Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (11 page)

“You’re a bundle of laughs today,” I said. “Anyway, its not like Homza can hear what we say in our hut, right?”

Two days later all the results were in on our tests.

“Nothing.”

•   •   •

THERE ARE NO FUNERAL HOMES IN BARROW. THE IÑUPIAT BURY THEIR OWN
dead. A
cakewalk
held before the burial—the sale of homemade cakes and pies—raises expense money.

The cemetery was a half mile from the airport, a small patch of tundra dotted with disorderly rows of crosses and markers, dwarfed by sky and horizon, rich with wildflowers in summer, but summer was over, and a big yellow borough-auger drilled loudly through thin topsoil, slashing into permafrost, to carve out a resting place for Clay. Four-wheel-drive vehicles circled the cemetery like wagons.

Tomorrow we’d go home.

On our last day in Barrow, Karen stood beside me at the graveside, as Clay’s wife, neighbors and friends remembered him, and a northeast wind whipped away every second word. The chill in the air seemed small beside the frost that had marked our Quonset hut since the dance. Nothing overt. No arguments. But something about my dance with Tilda Swann had set off a red flag inside my fiancée. I didn’t push. She would talk about it when she was ready. The truth was, I’d dreamed of Tilda for two nights running: graphic dreams, sex dreams, pumping bodies. It made me wonder if Karen’s intuition had picked up on even my dreams.

I’d told Karen about our orders shutting her out of things, and she’d shrugged. “No problem, Joe. You retire in a few months anyway.” She’d been more concerned about the deaths we’d come to commemorate.

“Clay was a servant of the borough,” Mayor Rupert Brower was saying. “He was my friend.”

Karen had plunged herself into her prep for her film over the past few days. I’d hit the investigation hard, testing soil samples from the camp, food samples, wood scrapings, victims’ medical records, from here, and home.

We’ve found nothing. And Merlin’s detectives found nothing useful in their interviews, either. No sign of aberrant behavior. No drinking or drugs. No big problems or depression, mood changes, or resentment of the Harmons. Nothing useful on the tip lines. Nothing found at the site.

No speaker uttered the words
suicide
or
murder
but even among a people who lived with sudden death—small plane crashes, snowmobiles falling through ice, fishing boats capsizing—what had happened stood out as special tragedy
.
Merlin Toovik remembered Clay as a skilled hunter. I met Clay’s sobbing wife, a bewildered nephew, an Army buddy from Germany who flew in from Juneau. I looked over the grouped residents of our little Quonset hut community.

The Harmons will be shipped south, but somehow this service is for all the dead, although the earth only receives one on this day.

Calvin DeRochers, the diamond hunter, stood to the side, near fourteen-year-old Deirdre McDougal, who was weeping. I spotted morose Leon Kavik, staring at the ground. Alan McDougal made a speech about how he’d only known Clay for six years, but that Clay had been a kind, smart, generous man.

My eyes roved over the crowd. Dr. Sengupta stood beside Bruce Friday, and wore enough clothing for three people, and still stamped his feet to keep warm.

Mikael Grandy stood alone, camera sweeping right to left, discreetly aimed at Karen, then on me.

But funerals have a way of putting smaller problems in perspective. Karen and I moved closer, until my arm was around her shoulder. By the time we got to the Presbyterian church for the post-funeral singspiration, the warmth I felt was not only from gas heat. It was us. Our argument was over. Whatever had been wrong, I knew, would be okay, at least for a while.

Truth was, our year together had been exciting, but part of that was that we’d lived in different cities. Our periods of togetherness—thus far—had been enhanced by the knowledge that they’d be short and sweet. Oh, we’d talked by phone every day, texted, e-mailed—all the modern substitutes for actual presence—and we’d look forward to the next romantic rendezvous in the Costa Rican mountains, or the white, deserted beaches of North Carolina, or the Broadway play weekend in Manhattan. All great.

But after our meetings, I’d go back to Anchorage. She’d fly back to California.

I told myself now that the mundane parts of our life together had not yet been given a chance to settle in, and turn from boring routine to intimate rhythm, which is what they do when relationships work. Our issues had been big tricky ones; not small, insidious ones. We’d settled on where to live, how to stay in contact when one of us was in the field, how long to hold off on having children. Karen did not want to be an explorer and mother at the same time.

