Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  “Waggy? Winfred? Winger?”

  No, not the dog, because now I heard the lock scraping. I heard the metal padlock being moved. Was the dog nosing the thing? Or was a person lifting it.

  “Who’s up there? Michelle? Is that you?”

  The scraping stopped. I called out and got no answer. I couldn’t believe that no one had heard all the shooting. Or maybe a neighbor had heard it, but was too scared to come over, or had decided to not involve himself, or was using the anarchy out there to mount up on a snowmobile with a good GPS system and drive off, exiting the town.

  Trapped.

  No, not trapped. Someone was unlocking the door.

  The scratching sounds stopped. But the door didn’t open. Heart pounding, I reached up and pushed and this time the door moved. I pushed harder and it swung up and fell over, open, made a thunking noise as weak light flooded in. I saw through a blurred film—my vision—the mass of bruised Arctic sky.

  Was he still here? Had he opened the door? Were the revving snowmobile sounds a trick, as in, Poke your head up so I can fire?

  I called out, “Jens!”

  No answer.

  “Who’s there?”

  Silence.

  I couldn’t just wait. I stuck the Beretta out and started firing, moving the gun in a circle. I quickly jutted my head up and glanced out, expecting to see Jens, maybe aiming at the door from a few feet off, but I saw Michelle Aitik. She lay still, two feet off, one hand tucked beneath her crumpled body, one stretched toward the door. She was a rag doll. Face in the snow. But the black hair spread over her back was matted with blood.

  Christ, Christ, I killed the person helping me.

  I made myself keep going. As I struggled out and up top I saw with no relief that I’d been wrong; she was dead, all right, but from this angle, it was clear that the wounds in her back were entry wounds. Clean and smaller, not wider. I’d not shot her. He had.

  She’d probably been in the house, heard me firing, maybe heard the snowmobile start up, came out and saw Jens and he’d whirled, fired, and then he’d run for it. Then Michelle, mortally wounded, crawled a couple of feet, smearing the snow, reaching to release me, reaching for the lock on that heavy trapdoor.

  My rage bloomed and for a moment drove off pain and dizziness. He’d slept with this woman. Then he’d shot her as casually as a farmer kills an animal. He’d killed four people on the tundra. He’d murdered Karen and Michelle. He’d destroyed the lives of innocent people. He’d used that storage cellar down there as a repository for a bioweapon, a murder weapon. He’d spread the disease from that vial.

  I’ll kill you. Whoever you are, I will kill you.

  I needed a doctor, but there was no time for that. I limped into the garage. Michelle’s snowmobile was gone. It had left a fifteen-inch-wide track heading north, up to the road, toward the sea, where Jens Erik, or whoever he really was, had driven off.

  The wind was picking up, from the north, and that trail would be gone in minutes. I knew that there had been no time for General Homza to get enough soldiers out on the ice to stop the exodus from town. Not yet.

  Go after him.

  There was just my Ford for that and a Subaru Impreza in the garage, but both vehicles, even with studded tires, would not be able to follow a snowmobile through smaller openings in the sea ice.

  If anyone in those adjacent homes was watching, they would have seen an apelike figure, me, run, hunched over, into the street, a knuckle-dragger with a Beretta, moving sideways, house to house, garage to garage. My ribs were on fire, the headache was worsening. In a subdural hematoma, one side of the brain hits the back skull, bounces off, then the other side hits the front. You’re okay at first, but things worsen if internal bleeding continues.

  Don’t think about that.

  Snowmobiles were often kept in yards. Sometimes, owners left keys in ignitions, not so much out of a belief in honesty, but it was tough to steal a snowmobile in a place where everyone knew one another, and many people would recognize the vehicle in town.

  Why are you riding around on Gustav’s Honda?

  In the third yard I passed, I spotted a red-and-white Polaris with a cracked windshield. The key was in the ignition! As I straddled the seat I saw a surprised face, a child clutching a doll, appear at the living room window. The face disappeared. It was replaced by an angry man as I turned the throttle. The snowmobile coughed clouds of blue smoke. I shot from the yard, glimpsing the front door opening and a man in jeans and a flannel shirt running out, shaking a fist.

