“But we don’t know for sure,” I said, envisioning those thousands of square miles of wilderness, tundra, mountains, beauty unparalleled, but also potentially a historic mix of poisons or chemicals deposited over the years by people regarding it as nothing more than a site for tests.
“Go north. Do the survey. We’ve done these surveys for twenty-five years now, without finding anything to worry about. It’s pro forma. It’s the law. It’s just a study.”
“Then why do you look worried?”
The admiral said, “Because when it comes to mutations, one never knows what is possible until it appears. And because your sworn enemy, Wayne Homza, is back. It’s backbiting time in D.C.!”
Eddie said, “Oh, shit.”
Major General Wayne Homza hated me. His office lay in the war plans section of the Pentagon. He managed strategy scenarios relating to bioterror attacks on U.S. troops or towns. He was a formidable antagonist; an ex-street kid from Cicero, Illinois, who’d fought his way into West Point. He was blunt, powerful, and relentless — the kind of man who magnifies minor grudges. He was stuck planning for something that had not happened yet, so he was off the track for rapid promotion. He’d been trying to absorb into his command any Pentagon unit even remotely dealing with germs or toxics. The admiral believed that Homza wanted to become the biowarfare czar. Homza was politically adept, hungry for advancement, and constantly pushing for more responsibility.
“He’s out to get you,” the admiral told me.
The reason was, for the past two years, Homza had been converting research units into combat units. “We need fighters, not scientists,” he said. “Guns. Not studies.”
Homza had actually convinced the secretary of defense to switch our unit to his control a year ago, when I ruined it for him. Recalled to D.C. after my last Arctic mission, Eddie and I were summoned to the White House for a medal ceremony, the kind where the president thanks you personally, but where no one in the media knows, because what you did was secret. The kind where several VIPs are also in the room, since several people simultaneously receive awards.
The president had shaken my hand, showed me the medal — gold resting in blue velvet — explained that it would be kept in a safe, apologized for the secrecy, and said, “Colonel, this country owes you more than a secret ceremony. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, I hope you will just ask.”
I’d blurted out, “Sir, don’t close us down.”
And I’d seen the blocky-looking general across the room start, and stare, and then slowly smile at me. It was not a friendly expression. He smiled, I thought, like a shark.
“You’re an interesting fellow,” Homza told me that day, out in the hall. I knew then that he would keep watching.
Now, in the copter, the memory died away and I grew aware again of static in my earbuds. Perhaps the dead were trying to speak. Who could tell? Who can predict science? The pilot was pointing and we all craned to see through the thick white mist and light falling rain, an October drizzle mixing with a few flakes of confused snow.
Ahead I saw a small wooden shack with a long porch and a concave outhouse, both set inside a tramped down area of grass near a thin, long, elliptical lake, with ripples on the surface from the drizzle. I saw a parked ATV. I saw a pile of canvas-topped gear. I saw two bodies — lumps on the ground — growing clearer in the drizzle as we approached.
Eddie said, “This is bad.”
I saw a lone red fox trotting off in the distance, moving in a sideways gait, absorbed into mist.
My dread for the Harmons was a cold clenching, a grinding in the pit of my belly.
The copter circled first, in smaller and smaller circles, to check if someone with a gun was hiding in one of the low areas between hummocks.
Merlin’s voice was in my earbuds, quiet and serious.
“Those were the parents in the grass. Where are the other two, Kelley and Clay?”
“The cabin. Gotta be,” Eddie said, staring at the buildings.
“Unless they left,” said Merlin.
“Unless it’s an ambush,” I said, reaching for my gun.
THREE
“The shooter could still be here,” I said.
Look anywhere except at the bodies, and the tundra presented a subtle, sweeping beauty; lovely, quiet, but as mute and indifferent as the huge snowy owl peering at us from fifty yards away. The rotors stopped moving. I had the door open and my shotgun out in case we took fire. The bodies out there, close up, lay in the loose-limbed tangled attitude with which the dead announce themselves.
Maybe the other two are still alive.
“Merlin, Eddie, and I should go in first. We have some experience in… uh… this.”
Merlin nodded. “You Marines take the door. We’ll spread out, hit the back and side. Stay low,” he warned his deputies, two big, nervous men from Minnesota, cold-weather farm boys who’d found their birthplaces too boring, rule bound, or confining. One thickly dark haired, named Steve Rice; the other bald and bearded, Luther Oz.
All of us wore Kevlar vests. The deputies had their Mossbergs out. Dr. Sengupta hung back in the chopper, wanting to go but waiting for an all-clear. The pilot snapped off the safety on his sidearm, a Beretta .45, but I told him to stay put. We needed him to get home.
Eddie and I hit the ground fast, separated, and, communicating with hand signals, stayed low and quick-ran toward the cabin, just like we would have done in a potential enemy village back in Afghanistan, expecting fire. Anyone inside would have heard the chopper.
Did I feel someone watching from the cabin, or was it my imagination?
Fifty feet to go.
I’d not protested when Merlin made us sign some legal paper… “cooperation agreement between federal agency X and local law enforcement”… on the way here. The admiral would be angry, but I’d taken him at his word when he said, “I value your judgment.” Merlin needed us to have a legal, official role in case later on, he said, “The issue comes up in court, Joe.”
I was aware of Merlin bending quickly over the two bodies — man and woman — sprawled amid the heather and sedges. He sought a pulse and my heart plunged into my belly when he rose and kept going.
Ten feet to the cabin. Is Kelley in there? Is Clay with her?
Something just moved at the window.
I hit the ground, rolled sideways to avoid a direct shot, and wriggled forward. The ground smelled of rain, voided bowels, and sweetish blood. Cold drops ran off my scalp, into my eyes and off my chin.
Up to the porch now, slowly…
Fucking creaky porch…
THE CABIN — FRONT DOOR TILTED SLIGHTLY OPEN — LOOKED AS ACCESSIBLE as every trap in the world, with that black slit inviting us in. I judged the place an eight hundred square foot rectangle—I hope it’s only one room—built from a conglomeration of weathered wood jutting up like a beached ship on posts hammered into the tundra, to set it a foot above the grass.
It sat thirty yards from the glassy lake—natural water supply—and another hundred from the shallow creek that probably swelled to monumental proportions in the spring, emptied into the Arctic Ocean, and served as a minor tributary to the Porcupine River, a major Iñupiat hunting grounds.
The Harmons weren’t soldiers. They were gentle people who collected plants and oohed and aahed over seeds and algae. They fretted about genes, not germs.
We made it onto the porch. We stood on opposite sides of the slightly open door. I heard a low droning inside, and realized it was a mass of flies.