Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (12 page)

In ninety days I would retire. In ten months so would Eddie, and then Karen and I and my partner and his family would take up residence on the East Coast. We’d never have to deal with General Wayne Homza again.

It struck me, as we glided along, that for the past twenty thousand years—from the time before the Romans to Wayne Homza—the land around us had simply sucked up lives with mystery. That Kelley and her parents, and Clay Qaqulik, were going to go down as the latest additions to a list stretching back to the days when mammoths and saber-toothed tigers walked these rolling plains.

If Clay Qaqulik hadn’t fired his shotgun, all four of them might have recovered and told the story one day of the scary time out on the tundra, when they’d become ill with something no one ever ID’d.

At first I thought the chirping sound was coming from Karen’s parka. Then I realized it was my phone and, seeing it was Eddie’s number, calling, clicked it on.

“Colonel Rush?”

It wasn’t Eddie but I recognized the musical intonations of Dr. Ranjay Sengupta, who had released the bodies for a flight home tomorrow morning. They’d be leaving at 9
A.M
.

“What is it?” I asked, assuming it was one more piece of nonstop North Slope or State of Alaska paperwork.

“I think you had better come to the hospital. I am afraid that we have another case,” Dr. Ranjay Sengupta replied.

FOUR HOURS EARLIER

It was hard to think about business when all he could imagine was sex.

George Carling—38, respected whaling captain, board member of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, coach of the Alaska state championship high school wrestling team, and descendant of a Danish-born whaler—and his Iñupiat wife sat at the long conference table on the third floor of the ASRC headquarters, trying to concentrate on the oil people’s words, but his heart was roaring with anticipation, his throat was dry with lust.

Longhorn Oil’s Dave Lillienthal, smiling at the dozen assembled board of directors, including George, said, “Believe me, our drilling will be done under the safest specifications. We will stop work when you are whaling, to avoid driving bowheads away.”

Unlike Native Americans in the lower forty-eight, Alaska’s Eskimos had not been given reservations by the federal government, in exchange for signing away rights to land. They got money, and established corporations under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Each tribe’s corporation had authority over their land. Any Iñupiat was an automatic shareholder, and received tax-free dividend checks annually. The ASRC, George’s corporation, owned twenty million acres on Alaska’s North Slope.

Dave Lillienthal said, “Longhorn North would be grateful if the ASRC supported our pipeline route, in Washington.”

So far this morning the board had approved a bid by a Los Angeles–based Arctic Tours Company to acquire a fifty-year lease for an eco lodge on sixteen thousand acres of land south of Barrow, to bring in tourists. They’d gone thumbs-down on an application by a Minnesota-based copper mining company to dig a mine to the west, even though the company promised that half their employees would be Iñupiats.

The proposed pipeline route/offshore drilling plan was the main thrust of today’s meeting.

“What can we do to get you to agree?” Dave asked.

Board members were almost all whaling captains, the most-respected leaders in their villages. They were responsible for the lives of their crews, usually relatives and friends. They brought food to their people, and so, in meetings like this, they wore two hats. As board members, they wanted to expand business. As whaling captains, they wanted protection for the hunt. In fact, their captains organization, the Alaska State Whaling Commission, paid lawyers in Washington, D.C., who filed lawsuits against oil companies when plans conflicted with hunting times.

Merlin Toovik, sitting beside George, said, “Put your promises on paper, Dave. That would help.”

Dave sighed, nodded as if that was a good idea, but then said, “That’s complicated. That sets a precedent. But we promise. You know our promise is always good.”

It was little Deborah on whom George concentrated, his mouth dry, and heartbeat strong, as he anticipated the pleasure in store for him across the street, up in the Wells Fargo Bank building when this meeting was over. George imagining that small dancer’s body naked, lying on the Naugahyde couch by the window; George remembering the feel of those slim arms around his neck, and those soft fingers gliding down, the dirty things that she whispered; George in wonder at the excessive physical zeal of which he’d been capable during the last three days, even with his wife at the hotel. Like he’d become twenty years old again. George shook his head in wonder. He and Agatha must have done it four times last night . . . and STILL this ceaseless urge made him hard right now, made it difficult to hear the mélange of babble from the brother, as he delivered the same promises that captains had heard from so many corporations over the years.

“There will be many jobs for local people.”

