White Plague (16 page)

“The XO brought it out of the
Montana
when they abandoned ship. It was on one of their sleds. I found it while poking around, looking for rations. The man who had it—he was unconscious when we got there—woke up. He said the exec told him to get it to the rescuers, if any came.”

The canister was old, all right, about a foot in diameter, olive colored, the universal hue of military issue. It was battered and dented and stamped on the metal container were the words
PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY
.

“Pretty old,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I have no idea.”

“Nineteen fifty?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

After she left, I sat staring at the canister, heart beating rapidly, but whether from her visit, or the object in my hand, I was unsure. I slid off a mitten. Instantly the air closed around my fingers like a cold vise, and I knew that even to touch frigid metal could stick skin to it, and bring on severe frostbite.

I put the mitten back on and considered using one of the ski poles to pry the can open, but in a storm, with wind blowing, I knew that old film—if it was even stable—could easily crumble or be destroyed by such savage elements. I shook the canister. Something rattled around inside, all right. Was it cellulose nitrate? Was it even a clue?

Don’t get so excited. You’ll do something stupid. You’ll ruin it before even seeing it.

Karen Vleska seemed to be watching from twenty feet off, where she knelt beside a sled and an injured man. I wished I could see inside the canister, wished I had x-ray vision, like Superman did in movies I loved as a kid.
PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY
. It was the color of uniforms, vehicles, canteen covers. It was an announcement confirming that the film inside related to death.

Reluctantly, I put the canister in my pack. It would have to wait for opening on the
Wilmington.

Twenty minutes later we saddled up again, and moved out.

I saw an upside-down ship in the distance, hanging in the sky. It looked solid as the sun emerging through gray, at 4
A.M.
, to reveal the gigantic inverted icebreaker, a steel piñata. I gaped. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of solid metal floated upside down; decks, antenna, escape boats, winches. Everything else was inverted here. So why not logic itself?

As we got closer, the upside-down antenna seemed to lower and then I saw a second
Wilmington
, right side up, beneath it, on the sea. Two ships of equal size, identical images, yin and yang, foot by foot.

Closer still, the mirage started to merge with the real ship, and then the sun broke out, and suddenly an enormous prism filled the sky, like a pipe organ in a cathedral, a shining rainbow that made the two ships less distinct. Then the two ships blurred, and then abruptly, the one in the air vanished. The welcome form of the red hull was dead ahead, at about a half mile, and it was coming toward us, breaking ice.

Eddie came up beside me.

“Murphy’s Law,” he said. “As soon as you reach the stuck ship, it’s able to move again.”

With binoculars we could see men and women lining the prow, waving. They seemed to be celebrating that we were alive, and their joy made my plan for them crueler, more dangerous, but I pushed that notion away.

I was thinking that Eddie had been right earlier. In less than twenty minutes, when we rejoined the
Wilmington
, I would take the biggest risk of my life. Because it involved more than just my life, but the lives of others.

Am I doing this because of what happened two years ago?

I was going to put the sick aboard the
Wilmington
, and gamble that we could figure out what ailed them and at the same time prevent the thing inside them from spreading.

I would gamble that we were smarter than a germ, and that the thing inside them was smaller than our ability to stop it.

The ship got closer, and the image I saw merged into some other version, a past one.

I saw a memory all too clearly, and it was one that I wished had been the mirage.

Majors Joe Rush and Edward Nakamura looked down from the open door of the Chinook helicopter taking them and twenty Marines south from Kandahar Air Base toward one more alleged hidden biological laboratory, this time near the Afghan border with Pakistan and Iran, in the southwest.

The base commander had been taken aback by two officers from Washington appearing out of nowhere, irritated at the “special orders” requiring cooperation, and reluctant to release the copter. He’d argued that the aircraft was needed for a raid on the Taliban, to the north.

“We’ll need Marines, too,” Rush had replied.

Joe and Eddie had been chasing rumors, a whisper in a village bazaar, a prostitute’s boast, a tip from a beggar, a monitored e-mail, a voice fragment on an NSA phone snag. This time the “information” had come from a bloody man strapped in a basement chair, screaming for the Afghan security officers beating him to stop: “They’re mixing chemicals!”

Eddie said, as the copter hit an air pocket, “Another wild-goose chase, want to bet?”

After all, the “hidden lab” in Teyvareh had turned out to be nothing more than a filthy pharmacy the size of a closet, its cracked glass shelves filled with ten-year-old aspirin, and dried seaweed that the “druggist” called Viagra. The “cave of equipment” near Daulet Yar had been deserted, burned charcoal as evidence that the Taliban had once used it. They’d found a pile of gnawed goat bones, and a latrine area crawling with rock rats, but nothing else.

