His eyes widened. Then he frowned. “And do what?”
I looked out the window. The world was white. The lake will be frozen. And not just frozen like ice freezes lakes back in Massachusetts, where people drive cars on them. Frozen like you could drive a personnel carrier on it, full of Marines.
I made up an answer as I went along. “I want to finish what the Harmons started. Fly out with an ice augur, drill a hole. Hell, take samples and send ’em back to Ted’s college, just like he would have done.”
Merlin’s chair creaked as he sat back, put his big hands behind his head, and moved his head slightly, right, then left, as if to encompass the barriers enclosing the town, the Rangers barring exit. Whatever the hell was going on outside his office, it had the cops agitated, I saw.
“Just exactly how would you get there?” Merlin said.
I can’t ask Homza for a copter. I’m supposed to be out of the investigation, out of favor with him.
“You’ll help. You’ll ask the general for permission to take a borough copter. You two are cooperating, right? You’ll say it’s part of your investigation into the Harmons and Clay. Rangers can come. You’ll say there are no villages near lake number nine, so we can’t infect anyone. We’ll come right home. That chopper is big enough to carry a small augur.”
“It will be fifteen below tonight. Temperatures are still dropping. The Harmons would have quit by now.”
“Maybe that was the whole point, to stop them.”
“And what do I tell Homza is the reason I want to go?”
“You’re investigating four possible murders. All four victims were slated to go to that site. You want to eyeball it. You want to check the cabin for prints or evidence, in case someone else was there.”
This time when his gaze moved I followed it. Outside the glass wall, Deputy Luther Oz was standing there, eyeing us. Oz saw me notice him, and joined the officers clustered around the desk.
I had another thought. “Merlin, you said lodge buyers can’t go after minerals. Does that mean the ASRC can sell mineral rights to someone else, if the lodge is there?”
Merlin stood, back to me, looking out at the road, where three Army Humvees suddenly shot past, fast, heading for the airport. Something was happening. Merlin said, “No. That’s part of the deal. We leave everything alone. But before we agreed we had our geologist take samples, see if there might be minerals there. Negative report. Everybody wins.”
“You mean the Harmons won? Karen won? Clay?”
“I’m surprised you’d trust my guys to come with you,” Merlin said coolly, turning back to me. “After what you said about me being involved. Remember? Me taking oil money?”
“I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
“The thing about being drunk,” said Merlin evenly, “is that you may not know what you’re saying, but you mean it. And there’s nothing out there but ice. There’s never going to be enough vaccine for everyone in Barrow, is there?”
“No.”
“You knew it all along. You lied by omission. Again.”
“Yes.”
“Good-bye, Joe. I have to get back to work.”
Suddenly alarms went off in the building. I saw cops putting on body armor and throwing on parkas, rushing for the exit. Luther Oz burst into the office, snapping on a Kevlar vest. “The airport,” he gasped. “Shooting at the airport.”
I followed Merlin and Oz as they ran from the office, both carrying heavy shotguns. Outside it was snowing lightly. The cold hit us like a fist. I heard shots now, from a distance, the steady snap-snap-snap of M4 carbines. Merlin rolled down the passenger window. Oz was driving.
“Stay out of it, Colonel. Stay away. I don’t owe you anything anymore. I see you there, I arrest you,” Merlin said. Their Ford disappeared into the falling snow. The shooting in the distance picked up. I heard lots more weapons now.
NINETEEN
The Rangers manning the roadblock trained their M4 carbines on me as I slowed the Ford. I did not know them, and to them I was in civilian clothing, driving a civilian vehicle. They looked tense and angry, eyeing my Marine ID, as if they refused to believe that I was really the person on the card. Ogrook Street was a gauntlet of small homes, with frightened faces pressed to many windows. The airport, my destination, was a quarter mile away.
“Can’t let you through, sir. Please turn around.”
The quarantine plan called for defensive zoning if violence broke out, to try to contain it. These twenty-two and twenty-three-year-old Rangers had quickly and efficiently blocked key roads, but from their tense attitude I had a feeling that the source of the shooting had not yet been identified.
The lieutenant at my window — a tall, chisel-faced Creole from Louisiana — would brook no argument. The privates at his side, their carbines trained on me and on an approaching snowmobile, were ready to fire. They seemed more angry than scared. Someone had shot a Ranger.
I said, pushing it, “Lieutenant, let me through.”
“Sir, you are not my commander. My orders are to arrest anyone who will not turn around.”
He’d do it, I saw. Argument was useless. “At least give me an idea what’s happened.”
He considered for a moment as wind whipped up a gust of diamond-like specks, hard, granular snow in his face.
“Sniper, sir. Shot two guys at the wire.”
I turned the Ford around and headed for the military base, encountering no other roadblocks. But on the way I saw a sight that struck me as wrong; a few people, men, women, and children, in their yards, loading up snowmobiles and pull-sleds, as if the day was normal, and they could leave town. They were dumping in knapsacks, food, snowshoes, cross-country skis. Rifles or shotguns went in last, so as to be easily accessible. They couldn’t leave town, so this made no sense. Yet they kept loading, in fact, seemed to be hurrying their families to finish up.
Then it hit me. That’s why those men were out on the ice, probing the thickness. They’re going to break out, just drive off over frozen sea.
Some quarantine. I heard my own bitter laugh over the Ford’s engine, not the kind that comes from something funny.
The coast road was deserted, and at sea, farther off than where it had been yesterday, the Wilmington had turned, a red speck, limping west toward the Bering Strait. The ice must have thickened so much it threatened to trap the ship. It had to leave. Usually ice didn’t solidify so much for another month. But the cold snap had deepened. The Wilmington’s departure meant escape had just become an option for anyone in town who was scared, or blamed the Army for the outbreak, or was guilty, or just wanted to get out. Now they could mount up and disappear into the white while the troops were occupied on land.
Or does the sniper know that? Was the shooting intentional? Is it a diversion to occupy Rangers while people — while Karen’s killer — gets away?
It was all falling apart, I thought, pushing down on the accelerator. All the careful strategy drawn up in warm classrooms at the Navy War College. The fine plans were about to be busted open by plain old ice. I’d been to some of those meetings with Eddie. We’d sat in classrooms with other alleged “experts.” We’d made lists of questions to be dealt with in the event of a quarantine of a U.S. town. But no questions and no strategies had regarded the Arctic.
Because no one in Washington, including me, had thought that a quarantine could occur in such a cold, remote place.
Now Homza would be scrambling to adjust, calling for more troops, more wire to block sea escape, air patrols, more housing, but extra help was hours away at best!