George read the lips of one of the Point Hope captains, a young man, and angry.
Lies.

But Point Hope people were always angry. They never trusted outsiders and George could not blame them. First they’d been decimated by diseases that the whalers carried in the 1800s. Then the U.S. government had tried to blow up the village with atomics, during Project Chariot, and government scientists had dumped cesium in nearby water.

“I’m sure none of you want,” Dave Lillienthal said, looking around, palms out, “to go back to pre-oil days, when you chopped ice for drinking water.”

The sister actually thought she could influence his vote by sleeping with him. George found this amusing. But he was not going to turn down excellent sex.

George tried to take notes but his fingers began going numb again, damnit, he was losing feeling at the endings. The tingling and deadness had come in waves over the past two days, starting a day after he’d arrived in Barrow. In fact, when he’d walked into this room an hour ago, he’d almost fallen into the chair, because his right leg didn’t work right. Fortunately no one had noticed.

I must be getting a flu, he thought.

George caught sight of his reflection in the window and it disgusted him; the clean-shaven squarish face, bullet head, and fleshy cheeks on a trunk of a neck, a worker’s face, strong, the same as always and yet it seemed wrong to him, ugly, something he did not want to look at.

Like this morning, at the hotel, after the post-sex shower . . . First the water had felt slimy, like there were chemicals in it, and then his reflection in the bathroom mirror was so disturbing that’d he’d draped a towel over it to shut the sight of himself off.

Weird. Well, he’d gotten flus before. Whatever this stupid thing was, it would go away.

Dave Lillienthal got his attention again, holding up the TV clicker, gesturing at the teleconference screen in front of the room, by the coffee and ham and turkey sandwiches. He said, “Our engineers in Houston want to show you our new drill machinery, safer and more efficient than before.”

George distracted, catching Deborah’s wink. George thinking, I can’t believe I’m so hard!

Last night he had been incredible, insatiable, better than when he was courting Agatha, better than his honeymoon or even anything he’d imagined when he was a teenager watching James Bond. He’d done it with Agatha again and again and left her gasping, both of them gloriously sore, and STILL he’d seen her with the towel this morning, gotten aroused and gone at it again.

And now he could not stop glancing at Deborah, the way her hair fell around her face . . . the way her slender fingers caressed a pen. He smelled her Shalimar fragrance over the scents of coffee, Paco Rabanne from Dave, leather chair cleaner, and
muktuk
. Someone had it in a pocket, or breathed it.

And now, in his head, pain, growing . . . Boom . . . Boom . . . Boom!

“As you know,” Dave said, through George’s headache, as if he needed to remind them of what they all never forgot, “in the days of your grandparents, the Iñupiats had no plumbing. In the Indian Affairs schools children cried themselves to sleep at night. The Iñupiat language was banned in class.”

A captain from Wainright, and one from St. Lawrence Island, both more than seventy years old, nodded, remembering.

Dave said, “It wasn’t until you taxed oil that you took control of your own destiny. But if you shut us down, if offshore fails, you go back to the past.”

The board thanked the Lillienthals and asked to discuss this in private, and the brother and sister left. They’d paid for the coffee and sandwiches; turkey on wheat, ham on rye, bacon cheeseburgers from Northern Lights Café.

George’s headache was worse now, so bad that he forgot the sex, as the board argued about offshore drilling. Some favored it, because without oil tax money, the borough would go broke and without oil the ASRC would lose business. Others feared that a spill or explosion would drive away whales. Everyone felt the pull of logic on both ends, but half of the board came down on one side, half on the other.

“George? You’re not saying anything,” Merlin said.

“What?”

“We’re going around the table.”

His hand wouldn’t move. He told them he needed to think more, needed to pray on it. He sat there trying to look normal, caught sight of his face again in the window, and turned his eyes away.

But then the numbness passed as suddenly as it had come, as it had several times already. It would probably go away by itself in the end. The meeting ended without resolution. George waited until he was the last to leave—so no one saw where he went next. He made his way outside and across the street to the Wells Fargo Bank building, and up in the elevator to the fourth floor, where she waited in the tiny, unoccupied Teens Against Drugs suite. Longhorn funded the organization, so she had a key.

“Georgy.”

