White Plague (6 page)

Eddie sighed. “Horny guys the world over,” he said.

The bridge smelled of coffee. The helmsman steered the big ship with a small wheel. Some joker had placed a tiny plastic toy, of an old-style inch-wide ship’s wheel, the size of a Cracker Jack prize, atop a joystick. I noticed a wooden handrail running the length of the ceiling, behind the console, and above rubber flooring.

“You’ll want to hold on to that when the weather hits,” said DeBlieu. “But one advantage of ice is, when we reach the storm, waves’ll be smaller.”

The bridge was a spaceship traversing another world. The U.S. flag snapped ahead. The planet’s curve was evident on the horizon. I borrowed Clinton’s binoculars, and in the distance, a white city skyline leaped into view; a row of high-rise buildings, white as snow, thrust upward; they had to be ice. “There’s land here?” I asked, surprised. “What the hell is that? An island?”

Clinton grinned and DeBlieu said, “It’s your first mirage. Wait until the upside-down ships appear. You’re looking at pancake ice, light stuff, not even a foot thick, but from a distance, with the earth’s curve, well, everything’s different from a distance here. You’ll see when we get there in about twenty minutes.”

The sense grew stronger that we were entering a world where rules were different. Clinton’s smile sank to a frown as he eyed the purple-gray skies. He went outside onto the outer deck, in the wind, then came back five minutes later, none the worse for wearing only a T-shirt. He did not look happy.

“When I was a boy, our elders warned about that,” he said, nodding at the sky ahead.

He looked into my eyes. His own were calm, and I saw deep knowledge there.

“We’re on a rescue drill, right?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“An exercise. Make-believe.”

“You got it,” said Eddie with confidence.

Clinton nodded. “Then I suggest we turn around.”

My mouth felt dry. I looked at the white city that wasn’t really there.

“Oh, we can’t do that,” I said. “Timetables. It’s all about timetables. It takes months to draw up these games.”

He didn’t seem surprised. He just let out air. “Any chance I can have a few minutes to call my wife? I’ve got my own sat phone. The borough’s paying. So you don’t have to worry about cost. Can you open it up?”

I felt a chill. Eddie, over Clinton’s shoulder, had his brows up.
Can’t do it.

I knew that Clinton wanted to say things to the woman he loved that wives need to hear from husbands, and husbands need to say to wives. I especially knew this because I had not said them when I should have. I wondered if Clinton had children. But I also wondered, even as I hated myself for thinking it, whether the call Clinton wanted to make really was to his wife.

I slapped him on the shoulder. “It’ll be a great story to tell her when you get home.”

I sounded like a fool, probably like every trader or whaler who’d ever told the Iñupiats a falsehood during their long history. Joe Rush, professional liar.

But I couldn’t open up the sat lines, not yet, not until we were closer, so close that even if the Russians or Chinese discovered what we were up to, we’d get there first. I needed to keep a fucking piece of inanimate machinery out of the hands of strangers. That was more important than this one man talking to his family.

I sounded like every sorry bureaucrat who’d ever frustrated logic, hope, desire, or human need.

“Sorry, Clinton. If we let you call out, we have to let other people do it, too.”

He took it in stride. He just nodded as if his request would have been too easy. I think he knew we were not really on a drill. I’d tell the crew soon enough, but just now, something fatalistic moved into the Eskimo’s deep brown eyes.

With a duckish gait, Clinton turned to leave the bridge, shoulders slightly slumped, his cadence as measured as his quiet voice.

“Where are you going?” DeBlieu called after him.

“My cabin,” Clinton said. “To pray.”

I’d given up on God in an Iraqi bunker one day, years ago, when I saw things that changed me and Eddie. But at the moment, I’d settle for sleep, I realized; restful unconsciousness—just for a while—as my personal savior. For what is God if not the voice in your head that tells you to worry, and when trouble is coming, helps you prepare?

