White Plague (7 page)

The smoke didn’t kill them. Or is it killing them now?

I recoiled as my light beam hit the dead face of another monkey in the hallway; bled out, belly blasted open, ears a mass of clotted blood.

Did the doctors open the cages before they left? Did they leave because the cages opened accidentally, or because we were getting closer? Are these animals contagious, and if they are, will our suits protect us?

Each time we opened a door, we stepped back and waited for a charging animal. A pharmacy closet had been looted of drugs. The doctors’ quarters were equipped with DVDs and TV sets, refrigerators, porno and religious magazines.

The operating room had two tables, a small one for a child, or monkey, I guess, the other one for a larger primate or human adult. Built into both were bloodied iron manacles for hands and feet. There were vials on shelves and an electron microscope. I saw drawers labeled in Arabic. I smelled urine, shit, fear.

I opened the next door. The screaming exploded.

At least a hundred monkeys were inside, in cramped cages, on tables spread along four long aisles. I walked the aisles, horrified, disgusted, terrified, hoping the hot air in my suit remained clean. I saw animals with bloated stomachs and blood leaking from their ears, noses, mouths. I saw monkeys dead in cages, popped open at the intestines, flies buzzing by their heads. The live ones panicked, grabbing bars, possibly driven insane by what was going on around them, or by their treatment.

Monkeys watched me with eyes too sick to care. Monkeys lay in their own shit. Monkeys reached through bars like condemned prisoners, beseeching another species for help, with those pink human-like hands.

One male, the biggest, went berserk, throwing himself at me, trying to smash through his cage, when I looked into his eyes.
Crabeater monkeys
,
I’d learn later. An Asian variety hunted in the swamps of the Philippines and shipped to labs all over the world.

I gagged but held it in. One of my guys was puking in a hallway. His mask was off. I sent him up top, fast. I was snapping photos for our major. Panic was trying to get out of my chest, into my thinking.
What more do I need to do?

I felt something land on my shoulder and I whirled and it was Eddie. I felt better for a moment until I saw, behind him, like a ghost, through curling smoke, a man charging him, no, not a man because it was coming too fast.

My M16 was going up. Eddie saw it, threw himself left. The creature was in the air, canines bared, and it would have landed on his neck but my shots drove it sideways and into the wall and it slid down, whimpering and thrashing, torn and bloody, and a moment later it was still.

Eddie stared down in horror. “Shit. If it bit me . . .”

“Get out,” I ordered everyone, having had enough.

We retreated, all of us, before invisible microbes.

Then I ordered the place blown up, used flamethrowers on the wreckage, and watched it burn.

That night we lay by our vehicles below the stars, when they weren’t obscured by smoke from burning oil fields. The temperature had dropped but we couldn’t make our own fire, and risk alerting stray fedayeen
that we were here. Tomorrow we’d rejoin the main column. Tonight everyone who had been below was wondering the same thing, and fear floated among my men like airborne germs.

Private Lionel Pettibone, nineteen, asked me, “Did you see the monkey with the stomach busted open, Lieutenant?”

“I’m sure you won’t catch it,” I lied.

“But I took my mask off! I breathed the air! It smelled funny! Was it chemical or germs?”

“I don’t know, Lionel. The docs will check you out.”

“Oh man, why did I take that fucking mask off?”

I wanted to know this new enemy. I wanted to answer his questions. When I’d joined the Marines, I’d envisioned foes as two-legged, but now saw that they might be invisible, yet do more damage, if unleashed, than an atomic bomb.

I lay awake, thinking about my wife, my beautiful young wife back in North Carolina. I thought about my parents and friends. I saw the crowded cities, Chicago’s Loop and Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, except in my head, the crowds were screaming like the monkeys, bleeding and convulsing.

“Lieutenant, I’m getting a sore throat!”

“You had a sore throat yesterday, Platt. Remember?”

There was no way to know that the knowledge I sought would, in the end, drive me from all the people who, at that moment, I wanted to protect. My wife. My lovely wife. Average people. Poker pals. Kids I’d grown up with.

Eddie lay a few feet away, in a sleeping bag.

“We’ll know in a few days if we’ll get sick,” I told Pettibone, who was unable to sleep.

In ROTC, and at Quantico, I’d learned facts about toxic warfare: symptoms, delivery systems and antidotes and gestation periods. But it had not been real, not like what I’d seen today.

