He’d been so preoccupied with the shooting that he’d not seen the goatherd, fifty yards from the explosion — side of the road, man and flock, and the man was suddenly engulfed by a cloud, his hand going to his throat, a man on his knees, animals falling sideways, a man convulsing like an epileptic, while the skinny goat legs waved and went still. The truth sinking in to the Army guys.
“Holy shit, sir. What… what’s the cloud… what’s…”
And Joe, on his knees, knowing he’d just killed eight innocent Marines, not just Rana Khan, answered, “Sarin.”
That part was hushed up. The guards were sworn to secrecy, threatened with prison if they talked. No one wanted the other troops or the American public to know how close the attack had come to success, or that a U.S. soldier had facilitated it. No one, the director explained, wanted Congress to restart the debate about pulling out. The Pakistani professor who made the sarin had been “dealt with.” Corporal Khan’s parents got a letter saying their son died “in an accident.” So let’s put it to rest.
And later, when Joe couldn’t sleep, when he relived the scene nightly, when his emotions caught up and passed his logical mind, and when he was losing his wife, he decided fuck orders, and he told her. He’d given the director three years of his life at that point. He wasn’t going to give the director his wife, too.
But it was too late, she said. “I know you’re a hero, Joe. I know you saved lives. But you’re not who I married. That man would not have been able to make that choice so quickly.”
“Is that so bad?”
“No. You saved a thousand lives. But that’s not the issue,” she said, knowing, without rancor, after ten years with him, where the holes in his veneer lay, to get inside. “I’m not leaving because you saved people. I’m leaving because when I look at you, I see dead ones. It’s my fault. Not yours. I’m not strong enough for you.”
He’d sat numbly, too guilty to protest, their home, their voices, the city of Anchorage outside just a hollow stage pounding with his heartbeat, and with loss.
“Joe, my father told me something. He said we all find a life to justify what’s inside us. I can’t help thinking, I wish I didn’t, but are you sure you didn’t enjoy the power at some level? I can love a flawed man. I need one. But not a flawed God. If you can’t be perfect, don’t play God.”
Joe broke from his reverie. Men on the sleds were coughing, growing sicker. They were being carried up the brow, to the ship.
He thought, in agony, I’ll kill them if I have to, if I really have to. Because letting them die is the same thing. But maybe there will be something good on that film.
Do we pick a life just to justify urges inside us?
When did our weapons start depriving us of choice?
EIGHTEEN
“Don’t open the canister,” the director ordered.
The Wilmington pushed back toward Barrow, the storm over, crystal air — aftermath of the cyclone — making the view stunning and unworldly from the aft deck. I was on another planet. I saw four suns: the main one a hazy orb, floating on mist like a New England lake’s, above the white vista. But there were three more suns, too, smaller stars or “sun dogs,” Captain DeBlieu had called them; a diagonal row of accolade satellites whose coronas formed prisms of ruby, emerald, turquoise, cobalt.
The temperature was a sharp twenty degrees, and fine diamond dust, ice bits, fell as if out of nowhere, like glitter at a party. The ship nudged small floes from its path, the ice suddenly as cooperative as a meek dog. The thick pack that we’d struggled through on the way north had been pushed west by wind and current. We moved faster. We’d eaten a good meal, brought aft from the mess while we worked. We slid through ice passages and between floating sculptures: a hilly ice island, a truncated ice cathedral, a series of ice church pipe organs thrust into the sky, as if to blast out Bach, the whole seascape rolling out beneath one perfect cumulous cloud. I stood alone, unsure whether I’d heard the director properly, hoping I had not.
“Sir, we need to identify this thing, and fast.”
His pause when I’d first mentioned the film had been a buzz on the sat line. He’d gone away for several minutes. Then he’d come back.
“Joe, I know how important the film might be. And how delicate it is. That’s why you need to leave it alone so experts can handle it. People who know how to keep it intact. People at the national archives military section, in Culpepper.” His voice dropped into a soothing range. “We don’t want it crumbing in your hands, man. Look, when you’re in range, we’ll send a copter, get the film back East. Meanwhile, do your best.”
“My best, sir? For that, I’d like a shot at the film.”
I stood, phone in hand, eyeing rescue work around me; gauze-masked Coast Guard crew moving men and women on stretchers through the unrolled sliding door into the copter hangar, open to the Arctic air like the enormous maw of a hospital emergency room. Inside, six rows of cots bolted to the deck — three short ones for the sick, three longer ones for the quarantined, off to a side — had transformed the former makeshift basketball court, floating warehouse, dance class area, and Saturday night movie theater into a hospital. Janice Cullen, ship’s medical officer, had assigned each patient, crew member, or Marine to a cot, taken names if possible, or got them from other patients; the whole orderly system working just as smoothly now as it did in the drills the crew endlessly practiced; but I knew what lay beneath it; and it was not what initially seemed like control. It was anarchy and terror.
Saline and antibiotic bags hung from metal racks above cots. Janice Cullen and Eddie went patient to patient, taking vital signs, asking about symptoms, looking down throats, into noses, and ears, and measuring blood pressure. The pneumonia-like signs looked bacterial. Many chests were filled with fluid. We were prescribing Cipro and Bactrim antibiotics.
“But the bacterial stuff is secondary, I think,” Eddie had told me. “I think a virus started it, weakened them, and then double pneumonias hit. We’re giving the aerosol antivirals, ribavirin, zanamivir, and xapaxin, which, thanks to our buddy Zhou, we have extra. At least something good came from that. I’ll get a look at blood samples in the labs. They’ve got microscopes back there for their mammal work. Whoever would have figured they’d need the labs for this.”
The worst should have been over — the sick and burned under care, more doctors on their way to Barrow to meet us, copters readying to pick patients up when we got within range, and American attack subs converging in our direction, in case Captain Zhou Dongfeng remained somewhere nearby.
The director switched to his no-nonsense voice, the voice of the old Washington insider, the high-powered New York boardroom voice, the friend of important people voice, the I-know-things-that-you-can-trust voice. “Please acknowledge instructions, Joe.”
“I hear you, sir.”
“You did a great job and we’re all proud of you. You kept the Montana out of unfriendly hands.”
Something was off. When we’d reached the part about the canister, all the hearty concern had dissipated. He was my personal Machiavelli and he explained with paternal authority — support that was also denial, “We’ll get that film checked out, chop-chop.”
“I urge you to reconsider, sir.”
“Foresight now may save lives later.”