The First Horseman

by John Case

  Not that Svalbard was bristling with natural resources. Basically, there were seams of coal. An American businessman named John Longyear was the first to exploit the archipelago’s resources, establishing the Arctic Coal Company in 1906. It was under the auspices of Arctic Coal that a mine was opened on the island of Spitsbergen, an event that sparked what amounted to a ‘coal rush,’ with adventurous Brits, Danes, and Russians staking out mines up and down the archipelago.

  Profitable at first, the coal became increasingly expensive to mine. But that was hardly the point. The real prize was the archipelago itself, which sat strategically on the roof of the Atlantic, guarding the entrance to the Barents Sea. The Russians and Brits, Norwegians and Danes, were staking claims to a lot more than the coal in the ground.

  In the end it was the Norwegians who prevailed, and they did so by continuing to operate mines like the one at Kopervik – a nearly inaccessible outpost that eventually produced the most expensive coal in the world. Or it did until the question of sovereignity was finally settled in Norway’s favor, whereupon the mine was immediately shut down.

  Now, almost sixty years later, Annie and Doctor K were after a different kind of buried treasure: a virus so virulent and contagious that it might serve as a standard against which all others should be measured. It lay, or so they hoped, three feet under the permafrost, deep in the lungs of five Norwegian miners who’d drowned in their own sputum eighty years before. According to the meticulously kept records of the Lutheran minister who’d lived in Kopervik at the time, the miners’ bodies were in the westernmost corner of the graveyard, just behind the chapel.

  Of course, the NOAA team would have to take ice-core samples from the permafrost before any exhumation would proceed. If the ice patterns within the cores revealed melt-and-thaw cycles, a decision would have to be made as to whether or not to go forward. Since the influenza virus deteriorates so quickly after its host’s death, it would be pointless to disinter the dead if the cadavers had thawed at any time since 1918.

  Which, when you thought of it, seemed likely.

  This damned ice, Annie thought, gazing ahead at the rumpled white ocean, hoping for a glimpse of black water. But there was none to be seen, only the crystalline blue sky and mounded waves, white as sheets and just as dazzling.

  The thing was . . . this was her baby. No wonder she was impatient.

  She was the one who, with Doctor K’s encouragement, had spent nearly all of her spare time researching high altitude settlements in places as remote as Chile, Siberia, and Tibet – looking for what Doctor K called ‘viable victims.’

  Eventually, she’d read about Spitsbergen in a back issue of the New York Times. The article was about Russian and Norwegian claims to the Svalbard archipelago. Almost in passing, it mentioned the region’s coal mines, and how, in 1918, those who’d worked them had been hard hit by the Spanish flu. It didn’t surprise her to learn of the miners’ deaths. What did surprise her was that the miners had been buried in situ, rather than taken to the mainland. Intrigued by this, she’d delved further into the story, and soon learned more than she’d ever expected to know about burial practices in the frozen North.

  Most often, among the natives, the dead were laid to rest above the ground and covered with a cairn of rocks and stones. Digging was impossible. The ground was frozen solid to a depth of several feet. Better to let nature take its course, and so they did. In the end the bears always had their way with the dead.

  But the mining companies had an alternative, and that was dynamite. Drilling into the frozen earth, they’d stuff the holes with explosives, and blast the graves out of the ground to a depth of about three feet. Which was more than enough: neither heat nor bears would ever get so far.

  Or so Annie hoped. And, with Doctor K’s permission, she had written to the mining company about the burials. The company went out of business in the Second World War, but the law firm that represented its interests put her in touch with the church whose minister had served the camps at Kopervik and Longyearbyen. Church records identified the miners and their next of kin, whose descendants had then been contacted for permission to exhume (and subsequently to reinter) their relatives.

  Through all of this, Doctor K had played a passive but encouraging role. And in the end, when the groundwork had been laid, he applied for a grant in both their names – only to be turned down.

