I managed to force out, “You’re Russian?”
“Nah. They are. Not me. I hate Russians.”
I heard myself whisper, “Who are you?”
“International citizen of the world.” He grinned. “One for all and all for one.”
My mind was pain. I tried to get words out and he watched, curious about what I would say, now that he was master here. He coaxed me. “You can do it. Try it slow. I need a few minutes rest before I get out of here anyway. Long day, Joe.”
“The… rabies isn’t… con… contagious?”
“Nah.”
“You… spread… it.”
He nodded. “One person at a time, except for the first ones. Damnit, Joe. I put it in Ted’s ice cream, the goddamn ice cream. He never shares his ice cream. Except Kelley decided to play a joke on him on his birthday, share it with all of them: Ha-ha, Dad, we ate half your precious supply! They all ate it. He was supposed to get sick alone and that would end the project. Stupid teenage joke.”
I tried to think. Through the green dancing light, black spots appeared. I forced out, “Why… give it… why…”
“Why give it to others? In town? Come on, man! Think! Once four people had it, we needed to keep you away from here, from connecting the deaths to their work. So we created an emergency. We gave you what you looked for. A ‘new’ disease. We shifted attention. It should have worked.”
He stood up. He seemed amused. “I thought you were going to ask me about her, but you didn’t, Joe. You asked about something else. Marine to the end.”
“What is… here?”
He made a noise like a game show buzzer. “Gotta go!”
“I’ll… find… you.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He sighed, getting up. “You’ll hunt me down. I can see you’re in good shape. Anyway, just so you know? I liked all you people. You are one fucking bird dog once you get an idea in your head. Everyone else, fooled. Gotta go, Joe. Gotta reach Canada.”
I tried to claw my way through the snow to him. I managed to move my left hand a whole inch.
I whispered, “Eco lodge?”
“Hey, Joe, remember that time early on, in the season, that homemade pizza at the Harmons? That was a good night. Kelley rolling dough. Ted chopping onions. Lillienthal and his nympho sister coming in with that Texas brewery beer? Summer friends.”
“Who…?”
“You still haven’t asked about her. Some fiancée you were, Colonel. Workaholic to the end. Well, you get no sympathy from me. I could shoot you, but hell. Freeze.”
He leaned down. I was as helpless as an infant. He stripped off my hat and mittens, and instantly I felt the temperature plunge. He unzipped my thermal suit. He took my M4. He said, “Well! Gotta burn those bodies and get gas!”
He stomped off into the snow, green lights playing on his back. I heard him crunch away, right about the time that the aurora borealis failed and night came back. Show over.
When I was conscious again I heard grunting from some distance off, probably him dragging a corpse toward the fire. I heard a smashing noise, and imagined Jens busting up a dead man’s teeth with his rifle stock. Can’t have authorities checking teeth on bodies burned in the fire. He’d probably blow up the Twin Otter, too, try to obliterate the record, once he gassed up one of the snowmobiles.
And the evidence here, a burned-down cabin, a blown-up plane. Hell, put it down, Detective, as a cocaine or illegal alcohol delivery gone bad… one more mystery of the High North to be written up in the adventure magazines.
Karen Vleska paused at the top of the depression, her long silver hair flying in wind, her mittens wrapping ski poles, her eyes hidden by goggles, her hip jutting out, feminine, petite, perpetually sexy. There was a long red scarf wrapped around her neck, and I understood it hid a knife scar. She’d heard Jens Erik Holte’s accusation. I thought you were going to ask about her, but you didn’t, Joe.
I told her, “I’m glad you’re all right.”
She said, “I’m not.”
I said, “Where are you going?”
She said, “Oh, I’m already there.”
“Karen. I love you.”
“Funny way to show it, Joe.” She skied away.
Back in Washington, before Eddie and I had flown to Alaska this summer, the admiral had insisted that we watch a warning film, an old black-and-white copy of an original made at a German World War Two prison camp, Treblinka. It was one of the films that Admiral Galli came up with from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of archived, classified files, which he regularly used to underline points. We’d pissed and moaned because it was a nice, warm spring day, and Eddie wanted to shop for souvenirs for his wife and daughters, and I wanted to sleep at the hotel.
Instead, we were ushered into the admiral’s screening room, space for six, where we slumped into cushioned chairs and, coffee before us, watched a grainy film. We sat up a little. Then we sat up a lot. Eddie grew so sick at what we were seeing that at one point he gagged.
Shot one: three smiling white-coated doctors standing by a bathtub filled with water. Shot two: the biggest, fattest, least-healthy looking doctor waves his hand, and two German soldiers dump lots of ice cubes into the tubs.
The three prisoners look like toothpicks when they lurch in, terrified, eyes swinging between the smiling doctors and the ice-filled tubs. And then, clearly forced, they remove their rags. The man folds his neatly. Maybe once he was a lawyer, or businessman, the kind of guy who draped his clothing neatly over the top of a chair each night, before climbing beneath laundered sheets with his perfumed wife. The woman refused at first to get into the tub. The soldiers pushed her in. The kid was screaming, but the film had no sound reel with it. We only heard the whirring projector and the muted hum of Washington on a warm spring day outside, where cherry blossoms bloomed.
“You two Marines will not let yourself get frostbite or hypothermia this summer,” Admiral Galli said. “I hate this film and the people who made it. But it’s the best graphic warning I know. Watch!”
Watch? Horrified, we couldn’t stop. The Nazi doctors slid big red thermometers in the water, and smaller ones in victims’ mouths. Someone, an Allied technician likely, had added numbers on the bottom of the screen. The thermometers in the film showed temperature in Centigrade. The added numbers were Fahrenheit, easier for us to understand.
“Body temp, ninety-eight point six,” whispered Eddie. The immersion had begun.
The victims began shivering.
The shivering grew worse.
The child shivered more than the adults.
“Keep watching,” Galli said.
He’d given us reading material, and I’d skimmed it, but now, facts slammed home. I knew for the Jews in the tubs, as their skin temperature dropped, the nerves on the surface pulled back, pushed blood farther into the body. It was natural triage, the body sacrificing its skin in exchange for keeping organs — heart, lungs, kidneys — warm.
The fingers in those tubs were probably numb by now.
At body temp 97F, the father seemed to pause, and I knew that inside, he’d gone into a pre-shiver, the body’s expectation of near convulsions to come.
Fat Nazi doctor said something to skinny one, pointing to his own ears, then Dad’s ears, keenly observing, fascinated, probably saying something like, “Und now ze ears vill begin to hurt him!”
At 88F, the doctors were looking at blood in a test tube. “Thicker blood,” Fatso probably remarked. “At zis temperature, ze blood thickens into natural oil.”