Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

BERKLEY TITLES BY JAMES ABEL

WHITE PLAGUE

PROTOCOL
ZERO

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375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Reiss.

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eBook ISBN 978-0-698-16894-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Abel, James.

Protocol zero / James Abel.—First edition.

pages; cm

ISBN 978-0-425-27634-1

I. Title.

PS3568.E517P76 2015

813’.54—dc23

2015007878

FIRST EDITION:
August 2015

Cover design by Richard Hasselberger.

Cover photo:
Ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules
© Stocktrek Images/Getty.

Endpaper map by Virginia Norey.

Interior art:
Aerial view of tundra near Arctic Ocean
© by George Burba/Shutterstock.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The author would like to thank the following people for giving generously of their time during the research and writing of
Protocol Zero
.

Thanks to James Grady, Phil Gerard, and Charles Salzberg, terrific writers and friends, for story advice, or for reading the manuscript.

To Dr. Charles Rupprecht, thanks hugely for talking to me about rabies. And to Dr. Fred Tilden, thanks for staying on the phone late at night, planning injuries to Joe Rush.

In Barrow, thanks to former Mayor Edward Itta, and to whaler, geologist, musician, and executive Richard Glenn. Thanks to the scientists of the North Slope Wildlife Department. Thanks to Harry Brower of the Alaskan Whaling Commission. And to Glenn Shehaan, who keeps science rolling in the High North.

Closer to home, thanks to my dad, Jerome Reiss, and my friends Lizzie Hansen and John Kukulka, for plot advice.

A thousand thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard, America’s Arctic front line, for letting me fly and sail with you.

A thousand thanks to my agents, Esther Newberg and Josie Freedman. And to my terrific editors, Tom Colgan and Amanda Ng. And the whole fantastic team at Berkley.

Finally, to Wendy, with love, thanks.

No character in this book is based on any actual person, living or dead. Any mistakes are mine. PS, the ASRC is a real company, mentioned in the book. The author has only admiration for the way the ASRC has safeguarded the interests of North Slope people.

Anyone interested in learning more about Project Chariot—the plan to create a harbor in the Arctic by blowing up atom bombs—should read the splendid book about it,
The Firecracker Boys
by Dan O’Neill.

The police chief’s emergency call had to bounce off three satellites to reach me. The first—over Russia—was snapping photos of their paratroops by the North Pole, on maneuvers. The second—over Arctic Canada—watched a U.S. attack submarine testing weapons, surfacing in ice. The last one was directly overhead above northern Alaska. North Slope Police Chief Merlin Toovik’s voice came in loud and clear, from nine miles away.

“I need help, Colonel.”

I stood, breath frosting, at the end of North America on a twenty-foot-high grass bluff overlooking the Arctic Ocean, a Mossberg shotgun over my back, in case polar bears showed up. Fire in the air, they usually turn away. My best friend and partner Marine Major Eddie Nakamura and I were trying to figure out what had killed the emaciated male bear at our feet. It looked like death by starvation. I wondered if it had been caused by a new germ.

“You know the victims, Colonel.”

No other people were visible. No buildings or roads were here. The tundra stretched south for three hundred miles to the Brooks Range, in October, in a stark undulating beauty; an ocean of olive-brown high grass, filled with dips and hummocks, and spotted with the withered remains of summer flowers: once-yellow paintbrush, bright firewood, purple Siberian phlox, bell heather, and my true love Karen’s favorite, the white-flowered anemones, which I gathered in bunches like a lovesick teenager. But it was worth her smile. Just about anything was.

The sea, thirty yards off, was black as anthracite and dotted with an early pancake glaze of ice. Locals had told me that the big pack would come in soon, to extend all the way to the pole, eight hundred miles north. The sky was a thick gray, the temperature hovered at thirty-six degrees. The Arctic sun looked as tiny and distant as Pluto. It rotated elliptically, staying low to the horizon, lava-colored but weak, more glow than heat, as if shy, as if frightened. Soon this remote landscape would fade to black beneath three months of night.

“Four people in trouble, Joe,” Merlin said.

Ahead of us rose what looked like a mini Stonehenge; fantastic curving shapes rising up for fifteen feet; spaced as regularly as church organ pipes, and bleached gray by weather. They were bowhead whale ribs. Iñupiat hunters built the bone pile—bulldozing them there twice a year after the fall and spring hunts. The bones attracted hungry polar bears, who cracked the ribs and ate the marrow. The bone pile kept polar bears off of Barrow’s streets, its supermarket parking lot, its backyards, and away from America’s Arctic capital’s kids.

“Joe, they were your neighbors,” Merlin said.

No roads led in or out of Barrow. You arrived by snowmobile or four-wheelers, like we drove today, or you flew in or came by boat during the four months a year when sea ice was relatively clear. The nearest highway was three hundred miles away, at the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay.

The voice said, “Can you bring your medical gear?”

“Couple questions first, Merlin. How did you hear?”