“Once I have a child, I’ll be there one hundred percent,” she’d said.

“I can wait a few years.”

“It will be a challenge, you and me, Joe.”

“You mean, having children?”

“No. I mean, just living. Because one of us will usually be traveling. Because there will always be aspects of our work we can’t discuss. Because we’ll need to get used to the other person . . . the one you love . . . being in danger. You with diseases. Me and my long Arctic walks.”

I shook it off. When we gathered up our parkas, I saw her turn and make a hand gesture to Mikael Grandy, who was in a rear pew, and it meant,
Not now, not today, go away.

“Let’s take a drive,” she said. “And talk.”

The wind had risen, and snow had fallen last night, so two inches of fresh fall coated the town. It looked more like sand, hard and granular, the way it collected on rooftops and stop signs. Barrow is technically a desert. Little precipitation falls but what does stays there all winter. Plows move it around at night, pushing drifts into piles that, during the day, spread out again.

We wore extra layers, stocking hats, fur-lined gloves, calf-high boots, and wool socks with liners. The ocean had a glaze, stretching to the horizon. Night had fallen with particular sharpness. The stars were bright, a rarity in a place where 90 percent of the time the land sat beneath thick cover of clouds.

When she walked past my truck I said, confused, “I thought you wanted to take a drive.”

A smile. “You’ll see, Marine.”

So! A peace mission. We strolled down empty streets, stopping finally before a two-story home with detached garage, and a warren of chain-link cages cramming the side yard. I heard deep excited barking from many throats.

“Oh,
that
kind of drive,” I said.

“I took the dogs out earlier this week, when you were at the lab. Luther Oz let Mikael and me borrow them, once he saw me mush. Twelve-dog power. Got my sat phone and trusty GPS. Help me start the engine, Joe.”

The huskies were enormous, shaggy, and more wild than domesticated, each one chained to a small wooden box that served as home. They knew Karen, eyed me but gave up suspicion when they realized we were going running. They leaped and howled with excitement when they saw her pull the wooden sled from beside the garage and lay the harnesses on the snow, in each animal’s place. This was the last dog team in Barrow. The Iñupiats used snowmobiles on the tundra. They were cheaper than dogs and didn’t have to be fed every day. This team was a last vestige of the old Arctic. Hell, Deputy Luther Oz—who raced in the Iditarod each year—spent hours catching more than two hundred fish a week with spread nets just to feed the animals.

We unchained the dogs. The harnesses went on smoothly. The last animal to be fitted was the lead, a five-year-old female named Justina.

“Climb on. I’ll start it out,” Karen said.

I sat legs out on the sled’s pile of woolen blankets. I smelled dog and mildew and the sharp tang of ammonia. She stood behind me on the runners, the woman I’d fallen for, my personal explorer, my one in a million. She shouted, fiercely and happily, “Hut-hut-hut!”

The sled rammed forward at twelve miles an hour, out of the backyard, up over the packed-down snow on the road. We skittered hard across someone’s backyard, past hanging caribou skins, and across a frozen lagoon and out onto the tundra. We passed the airport runway lights, with the streetlights of town receding. The dogs headed at a happy gallop toward the raised-up natural gas pipeline in the distance, source of Barrow homes’ heat.

“Beats the horse carriage in Central Park,” she called.

I forgot any investigation. I saw furred dog tails wagging. The sense of space pressing in; the lab, the base, the hut, disappeared. Karen’s voice floated in from behind.

“I apologize, Joe.”

“Why?”

“Because you were just doing your job at that dance. You know why I’ve been spending so much time with Mikael? To show you I’m independent. Truth is, I used him to make myself feel like I wasn’t getting tied up. I mean, he needs to be here, but I went a little overboard.”

“Thanks.”

“And then I saw you with Tilda Swann and I was furious. Like you were flaunting someone else in my face. But you weren’t doing that. I was.”

I thought, recalling last night’s torrid sex dream about Tilda,
Accept this gift and shut up.

“I want us to work, Joe. I want it so badly that I get scared.”

“Me, too.”

“I thought Marines never get scared.”

“We hide it better.”

