Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (7 page)

“Maybe he didn’t kill himself,” I said.

“Are you kidding? His finger was still in the trigger guard, right? And the dislocated arm, hell, pulled from the shoulder. Can’t fake that! I took him along once as a guard. He was always quiet. I think that guy had secrets.”

You don’t know the half of it,
I thought.

I said, “Is there anything that happened today that this whole town isn’t aware of?”

Calvin DeRochers blew on his tea. I watched the ripples dance across the golden surface, and his greenish eyes came up slowly, met mine and stayed there, keen, smart, probing.

“You tell me,” he said.

•   •   •

I TRIED TO CALL EDDIE. HE DIDN’T ANSWER.

Calvin’s rent-a-pilot, Jens Erik Holte, arrived, a boisterous summer presence in Barrow and Norwegian American who spent his winters in Mexico. Then Mikael the weasel. Then the three-person visiting meteorology team from Boulder. And then three more crowded in: Alan McDougal, who ran logistics on the base; his wife, Candida, an anthropologist; and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Deirdre, a serious, attractive girl and casual friend of Kelley’s. Deirdre sat mute in a corner, then broke into sobs.

I tried to cheer her up, which got her talking a little, wiping her nose with a bunched-up tissue. I asked, “Do you happen to know anything about Kelley keeping a diary?”

“Just that she had one. I never saw it.”

“Was it on her computer? Was it a book?”

“I don’t know.” She blurted out, looking around, making sure all the other adults were in conversation, “Ask . . .
ask her boyfriend
!”

“Kelley had a boyfriend? She was only on base for a few days at a time. How did she manage to—”

“People always say they can talk to you, Colonel. Kelley said you and Karen, you can keep a secret. Help me. I feel awful. I don’t know what to do.”

I knelt on one knee to be at face level with her. It was something that Iñupiat adults did with children, and with the very old. They did not talk down to them. They always looked them right in the eye.

“Deirdre, this will stay between you and me.”

The girl looked guilty, miserable. She
wanted
to talk. “She said she trusted you and Karen.” The pressure in her face was palpable, awful. “She said . . . she . . . You
promise not to tell
?”

“Yes. I promise.”

“She made me swear not to tell also. He works at the Heritage Center. Leon Kavik. He’s older. Eighteen. She used to sneak away to see him. I wish her parents
had
known! They’d have sent her home!”

Her hands were twisting, and her eyes pleaded for understanding. I said, touching her shoulder, resting my hand there, “What happened wasn’t your fault, Deirdre.”

If we’d been alone she would have cried out, but her agony came out in a whisper. “It was! She’d lie and tell her parents she was at our hut, but she was with him! She lied! And I lied, too! Oh, God!”

Everyone stared at me when she ran out of the room and into a bedroom, crying. I shrugged. I did not want to get her in trouble, but we were going to have to talk more. I wanted to see that boyfriend, and talk to Merlin again, first thing in the morning—and not just about the bodies.

You hid things about your cousin, Merlin.

Why shouldn’t he have his secrets? Everyone else did around here.

Report from Barrow

Received by encrypted satellite transmission.

I attended a small wake at Dr. Rush’s Quonset hut tonight, where many campus residents were present. So far, no one understands what has happened, what is at stake. But the police emergency operator who spread the initial story has been fired, so it will now be slightly more difficult to gain access to the department.

The bodies have been brought to the hospital, where they are in an isolated area in the morgue. There have been no other cases so far, not in town, but that could, of course, change and if it does, there will be widespread panic. I may need a way to get out, fast.

So far, the Eskimo Qaqulik is being blamed for the deaths. With luck, that will be the official finding.

Plus side: I planted microphones in the Quonset hut during the evening—one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen area off the living room—that should pick up conversation in either place. I’m receiving talk in the hut loud and clear.

Both Marine doctors and the submarine engineer Karen Vleska may need to be killed.

Merlin Toovik was making whale bombs when I interrupted him at eight the next morning after I heard from Valley Girl. He was at a wooden worktable in his small, cramped, detached garage, wearing a lightweight Seattle Seahawks jacket and jeans in thirty-five degree weather, concentrating and staring down at a foot-long copper-shaped missile lying on a coffee-stained blotter, tilted open at the tiny warhead area on top. I knew better than to interrupt while he poured black explosive powder from a spigoted plastic bottle into the finned missile.

