White Plague (24 page)

Why did he come back for me? Maybe he thought I recognized him through the faceplate.

His face inside the shield was bulging and white and streaming sweat. The formerly pleasant features were twisted with rage. Perspiration flooded my eyes. There was no room to back up. I gathered all my strength and, when he jabbed again, swung the bad leg in a roundabout kick, making contact with the side of the ax head with my boot, pushing it left as I screamed from the pain.

The momentum swung him off balance. I tried to lunge past him and reach the Beretta, and actually touched it, actually felt fingers brush steel, but then he was on me. His hood fell off. His breath smelled of garlic. His eyes were huge and furious. I saw veins in his nostrils, and dandruff caught in an eyebrow. His fingers were vises, pressing into my throat.

“You . . . should have . . . killed them,” he said.

I could not breathe but I pulled the trigger, heard the M9 go off. Nothing. I fired again, heard ricochets in the corridor. I felt a sting at the edge of my ear. The ricocheting bullet had winged the marksman.

He straddled me. I was losing consciousness. His right knee pinned my left hand on deck, his hip blocked movement of my right. I needed all my remaining strength to push the gun three inches toward his belly. I pulled the trigger, and with my oxygen cut off, sound seemed louder.

He was still there.

Maybe the noise had attracted attention, because I heard running, and someone shouting, “Hey! Hey!”

I could breathe. He was running off. A woman’s face was bending over me. I recognized the small blonde, an Alabaman, an officer who worked night shifts on the bridge.

“Colonel? Are you all right? Colonel?”

I gasped for air. I forced out, “Where’d he go?”

“Into the stairwell. Look, he left something in the sink. It’s another one! Carla! Call the incendiary crew!”

Two minutes later, limping, I found the other white-suited figure who had been with Del Grazo, crumbled, around the corner, blood spurting from a wound opening his left side. Ribs caved in. Just a kid. An eighteen-year-old who’d not known the figure he was running with was the man for whom he’d been searching.

“Colonel, we’re fighting four fires now! He left devices all over the place!”

As for Del Grazo, he was, once again, gone.

His words a drumbeat in my head.

You should have killed them.

By the time the ship exec spotted him, the radio room was wrecked, the fires were under control, but the Zodiac was overboard, and he was inside, pulling away in the dark, hoping to be absorbed into the inky blackness, natural color of the Arctic sea in summers these days, not white, as it had been for centuries until now.

With satellites blocked off and the radio room burned, the only two means of communication remaining with the outside world were the line-of-sight handhelds, good at a measly six miles . . . and the long-range radio from the bridge, that is, if atmospheric conditions cooperated, and if, the huge
if
, the cable running from the radio room had not melted.

But if the cable was out, we had no way of reaching the mainland, or any ships, or anyone at all more than six miles away.

Del Grazo was waiting for darkness to get away. He was using the fires to give him time, and distract the crew.

He’d needed only a few minutes to manually release the Zodiac, climb in, ride it down to the sea, and disconnect the hooks.

Del Grazo turning black also, man blending in with sea.

“Night vision,” I snapped, watching Del Grazo disappear.

Crew lined the railings. Some held binoculars. Others, like me, wore cyclops night vision monoculars, which used ambient star or moonlight to—under normal circumstances on the
Wilmington—
track whales surfacing in dark, or walrus, seals, polar bears.

“What is this guy, invisible?” said Eddie, scanning.

“Where the hell could he be going?”

“He’s using that berg piece as cover. There!”

I’d spotted a human figure two hundred yards off, a silhouette actually, at the Zodiac steering console, staying low, knees down, as he emerged from behind a three-foot-high protruding bit of ice, just high enough to shield a man. I heard M4 fire beside me in a three-round burst. The figure kept moving, well within range, but now that we were out of the ice, the open water was choppy. The ship rocked back and forth, the Zodiac up and down. It was hard to hit anything at this distance when both parties were moving in three directions at the same time.

