James Abel
Protocol Zero
MAP
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the following people for giving generously of their time during the research and writing of Protocol Zero.
Thanks to James Grady, Phil Gerard, and Charles Salzberg, terrific writers and friends, for story advice, or for reading the manuscript.
To Dr. Charles Rupprecht, thanks hugely for talking to me about rabies. And to Dr. Fred Tilden, thanks for staying on the phone late at night, planning injuries to Joe Rush.
In Barrow, thanks to former Mayor Edward Itta, and to whaler, geologist, musician, and executive Richard Glenn. Thanks to the scientists of the North Slope Wildlife Department. Thanks to Harry Brower of the Alaskan Whaling Commission. And to Glenn Shehaan, who keeps science rolling in the High North.
Closer to home, thanks to my dad, Jerome Reiss, and my friends Lizzie Hansen and John Kukulka, for plot advice.
A thousand thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard, America’s Arctic front line, for letting me fly and sail with you.
A thousand thanks to my agents, Esther Newberg and Josie Freedman. And to my terrific editors, Tom Colgan and Amanda Ng. And the whole fantastic team at Berkley.
Finally, to Wendy, with love, thanks.
No character in this book is based on any actual person, living or dead. Any mistakes are mine. PS, the ASRC is a real company, mentioned in the book. The author has only admiration for the way the ASRC has safeguarded the interests of North Slope people.
Anyone interested in learning more about Project Chariot — the plan to create a harbor in the Arctic by blowing up atom bombs — should read the splendid book about it, The Firecracker Boys by Dan O’Neill.
ONE
The police chief’s emergency call had to bounce off three satellites to reach me. The first — over Russia — was snapping photos of their paratroops by the North Pole, on maneuvers. The second — over Arctic Canada — watched a U.S. attack submarine testing weapons, surfacing in ice. The last one was directly overhead above northern Alaska. North Slope Police Chief Merlin Toovik’s voice came in loud and clear, from nine miles away.
“I need help, Colonel.”
I stood, breath frosting, at the end of North America on a twenty-foot-high grass bluff overlooking the Arctic Ocean, a Mossberg shotgun over my back, in case polar bears showed up. Fire in the air, they usually turn away. My best friend and partner Marine Major Eddie Nakamura and I were trying to figure out what had killed the emaciated male bear at our feet. It looked like death by starvation. I wondered if it had been caused by a new germ.
“You know the victims, Colonel.”
No other people were visible. No buildings or roads were here. The tundra stretched south for three hundred miles to the Brooks Range, in October, in a stark undulating beauty; an ocean of olive-brown high grass, filled with dips and hummocks, and spotted with the withered remains of summer flowers: once-yellow paintbrush, bright firewood, purple Siberian phlox, bell heather, and my true love Karen’s favorite, the white-flowered anemones, which I gathered in bunches like a lovesick teenager. But it was worth her smile. Just about anything was.
The sea, thirty yards off, was black as anthracite and dotted with an early pancake glaze of ice. Locals had told me that the big pack would come in soon, to extend all the way to the pole, eight hundred miles north. The sky was a thick gray, the temperature hovered at thirty-six degrees. The Arctic sun looked as tiny and distant as Pluto. It rotated elliptically, staying low to the horizon, lava-colored but weak, more glow than heat, as if shy, as if frightened. Soon this remote landscape would fade to black beneath three months of night.
“Four people in trouble, Joe,” Merlin said.
Ahead of us rose what looked like a mini Stonehenge; fantastic curving shapes rising up for fifteen feet; spaced as regularly as church organ pipes, and bleached gray by weather. They were bowhead whale ribs. Iñupiat hunters built the bone pile — bulldozing them there twice a year after the fall and spring hunts. The bones attracted hungry polar bears, who cracked the ribs and ate the marrow. The bone pile kept polar bears off of Barrow’s streets, its supermarket parking lot, its backyards, and away from America’s Arctic capital’s kids.
“Joe, they were your neighbors,” Merlin said.
No roads led in or out of Barrow. You arrived by snowmobile or four-wheelers, like we drove today, or you flew in or came by boat during the four months a year when sea ice was relatively clear. The nearest highway was three hundred miles away, at the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay.
The voice said, “Can you bring your medical gear?”
“Couple questions first, Merlin. How did you hear?”
I hit the intercom so that Eddie could listen. He was kneeling by the carcass, looking up, a small skull-saw in his gloved hands, and an unrolled scalpel kit in the grass. This bear had been sick, that much was evident from the fur patches stripped away. But what had killed it? Something usual and natural? Or the type of thing we secretly sought?
Merlin Toovik said, “The daughter called me, hysterical, screaming about sickness. She was crying too hard to make out words. But then I heard a shotgun. And the call went dead.”
“You called back?”
“Yeah, tried both parents, her, too. No one answers.”
“What sickness?” I felt a wave of fear hit my stomach.
“I don’t know. I could barely hear. It was a bad connection. And there were funny noises in the background.”
“Please describe them.”
Eddie was frozen now, frowning.
“Grunting. An animal, maybe, but not one that I know. Too high for a wolf. Too low for a bear. Plus, she was inside their hut, she said, not outside. So whatever made the sounds was in there with her. Right beside her, sounded like. Weirdest, spookiest sounds, Joe.”
Admiral Galli — who ran our small, secret unit — had been adamant when he’d ordered us not to get involved in local matters. Our mission had a public aspect, which Eddie and I had explained to Iñupiat leaders; but it also had a secret component, which we had reluctantly held back.
— For their own good, Joe, the admiral had said.
— Sir, I disagree and think I ought to tell them.
— Not a chance.
We were behind schedule with winter rapidly approaching. We needed to finish our study and go south.
Now, for a fraction of a second, the admiral’s orders warred with Merlin’s plea. I was seeing something in my head and it wasn’t anything my boss said about an upcoming Arctic war game, due to start in the spring, about billions of dollars in weapons appropriations at stake, about national security. Barrow will be flooded with VIPs, Joe: White House, State, Pentagon. We’re behind the Russians in the race for control. And the Russians are getting belligerent again in Europe. If we don’t get our act together, it will be too late. Something will happen up there, and we won’t be able to handle it.
What I saw in my head was a fifteen-year-old girl, and our neighbors for the last few weeks in the old World War Two — era air base where I’d been stationed with Eddie, where we’d lived in a Quonset hut among the university types who spent summers studying walruses, potential oil finds, ice melt, or, like our neighbors, nothing more threatening than seeds and moss. Our neighbors were a couple with whom we’d become friendly, two professors from a small New Jersey college, Ted and Cathy Harmon, and their daughter, Kelley. The parents were quiet academics who invited us over sometimes for poker games, cocktails, tirades on the warming Arctic, or rose hip tea.