Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (22 page)

“Why are you telling me this, Mikael?”

“I need to tell somebody.”

“Right. Plus, your film of her death will make your show a big hit, huh? You’ll tell the story of the Marine savage who broke your ribs at conferences. You’ll tell the story when you win your gold statuette next year. You’ll say,
I felt sorry for Rush. I couldn’t take that poor Marine to court.
”

He did not reply. I saw truth in his face, a flush, but also something deeper resembling genuine sympathy.

I asked, “Did your family really own part of the North Slope way back when, Mikael?”

“We would have been millionaires today.” He winced when he shrugged. “But my grandfather used to tell me, in Brooklyn, millionaires have money, but this does not make them happy people.”

“What would you be today, if Russia had kept Alaska? Duke Mikael? Count Mikael?”

He cradled the hurt arm. “Duke.”

“Where was the land your family would have owned?”

“I’m not exactly sure. But the communists would have wiped away our claims anyway, even if Russia had kept Alaska.”

“You never even went looking for the land? I mean, you’re here! You didn’t even want to see it?”

“What would be the point? I concentrate on today,” he said. “The grand days of my family are over.”

•   •   •

ARMY CAPTAIN RAYMOND HESS, AMANDA NG’S INVESTIGATOR, FOUND ME
in the chair a half hour later, said he’d looked all over for me, checked the labs and my Quonset hut. Said, in a tight, irritated voice, as if I’d purposely avoided him, which I had, that he “needed to clear up a few questions.”

Hess was a trim, balding man with almost invisible eyebrows, an oddly high voice, watery light blue eyes, and a West Point ring on one finger, a thin wedding band on another. His collar was starched above the Arctic-weight Army sweater. He’d draped his parka over the back of his chair. He looked an old thirty, and had a lean bullet shape, tapering at the head. By now he’d know that he was supposed to pay extra attention to me. He’d have been told in no uncertain terms that if Colonel Joe Rush and Major Edward Nakamura
were
involved in a cover-up and he missed it, he could kiss his career good-bye.

A toilet flushed. And flushed. And flushed. I’d “finished” my third glass of vodka. Hess’s nose wrinkled. He smelled urine on me, or maybe the liquor I’d rubbed on my clothes. I was sprawled, legs stretched, head lolling, a sneer on my lips.

“Army security,” I said. “You guys are even worse than the Federal Bureau of Incompetency.”

“Let’s go back to the research center, Colonel. We have a room set up for quiet talk.”

“For interrogations.”

“Discussions.”

“Discuss away,” I said, leaning back, watching the man’s irritation grow as blotches on his too-white face.

“It really would be better at the center, sir.”

“For who? Whom? Is it
who
or
whom
? I never know. How are you with grammar, Hess? How’d you do in high school English?”

“Colonel, please don’t make this difficult.”

“Her death is easy so far, Hess?”

I had to give him credit. He remained polite, if stiff and disingenuous. “Sir, we’re on the same team.”

I stood up. I breathed into his face. Up close, his skin seemed to lack pores. There was nothing wrong with his approach. I had to be eliminated as a suspect. Also, like all the troops here, he had to know he was in danger, if the vaccinations didn’t work, and the rabies turned out to be contagious. He’d been parachuted into a strange town and denied full support. In quarantine
drills,
the security contingent included dozens of personnel. But Barrow lacked logistics for a larger team. The admiral—the old head of my unit—had warned Washington for months that the country was unprepared for an Arctic emergency. The emergency was here. The country was still unprepared.

I snapped, “Hess, you can’t order me.” As if the effort had been too great, I fell back on the chair.

“Colonel Rush, you—”

“Hey, Hess! Did you volunteer for this? I bet you did! How’d they trick you into volunteering? You might get infected, bring the germ home to your wife and kids. That’s why that bitchy colonel only took along three of you, you know. Until they know the vaccine works. You’re expendable. How’s it feel to be the guy they could lose and not care?”

