Shit, shit!
I stopped before reaching the water.
“Hands up, you!”
I did not see Jens Erik Holte anymore.
He’d gotten away.
The first man, the shooter, trained his carbine on me as the second dismounted. From the way One looked at Two, Two was the boss. They held me at bay. I was a prisoner who’d been stopped from escaping. They were in no mood for back talk.
I tried to reason with them. “I’m Colonel Joe Rush. I’m a Marine. I’m working with General Homza. Remember me, from the school? Were you at the school? I’m after a fugitive. I have ID. You need to let me pass.”
The plea had no effect. Their attitude was tense and angry, as someone had shot two Rangers. They had no instructions regarding me. They would have been ordered to ignore any pleas from escapees.
Besides, the only people who know about my deal with Homza are the general himself, and Eddie.
But now I recognized one of the soldiers. It was the captain I’d expelled from my hut on the first day of quarantine. Great. Not exactly a friend. But at least he knew I was a Marine.
“You know me,” I told him.
He said, flat and hard, “Yes, I do, sir.”
“Then let me go. He’s getting away!”
The captain turned and peered west. There was nothing there. Jens was gone. The captain turned back. I pointed down at the ice, the fifteen-inch-wide track that Jens had left, but even as I regarded it, it filled with windblown grains of snow or ice. It could be anyone’s track.
“He’s on that snowmobile. He’s the one who started the outbreak. You have to let me pass,” I said.
But he wasn’t buying it, and I detected a measure of satisfaction in this. “We’ll wait. I’ll call. Meanwhile, you’re not going anywhere, sir.” He added, “They kicked you off the base, didn’t they, sir?”
“I need to talk to General Homza!”
Five minutes passed.
It was cold, standing here, and the pain seemed to rise up in my head and replace thought. The bruising in my head and shoulders ratcheted into a wave, then more waves.
Nine minutes. I was sweating, always a bad thing in the Arctic. The sweat was freezing beneath my inadequately insulated jacket. I was not dressed properly for extended time out on the ice.
“Let me go after him,” I asked, through the pain. “Come with me if you don’t believe me.”
“No can do.”
“All of us. Together.” My ribs felt as if they were about to burst from my chest, tear out of my parka.
Closer up, the Ranger with the carbine looked young, maybe twenty one. He regarded me with slightly more sympathy, or at least less aggression. Only a moron would not see how hurt I was. I looked down and saw drops of blood in the snow. Mine. The Ranger became two Rangers, and then the two Rangers merged back into one.
“Sit down, sir,” he said. “You don’t look so good.”
I tried to think. Where had Jens been going? Somewhere specific? Or anywhere as long as he escaped from town? I gazed off in the direction I’d last glimpsed him, a dot, diminishing, but also turning back to land. He’d passed the line of soldiers and had been looping back, as if to reenter the continent behind the line of soldiers on land. Moving southwest, into tundra. What did he hope to accomplish by heading off there?
What lies in that direction? A village? No. There’s no village in that direction.
The captain had gotten through to someone on his radio, and was telling him I’d been stopped while trying to escape. I glanced at the GPS on my handlebars. The sky was clearing as night came on. The stars coming out. I looked into the void and saw Polaris, brightest star in Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. And Vega, brightest star in Lyra, the Harp, a sapphire sphere, second brightest light in the Northern Hemisphere constellations, after the North Star.
If that’s the North Star and that’s Vega… Karen was always gazing at stars… if Jens was steering a path between them, he’d be heading southwest toward…
Toward where?
I told myself to think. But it was hard to do anything but hurt. I looked up again and saw I had three fixed points with which to work, Barrow, and the two stars. Marines learn night navigation in basic training. We go out without compasses and are challenged to find our way. In my head, I considered the 360-degree horizon as a compass, and assigned numbers to angles. I tried to crudely triangulate direction, using the town and stars as fixed points. I extended an imaginary line into the tundra from where Jens had turned south. I envisioned the North Slope map I’d been staring at over the last few months, the tundra areas, the spots Eddie and I had visited during our mission.
I stopped. The pain in my chest grew sharper. I heard my own whispered speculations coming out, more hope, more question than answer, “Lake number nine?”
“What was that, sir?”
“Nothing.” I put my head in my hands. Maybe the pain had caused me to err.
I tried to think. I had to be wrong. Because what the hell would he do at nine? There was nothing at nine. At best there would be a little research cabin, as at lake number four. It would be winter. There would be no people. The lake would be iced over. Why break quarantine, why risk capture to go to that isolated spot? It made no sense.
Oh, yes it does. You just don’t understand why. Because you don’t know what this whole thing is really about.
Then I thought, Maybe it’s just a coincidence that he’s heading toward that lake. Maybe, the second he reached land, he changed direction. He’s evading, that’s all.
The captain, I realized, was now actually talking to Homza’s adjutant. Number Two kept back from me, eight feet off, carbine aimed loosely. The captain told the adjutant that I’d been injured while “trying to run the blockade.”
“That’s not what happened!” I protested.
He waved for me to shut up. “He tried to elude.”
I slumped forward in the saddle. Even the Rangers could hear breath rattling in my lungs now. I felt ice on my chin and wiped it with a sleeve. But the pain had a benefit. I looked into my guard’s face. He’d relaxed.
I heard Eddie’s voice in my head, warning, One, don’t do it. I saw Karen lying in a pool of blood. Any notion of protecting myself was repugnant at that moment. I let the pain take me. It was easy. I slumped forward. It was what my body wanted. I felt the seat slide up my butt and my knees fail. I would have one chance here, just one.
I heard an old drill sergeant’s voice in my head. Adopt a submissive posture, if you’re about to try to take away a weapon, Marine.
I needed the carbine closer. I got off the snowmobile and dropped to my knees. I tried to struggle to my feet. I prayed, Come closer, just a few steps. And he did. But three steps wasn’t close enough. I started coughing. He said, his glance sliding left for a fraction of a second, toward his boss, “Colonel, why don’t you get…”
I launched up, hard, screamed in fury and deflected the swinging barrel with my left palm, my head averted in case he fired, which he did. I locked my arms around the carbine and brought my knee up and yanked the M4 back as I made contact. I had the M4 in my hands.
My whole body was on fire.
The captain’s gaze had been averted and only the shot got him spinning around. He was too late. Now I had the carbine. I shouted, razors in my lungs, “Down, down, get down, on your knees now!”
The soldiers kneeled, expecting me to fire. The captain’s look now pure hatred; the other guy’s embarrassed, scared as shit. I don’t want to die.