Del Grazo slipped behind another small ice bit, and must have slowed down, because he didn’t come out.

DeBlieu ordered another Zodiac lowered.

Pettit came up and joined the Marine marksman, pointed to where the figure had disappeared. Both men resting elbows on the railing, staring fixedly into the gloom ahead.

Pettit muttering, “I think he moved behind another piece. See the ice shaped like an hourglass?”

“The two humps? The camel shape?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, sir, there’s two pieces camel shaped,” the other Marine said. “The two o’clock? Or the four o’clock?”

“You think two o’clock looks like a camel?”

“Well, what do you think it looks like?”

“I don’t know. Breasts,” suggested Pettit.

The kid looked up, astonished. “You think a camel looks like breasts?”

DeBlieu interrupted. “Stop the fucking Rorschach test. The Zodiac is down.”

Eddie came up beside us, stamping to keep warm. “Do you mind telling me where the hell he’s going, middle of nowhere? Guy’ll freeze to death in a few hours.
What is he doing?
”

Del Grazo’s ice shield was a ghost bit beneath a speck of moon, but even that faded as clouds thickened, massed low, cut down on even ambient light. The damn Arctic weather seemed to change every ten minutes here.

Inside the ship, I knew that crew searched for more incendiaries, moving from cabin to cabin. But the fires were out.

“I just don’t understand . . . oh shit,” moaned Pettit. “Look!”

I did and my heart sank as it all came together. I saw—in green—five hundred yards off, a frothing, surging milkshake of activity, foaming water erupting, and then the big sub thrust upward, bigger than a bowhead. Biggest thing under the sea. Welcome to the new Arctic.

“He’s
baaaackkk
,” said Eddie morosely. “Let’s hear a big round of applause from the studio audience for Captain Zhou!”

The sub came out clean, smacked back down, and sent up spray. The black eel-shape positioned itself to block any more shots at Peter Del Grazo. We couldn’t see him anymore. He must have called them. He’d set up a rendezvous with his masters, then delayed until he could get off the ship.

Eddie said, “Hey, look at the bright side. Maybe he’ll infect
them
,
send them to the bottom, One.”

“Yeah,” muttered Pettit. “Like the
Montana.
Goddamn spy. Goddamn turncoat. Hail the conquering goddamn traitor.”

But that’s not what happened.

Because ten minutes later, as we watched, stunned at one more turn of events, they shot Del Grazo as he argued with them on their deck.

They shot him.

It happened like this.

First we watched the Chinese sub surface, an immense dark moray eel shape with greenish current flowing past, and occasional bergy bits. Then the hatch opened and fur-hatted soldiers climbed out onto the deck, followed by two crew members wearing bulky-looking hazmat suits.

Eddie saying bitterly, “Looks like Zhou believed you about the sickness on the
Montana
.”

Eyeing the suits, I recalled the circular motions of Del Grazo’s arm earlier on the monitors, when his back was turned. I understood what he’d been doing suddenly. I’d seen it enough in hospitals. His left arm—from behind—straight out. His right arm making little circles.

“He was taking samples,” I whispered.

Eddie spun toward me. I nodded. “Mucus. Sweat. Blood.”

Eddie looked thoughtful. “Zhou did ask us to send blood samples over for analysis. Trying to sound helpful . . . but . . . do you really think they believe it’s a bioweapon? That we have a bioweapon that got loose?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. My whole body hurt from the fight with Del Grazo. I limped when I walked. My head pounded.

Now through the monocular I saw a head—Del Grazo—appear above Zhou’s deck on the far side, body shielded from us. The Chinese must have thrown him a rope ladder, and he’d climbed up, and now stood.

I made sure the Marines had all weapons lowered. The sub was Chinese territory, not to mention that it carried torpedoes, and a pissed-off Captain Zhou.

“Nobody shoots,” I said.

