I’ll check their blood back on the Wilmington, in the labs off the helicopter hangar. There are microscopes there, sample freezers, instruments, a lot I can use. I’ll call the CDC in Atlanta. The director will assemble the wise men — a committee — to deal with this on screen. We’ll try an assortment of antibacterial and antiviral medicines to see if anything works.
But just now our worst-case victims were lying in vomit-soaked salvaged bedding, shaking like malaria victims, groaning from stabbing pain in their joints — elbows and knees — crew wrapped in blankets that stank of diarrhea, as blue patches, the size of dimes, blossomed on frozen cheeks. The same man might have black areas from fire on his face, white ones from frost on his hands.
I’d asked the men, “Where are your officers?”
“Dead, sir.”
“Do you know where the infection started?”
“No.”
“Did your medical officer figure out what the sickness is?”
Hands gripped my forearm, fell away, clawing. “I don’t know. I have kids at home. Help me.”
“Major Nakamura! More xapaxin here, fast.”
We had no idea if any medicines would work, and if so, which ones. We acted confident around the victims, telling them things would get better, especially once they got to the Wilmington, once they were airlifted ashore to warm hospitals… but when we were outside, Eddie had slumped and said, “Christ, this is about the worst thing I ever saw.”
“Get them on the ship soon as possible. Quarantine the hangar. Block all contact between Wilmington crew and rescuers. Everyone who came here stays in the hangar.”
“Numero, no one will do more for these guys than you. They’re lucky to have you.”
“I don’t want lucky. I want them cured.”
Then I called Major Pettit aside and explained that his men would need to stay in the hangar once they got back to the ship, stay clear of the ill, and wear masks. Anyone who’d been exposed to the Montana crew might become sick, too, I said, and needed to be quarantined.
The hangar isn’t as secure as — say — even a level-three biohazard lab, but if we keep it closed off and the hangar doors open, and ventilation system off, hopefully any contagion can be contained for the time it takes to get to shore, or for airborne help to arrive.
Pettit told me coldly, almost accusingly, “Marines don’t leave anyone behind, Colonel.”
He’s thinking that I’m afraid. Well, fuck you, Pettit.
I wanted to be going with them. But the source of the illness was in the sub, and I needed to identify it and either scuttle the Montana or guard it until the Wilmington broke free of ice, and arrived to take us under tow.
Eddie will start out without me. Clinton can guide them back to the ship.
I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. A mold? Mold could have taken root in their lungs, and started growing. A gas could have dissipated, liquefied, frozen.
If it was mold or gas, why did the sickness spread after they left the sub? Because the toxin was already inside them; and it took a couple days for it to work?
No, it’s more likely that a germ did it.
I shuddered.
A germ.
A random germ? Or a planted one?
I told Karen and Speck as we moved, “An airborne germ would have spread through ventilation. Hell, one crew member gets a cold and soon half the crew has it. Each sick person amplifies the spread.”
Or was the source, I wondered, the Arctic virus or bacteria we’d been waiting for? A virus like the one that Russian scientists pulled from a Siberian lake a few years back, fully formed, a tiny life that woke up in a heated lab?
I was so preoccupied that it took some time before I realized that something else was bothering me.
Why is it that as soon as we arrived here, I got a funny feeling in my scalp, an itching, the sort of warm tickle I used to feel in Afghanistan when it turned out we were under observation?
Maybe it’s just normal itching. After all, my scalp is itching now, inside the sub, probably from sweat from the balaclava.
No, that’s not it, I thought.
I feel watched.
“Chief,” I asked Apparecio, “tell me more about your mission.”
“Sir, we set up a weather station and then we were testing weapons capability in cold conditions.”
“Anything biological?” I prayed the answer would be no.
“Just the new torpedoes, sir. But then we got an emergency message to drop everything.”
“Emergency?” I said, surprised.
“We were told to meet an explorer who needs assistance. An American… some guy walking and paddling to the North Pole.”
Karen spun around and stared at him.
“He’d sent out a message. He’d stumbled onto something. What was his name? Nate… Nate something…”
“DiLorenzo?” said Karen.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“I know him,” she said, sounding concerned. “He’s on a one-man expedition this year, to dramatize ice melt. Foldable kayak and sled. Nate was in trouble, you say?”
“It wasn’t that, ma’am. He’d found something. Anyway, we got there, surfaced. Sunny, beautiful day, ma’am. I went out with the rescue crew. Your friend. He was fine, but…”
“But what, Chief?”
“Well, it was what he showed us, Colonel. It was the damndest thing. I’m out there and I can’t believe what I’m seeing because it’s like my six-year-old daughter’s dollhouse, you know? A cutaway section, like the hull of a boat had been torn away, but one cabin had been saved, intact, sir, embedded and sticking out of a half-melted iceberg. The rest of that boat, maybe it was crushed, on the bottom. What was left, two frozen men at a table.”
Karen and I looked at each other, holding our breaths.
Apparecio said, “They’d probably been there for years. They’d died at that table. What’s the word, sir, when you’re in second grade and you make a scene in a shoebox, a picture, you know, to show your class?”
“Diorama,” I said, my heartbeat rising. Why didn’t the director tell me about this? Or did he know?
“Yeah. That’s it. Like an exhibit in a museum, behind glass. There was old film equipment there, a tripod with an old camera. There was a pot of coffee with the stuff frozen inside. Weirdest goddamn thing.”
“You took the bodies aboard,” I said, feeling the worst sensation — heat — spread inside my skull.
“Yeah, those frozen guys were U.S. Army, right? The film container said ARMY, and we took it, too. Battered old canister, sir. Really old. Blankets. Knives. We wouldn’t leave them. The doc was supposed to keep the bodies in the freezer, but he wanted a look. So I heard from Chief Duerr that he took a body out, to examine.”
My headache worsened. “And it thawed out.”
“Only thing I know is, two days later the doc was sick, and then the skipper, and so fast. He was fine in the morning. He was dead that night. Then it spread. Colonel, the XO told Washington about this before he died, and…”
I stopped dead in the passageway, looking back at the open, round, kind face of the chief — the five-day beard. The shock spread through me.