White Plague (10 page)

First the Chinese turn toward the sub, then the Arktos stops.

Wind blasted into my face. There was a burning sensation in my throat, and I felt it closing. I could not breathe directly into the wind. The storm made me see everything as if in a white tunnel, the sides a kaleidoscope of movement. The driver and I made our way to the rear. Ice had frozen shut the panel protecting the gas cap, so we had to retrieve a Ka-Bar from the cab, and chip ice to open her up. The driver pulled out the fuel cap dipstick—a modified Arktos feature. Newer Arktos crafts featured fuel-tank entry from inside the vehicle. We rode in an earlier model.

“Almost full, sir.” Then he peered closer. “Shit, sir, what’s this blue coating? It’s not fuel.”

I peered at the stick, then, with a sickening feeling, looked more closely at the cap door itself. I saw pry marks along the chassis where the cap opened, damage streaks resembling the scrapes you see on an automobile door, when a thief has tried to jimmy the lock.

Someone tampered with the fuel.

Or was it, I asked myself, hoping against logic, that the striations had been caused by steel cables during loading, by an impact going in or out.

Get a better look at the dipstick.

I climbed back into the relative warmth of the cab. My eyes hit Eddie’s. I nodded slightly. His mouth was set in a solid, angry line.

I unrolled my mittens from around the dipstick, and held it up.

“What’s this blue stuff? Anybody know?”

Del Grazo’s breathing quickened and his eyes narrowed and he reached for it, held the stick to his nose and sniffed and grunted unhappily.

“It’s . . . it’s fire retardant, Colonel.”

I cursed. He said, “It’s what we carry in the canisters. My job used to be to check them, when I first joined up. We were in the Pacific. I’ll never forget the goddamn smell. But how did fire retardant get into the . . . wait . . .
during a drill!
”

I had a vision, a memory of the emergency drills that had marked normal life on the
Wilmington
. A bell goes off. Minutes later the ship fills with groups of white-suited emergency crews. Men and women with their faces covered. People carrying axes and tools that could have opened a fuel cap. People scurrying around while the Marine guard who was supposed to be in the hangar allegedly watched.

“You’d only need thirty seconds to pry open the tank, stick the hose in, spray, screw up the fuel line,” I said.

Eddie added, “While twenty other people in suits just like yours distract the guard, simply doing their jobs.”

I said, “Major Pettit?”

“I had a guy there all the time.”

“One guard?” I accused, which was unfair, because one should be enough. But I wasn’t going to apologize, especially not to the man sleeping with my ex-wife.

“Yes, sir. One.”

Del Grazo’s mouth was a tight line of fury. “We’ll ask the captain to question everyone who worked in the hangar.”

Eddie shook his head. “Anyone could put on a suit and look like he belonged to that crew.”

“Or
she
belonged,” added Dr. Vleska.

Major Pettit looked around at the faces around us: Karen’s stiff, Sachs’s tense, the driver’s fearful, me trying to stay bland, as if I maintained hearty confidence. Eddie just voiced what we were all probably thinking.

“Is the person who did it on the ship? Or with us now?”

“Get ready to walk,” I said.

Lieutenant Del Grazo radioed back, asking Captain DeBlieu to order a review of all security tapes made over the past few days of the helicopter hangar.

“Maybe we’ll see something.”

Eddie said morosely, “Yeah, twenty people dressed exactly the same, with no faces, and who is to say it even happened then? Maybe it happened in Fairbanks. Or Barrow.”

“Everybody out,” I said.

With the hatch open, snow blew in. Outside, we helped the Marines unload sleds, piled on the medical supplies, explosives, and propane—heat—for any survivors.

“Stay close. Pay close attention to the person in front of you. Obey Clinton or Dr. Vleska, whoever is leading at that point. Lieutenant Del Grazo, can you stay in contact with the ship while we’re outside?”

“Do my best.”

We started into the maelstrom. The Arktos—our magic carpet—disappeared. Clinton knelt and peered down and adjusted course and slid north, cutting diagonally across wind lines in the snow.

I looked behind me at the straggling, jagged line: the Marines, Karen, Eddie, Andrew.

Who’s the spy?
I thought.

What will you do next?

Plant your pole, push and glide; that’s the way you’re taught to do it. But it was impossible in this shrieking violence, especially when we hauled Kevlar sleds on which were piled up to—depending on the hauler—two hundred pounds of supplies.

