His eyes grew huge. “How’d you get permission to leave?”
“Persistence. Is he here or not?”
Bruce glanced around. “I was taking a nap. I don’t know. Did you hear? About the sniper? My God! I knew if Homza kept the lid on, this place would blow. I told Homza! You can’t lie to people. You have to tell them the truth, especially if they don’t trust you to start with.”
“I know.”
Bruce said, “People have had enough.”
I raised my voice to make an announcement. I told everyone in the hut, “I’ve got permission to take a chopper. Anyone see Jens?”
No one had seen him.
“Tell him I’m looking for him if he comes back.”
Nods. Grunts. Who cares? The poker players went back to their game. McDougal seemed thoughtful. Deirdre looked miserable. Dave Lillienthal came out of a bedroom with a glass in his hand, and a half-filled bottle of scotch.
I left.
Heading back into town, I left a message for Eddie to call me. I thought, Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe he’s got a secret that has nothing to do with rabies. Maybe I’m frustrated so I want the answer to be Jens.
Where to look? If he was the sniper he’d be moving, and finding one man in Barrow — if he did not want to be found — was like finding one flake of snow in a field of drifts. There were hundreds of homes here; the community center, the Heritage Center, and restaurants, all closed, but accessible with a pick of locks. There was the roller rink. The environmental observatory. The long utilities tunnel. Add in city garages, schools. About two hundred permafrost cellars, a public library — even the old, abandoned, half-buried sod houses near the sea, mounds jutting up from tundra, cramped dark spaces where, centuries ago, humans spent winters huddling to keep alive.
Look for his car.
I passed his girlfriend’s house. No cars there. I knocked. No one home. I started off again. He could be anywhere. He could be crouching in someone’s home or backyard or an abandoned house, amid busted stoves and discarded refrigerators. He could be inside a parked car. On a roof.
Try Eddie again.
Jens had been the pilot who worked with the Harmons after the original flier was hurt. Jens would have heard their plans. He had time and opportunity to tamper with supplies. Jens was the invisible fifth member of their party. Jens, in fact, was the invisible member of at least a half dozen projects here; oil surveys, water surveys, pipeline surveys, even Eddie and me going out.
As I passed the big AV Value Center I caught a fast blur of movement to my left. I slammed on the brakes and skidded sideways and almost hit a snowmobile pulling a sled as it bounced out of a yard, crossed the road three inches in front of me, and zipped toward the beach. A second Polaris followed. Escapees. My heart clung to my throat. The sleds pulled away. Looking back were women and children, huddled beneath blankets. Everyone scared. It was just a question of what you were more scared of. Illness? The Army? Secrets? The North?
Those families believed that the icy tundra was safer for them than here, and the drivers were probably taking their chances heading for the nearest village, a hundred miles away, a three or four hour journey if they were lucky.
I sighed. I pulled out my phone. If any of those escapees were infected, if they were vectors, they could turn a bad situation to start with into a disaster, if they reached another town.
I punched in the general’s number. He needed to know that people were running from the quarantine. There were no good choices here, just gradients of bad. No one answered. I sat for a moment deciding which danger to address. Go back to the base or the roadblock? Alert the Rangers? Assume they knew that people were escaping by now?
They’ll see it. They’ll spot snowmobiles leaving, fanning out on the ice. Someone will see it. Meanwhile, Jens might be getting away.
I headed for Eddie, at the hospital. I thought, We lied to them from the first. If there’d been serum, if we would have leveled with them, they’d have given us a few more days of cooperation before trying to get out.
I saw blue smoke puff up in another yard, another family mounting up on snowmobiles. A Chevy Blazer roared past, crunched onto icy beach and reached the sea ice and turned right, toward Prudhoe Bay, driving right over the Arctic Ocean, as if navigating a clear, straight highway, instead of a boundary-less plain.
If Jens is responsible, he’ll know what this microbe is. He’ll know whether it is contagious.
If he killed Karen, I’ll do the same to him.
Three minutes later I pulled up to the hospital. As I leaped out the cold hit me like a glass wall. I found Eddie eating a PowerBar in the corridor outside the emergency room, inside of which Ranjay and an Army surgeon operated on the wounded Ranger.
Eddie looked exhausted, standing there in medical whites. Eddie saw my face and threw the PowerBar in a freestanding ashtray.
“It’s Jens, Eddie. Valley Girl called. Bogus name. The real Jens is institutionalized in Norway.”
“Who is he, then?”
“No idea.”
Eddie frowned, thinking fast, thinking what I’d told myself at first. “Phony name doesn’t mean he’s guilty. People hide out here. End of the world. Leave your family, job, divorce, nineteen thousand traffic tickets.”
“Let’s find him.”
“You told Homza?”
“I’m blocked.”
“Merlin?”
“He won’t have anything to do with us.”
“Pain in the ass Ng and Hess?”
“They’re at the front line and can’t be reached.”
“You’re just Mr. Popularity, aren’t you, Uno?”
“Get your goddamn parka on,” I said. “He can’t get around without his truck, not in twenty below zero. His damn truck will be parked somewhere. We find him, we worry about the other stuff after. Meanwhile, people are mounting up, heading out on the ice.”
“Oh, shit,” Eddie said, eyes wide.
A satellite, if one happened to be looking down from space, would see the triangular town, and then a speck, a snowmobile, heading from the populated area into the voidish white… and then a second speck, and a third, and then a fan-shaped parade, some Ski-Doos or Hondas turning right, toward the oil fields. Some left, toward the next village along the coast. Some making a wide U-turn to bring them back to land, behind the Rangers.
Most people will stay, but I bet over a hundred make a break.
Eddie checked Itta Street and Ahkovak Street and Takpuk Street, looking for Jens Erik Holte or his metallic green Isuzu truck. I took Egasak and Pisokak. Eddie at the library. Me at the quarry. Eddie at UIC Car Rentals. Me at Utilities and Electric and KBRW radio and the Piuraagvik public athletic center.
Nothing.
If Jens is the sniper, his car could be inside the blocked-off area, I thought, scanning the elementary school parking lot, going around back, peering into the garage, bumping back onto the street.
Twice I was flagged down by nervous troops in Humvees, checking IDs of anyone out, telling them to go home. I said I would. I didn’t. I passed a Humvee chasing a snowmobile, which eluded it by slipping into a yards-wide passageway separating two homes. The Humvee was too wide to get through.
Minutes later I passed a different Humvee whose crew had cornered a snowmobile in a front yard. The snowmobile driver had his hands up. Soldiers advanced on him, carbines out. The driver looked middle-aged, heavy, miserable.
I reached my own street, Stevenson, which ran along the Chukchi Sea. The shoreline was eroding here, and at several places homes had been abandoned and soon would crumble during winter storms. I headed over to Kongek Street, for a second try at the house where Jens lived with his girlfriend, Michelle Aikik. I pulled up before a one-story shack with a neat front yard, a freshly painted door, a corrugated iron fence, a freestanding garage, open, that had Michelle’s rusty blue Subaru Impreza inside, an electric wire extending from the engine block to an outlet.