The sickness was monkey hemorrhagic fever
,
I’d learn months later, when interrogators discovered the truth.
It doesn’t kill humans, but the Iraqi docs were trying to figure out how to make it jump species, mixing it with common colds.

“I want,” I told Eddie suddenly, “to work on toxics.”

“Great minds think alike, Number One.”

“You, too?”

“Hey, it’s another chance to beat you out.”

We’d seen a weapon that was so horrible that most people don’t want to know about it, a weapon grown in glass tubes, sought in jungles, farmed by men in white coats. We’d seen up close a possible future that was terrifying. Oh, we’d imagined
something
before, but it was distant, like a movie. You simply leave the theater when it’s done.

We’d seen a weapon that generals desire but no one wants to talk about, a weapon that never marches in proud public military parades.

Eddie grinned. “You saved my life.”

“Are you kidding, Eddie? One taste of your blood, that monkey would have keeled over, man.”

We became best friends that day, not just old roommates.

After all, before that we’d had common experiences and friends, and we’d lived in the same location, but now we had a common enemy.

What can draw people together more than that?

I shot awake. Eddie was shaking me. I lay in my bunk on the
Wilmington
,
remembering where I was, remembering the monkeys becoming human in my dream. Eddie’s face looked concerned through the red nightlights. The porthole was closed. The clock read 9
A.M.
I’d been out for six hours.

All the humor was gone from Eddie’s face, the lines by his mouth standing out, tense, drawn, bad news.

“We heard from the director, Number One, got through to him when the jammers were shut off for ten minutes.”

“Say it.”

“They know.
They found out
. Washington’s picked up something moving toward the sub.”

“The Chinese,” the director said.

Like an armed torpedo zeroing in on us, the red blip on screen turned slowly in our direction, and aimed just north of our yellow boat shape, to intersect. I watched it begin sliding over grid lines superimposed over the Arctic Ocean.

“The
Snow Dragon
is their first icebreaker. The second should be in operation this year,” the director said over the intercom box on the captain’s conference table.

The pressure in my chest mounted as I eyed another blip, this one green, pulsating in the sea.

“It is also possible that the Chinese have a Jin-class nuclear-powered submarine somewhere in the Arctic, but we’re not sure. They’re not usually up there with subs, but last we heard, it was headed in that direction, weeks ago.”

The somber-eyed group of ten around the conference table included Eddie and me, Dr. Karen Vleska, Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Andrew Sachs, Marietta Cristobel, and Clinton Toovik, our ice experts. On the crew side, with DeBlieu, sat his executive officer, a competent-looking fortyish man named Gordon Longstreet, and his communications officer, Brooklynite Lieutenant Peter Del Grazo, who managed to seem cheery despite the danger. Major Donald Pettit sat on my left. It was time for the key players to know the big picture.

The screen changed to the actual
Snow Dragon
,
its hull red, its superstructure white. Arctic ships tend to be painted colors that stand out. The icebreaker was smashing through three-foot-thick ice, pushing chunks the size of boulders left and right, seeming to bull off the screen and drive straight at us.

The director briefed us dryly. “The Chinese are not an Arctic nation but they have huge interest in new shipping or attack routes around the top of the continent, and in access to seabottom oil. They’re investing in a deepwater harbor in Iceland. The
Snow Dragon
may be carrying troops for ice maneuvers, although usually it’s just scientists. Their top speed roughly equals yours.”

“So it’s a toss-up who gets there first?” Eddie asked.

The director sighed. “It could come down to minutes. Get as close as you can. If the ice blocks you, send a party on foot, or in those vehicles, depending on terrain.”

My mouth was dry. Major Pettit had switched off our jammers for the conference, after an announcement went out prohibiting unauthorized calls or e-mails from the ship.

In the brief window we had now, Marietta had checked in with Maryland for updated ice information. Sachs had called Washington. He had a look of anger on his face. It probably related to why, with an international incident possible, the director was on screen, not someone from State.

The director just glanced left, so someone else is in the room with him. Someone higher up, I bet.

The director, on H Street, went in and out of focus, as if the storm ahead infused itself onto the screen. Snow-like interference drifted across his face, which degenerated into lines resembling wind-pushed current; as the High North played with us, just as it had teased sailors for centuries.
You’re not so different from hundreds of others. They were as confident as you.

I asked, “Sir, do we know how the Chinese found out?” I hoped to eliminate the
Wilmington
as a source.