“Want to drive?” she said.

“
Now
I’m scared. Explain how to steer this thing.”

“Pick a direction.”

“Right.”

She shouted out a sharp command, “Dee! Dee!”

Justina suddenly veered off to the right, looping the whole team, the sled, and me that way. Amazing.

Now we were running away from the pipeline, and straight away from Barrow, and toward the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay, two hundred miles ahead.

Karen shouted, “Haw!” and Justina smoothly and instantly veered back the way we’d come.

“Stop! Okay, Marine, let’s see you try.”

We reversed position, Karen sitting on the sled, me standing in the back.

“See that flat iron bar above by the back runner, Joe?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a brake. If you stand on it, it slows the sled. But you still need the command for them to pull up.”

“What’s
that
command, Karen. Moo?”

“Just yell ‘stop,’ silly. Like I did.”

I yelled, “Hut, hut!” and off we went again.
Joe Rush, Arctic dog team commander.
I gathered up my Marine colonel’s voice and shouted a resounding “DEE”—turn right—except the dogs ignored me. I tried, “Haw! Haw!” and a dozen heads whipped around, regarded me with doggy distain, and kept going straight.

Karen was laughing. Then she said, “Oh! Look up, Joe. Look at the stars!”

They seemed closer and brighter. Then there was a sudden disturbance up there, like a razor blade drawn across darkness. A slit opened and I watched in awe as molten color—green lava—began spilling out, dripping down in luminous sheets.

“Aurora borealis,” I breathed.

The lava faded to a luminous gas, swirling in the southwest quadrant. It sharpened back to the lava-like mass that colored even stars and flared brightly and disappeared so suddenly that they left an ache in space.

We stopped the sled, the dogs lay down, she got on beside me and pulled up a free blanket. “Now this
really
beats Central Park,” I said.

She giggled. “Ready to hear a super-classified submarine crew war game secret? Death penalty if you talk?”

“They’ll never get it out of me.” From the teasing tone, all I knew was that something amusing would come.

“I was on the
Virginia
a couple years back, war game, north of the Bering Strait. Scary scenario, actually. The deal was, Russia’s in the Ukraine again. We’re threatening reprisals. They up the ante in the Arctic, face-off, and we suddenly lose all sat coverage, we’re stuck on the surface, fire’s destroyed guidance. We have to get to Nome.”

“You navigated by stars,” I said.

“Right, except the game was,
The Russians can hear everything we say . . .
so one of our chiefs, a guy from Louisiana, shrimper family, told us about this game his people played in the Gulf.
They made up constellations.
”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it, Joe. Look up. See Polaris? The North Star? See how it’s part of Ursa Minor, the bear?”

“Yes, I know it.”

“The Greeks named it. They knew that if they drew lines connecting those particular stars, you’d see the outline of a small bear, and they named the whole image, see?”

“So what was the game? Rename the image?”

“No! Better! Because the images are arbitrary. Take those same stars, connect them to
other
stars, thirty degrees south, and turn your pen northwest and hit that red-looking star, see it? Good! Connect
those
dots instead of the Greek ones, you get a squatting monkey.”

I started laughing.

“It was the simplest damn code,” she said admiringly, and lowered her voice, became a ship commander directing a helmsman to change course. “Head for the monkey’s chin.”

I loved that laugh. Karen taught me new constellations. The fat zebra. Flipper. She was right. It was easy, and had us howling. “Head southwest from the giant toad.”

Funny, yes, but as we stood under the stars, holding hands, the sad truth about the deaths of new friends came back to me.

“Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is the truth, Merlin will announce a suicide/murder.”

We started back. At length I saw, in the distance, hemmed in by vast night, the small glow of human-made light in Barrow. I knew that probably a thousand new diseases come into existence every year. You never hear about them. A goatherd in Turkey develops rashes from a new skin virus. His fever spikes. He recovers. The rash disappears.

A Boston two-year-old comes down with a cough that lingers, and the child does not respond to antibiotics. Three days later the girl is cooing at her mother, cured not by medicine, but by natural body defense.

In less than twenty-four hours we’d board the evening Alaska Airlines 737 and head south, me to D.C. for a talk with my new boss, she to Nome for upcoming war games.