He was red now. I allowed him to escort me into a rear bedroom, the one with the air vent above the right-hand bed. The shaft ran directly to the living room, where I hoped conversation was quieting, as people positioned themselves beneath the vent, straining to hear. Or maybe they’d be behind the bedroom door, government-contract quality, even thinner than the old piece-of-garbage security doors that the FAA approved on pre-9/11 commercial aircraft.

Someone out there, I prayed, was desperate to listen.

Hess was smart. He didn’t start off with rabies. He started with Karen. He told me how sorry he was about her death. He asked about the status of our relationship. He made it seem he cared about her.

Our status is that I’m responsible for her murder.

I said, “We were engaged to be married in two months.”

Had things been “good” between us recently?

We fought and made up and fought some more.

“They were very good,” I said.

Did Karen have enemies in town? Had she said anything about work problems? Had I shared sensitive information with her?

Ah, here we go on rabies. Yes. I shared information.

“No,” I said. “Tell me something, Hess.”
We’re all on the same team?
“What kind of weapon killed her?”

“I’m sorry, Colonel. I can’t tell you that, sir.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?” I knew he couldn’t.

“Same thing, sir.”

“Leftie or rightie? Man or woman? Give me something.”

“Did you and Dr. Vleska ever discuss your work here, or the investigation into the Harmon deaths?”

“We were threatened if we talked about work. We discussed honeymoon plans. Want to hear them?”

“Yes.”

I’d asked Eddie to watch for anyone hanging around beneath that air vent. I envisioned people jostling and quieting and looking up. I told Hess loudly what I’d
really
told Karen, and wanted people in the other room to hear. “Everything’s connected. General Homza is wrong when he thinks she was killed by a local. They couldn’t get to me, so they went after her! It’s not about the quarantine! It’s the same people who killed the Harmons!”

I raised my voice until I was shouting.

“GIVE ME ANOTHER DAY WITH THAT DIARY! THERE’S SOMETHING IN THAT DIARY! I KNOW IT! I’M CLOSE, I’M VERY CLOSE!”

Hess’s voice sharpened. “You have the diary?”

“An F-drive copy. Not the original, asshole.”

“Sir, I’ll need you to hand it over. It’s evidence.”

I argued, shouted that I needed the files. He threatened to have me arrested if I did not surrender them. Under martial law, he could do it.

I begged him to let me keep the diary. I said that it was my right to have a copy. When he didn’t back down I grew more belligerent, told him to go fuck himself, shouted, refused, and finally gave in, making sure my voice carried.

“Just how small is your brain, Hess? Is it even there?”

“We’ll go and get it now, Colonel.”

I’d alienated everyone I could think of. If someone here was guilty, I hoped I’d hit on the thing they feared. Hess escorted me from the bedroom, a drunk, shamed, broken presence, except as we passed the group outside I glanced over and winked, as if I’d just pulled a fast one on Hess. I saw my look register. I saw Mikael Grandy frown and look sharply at McDougal. Deborah Lillienthal stared. Dave had been pouring himself a vodka. He looked thoughtful. Eddie watched them all, trying to see a tell.

Outside, the night was dark, and the wind came off the sea and sliced at my face with the sharpness of an
ulu
, an Eskimo knife used for skinning. I glanced back at the hut and saw a white face, Deborah, in the window. Deborah who’d feared she was infected with rabies.
Because you slept with someone. Who?

Soldiers moved between huts. Smoke whirled from stovepipe vents. Someone approached Hess and told him that sleeping arrangements were changing. All the civilians would sleep in two huts, or in town, if they had friends there. Soldiers needed the other huts.

My fists were clenched. My jaw throbbed. I felt blood coursing in my arteries, trying to burst out; a fury that was pure and directed and craved outlet. I was filled with the rage of a man who had, through his pride and maneuverings, killed his future.

In our hut I retrieved one of two F-drive copies I’d made of Kelley’s diary files, and gave it to Hess. He didn’t see me shove the extra one in my pocket. He probably saw the spittle that I made sure hung from a corner of my mouth. Joe Rush, half drunk, in a rage.

A rabbit’s foot. A talisman.
An answer,
I hoped
.

If Homza came through on his promise, I’d be transferred off base—suspended from the investigation.

You’ll be alone, General Homza had warned me.

