Yuri nodded, grimacing with pain.
The man gave another yank, and pulled him sidesaddle onto the back of the skidoo. Yuri’s arm throbbed, his shoulders burned, and his twirling brain made the horizon tilt back and forth like a teeter-totter. But freed from the snow, he could move again. He rotated to face forward and, sliding a leg over the rear seat, sat astride it. “Why wait . . . so long . . . to pick me up?”
“To make sure those Yankee yahoos had stopped shooting. Now hang on, cowboy. This ride is going to be hilarious!”
Wait a minute. The voice! It had lost the Russian accent. The bubble of the helmet couldn’t distort sound that much. And come to think of it, Boris’s man never had the physical bulk of this guy. A flash of panic erupted in Yuri’s chest. “Stop! Who are you?” he asked, still fighting for breath.
“I’ll explain later.” With that, his rescuer revved the motor, and the machine leapt ahead, the exceptionally wide tread churning its way up the grade and back into the forest. Once there they picked up speed, and soon were zipping over drifts where no cop car, American or Canadian, could follow.
Chapter 16
That same morning, Friday, January 23, 2009
America Comes Down With The Shakes, read Frank Rajensky, as he pulled a copy of the New York Times off the candy striper’s cart. “Tell me about it,” he muttered, looking around the packed waiting room.
A twenty-year veteran of driving cab in Manhattan, he had finished a double shift seven hours ago, just after midnight. By then he’d been told so many variations of what had taken the crew of the USS Reagan that even the flicker in his right eyelid and the itchy rash in his crotch worried him. What if they meant something dire?
But the lineup for ER at New York City Hospital had rivaled those in front of Radio City Music Hall where tickets for Cher’s comeback tour would go on sale at daybreak.
He’d opted for ER.
“See that? My thigh muscle jumped, ” he exclaimed, pants down around his ankles after having finally been called into an examination cubicle.
“I don’t see much more than a heat rash,” a weary resident told him, kneeling at eye-level to Frank’s privates and wrinkling her nose. “Bathing more would help,” she added.
“There! It jumped again.”
“Where?”
“Put your hand on my groin. You’ll feel the muscles move.”
She screwed her face into an I-ain’t-touching-anything scowl. “Go home. There’s nothing wrong.”
Inside Frank’s brain, millions of micro-electrical impulses cascaded down a million slender axons, passed through their bulbous central bodies, then fanned out like mini-forked lightening, multiplying twelve fold along twelve million dendritic branches, all racing toward the next set of junctions with even more axons. That’s where tendrils of an invader stopped them cold. As inert as white chalk, it had severed conduction pathways with the efficiency of a scalpel. Signals were left curling back on themselves, looping through aberrant routes and setting off the little quivers in odd muscle groups that had had him worried.
Over a thousand miles to the west, Ramsey Lewis, thirty-year-old grain farmer, stamped his feet on the ice-coated asphalt to keep them warm. The thermometer outside his barn had read forty-below zero at 4:00 A.M. that morning, not an unusual low for northern Minnesota this time of year. He eyed the lineup that snaked through the still dark parking lot for Our Lady Josephine’s Hospital of Perpetual Hope, nicknamed “Sloppy Joe’s” by the local ambulance drivers. He figured it might be another ninety minutes before he got inside the emergency room door. How long before he actually saw a doctor, who could say. He’d gotten here an hour ago, figuring no other fool would bother showing up so early. Should he just go home? He had two dozen head of cattle needing to be milked. But his hands, even when he kept them jammed deep into his pockets, continued to tremble, exactly as they had on and off for the past week.
While he weighed whether to stay, rogue currents erupted along strangled neurons that flared and died the way filaments burn out in a spent light bulb. These final microbursts coalesced to send mini-electrical impulses through whatever adjacent pathways remained, locking his fingers into the tiny, repetitive tremor that had grown more insistent day by day. The physiological equivalent of an early warning light, it signaled something gone horribly awry But the actual damage, having occurred on a cellular level, lay beyond what the probes of physicians at Sloppy Joe’s could detect or visualize. Not that other places could do better. Doctors the world over would look upon such apparently innocuous signs and not grasp what they meant.