  I bumped up onto the street and felt the track catch and I turned left. Jens’s trail led straight to the sea. My back was on fire. The wind blew cross-wise, into my mouth, making it harder to breathe. The brakes were spongy. The pitted wind guard would make visibility difficult. Each bump was torture. I screamed to stay angry, screamed a war cry, screamed as fuel.

  I took a shortcut between two homes and down Stevenson Street and Nachik Street and across Egasak onto the ice-sheathed beach. I spotted a moving dot a half mile ahead, zipping west. His track was shallow and the wind made it less visible with each minute. What if the person ahead isn’t him? What if I mixed up his trail with another escapee?

  It better be him. I turned the throttle higher with my right thumb. I sped up.

  Which was dangerous.

  I left the beach and reached sea ice, but this was no flat plain, no Bonneville salt flats of ice, no smooth skating-rink-type surface where you could drive as fast as the engine allowed. This was an obstacle course; hard, ridged, pitted geography that could hide a hill or make it look like a depression. It could offer a slit of open water as looking solid, a mirage. It could topple a rider as easily as a giant flicked a fly. One second you’re speeding along. The next you slam into an outcrop, miss a dip, plunge through an opening, skid sideways and topple. The borough emergency squad regularly attended to people—newcomers usually—who’d suffered accidents on ice.

  I sped up again.

  So, apparently, did the figure ahead.

  I maintained distance but my windshield grew smeary. The horizon merged ice and white air. Featherlike flakes began swirling. I lacked goggles. I needed a thermal snowmobile suit. My fingers were already cramping. I needed mitten liners against hypothermia. And special boots, not the walking kind which I wore. A helmet would be nice, too.

  Maybe goggles are in the saddlebags but there’s no time to look. At least not until I get past any troops out here.

  Wind abraded my face. At thirty miles an hour, the temperature dropped at least fifteen degrees. Night was falling. That would make it worse. My ribs seemed to be cracking, fractures inside growing longer. I was losing vision, as it contracted at the edges, but I willed it to expand. My headache spread out, deepened. Thudthudthudthud!

  Pay attention.

  I bounced out of an ice rubble field, reached a rise, and leaned forward on the snowmobile for traction. I remembered lessons that Alan McDougal had drilled into me at the beginning of the summer, when he gave Eddie and me a course in basics. I sat back for better weight distribution on the way down the hill.

  Ahead of me the terrain went perpendicular. I shot across a hill face, leaning up, away from the drop, into the slope. Jens was a good rider. But I kept pace, riding with one knee on my running board, the other leg out, as I tried to ignore the pain.

  Was I gaining on him?

  That’s when I saw two other snowmobiles closing on me, ahead, a pincer closing from right and left, both machines spewing ice trails, trying to cut me off.

  They were Rangers. Rangers trying to expand the blockade. Rangers on confiscated snowmobiles, drawing the cordon closed to cut off seaside escape. They had to be soldiers because civilians would have avoided other snowmobiles. These guys thought I was trying to escape.

  Jens Erik had gotten through before the circle closed.

&
nbsp; I might not make it.

  I sped up, a mistake. The Polaris spun out. I’d been pushing too hard. I bounced off a stubbly rise and was suddenly spinning in a circle. I hit more ice, tilting, almost falling, sliding sideways on an incline as the track fought for grip. The other snowmobiles closed on me.

  I saw one man unsling a rifle off his back as he moved.

  I gunned the engine and only at the last second realized that the ice had opened here, torn, and looming twenty yards ahead lay a long, black slit of open water!

  I slammed on the brakes. The sudden locking almost launched me off the seat. The track caught and spun left and I slid in a fast glide toward open water.

  Jens Erik Holte, in the distance, beyond the two snowmobiles, drew farther away.

  Ahead of me, the ice began bursting up in puffs, warning shots. The soldiers did not see the open water yet. They were shooting to try to stop me. They thought I could stop if I wanted. But I could not.

  Shit, shit!