Three steps and glide became two, then one, then we were stepping forward as if through heavy water. The rubbly plain became a field piled with close-packed ice boulders. The sky tilted sideways as, linked to the sled like a horse, I pulled it into a gap, and there it stuck. Pettit materialized beside me, reached wordlessly to help me.

“Together, Colonel. One . . . two . . .
pull!
”

The group was roped together like a slave caravan. The ice went spongy suddenly, and I saw Clinton’s shoulders drop, felt a sickening lurch as the surface gave way. I was falling, expecting to feel seawater, but I’d merely dropped into a small ice ravine. Shaken, still standing, I stepped out, slid back, pushed forward, and froze as I heard a vast rumble beneath me. Then came a long cracking sound above the screech of wind, as if solid rock were tearing apart down there. As if sped-up plate tectonics ripped at granite seams. It was the sort of sound that sent coal miners scrambling for exits.

The echo stopped. I never thought I’d be happy just to hear a screaming wind.

Clinton slogged away into the dark, a half-visible figure in my yellow headlamp beam.

We carried salt pills against cramps, burn salves, and medicines. We carried military rations that self-heated if you tore open the pouch. There were tents, if we had to stop. There were vaccinations and aerosols. There were hydration packets. There were waterproof blankets. There were splints, hazmat suits, goggles, chemical sample kits.

How much time passed? An hour? Two? The cold wind elongated each second. I felt the sled working against my upper arms and thighs. The wind lessened; was it stopping finally? No, no, it was only teasing, and it sped up again.

Suddenly Major Pettit pushed past me up to Clinton and the forms came together in the semidarkness, and from Pettit’s angry hand gestures, I gathered he was shouting. His gloved hand jabbing left. Clinton’s parka hood shaking back and forth,
no!
When I skied up to them, they were arguing over Pettit’s ice-rimmed compass, which he wielded—shaking it—like a prosecutor producing exhibit A.

“You’re going the wrong way!”

Clinton calmly knelt, traced a gloved finger along the almost invisible line of a wavelike snow, sastrugi.

Pettit shook his head. “That’s east, not north.”

The earth was a monumental tuning fork. The hideous tearing noises started up again. I felt the ice shuddering and rumbling, a metal animal. Clinton’s face was before me, eyes oval, features hidden by the black balaclava, lips white, nose white. Clinton assured me, “It’s just moving down there, but not breaking up. Still, we’ll circle around that flat area ahead.”

“But that will slow us.”

“If we don’t, we’ll fall in.”

Our ski trails filled with blowing granules. Karen moved easily, head down, bulling forward. Eddie slipped but kept up. Pettit traveled up and down the line, making sure his men kept going, like every line of sailors which had disappeared into the polar void for the last five hundred years.

Peter Del Grazo materialized beside me, having conferred with Pettit. “It’s
Clinton,
Colonel. He’s taking us the wrong way!”

His eyes were fierce in his balaclava, and his voice, that Brooklyn accent, had lost all trace of the good humor marking it previously. “He goes where he wants on the ship. He doesn’t report to anyone. He could just ski off.”

Ice rime hung from his balaclava, his breath was white brume, his anorak matted crystal.

“Get back in place,” I said.

How far can the fucking submarine be?

We stopped for a ten-minute rest on the protected lee side of a huge ice column, a lone formation like a sandstone form in Utah, a tower that shielded us slightly from direct wind. Someone produced cocoa. My fingertips were losing feeling. We sat shoulder to shoulder for warmth and inside my mitten liners I imagined skin turning solid, blood crystalizing, fingers as blood sausages, legs as statues unable to move.

Andrew Sachs had done surprisingly well, I thought. He’d not complained. He’d shut up. I’d been surprised at his acuity on skis, at his hidden resources, his ability to pull a sled. He sat off to the side, alone. One of the Marines suffered from the freezing together of his lips. His frosting breath puffed out from both sides of his mouth, and his fitful breathing resembled that of a horse.

The man wordlessly endured the ripping apart of his lips. Karen Vleska advised him to keep his mouth open as he walked, and to turn away from the wind, to keep the running blood from freezing his lips together again.

Del Grazo pulled the radio from his sled, tried for a fix on the submarine, looked up, and nodded happily.

“Hey, he was right, Colonel! It’s still ahead.”

Clinton switched off with Karen, who took the lead for a while, and then they switched back. He probed ahead with his long ice gaff.