He could not control himself. He had her gasping. She lay eagerly below him on the couch. His knees pressed into thick carpet and he knelt behind her, ramming. His big hands encircling her tiny dancer’s back, squeezed her small breasts. A coffee table was knocked over. The smell became rank and musky. All of it drove him to new heights.

He looked down, and son of a bitch, HE WAS STILL HARD.

“George, how old did you say you were? Seventeen?”

He made a grunting sound, like an animal.

“A little bird told me that you didn’t vote in there, Georgy. Is there something bothering you about our plan?”

George knew that the “little bird” was thirty-six-year-old Patrick Ahmogak from Nuigsut, who had once worked as a marine mammal spotter on the BP seismic boats out of Prudhoe Bay.

Deborah jerked up on the couch when he answered, looked alarmed and asked, “What did you say?”

“I said I want to think about it.”

“Why are you making those noises?”

“What noises?”

“George, stop that! This isn’t funny! Speak English!”

He stood up. He could see the reflection of a startled, ape-like man, naked in the window, and a small woman, head turned to him, her white body stiff on the sofa. He sat beside her. He tried to explain about the headache. Except she backed off and then stood, quickly gathering up her clothes, looking frightened. He tried to reach out to soothe her, but his hand remained at his side. She was dressing, telling him that no one was supposed to know that they spent time together and she’d see him later and just STOP MAKING THOSE NOISES!

And that was when George realized that he’d only thought he’d been speaking English. Because the sound of barking in the room, the sound that he believed to be coming from outside, from a dog, was actually coming from deep inside his own throat.

George dressing now also, baffled and afraid. He needed to see a doctor. He’d go to the hospital. But he waited for her to leave first, as she always did, to keep their secret, before he took a step toward the door to leave.

He fell down.

His foot would not work. It simply refused to function. He told himself to stand but the command did not reach his limbs, so they did nothing. Instead little shooting pains started up in his ankle, worming their way toward his hip, so that his knee began stinging, too.

He lay on the carpet. He fought away fear. He was a captain and he had faced many dangers worse than this, he thought. There was the time that the engine stopped forty miles out, during a fall hunt, in a storm, and they’d been towing a dead thirty tonner and he’d kept the crew safe until help arrived. And the time on the tundra when he’d been alone, hunting caribou, and the snowmobile engine jammed and he’d walked twenty-nine miles home in a blizzard. So now he lay there and waited for opportunity. He waited for the numbness to pass and he told himself that he would then get up and go to the hospital emergency room.

He could see a clock on the shelf and at length thirty minutes had passed, then forty. His throat seemed to be closing. He was thirsty, REALLY thirsty but at the same time the thought of water in his mouth was repulsive, and he watched the clock and waited for the bad to pass.

George told himself that when he got to the hospital, he would need to tell doctors about the symptoms. He tried to think back and pinpoint when they had begun. He’d been fine four days ago when he and Agatha had boarded the flight from Wainright, his village, to Barrow. He’d felt fine on the plane, and on the first night here, at the potluck at the high school. That was the evening he had gotten into that argument with the woman from Greenpeace, the fiery Brit who was always trying to stop any kind of development on the North Slope.

“Longhorn is lying to you,” she’d said. “Nobody can clean up spilled oil under ice. Why not make this land into a beautiful park for tourists, and make money that way.”

“That’s all we need, thirty thousand tourists a year,” he said. He’d been to several public parks and remembered crowds, trash, blaring radios, buses. George had told the woman, “You want to put us in a snow globe, and shake it, so snow falls on the quaint Iñupiat people. You want us to be the endangered species, not the animals.”

That same evening he’d had a pleasant talk with Alan McDougal, who ran the research base, and told him that caribou herds were growing instead of shrinking even with pipelines crossing part of the borough. Then he and Agatha had stayed up until two, catching up with his cousin, Ned, and his wife and son, Leon Kavik, in Browerville. He’d felt a bit of headache the next morning, and attributed it to the hotel bed, and the odd angle with which his head had lain on the overly soft pillow. And then later that day he’d felt a little fatigue, and Agatha had taken his temperature and told him it was low grade, little cold probably, 99.2, a nuisance, a go-away-fast fever, not worth thinking about.

George tried to move his hand. It worked! He filled with gratefulness. He tried his feet. They slid forward a few inches. He felt as if he had won an Olympic race. He stood. He felt dizzy. His fever had spiked.