My Humvee rumbled forward, filled with Marines. I looked out and saw desert sky roiling with black smoke from burning Kuwaiti oil fields, to the south. The world was on fire, the air orange, the color of hell, at midday. Ours was supposed to be an easy assignment, but I felt, looking in my binoculars, a premonition, a claw on my spine, a catch in my throat.

“Something’s wrong with that village ahead,” I told Eddie over the radio.

We were thirty miles into Iraq. Our column—four Humvees and an armored personnel carrier, containing my rifle platoon—had been detached from the main attack for special duty, protecting the flank, patrolling outlying villages, dots on the terrain map on my lap. Eddie on the ride-along. “Make sure they’re free of fedayeen, ambushers,” the major had said, sending us out.

Joseph Rush and Eddie Nakamura, two years into the Marine Corps, both wearing silver bars denoting us as first lieutenants.

“Nothing moving,” said Eddie’s barely contained voice in my earpiece, from the second Humvee. “What’s the problem?”

“This road.”

“What’s wrong with it? It’s just tar, man.”

“It’s new. Brand-new highway in the middle of nowhere. Why build a four-lane highway out here?”

My face felt like sandpaper. The landscape was hard desert, prickly hills and rocks blasted by sun in daytime, split open by freezing cold at night, as if the earth here was unable to decide how to torture you, and had become as schizophrenic as the tyrant we’d come to fight. Southern Iraq resembled 29 Palms, the Marines’ high-desert training area back in California—filled with sandstorms, winter storms, blasting heat one day, freezing wind the next.

Eddie snorted at my worry. “Why a new road? Saddam’s cousin Achmed is a road contractor. So he needed a job.”

“Then he would have built a lousy road. This is top quality, built for a reason.”

Fragmented radio reports told us that the main action was south or far north, where coalition forces blasted Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards from their bunkers. Burning Russian tanks and Iraqi corpses littered the main highway. Our smart bombs had hit the power plants and communications centers. The regime was collapsing.

Overhead, three F-16 Falcon jets shot past.

We’d taken some sniper fire from behind rocks, nothing major. An hour ago the pings of AK-47 rounds had bounced off my Humvee, and my gunner had killed four teenagers who could not have been older than seventeen, and who we’d left in the dust.

Now Eddie laughed, high on combat and victory. He was happy-go-lucky, the lone child of two San Francisco accountants who’d been horrified when he chose a military career, and his jocular surface hid a dangerous fighter who could come out if provoked by unequal odds. Back in college, where he’d been my ROTC roommate, I’d seen him wade into a street fight once, to help a small kid. I couldn’t figure the fury. Then he told a story. At age nine he’d been in a plane hijacked by PLO terrorists. He’d been on vacation with his parents, sitting next to a sixty-year-old Jewish lady playing magnetic chess when gunmen took over the plane.

The lead man had walked up to the boy and woman, spotted the Jewish star hanging from the woman’s neck, and shot her in the face.

The man had told the shaking boy, “Why sit with kike pigs? Come sit in a cleaner place.”

Eddie said now, “You’re looking for reasons, Number One? This country is a madhouse. Bridges built over desert, not water. Mansions filled with gold statues of movie stars. Mercedes upholstery of real tiger skin.”

Looking out, ahead I saw pathetic poverty-stricken architecture dating back to Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar.

Inside the boxy Humvee, I smelled men after days without baths, dirty feet, cordite, peanut butter.

I said doggedly, eyeing the collection of mud and wattle huts coming up at the end of the black highway, “No, there’s something more . . .”

The air was filthy orange through dust goggles, and thick with sand particles that stung exposed flesh like flies. The surface of the planet was the bottom panels of the Sistine Chapel, where tortured figures—onetime men—emerge howling into eternity.

After three days my thirty-seven guys coughed sand and spit crud out every few minutes, and blobs of heat-caked yellow phlegm marked our passage.

“Come on, man, in and out, like the other villages,” Eddie said.

This one rolled closer. I saw walls ahead, a dirt village square, a collection of huts each the size of an L.A. maid’s room, shimmering in heat that seemed to throw back the sound of our mechanized advance. The hair on my neck began to stand up.