“Why did he do it?” said DeBlieu, as if unsure to be enraged, baffled, or both.

“Who knows? Money? Sex? Who the hell knows? But I’m sure there will be one heck of an investigation to figure it out when we get back.”

Del Grazo, on deck, seemed half bent from his exertions, getting his breath back, I imagined, as he glanced our way, and I also imagined him feeling a surge of triumph, relief, maybe superiority. I remembered the rage in his face as he tried to choke me. I wondered if he felt trapped, his options over, his traitorous dreams in shambles. Del Grazo left with a life, but one he’d live far from home, in a foreign land.

I watched him pull something from his parka pocket. I adjusted focus, trying to see better. Larger images like his body grew blurry. But the object in his hand crystallized into what looked like a ziplock bag.

Meanwhile, the Chinese stayed back from him except for the hazmat guys, but even they approached gingerly, stopped ten feet away, and extended a metallic retractable arm, mechanical pincers to grab the bag, and bring it back.

“They’re disinfecting it,” said Eddie as the hazmat figures started spraying the outside of the bag, then wiping it off, with great rigor. Then spraying again.

Del Grazo took a step toward them, clearly wanting to reach the protection of the inside of the submarine. But the soldiers jerked up their bullpup assault rifles, as if to pantomime,
Stay back.

The Del Grazo silhouette halted in the shadow of the tower, looking like one of those Indonesian shadow puppets, a figure half hidden by translucent curtain, arms out, frozen, mid-step.

Eddie narrating, as if we couldn’t see it anyway. “He looks like he’s arguing,
Let me aboard! I did what you wanted! You promised!
”

Two figures appeared on the bridge of the sub, the high point, looking down at Del Grazo, like priests atop an Aztec ziggurat. I adjusted focus again. I saw fur hats with red stars pinned in front, faces beneath them. I’d never seen Zhou, at this particular angle, but I was pretty sure I was looking at him and his British-accented translator. Yes, it was the translator, because I saw the guy’s thick-framed glasses. Fat face. Fat frames. Zhou was smaller, features tight.

Del Grazo’s movements growing more agitated.

Zhou—looking down, listening, then shaking his head.

Del Grazo took two quick steps toward the hatch and the guns came up. And now he was shouting in pantomime, waving his arms, body bent into his screaming as the hazmat guys disappeared into the sub, with the ziplock, then all the Chinese soldiers but one filing down into that hole, to safety, then there were only four figures out there. Zhou and his translator up high. Del Grazo and a single soldier below.

Eddie gasped. “They’re going to leave him.”

I shook my head. “No. If they leave him, we pick him up. They won’t leave him.”

“Then what are—”

Del Grazo must have panicked. He lunged forward. Later I’d try to figure out what had happened. All the pressure he’d been under—the spy normally assigned low-key missions, a computer hacker, not a saboteur. A sneak, not a warrior, suddenly pressured to do more as the stakes shot up.

We saw the gunfire before we heard it, blossoms of light in the dark before the snapping sound, a faint pressure on the eardrums over the humming idling of the icebreaker.

He crumbled. He was on hands and knees. I felt sorry for him for a moment. He crawled a few feet toward the edge of the deck, and then he toppled, disappeared, dropping into the sea.

Back to Zhou now, through glass. Zhou, on the bridge, riveted, eyeing the spot where Del Grazo had disappeared. Zhou, motionless for what seemed a long time. Then Zhou’s right hand came up, and he saluted the spot where Del Grazo had been last with that stiff, palm-up motion favored in the People’s Republic.

Eddie said, “One, you want to tell me what the hell just happened over there?”

“He’s honoring him,” I said.

“Oh, honoring. Some honor. Shoot a guy and salute him.”

I turned to Eddie, who, close up, was as green as the Hulk. “Zhou had the same choice we did. Zhou decided—or was ordered to—keep the potentially infected guy off. He knows what happened in the
Montana
.
He got the samples for analysis. They’ve probably got that bag in a locked freezer that no one will go into until Zhou gets home.”

