Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (31 page)

The wedding started well but then things went sour. The ceremony was held in the small, white-steepled Methodist church in Smith Falls, the Massachusetts town in which I’d grown up. It was October, peak of New England leaf season, and the oaks, maples, and birches had lost their summer green and taken on crisp, bright hues: pumpkin orange, dazzling yellow, maroons in shades ranging from dried blood to the deep rich of an emperor’s cloak.

Karen pulled up in a dogsled outside, through a shower of leaves, the huskies puffing as she stepped off the runner, dressed in a clinging white gown that showed her lithe body. I hate big gowns, the hoop kind, that make brides look like they stepped out of an Alabama antebellum ball. My parents smiled at us from the first pew. Behind them sat kids, still ten and eleven years old, with whom I’d attended school, and beside them an old drill sergeant from Parris Island, odd because he’d died of cancer. The admiral sat beside General Homza. It was a happy scene, with sunlight brightening the stained-glass windows. But then I saw that the scenes depicted on those windows were not from the Bible. Afghanistan didn’t show up in the Bible. Neither did a tarp-covered troop truck exploding. In the center window, each piece of colored glass in the mosaic showed a different aspect of the explosion: a shard of metal, a severed limb, roiling smoke.

And the faces on that window—eyes turned toward heaven, fractured into Picasso-like angles—belonged to eight dead Marines, who I’d blown up. Their eyes were the color of sapphires and their helmets reflected the gold of the sun. I’d never met them. I’d seen photos. Depicted in glass, their eyes followed the reverend, as he took a step toward Karen and I.

“Do you promise to lie, honor, and obey?” he said, smiling pleasantly.

“It’s not a lie if you do it for your country,” I answered.

Karen looked angry at that. Wrong answer. The faces in the pews, when I turned, were sad. Eddie sat in back, trying to tell me something. I heard the sled dogs outside, baying. The air in the chapel grew cold, and my fingers hurt, and I felt the brush of snow on my abraded face.

Karen was walking off without me, out the church.

“I can’t pronounce you,” said the reverend, and I realized that his voice had deepened and acquired a foreign accent. He still wore vestments but now he’d morphed into Jens Erik Holte. Jens holding a Bible. No, not a Bible, but an advertisement for an Arctic eco lodge.

Jens said, “Lots to see!”

I opened my eyes and saw white ceiling. I heard a roar which I recognized vaguely as fighter jets taking off. Through gauzy curtains a low, bright sun flooded in. My fingers really did hurt. They lay beneath clean covers. I turned my head on the pillow and saw what had to be another hallucination, because it was Admiral Galli, in a light gray suit and striped red-and-blue tie, sitting in a visiting chair a few feet away.

The room smelled of tulips. Tubes ran into my arms. I held my hands in front of my face and saw stained wrappings. The pain was fiercest inside the bandages wrapping my right hand.

“He’s awake,” Galli said.

“I’m not, sir,” I said, in the dream. “I’m not awake if you’re here.”

He stood. He nodded. I smelled the faint aroma of cigars that often came off the admiral. He said, softly, “Homza’s out. I’m back. The administration wants a face that reporters like. The quarantine ended. You’re awake, all right. You’re in Anchorage. Joe, do you remember telling us about Holte? The rabies? The ice cellar?”

“Now I know I’m up, sir. You didn’t ask how I feel.”

He smiled. His hand on my shoulder was light, reassuring. “You feel like shit, what’s to ask? And it’ll last awhile. CDC’s confirmed it, Joe, rabies not contagious. We found the vial in your parka, where you said it would be. But we still need to figure out where it came from. Colonel, you did a hell of a job.”

I closed my eyes. I heard hospital machinery beeping behind me, heartbeat low, blood pressure could be better. I heard a cart squeak out in the hall. The door was open, and a man was weeping copiously somewhere beyond my range of vision. I smelled Lysol and boiled chicken, boiled string beans and packaged orange juice. The ubiquitous hospital meal. Chicken. The least-fortunate creature on the planet, designed for one purpose, slaughter.

“Yeah, I did one hell of a job,” I said.

“I’m sorry about Karen.”

I closed my eyes.

“Joe, you’re going to have to testify on the Hill.”

I opened them.

“In secret. We’ve got half of Congress accusing us of a cover-up, hiding some weapons program, thanks to someone named Tilda Swann. We’ve got the other half wanting to double appropriations against terrorists. The quarantine’s over but what the hell happened?”

