White Plague (19 page)

The film crumbled when I touched it.

The first three feet disintegrated; one second whole, the next—in despair—I looked down on an array of glossy shreds on the blotter.

I heard the men behind me breathing, and the crackling of aged cellulose. I tried another strip, gently, heard a noise like wax paper crackling, and another three-inch section broke off. Two inches remained intact. There was no picture on it. It was ghostly white, the image either long gone or, I hoped, this was an unused start to the roll.

Was I destroying evidence? I tried to unroll a third piece and the tweezers managed to pull out another intact two-inch strip.

“Attaboy,” said Eddie.

I smelled DeBlieu behind me, a mix of Old Spice and Irish Spring soap, a whiff of a last meal, barbequed chicken. I held the strip firmly on the blotter. With my free hand, I gingerly slid a hand magnifier over it. The tensor light shone brightly, reflected off the magnifier and into my eyes. The shadows of the men behind me fell on the blotter. I felt the lab rock gently from ship movement as I leaned down again, put my eye to the piece.

I said, “Got something!”

Leaping into view was a single frame, showing four soldiers in uniforms standing proudly before the front door of a Quonset hut, the middle man, clearly clown of the group, sticking his hand in his shirt, like Napoleon, and saluting. Long-dead buddies. The hats held at their sides were floppy brimmed, early-twentieth-century U.S. Army. The men wore suspenders and loose breeches stuffed into high boots. They had neat mustaches, long for my taste, and the two men not wearing hats had their short hair parted in the middle.

“This is turn of the twentieth century. It’s a silent movie,” I breathed. “Older than we figured.”

What possible relevance could it have to the submarine
Montana
?
I noticed a sign beside the Quonset hut door. I heard myself read the words with horrified reverence. They froze my blood.

“
FORT RILEY, KANSAS, 1918.
”

Eddie whispered, awed, too, “Oh, shit.”

DeBlieu asked impatiently, “That’s important? What happened at Fort Riley in 1918?”

Neither of us responded, hoping we were wrong. After several more strips disintegrated, a long one rolled out. Perhaps the more deeply I unrolled the spool, the more protection the film had received, the better shape it was in.

DeBlieu said, “Hey, feel free to answer.”

With unreal slowness, I pulled out film. I needed many frames just to see an elbow shifting, a leg lifting. I said, “They’re packing now. They’re filling knapsacks. They’re going on a journey.”

Maybe I should have stopped as the director had ordered, but by now I was too excited and frightened at what I suspected would come next.

I narrated to my transfixed audience. “They’re inside a building now. A warehouse. I see stacked Springfield rifles. Machine guns. Other soldiers help them load it onto trucks. Wait! Someone’s inserted captions now. Handwritten. Eddie, you ever hear of U.S. Army Project White?”

“No.”

“It says ‘part two.’ Do you think that first section, the busted-up one, was part one?”

“I’ll take part two if we can get it.”

The pressure of the eyepiece against my face seemed to penetrate my sockets. Eddie groaned. “They’re only loading rifles, right? Arms, right?”

DeBlieu repeated, as if we’d not heard his previous plea, “What about Fort Riley? This is a hundred years old. What does this have to do with us?”

I held up a hand to let him know I’d heard. It was too early to answer. The film must have been developed on the old boat. As I kept rolling, and the strip started dangling off the table, Eddie scrounged around behind me and created a way to roll up the film as it uncoiled . . . He cut a knife groove into a wooden dowel. He inserted the film edge into the slit. He rolled film up as it unspooled. I figured—when we were done, we’d spool the film back up, if we could.

There were bare frames and that was so frustrating. It was like watching an old movie but only seeing every fourth or fifth frame . . . sometimes nine or ten in a row before a strip broke off.

Then the film seemed to stabilize enough so that I could pull it, frame by frame, beneath the hand magnifier.

I read out loud, peering down from a century ahead, to the century behind, “
OFF LIMITS. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
.”

Little figures moved jerkily. The soldiers were on a dock now, in civilian clothing, loading the crates of grenades and Springfield rifles onto a boat. Time leaped in jerks. The gangplank seemed to bow with weight as men went back and forth onto a small, private, forty-foot-long boat, and there was a long shot of the name,
Anna.
The clown guy, the one who had acted like Napoleon before, did a sailor jig on the dock, hands on his belt.

