthen walls coated with slick, permanent ice.

  The ladder was wooden. I felt the rungs bend beneath my weight, heavier from the extra clothes and ballistics vest. I stood at the bottom, looking around. I was in a large, squarish room, eleven feet high, my breath frosting as it would in a Manhattan meat locker. The cold down here was a thousand years old. The meat lay stacked irregularly in piles. I saw a pile of frozen fish. I saw hacked-off chunks of sinew and bone, ribs and fat. The smell was cold.

  Michelle’s voice drifted down from the small opening. “You good down there, Doc? I need to go into the house.”

  “I’m good!”

  I stood and slowly pivoted. I thought hard. This is a natural version of what Eddie and I use in the lab building to store samples in, disease samples, to preserve them, so that they can be unfrozen and brought back to life.

  Was it possible?

  I saw that my breathing had quickened from the puffs dissipating as they left my mouth. I felt mucous freezing in my nostrils, felt my moist lips cementing together. I opened them.

  Gotta watch that.

  It won’t be in the meat. There are lots of places to hide things in meat, cavities, rib cages, or the piles . . . but Michelle lets people come down here and take what they want. Jens would be crazy to hide anything in the meat.

  But the walls . . .

  The walls weren’t solid. They looked solid as steel, but anyone could easily chisel out a small opening in the permafrost, and then, within twenty minutes, use a spray bottle, and ice glaze would cover it up again.

  My boots crunched. Even the air down here seemed to be ice. The meat smell was hot and wet. I let the flashlight beam enhance the weak bare bulb light. The beam played over the walls, glaze, and came back at me in an ice reflection.

  Check the ice thickness.

  All you’d need to conceal a small vial would be a few inches of space, tiny opening, four-inch-deep hole.

  It won’t be here. You’re imagining things.

  I went slowly, inches at a time, letting the beam move like a mini searchlight up a wall, right, left, down.

  Take two steps over and start again at another spot.

  This is crazy. There’s too much wall here. I won’t find anything. I’m wasting time.

  I kept going.

  I saw a thin spot where the light looked sharper, an area where the ice seemed thinner. I pulled out my Leatherman and dug at it. The tip broke through, I hit earth. Solid, packed, two-hundred-thousand-year-old earth.

  Sighing, I moved left.

  I saw another interesting patch about seven feet off the ground. I moved the ladder. The cold here was more severe than outside. It was a cold that had been nurtured and preserved, enhanced, cold that formed the base of cold. I needed a new word to describe it, not just, the English, cold.

  I felt the air creep through my mittens and my fingers. I felt it start to turn my trachea white. I felt it inside my elbows. I used the Leatherman on the spot seven feet up. I broke through. I poked the Leatherman into earth.

  Solid again.

  Leave. This is stupid.

  I moved the ladder left three feet, climbed up, letting the flashlight beam play over the upper level of ice. I moved around the basement, using the ladder as if I occupied a private library and climbed up and down, getting new volumes in reach. Somewhere at this depth, not here, but at the quarry, researchers had found frozen mammoths, petrified cartilage of sharks the size of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, creatures that fell to the bottom of a Jurassic Ocean long before Jesus walked the earth.

  I saw another inch-wide spot where the ice seemed thinner. I poked it with the Leatherman. The blade punched through the last bit of glaze.

  And plunged all the way in, into a hole.

  I stood there, breathing fast. I shone the flashlight beam into the hole. The cold in my chest grew warmer. It dropped into my belly. My breathing came sharper. I saw something in that hole.

  I reached in and withdrew a small plastic box, maybe four inches long. Metal was a bad idea down here. Touch metal with skin, the skin would adhere, rip off, and frostbite would set in. So he’d used plastic.

  I opened the case with bare fingers and saw, nestled in velvet inside, plastic vials. Sample vials!

  The light changed from above, went shadowy, probably from clouds, the Arctic gray veil.

  I closed the box and put it into my parka pocket. I climbed down and moved the ladder so that its upper tip now protruded, once again, out the open trapdoor.

  You did it, Jens. You infected people intentionally. The Harmons. The people in town. You faked an outbreak.

  I’d take the vial to the general. I was extra aware, going up the ladder, that what I carried in my pocket was deadly. I took each rung slowly, feeling the rungs dip from my weight. I concentrated on the vial, and the rickety ladder. If it broke, if I fell, so could the vial.