  I stopped before reaching the water.

  “Hands up, you!”

  I did not see Jens Erik Holte anymore.

  He’d gotten away.

  • • •

  THE FIRST MAN, THE SHOOTER, TRAINED HIS CARBINE ON ME AS THE SECOND dismounted. From the way One looked at Two, Two was the boss. They held me at bay. I was a prisoner who’d been stopped from escaping. They were in no mood for back talk.

  I tried to reason with them. “I’m Colonel Joe Rush. I’m a Marine. I’m working with General Homza. Remember me, from the school? Were you at the school? I’m after a fugitive. I have ID. You need to let me pass.”

  The plea had no effect. Their attitude was tense and angry, as someone had shot two Rangers. They had no instructions regarding me. They would have been ordered to ignore any pleas from escapees.

  Besides, the only people who know about my deal with Homza are the general himself, and Eddie.

  But now I recognized one of the soldiers. It was the captain I’d expelled from my hut on the first day of quarantine. Great. Not exactly a friend. But at least he knew I was a Marine.

  “You know me,” I told him.

  He said, flat and hard, “Yes, I do, sir.”

  “Then let me go. He’s getting away!”

  The captain turned and peered west. There was nothing there. Jens was gone. The captain turned back. I pointed down at the ice, the fifteen-inch-wide track that Jens had left, but even as I regarded it, it filled with windblown grains of snow or ice. It could be anyone’s track.

  “He’s on that snowmobile. He’s the one who started the outbreak. You have to let me pass,” I said.

  But he wasn’t buying it, and I detected a measure of satisfaction in this. “We’ll wait. I’ll call. Meanwhile, you’re not going anywhere, sir.” He added, “They kicked you off the base, didn’t they, sir?”

  “I need to talk to General Homza!”

  Five minutes passed.

  It was cold, standing here, and the pain seemed to rise up in my head and replace thought. The bruising in my head and shoulders ratcheted into a wave, then more waves.

  Nine minutes. I was sweating, always a bad thing in the Arctic. The sweat was freezing beneath my inadequately insulated jacket. I was not dressed properly for extended time out on the ice.

  “Let me go after him,” I asked, through the pain. “Come with me if you don’t believe me.”

  “No can do.”

  “All of us. Together.” My ribs felt as if they were about to burst from my chest, tear out of my parka.

  Closer up, the Ranger with the carbine looked young, maybe twenty one. He regarded me with slightly more sympathy, or at least less aggression. Only a moron would not see how hurt I was. I looked down and saw drops of blood in the snow. Mine. The Ranger became two Rangers, and then the two Rangers merged back into one.

  “Sit down, sir,” he said. “You don’t look so good.”

  I tried to think. Where had Jens been going? Somewhere specific? Or anywhere as long as he escaped from town? I gazed off in the direction I’d last glimpsed him, a dot, diminishing, but also turning back to land. He’d passed the line of soldiers and had been looping back, as if to reenter the continent behind the line of soldiers on land. Moving southwest, into tundra. What did he hope to accomplish by heading off there?

  What lies in that direction? A village? No. There’s no village in that direction.

  The captain had gotten through to someone on his radio, and was telling him I’d been stopped while trying to escape. I glanced at the GPS on my handlebars. The sky was clearing as night came on. The stars coming out. I looked into the void and saw Polaris, brightest star in Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. And Vega, brightest star in Lyra, the Harp, a sapphire sphere, second brightest light in the Northern Hemisphere constellations, after the North Star.

  If that’s the North Star and that’s Vega . . . Karen was always gazing at stars . . . if Jens was steering a path between them, he’d be heading southwest toward . . .

  Toward where?

  I told myself to think. But it was hard to do anything but hurt. I looked up again and saw I had three fixed points with which to work, Barrow, and the two stars. Marines learn night navigation in basic training. We go out without compasses and are challenged to find our way. In my head, I considered the 360-degree horizon as a compass, and assigned numbers to angles. I tried to crudely triangulate direction, using the town and stars as fixed points. I extended an imaginary line into the tundra from where Jens had turned south. I envisioned the North Slope map I’d been staring at over the last few months, the tundra areas, the spots Eddie and I had visited during our mission.