“Be ready for ambush,” I told my guys.

“Hey, Numero,” Eddie said, “little bet. I say it’s nothing. You say fedayeen.”

We’d started the competition in college. Our race for better grades spread to everything else. Who could drink more beers on Saturday night? Who would win the motorcycle competition, the weapons competition, raise more money for the leukemia walkathon? Name it. It became a contest.

He won the best rifle shot, the push-up competition by a hair, and hand-to-hand combat, after four ties. I won the hot dog eating, beat him by one and a half seconds on the obstacle course, and I led the Red Team in war games, creeping over a forested western Massachusetts ridge in a surprise assault during a thunderstorm that captured the “general” of the Blue Team. That ranked me number one in the graduating class, hence the nickname.

We’d lost contact after graduation. Eddie went to Pendleton, I to Lejeune. And now we were rolling those final hundred yards toward Al Rassad, and the rooftops grew clear to the naked eye. I scanned the tops of walls for the glint of metal, a ducking head.

Nothing.

We stopped fifty yards short. I looked for the usual buzzards circling. The sky was an empty furnace; a lone smeary cloud seemed glued in place, almost two-dimensional.

The heat seemed to expand inside my head.

Now Eddie saw something. “Hey, man, no garbage.”

“No busted cars. And look at these tracks in the dirt. They’re from big trucks. Heavy treads.”

“Clean as a Hollywood set, One. No Coca-Cola bottles lying around, no chickens . . .”

“No dogs,” I breathed. “
No damn dogs!
”

That was the crowning touch—no yowling dogs, those big mustard-colored Iraqi canines that seem more like hyenas than domesticated pets. Dogs that make your average Manhattan pit bull look as pitiful as a Chihuahua. The dogs always stay behind in evacuations. They belong to no one. They seem to have sprung to life from rage itself, the yellow desert become flesh and hair.

We’d halted just inside a newly constructed ghost town. No creaking wooden doors left open to wind or looters, no shutters banging, no whiff of human shit marking the community ditch, not even any chicken droppings.

Just the hiss of sand scouring walls.

“Eddie, from the air, this place would look like a typical village. It’s a set!”

My guys went in, house to house, and in the very first one found that people had lived here, all right, but they hadn’t been peasants. Army cots, empty weapons racks, electrical appliances and generators, and the dirty rags of villagers hung on hooks . . .

“Troops disguised as villagers, but for what?”

Then, inside the third hut, we found what they’d protected, the entrance to a bunker, a steel doorway built into rock. Twin surveillance cameras aimed down on us.

“Engineers!” I shot the cameras out.

They blew the door with C4 and sent it flying. Eddie’s squad raked the entranceway with fire, and when there was no response, I told my guys, “Watch for booby traps. Go slow.”

We entered a tunnel, angling down into the earth. It was wide as three Humvees, with an arched roof fifteen feet high. The walls were blasted-away limestone. Bare bulbs overhead remained dark—but everything glowed green from the night goggles. Ahead, the tunnel turned right.

We wore bulky, tough-fibered two-piece camouflaged chemical suits. We carried M16A2 rifles, firing 5.56 mm rounds. I heard our equipment jangling. My heart seemed loud inside my chest, and my breathing was audible.

Lower, ten feet down, fifty. We shot out more cameras, dead eyes, maybe someone watching, maybe not, and after about three hundred feet we found ourselves spilled into the complex. Lights were on and bright.

At first, it could have been a hotel subbasement, with pipes and wiring, the part of the building the guests never see. Cool air down here. I saw an official warning sign in red, in Arabic, a cartoon drawing of an Arab man with a Saddam mustache—it must have been the law here for all guys to wear them—the guy in a yellow hard hat, air filter over his mouth, finger in the air as if to say, “Danger!” Beside the man was a skull and crossbones, but none of us could read the words. I cursed. Our translator had been sent away, to help in the main attack.