I tried to think. My whole body was a mass of pain. I said, “What story are you putting out?”

“That the rabies morphed naturally. That it was a rogue strain that just died out. CDC’s going along. Truth is, authorities in Yellowstone did find a strain that’s jumped fox to fox, without bites. So it’s
possible
that the disease could evolve. But our batch came from a lab.”

“Jens will know the answer. Did you get him?”

I was tired. Fading. The weeping in the hall subsided, and the beeping of the machinery grew low. Someone else came into the room, but they looked hazy and indistinct in sunlight. I closed my eyes. I was exhausted. I was too tired to wonder who was there.

“He’s out again,” said Galli’s voice.

The other voice said, “Did you tell him about his toes?”

“When he’s better. One thing at a time. Merlin, are those damn reporters still downstairs?”

•   •   •

NEXT TIME I OPENED MY EYES THE ADMIRAL WAS GONE BUT MERLIN WAS
there with Eddie. I was more alert and recognized the unmistakable roar of fighters, F22 Raptors taking off outside, possibly headed north to intercept Russian Bear Bombers. The bombers have started buzzing Alaskan air space recently. They’d stopped after the Cold War. They started again when oil extraction came up as an issue in the Arctic. The bombers never enter U.S. territory. They fly along the border, doing “exercises,” often at times when U.S./Russian relations sour elsewhere on Earth. Recently they’ve buzzed U.S. airspace more and more. I figured I was at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

Merlin looked shy, an expression I’d not seen on him before. He seemed bigger in the small room, dressed in freshly laundered jeans and an ironed, button-up, lavender-and-white-striped shirt, bowhead buckle design, spotted seal vest, bolo tie in walrus ivory. Eddie wore a light blue dress shirt, tie in solid blue, matching dark blue jacket and charcoal trousers, sharply creased.

“What happened to you?” I said, taking in the outfit.

“The admiral paraded me before the governor,” Eddie said. “The governor wants details. So does the world. Lotta nervousness out there, Joe, as in: Will this thing come back?”

“Tell
me
details.”

“Bottom line, we don’t know! Ranjay saved you. Brought you back. It was touch and go for a while, but we airlifted you out when you stabilized. You’ve been here for a week.”

Merlin hung back, shyly, out of character for him. He was a quiet man, but he was not shy. Eddie tilted his head at Merlin, brows up, as if to say,
Tell him
. Merlin pulled a chair close. “Eddie told me about your deal with Homza. You’re a hell of an actor, Joe. You convinced me not to trust you. What can I say?”

“I need to tell you that I called Homza when the breakout happened. To ask him to stop people from leaving Barrow. I tried to stop it.”

Merlin chewed that over. “I’m fine with that. You did what you had to do. You were trying to stop the spread. If it
had
been contagious, if those people had reached other villages, only God knows what would have happened. We alerted them, too. A couple of snowmobiles reached Wainright, but they were held up. Later choppers brought them back. No charges filed. Enough is enough.”

“Thanks for understanding.”

“I owe you, Joe. Lifetime offer.”

“In that case, one of you tell me about this,” I said, raising my bandaged, throbbing left foot.

My whole body hurt and the hammering was worst at the extremities; right hand, left foot. I was familiar with the sort of constant pounding that came from serious bruising. But this sharp burning was one I’d never felt before.

Eddie let out a deep breath. He said, “Who needs all ten toes, right? Like the appendix. Eight toes work fine. Hell, couple of tips gone. Big deal.”

I glanced down at my feet, lumps under the lightweight white hospital blanket.

“Two toes on the left foot, Joe. Little therapy, few weeks of new moves, you’ll be dancing again.”

“I can’t dance now.”

“See what I mean? This will improve things.”

Truth was, I couldn’t believe that they’d saved me at all. I remembered my brief conscious time in the snowbank as a cold dark, a dark that surpasses anything living, a sensation that—if you have a choice, if you can trade a toe or two to keep it away, seems worth it. I would not have thought previously that the loss of a couple of toes could seem small, but compared to the enormity of what had happened, and what I’d lost, they were beside the point. They were not the point at all.

“Eddie, tell me about Jens.”

