I heard ringing.
They might have him at the base, having arrested him. They might be grilling him now. They might have his phone. The ringing went on, four… five…
“Hey, man,” Eddie said. “Where the hell are you?”
Translation, if that was his opener: They’re grilling him. They told him to learn where I am.
I said that I needed to speak to Homza, and Eddie responded, “So do I, man.” I told him that Jens had fled town and I pursued him. I said that Jens had spread the rabies. I spoke through Eddie to whomever monitored me.
“Uno, tell me where you are? Are you hurt? Those Rangers said you were hurt. We’ll send a doctor for you.”
Here we go.
“Remember the place we found those dead foxes?”
A pause. He was thinking, adjusting. There was only one place where this had happened, back in June. He said, remembering, slowly, “The foxes. Yeah.”
“Well, let’s say, with fifty miles to go, I’m heading approximately ten degrees south by southwest from the tip of the fat monkey’s tail.”
Thank you, Karen, for teaching me about the made-up constellations because I shared it with Eddie. He’d better remember that “the tip of the fat monkey’s tail” is the North Star.
Eddie was silent. Then he said, “What?”
“Ten degrees south, and thirty degrees from Flipper’s left eye, roughly.”
Sound grew muffled. Someone’s hand was over his phone. Someone would be demanding of Eddie what I was talking about. Meanwhile, I approximated angles, triangulating, using the horizon’s circle as a compass, assigning values and degrees. It was up to Eddie to get to the general now. I could not waste any more time here.
I thought, Why didn’t Homza tell his adjutant about our arrangement? Why did he keep it to himself?
“You hallucinating or what?” said Eddie. He knows!
I clicked off, pulled the battery from the phone, stomped on the phone, and left it. With a groan of pain I mounted up. I wished I could jettison the GPS, too, but I was still too far from the lake, and destroying the GPS now was too risky. If the stars disappeared, once the sod homes were gone, without GPS there would be no way to triangulate. So I had to hope that the Rangers who had confiscated my particular GPS from a private citizen did not know which one it was.
The pain seemed worse when I started off again. Each buck of the snowmobile a fist striking the inside of my head. You know what they say: A physician who has himself as a patient is a fool. But I was the doctor and I was the patient. I reviewed symptoms. The shots that had hit my body armor had caused massive bruising, at a minimum. The parka had cushioned my fall a little, and my shoulders had done the rest. The problem was the head injury, how bad it was, and how much worse it would get.
I was running on adrenaline, grief, and rampant fury.
And running out of all three.
Rabies figured in as one of mankind’s earliest attempts at creating bioweapons. The disease entered military records in the fourth century B.C., when soldiers in India were advised to dip war arrows in the blood of rabid muskrats. “Anyone pierced by such a weapon will then bite ten friends, and they will bite and infect ten more,” the manual Arthashastra said.
By 1500, the great Leonardo da Vinci sketched out a “rabies bomb,” and, in 1650, Polish General Kazimierz Siemienowic tried one, having his engineers mix “slobber from mad dogs” in clay artillery shells.
It didn’t work. No enemy caught rabies.
But that didn’t stop the experiments. During World War One both sides worked overtime on designing poison gasses and disease bombs, including devices to inflict rabies. By the Cold War, both U.S. and Soviet scientists worked on creating a contagious, fast-acting strain. The reasoning was that even if rabies remained inefficient against humans, due to spread problems, it could be used against cattle, to damage an enemy’s food supply.
And now I had a vial in my pocket, and inside it I was pretty sure I carried a new lab strain of rabies, which had been spread intentionally, first to a four-person research team on the tundra, and then to innocent people in town.
But why?
How far off was lake number nine? Fifty miles? Sixty? That seemed like months or years away.
My face was going numb. Snow blew inside the windshield. I felt sand-like granules between my teeth. My skin burned beneath the balaclava. My lungs ached with each breath and I wondered if we could add frostbite to the mix. The Polaris threw up geysers of snow, where wind had it piled, and in other spots, rubbed raw by wind, I bumped over dead, matted brown grass.
Going uphill, the front of the snowmobile rose, and I leaned ahead, adding weight. Going downhill, I downshifted, sat back.
I heard an erratic clicking and realized it was the engine. Something was wrong in there. But I kept going.
I checked the odometer. I’d traveled only thirty-one miles.
I started to see things that weren’t there. I saw a gigantic wolf running beside the snowmobile. Ten minutes later I saw the same wolf, sitting, watching me pass.
I saw a mass of office buildings ahead, tall ones, white, at least ten or eleven stories high, except they turned out to be more small mounds when I reached them.
Seventeen miles.
Eight miles to lake number nine.
Six. The clacking noise worsened.
The stars were gone. A fine mist thickened the sky, hung twelve feet above the tundra.
I passed over fresh bear tracks, huge ones. Monster animal. Maybe not a polar bear. Maybe one of those big hybrids, half grizzly, half polar, that have been showing up as the species mix.
I was losing vision.
A good soldier knows when he has to stop for a break, like it or not. I stopped.
One mile to go, more or less. I ate the powerbar, and drank still-warm coffee, sitting in the snow. Then I destroyed the GPS, shot it, actually, while the wind was keening. I was the Spanish explorer Cortes burning his warships when he reached Mexico, so his troops had to move forward. No retreat allowed, soldiers. No way back now, except by luck.
I turned the key and the engine roared, coughed, and sputtered. The snowmobile jerked ahead ten feet and died. The gas gauge read half full. I checked the tank.
Out of fuel.
Had there been spare fuel stored in the saddle bags? Nope.
Well, it’s probably a good idea not to get closer with the snowmobile anyway. If he’s there, he’d hear it. This way, I’ll surprise him.
Which made me laugh. Some surprise.
I hooked the M4 over my shoulder, and shoved extra ammo clips into my parka pockets. I made sure the carbine was ready to fire. The M4 was a good weapon, and normally I could hit a target with one from three hundred yards away.
I advanced like a limping ninety-year-old into the wind, head down, scanning my field of vision, which extended a good solid two hundred feet ahead. The snowmobile disappeared. Then so did direction. But I remembered what an Iñupiat friend had taught me last year on an Arctic mission, and it was that in wind, you can use sastrugi, lines created by wind on snow, for direction.
For the past hours I’d been cutting crosswise through line after line of jagged sastrugi. I continued to cut the lines on foot. Either the cabin would show up soon, or I’d simply wander off into the void.
Suddenly I was knee deep, struggling through drifts that sucked me back. The earth’s gravitational field grew stronger. Invisible hands grabbed my boots. I discarded the helmet to improve visibility, but what I saw was darkness. Then abruptly the sky cleared a little.