Well, I was already alone. I was more alone than I’d known possible.

Watching Hess drive off, I spoke softly, out loud, to thin air, to whoever had killed her. Who, I now believed, had wiped out Clay Qaqulik and the Harmon family, and then eight others in town.

“Come and get me,” I said.

The first quarantine death occurred three days later. It was not from rabies.

Whynot Francis, hunter, father of three, whaling captain, stood twelve feet beneath the earth in his ice cellar, behind his one-story Barrow home, that morning, enraged at the soldiers who had sealed off the town; at the growing fear, at the lines of panic-stricken people flooding the hospital, coming in with any symptom at all; normal coughs, normal aches, normal fevers, imaginary pains. Everyone waiting, holding their breath, waiting for something terrible to occur.

They will not keep me here,
he thought.

Whynot was a stocky, balding, pigeon-toed man, plain faced, with a bowlegged walk. He had a masters degree in geology from the University of California, and worked for the Iñupiat-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, advising the board on which tribal land could be leased to outsiders, which should be retained.

Whynot took an annual spring trip each year to Philadelphia, where his college-age daughter was an English major at Penn. His wife was an anthropologist, who studied the psychology of nonnative scientists who came to the Arctic.

That morning Whynot considered the hacked-off chunks of raw seal, musk ox, and caribou around him—and a diminishing supply of bowhead. It not only fed his family and in-laws, much of it went to the old folks’ home, the Presbyterian church, and to Uncle Glenn and Aunt Flo, after Glenn broke his leg in July.

There was not enough food. Whynot’s anger crested.

“We’re going out. To hell with the soldiers,” he called up to the four faces peering down at him through the wooden trapdoor opening. Above that was thick fog.

The cellar was fifteen by ten feet. Its permafrost walls gleamed with ice. Permafrost went down eight hundred feet in Barrow. Many homes had these cellars. Whynot’s meat lay in piles, not neatly cut as in a butcher shop, but in hacked-off chunks, ribs rimed with frozen blood, white bones protruding, ice crystals coating it, nature’s freezer burn.

Whynot climbed up the aluminum ladder. Up top waited his two favorite cousins, Lewis and Aqpayuk, his brother-in-law, Edward, and his best boyhood pal, Walter Aiken, who had played tight end for the Barrow Whalers state champ high school
football team when Whynot was quarterback.

Whynot told the others, “I served my country in Iraq. I fought for the United States. These soldiers have no right to keep us here.”

Three of them nodded agreement but Edward looked nervous. He was a shy, heavyset, kind man whose bad eyesight required the use of thick-lensed glasses. He tended to sweat when nervous, and he was sweating now. He was a reliable and highly efficient crew member.

Edward said, doubtfully, “That general said the Coast Guard will stop boats from going out.”

“We’ll go the long way around. The ships won’t see us in the fog.”

Whynot kissed his wife, Violet, good-bye and made sure his eighteen-foot-long powerboat was secured in its hauler to his Durango. He loaded the whaling dart gun, harpoon, and whale bombs. The crew piled in and they bumped through semi-deserted streets toward the beach. Normally small boats were launched from a protected point, a small cove north of the old Navy base. But the road was blocked, so Whynot figured he’d just back the rig up in town, onto the black beach.

Almost all the soldiers were out at the barricades. So no soldiers spotted the truck hauling the boat.

Bowheads were enormous compared to the small aluminum outboard boats. Normally this time of year, scouting crews would go out, range around as far as thirty miles away, and report back to Barrow by radio. When the migration began, all the other crews would go out, too.

But all radio reception was jammed just now. Whynot knew that if he got lucky today, if he spotted whales, his crew would be alone.

The whales were much, much bigger than the little boats. Normally several boats would haul a floating carcass home. Whynot’s elders had told him to go for the young ones, as they are plumper. Bowheads could live for over two hundred years. Some had been harvested with harpoons in their hides dating from President Andrew Jackson’s day.

“Cold,” Whynot told Edward and Aqpayuk, in the cab with him, as he backed onto the beach. “I haven’t felt cold like this, this time of year, ever.”