When he was screwing the cap back, I said, “You didn’t tell me everything, Merlin. Why not?”

“Found out about the FBI, huh?” He laid the missile aside and opened the cap of a second one.

“Merlin, not just that. He worked for you?”

The police chief looked up, visibly impressed, the muscles on his shoulders and arms straining against the fabric of the jacket. “How’d you find that out?” he asked, starting on a second missile.

I’d found out because “North Slope Police Department” was written on the dead man’s federal income tax form, but I did not say that. I said, “Merlin, what was one of your detectives doing pretending to work for the Harmons? Yesterday you chewed me out for keeping things from you.”

“Technically, no lie. He
did
work for them.”

“I put my neck on the line for you.”

“Look, I can’t make a mistake on these bombs, Joe, or a few more relatives will be killed when we fire one and it doesn’t work, or blows too soon. Give me a minute. Then we’ll have coffee in the house and I’ll explain.”

I folded my arms and watched, fascinated by the process despite my irritation, as he loaded two more whale bombs. Whaling captains were the most-respected men in the community. They ran crews of a dozen men, mostly relatives, and went out twice a year to harvest the big bowheads migrating past Barrow, using motorboats in fall, and paddling twenty-foot-long sealskin boats in spring, launched directly off the shore bound ice.

At fifty, Merlin was considered young, not yet an elder. Shotguns hung in racks on the wall. There were two snowmobiles outside; fishing nets were drying in the yard. I saw three sets of rubber boots, two outboard motors against a wall, grease-smeared oilcans, clean fishing hooks.

“Do you know how these whale bombs work, Joe?”

Answer the question. Don’t push him. He’s testing you. You’re on North Slope time here, not D.C. time.

“Tell me, Merlin.”

He stood and stretched, getting the tension in his muscles out, and then he strode to the wall and easily hefted an evil-looking harpoon, about six feet long. The wooden shaft ended in a steel, wickedly barbed arrow-shaped protuberance.

“Most people think the harpoon is the whole thing, but it’s just the steel part on top. Look down the shaft and we come to this little plunger, see? A trigger. See it?”

I want to know about your cousin, not the damn harpoon.

“Yes, I see it.”

“Well, if the harpooner throws well and hits the bowhead—you only have a few seconds to do it before it dives—and you aim just behind the head . . . the harpoon goes in up to the plunger, then the whale’s skin depresses the plunger, the plunger acts as a trigger, and the trigger fires the missile from the wooden shaft. A good throw blows up the heart. No suffering. Quick death.”

“Then the whole wooden shaft there is a gun?”

“That’s right. Hollow inside.” He placed the harpoon back on the rack. “There! That ought to do it,” Merlin said. “These things are humane. The harpoon stays in, and the shaft floats away, so we can recover it. The harpoon is attached to a floating buoy that marks the whale’s location if it dives and tries to get away, still alive.”

“Merlin, I’m not here to talk about hunting.”

“Sure you are.” Merlin signaled me to follow him into the house, walking out the door. Over his big shoulder he said, “Just a different kind. Clay worked for the mayor, actually. He kept tabs on visitors. Too many of them are like you, Colonel. They don’t tell us the whole truth about why they’re here, just what they want us to know.”

Well! He had a point there, I had to admit.

We passed outside and entered his one-story wooden house through a cold room—called a
cunnychuck
—where we left our shoes among hanging jackets, muddy boots, parkas, and anoraks. The living room was hot, from gas heat, and I smelled coffee brewing. A TV was on, tuned to MSNBC. The couch and sitting chair were Haitian cotton. The pile was colored gold. There was an exercise walker, from where Merlin’s wife, Edith, waved to me. She wore spandex pants, a long floral-motif snow shirt, and sneakers and she was glued by earbud to Al Sharpton on MSNBC. The walls were decorated as in most homes I’d visited here, packed with family photos: graduation shots of nephews and nieces, high school football shot on a blue Astroturf field, Hawaii shots of Merlin and Edith on vacation—looking miserable in the heat—a shot of Merlin’s crew on the ice, carving up a harvested bowhead with half the town helping. People atop the whale wielding carving knives affixed to long poles. People loading meat onto sleds. A smiling hunter holding out a piece of heart. I saw Clay Qaqulik in back.