I hit the intercom so that Eddie could listen. He was kneeling by the carcass, looking up, a small skull-saw in his gloved hands, and an unrolled scalpel kit in the grass. This bear had been sick, that much was evident from the fur patches stripped away. But what had killed it? Something usual and natural? Or the type of thing we secretly sought?

Merlin Toovik said, “The daughter called me, hysterical, screaming about sickness. She was crying too hard to make out words. But then I heard a shotgun. And the call went dead.”

“You called back?”

“Yeah, tried both parents, her, too. No one answers.”

“What sickness?” I felt a wave of fear hit my stomach.

“I don’t know. I could barely hear. It was a bad connection. And there were funny noises in the background.”

“Please describe them.”

Eddie was frozen now, frowning.

“Grunting. An animal, maybe, but not one that I know. Too high for a wolf. Too low for a bear. Plus, she was inside their hut, she said, not outside. So whatever made the sounds was in there with her. Right beside her, sounded like. Weirdest, spookiest sounds, Joe.”

Admiral Galli—who ran our small, secret unit—had been adamant when he’d ordered us not to get involved in local matters. Our mission had a public aspect, which Eddie and I had explained to Iñupiat leaders; but it also had a secret component, which we had reluctantly held back.

—For their own good, Joe, the admiral had said.

—Sir, I disagree and think I ought to tell them.

—Not a chance.

We were behind schedule with winter rapidly approaching. We needed to finish our study and go south.

Now, for a fraction of a second, the admiral’s orders warred with Merlin’s plea. I was seeing something in my head and it wasn’t anything my boss said about an upcoming Arctic war game, due to start in the spring, about billions of dollars in weapons appropriations at stake, about national security.
Barrow will be flooded with VIPs, Joe: White House, State, Pentagon. We’re behind the Russians in the race for control. And the Russians are getting belligerent again in Europe. If we don’t get our act together, it will be too late. Something will happen up there, and we won’t be able to handle it.

What I saw in my head was a fifteen-year-old girl, and our neighbors for the last few weeks in the old World War Two–era air base where I’d been stationed with Eddie, where we’d lived in a Quonset hut among the university types who spent summers studying walruses, potential oil finds, ice melt, or, like our neighbors, nothing more threatening than seeds and moss. Our neighbors were a couple with whom we’d become friendly, two professors from a small New Jersey college, Ted and Cathy Harmon, and their daughter, Kelley. The parents were quiet academics who invited us over sometimes for poker games, cocktails, tirades on the warming Arctic, or rose hip tea.

The kid was smart and likable and wanted to be a scientist also. But she was also just a girl who liked normal teenage things. She’d sneak over to our Quonset hut at night—I had given her a key—to watch TV shows that her parents banned next door—
American Idol
,
The Vampire Diaries
—shows that Ted told me would “rot Kelley’s mind.” She also talked for hours with Karen Vleska, my fiancée, who’d flown in to visit a couple of weeks ago.

Cathy Harmon had taken me aside one day, squeezed my shoulder and said, “Thanks for giving Kelley a place to go. Every kid needs a friendly uncle. She doesn’t have real uncles, so you and Eddie seem to be her choice.”

“Colonel,” Merlin said now, urgently. “I’ve got deputies ready and a copter gearing up. I’ve got Dr. Ranjay Sengupta along from the hospital. But I’d appreciate having you and Major Nakamura along, too.”

I wanted to go. “Merlin, are you sure the noise you heard on the phone wasn’t just static?”

A pause. From the silence, I knew I’d insulted him. “I know the difference between static and grunting. Also,” Merlin said, “you and Major Nakamura have been visiting the villages all summer, asking about new diseases, rashes, hives, fevers, right?”

Eddie’s brows rose. Despite the danger, I broke out smiling. It was impossible to hide anything from people here. They were scattered throughout an area the size of Wyoming, a county comprising America’s northernmost outpost. America’s Arctic Serengeti, filled with hundreds of thousands of caribou, wolves, grizzlies, foxes. There were about twenty million birds. But the human population was only 7,500, concentrated in eight small villages, with the capital, Barrow, home to 4,500 Iñupiats and a smattering of whites, blacks, Samoans, and Asians. Although hundreds of miles separated villages somehow the Iñupiats seemed to know everything that outsiders did within days of their arrival. I’d told this to the admiral, advised him to let me speak plainly, warned him that lies backfire here.

Now I admitted, “We’ve asked a few questions about diseases, now and then.”

In his pause I heard desperation. “If you won’t do it for that reason, do it as a favor for me. Their bear guard is my cousin, Joe. Please.”

That did it. People here did not ask favors lightly. Favors were more important than money. Favors were contracts. Favors were life. I told Merlin, “We’re at the bone pile. Give me twenty minutes to get into town.”

“Go to the rescue squad,” Merlin Toovik said, and added, “I’m sure they told you not to do this.”

“I was told to give you every assistance,” I lied.

