The kid was smart and likable and wanted to be a scientist also. But she was also just a girl who liked normal teenage things. She’d sneak over to our Quonset hut at night — I had given her a key — to watch TV shows that her parents banned next door—American Idol, The Vampire Diaries—shows that Ted told me would “rot Kelley’s mind.” She also talked for hours with Karen Vleska, my fiancée, who’d flown in to visit a couple of weeks ago.
Cathy Harmon had taken me aside one day, squeezed my shoulder and said, “Thanks for giving Kelley a place to go. Every kid needs a friendly uncle. She doesn’t have real uncles, so you and Eddie seem to be her choice.”
“Colonel,” Merlin said now, urgently. “I’ve got deputies ready and a copter gearing up. I’ve got Dr. Ranjay Sengupta along from the hospital. But I’d appreciate having you and Major Nakamura along, too.”
I wanted to go. “Merlin, are you sure the noise you heard on the phone wasn’t just static?”
A pause. From the silence, I knew I’d insulted him. “I know the difference between static and grunting. Also,” Merlin said, “you and Major Nakamura have been visiting the villages all summer, asking about new diseases, rashes, hives, fevers, right?”
Eddie’s brows rose. Despite the danger, I broke out smiling. It was impossible to hide anything from people here. They were scattered throughout an area the size of Wyoming, a county comprising America’s northernmost outpost. America’s Arctic Serengeti, filled with hundreds of thousands of caribou, wolves, grizzlies, foxes. There were about twenty million birds. But the human population was only 7,500, concentrated in eight small villages, with the capital, Barrow, home to 4,500 Iñupiats and a smattering of whites, blacks, Samoans, and Asians. Although hundreds of miles separated villages somehow the Iñupiats seemed to know everything that outsiders did within days of their arrival. I’d told this to the admiral, advised him to let me speak plainly, warned him that lies backfire here.
Now I admitted, “We’ve asked a few questions about diseases, now and then.”
In his pause I heard desperation. “If you won’t do it for that reason, do it as a favor for me. Their bear guard is my cousin, Joe. Please.”
That did it. People here did not ask favors lightly. Favors were more important than money. Favors were contracts. Favors were life. I told Merlin, “We’re at the bone pile. Give me twenty minutes to get into town.”
“Go to the rescue squad,” Merlin Toovik said, and added, “I’m sure they told you not to do this.”
“I was told to give you every assistance,” I lied.
My name is Joe Rush and you won’t find a description of my real job in my files at the Marine Corps. When I was seconded to the unit, my records were sheep-dipped — altered — to contain enough truth to fool a casual observer, the rest lies to protect the Corps, unit, and country from learning things that my bosses in Washington believe you ought not to know. Sometimes I agree with them. But often we fight.
Forty years old, the file says, and that part is correct, at least. Marriage status single; which was true that day, but happily due to change in three months. Six foot two. The photo shows blue-black hair, dark as the coal veins mined by my Welsh great-great-grandfather, eyes as light blue as those of great-great-grandma, daughter of a Norwegian cod fisherman, who met Gramper Bowen on the foredeck of the rusting steamer that brought them into New York Harbor as immigrants, 131 years ago.
They settled in Massachusetts, as the stumpy green Berkshire Hills reminded my ancestor of Wales. I grew up in the dying textiles mill town of Smith Falls, population 250, nestled between a thin, rocky river and a granite quarry, ten miles south of the Vermont line, on a two-lane cracked rural road.
There, generations of Rushes manned the assembly line of Brady Textiles, making button-down shirts in peacetime, Army uniforms during World War Two and Korea and Vietnam, but when the Brady company fled Massachusetts for cheaper labor in Honduras, the Rushes became roofers and plumbers catering to summer-home owners from New York or Boston, who returned to their cities when the air turned chilly each autumn, and I climbed onto the creaky bus heading for my leaky country school.
I thrilled to TV commercials showing Marines — strong, confident men just a few years older than me — storming ashore on foreign beaches, rescuing hurricane victims, safeguarding the flag that we saluted every morning at Colonel David Harding High, named after the Massachusetts Civil War hero, killed during the Union’s failed amphibious landing attempt to capture Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on September 8, 1863.
I never traveled farther than forty miles from home. I had friends, and girlfriends, but their smiles and invitations were, to me, traps to keep me in town.
So I left Smith Falls, and the higher-education part of my file correctly indicates that I attended UMass on an ROTC scholarship. The early Marines history is right, too: Parris Island, Quantico, antiterrorist guerrilla action in the Philippines. All of it real until Iraq and the secret germ lab I stumbled on there with Eddie Nakamura, when we were both lieutenants. The sick monkeys we found there — intentionally infected with disease… convulsing, terrified, dying — changed our lives, sent us to medical school, and made us experts on a kind of danger that most people fear, but put in the backs of their minds, not wanting to think about it, not wanting to remember it exists, not wanting to know.
Our enemy became smaller and traveled in vials and hypodermics or on air currents, in subway vents, or in bombs.
Awards? The Silver Star is there for Iraq, and a Navy and Marine Corps medal for actions taken in combat during the global war on terror — although the exact actions I took part in are secret. Our director once said that I’d saved “Thousands of lives, in Afghanistan and in the Arctic. Too bad we can’t release either story, Joe. But we can promote you. You’re young for a full colonel. Congratulations.”
Under “skills” my file says that I can hit a running enemy at three hundred yards with an M4 carbine; and then, thanks to my M.D. degree, extract the bullet, clean the wound, administer antibiotics, and run any field hospital or bio lab in the world, to identify chemicals or germs.
I am also qualified to lead an assault on an enemy bioweapons facility, secure it, decontaminate it, and then interrogate its staffers, and kidnap them home to be tried and hung by military tribunal, under more obscure laws of the Republic. If my skill set seems contradictory to you, you’re getting an idea of why I have fewer friends than I used to, other than Eddie, and my fiancée, Karen. It’s also why my first marriage failed three years back, after I told my wife some things about my job. She’d been my college sweetheart and a loving, patient partner. But that disclosure — my attempt to save the marriage — came too late and put the last nail in a union that had been dissolving for some time.
That’s the problem with secrets. Keep them and you drive away loved ones. Share them and you might do the same. Still, these days I kept no secrets from Karen. The admiral — former Coast Guard commandant — didn’t like it. But I’d insisted when he asked me as a favor to stay in the unit, not retire, that I would only agree if Karen remained in the loop. The admiral had refused, argued, and then checked on Karen’s high-security clearance. He’d tried to talk me out of it one last time, and then he’d given in.
“Because we need you, Joe. But if either of you talk, I won’t be able to protect you.”
I liked the admiral. Unlike the former director, who came from Wall Street and was destroyed by a financial scandal, the admiral was a true public servant: hero of Hurricane Laticia, hero of Deepwater Horizon, he deserved to keep the unit intact and strong. So I stayed.