Maybe one of my guys hit a tripwire. Maybe the place had been wired and a timer set. All I knew was that suddenly the ground began trembling. Then shaking. “Down!” I yelled as a chain of explosions went off below. Blue smoke poured from the vents.

“Masks!” I yelled.

We donned the bug-eyed masks. Now the smoke was all around us, coming from beneath doors, filling the hallway. But nothing bad was happening—no itching, no catch in breathing, no burning, at least not yet.

I decided to stay.

There’s something important down here Saddam does not want us to find.

Then I saw something moving ahead, something living staggered toward us through smoke. It was small and two-legged, a child. A goddamn kid. A silhouette in agony, hands waving in the smoke, maybe to surrender. Head whipping back and forth.

I yelled, “Hold your fire!” The figure fell and stood and then continued forward with a crazy side-to-side gait. Up. Down. It was hurt or ill. A voice in my earpiece gasped, “What the fuck is
that
, Lieutenant?”

I breathed, staring, “A monkey.”

The thing began screaming, “
Kraa . . . kraa.
”

It had a snout like a dog or a baboon and pink hands like a person. It had a pink face and white fur on its chest. It jerked in crazy circles, not seeing us. Blood was pouring from its mouth and nose, and when it turned sideways, I saw red ooze dripping from its ears.

Concussion from the explosion?

The animal took two steps forward, rubbed its eyes, cocked its head, my guys froze, and then it seemed to see us. I could not imagine, in my wildest imagination, what it must be thinking.

The monkey screamed one long eruption of rage.

It lurched forward but fell down and began convulsing.

By the time I reached it, it was dead. It had hemorrhaged out from every possible orifice. Black, clotted, evil stuff spread out, pooled on the concrete floor.

Shit, shit, what were they making in here?

Eddie’s voice in the earpiece was saying, “We’re coming in, One, behind you.”

I saw a sign half in Arabic, half in English.
AL HAZEN IBN AL HAITHAM INSTITUTE RESEARCH SATELLITE FACILITY.

“Eddie, it’s a lab down here. Stay out.”

I kept going.

The smoke thinned and the screams started.

It was hell, a tunnel to hell. Now the echoes came through vents all around us. “
Kraaaaaaa!
” It sounded like hundreds more animals were down here somewhere, grunting, screeching, and there were tearing noises and retching, and I did not think there would be humans down here anymore, but I still could not be sure what waited behind the next bend.

The toxic gear better work
, I thought, and we stayed a couple inches farther away from the walls. We passed a half dozen paintings of the dictator, the madman king of this madman house; Saddam on a white horse, wearing white flowing Bedouin robes. Saddam cross-legged by a desert campfire, reading a Koran, the wise military sage.

I was proud of my guys. Eighteen and nineteen years old and they held discipline. The point men going in first, the other two behind.

The first room turned out to be an office. There was a steel desk, wood-paneled walls, and in the flashlight beam, I made out medical certificates in biochemistry. A panel read:
DR. MASSOUD AZIZ
. He was, in the photo, on a beach with a plump, fortyish woman and two smiling teenage sons. There were lots of reports in blue binders, a TV set in the wall, a pair of backless slippers on an oriental rug, as if the owner had laid them carefully down, expecting to return. I opened a photo album with my rifle. I was looking at photos of dead people, their faces bloated, bleeding, their eyes red from blood.

The next room was a locker room. Medical whites hung on hooks. There was a break room with refrigerated glass cases filled with orange juice cans, and dishes of what looked to be hummus or baba ghanoush, olives, tomato slices. I saw small bloody tracks . . . animal feet . . . on the linoleum, a loose pile of bloody stools on a table, an overturned sugar bowl. Those tiny hands would have been in there. There were sugar strands on the table.

The cacophony was growing. A symphony of agony came through the vents, echoed between walls. I heard sobbing, hiccups, metal rattling. I heard hacking and sneezing. I was in Bosch’s hell, and somewhere ahead, behind a door, behind smoke hovering by the floor, were the creatures.