“The sea will freeze soon,” said Aqpayuk, a backhoe driver.

“The whales must be coming,” said Edward.

“If this cold settles in for a few more days, soon we can ride our snowmobiles away, around the soldiers.”

Edward said, as they backed the boat into the water, “The general said the quarantine might end soon.” Meaning,
Let’s wait and not go out today.

“No! The ocean will be solid by then. No hunt!”

Whynot’s friend Walter guffawed from the cramped backseat of the extended cab. He was a good spotter, an alcoholic who sometimes disappeared for weeks on Nome’s Front Street, its row of bars. He’d fly off. Later, someone would get a phone call. Someone else would go fetch Walter, and bring the sick man home.

“Once the whales pass, they are gone,” he said.

Edward kept at it, as they bounced off in a thick fog. “The general said the Coast Guard has a chopper, snipers.”

But any reference to threats hardened resolve. Lewis, a teacher at the high school, growled, “The Whaling Commission. The duck in.”

These were references to other times that outsiders had imposed their will on Barrow. The International Whaling Commission, which regulated global whale hunting, had ordered it all to stop in the 1970s, when scientists said the species was on the edge of extinction.

“Only six hundred left, they said,” Lewis said. “We said there were more. The commission said we were wrong. Turned out there were thousands of bowheads. The ban was lifted. If we would have gone along, hunting would have stopped.”

Walter agreed. “And the duck in. Those federals said we couldn’t hunt ducks. Too many ducks shot down south, by sport hunters. We didn’t listen. We eat those ducks. We killed what we needed and, together, took the ducks to their offices and dared them to arrest us. We were too many. Civil disobedience worked. It will work now.”

“What’s that?” interrupted Aqpayuk, quietest man in the crew, shielding his eyes, gazing west. They’d left the fog area. They were in the clear. He gazed in the direction of the Coast Guard ship, which was not in view.

“Where?”

“That speck.”

“It’s a drone!” announced Edward.

Their parkas were powder blue. The boat was white. Whynot manned the steering console.
To hell with the drone,
he thought.

Despite the speck growing closer in the sky, Whynot felt a surge of excitement. Hunting!

The drone—it looked like a big model plane—came closer and began circling as they reached an area of slush, and began powering through, rocking as the hull made contact with more solid area. The drone flew about a hundred feet up. Whynot pushed the throttle forward. The boat surged ahead. The drone fell back but sped up. The boat—now more than a mile out—hit a completely ice-free area and reached more turbulent waters where the Chukchi Sea met the Beaufort. The drone stayed with them, like a prison searchlight tracking an escape.

Whynot moved the steering wheel left to right, left and right, zigzagging to see what the little drone did.

It adjusted.

“I don’t like that thing,” Edward said.

“Do you think it is armed?” asked Aqpayuk.

The seas grew calmer as they left the junction of currents. Glass. Perfect for hunting. The whales, if they were out, could come up at any time. They could be five miles from shore or thirty. The men started to see solid ice bits. Suddenly a message came over channel six, the international channel. They’d passed beyond the area being jammed.

“This is the U.S. Coast Guard cutter
Wilmington
to the boat which has just left Barrow. Please turn around.”

“Well, it was a good try. Let’s go home,” said Edward.

Walter snorted. Lewis asked, from the prow, “How long can that thing stay in the air anyway?”

“I’ll shoot it,” said Walter, hefting his rifle.

Whynot told him to put the rifle down. Destroying property was not something he wished to do. “It will go away,” he said, although he was starting to doubt this.

The radio started up again. “This is the U.S. Coast Guard cutter
Wilmington
to the boat which has just left Barrow. You are violating quarantine. You are ordered to turn back. Please acknowledge.”

Whynot mimicked the tone. “‘Please acknowledge.’”

They rode along like this for a while, the drone sometimes dipping, sometimes making a wrong move but adjusting, sometimes disappearing into low mist but reemerging. The ice bits became more numerous. The whole sea was starting to freeze. Edward ducked his head, as if that would make him invisible. Whynot eyed the thing. Walter gave it the finger. Aqpayuk said that back in Barrow, probably lots of people knew they had gone out. They’d be on landline phones. “Hey! Did you hear! Whynot’s crew went out!!!!”

