White Plague (27 page)

I turned to glance back. Behind the ship, a half mile away, was our follower, the sub, matching our speed.

DeBlieu’s crew stood ready with bottles of powerful disinfectant. They would pounce when I left and scrub anything I touched, anything nearby. The captain showed me how to operate the HF radio, and explained that the crew had been working in the radio room, and they were ready for a test.

“But even if we got the thing working, you might have trouble due to that light show overhead,” DeBlieu said.

When I switched it on, a gaggle of electronic scratches and screeches poured out. Nothing . . . nothing . . .

The whole thing went dead.

I could not call out.

I got on the handheld and called the submarine. While DeBlieu and the bridge crew listened, transfixed, I told the truth, that their medicines were working. I said that we knew now they’d sent aboard different stuff than ours. I told them that we’d compared medicines under the microscope, and the differences, chemically, were huge, no small modification. I thanked Zhou but also asked him, “Can you tell me what is in those containers? We’re going to need more. We need to know what it is.”

The static grew so bad that for an instant I thought that I’d lost him. The gray clouds were ominously closer in the sky now, racing toward us, closing the gap. The static climbed so high that I saw two of DeBlieu’s crew cover their ears with their hands.

But then the voice came through.

“Colonel, this is excellent news. I’ve been instructed to tell you that we are pleased that medicines made in China have been able to assist you in a time of need.”

He had not answered the question.

I asked, “But what
is
the medicine that you gave us?”

“I’ve been instructed to inform you that representatives from the People’s Republic would be pleased to work out a way, with your government, of supplying more help. These discussions will be held at high levels so action can come fast!”

I felt as if he read from a script that had nothing to do with my questions. That he understood my questions perfectly and that no real answers would come. It was maddening. The man had studied English but just used it to talk in riddles. So I asked directly about Zhou’s change in behavior, the switch from aggressor to helper, as the static poured forth, and the British accent—if I didn’t know it came from a Chinese man, I would have envisioned someone in a bowler hat—came through again.

“I have been instructed, should you make this particular inquiry, to inform you that we work for a different superior now. The officer formerly in charge of our command is temporarily assigned to a different job.”

Above, I watched the dark clouds consume the light show. Soon half the sky was gray, then 30 percent, then 10. The electric green undulations vanished, as if they’d never been there at all.

I said, “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you? You’re not going to give me any answers at all.”

Nothing.

“Can you help us call Washington?” I asked, grasping at a new thought. “Patch me through?”

But they were gone. I cursed.

They were back.

“I’ve been instructed, Colonel,” the voice continued in that maddeningly formal tone, “to inform you that we now intend to break off contact, submerge, sir, and leave you with our good wishes before your warplane arrives.”

“Warplane?” A barb sliced into my belly. “What warplane?” I thought,
Was that a warning? From Zhou?

“Colonel, considering the recent misunderstandings between our countries in the South China Sea, we do not wish our presence to be misconstrued as aggressive. We wish you continued success in thwarting the outbreak. I am instructed to say good-bye and wish you the best of luck, especially now that satellites cannot see what happens to you, with cloud cover so thick. We hope you suffer no accident.”

He clicked off. He did not answer when I attempted to reestablish contact. I went out on deck and saw, beyond the aft deck and copter landing square and winches at the rear of the ship, the submarine fall back, slide low, and then there was a phosphorescent frothing at the bow, from microorganisms. Zhou’s submarine began to disappear.

Captain DeBlieu—back on the bridge—had heard the whole conversation.

“What was that about a warplane?” he asked. “And an accident? And why the effing x do they know more than we do half the time? We need choppers, dropped supplies.
A warplane? An accident?
”

“How far are we from land, Captain?”

“Eighty miles, more or less. But I don’t get it. How come they haven’t sent us a copter by now?”

“Can I reach Barrow on the handheld?”

I tried. Of course no one answered. We needed a miracle. The goddamn radio had a range of a few miles.

DeBlieu said, not really believing it, “Maybe we’ll get lucky, patch up the radio room. Yeah, maybe.”