“
Now we’re at sea,” I said, seeing gray rolling waves, which were still out there, unlike the men who had shot this. A whale spouted. Then there were three whales. I said, “Shit,” as a whole section of film tore off, and when I resumed, the men were in a rocky forest. “Whole bunch of new guys now with them, and mules, and the crates are on the animals. They’re moving through a trail cut through high fir trees.”

DeBlieu said, “Project White. Delivering arms.”

It was like some old Charlie Chaplin movie. Real humans didn’t move like this. Now the clown guy was standing on a stump, watching the mules go by, pretending to be an ape, hunched over, swinging his arms, scratching his armpits, beating his chest.

“He just broke out coughing,” I said.

“You want to tell DeBlieu? Or should I?” said Eddie.

I felt a wave of devastation sweep over me. Now the clown guy must have had the camera, because the other guys—long overcoats on, rifles over their backs, military caps on—had paused for a group photo. The coughing wasn’t the point of the shot. Clown guy had just happened to cough when they were rolling. The camera panned away, and there was a gap in the forest, and through that I saw a fuzzy moving blob in the distance.

“Guys coming on horseback. About thirty of them. A village there, too. Thatched roofs. Timber walls. The riders wear fur-flapped caps and baggy trousers and have rifles on their shoulders. Small horses, skinny. Bandoliers . . . these guys look like Cossacks. Man, handlebar mustaches!”

The Americans waved. It was an arranged meeting. Close up, the riders seemed to stare at the camera, angry that it was there. Their clothing was a ragtag collection of peasant patchwork, some foreign military uniforms, and one man even wore a stylish bowler, low brimmed, above a coat more appropriate for the theater, long and hemmed with fur.

“Colonel, where are they?” asked DeBlieu.

“They’ve got a flag. It’s the two-headed eagle, the Russian imperial eagle, above a coat of arms. Russia.” I sat back. I looked at DeBlieu. Now I understood. “They’re bringing guns to the White Russians fighting the Reds.”

DeBlieu looked puzzled. “Wait. America fought against Russia in 1918?” he said.

“Yeah, Woodrow Wilson sent in troops to help fight the Communists,” said Eddie, a student of military history.

“He did?”

I felt DeBlieu’s hand on my shoulder as he leaned closer. “What happened to those soldiers?”

I snapped, “You want me to explain, or keep going?”

His hand fell away. I glanced up. He looked angry, but he’d shut up.

I continued rolling, feeling guilty because I was getting to see the story, not them.

“They must have transferred the arms because now they’re back on the boat. Mission accomplished! They’re slapping each other’s backs. They’re toasting the mission. Clown guy is really coughing in this one. All done! Except, whoa! Now they’re being chased by a gunship . . . Bolshevik ship . . . I can see the deck gun firing at them . . . a splash . . . the shell just missed them.”

The Bolshevik ship was getting closer. I prayed for our guys to get away. Now the view shifted abruptly, the camera in front of the boat. The clown guy on the prow, not smiling, pointing forward, as if urging more speed. There was a cloud bank in the distance . . . I imagined the guy shouting,
Faster!

“They’re still not hit.”

The film tilted. Brown spots, age spots ate up the picture. It was gone. I kept rolling. Eddie kept spooling up the film.

“They’re back,” I said, relieved. “It’s cloudy all around . . . no . . . they’re in mist. I guess they got away, escaped into it. They’re in front of the boat, looking ahead. There’s a caption:
TWO DAYS LATER
. Oh, oh, shit, man, they must be really north because
they’re in the ice
!”

Only it wasn’t the kind of ice the
Wilmington
was in, or the kind I’d seen near the
Montana.
Unrolling before my eye was the monster ice I’d read about in history books, seen in old lithographs. These were ice mountains. This was the Andes, the Alps, of ice. The walls surrounding the little
Anna
seemed to grow higher, frame by frame. I noticed one of the other men coughing, too, now.

I sat back. “They sailed too far north,” I said. “Got away, but they’re getting sick.”

DeBlieu said, “These are the bodies the sub found?”

“Has to be.”

The film jumped again and my heart did, too, because I saw it. I’d known we would end up here, but I’d hoped I’d be wrong.

“Take a look,” I told DeBlieu.

