I shook my head. “They never did. It just ran out. It morphed into something less lethal. But the fear has always been that it will come back, in the original form. The question… we got this at the unit, in seminars, we read papers about it, it comes up at conferences. If it didn’t have a name like flu, if it had a name like plague, believe me, you’d have heard of it. The question is, the fear has been, for a hundred years, if that flu comes back, can we stop it this time?”
DeBlieu said, “But it died out, you said?”
And Eddie said, “So did the black plague. First it appeared in 600 A.D. in Turkey. Then it came back in 1347, in Europe. Then it died out again. Then it returned in 1890, in China and India. Each time, millions died.”
“And now the Spanish flu is back,” I said.
Eddie said, “The White Plague.”
DeBlieu fell into a chair. For a moment nobody spoke. Then DeBlieu said, struggling with hope, “Well, we’ve got better medicines now, right? I mean, in 1918, doctors didn’t know a lot compared to now.”
“Right,” I said.
“Like those sprays and pills you’re treating patients with in the hangar. All new. Wasn’t even penicillin in 1918. So you can’t compare now and then.”
“Definitely,” Eddie said. “You’re right.”
“So this time,” DeBlieu said, fantasizing, “tell me that even if it’s the flu, this will be like other diseases that once were dangerous, but aren’t anymore. Polio. Cholera. Terrifying in the past, but now pretty much gone. You can beat it. That’s why you took the sick aboard. You have a whole arsenal of medicines. We’re just looking at something scary in the past.”
Eddie was expressionless. I sighed. What we faced downstairs from the lab represented precisely the prediction we’d made to the Defense Department that had brought me to the director’s attention five years ago. That a disease would erupt in the High North, not the Tropics.
I said, “I wish I could tell you that, Captain. But if we’re seeing bodies from Fort Riley, we’re dealing with the original strain. And we have no idea if people in the last hundred years have built up resistance to it, or whether, you know…”
Eddie added morosely, “Or whether we’re looking at an even more lethal mutation.”
DeBlieu argued doggedly, as if trying to change fact, “But if you’ve all been expecting it, why hasn’t anyone worked on it all these years?”
“How can you work on it when you don’t have samples of the original strain? Look, Captain, just in the last two years researchers have unearthed old corpses, flu victims, in Alaska, Russian Eskimo villages, trying to reconstruct the virus. It’s been controversial. Some scientists fear that could start an outbreak in itself. But the benefits were supposed to outweigh the risk, and truth is, some virus has been reconstructed, but not the original strain. Not what we have here.”
Eddie said, glancing down, as if he could see through the deck to the makeshift hospital ward in the hangar. “Now we’ll find out, I guess.”
DeBlieu, horrified, was reeling from the impact. He said, in a low, enraged voice, “You brought it onto my ship?”
“We didn’t know that’s what it was until five minutes ago. And we weren’t going to abandon U.S. sailors on the ice. Look, we keep watching the film,” I soothed. “Maybe there’s something here that tells us what to do. An antidote. Something they didn’t even know but we’ll know when we see it.”
“If they had an antidote, don’t you think they would have used it?” DeBlieu demanded, backing away.
“Maybe they didn’t know they had it. Maybe they only got seventy percent of the work done, but we can do the rest. Meanwhile, like you said, we’ve got new medicines. And we’ll try them. We’re using them right now.”
“Maybe,” DeBlieu repeated, as if the word, the doubt in the word “maybe,” represented an affront to his sense of right.
“Maybe is the best we can do,” I told him.
The enormity of the revelation seemed to suck air from the lab. DeBlieu absorbed the blow physically. He stood absolutely still, a vein throbbing on his forehead. He was an engineer by training, the commander entrusted with keeping the nation’s lone icebreaker safe. The competing pressures inside him had to be enormous — the responsibility to his crew, the training stressing rescue. DeBlieu stared down at the bits of film, as if the celluloid itself crawled with a mass of microbes.
I’d expected to see fear on his face. Or hardness. But not sadness. That was what entered the brown, intelligent eyes. “No, the best we can do, Colonel, is that I’m pulling my people from the hangar. I’m sorry about the patients. I’m sorry they’re sick. I have a different responsibility. You will remove every one of those patients and put them back on the ice,” he said.
Eddie said, “What ice? We’re past the tough ice. We’re closing on Barrow. What do you want us to do, put them in a life raft?”
DeBlieu stood straighter, moved back a step. “Do what you have to do,” he said with disconcerting decisiveness. “But get them off. Meanwhile, Colonel, I’m afraid I’m going to have to relieve you of command.”
I jerked up sharply.
He said, “My orders — as you know — were to relinquish control to you unless I felt there was a danger to the ship.”
“Captain, we don’t have time to argue over—”
“I agree completely. So we’ll find a stable area of ice, or even if we can’t, we will — no, sorry — your Marines — will remove the sick from the ship, unload them onto the ice, or rafts, along with whatever provisions will make them more comfortable. Medicines, tents, heating, whatever you need, if we have it, you’ll have it.”
“It’s a bit late for that,” I told him.
As if to punctuate the point, Del Grazo appeared suddenly in the doorway, looking disheveled, looking as if he was trying not to seem afraid. It wasn’t working.
“Colonel Rush, you better come. Clinton is really sick,” he said.
TWENTY
“Do you think Colonel Rush will watch the film?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” The director nodded. “He’s too dedicated not to do it, orders or not.”
It was dusk in Washington, and the lights remained off in the third-floor corner office of the four-story townhouse, diagonally across from the White House, on the north side of Lafayette Park. Outside, temperatures topped ninety-two degrees, and a gray, smoggy urban light — part sun, part rush-hour effluence — filtered in through mesh curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows.
During prior administrations, lesser White House officials had occupied this building, Council for the Environment, Council on Safety in the Workplace.
But the current National Security Advisor, Dr. A. R. Klinghoff of Michigan State University, the “Kissinger of the twenty-first century,” as pundits called him, preferred the weathered but homey building to the more impersonal gray, massive, Eisenhower-era, ornate, too-hot-in-winter, too-air-conditioned-in-summer Executive Office Building across Pennsylvania Avenue.
Klinghoff was the youngest son of World War Two — era Viennese refugees, a professor and a civil lawyer, who fled the Nazis when Germany took over that country in 1938. He had grown up hearing dinner table stories of the bad things that happen when overt threats are ignored, and had made a career of predicting how to cope with them.
All five people present — they’d been at this discussion for more than eight hours — were old enough to remember a time when the view outside included cars moving on Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, along an area now turned into a pedestrian mall shielded from truck bombers by concrete barriers. All here were acutely aware of the way the lockdown of official Washington had grown over the last two decades. Each person present had a responsibility relating to national security. Each had, in their own way, inherited the nation’s nightmares.