The Americans waved. It was an arranged meeting. Close up, the riders seemed to stare at the camera, angry that it was there. Their clothing was a ragtag collection of peasant patchwork, some foreign military uniforms, and one man even wore a stylish bowler, low brimmed, above a coat more appropriate for the theater, long and hemmed with fur.
“Colonel, where are they?” asked DeBlieu.
“They’ve got a flag. It’s the two-headed eagle, the Russian imperial eagle, above a coat of arms. Russia.” I sat back. I looked at DeBlieu. Now I understood. “They’re bringing guns to the White Russians fighting the Reds.”
DeBlieu looked puzzled. “Wait. America fought against Russia in 1918?” he said.
“Yeah, Woodrow Wilson sent in troops to help fight the Communists,” said Eddie, a student of military history.
“He did?”
I felt DeBlieu’s hand on my shoulder as he leaned closer. “What happened to those soldiers?”
I snapped, “You want me to explain, or keep going?”
His hand fell away. I glanced up. He looked angry, but he’d shut up.
I continued rolling, feeling guilty because I was getting to see the story, not them.
“They must have transferred the arms because now they’re back on the boat. Mission accomplished! They’re slapping each other’s backs. They’re toasting the mission. Clown guy is really coughing in this one. All done! Except, whoa! Now they’re being chased by a gunship… Bolshevik ship… I can see the deck gun firing at them… a splash… the shell just missed them.”
The Bolshevik ship was getting closer. I prayed for our guys to get away. Now the view shifted abruptly, the camera in front of the boat. The clown guy on the prow, not smiling, pointing forward, as if urging more speed. There was a cloud bank in the distance… I imagined the guy shouting, Faster!
“They’re still not hit.”
The film tilted. Brown spots, age spots ate up the picture. It was gone. I kept rolling. Eddie kept spooling up the film.
“They’re back,” I said, relieved. “It’s cloudy all around… no… they’re in mist. I guess they got away, escaped into it. They’re in front of the boat, looking ahead. There’s a caption: TWO DAYS LATER. Oh, oh, shit, man, they must be really north because they’re in the ice!”
Only it wasn’t the kind of ice the Wilmington was in, or the kind I’d seen near the Montana. Unrolling before my eye was the monster ice I’d read about in history books, seen in old lithographs. These were ice mountains. This was the Andes, the Alps, of ice. The walls surrounding the little Anna seemed to grow higher, frame by frame. I noticed one of the other men coughing, too, now.
I sat back. “They sailed too far north,” I said. “Got away, but they’re getting sick.”
DeBlieu said, “These are the bodies the sub found?”
“Has to be.”
The film jumped again and my heart did, too, because I saw it. I’d known we would end up here, but I’d hoped I’d be wrong.
“Take a look,” I told DeBlieu.
I held the magnifier in place. He bent down. I resumed drawing the film toward me. I heard DeBlieu groan.
“They’re all sick now,” he said. “With the same thing.”
Eddie sighed. “They kept filming, One. Till the end.”
It was a death film now. At first I didn’t realize that the man I watched in a bunk was clown guy. There was no smile now. No jumping around. A close-up showed him bleeding through his nose, like patients from the Montana. The camera pulled back. Another sick guy lay in an upper bunk, eyes closed, lethargic. The eyes opened. The mouth moved. History consumed his words. There was no technology to capture them. The hand of an unseen man laid a compress on clown guy’s forehead. The camera shook violently. Maybe the man taking the photo was coughing, too, doing his job, distracting himself from what they probably all knew was to come.
Eddie took over at the eyepiece, described what came next, which was a foregone conclusion. Three of the men on the boat struggling with the corpse of clown guy, rolling it over the side, in a shroud. A shot of an ice mountain. Then the vessel locked in place, caught by ice coating the gunwales and ice on the ceilings. The deck was slick with ice, the men coughing, throwing up as they tried to chip it away, get free. Cut to the mast, which was now an ice pole. Another body went over the side, and flopped, in its sheet, onto a floe. A bear bent over it.
DeBlieu commanded, “Enough! You know what it is! Explain. Now!”
Explain? It’s funny the way you can know something horrible, even be sure of it, but not want to say it because that will be the final step of transforming it into something real.
I said tiredly, “They called it the Spanish flu.”
“Even though it didn’t start in Spain,” Eddie said.
“It broke out in 1918, near the end of World War One.”
DeBlieu looked pensive, riveted.
“Nineteen eighteen,” I said. “Imagine it. The world at war. Millions of men in trenches. Chemical bombs. Fighter planes for the first time. Tanks for the first time. And then, out of the blue, on top of everything else, a new disease appears.”
“At Fort Riley,” said Eddie. “Kansas.”
“Wait, I heard of the Spanish flu,” DeBlieu said. “It started in Kansas?”
“Just like the Wizard of Oz,” said Eddie.
“I thought it killed millions in Europe.”
“Oh, it did. But that’s not where it started. We learned this on our first week in the unit,” I said. “That flu was the worst disease outbreak in history.”
“I thought the black plague was that.”
“No. The story — the theory — is that soldiers enlisting at Riley, guys from pig farms nearby, came in already infected. Then it spread. Doctors had never seen anything like it. It hit the younger people the worst, the healthier ones, ramped up the resistance system like crazy, so a more vigorous person, those guys were more likely to die. Victims fell ill in the morning and died that night.”
“Like on the Montana,” DeBlieu breathed.
“Yeah. And like on the Anna. Those guys probably didn’t know they were infected when they sailed off. Other Riley troops got sent to Europe. The disease amplified there, in the trenches,” Eddie said. “But it didn’t stay in the trenches. In the end, five hundred million infected. Twenty to fifty million dead, some estimates go as high as eighty million. It changed the war, altered battle plans, killed more people in one year than the black plague did in four. Fifteen thousand dead in Philadelphia. Theaters closed across the U.S. Schools closed. If the war hadn’t been on, taken up the headlines, every schoolkid in the U.S. would know this story. But it was downplayed at the time. Oh, you knew that people in your city were sick, in your family, but no one outside of governments knew the whole picture.”
I said, remembering photos we’d seen, “Crowds, people were too afraid to congregate. Cops and firemen stopped going to work in places. In some countries the dead were bulldozed into pits. The flu burned across earth. Hell, go to a New York Yankees game in September 1918, half the people in the stands wore masks. Neighbors avoided each other. In parts of Alaska, Eskimo villages suffered a ninety-five percent death rate. Alaska — the Eskimos — got it the worst.”
DeBlieu said, aghast, “How did they stop it?”