Inside homes you always met extended families, in person, or in photos that filled up walls.

Merlin said, putting two thick ceramic mugs on the kitchen table, “Straight talk?”

“Straight talk.”

“Clay was doing fine at the FBI until a North Slope case came up. Walrus ivory smuggling. Couple of low-rent jerks from Nome coming up with machine guns and a boat, leaving carcasses behind, harvesting the tusks and shipping pieces to Chicago, claiming they came from elephants. Know what the FBI did when the complaint came in?”

“What?”

“Laughed, Joe. That’s what Clay told me his supervisor did: laughed. ‘Fucking walruses,’ the guy told Clay. ‘We’ve got drugs coming in from Panama. We’ve got threats against the vice president when he visits Juneau next month. We’ve got bank robbers in Anchorage—and you want to go look for a couple of guys shooting walruses? Give it to ATF.’ Clay quit the next day.”

“What was he doing for you?”

“Not me, Joe. Us! The people who
need
walruses and whales to eat. Over half our food comes from subsistence hunting. And more than that, our culture. Walruses aren’t just something to look at in a zoo, man. Not here. They’re who we are for four thousand years.”

He gestured tiredly at Al Sharpton on TV, who was haranguing a Republican senator about an upcoming vote on aid to the Central African Republic.

“That gets more play than us,” he said.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Merlin went to a different cupboard and opened it and instead of cups and saucers pulled out a three-foot-long rolled-up paper, like a blueprint, which he spread on the checkered tablecloth, after pushing away the remains of a pancake breakfast. He weighed the paper down with a sugar bowl on one end, a maple syrup bottle on the other. It was a map showing the North Slope borough, the same shape as the admiral’s topographical depiction in Washington, only the admiral’s map showed a cute caribou and a wolf on the bottom, and highlighted the wilderness, lakes and mountains—the vast, open possibility. Merlin’s map showed the same area in plain, gridded white—as if the earth had been wiped away and what remained were perfect squares laid out as mathematically as in a Los Angeles real-estate guide. The squares were numbered. The tundra, lakes, and mountains had been reduced to mere geometry. I read out loud. “‘Land allocation in the North Slope.’”

“Joe, our heroes here are Eben Hopson and Willie Hensley, who created the borough so we’d have some power over people who want to rip this place apart. They were fought by the state, the oil companies, by anyone who wanted access to land.
But we won
. And now we have our own borough
.
We can tax companies. That gives us money to pay lobbyists in Washington, lawyers, and scientists of our own to counter whoever wants to run over us. Greenpeace wants to stop our whaling. Interior wants us to stop eating birds. Oil companies want to drill offshore. Well, it’s not so easy to come in and do whatever you want anymore. But it is always a fight. Hell, Joe, do you know how we became Americans in the first place? Russia
sold
us to you. No one asked us first.”

“You don’t want to be Americans?”

“
Of course
we want to be Americans. We’ve got the highest percentage of veterans in our population than anywhere else in the U.S. But like every other damn community, we want some power over our own fate.”

“How did Detective Clay Qaqulik fit in to this?”

“Well,
helpful
Clay Qaqulik guided an Arkansas senator out to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and listened to him on his cell phone, telling someone to try to get a gigantic open-pit mine in the place.
Cook
Clay Qaqulik made breakfast for the visiting president of the Northern Lights Drill Company, of Sweden, who, ignoring the Eskimo menial, bragged to advisers that even though he’d promised to build a pipeline if they found oil offshore, he’d move the oil by ship, save on taxes, cheat us. To them, Clay was a quaint piece of landscape, a dumb rube, and they said things around him that he reported. Well, I bet that Swede was surprised when Senator Maxwell demanded that they sign a paper promising a pipeline.

“Joe. I like you. Hell, you, Karen, and Eddie probably saved a few hundred lives here last summer. But you
still
didn’t tell us why you’re really here until yesterday.”

