He said, “Hmm, extreme light sensitivity.”
Kelley babbling, jumping from one half thought to another, the words becoming run-on, loss of control.
“… And Mommy coming out of Clay’s tent and Daddy yelling, ‘How could you do that to me! You bitch!’”
Eddie’s eyes meeting mine across the four feet of cabin that separated the two rows of passengers. Eddie’s brown eyes baffled. I knew he was seeing the same thing I was in his head; the Harmons, two quiet, middle-class researchers who don’t use words like bitch in public, and don’t brazenly sleep with their bear guards, certainly not in a small research camp in front of a husband and daughter. But perhaps we were misinterpreting what we were hearing. Or maybe, as Eddie said, “Maybe they had a dark side, Uno. Virginia Woolf times nine.”
Merlin trying to slow her down. The girl talked over the police chief. Merlin trying to soothe her, trying to get information. The girl was out of reach, emotionally and physically.
“I’m in the hut. They’re screaming outside. Clay says Daddy is trying to kill him! This is crazy! This isn’t happening! Lalalalalalalala… I’m putting my hands over my ears. LALALALAAAAAA!”
I heard a clumping on the line, and thought she’d hurled away the phone, into a corner. The lalala sounded farther away. I wanted to shut off the sound. Something awful was building. Dr. Sengupta’s eyes were huge inside his glasses, the deputies were still and silent, and the whole copter wobbled, as if the engine drew in the raw tension coming in with the call.
Then quiet, and another voice, a new one, Clay Qaqulik’s, I guess, said, strangled, choking…
“I have to stop it.”
A pause. Then Clay again.
“I have to. I’m sorry, Miss K.”
And then I started in my seat because I heard a bark, or a grunt, close to the phone; a throaty animal sound… The girl had stopped talking, Clay also. Something else was in there, in that research hut with them, sniffing at the unit. A series of more grunts followed. A flow of unintelligible sound: low and urgent, angry and primitive. Barking almost. Impossible.
Kelley screamed, “Stop it! Why are you doing that?”
Followed by the unmistakable BOOM of a shotgun.
And then nothing… zzzzzzz…
Eddie and I and the police chief and deputies bounced in the copter, transported into our imaginations. What just happened? The earbuds emitted static. The mist ahead thickened, to obscure not only air ahead, but earth below. The sky gone. The truth gone. The only sound the steady groan of engines.
“Play it once more, Merlin,” I said.
The nightmare voices started up again. I thought back to Washington, to the admiral’s small office on C Street, to the story he told us, to the secret part of our job.
“You are to look for what you predicted, Joe. For something new and potentially dangerous popping up as the region warms.”
Eddie, the admiral, and I had been sitting in a townhouse four blocks from the State Department in Foggy Bottom.
“Why send us now?” I’d said. “Did something happen?”
To answer, the admiral spread on his large desk a map of the North Slope of Alaska. Tinged brown for tundra, it formed the shape of a wild boar, the eastern side, or hindquarters, was the border with Canada.
“New fish species up there. New birds. Even a new kind of bear: half grizzly, half polar bear,” Admiral Galli had said.
The western side, or skull and snout shape, jutted west toward nearby Russia across the Chukchi Sea, ending at the Eskimo village of Point Hope.
“Question is, are there new, dangerous germs as well?” the admiral asked.
He sat back. “We’ve been assigned a delicate task, and you two have been up there before so you’re going. All this land here, vast space, hardly any people… that made it a natural lab for the white-coat guys, in the past, you see.”
Eddie said, “Weapons testing.”
“And designing. This started during World War Two, and went through the end of the last century. The bad guys looking for new ways to kill us. Our brightest minds trying to anticipate what might come at us from across the Bering Strait: chemicals, gasses, germs.”
“Meanwhile, we made some, too,” I said.
“You want them to be the only ones who have it?”
“Nope.”
“Of course not. It was a race. A germ and chemical race. And then, gentlemen, a few accidents started to happen. Montana: Army nerve gas experiment goes wrong, and next thing you know, fifty thousand sheep are dead. Nevada nuclear tests: Twenty years pass and the soldiers who witnessed explosions start to die of cancers. Atomic soldiers, we called ’em. Also a few locals, who drove through clouds of radiation emitted by the tests. You know these stories. If you’re not familiar with all of them, surely you know some.”
“And in Alaska, sir?”
“First, by the late 1980s, Congress was pissed off over these accidents, and the public outcry. Plenty of people opposed testing by then. This is before the chemical test ban treaties, big nuclear test treaties.”
“So they passed a law,” I guessed.
“Yep. HR-932. An obscure provision in a military appropriations bill mandated a kind of germ and toxics census in areas that had been used for testing. Every five years the secretary of defense is required to send out teams to, quote: ‘Conduct a detailed examination of any general areas once used by the U.S. military for chemical or biological testing, in order to determine whether any lingering negative effects have harmed U.S. citizens, crops, or domestic livestock. If any such organism or public-health effect is found, the secretary of defense is directed to make full restitution for properties lost, both living and realty, and to assume responsibility for related medical costs.’”
I’d asked the admiral whether, over the twenty-five years of the bill’s life, so far, any of the secret surveys had located a new germ or toxic effect that had harmed U.S. citizens. Admiral Galli had sighed.
“Unsure, Joe. In 2005, surveyors found an accelerated strain of hantavirus, a potentially lethal disease transmitted by mice, in an area of New Mexico that had received large doses of radioactive fallout during a series of 1950s tests. Six, seven deaths among local Navaho.”
“Washington took responsibility?”
The admiral looked strained. “The bill doesn’t require anyone to do that. It only states that all costs are to be assumed. Remember, this sort of thing, once publicized, even a rumor, usually results in about twelve thousand people filing cases, lawsuits, studies, bills blocked in Congress, headlines all over the world. So the framers of the legislation wanted to alleviate any suffering caused by the initial testing, but also wanted to avoid opening a floodgate of lawsuits. Delicate situation.”
Eddie quipped, “Yeah, you kill people, tricky problems pop up.”
The admiral looked irritated. “These tests were conducted a long time ago. The people who carried them out were no more evil than you or I.”
Eddie snorted.
“Colonel, this summer your job is to conduct the northern Alaskan survey. You’ll go out with the annual Coast Guard medical team visiting North Slope villages. Coast Guard has been getting ready for the place to open up. They use the visits to get their pilots familiarized, see if equipment works. Your job is to treat anyone with medical needs. There will be a dentist and optometrist along. Look at flus, colds, broken wrists, everything. But I want you to ask questions, especially of the elders. Any new sicknesses? Anything they’re seeing, even in animals? If you find something new, get samples. Those go straight to Fort Detrick. If the conclusion is that we’ve got a link, Uncle Sam sends the case to the green hats in the Treasury Department, and then lawyers, and they’ll start figuring out compensation.”