Over a thousand more miles to the southwest in San Diego, Lorraina Cortez, a twenty-five-year-old cashier at the city’s world famous zoo and mother of two boys, one three, the other five, got up from her chair in the waiting room at Memorial General’s Emergency Department. She started to walk toward the water fountain, but her left foot dragged, caught her right heel, and pitched her face forward onto the linoleum floor.
“What’s happening to me, Doctor,” she asked a pimply-faced medical student who’d been the only one free to suture her lacerated eyebrow. “I’ve been so clumsy of late. And my oldest, he’s been falling as well.”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” her boy-doctor said, frowning ferociously as he managed to complete the second stitch in two minutes as opposed to the five it had taken him to do the first. “Now relax. Only twelve more to go.”
At that precise moment in Atlanta, Georgia, the CDC’s Web site crashed because so many doctors from all around the country were trying to find a protocol to follow, or at least get some advice on what to tell growing numbers of anxious patients.
And G-TOED continued to erupt in red lights until the whole map was ablaze.
Even China, after it initially lagged behind the rest of the planet, bloomed as crimson as a poppy field.
“Old habits die hard,” one of Anna’s protégés in the New York office said as he zeroed in on that portion of the screen.
“What do you mean?” his assistant asked.
Both men were bleary eyed from meetings that had gone on all night.
“Probably local health officials sat on the information awhile, like in the old days. You’d think they’d learn. With all of China on the Internet now, not even retro-style communists can keep what happens there a secret.”
He forwarded the feed to all authorized recipients.
At least it’s not the Chinese, the newly inaugurated 44th president of the United States thought to herself, sipping a cappuccino as she glanced at the report. Phillippa Holt then placed it on top of her papers and summoned her secretary of defense for their usual pre-breakfast briefing.
* * * *
Terry slammed back into the passenger seat as the aging F-16 trainer catapulted off the flight deck and banked left into the night sky. He glanced over his shoulder and watched the USS Clinton recede from view until only its deck lights were visible against a black sea, an exact rewind of how he’d first seen the Reagan. His watch read 2:22 A.M.
Climbing through a ceiling of clouds that topped the squalls below, his pilot skimmed their craft across the freshly whipped skyscape, its billowy tufts and shadowy fissures highlighted under a full moon.
Terry tuned his headset to the right frequency, and the communications room relayed him through to the lab in San Antonio.
“Dr. Ryder here,” he said when the chief of staff picked up.
“Oh, fuck!”
“Good day to you too.”
“Call’s from you inevitably ruin my day.” He nevertheless agreed to give Terry’s samples top priority.
“Great. The initial specimens will arrive within twenty hours.”
“What are they?”
“CSF from people with tremors.” Terry signed off before the guy could complain about having to work through the weekend.
Tapping the liquid that bathes the central nervous system, or cerebral spinal fluid--CSF for short—had always reminded Terry of goi
ng through a person’s garbage to discover their secrets. Because floating chemical or cellular refuse sometimes corresponds to particular types of tissue damage, and, by examining these by-products, doctors can identify the disease process that produced them. Or if some exotic new virus were to blame for SHAKES, the San Antonio team might be able to culture it from the samples. Then they could visualize the organism under electron microscopes, separate out fragments of its genes, and sequence the DNA--one, two three.
Of course, real life seldom turned out so simple.
He radioed back to the Clinton’s infirmary. “It’s all set,” he told Dr. Louise Cameron, the first female ship’s surgeon to serve on a US carrier.
She gave a whistle of appreciation. “Must be nice having pull.”
“It’s more moxie than rank. The neat trick was your bringing the Captain on-side.”