  Everyone agreed that the proposal was promising. Interesting. Deserving. And timely: it was common knowledge that a major mutation of the influenza virus would soon occur. It happened every thirty years or so, and the world was ‘overdue.’ There was also agreement that ‘if past was prologue,’ the coming shift would be to an H-1 strain – like the Spanish flu. There was general accord as well that Doctor K’s theory held promise and that valuable data about the relationship between virulence and antigenic structure might be gleaned from a sample of the 1918 strain – if one could be found.

  If Doctor K was right, the more virulent strains of influenza could be identified by the relative prominence of a hooklike protuberance on the protein coat of the antigen. Among virologists this was known (half jokingly) as ‘Kicklighter’s Horn.’

  Even now, H-1 strains could be found in one part of the world and another – and those infected with them weren’t dying en masse. Doctor K’s studies of these strains tended to support his theory: they lacked the more prominent hook and, as he’d predicted, the virulence that went with it. It was fair to say, then, that apart from everything else that might be learned, a look at the 1918 strain would go a long way toward proving or disproving his theory.

  And, though it sounded selfish, Annie couldn’t help but think that if the expedition were successful, she’d be well on her way toward tenure at Georgetown.

  Indeed, she’d be even further along if the grant had not fallen victim to what amounted to bad timing. Only a month before the application was submitted to the National Science Foundation, there was a highly publicized accident at the National Arbovirus Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When a test tube shattered in one of the lab’s centrifuges, two doctors and a lab technician had been infected with Sabia, an often lethal hemorrhagic fever that had previously been seen only in Brazil. Though the incident was immediately contained, the tabloids had gotten wind of it, and the result was an afternoon of congressional hearings that had a distinctively chilling effect on the NSF. Fearful of further criticism, the foundation declined to fund an expedition that in essence promised to rescue from oblivion one of the most dangerous viruses in history.

  And then, when a year had passed and she’d nearly forgotten about the proposal, the funding came through – not from the NSF, but from a small foundation that operated out of a town house behind the Supreme Court.

  Annie had never heard of it, and what’s more, hadn’t even known that Doctor K was submitting the proposal to funding sources outside the NSF. But Doctor K was like that. He kept things to himself – probably to shield her from further disappointments. Which was okay with her.

  Annie lowered her binoculars, even as she stared ahead, trying to coax a lead into existence by sheer force of will. But there was nothing. Just the ice and the snow, and . . .

  A swirling patter, like fractals forming and reforming in her field of vision. She’d read about this. It was a common hallucination, and Annie knew, from the reading she’d done the week before, that the first person to report it had been a nineteenth century explorer who’d walked halfway across Baffin Island with his crew – after their ship froze in and was crushed ‘like a walnut’ by the ice.

  At least that wasn’t going to happen; there was no chance of getting frozen in. The Rex was built for the Arctic, and with its steel-strengthened hull and powerful engines, it was capable of plowing through ice as thick as fifteen or twenty feet.

  She just wished it would go faster.

  Annie squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, as she’d been told to do when she began to hallucinate. The thought of
the polar explorer and his crew made her feel cold. First, they’d eaten their dogs, then pieces of canvas, then parts of their clothes. The last thing they ate were their boots, and by then most of their teeth had fallen out. Eventually, the leader’s diary was recovered by a subsequent expedition. It had been preserved in oiled paper and stored within a tobacco tin. In the diary, the expedition’s leader wrote about the succulence of boot leather on the tongue, and the way he held it motionless in his mouth until it dissolved like a communion wafer.

  And then, apparently, he died.

  A change in the air caught Annie’s eye, and she squinted into the distance. There were rain clouds on the horizon, or so it seemed. She took a closer look with the glasses, and her mood sank. Thunderheads thrust into the blue sky. That’s all they needed. Another storm.