And I asked, “How fast can your Zodiacs go?”

“At top speed, twenty-six, twenty-eight knots.”

“So almost twice as fast as the ship. What kind of radio do they carry?”

“Standard line-of-sight transmission. You’ve got to see the place you’re trying to reach. On a good day, six miles.”

“I’d need to be near shore, then, to reach it.”

“If you even get there. There could be ice further south. It moves in packs. And you don’t know weather conditions. Things change fast. Look, Colonel, it’s an open boat, for work near the ship, but it’s not for distance, not up here. If you encounter a chop, or waves, you could flip in a second. And you’ll be in the dark. Hit ice at almost thirty miles an hour, and—”

“Lower a Zodiac, Captain. I need to get to Barrow.”

DeBlieu had turned white now, and not from disease, and he came close. He did not want the others nearby to hear.

“You’re saying that our own side is sending a plane to destroy us?”

“I’m saying give me a coxswain to drive the boat, the best person you have. I’m saying get someone on the radio, and stay on it, whether or not you think anyone can hear, and start screaming as loud as you can over the static:
We may have an antidote.
Keep sending, keep it up until you can’t scream anymore, keep it up while your guys try to fix the cables, in case you get a temporary connection, and then have someone else take over, scream it louder still.”

I started to leave, to get my gear, and turned back.

“Also,” I said, “I advise you to change direction
now
, head off toward the last place anyone would ever think that you’d go. Turn off every light! Now! Run dark. No radar. No sonar. Find that whiteout we passed and stay inside it. Give yourself every extra second. Maybe, with that electronic disturbance up there, it won’t be so easy to find you. Now, please
,
lower a Zodiac over the side!”

The coxswain was a master chief named John Kukulka. He was a big, strapping man from Ridgefield, Connecticut, built like a rugby player—ruddy face, fullback shoulders, curly hair and boyish cheeks, and a cheerful disposition as we sat in the Zodiac and were lowered down the starboard side of the
Wilmington
, to the Chukchi Sea.

“Ever go to Coney Island, Colonel?”

“Once, when I was a kid.”

“Like the rides?”

“Why?”

I saw his even teeth through the dark, white as snow. We wore crash helmets over our balaclavas. We wore thermal underwear and waterproof zip-up mustang suits against cold that would increase at almost thirty knots. Waterproof shells. Waterproof boots. The sky had clouded over. Aurora borealis was reduced to sporadic massive explosions inside the massed clouds. The ship was hidden from satellites. With Zhou gone, there would be no witnesses to whatever was planned to occur.

Now I was one of those Marines on the truck in Afghanistan, trying to reach the U.S. encampment, and whoever had ordered a warplane to hit us was also me, some officer onshore, in the continental United States.

“Coney Island,” John Kukulka said as I felt the buoyant Zodiac rock in the light swell, and as he button-started the motor. “At Coney Island, I liked the Cyclone roller coaster, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Python, now
that
was a good one.”

“And why are you telling me this, Kukulka?”

He grinned beneath his helmet. “Because
here we
go!
”

The shock of the water on my face was immediate. The boat seemed to dig in and spurt forward and the bow lifted slightly but not enough so that John Kukulka—at the steering console toward the stern—could not see, with his night vision glasses, what was coming up ahead. The engine sounded monstrous. The ship fell back behind us, went from being a gigantic tanker shape, to a vague block of darkness with a few lights on, to those lights suddenly going off in the distance.

Something hard and angular flashed by at eye level on the port side.

“Ice bit,” shouted Kukulka. “Didn’t even know it was here.”

Now I knew why he’d asked about Coney Island. The little boat corkscrewed and leaped, turned sideways and righted itself. Frigid spray came from three directions. Our floodlight stabbed ahead, bouncing, yet somehow reflecting back into our faces. The sky seemed to press down and try to smother us. I thought,
Warplane? What kind?
A Hercules that could drop a fire bomb to float down by parachute? An Apache equipped with ship-killing missiles? A Navy jet launching harpoon missiles from twenty miles away, to guide them electronically into the ship?