The blocky head—ex-college fullback—shook side to side. “We got word that they know, that’s all. You. Electric Boat. Washington.”

Button up your ship
, he was saying.

I asked, “Has Beijing asked to help?”

His smile was half visible through the interference, and sour. “Oh, we’re both pretending that nothing is going on, so in a worst-case scenario, it stays private.”

That’s why State isn’t the lead. Is someone from the White House with the director, then? Homeland Security?

Andrew Sachs spoke up shrilly. “Worst case?
Combat?
”

The director sounded exhausted, leaned left, and seemed to consult someone, then was back. “Our Navy and theirs are facing off more regularly in the South China Sea. And you, Secretary Sachs, know better than anyone that a Chinese sub collided with one of our destroyers during Pacific maneuvers last month. We had no idea they were there until then. But they said we did it on purpose. They lost twenty-eight crew. So . . . under these circumstances, things can go wrong. Big storm blowing. Tempers hot. Our sky eyes blind. Then guns go off. The apologies come later, and diplomats make nice, and the scapegoats who were positioned all along to take a fall go down,
but they have the
Montana.”

Sachs seemed shocked. “That’s absurd! Take some responsibility! If you tell your people to stand back, they’ll stand back.”

The director said coldly, “It’s our people, our sub. We’re not the ones who will stand back.”

“Even if you start a war?”

“Don’t be dramatic.” The director sighed. Sachs was trying his patience. But the director was a political animal and clearly knew he was talking to the Secretary of State himself through Sachs. “Like I said
,
excessive zeal by officers, human error, soldiers shooting blind in a storm, et cetera et cetera. It stops short of war.”

Sachs stared. “You’re setting this up for a fight.”

“I don’t consider forethought a setup.”

I asked, eyeing the Chinese icebreaker, “Those projections you’re showing us, sir, are they actual ship locations or computer guesses?”

“Last known position, coupled with current, wind, floe direction.” The director brightened. “Conditions are pushing our sub in your direction. But reaching her first may depend on ice. So! Marietta! Where are we on that?”

Ice
,
I thought morosely. It looks hard; it has the geometry of rock. You can walk on it and climb it, but it is always moving. Sometimes you see the movement. Sometimes you don’t. Imagine a city block constantly drifting. You walk outside and the supermarket is a hundred yards north of where it was yesterday. Then it drifts back fifty yards. Then the block splits in two, and the traffic light goes one way, and you, across the street, move the other. The landscape has viscosity. Solid is a lie, one more mirage.

Now, Marietta typed on her keypad and the picture on screen split: director on the left, sat shot on the right, a jagged white peacock shape; a grid superimposed over it, like a wire fence. The grid, she said, divided three thousand square miles into pixels. I saw a few patches of black spilling across lines. I saw a blotchy gray area containing darker speckles. It was like looking through a microscope at virus growing in a specimen of mold.

America’s foremost ice expert fingered an unlit cigar, worrying it like prayer beads. She still wore the baggy clothes she’d been in when we met. “This is our last projection, nineteen hours old. We’ve had problems with reception because the sats keep dropping into standby mode due to solar flares. They shut down during periods of intense activity to avoid damage. So! Aqua, our most advanced eye, uses microwave scanning. Each pixel represents a six-by-six-kilometer area; good overall, but when we get close, problems start. You see, if Aqua picks up sixty-five percent ice cover in one box, the computer turns the whole pixel white. Less than sixty-five percent, black. So if we’re heading for an area with only sixty percent cover, but it’s big, ship-killing stuff, the computer thinks it’s ice free. In the end, we need human eyes or the drone to know exactly what lies ahead.”

I said, “Then how do we pick the best route?”

Her mouth was a tight line of frustration. “Using luck. And Clinton.”

The director asked, “What are those gray masses?”

“Gaps in information due to the solar disturbances.”

Eddie sniffed. “This is the best we can do?”

“If we had more money, we could do better,” she said bitterly. “Also, Aqua sends photos every five hours. So even when everything is working perfectly, it’s possible that we’re making decisions based on hours-old information, since the ice keeps moving all the time.”

Captain DeBlieu raised a finger, like an engineer worrying a technical question. “Can you change the speed of transmissions, get them at, say, thirty-minute intervals instead of five hours?”

“No, that ability would have cost more. NASA was ordered to streamline costs during Iraq and the fiscal crisis. They ate up all kinds of capabilities. Don’t get me started.”