  Despite the layers of clothes she was wearing – starting with thermal underwear and working up to the puffy, red, Michelin-man parka issued by the Rex – a shiver rattled through her. She was cold, but she didn’t want to go back to her cabin, or even retreat to the warmth of the bridge. She had a superstitious feeling that if she didn’t keep staring ahead, the open water would never appear. And it must appear. Soon.

  Her eyes drifted to the catwalk below, where Doctor K was standing with his arms folded, jaw set, watching the horizon. He was probably nervous – he had to be nervous. There was a lot riding on the next few days. But, of course, he wouldn’t show it. Unlike her, he kept his feelings inside.

  Except for his acid intolerance of other people’s mistakes. Around Georgetown and the NIH, Kicklighter’s brilliance was taken for granted. As a virologist, he was one of the world’s foremost experts on RNA viruses. There was talk of a Nobel – there was always ‘talk of a Nobel’ – but he himself dismissed the idea. ‘I’m not interested in trophies,’ he lied.

  As an emeritus professor at Georgetown, he was famously unpopular. When people learned that she was one of his postdoc assistants, they raved: ‘You work with Dickbiter? How can you stand it?’

  He’s shy, she’d say. He lives inside his head. And . . . he just doesn’t have good people skills.

  That was one way of putting it. And, really, Doctor K was never mean. He didn’t get angry. And he never held a grudge. It was just that if you were working with him and you couldn’t follow the leaps that he took (and, let’s face it, a lot of students couldn’t), then he had to stop and explain. And sometimes this meant that he lost something, and sometimes what was lost was valuable.

  And if a question was particularly ill-timed, he got the look that his grad students loved to mimic. His shoulders would sag, his head would list to the side, and slowly, patiently, he’d begin to explain, talking in a voice so remote that it seemed at times almost like a recording – a recording that dissected the question as if it were a frog, laying bare the false assumptions that were its skeleton.

  It was a crushing experience, yes, but she could see that behind it all he was bereft, mourning the rush of insight that had been lost to a dumb-ass question.

  Not that she would ever say anything like that – because, she knew if she did, it would sound as if she were bragging, implying that she, at least, was brilliant enough to follow Doctor K’s careening mind. Though now that you mention it . . . she thought. Sometimes she could stay with him all the way, and spiral right up to wherever he was going – and then, when he lost momentum, she’d be the one to push him on. And that was very exhilarating. Anyway –

  ‘You’d better go inside, sweetheart.’

  She jumped. The voice was right in her ear, and it sent her heart crashing against her chest.

  This was something she’d never get used to – the bizarre intimacy forced upon them by the Rex’s noise. The ship’s din was amazing as it crunched through the ice ‘like a giant chewing boulders’ – she’d read that somewhere. And that was only the noise from the bow. The engine was aft, a constant, blasting racket that pulsed through the decks even as the ice ground along the ship’s sides.

  Obviously, the crewmen were used to the decibel level, and so were the Snowmen, who’d spent enough time on icebreakers that they, too, had adapted. There were eight of them on the Rex, and they all seemed to use a kind of sign language, so that when they wanted to communicate by speaking aloud, they didn’t bother with preliminaries: they just lowered their heads and shouted into your ear.

  It was a weird intimacy, feeling the man’s breath against her skin. Obviously, she was not used to it. Even when she saw it coming, when one of them began to duck his head, she jerked backward, as if dodging a kiss. And then she felt stupid. And blushed, just as she was doing now.

  It was Mark, the senior ice physicist. He ducked his head again, and this time she barely flinched. ‘You’ve got a patch of frostbite starting on your cheek.’

  He straightened up and touched his own cheek with his gloved finger. She motioned for him to lower his head so she could tell him something, but he shook his head impatiently and made a shooing motion that told her to get inside. She pointed to Doctor K, but Mark grabbed her arm and pushed her toward the door.

  After a minute he came in after her. In the warm air, wisps of vapor came off their clothing like smoke,

  ‘What are you,’ he said, with a nod of his head toward the outside, ‘his baby-sitter?’

