“Mr. Sachs, you’re a jerk under normal conditions, but pretty damn good in an emergency,” I said.
He grinned with an almost pathetic look of gratefulness, a broad sunny smile, and I saw his past in that moment; I saw other, bigger kids making fun of him when he was young, on a Boston street corner. I saw skinny Andrew being chased down a street outside of a school. I saw nerdy Andrew in college, winning A grades but looking yearningly at the baseball field. And later taking refuge in officialdom, as many in Washington do. What’s the old saying? Politics is show business for ugly people? All those power brokers on the surface walking around, chests thrust forward, thinking, inside where you can’t see, I’m big now. I’m smart. So how come I still feel like that jerk of a kid?
An hour later, Eddie and I had twenty men lined up in the lab, sleeves rolled up past their elbows; all Montana crew who had survived the outbreak. We dabbed forearms with alcohol-soaked cotton balls. We inserted needles into blue veins. We measured out blood into test tubes and stoppered the stuff; each container holding antibodies to whatever strain of flu was rampant on this ship.
But I felt like a medieval doctor, a barber with a knife and slimy leeches, about to do things to patients that would never be permitted in a modern hospital. I knew that if one of the men we’d taken blood from was infected with HIV, I’d be dooming anyone to whom I gave that preventive shot.
We diluted the collected blood with plasma from sick bay, to help supply other immunity proteins. Then we took the vials downstairs to the hangar, and the needles, about forty of them still in wrappers, and we also carried bottles of rubbing alcohol. We’d flush the needles with saline and autoclave the parts after each shot.
As we started going cot to cot, administering the shots, Eddie looked up at one of the hangar cameras, but he wasn’t really thinking about watchers on the bridge. “Hey! Hey, Zhou! You! Two orders of kung pao chicken, with an extra container of rice! And no MSG like last time!”
Elsewhere on the ship, I knew, DeBlieu had ordered sheets laid over computers, in case the cameras were being operated remotely. He’d ordered quadruple duct tape layers and foam padding over computer microphone openings, and all mikes turned off, or at least set that way.
Still, I had the disembodied feeling, at all times, that foreign eyes watched me, that we were on a TV screen somewhere, maybe with a Shanghai street outside the viewer’s window, maybe a military base near the Vietnamese border, or outside Beijing. Now Lieutenant Colonel Rush is examining another patient. Now Lieutenant Colonel Rush is shaking his head; he looks frustrated, exhausted. Now a man in row number two has died, and two Marines are carrying him out, covered with a blanket.
Another hour passed.
And another.
No change in the patients, I thought. But it’s still too soon. Wait until tomorrow. Give it time.
Eddie and I took a break, went outside, mugs of strong Maxwell House in hand. The ice was gone now. We were 140 miles, maybe eight more hours, from shore, if we maintained speed. The water had a light chop, a low, early moon sneered at us above, and suddenly I saw in the sky aurora borealis, as luminous streaks of emerald lights began pulsating above. I’d never seen one this clear. I was in another universe. The clarity was beyond comprehension, and all around it, day as night and night as day, earth’s processes all mixed in an Arctic blender, a million stars, each one a hint of more that you could not see, far stars, burned stars, dangerous stars, as many stars as microbes. Each one a private world.
A shooting star streaked into aurora borealis, seemed to be consumed and burned by it, then reappeared as a smear that dropped below the curve of earth and was gone. And then, to starboard, only a mile off, I saw solid whiteout. The planet was gone.
Maybe the inoculations will need a little more time.
The ship’s medical officer Janice Cullen suddenly appeared on deck with us, not even having put on a parka. Her face looked flushed. I thought she was ill at first, but then, for the first time, saw animation instead of fear or exhaustion. She was gripping the hand railing. But the eyes were bright, and I thought I saw — at least for an instant — what to me seemed like hope.
“Something is happening in the hangar,” she said in a breathy voice. “You better come look.”
“The serum?” I said. “So fast?”
“No, not the serum. It’s… it’s actually… Colonel, I’m not sure just what it is,” she said. “But you have to come see for yourself. See for yourself!”
She turned without waiting for an answer, and hurried into the hangar.
Heart slamming against my ribs, I followed, hearing Eddie’s bootfalls behind.
TWENTY-FIVE
Watching the soldiers refuel the fighter plane was so cool!
In Barrow, Seth Itta, age nine, and Leo Nuna, also age nine, best friends, peered out the window in the North Slope Rescue Squad office on the second floor of the squad’s hangar at the airport, at the recently lengthened runway and tarmac and the fascinating, gleaming predator-shaped plane that had landed thirty minutes before, and was now parked below.
The lone runway was empty, the brown tundra grass waving behind it, a big white owl there, staring back. Yesterday’s Alaska Air flight to Anchorage had left an hour ago — delayed by mechanical problems — and no private planes were due in, and the wind outside scuffed the tops of high grasses, and blew the red wind sock to the southwest.
“It’s an F22,” announced Seth.
“How do you know?” challenged Leo.
“Because Uncle Elmore showed me pictures. He fixes those things in Anchorage. He says they can go over a thousand miles an hour. He says they’re the fastest thing in the sky.”
Outside, in early September, it was light again, twenty-seven degrees, but it was one of those rare days when aurora borealis, the northern lights, was so strong that the sky rippled green lines that undulated above the ocean, and tundra to the south, shimmering and snaking and luminescent even during daylight.
Their third-grade teacher had said that aurora borealis was caused by “sunspots,” huge gas explosions on the sun, and that this year there were “extra strong” sunspots, and that was why the lights could be seen even during the day. He’d said this year’s display was the best the North Slope had seen in twenty years.
Normally the light show would have captivated the boys, but it paled beside the fighter jet. Flown-in Air Force crew had driven the fuel truck out to it, attached the hose, and were pumping in gas.
“Where are the bombs?” Leo asked Seth.
“Inside the plane, dummy!” announced Seth.
“Why do you think the plane is here?”
“Why do you think? To blow up bad guys! My grandfather was talking about walrus ivory smugglers last night, over by Wainright. Men from Nome. Maybe the bombs will blow their boats out of the water, like, boom! No more smugglers killing walrus!”
Seth made an explosion noise and swept some papers into the air, as if the explosion had dislodged them.
“Dead smugglers!” shouted Leo.
“Bust ’em to pieces!” cried Seth.
And then another voice, a male voice, and an unfamiliar one said quietly, “What are you two doing up here?”