“Get out,” I ordered everyone, having had enough.
We retreated, all of us, before invisible microbes.
Then I ordered the place blown up, used flamethrowers on the wreckage, and watched it burn.
That night we lay by our vehicles below the stars, when they weren’t obscured by smoke from burning oil fields. The temperature had dropped but we couldn’t make our own fire, and risk alerting stray fedayeen that we were here. Tomorrow we’d rejoin the main column. Tonight everyone who had been below was wondering the same thing, and fear floated among my men like airborne germs.
Private Lionel Pettibone, nineteen, asked me, “Did you see the monkey with the stomach busted open, Lieutenant?”
“I’m sure you won’t catch it,” I lied.
“But I took my mask off! I breathed the air! It smelled funny! Was it chemical or germs?”
“I don’t know, Lionel. The docs will check you out.”
“Oh man, why did I take that fucking mask off?”
I wanted to know this new enemy. I wanted to answer his questions. When I’d joined the Marines, I’d envisioned foes as two-legged, but now saw that they might be invisible, yet do more damage, if unleashed, than an atomic bomb.
I lay awake, thinking about my wife, my beautiful young wife back in North Carolina. I thought about my parents and friends. I saw the crowded cities, Chicago’s Loop and Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, except in my head, the crowds were screaming like the monkeys, bleeding and convulsing.
“Lieutenant, I’m getting a sore throat!”
“You had a sore throat yesterday, Platt. Remember?”
There was no way to know that the knowledge I sought would, in the end, drive me from all the people who, at that moment, I wanted to protect. My wife. My lovely wife. Average people. Poker pals. Kids I’d grown up with.
Eddie lay a few feet away, in a sleeping bag.
“We’ll know in a few days if we’ll get sick,” I told Pettibone, who was unable to sleep.
In ROTC, and at Quantico, I’d learned facts about toxic warfare: symptoms, delivery systems and antidotes and gestation periods. But it had not been real, not like what I’d seen today.
The sickness was monkey hemorrhagic fever, I’d learn months later, when interrogators discovered the truth. It doesn’t kill humans, but the Iraqi docs were trying to figure out how to make it jump species, mixing it with common colds.
“I want,” I told Eddie suddenly, “to work on toxics.”
“Great minds think alike, Number One.”
“You, too?”
“Hey, it’s another chance to beat you out.”
We’d seen a weapon that was so horrible that most people don’t want to know about it, a weapon grown in glass tubes, sought in jungles, farmed by men in white coats. We’d seen up close a possible future that was terrifying. Oh, we’d imagined something before, but it was distant, like a movie. You simply leave the theater when it’s done.
We’d seen a weapon that generals desire but no one wants to talk about, a weapon that never marches in proud public military parades.
Eddie grinned. “You saved my life.”
“Are you kidding, Eddie? One taste of your blood, that monkey would have keeled over, man.”
We became best friends that day, not just old roommates.
After all, before that we’d had common experiences and friends, and we’d lived in the same location, but now we had a common enemy.
What can draw people together more than that?
I shot awake. Eddie was shaking me. I lay in my bunk on the Wilmington, remembering where I was, remembering the monkeys becoming human in my dream. Eddie’s face looked concerned through the red nightlights. The porthole was closed. The clock read 9 A.M. I’d been out for six hours.
All the humor was gone from Eddie’s face, the lines by his mouth standing out, tense, drawn, bad news.
“We heard from the director, Number One, got through to him when the jammers were shut off for ten minutes.”
“Say it.”
“They know. They found out. Washington’s picked up something moving toward the sub.”
EIGHT
“The Chinese,” the director said.
Like an armed torpedo zeroing in on us, the red blip on screen turned slowly in our direction, and aimed just north of our yellow boat shape, to intersect. I watched it begin sliding over grid lines superimposed over the Arctic Ocean.
“The Snow Dragon is their first icebreaker. The second should be in operation this year,” the director said over the intercom box on the captain’s conference table.
The pressure in my chest mounted as I eyed another blip, this one green, pulsating in the sea.
“It is also possible that the Chinese have a Jin-class nuclear-powered submarine somewhere in the Arctic, but we’re not sure. They’re not usually up there with subs, but last we heard, it was headed in that direction, weeks ago.”
The somber-eyed group of ten around the conference table included Eddie and me, Dr. Karen Vleska, Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Andrew Sachs, Marietta Cristobel, and Clinton Toovik, our ice experts. On the crew side, with DeBlieu, sat his executive officer, a competent-looking fortyish man named Gordon Longstreet, and his communications officer, Brooklynite Lieutenant Peter Del Grazo, who managed to seem cheery despite the danger. Major Donald Pettit sat on my left. It was time for the key players to know the big picture.
The screen changed to the actual Snow Dragon, its hull red, its superstructure white. Arctic ships tend to be painted colors that stand out. The icebreaker was smashing through three-foot-thick ice, pushing chunks the size of boulders left and right, seeming to bull off the screen and drive straight at us.
The director briefed us dryly. “The Chinese are not an Arctic nation but they have huge interest in new shipping or attack routes around the top of the continent, and in access to seabottom oil. They’re investing in a deepwater harbor in Iceland. The Snow Dragon may be carrying troops for ice maneuvers, although usually it’s just scientists. Their top speed roughly equals yours.”
“So it’s a toss-up who gets there first?” Eddie asked.
The director sighed. “It could come down to minutes. Get as close as you can. If the ice blocks you, send a party on foot, or in those vehicles, depending on terrain.”
My mouth was dry. Major Pettit had switched off our jammers for the conference, after an announcement went out prohibiting unauthorized calls or e-mails from the ship.
In the brief window we had now, Marietta had checked in with Maryland for updated ice information. Sachs had called Washington. He had a look of anger on his face. It probably related to why, with an international incident possible, the director was on screen, not someone from State.
The director just glanced left, so someone else is in the room with him. Someone higher up, I bet.
The director, on H Street, went in and out of focus, as if the storm ahead infused itself onto the screen. Snow-like interference drifted across his face, which degenerated into lines resembling wind-pushed current; as the High North played with us, just as it had teased sailors for centuries. You’re not so different from hundreds of others. They were as confident as you.
I asked, “Sir, do we know how the Chinese found out?” I hoped to eliminate the Wilmington as a source.
The blocky head — ex-college fullback — shook side to side. “We got word that they know, that’s all. You. Electric Boat. Washington.”
Button up your ship, he was saying.