“How do you compensate someone for dying?” Eddie said.
The admiral said stiffly, “What are you suggesting? That we do nothing at all?”
It was one of the few times I’d seen Eddie blush.
“Sorry, sir, my mouth gets ahead of me sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?” the admiral said.
I said, “Sir, can you tell us exactly what happened in Alaska that may cause problems to pop up now?”
He sighed. “Oh, when it comes to the North Slope, that place was a biological dumping ground, and not just for us.”
Sometimes I think that the difference between alleged western civilization and others is that somehow, we got the idea that empty means useless. Silence? Fill it up with earbuds and loudspeakers and TV monitors in airports. Time? Pack every available second with multitasking, another word for attention deficit disorder, with iPhones and BlackBerrys and games where Angry Birds fly around on a screen. Wilderness? Intolerable! Fill it up with condos or tour buses or, if you can’t, drop in a golf course, at the very least flood the open space with experimental chemicals, bombs, drones, or man-made germs.
“Japan,” the admiral said, sliding his finger on that map across the Bering Strait and onto Asia, northern China to be exact, Manchuria. “In modern times, you’ve got the accident at their nuclear-power facility at Fukushima Daiichi, and winds capable of carrying fallout to northern Alaska. But previous to that, World War Two. Manchuria was where they had their germ facilities. Between 1932 until the end of that war, Japan had the most-aggressive biological-warfare program ever applied at the field level. They set up their infamous Unit 731 in their puppet state of Manchukeo. They called it a water-purification department. It was horrible and brutal; and in that 150-building complex, they amputated limbs of the living, to study blood loss. They infected patients with syphilis: men, women, and children. They designed plague fleas that were dropped on enemy soldiers. Their laboratory experiments alone, inoculating prisoners of war with disease, killed an estimated ten thousand. Their use of toxics in the field probably killed another two hundred thousand. They tried typhus, cholera, plague, anthrax, shigella, a kind of dysentery, and salmonella.”
“Christ,” said Eddie.
“As you know, Japan actually invaded Alaska during World War Two, and temporarily occupied part of the Aleutian Islands. So far there has been no evidence that they used biological weapons in that campaign. Nevertheless, you are to be aware of this history as you undertake the survey.”
“Next,” I said.
“Next! The Soviet Union. The Soviets captured Unit 731 after World War Two, and used the documents — Japanese formulas — to augment their own program,” the admiral said, as the big index finger pounded down again, this time in Siberia, western side of the Bering Strait.
“Sverdlovsk facility,” he said. “Between the 1950s until the ’90s, they weaponized and stockpiled over a dozen bio-agents including tularemia, plague, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, smallpox, and Marburg, a dirty little cousin of Ebola. Fifty-two sites. Fifty thousand workers scattered in an area where winds — on a fluky day — could take anything floating to Alaska. The Russians genetically altered some of these microbes to resist heat and antibiotics and, are you listening, resist extreme cold!”
“I think you should send us to Hawaii, not Alaska,” Eddie said.
The admiral wasn’t smiling. “We also know that there’s new interest in Russia in these programs. Their president may have restarted them. Status, unclear.”
“Yes, Hawaii,” Eddie said. “Beaches. Surfing, you know, Admiral, Colonel Rush’s fiancée is a surfer. Mai tais. Hawaii, sir. Definitely.”
The admiral’s brows rose. “Hawaii? Well, Major, our own Big Tom bioweapons tests were held in Hawaii.”
“Where the hell weren’t there tests, sir?”
“New York,” the admiral said.
“Yeah, but the traffic sucks there, sir.”
“Alaska,” I said.
The admiral frowned. “Alaska! Starting in the sixties and seventies we tested live nerve gasses, sarin, near Fort Greeley, and later, in the ‘Little Tom’ tests, bacillus globigii. But the big bad wolf was Project Chariot.”
“What was Project Chariot, sir?”
The admiral stood and walked to his top floor window, which provided a pretty nice view of the Kennedy Center. “This is all public record now. It was the intentional contamination of groundwater near a village called Point Hope, with radioactivity.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because Edward Teller, revered father of the atom bomb, had an idea for peaceful use of atomics. Anyone can google this. Teller convinced D.C. that it was possible to create America’s first Arctic deepwater harbor at Point Hope by blowing up a few atomic bombs at the location.”
“Give me a break,” said Eddie.
“Yep,” said the admiral. “The Atomic Energy Commission approved it. It was one of those grandiose futuristic plans that looked good on paper. Re-engineer the planet! Project Plowshare, they called it… you know, like in the Bible… ‘they’ll beat their weapons into plowshares,’ or something like that. The planet was ‘slightly flawed,’ Teller said. The use of nuclear bombs would dig canals, get rid of obstacles like mountains, change the earth’s surface to suit us, he said.”
“So what happened at Point Hope?” I asked, finding the little village on the map on the admiral’s desk. It lay due southwest from Barrow, a few hundred miles off, the last tip of land before the Chukchi Sea on the west coast of the borough, the snout of the wild boar.
“What happened was that the plan was approved and engineers and Atomic Energy Commission people flew into Point Hope. They told the Iñupiats that the use of atomics in their area would be nothing more than a mild inconvenience. They said — while the locals secretly recorded them — that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not really had such a terrible impact on people. The villagers would temporarily leave. The blast — it would be 150 times more powerful than the bomb dropped at Hiroshima — would equal 40 percent of all firepower expended during World War Two — and instantly create a harbor where before had been a small creek. Then the locals would come home. The new deepwater harbor would show the might of America. Everyone would benefit.”
“But it never happened, so what’s the problem?” I asked.
“It never happened because the Iñupiats fought it, and stopped it. But before they did, Atomic Energy Commission staff started work.They wanted to know how groundwater flowed in the area, and so…”
I closed my eyes. “And so they put radioactive material in it, to track the flow.”
“Yes.”
“Cesium?”
“You got it.”
“Didn’t they clean it up, after?”
“They said they did. They got most of it. But as late as 2010, people were still finding traces in the soil.”
“Cancer rates in Point Hope?”
“Slightly elevated.”
“Proven connections?”
“No.”
I thought about it. “Any other deposits of radioactivity in the North Slope, that maybe the locals don’t know about?”
“Not to my knowledge,” the admiral said, looking uncomfortable.