  I was so aware of the vial that, poking my head out, I was only vaguely conscious that a figure stood nine or ten feet away, and when I looked up, I saw the muzzle of the rifle.

  He didn’t say anything. He just fired. I was already pushing off, into the air, but I was too late.

  Two shots hit me.

  I was falling. The trapdoor was a far-off geometry. Miles away, whole universes away, was gray Arctic light.

  TWENTY

  The ballistics vest took the two impacts, both over my sternum, bull’s-eyes, normally guaranteed death shots. I’d pushed backward as he fired. I was flying away from that opening, falling in a kind of slow motion, splinters flying off the door above as he fired, automatic weapon, and when I smashed into hard earth below it was unclear which pain was worse, the concrete feel on my back, or the sensation of having been hit with sledgehammers in front.

  My shoulders had taken most of the blow.

  I couldn’t breathe for a moment. My vision returned. I’d struck the earth with the top of my spine, and shoulders, and then my skull had rocketed back and slammed into the ground. The parka had provided a minimal cushion. It was like an airbag had gone off inside my brain. The earth burst up in splinters around me. He was firing diagonally through the trapdoor, as he moved toward it. He didn’t see me yet. He was spraying. I’d thrown myself out of his line of sight; now he needed to look down to see me.

  Did the vial in my pocket break? Are the germs out?

  The pain was a freight train in my ears; a jackhammer. I felt a cracking sensation in my chest when I breathed. The three-fingered mitten was inside the Beretta’s trigger guard. I saw my arm go up, swiveling toward that square of light. The pistol bucked, crackcrackcrack, as if firing by itself, firing from twenty years of Marine survival instinct.

  I pushed backward. My back was an anvil and a hammer slammed down on it. I was dizzy. My fifteen rounds were exhausted. As I groped for a second clip I saw that my only advantage was that while his rifle was silenced, my Beretta was not, my firing would be magnified down here. My shots might be audible in the neighborhood. If so, they’d bring onlookers. They’d attract attention. They’d lure soldiers if any were near, or if someone phoned them. Someone is shooting a gun down the block!

  Jens would know that he could not stay here long.

  The door swung shut above me, with a heavy boom, plunging me into darkness. I heard a lock snap. It made my breathing louder, safe for a moment, but each exhalation ground glass into my lungs. I tried to stand but a wave of dizziness knocked me back to the ground.

  I took a quick measure. The back seems bruised but the head injury will be the worry. I hit hard, so my brain would have smashed into my skull, front and back. Potential subdural hematoma. Potential expanding dama
ge. Potential blood leakage. THINK ABOUT IT LATER!

  He’s getting away.

  I groped two steps toward the ladder, bent like an old man, stopped, and threw up. I groped for the flashlight. It had broken in the fall. In the dark I brought out fresh ammo. I thanked the Lord, the U.S. Marines, and a long-ago tight-assed drill sergeant named Dave Gaffney for making me load guns blindfolded at Parris Island, during training.

  My breathing sounded like ripping fabric. As I touched the ladder, I heard, up top, slightly muffled by the door, the unmistakable revving of a four-cylinder snowmobile. That would be Jens, I guessed.

  I envisioned him heading for the ocean, disappearing into the flood of people escaping from town, over the ice.

  In the dark, struggling up each rung felt like dragging a boulder up Mt. Everest. My breathing sounded like an emphysema patient’s. I tasted sweet, cloying blood. Inside my back writhed a jumble of snakes. Was the total darkness natural? Or had I suffered some vision loss, too?

  The revving sound up top grew smooth and dissipated. I envisioned a snowmobile heading off. My head hit the door. I’d reached the surface. Hooking my left arm around the top rung, I reached with the right and pushed, but the trapdoor would not move enough to let in even a sliver of light.

  I banged on the door. Each impact sent waves of pain through my arm, into my chest. I tried yelling for help. My voice sounded frail to me, like some other, damaged man’s voice. The blood in my mouth inexplicably tasted of apples, and a wave of dizziness threatened to topple me back into the dark, but the arm around the rung kept me in place.

  Gotta get him.

  I reversed the Beretta and used it as a hammer. I banged on the hatch. My voice sounded like a whisper to me. Maybe it was not even coming out at all.

  Then I heard a scraping noise, inches away, and an odd clicking, as if an animal, a woodpecker, tapped against the thick wooden door. A beak. Paws with nails. I heard a snort.

  “Is someone there?”

  The response was only muffled, jagged breathing, heavy, sounding like an animal’s.