This gave Whynot more resolution.
Iñupiat
means “the real people” and the people were with him, urging him on.

Edward groaned. “Look! Here comes the helicopter.”

This time the thing in the sky was bigger, red, coming fast, a swiftly moving bubble.

Edward said, “You think there’s a sniper on board?”

Walter scoffed, “What are they going to do, shoot us?”

“I heard those snipers are trained to shoot out engines on boats. I read it in
Parade
magazine. They clip on a harness, hang out the door. They shoot up drug boats.”

“Drug boats?”

“Yeah, those fast-moving ones—faster than us—that come up from Colombia, heading for Mexico, with cocaine.”

Whynot was outraged. “You’re comparing us to a cocaine boat?”

“I’m just saying the snipers are good.”

Whynot barked, “You’re saying that whaling—our families have been whaling for a thousand years—is like selling cocaine!?”

“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” said Edward as the little drone veered off, made a wide U-turn, summoned back toward its launch point. It passed the incoming chopper. One craft grew smaller, the other larger.

So Whynot increased the zigzagging. His anger was cresting. That these people would barricade his town! That they’d treat citizens like prisoners! That they’d send a sniper to try to stop him from whaling! That they did not even send vaccine to cure people of a disease they claimed was fatal!

“We should give up,” counseled Edward.

Walter and Aqpayuk didn’t say it, but Whynot could see from their bland expressions that they now agreed. And his own more logical side said that perhaps it was time to give up. But his fury grew. He did not want to back down. Perhaps if he pushed this confrontation a bit longer that red helicopter would turn around.

Except it wasn’t turning. It was getting lower, and now, looking up, Whynot saw the door was open and someone was harnessed to the side, one boot on the runner, and the person was positioning a rifle of some sort, aiming at the boat.

“It’s a girl,” Aqpayuk said in wonder.

“A girl!”

Those who would survive today would learn later that the sniper had been trained at the Guard’s facility in Jacksonville, Florida. Her name was Gail Mullen. She was twenty-five years old. She’d proved her marksmanship several times over during Coast Guard drug interdiction patrols off Panama. There, during 2
A.M.
chases in the Pacific, against boats moving twice as fast as Whynot’s, she’d brought her .50-caliber rifle to bear on an engine, and, after drug runners ignored warnings, put a round into that engine, made the boats stop, the crews give up. She’d trained to shoot out engines, not to hurt people.

She was a little nervous this time, though, because she knew that the people below were not drug smugglers, but just whalers. These men had not been confined to town because they were evil, but because they might be ill. Gail Mullen hated her job at that moment. The boat below cut right, and left. The figures in baby-blue parkas looking up at her. No drug bales aboard. Just five guys.

Gail heard her pilot over the loud-hailer, urging the whaling crew to change course, using information he’d been supplied with from town. “Captain Whynot Francis, please turn around.”

Below, Whynot grew furious at the mention of his name! The government knew everything about everybody! The use of his name was supposed to make him feel small against their hugeness, make him back down because just by saying his name they were telling him that they knew who his family was, where he lived, they knew his history. He’d learned in college that in some parts of the world, primitive people never reveal their real names to outsiders. They believe that if you know someone’s name, you have power over them.

Whynot saw that this was true. He was an unimportant asterisk to those in that chopper. Those who wanted to stop a four-thousand-year-old hunt.

He told himself to stop, turn around, Edward was right.

He pushed the throttle ahead.

At that moment two things happened. The first was that the copter hit an air pocket and dipped as Gail Mullen pulled the trigger. The second was that Whynot swung the wheel left. In a fraction of a millisecond, the object in the rifle sight stopped being an outboard engine, and became a man.

The bullet slammed into Whynot’s chest with force enough to knock over a man ten times his size. He went over the side, into the freezing water. The crew thought the shooter was going to fire again. Aqpayuk ducked. Walter ran for the steering console. Edward grabbed the gaff, already looking over the side to where Whynot floated facedown in the sea, a spreading mass of red around him.