  I stopped. The pain in my chest grew sharper. I heard my own whispered speculations coming out, more hope, more question than answer, “Lake number nine?”

  “What was that, sir?”

  “Nothing.” I put my head in my hands. Maybe the pain had caused me to err.

  I tried to think. I had to be wrong. Because what the hell would he do at nine? There was nothing at nine. At best there would be a little research cabin, as at lake number four. It would be winter. There would be no people. The lake would be iced over. Why break quarantine, why risk capture to go to that isolated spot? It made no sense.

  Oh, yes it does. You just don’t understand why. Because you don’t know what this whole thing is really about.

  Then I thought, Maybe it’s just a coincidence that he’s heading toward that lake. Maybe, the second he reached land, he changed direction. He’s evading, that’s all.

  The captain, I realized, was now actually talking to Homza’s adjutant. Number Two kept back from me, eight feet off, carbine aimed loosely. The captain told the adjutant that I’d been injured while “trying to run the blockade.”

  “That’s not what happened!” I protested.

  He waved for me to shut up. “He tried to elude.”

  I slumped forward in the saddle. Even the Rangers could hear breath rattling in my lungs now. I felt ice on my chin and wiped it with a sleeve. But the pain had a benefit. I looked into my guard’s face. He’d relaxed.

  I heard Eddie’s voice in my head, warning, One, don’t do it. I saw Karen lying in a pool of blood. Any notion of protecting myself was repugnant at that moment. I let the pain take me. It was easy. I slumped forward. It was what my body wanted. I felt the seat slide up my butt and my knees fail. I would have one chance here, just one.

  I heard an old drill sergeant’s voice in my head. Adopt a submissive posture, if you’re about to try to take away a weapon, Marine.

  I needed the carbine closer. I got off the snowmobile and dropped to my knees. I tried to struggle to my feet. I prayed, Come closer, just a few steps. And he did. But three steps wasn’t close enough. I started coughing. He said, his glance sliding left for a fraction of a second, toward his boss, “Colo
nel, why don’t you get . . .”

  I launched up, hard, screamed in fury and deflected the swinging barrel with my left palm, my head averted in case he fired, which he did. I locked my arms around the carbine and brought my knee up and yanked the M4 back as I made contact. I had the M4 in my hands.

  My whole body was on fire.

  The captain’s gaze had been averted and only the shot got him spinning around. He was too late. Now I had the carbine. I shouted, razors in my lungs, “Down, down, get down, on your knees now!”

  The soldiers kneeled, expecting me to fire. The captain’s look now pure hatred; the other guy’s embarrassed, scared as shit. I don’t want to die.

  “Look, I’m not going to hurt you, unless you move. I have to go,” I spotted the captain’s phone in the snow, probably still on, probably with Homza’s adjutant on the other end, listening. Damn.

  “Colonel, come with us,” the captain reasoned smoothly, friendly now that our situation was reversed. “You’re hurt, sir.”

  He started to get up.

  “If you do that, I will fire. Pick up that phone. Give it. Slowly.”

  I took their weapons and ammo. I took the key off my snowmobile. I motioned the captain away from his Polaris and stole the key. They could not chase me now.

  A quick scan of the captain’s saddlebag showed a welcome sight; a bunched up thermal snowmobile suit, an extra he’d probably been ordered to give to some Ranger riding without proper protection. I saw thermal gloves.

  They’d be sending people after me. Rangers were probably coming right now. I had to get out of here. I’d change clothing later.

  I mounted up, armed now at least with two M4s and extra ammunition pouches, each containing three magazines, each of those holding thirty .223-caliber bullets. The M4 can fire selectively, in three-round bursts, or it can be used on fully automatic.

  But could I catch Jens Erik Holte even if he was really heading toward lake number nine?

  Gotta try.

  I told the captain, “Get to General Homza. Tell him, please tell him that I said that Jens Erik Holte is the guy we’re looking for!”