There was no doubt in Rush’s mind that Al-Qaeda sought biological weapons the world over—sending buyers to Russia, for stockpiled chlorine bombs; to Syria, wanting nerve gas; to Sudan, where hidden labs toyed with that country’s strain of the Ebola virus.

Phone calls had been picked up by satellites, snatched e-mails pored over in Virginia.

Back in D.C., Joe and Eddie had sat with the director, peering at Manila passport control shots of men claiming to be “importers” when in fact they sought germs or chemicals for use against U.S. troops, or targets like London. Madrid. New York.

“I didn’t know they even had lakes in Afghanistan,” Eddie said now, looking down.

“They dried up,” Joe said.

“Look, there it is, a goddamn ship laying in a desert,” Eddie said, as the copter angled down, as the pilots strained forward, nervous, watching for white puffs below, streaking smoke tails marking the flight of shoulder-fired missiles rising from the mud flats, skimpy cornfields, watermelon patches, and refugee camp, the entire vista pathetic remnants of what had once been one of the most magnificent lakes in Central Asia.

The man strapped down in Kabul had told the Afghan officers, while Eddie tried not to throw up, “The doctor from Pakistan made the ship into a laboratory. They put explosives on the bottom of oil drums, chemicals on top.”

“I read about this region,” said Eddie, fixing the strap on his helmet. “Used to be otters here, leopards, and freshwater farming. Look at this mess. It’s worse than Secaucus. A thousand-square-mile dump.”

They passed over a mass of tents, through a gray cloud formed by four thousand cooking fires. The acrid smell of human waste and swamp washed through the open gunner’s door. Nine miles later they set down on a slightly raised area, on cracked hard earth, surrounded by softer clay, from which tall reeds sprouted like the last stubby hairs on the skull of an eighty-year-old with cancer. The Marines jumped out and, to Joe’s orders, rapid stepped through a foot-wide path in the reeds, their brittle straw-colored tops higher than the moving helmets, toward the now-invisible wreck lying like a dead whale three hundred yards away.

The only sounds were mud sucking at their boots, and flies. Joe glanced down to see, discarded, an empty canvas sack stenciled UNAID. Something living wriggled inside it. A rat or snake. He saw a mud-spattered Little Debbie snack cake, still in the wrapper, Debbie beaming, probably surprised that she’d landed ten thousand miles from home. He saw a wad of crumpled
International Herald Tribune
that some smuggler probably used as toilet paper. The whole place was a cornucopia graveyard for manufactured crap from the first world, where Hostess Twinkies and Dallas Cowboys T-shirts go to die.

The prisoner in Kabul had been a clerk in a hotel, a small, soft man, picked up by Afghan security guys after he left one of their agency-run brothels. Under torture he’d started crying. Eddie had gone outside, after watching what the officers did to him, and had been sick.

But with his functioning left hand, the prisoner had drawn a map smeared with blood, and later, a passing satellite had confirmed the location of the wreck, but spotted no human movement, then glided away, in the void, where military eyes peer at rooftop laundry, seeking hidden antennas in souks far below.

“They make the gasses there,” the man had gasped.

Eddie said, “Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south. Welcome to smuggler heaven. Even if the ship houses a lab, five to one it’s for heroin.”

The vista opened up abruptly and the ship lay ahead, on its side, as if it had fallen from the sky. Was it rigged to explode? The men sank into mud the color of iron oxide. Flies rode each air molecule. The heat made the ship shimmer, and it seemed larger, the closer they got. Once it had been a fish factory. Its nets had pulled glistening masses of catch from the lake. Now the lake was a thin layer of dirty water hosting bottom feeders and speedboats, but no longer heavy craft.

Once this discarded rust bucket had provided food and respect for locals. Those days, and benefits, were gone.

Eddie said, “Boot and sandal prints. At least twenty guys. Truck tracks, too, light here, then heavy. Was it delivering or removing cargo from the wreck?”

“Major Rush, we found a ladder in the reeds!”

The Marines formed a cordon to protect Joe as he went up first, M4 ready. At the top he heard movement, but it was just a fat rat waddling down the slanting deck—owner, captain, crew.

They all reached the deck without incident.

Eddie let out an amazed breath, minutes later, when they opened the door of the former mess room.

“Fuck me, One. That clerk told the truth.”

A lab.

The Marines roused two guards, teenage boys with AK-47s, asleep in a cabin where they’d been screwing. The stubs of two fat marijuana stogies lay on the deck beside them. The ship reeked of mold, hemp, sex, and piss.

“Where are the other men?” the Marine translator—a Yemeni immigrant from Orange County, California—demanded.

No answer.

The translator aimed a .45 at the head of one of the teenagers. Joe lowered it when the bluff didn’t work.