The director’s lips were a hard line, and I knew that he was cursing inwardly. I’d had this discussion with him plenty of times over beers.
We’ve been warning Congress for years that we need better equipment, Joe, and they never give it. Washington’s gridlocked. Sooner or later something like this had to happen.

“Thank you, Dr. Cristobel,” said the director.

She smiled unhappily. “For what?”

Thinning light seeped in through the cabin’s portholes. DeBlieu’s walls were hung with photos—mug shots of the Arctic that would have been lovely in an art gallery, but were daunting just now. One old shot showed a snow-swept ice sheet, jagged icebergs, in sepia, nature’s pillars, trapping a twin-masted steamer between them, circa 1931, like massive pincers.

The framed shot beside it showed an ice storm, thousands of pellets driven sideways to create a translucent curtain half obscuring a trio of roped-together scientists tap-tapping their way like blind men, with walking probes, over a floe. Astounding beauty, but it reduced humans to insignificance. The scientists in the photo had about as much presence as a lone flake of snow.

The director said, “Dr. Vleska, your turn.”

She sat directly across from me, projecting an image of a Virginia-class nuclear sub on screen. The long black tube resembled an immense eel, and featured a jutting egg-shaped mast about a fifth of the way aft.

I thought that Karen’s lips looked nice.

She said, “The Chinese know what’s on our sub in theory, because it’s public, but not how it works. So you might as well know, too.”

Her voice was soft and she’d changed into a red and black checkered flannel shirt over a black wool turtleneck that showed an inch of soft throat. She seemed petite and fresh from sleep. Her hair was worn long, its silvery mass draped over small shoulders, probably brushing her seat cushion. Her hands were small, but rough, strong, an outdoorswoman’s. I saw a pale band of whiter skin on the fourth finger of the left hand. A wedding or engagement ring had been removed recently and left a mark.

Click.
The torpedo was shaped like a large, finned, green baseball bat, tapered from narrow tail to front. “The new prototype Mark 80,” she said, “capable, while closing on a target, of calculating hull mass and detonating at optimum standoff distance, guaranteeing the best chance of destruction. Best torpedo on Earth.”

Click.
Two subs passed each other, underwater. “Our acoustic countermeasures are way ahead of Beijing’s.”

Her eyes met mine. I had not noticed the gray flecks in the blue before. “The
Montana
is whisper quiet from electromagnetic signature reduction. The enemy may detect her presence, but has no way to determine which exact unit she is, no way to track specific boats.”

Eddie piped up, “Any way to do that for people, so I can keep the director from knowing where I am?”

Marietta and DeBlieu laughed. Sachs rolled his eyes. Karen Vleska smiled. “I know what you mean,” she said.

“The Virginia class has been modified for combat in littoral waters, shallow ones like those in the Mideast or the areas around Taiwan. She can slip inside the enemy’s air defense and unleash salvos of up to sixteen tomahawk missiles. She’s less detectable on the surface with the periscope gone. She uses a mast-mounted photonics array instead. She’s got hull-mounted mine detection. The acquisition by an enemy of this craft would jeopardize thousands of U.S. military personnel around the world, and our ability to wage war. When we get there, I go in first to check things, and you all wait outside.”

I started. I’d not envisioned taking her in, or taking her at all if we had to go on foot. “Dr. Vleska,” I reasoned, “you have to understand . . . conditions won’t be optimum. I suggest the Marines and I go first, and once we secure the boat—”

“No! There are things I need to do before anyone else can enter.”

The director remained silent. Why didn’t he stop her? I started to say, “You don’t understand . . .” but noticed Lieutenant Del Grazo, across from me, grinning.

“Do you mind explaining what’s so funny?” I snapped.

His and Vleska’s eyes met. They seemed to share something amusing. I felt an irrational stab of jealousy, even while I waited to hear what the hell was going on.

Del Grazo said, grin broadening, “Karen
Vleska,
Colonel.
Vleska.
Remember? She’s
that
Karen Vleska.”

Marietta Cristobel let out a sharp breath. “That’s
you?
”
she said, staring at the submarine expert.

I was baffled. But now Eddie got it, too, sat back and turned to me, joined in the grin festival, at my expense. “Colonel, she’s probably got more polar experience than all of us together. She was on that expedition to the North Pole two years ago, the skiers . . .
Fifty Nights . . .
the documentary. Won the Oscar. All-woman expedition. Remember?”