She’d sold their plan to her commander, convincing him to authorize both Terry’s flight to Oahu and the transport of their samples to San Antonio. The new warship had a power to unleash Armageddon when it came to taking life, but was equipped with the medical labs of a rural hospital when it came to saving it.
“If this works, Terry, they’ll be giving us all medals. Safe flight, and good luck.”
He reconnected with the communications room of the Clinton.
“Morning, Dr. Ryder,” It was the same ensign who’d previously failed to secure him a civilian line to Honolulu General. The boy might have been old enough to join the navy, but his warbled voice still fell a note short of manhood. This time, however, he successfully plugged Terry through to the hospital’s switchboard.
“There’s still rumors going around that you’re dead,” one of the operators told him.
“Consider them premature.” He set about lining up calls to every friend he had in the pathology department. “I don’t care if they’re at home in bed. Roust them out and have them on the line, ready to talk with me.” He doubted many would be sleeping tonight anyway. “Now let’s start with who’s already in house.”
Waiting on the line, he wondered if an explanation to the general would be wise, and decided against it. Why risk being ordered off? What he had in mind involved fancy footwork outside official channels. Better to follow his primary rule with the military: Do the right thing, then get permission.
The pathologist on call turned out to be Jim McAllister. He was a short, beefy-faced, barrel-chested man who had such a booming voice it made speaker phones unnecessary.
“I need a favor, Jim,” Terry told him, and explained what he had in mind.
“Thank God someone’s doing something,” the man said, his trademark rumble loud enough to rattle loose instruments on a surgical tray.
A few similar conversations later, Terry began to feel like Mickey Rooney in those old movies with Judy Garland. “Come on, gang, let’s put on a show,” and in an old barn they’d hammer together a million dollar Busby Berkeley extravaganza worthy of a Broadway hit. This would be the scientific equivalent, in terms of it being an impossible longshot by a cobbled-together group of upstarts foolish enough to think they could get a first look at the enemy.
After a dozen more calls, he had the people and equipment he would need.
Now for permission.
“Are you sure you’re not infectious?” the very skeptical chief medical officer at Hickam wanted to know.
“I used the toxic-spill showers to decontaminate myself before I took off, so I figure that got rid of anything I’m carrying. But hose me down again and burn my flight suit, if you like.”
“Trust me, we will. Word just came down from PACOM that every ship in the US fleet is turning up with cases of SHAKES. Given the meltdown on the Reagan, they’ve all been ordered back to port.”
“The entire fleet?”
“Let’s just say if this is part of an attack like CNN keeps reporting, America’s got no navy at sea.”
Terry didn’t reply. Instead he signed off while he still had a half-assed clearance to land, but a chill had settled into his bones.
He requested the ensign connect him with Honolulu General again, determined to reach Carla. This time he hit so many dead-ends--“Sorry, Dr. Ryder, she just left the department on break.”--that he began to suspect she’d fallen too ill to talk, but, not wanting to worry him, told everyone around her to block his calls.
He closed his eyes, hoping to grab a quick snooze, but as he dozed in a zone between awake and sleep, images of radiation sickness resurrected themselves. They intruded willynilly and distorted, a few born of science, others from his store of horror films. For some reason he repeatedly flashed on the entire staff of ER standing outside the hospital, Carla included, everyone smiling the way people do in a grad photo or for the celebration of milestone events, but their skin hung off them in sheets.
He shook himself awake and tried to drive all such visions from his head, focusing instead on SHAKES and preparing himself for what must be done tonight. At the same time, he felt ashamed. A race to save millions rattled him less than his fear of losing Carla.
You may not want to tell me how you are, but I’ve got my sources.
Using the satellite link in his laptop and the access codes that allowed him entry to the hospital computers, he clicked up her blood results. The platelets had started to fall, her hemoglobin had slipped a point, and white cells, previously a robust normal, were now borderline. The process had started, but not enough to explain why she wouldn’t speak with him.
So what could be the reason?
