Bending by his bed, mask on, she helped Clinton to drink water from a glass. Keep them hydrated. And thanks to the Chinese, we had plenty of antivirals, at least something good had come from that confrontation, and she stuffed a squeeze-bottle nozzle into each nostril, sprayed, and left the medicine on a makeshift night table, a wooden crate, within Clinton’s reach. Each patient had one. They displayed eyeglasses, pill vials, even, as in a real hospital, donated books or magazines from the crew.
On Clinton’s crate lay a copy of Outside magazine. The cover showed a happy couple cross-country skiing over a snow field. ADVENTURES IN THE OPENING ARCTIC! the headline read.
His cough sprayed mucus. His blanket was stained with vomit. Our masks had been coated with disinfectant, so I smelled that mostly, not the effluence of the ill.
This man had saved our lives and I remembered — ministering to him — what Eddie had told me. In 1918, the death rate from Spanish flu in Eskimo villages had reached 98 percent. Alaska’s indigenous people had been among the worst hit. It made sense. Their numbers, since contact with Westerners, had been decimated by flu and other illnesses that might cause a single week of discomfort in Ohio, but kill in the High North.
“Swollen,” I said, probing lymph nodes in Clinton’s neck. “Get an extra blanket, he’s practically convulsing.”
“None left,” said Cullen.
“Then a parka. Get extra jackets sent in here. Sweaters. Jackets. Anything the crew can donate, to help keep ’em warm. And leave all clothing outside, in the halls. Nobody new comes in here.”
Cullen looked at DeBlieu for confirmation, and the captain nodded stiffly.
I told him, standing up, “It’s too late to put anyone off. We don’t know who’s infected, including us. So unless you’re prepared to empty this whole hangar, all hundred-plus people here — you, too — we stay.”
DeBlieu looked like he was going to hit me. His breath vaporized with each exhalation. The sounds around us seemed magnified: wheezing, coughing. Someone moaned for “Linda.” Someone was throwing up.
DeBlieu said, in a low voice so people around us would not hear dissension, “Goddamn you.”
I bent down to the patient. “Clinton?”
His oval eyes were bloodshot, only vaguely attentive.
“Clinton, where do you hurt?”
He focused weakly. “Name a place.”
“Where’s it the worst?”
“Take my wife’s phone number, for when you can call out. Give her a message.”
“No need for that. We’ll get that fever lowered and you’ll call her yourself soon.”
His tongue was coated with blue. His cough was steady, wet, and hideous.
Clinton closed his eyes. “Don’t go to Barrow,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t bring us ashore. I have two kids. I have a wife. I know what’s happening, Colonel. The elders told us what happened when their grandparents were kids, and got sick after being around whalers. You’re all whalers.”
Meaning outsiders. Like me. “Don’t count yourself out, my friend,” I said, the word “friend” bitter in my mouth. “I’m going to take your blood, okay? Check it in the lab.”
Clinton stared at me blankly. I thought the fever was taking him. Then he said, “We don’t have funeral homes in Barrow, you know. We bury our own dead, Colonel Rush.”
Major Pettit stepped into my path as we reached the stairway to the labs. Like the other Marines, he wore a medical apron and gloves. I tried to brush past. Pettit kept his voice low. “A moment, sir?”
Ten feet off, I saw Andrew Sachs mopping the brow of one of the sick. Karen Vleska was applying ice — no shortage of that here — to a feverish head. I kept hearing Clinton’s words in my mind and they seared me. Had I made a mistake, jeopardized everyone here because I felt guilty over what I did in Afghanistan? Had I let personal problems get in the way of professional judgment? That’s what they were thinking. The director. DeBlieu. Clinton. Everyone.
“I’m in a hurry, Major. If it’s not urgent…”
“Sir, I just wanted to say—”
“Get it out.”
He stood straighter, and his words vaporized as they emerged. “Colonel, I was wrong about you. I apologize for what I said before. I’m proud to serve with you and so are the men. They asked me to tell you. Marines don’t leave wounded behind. You don’t leave your people behind.”
Stunned, I stared at my ex-wife’s lover, and saw, in his eyes, a tough Marine’s respect. He was the last person I would have thought would back me up, on anything.
I said gruffly, “That’s not urgent, Major.”
I pushed past, keeping my eyes averted, so no one could see tears I blinked back, stupid tears, I thought, enraged. Stupid, idiot tears.
The only good thing about the United States having only one icebreaker was that whoever stocked it made sure its labs came with the best equipment — including an electron microscope, used normally, DeBlieu had said, to analyze walrus blood, or southern fish species moving north, or bottom sediment that the ship dredged up, as scientists tried to gather information to support a U.S. claim for undersea territory at the UN.
Now it would help me look at Clinton’s blood.
The apparatus had its own room, and looked nothing like the old handheld microscope my parents had given me as a birthday present when I was eleven years old. It was built into a six-foot desk, and consisted of a periscope-shaped tower, dial controls, twin eyepiece, as in a periscope, and two monitor screens on which the produced image would show up.
I would not see Clinton’s blood directly, as in a normal microscope. I would be looking at a 3-D picture.
Well, the director was right about one thing, and that’s the quality of my thumb drive encyclopedia. I found no shortage of electron mike photos of Spanish flu cells. They’ve been widely published since 2005, when doctors at the CDC reconstituted some from a corpse dug up in Alaska. Let’s see if Clinton’s blood looks the same. That would confirm we’re dealing with the 1918 strain.
I injected some of Clinton’s sample onto a petri dish. I inserted the sample into the vacuum compartment and closed the tiny door, six inches up in the microscope tower. I flipped a switch, heard a hum as power came on. Hitting a second switch, I envisioned a stream of high-voltage electrons — shot by a gun — spraying down from the top, through a condenser lens onto the dish. The electrons would pass through and then widen out in a cone shape, like moving shotgun pellets, to be reconstituted — as in a copy machine — onto a fluorescent screen that I watched, riveted, through the eyepiece.
The electron beams created a 3-D image of Clinton’s blood, magnified twenty thousand times.
I heard myself breathing. On monitor one was the original Spanish flu; enlarged into a small armada of brown ovoid submarine shapes floating toward a wildly exotic-looking sprouting of long green undersea leaves. I was in a nano-world, and the rounded surfaces of the attackers were covered with sharp spikes, like mines.
The magnified leaves were actually cilia, microscopic hairs lining the lungs of a pig infected with reconstituted virus. The brown floaters were flu microbes, incoming to infect.
Enlarged to 100,000 magnification, the undersea landscape disappeared to be replaced by clusters of cells, rod or ovoid shaped, red with dye, looking like massed versions of what you see in a lava lamp, stretching and contracting and dividing into new cells, as they attacked the healthy cells of the pig. Each invading cell contained a jellylike center, its nucleic acid, surrounded by a protective layer, a thin capsid.