  ‘He’d never notice if he was getting frostbite. I was just –’

  ‘You didn’t notice you were getting frostbite.’ He took his goggles off and bent to look at her cheek. ‘Superficial. And you can relax – the professor is fine, I checked him out. What were you doing out there anyway? Someone said you’ve been out there for more than an hour.’

  ‘I was looking for water,’ she said.

  ‘Well, don’t worry about it. We’ll get to water in half an hour – maybe less.’

  She gave him a skeptical look.

  ‘There’s a blink,’ he said.

  She just looked at him, not sure if he was teasing. ‘A blink,’ she repeated.

  ‘You’re so suspicious! C’mere,’ he said, and taking her arm, guided her to a porthole. ‘Look at the sky, just above the horizon. You see those dark shapes?’

  Annie nodded. ‘There’s going to be a storm,’ she said.

  Mark shook his head. ‘There’s not going to be a storm. And those aren’t clouds. Like I keep trying to tell you, we don’t get a lot of snow up here. In fact, we get more in Atlanta. The Arctic is a desert.’

  Annie squinted through the glass, which had a layer of film on it to cut the glare. ‘Why do you say those aren’t clouds? Look at them! They’re clouds.’

  ‘It’s a reflection. With ice and snow, you get temperature layers in the air – and it makes for some crazy refractions. A lot of times you can see over the horizon.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘And on a clear day, you can see the future – or is it “forever”?’

  ‘I’m serious. When you’re surrounded by ice, and the conditions are right, you see the water up ahead, just beyond the horizon, reflected in the sky. If you’re in water, you can see ice – which used to be the more important use of the phenomenon. In the old days, ships posted somebody on bow watch to study the sky for early warnings about icebergs.’ He gestured ahead. ‘They call it “blink.” Water blink. Ice blink. Snow blink. Up there – that’s a water blink. We’ll be in the open sea inside an hour. You’ll see.’

  She didn’t really believe it until it happened. She was in her cabin, changing into dry clothes, when her heart was slammed by a sudden silence. Without warning the ice gave way, the boulder crunching ceased, and the world – the entire world – surged smoothly ahead, like a drill bit that has just broken through a thick board.

  With a smile, she fell back on her bunk and closed her eyes. It was almost as if she could see it: the clean sharp line of the raked prow as it knifed through the open water, the dark sea parting in furls of phosphorescent foam.

  And just ahead, almost within reach: Kopervik. The virus. And her future.
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  7

  ARCHANGEL

  MARCH 24, 1998

  ‘IS GONE.’

  ‘No,’ Daly said, ‘that’s gotta be a mistake.’ The blizzard hadn’t even slowed down yet, so the clerk at the Polarsk Shipping Agency had to be wrong. ‘It was scheduled to depart yesterday, but, look – I couldn’t even get to Murmansk.’

  The young man listened patiently, twisting a long lock of greasy hair around his forefinger. Then he repeated what he’d said: ‘Is gone.’

  ‘But – there’s a storm. There’s a fucking hurricane! Nobody’s going out in that!’

  The clerk sighed, flattened a sheet of thermal fax on the desk in front of him and put his finger next to a line in the middle of the page. ‘I hear you, man, but this ship, she’s an icebreaker – she’s leaving ahead of the storm.’

  ‘What?’ Daly was taken aback as much by the clerk’s use of slang as by what he’d said. For the first time, he focused on the fact that the kid was wearing an AC/DC earring.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She goes out at 1100 yesterday.’

  Daly ran his hand through his hair and sat back in the chair. He had a feeling the kid knew what he was talking about. And then it hit him: not only had he missed the boat, but it had left even before he himself was scheduled to arrive.

  Which pissed him off. Here, he’d been feeling guilty about holding up Kicklighter and Adair – they’d be wondering where he was, and so on – only to find out that they’d blown him off, just like that. As if he’d been standing outside a movie theater in Washington rather than sitting in the Chernomorskaya the fucking Chernomorskaya – in Archangel!