“Joe,” he’d said. “You’re the best I got.”
My memo to the secretary of defense six years ago — which brought me into the unit — suggested that the military should prepare for the possibility that the next big outbreak of human disease might come from a cold climate, not a hot one, not a jungle, as is usually assumed… but from a microorganism released by melting ice, after being encased in it for hundreds of thousands of years, or by an enemy who knew where to look for germs — new, terrible weapons — in cold latitudes.
On the day I received Merlin Toovik’s phone call I had two months remaining in my one-year extension. Then I planned to move east with Karen, and start a biotech company with Eddie, looking for cures in the wild: good germs, not bad.
That was the plan, at least. But you know what they say about plans. Or at least what smart Marines know. Once battle starts, plans fall apart.
Eddie and I sealed the dead bear’s brain and tissue samples into Ziplocs. The disease that had killed it was probably something normal, nothing new. We mounted our Honda four wheelers and turned south. We sped over the tundra, and ten minutes later I glimpsed the high cell-phone and radio towers and satellite farms ahead that constituted a first glimpse of town. Then would come the base, where Karen was waiting. She’d arrived two weeks back to train for her next polar trip, and she’d brought along a documentary filmmaker who looked at her in ways that annoyed me, trailed her around constantly, and gave Eddie and me the creeps.
I’d call her from the chopper. I’d say we’d be late. She’d be crazy with worry about the Harmons, but the filmmaker would probably be happy to have a few more hours with her, alone. The jerk.
I was thinking, Maybe they are okay. Maybe Merlin was wrong about hearing a shotgun. Maybe they’re too sick to answer their phones. Maybe, even if he did hear a shotgun, someone is still alive.
I needed to concentrate on driving or the Honda might turn over, but I kept seeing in my mind the fifteen-year-old high school girl, just a kid, who had adopted me as an uncle. I had no children of my own. You could say that I had adopted Kelley Harmon back.
The Honda skidded on slick tundra, began to go over, but the wheels caught and I righted it. I accelerated.
The biggest dangers start out small, one of my old instructors at Quantico used to say. Things sounded bad already. Four possible victims.
I had no idea how much worse things would get.
TWO
“Play Kelley’s call again,” I said.
The rescue squad’s big, twenty-year-old Bell 412 copter rose off the tarmac, spun southwest, and headed for the research camp. I was crammed with four others into the cab, and through the window had a last glimpse of Barrow. The triangular town hugging the last bit of coastline on the continent. The mass of one — and two-story wooden homes sat on concrete pilings to prevent them from heating up and melting the permafrost below. The dirt and gravel roads, at 5 P.M., were alive with taxicabs, kids on banana bikes, a truck hauling a big outboard boat toward the beach and lagoon. Probably whalers going out to scout for bowheads. The fall migration was due to start any day.
Then the city was gone. We raced over a sea of tundra, and through mist so thick that it felt like flying inside lungs… the land rolling out in glimpses, in patches; thousands of elliptically shaped freshwater lakes, there because permafrost kept what little precipitation falls here from draining. Wiley Post Airport was gone. It was named for the American humorist who crashed there a century ago. Barrow’s fame comes from death. The town was named for Sir John Barrow, English lord of the admiralty, who sent a thousand British explorer/sailors to their icy demise in a search for the Northwest Passage, Europe’s quick route to Asia, over a century ago. Some of them sank. Some abandoned ships trapped in ice, walked off in search of rescue, and disappeared. Others died of sickness or starvation or they ate each other.
“Okay, here goes,” Merlin said.
When I heard the terror in Kelley’s voice, a fist seemed to cut off the air in my throat.
“Oh, God, God, no one’s answering. I tried to reach Dr. Rush and Dr. Nakamura, and then your operator couldn’t hear me. Everyone is screaming! I’m scared.”
“Slow down, Kelley, okay? You’ve got all my attention. What’s wrong? S-l-o-w.”
We were dressed in zip-up float suits in case we ditched in water. We wore helmets equipped with mikes and earpieces and wore waterproof, calf-high Northern Outfitter boots. In the back we carried stretchers and medicines and sample bags and field surgical kits. Merlin was armed with a .45 Beretta, and he and his deputies wielded Mossberg shotguns. Eddie and I had our bear guns. Now there was a small clicking in my helmet, and over the rotor roar I heard the plaintive, terrified voice of the girl.
“We’re all sick! Daddy said not to call. Said I was wrong. He said it was just flu. But he can’t close his hand. He fell. He said a good scientist never jumps to conclusions, but I didn’t! I didn’t jump to conclusions! Oh, God! I wrote down the symptoms even before the sticking pains started. And Clay Qaqulik was babbling about little people. And Mom… I can’t believe she and Clay… And the water tastes bad and…”
My throat closed up. This frantic voice was not the one I usually heard from her when she came over to watch TV, or to ask Karen endless hero-worship questions about being an Arctic explorer. Aren’t you scared when you’re out in a blizzard? How did you get Coca-Cola to sponsor you? I was used to her saying things like, “Why can’t I spend summers like normal kids? The beach. Music. I’m, like, in prison. I mean, it’s not like I don’t like science, but my friends are at parties and I’m stuck here, looking at plants. I didn’t ask to be an intern. They said it would help me get into college. They don’t even pay me. I’m their little summertime SLAVE!”
My mouth was dry. My head was pounding with fear for the whole family, and I could feel my intestines clenching as the voices went on. It was Merlin now.
“Honey, slow, please, okay? Focus. What happened and when did it start?”
It was no use. Kelley was too scared.
“I saw that redheaded woman in the warehouse, bending over the water bottles! And then the water tasted funny and my throat hurt, but I thought it was just, you know, like when you wake up sometimes and it burns. And Daddy said the redheaded woman wouldn’t harm us, and Clay… (zzzzz) and Daddy screamed at Mommy because her underwear was (zzzzz) and I said, ‘What little people?’ And Mommy said (zzzzzzzzzzz)”
Eddie said, cocking his head, trying to hear, “The underwear was what?”
“Did she say bleeding?”
“I don’t think it was bleeding. It was something else.”
“Merlin, can you try that again?”
The voice had degenerated into a little girl’s, the use of the word Mommy, like she’d become five years old, like she was cowering under covers, afraid that the bogeyman in the closet was real. I felt trapped in the copter. My mouth was dry. I was filled with a sense of being too late. We still had a good fifty miles of tundra to go.
“And then I was looking in the shaving mirror and the glass bothered me, the sun was so bright on it, it hurt my eyes so I just… just BROKE IT…”
Dr. Sengupta, sitting opposite me, was a forty-two-year-old from Mumbai who’d taken a three-year contract at the hospital because he’d “Always dreamed of ice, since I was a little boy. So when I saw the job description, I felt I must come and see my dream.”