“Clay was a spy for you, you’re saying.”

“He was my cousin and a trained investigator and he was undercover for me. He helped out.”

“Spying on the Harmons.”

“No,” Merlin said, frowning, pouring coffee, stirring in sugar. “He was on another kind of case with them. Actually, he was trying to protect them.”

“From what?”

Merlin sipped his coffee, made a face, dumped in more sugar. “Clay believed that someone has been trying to stop their work all summer,” Merlin said. “He hangs out at the base and he decided, too many accidents. Too many delays. But why? Why them?
Something is going on!
”

“
Like what?”

A shrug. “Who knows? Something small and personal? Something bigger? Someone trying to keep them from going somewhere, doing something, seeing something related to
us
? Either way, if someone is breaking equipment, starting fires, that’s a crime. And now, on top of that, the kid’s on the phone. ‘
We’re all sick
.’”

I thought about it. It made sense. I sat and sipped coffee, and let the acid spread warmth into my stomach.

Merlin said, “Anyway, right now you and I ought to get to the office. Major Nakamura has something to show us.”

I started.
Why didn’t you tell me that right away?

Merlin added, “While you were parking your truck, my friend, he found the diary.”

I’d shut my phone off so any ringing wouldn’t disturb me grilling Merlin. The police chief was grinning now, enjoying this part. I sighed. “Okay, Merlin. You win.”

Merlin changed out of a T-shirt and into a button-up. He added a bolo tie with a walrus-ivory clip, a carved hunter. He kissed Edith good-bye as she walked on the slow-moving treadmill. He took a paper bag lunch from the refrigerator and put on an anorak against the thirty-six degree cold, whereas I needed a parka. I followed him outside. He stared at the ocean for a moment, across the street, beyond the beach. It was black, frothy with wavelets.

“Hmm, see that sky, Joe?”

“What about it?”

“Surely you smell
that
?”

I sniffed. “Pancakes?”

“Winter’s coming,” said Merlin, tapping his nose.

“Any day now,” I answered.

“No, in about twelve hours,” he said. “By tonight that ocean out there will slush and ice.”

•   •   •

I DROVE FAST, FOLLOWING MERLIN, MY RENTED TWELVE-YEAR-OLD FORD
Explorer eating up the six miles of dirt-and-gravel road; past city garages and yellow bulldozers waiting for winter, past the blue Astroturf football field donated by a Florida woman for Barrow’s high school, into the triangular mass of streets and past a restaurant that had once been a whaler trading station, abutting the beach, fronted by a bleaching bowhead skull—a popular spot for tourist photos.

I passed another tourist attraction: a signpost on a pole, nailed with wooden arrows pointing in all directions. They read:
SEATTLE, 1,960 MILES. LOS ANGELES, 2,945 MILES. AYACUCHO, PERU, 7,691 MILES. PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, 4,966. WASHINGTON, D.C., 3,600.

Many Barrow streets lacked street signs. Homes were designated by number for postal deliveries. We passed the Osaka restaurant where Karen loved the sushi. Backyards were little museums for people who loved the outdoors, filled with sleds, SUVs, hanging racks for drying fish or caribou hides. The tallest structures in town, grouped around one intersection, were Borough Hall, the Wells Fargo Bank building; the Iñupiat owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; and the two-story police station, in front of which we parked. Jail cells upstairs.

There was no need at this time of year to plug the engine into one of the electric heating sockets situated in rows outside any public building, like hitching posts in Old West towns.

Eddie sat in Merlin’s small office, at Kelley’s laptop. Its cover open, pasted with a mass of stickers depicting singing stars: Ed Sheeran, Meghan Trainor.

Eddie looked up. He seemed exhausted. On Merlin’s leather couch I saw rumpled bedding.
He’s probably been here all night.
“The diary is several files, some written, some recorded. All labeled something else. She would have made a pretty good researcher, One.”

He’d given me downtime with Karen, while he and Merlin’s computer guy went through file after file in the laptop last night. The remains of a delivered breakfast from Osaka—eggs on muffins, bacon, coffee, hash browns, and a big cup of OJ—sat on the blotter on Merlin’s desk.

“This is as good as any research you’d see at Harvard, Uno.”