He nodded and swiveled back in the hospital chair and came back with an attaché case, opened it and extracted eight by ten magnified aerial photos. The first showed the Alaska pipeline, the lifeline flowing north-to-south from Prudhoe Bay, atop the North Slope, to Valdez, in the south. Not so long ago, 20 percent of America’s oil flowed through that pipe. These days it ran one-third full. Land-based oil was drying up. That’s why Dave Lillienthal at Longhorn wanted to drill offshore, where they’d estimated lay several billion barrels of crude.

But I understood that Eddie’s showing me this photo just now had nothing to do with fuel. He was showing me a border, which Jens would have had to cross if he wanted to reach Canada.

“You stopped him at the pipeline?”

“We spotted him there.”

He’d avoided a direct answer. I saw a shot of a snowmobile heading out of the left side of the frame, churning snow, toward the pipeline. Next the snowmobile was zigzagging, trying to evade whoever was above. It was like watching a silent film frame by frame. The snowmobile stopped. A figure crouched beside it. Yellow bursts, shots, erupted from the muzzle of the rifle. This last photo had been taken at a steep angle. Now the chopper pilot was trying to evade.

Eddie said, “Homza had the pipeline manned as soon as he got your message. There were already troops there, beefed up because of the quarantine. I’d told Homza that Jens might be headed in that direction.”

“Why did you think that?”

“You. It was clear that you hadn’t dragged those bodies into the fire. Someone else did, so there was another survivor. We knew you were after Jens. We knew whose snowmobile you’d stolen, and it wasn’t there. So I figured Jens was running, he’d taken yours.”

I nodded. The logic was right on.

Eddie continued, “The police had been alerted to watch for incoming at the seven villages. He didn’t show up. Airports closed. No roads to block. Everyone cooperating for a change because no one wanted a contagious disease spreading. So where was he? He had to be heading east.”

I saw it as he described it, and picked up the thread. “You checked and found that the Twin Otter hadn’t originated from anywhere in Alaska. You figured the plane had come in low, over a border. What did he tell you when you got him?
Tell me what you learned when you caught Jens.
”

Eddie blew out air and sat back and the posture and expression gave me an answer. The next photo showed a black-clad figure lying in the snow, left arm thrown back, rifle nearby, dark blood by the head. He looked like a dead man half trying to make a snow angel. I felt a hard, angry knot form inside. They’d not talked to Jens at all.

“They shot him?”

“He shot himself.”

“Then who was he, Eddie?”

Merlin sighed. Eddie stood up in agitation. “We don’t know. No ID on any database from fingerprints or DNA. Nothing from national security. Dental records, zilch. Documents, immigration, forget it. That coast up there is the most porous entry point in the country. There’s no customs agent on the entire North Slope. The FBI checked back. So did Amanda Ng and Hess. He didn’t come from where he said, even in America. So far, he’s a total blank.”

A hollow frustration filled my belly. “What about the bodies pulled from the fire? Prints? Clothing? Anything?”

“Burnt up. Teeth smashed. Fillings generic. What I want to know is why, if he’d escaped, he wasted time going to that cabin? He could have reached Canada if he headed there from the get-go. What was at the cabin?”

“Whatever
was
there isn’t there anymore.”

A sudden stabbing in my leg made me shift position, and the move shoved photos off the bed so they separated and drifted onto the floor. There they lay, clues without answers, dead men, charred sites.

“We have nothing then,” I said, bitter.

“No, One.
You
found the vial, which we took from your pocket.
You
enabled them to end the quarantine.
You
found rabies. All Jens had to do when he wanted to infect someone was stroll over to the supermarket and put a few drops in a food. If it wasn’t for you, it would have worked. The phony outbreak would have ended. We all would have gone home.”

A pretty red-haired nurse appeared. She told Eddie and Merlin that they had to leave. She said I needed rest. She said they could come back in a few hours.

“We’ll be nearby,” Eddie said.

Merlin said, “Eddie sleeps in the hall, Colonel. He won’t leave here.”

When they were gone, the nurse fussed over me and gave me more orange juice and said I needed fluids and said that I must be important because of all the reporters downstairs and all the VIPs who kept calling and asking how I was, telling the doctors to treat me like royalty. She said that yesterday night, when she stopped at a bar after work, a reporter from a Los Angeles–based rag sheet,
Creeps and Celebs
, had offered to buy her dinner and slip her a thousand dollars to take a couple of photos of me in bed.