“He told this to Washington?”
“I was there, sir, he plain out said it.”
“That you’d taken aboard frozen bodies.”
“Yeah. By then lots of guys were coughing. It spread so fast. It got hard to do normal work. Lieutenant Robbins died. And then Chief Duerr was really sick but working three jobs, because everyone else was out, and Duerr — he was exhausted, sir — he made a mistake and the fire started. It was an accident.”
“What was the name of the person the XO spoke to?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Karen was staring at me angrily. “Nobody told me about this,” she said. “Or any accident.”
“Nobody told me either.”
She studied me in the beam, deciding something.
“Then someone lied to us both,” Karen said.
The fury started as a small beat in my chest and spread down into my belly. The director! Had he known? Had he sent us five hundred miles from land, into a blizzard, into this, and not told me everything?
Or was someone in Washington holding back from him?
I said, “We need to figure out what infected these people.”
She said calmly, “Before it spreads.”
“We need to find that old film. Maybe there’s something on it that… Chief, do you know what happened to it?”
“Maybe it burned up. Maybe it melted. Maybe it’s in here somewhere. I don’t know.”
We couldn’t find it. Or any overt clue.
I cursed inwardly as we looked for records: a captain’s log, a book, a diary, a file; a thumb drive that would explain what the Montana had taken aboard… but finding things amid the wreckage seemed impossible. The captain’s cabin, wardroom, the infirmary, useless. The control room. You’d need a month in here to do this right.
We pulled open blackened steel desk drawers, opened lockers, bashed a lock off a soot-smeared desk, covered with a snowfall of burned insulation. Nothing.
Our Marine Motorola emitted static. Possibly someone outside was trying to reach us, possibly they were just talking to each other. Inside our cold cave, I couldn’t make out words, so we kept going. If it was important enough, a message for me, a Marine would come down.
What is on that film? Can it even help us?
Digital monitors had exploded. Plastic keyboards were frozen blobs that clicked emptily if you touched them.
That film is probably burned up or useless anyway.
In the sub’s mess were soot-coated stainless steel cabinets and cookware. A red and white cardboard box of Sysco Kosher Salt lay by the sink.
“There’s nothing here the Chinese could use,” I said.
Karen made a tsking sound. “Oh, they could learn plenty from those prototype torpedoes in the bow.”
I envisioned the twelve Marines outside, stationed beside the Montana, watching to make sure that the ice did not start to move, start to break up, float off with the submarine attached, or with the sick on top.
I recalled a lecture from one of our old biowarfare instructors at Quantico.
“Back in the 1980s,” I said, “the Soviet Union designed chemical weapons for cold climates. Their gasses could kill in forty below zero. Their mustards worked below their freeze points. Their hydrogen cyanide,” I said as we walked, probed, took samples, “solidified at fifteen below into particles you could send through ventilation systems.”
I said, “In extreme cold, chemical contaminants are harder to locate. Gas goes solid, breaks into bits that can cling to clothing. Chemicals can be carried on a hazmat suit into a warm room, where they vaporize, go airborne, sicken people who think they’re safe… Lieutenant Speck, hold that detector lower. Some chemical agents settle by the floor.”
“Yes, sir.”
Karen said, “You wanted to know why I decided to go into submarine work? Man, why did you go into this?”
“I love the Tropics.”
She turned and hit me in the arm, grinning.
Her first nonprofessional act toward me.
The radio emitted more static. What were they saying out there? Where was the damn movie canister?
I glanced through Karen’s face shield, got a flash of cheekbones, and eyes looking back, felt a dry beat on the roof of my mouth.
She’s beautiful, even at a time like this.
“I’m not leaving them on the ice,” I said.
Our search was interrupted, from outside, as I grew aware of a new sound against the hull, not the irregular scrape of ice, but a rhythmic pounding of a person out there using something heavy against steel. Three hits and stop. Three and stop. Whoever had been trying to reach us via radio had given up, and was using a more urgent method.
As I turned to go, Karen’s glove reached out and brushed the arm of my hazmat suit, too lightly for me to feel it. “You really think that film is important?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me try the captain’s cabin again, and the exec’s. I’ve got to think they’d keep anything important there. Maybe there’s a place we missed. I mean, we’re moving around here so fast.”
“Good.”
I had a vision of the ice field outside splitting, those deep cracks spreading, and the sub floating off, powerless, the sick and burned sub crew drifting farther away. I rushed through the passageways, the banging more urgent on the hull. I felt an ice stalactite snag at my shoulder, at my hazmat suit. I reached the ladder and climbed as quickly as the bulky garment allowed, to emerge outside, onto the bridge.
What I saw out there froze me in place.
It was big, and black, closing slowly, five hundred yards away.
Through the snow and gloom, I recognized the tapered shape from images the director had forwarded, and the red flag made identification unmistakable.
It was a Chinese submarine.
FOURTEEN
From the bridge, I saw the Chinese sub halt about three hundred yards away, inside the lead, its bow facing our midsection, far enough away, if the commander was confident he could withstand a blast at that distance, to enable him to fire. If he used a spread, he’d hit the Montana and also kill the evacuees from the sub, at the edge of the ice. Or he can just go after the survivors and seize the sub.
Their sail flew a white flag, requesting parlay, along with the red flag of the People’s Republic of China.
As Dr. Vleska and Lieutenant Speck came up from below, I watched Chinese crewmen lower a Zodiac boat into the sea. Two figures in bulky parkas and fur hats climbed onto it, one at the bow, the other steering, avoiding bergy ice bits that swirled in the crosscurrents, their sharp edges capable of ripping a hole in the small craft.
I placed my Marine Motorola to my lips, hoping that I could reach Chief Apparecio in the engine room. “Chief?”
No response.
“Chief?”
I heard static. Then, “Here, Colonel.”
“We really could use that electricity.”
“Working… on… Maybe in… buzzzzzzz… ten… buzzzz.”
The Zodiac was a hundred yards off and closing. The wind had died, the falling snow had gentled. But the currents below seemed even more violent, ice swirled in different directions, floes collided, moving north and south. Natural law seemed held in abeyance. Even math and logic degenerated into anarchy this far north.
“If you get electricity, how long till you can arm the torpedoes, Chief?” I asked as Karen’s head jerked in my direction.