“Weak ice.”

Gingerly moving, he played out rope. His form grew dimmer and I thought,
This is what Pettit predicted. He’ll uncouple. He’ll ski away. He’s leaving us.

The form was coming back.

“There’s a way through, but just a small one. If we go fast, we can ski right over the water.”

“
Ski into water?
”
Eddie gasped.

“It’s only water on top. There’s ice just under it. If you go fast, you’ll be fine.”

“That water is what . . . like thirty degrees?”

“In and out,” said Clinton. “Otherwise, it gets deeper east and west of here.”

“But thirty degrees—”

Clinton said calmly, “Just keep moving. The boots are waterproof. If you get wet, the wool socks will keep in heat. What’s the matter, tough Marine? You chicken?”

“I’ll go first,” I said, to shut them up.

He was right. It was easy. The water came up to my ankles. But the ice held, and we passed. The socks held the extreme cold off my feet.

We built up speed, made good time, the wind at our backs for a while, which made no sense, but then, nothing did here. Then the wind dropped and the light turned gray and ahead rose a range of looming shadows. Ice mountains. My heart sank.
Ivu
,
Clinton called it, the upthrust edges of two floes that had collided.

“We have to climb
that
?”
Eddie said beside me. They had to be at least forty feet high. Forty feet of ice. A four-story building. How do you climb up forty feet of ice, with sleds?

Wind hissed down from the saddle shape above, whooshed into our faces, and drove ice pellets into our exposed skin.

Clinton said, “It’s not that hard.”

“Maybe not for you,” Eddie said.

“Either way, Jarhead, you do it.”

“You have a problem with Marines, Clinton?”

“You have a problem with Army, elitist?”

The sleds seemed to weigh double poundage going up over the ice. We all hauled and pulled, helping each other, inching them up, and trying to keep them from crashing down, and finally, exhausted, we got over the top.

One Marine had sprained an ankle. We were beat. We’d been out for seven hours, but had probably suffered an equivalent energy drain of two days of normal athletic activity. The storm had dulled senses and battered bodies and I knew that it might make us careless.

So I called another rest, a longer one, and two sleepless hours later, we pushed off again and made decent time overcoming a much smaller pressure ridge, pros at this now, pushing through an ice field—and two hours after that, from the top of yet another ridge, and through still falling snow, I looked down, a quarter mile ahead, and glimpsed the long dark form of a nuclear submarine along the edge of a lead in the ice.

We made it.

It was like seeing a sub beside the bank of a river, except instead of land on either side, there was solid snow-covered ice, which just looked like land.

I recognized the configuration of the sub.

It was the
Montana.

Nearby, on the ice, sat a motley collection of oblong-shaped covered black life rafts, with tented roofs, and a couple of orange Arctic tents. The survivors would be inside. The small generators running the heaters inside the shelters sat on the ice, rumbling and sending up thin plumes of grayish smoke. I saw no people.

My spirits lifted, but as we started down the rubbly incline, the ice began shaking. There was a sound like a railroad train, and the deep vibrations began again, from below. To me it sounded the same as before, but Clinton stopped abruptly, cocked his head, and held a hand up to halt us. He began scanning the ice plain spread out at the foot of the pressure ridge. And we waited with him.

Suddenly I heard a deep ripping noise, a shredding sound reverberating inside the wind, low, alive. It echoed far in the distance, thunder exploding many miles away, except sound was all wrong up here, I knew. So maybe it wasn’t far. Maybe it was close. And then I saw, with horror, only four hundred yards from the collection of tents and rafts, a jagged shadow appear on the surface. It ran quickly toward us for a quarter mile, from the open water right up to the rubbly hills where we stood, watching.

“It’s breaking up,” said Karen. “My God!”

The crack had missed the tents, but it was widening. It stopped suddenly, as if an earthquake had ended.

It’s going to start up again. This ice is unstable.

We climbed down, hauling sleds, in a different sort of race now. At bottom, we raced toward the tents, as men,
Montana
crew,
several upright, in parkas . . . or on all fours, began emerging into the snow.

They moved like apes, half hunched over, swaying, cavemen, Neanderthals, evolutionary throwbacks. One man fell down. Men waving. Burned, sick men. Now a woman, coughing, half bent.

These were probably the healthier ones.

The ice underfoot was a shattered mirror.

Sick or not, I’ve got to get that crew out, fast.