She slid closer. There was a wet wool odor over the granular snow smell, and the oily propane, and the whiff of bad electronics. The hint of sweat-tinged perfume had to be the part manufactured in my head.
“I’m going to close my eyes a bit,” I said, meaning she should go away.
She rose and her sigh came out as a thin cloud that expanded and dissipated. Her breath, if solidified, would resemble an icicle pointed at my throat.
“Well, if you’re not the spy,” she said, “then what you did back there was pretty remarkable.”
I raised my brows.
“You didn’t fire the torpedo. You stopped the fight. You prevented a massacre. You put everything on the line.”
We watched each other.
“Surprised?” she said. “That I care more about the people than the submarine?”
“Your bosses hear that, they’ll dock your pay. Two billion. That’ll take a few years to work off,” I said.
The way her hands hung for a moment conveyed a vulnerable awkwardness. She said, “Sometimes I have trouble saying the nicer things. I’m better at the other.”
“My ex-wife was like that. Is it all women? Or just ones I know?”
“I don’t understand why the Marines call you Killer. It doesn’t seem right. It seems cruel. You’re not a killer, are you? You can do it, but you’d rather not. So what is that about? They seem to have the wrong idea about you.”
“Excellent interview technique,” I said. “You ever leave Electric Boat, I can find a good berth for you at the unit, as an interrogator.”
“Well, if you’re not the spy, I guess I can give you this,” she said, smiled, reached into her parka, and when I saw what she pulled out, the force of it pulled me to my feet. I could barely believe what I was seeing.
“The XO brought it out of the Montana when they abandoned ship. It was on one of their sleds. I found it while poking around, looking for rations. The man who had it — he was unconscious when we got there — woke up. He said the exec told him to get it to the rescuers, if any came.”
The canister was old, all right, about a foot in diameter, olive colored, the universal hue of military issue. It was battered and dented and stamped on the metal container were the words PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY.
“Pretty old,” she said. “What do you think?”
“I have no idea.”
“Nineteen fifty?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
After she left, I sat staring at the canister, heart beating rapidly, but whether from her visit, or the object in my hand, I was unsure. I slid off a mitten. Instantly the air closed around my fingers like a cold vise, and I knew that even to touch frigid metal could stick skin to it, and bring on severe frostbite.
I put the mitten back on and considered using one of the ski poles to pry the can open, but in a storm, with wind blowing, I knew that old film — if it was even stable — could easily crumble or be destroyed by such savage elements. I shook the canister. Something rattled around inside, all right. Was it cellulose nitrate? Was it even a clue?
Don’t get so excited. You’ll do something stupid. You’ll ruin it before even seeing it.
Karen Vleska seemed to be watching from twenty feet off, where she knelt beside a sled and an injured man. I wished I could see inside the canister, wished I had x-ray vision, like Superman did in movies I loved as a kid. PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY. It was the color of uniforms, vehicles, canteen covers. It was an announcement confirming that the film inside related to death.
Reluctantly, I put the canister in my pack. It would have to wait for opening on the Wilmington.
Twenty minutes later we saddled up again, and moved out.
I saw an upside-down ship in the distance, hanging in the sky. It looked solid as the sun emerging through gray, at 4 A.M., to reveal the gigantic inverted icebreaker, a steel piñata. I gaped. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of solid metal floated upside down; decks, antenna, escape boats, winches. Everything else was inverted here. So why not logic itself?
As we got closer, the upside-down antenna seemed to lower and then I saw a second Wilmington, right side up, beneath it, on the sea. Two ships of equal size, identical images, yin and yang, foot by foot.
Closer still, the mirage started to merge with the real ship, and then the sun broke out, and suddenly an enormous prism filled the sky, like a pipe organ in a cathedral, a shining rainbow that made the two ships less distinct. Then the two ships blurred, and then abruptly, the one in the air vanished. The welcome form of the red hull was dead ahead, at about a half mile, and it was coming toward us, breaking ice.
Eddie came up beside me.
“Murphy’s Law,” he said. “As soon as you reach the stuck ship, it’s able to move again.”
With binoculars we could see men and women lining the prow, waving. They seemed to be celebrating that we were alive, and their joy made my plan for them crueler, more dangerous, but I pushed that notion away.
I was thinking that Eddie had been right earlier. In less than twenty minutes, when we rejoined the Wilmington, I would take the biggest risk of my life. Because it involved more than just my life, but the lives of others.
Am I doing this because of what happened two years ago?
I was going to put the sick aboard the Wilmington, and gamble that we could figure out what ailed them and at the same time prevent the thing inside them from spreading.
I would gamble that we were smarter than a germ, and that the thing inside them was smaller than our ability to stop it.
The ship got closer, and the image I saw merged into some other version, a past one.
I saw a memory all too clearly, and it was one that I wished had been the mirage.
SEVENTEEN
Majors Joe Rush and Edward Nakamura looked down from the open door of the Chinook helicopter taking them and twenty Marines south from Kandahar Air Base toward one more alleged hidden biological laboratory, this time near the Afghan border with Pakistan and Iran, in the southwest.
The base commander had been taken aback by two officers from Washington appearing out of nowhere, irritated at the “special orders” requiring cooperation, and reluctant to release the copter. He’d argued that the aircraft was needed for a raid on the Taliban, to the north.
“We’ll need Marines, too,” Rush had replied.
Joe and Eddie had been chasing rumors, a whisper in a village bazaar, a prostitute’s boast, a tip from a beggar, a monitored e-mail, a voice fragment on an NSA phone snag. This time the “information” had come from a bloody man strapped in a basement chair, screaming for the Afghan security officers beating him to stop: “They’re mixing chemicals!”
Eddie said, as the copter hit an air pocket, “Another wild-goose chase, want to bet?”
After all, the “hidden lab” in Teyvareh had turned out to be nothing more than a filthy pharmacy the size of a closet, its cracked glass shelves filled with ten-year-old aspirin, and dried seaweed that the “druggist” called Viagra. The “cave of equipment” near Daulet Yar had been deserted, burned charcoal as evidence that the Taliban had once used it. They’d found a pile of gnawed goat bones, and a latrine area crawling with rock rats, but nothing else.
There was no doubt in Rush’s mind that Al-Qaeda sought biological weapons the world over — sending buyers to Russia, for stockpiled chlorine bombs; to Syria, wanting nerve gas; to Sudan, where hidden labs toyed with that country’s strain of the Ebola virus.