“Honoring,” said Eddie.

“I think so. Yes.”

“Yeah, so how will they honor us? A torpedo?”

Zhou turned to us, as if he felt our eyes on him, and knew we tried to figure out what he was doing. I felt him staring back. Maybe he even had a photo of me.

But oddly, probably because we were both motionless, it was not a tense moment. I had no sensation of antagonism across the black water. Just a sort of connection through the green world of night vision, as if we both understood that we’d faced the same choices, that the consequences of missteps in the microbial world we’d been thrust into had spiraled far from human control.

It was, I knew, just a feeling. And feelings can be dangerous. That
feelings
in a confrontation can—if you deceive yourself, if you fall victim to wishful thinking, if you get tired, as I was, and were scared, as I was, and confused, as I knew myself to be—lead to disaster.

And yet the moment lengthened, and I could not help but believe that a fellow consciousness linked our two vessels.

He would protect his crew
better than I did mine
,
I couldn’t help thinking. He would take the samples and disappear below and turn west, staying in international waters, heading toward the U.S.-Russian border, then veering south into the narrow Bering Strait, and the northern Pacific, the main sea lanes, and ultimately to whatever secure lab awaited that ziplock and its contents somewhere in the People’s Republic of China.

That’s what I figured would happen.

But it did not happen.

The submarine remained on the surface. The real truth, I saw, was that whatever was going on lay far beneath any surface that I knew. Zhou stood there, looking back, as the sub began turning in our direction.

I didn’t have any torpedoes with which to protect us this time. There wasn’t even a single deck gun on board.

“Shit,” said DeBlieu, and told the bridge to start us up again, head south again, full speed ahead in relatively clear seas, no point in hanging around waiting to see what Zhou intended. In fact, if he was going to fire, why leave the ship sitting broadside to him, fat and open?

I felt the icebreaker’s engines rev, felt us turning.

“Sweet Jesus,” said Marine Lance Corporal Frederick Fastbinder beside me at the handrail.

Waiting . . .

Waiting . . .

Then minutes later we got a message on our handheld radios, channel 13, required to be monitored on all vessels. Our ship radios were out.

“Captain Zhou wishes to escort you as far as the U.S. twelve-mile limit.”

“That will not be necessary,” I replied.

“Captain wishes me to say that you are in no danger. He would appreciate it if you might be so kind as to allow us to trail behind you, like one of your research vessels. We do not wish to encounter ice. Even small amounts might damage our hull. Please to not be alarmed. If you like, we can coordinate speeds. Again, we have no hostile intent.”

He wasn’t asking permission, I knew. He
sounded
like he was, but he was informing us, not making requests. There was no way for us to stop him.

“Hostile intent?” said Eddie. “This is a guy who threatened to kill us all yesterday.”

“My captain heard that and assures you that the situation is quite different now.”

“Different how?”

“The
Montana
has gone to the bottom. We are on a humanitarian mission.”

All fires on board were extinguished, and a vague smell of burned rubber drifted from the ship’s vents, and across deck, a dirty, infected odor, a whiff of destruction, enhancing the sense of near escape that worsened moment by moment, along with the growing sense of danger. The
Wilmington
steamed south, 300 more miles to Barrow, 288 miles to U.S. waters, seventeen hours minimum, if we could hold top speed, and the British-accented voice of the Chinese translator clear and bright, all of us aware that, thanks to Peter Del Grazo, there could be listening software anywhere on the ship. Zhou’s people might be riveted right now hearing any private talk between us.

Eddie said, “Fucking Del Grazo.”

Zhou repeated patiently that his intents were honorable, that he understood that we might not trust him.

I asked him what his intentions were exactly. Or rather, why he felt it necessary to escort us at all.

When he answered, when the stuffy British-sounding translator spoke next, Eddie turned bone white.