I held the magnifier in place. He bent down. I resumed drawing the film toward me. I heard DeBlieu groan.

“They’re all sick now,” he said. “With the same thing.”

Eddie sighed. “They kept filming, One. Till the end.”

It was a death film now. At first I didn’t realize that the man I watched in a bunk was clown guy. There was no smile now. No jumping around. A close-up showed him bleeding through his nose, like patients from the
Montana
. The camera pulled back. Another sick guy lay in an upper bunk, eyes closed, lethargic. The eyes opened. The mouth moved. History consumed his words. There was no technology to capture them. The hand of an unseen man laid a compress on clown guy’s forehead. The camera shook violently. Maybe the man taking the photo was coughing, too, doing his job, distracting himself from what they probably all knew was to come.

Eddie took over at the eyepiece, described what came next, which was a foregone conclusion. Three of the men on the boat struggling with the corpse of clown guy, rolling it over the side, in a shroud. A shot of an ice mountain. Then the vessel locked in place, caught by ice coating the gunwales and ice on the ceilings. The deck was slick with ice, the men coughing, throwing up as they tried to chip it away, get free. Cut to the mast, which was now an ice pole. Another body went over the side, and flopped, in its sheet, onto a floe. A bear bent over it.

DeBlieu commanded, “Enough! You know what it is! Explain. Now!”

Explain? It’s funny the way you can know something horrible, even be sure of it, but not want to say it because that will be the final step of transforming it into something real.

I said tiredly, “They called it the Spanish flu.”

“Even though it didn’t start in Spain,” Eddie said.

“It broke out in 1918, near the end of World War One.”

DeBlieu looked pensive, riveted.

“Nineteen eighteen,” I said. “Imagine it. The world at war. Millions of men in trenches. Chemical bombs. Fighter planes for the first time. Tanks for the first time. And then, out of the blue, on top of everything else, a new disease appears.”

“At Fort Riley,” said Eddie. “Kansas.”

“Wait, I heard of the Spanish flu,” DeBlieu said. “It started in
Kansas
?”

“Just like the Wizard of Oz,” said Eddie.

“
I thought it killed millions in Europe.”

“Oh, it did. But that’s not where it started. We learned this on our first week in the unit,” I said. “That flu was the worst disease outbreak in history.”

“I thought the black plague was that.”

“No. The story—the
theory—
is that soldiers enlisting at Riley, guys from pig farms nearby, came in already infected. Then it spread. Doctors had never seen anything like it. It hit the younger people the worst, the healthier ones, ramped up the resistance system like crazy, so a more vigorous person, those guys were more likely to die. Victims fell ill in the morning and died that night.”

“Like on the
Montana
,”
DeBlieu breathed.

“Yeah. And like on the
Anna.
Those guys probably didn’t know they were infected when they sailed off. Other Riley troops got sent to Europe. The disease amplified there, in the trenches,” Eddie said. “But it didn’t stay in the trenches. In the end, five hundred million infected. Twenty to fifty million dead, some estimates go as high as eighty million. It changed the war, altered battle plans, killed more people in one year than the black plague did in four. Fifteen thousand dead in Philadelphia. Theaters closed across the U.S. Schools closed. If the war hadn’t been on, taken up the headlines, every schoolkid in the U.S. would know this story. But it was downplayed at the time. Oh, you knew that people in
your
city were sick, in
your
family, but no one outside of governments knew the whole picture.”

I said, remembering photos we’d seen, “Crowds, people were too afraid to congregate. Cops and firemen stopped going to work in places. In some countries the dead were bulldozed into pits. The flu burned across earth. Hell, go to a New York Yankees game in September 1918, half the people in the stands wore masks. Neighbors avoided each other. In parts of Alaska, Eskimo villages suffered a ninety-five percent death rate. Alaska—the Eskimos—got it the worst.”

DeBlieu said, aghast, “How did they stop it?”

I shook my head. “They never did. It just ran out. It morphed into something less lethal. But the fear has always been that it will come back, in the original form. The question . . . we got this at the unit, in seminars, we read papers about it, it comes up at conferences. If it didn’t have a name like flu, if it had a name like plague, believe me, you’d have heard of it. The question is, the fear has been, for a hundred years,
if that flu comes back, can we stop it this time?
”