But none of these samples might be as important as the one I awaited seeing.
I had my pick of familiar instruments: tweezers and magnifiers, chemicals and monitors to show images, and there was even a shower decontamination room in case — on a normal day — a chemical accident occurred.
I lay the canister on a table that had probably been used for slicing open fish bellies. I wore a mask, apron, and rubber gloves, as did Eddie and DeBlieu.
“Disease-kateers. One for all and all for one,” Eddie said, always the joker, the kind of guy who could lighten the mood in a morgue.
The canister lay on the blotter like an anesthetized patient. I hesitated. Maybe the director had been right. Maybe opening the thing would damage it. Maybe I’d been wrong in thinking people were hiding things from us. Maybe the film curled in there — if it was even still intact — had absolutely nothing to do with the cause of the hideous suffering going on only yards away from where we stood.
In the fluorescent light, the dents in the metal stood out. I had a vision of this thing encased in ice, waiting, years going by, snow falling, storms battering the wreck, bears wandering by the two mummified, ice-glazed corpses. The cellulose images in darkness until, one day, the Montana surfaced nearby.
Eddie said, “Change your mind?”
“No, Eddie.”
“What are you waiting for?” said DeBlieu.
Slowly, holding my breath, I began working free the wedged-on canister lid.
NINETEEN
The film crumbled when I touched it.
The first three feet disintegrated; one second whole, the next — in despair — I looked down on an array of glossy shreds on the blotter.
I heard the men behind me breathing, and the crackling of aged cellulose. I tried another strip, gently, heard a noise like wax paper crackling, and another three-inch section broke off. Two inches remained intact. There was no picture on it. It was ghostly white, the image either long gone or, I hoped, this was an unused start to the roll.
Was I destroying evidence? I tried to unroll a third piece and the tweezers managed to pull out another intact two-inch strip.
“Attaboy,” said Eddie.
I smelled DeBlieu behind me, a mix of Old Spice and Irish Spring soap, a whiff of a last meal, barbequed chicken. I held the strip firmly on the blotter. With my free hand, I gingerly slid a hand magnifier over it. The tensor light shone brightly, reflected off the magnifier and into my eyes. The shadows of the men behind me fell on the blotter. I felt the lab rock gently from ship movement as I leaned down again, put my eye to the piece.
I said, “Got something!”
Leaping into view was a single frame, showing four soldiers in uniforms standing proudly before the front door of a Quonset hut, the middle man, clearly clown of the group, sticking his hand in his shirt, like Napoleon, and saluting. Long-dead buddies. The hats held at their sides were floppy brimmed, early-twentieth-century U.S. Army. The men wore suspenders and loose breeches stuffed into high boots. They had neat mustaches, long for my taste, and the two men not wearing hats had their short hair parted in the middle.
“This is turn of the twentieth century. It’s a silent movie,” I breathed. “Older than we figured.”
What possible relevance could it have to the submarine Montana? I noticed a sign beside the Quonset hut door. I heard myself read the words with horrified reverence. They froze my blood.
“FORT RILEY, KANSAS, 1918.”
Eddie whispered, awed, too, “Oh, shit.”
DeBlieu asked impatiently, “That’s important? What happened at Fort Riley in 1918?”
Neither of us responded, hoping we were wrong. After several more strips disintegrated, a long one rolled out. Perhaps the more deeply I unrolled the spool, the more protection the film had received, the better shape it was in.
DeBlieu said, “Hey, feel free to answer.”
With unreal slowness, I pulled out film. I needed many frames just to see an elbow shifting, a leg lifting. I said, “They’re packing now. They’re filling knapsacks. They’re going on a journey.”
Maybe I should have stopped as the director had ordered, but by now I was too excited and frightened at what I suspected would come next.
I narrated to my transfixed audience. “They’re inside a building now. A warehouse. I see stacked Springfield rifles. Machine guns. Other soldiers help them load it onto trucks. Wait! Someone’s inserted captions now. Handwritten. Eddie, you ever hear of U.S. Army Project White?”
“No.”
“It says ‘part two.’ Do you think that first section, the busted-up one, was part one?”
“I’ll take part two if we can get it.”
The pressure of the eyepiece against my face seemed to penetrate my sockets. Eddie groaned. “They’re only loading rifles, right? Arms, right?”
DeBlieu repeated, as if we’d not heard his previous plea, “What about Fort Riley? This is a hundred years old. What does this have to do with us?”
I held up a hand to let him know I’d heard. It was too early to answer. The film must have been developed on the old boat. As I kept rolling, and the strip started dangling off the table, Eddie scrounged around behind me and created a way to roll up the film as it uncoiled… He cut a knife groove into a wooden dowel. He inserted the film edge into the slit. He rolled film up as it unspooled. I figured — when we were done, we’d spool the film back up, if we could.
There were bare frames and that was so frustrating. It was like watching an old movie but only seeing every fourth or fifth frame… sometimes nine or ten in a row before a strip broke off.
Then the film seemed to stabilize enough so that I could pull it, frame by frame, beneath the hand magnifier.
I read out loud, peering down from a century ahead, to the century behind, “OFF LIMITS. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.”
Little figures moved jerkily. The soldiers were on a dock now, in civilian clothing, loading the crates of grenades and Springfield rifles onto a boat. Time leaped in jerks. The gangplank seemed to bow with weight as men went back and forth onto a small, private, forty-foot-long boat, and there was a long shot of the name, Anna. The clown guy, the one who had acted like Napoleon before, did a sailor jig on the dock, hands on his belt.
“Now we’re at sea,” I said, seeing gray rolling waves, which were still out there, unlike the men who had shot this. A whale spouted. Then there were three whales. I said, “Shit,” as a whole section of film tore off, and when I resumed, the men were in a rocky forest. “Whole bunch of new guys now with them, and mules, and the crates are on the animals. They’re moving through a trail cut through high fir trees.”
DeBlieu said, “Project White. Delivering arms.”
It was like some old Charlie Chaplin movie. Real humans didn’t move like this. Now the clown guy was standing on a stump, watching the mules go by, pretending to be an ape, hunched over, swinging his arms, scratching his armpits, beating his chest.
“He just broke out coughing,” I said.
“You want to tell DeBlieu? Or should I?” said Eddie.
I felt a wave of devastation sweep over me. Now the clown guy must have had the camera, because the other guys — long overcoats on, rifles over their backs, military caps on — had paused for a group photo. The coughing wasn’t the point of the shot. Clown guy had just happened to cough when they were rolling. The camera panned away, and there was a gap in the forest, and through that I saw a fuzzy moving blob in the distance.
“Guys coming on horseback. About thirty of them. A village there, too. Thatched roofs. Timber walls. The riders wear fur-flapped caps and baggy trousers and have rifles on their shoulders. Small horses, skinny. Bandoliers… these guys look like Cossacks. Man, handlebar mustaches!”