The pilot rolled their jet through a jagged rip in the clouds and plummeted him back toward the dark world beneath.
Soon he’d see for himself.
Chapter 17
That same hour, Friday, January 23, 2009, 7:17 A.M. EST
Wellesley Island, St. Lawrence River, Canada
They rode the skidoo through the storm, bucking over drifts and lurching through turns. Yuri clung to the driver’s back with his good arm and squeezed the seat with his legs to keep from falling off.
Snow peppered his face, stinging the skin. Squinting through eyebrows coated with ice, he saw only the flicker of black tree trunks on either side of him. His feet, still covered in wet neoprene, burned with an icy numbness.
“How much longer?” he yelled, afraid he’d pass out, his brain careening about his skull on a chaotic course of its own.
The man reached down into a bin between his knees, yanked out a bulbous black helmet identical to his own, and handed it to Yuri.
Figuring it was now a forgone conclusion that he’d fall off and needed all the protection possible, Yuri pulled it on.
Static hissed in his ear. “Hang on, cowboy. This is where we really have fun,” the driver’s voice crackled through a built-in headset.
“But--”
They zipped out of the forest’s edge, down a shallow drop off, and onto a large pan of ice. Skimming through a limbo of fog, ashen light, and a barrage of flakes, all sense of speed and direction vanished.
“Are you sure this is safe?” he managed to ask, visibility zero wherever he looked.
In reply, the man gunned the engine up a notch, and the burst of acceleration nearly toppled Yuri backwards. The added wind-speed made the air whistle around the outside of his helmet and increased the frosty burn in his feet. He stared nervously ahead, the visor blocking the assault of snow on his eyes, but still saw only an impenetrable void.
If anything, it seemed to be growing darker.
The light became suffused with a charcoal tinge, and the expanse directly ahead of them appeared to be turning black.
Their craft began to lurch and slither.
Open water!
Raw panic ripped through Yuri.
Before he could scream they surged into it, skipped across the surface, then settled deeper.
He started to scramble free.
“Sit still, asshole!” the driver said, his voice blasting through the headset. He flicked a switch on the da
shboard, and the craft once more picked up speed, sending a bow-spray cascading to either side, the skidoo now a seadoo.
Minutes later, switching back to the powerful treads, they mounted another ice pan, sped the rest of the way to shore, and roared up onto the mainland. Three hundred yards into the trees, his rescuer glided to a stop alongside a small, clapboard cottage, the walls so flaked and peeling with white paint that, in the thick falling snow, it would be camouflaged to the point of near invisibility if viewed from the river. He cut the engine.
Yuri rose none too steadily to his feet. “I need bandages, and antiseptic,” he said as firmly as possible, wanting to take charge of his situation.
Without saying a word, the man helped him inside and lowered him onto a worn, red couch in a dilapidated kitchen. What light they had filtered into the room through a single grimy window. Two rickety chairs and a wooden table with several red-checked oilcloths stapled to its surface occupied the center of a plywood floor. Off to one side a sink with a hand pump stood at the ready, but the icicles trailing off its spout didn’t bode well for the prospect of running water to clean his wounds. And if there was a toilet somewhere, the cloying aroma that played at the back of his nose told him the plumbing had plugged.
A wood stove in the far corner crackled to life as his host lit a fire, instantly cutting the chill. At least they’d be able to melt some snow, and hopefully the bleak room would eventually warm up enough to thaw out his feet. But an orange flicker of open flames licked through cracks in the black metal, and he worried that the shack might burn down before his toes got toasty.
“We have to talk,” the big man said, and pulled off his helmet. He had long black hair swept back in a ponytail, dark brown eyes, and the smooth wide features of a North American Indian.
Yuri stiffened. In all his years working with Boris, Yuri had never encountered anyone but Russians in the network. “Who are you?” he asked. “And where’s my usual contact?”
The man grinned. “What’s the matter, cowboy? Afraid I’m going to scalp you?”
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