•   •   •

MY NAME IS JOE RUSH AND YOU WON’T FIND A DESCRIPTION OF MY REAL
job in my files at the Marine Corps. When I was seconded to the unit, my records were sheep-dipped—altered—to contain enough truth to fool a casual observer, the rest lies to protect the Corps, unit, and country from learning things that my bosses in Washington believe you ought not to know. Sometimes I agree with them. But often we fight.

Forty years old, the file says, and that part is correct, at least. Marriage status single; which was true that day, but happily due to change in three months. Six foot two. The photo shows blue-black hair, dark as the coal veins mined by my Welsh great-great-grandfather, eyes as light blue as those of great-great-grandma, daughter of a Norwegian cod fisherman, who met Gramper Bowen on the foredeck of the rusting steamer that brought them into New York Harbor as immigrants, 131 years ago.

They settled in Massachusetts, as the stumpy green Berkshire Hills reminded my ancestor of Wales. I grew up in the dying textiles mill town of Smith Falls, population 250, nestled between a thin, rocky river and a granite quarry, ten miles south of the Vermont line, on a two-lane cracked rural road.

There, generations of Rushes manned the assembly line of Brady Textiles, making button-down shirts in peacetime, Army uniforms during World War Two and Korea and Vietnam, but when the Brady company fled Massachusetts for cheaper labor in Honduras, the Rushes became roofers and plumbers catering to summer-home owners from New York or Boston, who returned to their cities when the air turned chilly each autumn, and I climbed onto the creaky bus heading for my leaky country school.

I thrilled to TV commercials showing Marines—strong, confident men just a few years older than me—storming ashore on foreign beaches, rescuing hurricane victims, safeguarding the flag that we saluted every morning at Colonel David Harding High, named after the Massachusetts Civil War hero, killed during the Union’s failed amphibious landing attempt to capture Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on September 8, 1863.

I never traveled farther than forty miles from home. I had friends, and girlfriends, but their smiles and invitations were, to me, traps to keep me in town.

So I left Smith Falls, and the higher-education part of my file correctly indicates that I attended UMass on an ROTC scholarship. The early Marines history is right, too: Parris Island, Quantico, antiterrorist guerrilla action in the Philippines. All of it real until Iraq and the secret germ lab I stumbled on there with Eddie Nakamura, when we were both lieutenants. The sick monkeys we found there—intentionally infected with disease . . . convulsing, terrified, dying—changed our lives, sent us to medical school, and made us experts on a kind of danger that most people fear, but put in the backs of their minds, not wanting to think about it, not wanting to remember it exists, not wanting to know.

Our enemy became smaller and traveled in vials and hypodermics or on air currents, in subway vents, or in bombs.

Awards? The Silver Star is there for Iraq, and a Navy and Marine Corps medal for actions taken in combat during the global war on terror—although the exact actions I took part in are secret. Our director once said that I’d saved “Thousands of lives, in Afghanistan and in the Arctic. Too bad we can’t release either story, Joe. But we can promote you. You’re young for a full colonel. Congratulations.”

Under “skills” my file says that I can hit a running enemy at three hundred yards with an M4 carbine; and then, thanks to my M.D. degree, extract the bullet, clean the wound, administer antibiotics, and run any field hospital or bio lab in the world, to identify chemicals or germs.

I am also qualified to lead an assault on an enemy bioweapons facility, secure it, decontaminate it, and then interrogate its staffers, and kidnap them home to be tried and hung by military tribunal, under more obscure laws of the Republic. If my skill set seems contradictory to you, you’re getting an idea of why I have fewer friends than I used to, other than Eddie, and my fiancée, Karen. It’s also why my first marriage failed three years back, after I told my wife some things about my job. She’d been my college sweetheart and a loving, patient partner. But that disclosure—my attempt to save the marriage—came too late and put the last nail in a union that had been dissolving for some time.

That’s the problem with secrets. Keep them and you drive away loved ones. Share them and you might do the same. Still, these days I kept no secrets from Karen. The admiral—former Coast Guard commandant—didn’t like it. But I’d insisted when he asked me
as a favor
to stay in the unit, not retire, that I would only agree if Karen remained in the loop. The admiral had refused, argued, and then checked on Karen’s high-security clearance. He’d tried to talk me out of it one last time, and then he’d given in.

“Because we need you, Joe. But if either of you talk, I won’t be able to protect you.”

I liked the admiral. Unlike the former director, who came from Wall Street and was destroyed by a financial scandal, the admiral was a true public servant: hero of Hurricane Laticia, hero of Deepwater Horizon, he deserved to keep the unit intact and strong. So I stayed.

“Joe,” he’d said. “You’re the best I got.”

My memo to the secretary of defense six years ago—which brought me into the unit—suggested that the military should prepare for the possibility that the next big outbreak of human disease might come from a cold climate, not a hot one, not a jungle, as is usually assumed . . . but from a microorganism released by melting ice, after being encased in it for hundreds of thousands of years, or by an enemy who knew where to look for germs—new, terrible weapons—in cold latitudes.