The Marines reported the rest of the ship empty, then took up defensive positions on deck, in case whoever worked there came back.

“Major, they must have seen the copter,” the lieutenant in charge of the squad said. “I suggest we hurry.”

“Where’d they go?” said Eddie.

“Maybe they got invited across the lake for a Big Mac at the local Iranian Ministry of Intelligence Office. Maybe there’s a clue in our little lab.”

“Someone’s done a pretty good job in the build-it-at-home league,” Eddie said admiringly, and uneasily, some minutes later.

Joe eyed the “lab” by flashlight, danger ticking in his throat. The portholes had been welded over, so no outside light came in, no air could flow in or out. The fume hood and small vats were state of the art. Four large electric fans filled a jury-rigged anteroom, a sort of airlock welded between the cabin, and outer door to the passageway. The fans faced inward, to keep air from escaping. It was a primitive version of up-to-date biolabs. Air was never supposed to be able to escape those labs, in case something deadly got loose. Fort Detrick level fours had vacuum antechambers, air-sucking fans, and triple-sealed hinges. But the jury-rigged lab here used household fans from some desert bazaar. Add in rubber tubes, vacuum bottles, water hoses, bleach and water decontaminant, steel milk cans and pumps, and you got Dr. Frankenstein’s lab-in-a-ship.

“Don’t try this at home, kids,” said Eddie. “Or you could wipe out your family.”

“Whoever worked here had guts,” Joe said.

“Maybe they don’t care. All those virgins waiting for them in heaven. I never understood what’s so great about virgins anyway. They thrash around and knee you in the groin,” Eddie said.

“All women knee you in the groin.”

There came, over the decrepit smells, whiffs of old alcohol and Lysol. Hanging in rusted steel lockers were chem suits, goggles, face masks, and on shelves, cardboard boxes filled with rubber gloves. There were three vintage Maytag refrigerators, but with no electricity on at the moment; whatever was inside would be moldy at best.

“Open it.”

Eddie, biomask on, reached for the tarnished handle. Inside were racks of empty test tubes, empty vacuum jars. Both other fridges were empty.

Joe frowned. “That clerk said they had oil drums, made ’em into bombs.”

There was a long wooden worktable, upon which a thick green ledger sat, except, when Joe opened it, it did not show rows of figures, but diagrams of oil drum bombs.

“Where are those oil drums now? What’s in ’em?”

“Maybe those prisoners will tell us, although they don’t exactly look like scientists. More like the dropouts hanging near the Taco Bell by my house, sniffing glue.”

But then came—after months of frustration—one of those dumb luck moments that happen. Admiral Yamamoto’s plane gets shot down after Americans break the Japanese war code. A Union soldier in the Civil War finds a discarded cigar box containing General Lee’s secret orders, and the North wins the battle of Antietam. Two U.S. majors in Afghanistan find a ledger in an old desk. Flipping pages, they see lists of chemicals in English.

Methylphosphonyl difluoride.

Isopropyl alcohol.

Isopropylamine.

Eddie looked at Joe. “Oh no.”

To bioexperts, those three chemicals were a signature.

Joe saw, in his head, aerial photos of the Kurdish city of Halabja, with bodies, about five thousand of them, dead in streets, squares, alleys, stadiums. Bloody Friday, the locals still called it. Nineteen eighty-eight, 150 miles north of Baghdad, when Saddam Hussein’s gas shells rained down on the civilian population. Ten thousand injured. And thousands more to die in the coming days from vomiting and diarrhea, shortness of breath, convulsions, paralysis, from a gas that had been developed originally as a German pesticide.

“Sarin,” said Joe.

It was three hundred times more toxic than cyanide. In even a mild form, released by terrorists in the Tokyo subway, it killed fourteen commuters in 1995. It was possibly the deadliest chemical weapon in existence, and Joe, staring at the ledger, belly hollow, said, “What else is in that book?”

The next page was about expenses, not sarin. Rice cost. Cheese cost, the Yemeni-born Marine translator said.

“One book for everything. Keep turning.”

“Whoa, call the porno squad,” said Eddie. “But tear out that top shot. Interesting position! Next!”

Next page showed a diagram of a big circle with jagged lines around it, maybe mountains, and arrows pointing from left to right, and little
x
’s in the circle, and little
y
’s inside the jagged lines. Men? Tents? Trucks? Planes?

“Who the hell is that?” Joe said at the next page.

This time they were eyeing four photos of a swarthy, handsome, dark-haired and uniformed U.S. Army corporal, and Arabic writing underneath. In two shots, the corporal stood before a small, neat, clapboard home, with Mideastern-looking parents, and a younger boy who looked like him, brother probably. The proud soldier back home.