“Sachs?” Eddie threw out a name.
“He speaks Chinese. He wanted us to hand over the sub. But he did a good job during the fighting.”
“Our lovely Karen Vleska?”
“Hell, she knows so much anyway, she could just tell them half the things they want to know. She didn’t need to come all the way here to do that.”
“Is that logic talking, or love?”
“Eddie!”
“Okay, okay. Clinton, then? He’s always there when we need something, always around.”
“What are you saying? That the most helpful guy is guilty because he helps?”
“Well, if the truth was obvious, we’d know it by now.”
Glumly, I concurred. “A lot of the Iñupiats do have relatives in Russia.”
“And what exactly does Russia have to do with China?”
“I’m just saying,” I snapped. “You know. They’re both rivals.”
“I keep going back to Sachs. Or Del Grazo. Mr. Communications. We never think about him. He knows how to fix equipment, so he knows how to screw it up. He looks over everyone’s shoulder, and no one looks over his,” Eddie said. “He could be the one, plain and simple.”
“I thought of that. Plus, Del Grazo kept pointing his finger at Clinton.”
“Like you did back there?”
“Del Grazo was in every meeting.”
I looked back at Del Grazo, who was skiing beside a sled and talking to one of the wounded Marines, Del Grazo bending to adjust the man’s blanket. He was a constant positive presence. Only in our upside-down world would support constitute a clue.
“Pettit was in the meetings, too,” Eddie mused. “Hey, that would be great if your ex-wife’s paramour turned out to be a spy. She always did have bad judgment in men. I mean, look who she married.”
“Not funny. I don’t think it’s Pettit. I think the Chinese had someone in place on the ship before we got there, someone monitoring the original mission. That’s more logical than them lucking out and managing to place someone inside an emergency rescue so fast.”
“More logical, but not necessarily right.”
I sighed. We scanned our sled convoy. Ahead looked like behind. The ice rumbled below, as unstable as a tropical volcanic island. I heard a tearing noise, like fabric ripping, and felt the surface heave suddenly. There came a single tremendous lurch and a crevasse ripped open, running past us, widening, faster than we were, a maw a mere terrifying eight yards to our right.
The ice settled down again.
“Shit,” Eddie said, awed and horrified and remembering, as I was, how we’d left the Montana site just as the lead closed and the two floes crashed together behind us, a convulsion that pulverized in seconds ice edges that had been solid moments before. The earth was unstable. The groaning never stopped. It occurred to me far to the south, in the marble halls of Washington, men in comfortable chairs called this process “global warming.” There it was academic dinner argument. Here I watched a planet disintegrate before my eyes.
“Eddie, we need to get these people inside, and warm,” I said, realizing how right the Eskimos were when they gave ice a hundred names, treated it like an animal. “And I wish we could have found that film, the goddamn film.”
Eddie nodded toward the sleds thoughtfully. “The latency period for spread… if we’re going to start getting it, too, I wonder, once we’re on board, how long before—”
I cut him off, snapped, “I just almost started a war to save these people. I’m not losing any more, not abandoning them to die, or fall in when the ice cracks open again.”
“Hey, I’m with you, man. I’m just saying.”
“Well, don’t just be saying. Figure out what made them sick. Be useful, for Christ’s sake. For all we know, the antibiotics will knock it, or weaken it. Two days from now they’ll all be better. Scare over. Welcome home, Marines.”
Eddie hesitated. “That movie, what year do you think it was made, Numero? It was old, the chief said. Nineteen sixty? Nineteen eighty?”
“We’ll never know.”
“Ah, maybe it was old porno. Maybe it was bullshit. Hey, remember those monkeys, One?”
“I never forget them.”
“I dream about them sometimes, and in the worst dreams the monkeys get human faces. People I love. Then ones I don’t know. One gets sick. Then another. Buses. Trains…”
We skied in silence for a while. There was some small comfort in mindlessness, but then I reminded myself that to do anything mindlessly out here could be fatal. Simple relaxation was not an option.
Eddie said in a low voice, “Thirteen forty-seven.”
“You’re filled with happy thoughts today,” I said.
I halted and our eyes met through the slits of our balaclavas. He’d finally mouthed the nightmare that loomed over this whole mission since I’d found out that the sickness had preceded the fire aboard the Montana, that — with the sailors coughing on the sleds — would have occurred to any doctor in our unit.
“Marseille,” I said, naming the French Mediterranean port that was famed for its role that year. “Yersinia pestis,” I said, naming the infamous passenger that had come ashore there in 1347.
I knew that Eddie and I both were seeing the first map that we’d been shown when we’d joined the unit. It was a map of the past — the year that the black plague sailed out of Astrakhan, in central Russia, tacking its way south to Sarai, on the Sea of Azov, and then past the great Turkish port of Constantinople, until the tiny, cramped ship docked at Marseille.
“To burn through Europe,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Eddie miserably as we stood to the side and watched the progression of sleds pass, pulled by healthier Marines and Navy guys. Del Grazo helped. So did Sachs. Karen Vleska skied up front with Clinton.
The nightmare of nightmares had started on a ship. One ship that disgorged, along with coughing sailors, a few rats. Black ones, not the brown kind you see in the New York transit system. Rattus rattus. Rats that carried fleas. Fleas that carried bacteria. Bacteria that entered human bloodstreams when the fleas bit a dockside vendor or two, maybe a beggar with his hand out, maybe a fat, fur-clad merchant in his rich home overlooking the port.
Day one, a scattering of men and women, just a handful, scratching idly at their ankles and wrists, where fleas bite. Same day, a few locals grow feverish and have headaches. By day three, even for the strong people, here come the chills, first like a cold coming on, then chills become shakes and shakes become convulsions, and those little bite marks bloom into buboes, and soon after that, other family members who touched the sick, or breathed air they exhaled, maybe fed them a bit of soup, maybe told them a bedtime story, maybe changed a bandage, they began to get fevers, too.
“We may not know what our guys have,” I told Eddie, eyeing a moaning man being hauled past by a Marine. “But the good news is, it is definitely not the plague.”
“Ninety-five percent,” Eddie said.
Which was the percentage of people who contracted pneumonic plague who perished from it across Europe. A kill rate of 95 percent. Add in people who got just regular old plague, black plague, not the pneumonic kind, and you ended up with between thirty and seventy million dead. Clinically speaking, hiding horror with math, the way scientists prefer to do it, that was an overall 30 to 75 percent death rate, all starting with a couple of skinny, hungry rattus rattuses jumping off one ship in Marseille.
One ship.
And in those days far fewer people lived on Earth. And there were no airplanes, cars, and trains to spread things.