Radar
, I thought.
Even with thick cloud cover, a warplane could light up that ship with radar.

“Hey, Kukulka!”

“What, sir?”

“You married?”

“To Lizzie.”

“Kids?”

“Ian. He’s eight.”

“Tell me about Ian.”

The jolly voice called back, “He’s got a birthday coming up.”

“Get a present for him yet, Chief?”

“Yeah, Colonel,” shouted the big man, only the jaunty tone was gone now, and something harder and diligent was there. “I’m going to give him an intact family. I’m going to give him a mom who’s not a widow. And a dad who helps him blow out the candles on Lizzie’s banana cake. I’m going to get you where you need to be, so you can reach someone over our fucking radio, excuse the word, sir.”

At that moment, we hit something, wave, ice, log, who knows what, and we launched into the air again, corkscrewing and starting to flip. Kukulka slammed into the steering wheel, and bounced back. His hands flew off the wheel. His helmet hit the casing again. Blood blossomed from his right eye. I was no longer on the seat. I saw water below at a sixty-degree angle. Colonel Joseph Rush, no longer human, was flying. Colonel Joe Rush and coxswain John Kukulka, like Arctic birds, aloft, in the night.

In Barrow, the clouds blanketed the sky and the light show disappeared and the word finally came from Washington. The general stood up in the rescue squad office, at the airport, said good-bye to the two Eskimo boys. They’d been talking football, which had been pleasantly distracting. They were good kids, curious and smart, and joking with them had made the otherwise torturous wait go faster.

The general made his way downstairs, in his Arctic-issue shearling-lined hat and fleece pants. The F22 awaited him outside the hangar. The wind smelled wet. Inside the plane, huge kayak shapes, bombs, were finned and ready to be guided into the ship.

Their weight made takeoff longer than usual. Once in the air, he turned the Raptor to the north. He trimmed the wings. Dark sea raced by. He stayed below the clouds for better vision. He knew the last satellite coordinates for the
Wilmington
, but his radar seemed slightly off, possibly due to the light show high above in the ionosphere.

The Raptor had a top range of more than 1,800 miles and could reach air speeds of 1,500 mph, although today he was flying slower. The plane was capable, under combat conditions, of flying 500 miles, maneuvering, attacking an enemy, delivering payloads, and returning home. It was a miracle. He loved the Raptor. Today the route would be shorter, and finding the target should be simple with radar, despite the massive atmospheric disturbances wreaking havoc with satellites and sensors. Once he had visual confirmation of the target—as Washington wanted no mistakes, no bombing of some errant research or German tourist ship—he’d let loose with the 2,000-pound bombs.

The general knew the course that the
Wilmington
was committed to, and the speed it had been going before the satellites lost view. So he should be able to locate the ship whether or not it lay dead ahead.

He thought, We’ve got a tanker up here somewhere if I need a bit more time, need to refuel in the air. But if there are no problems, thirty minutes maximum. Thirty more minutes and I’ll circle while she burns, to make sure the ship goes down, and then I’ll go home, and resign and get drunk.

The Zodiac flew left and righted itself and smacked down into the ocean again as the prop bit into the water. The craft spun left. I fell back in. Kukulka lay on the bottom, facedown, in water, as another wave towered overhead.

I crawled to the wheel and managed to right us. We were climbing a wave, me at the wheel, fighting the pull. We topped it and sledded downward. In the trough, I cut speed, knelt, and turned Kukulka over, got the helmet and balaclava off. His head was bloody but he was breathing. His eyes looked glazed. I heard a rattling sound in his chest. Broken ribs.

“John? You with me here?”

No answer.

There was nothing I could do but make sure he was free to breathe. I took the wheel and continued south.
Was it south or had we turned around?
The engine fought me like an animal. The waves came sideways, and remembering what Clinton had said about snow, and wind lines, I aimed at the same angle into each wave, hoping this meant we were continuing in our prior direction. There were no stars. The compass needle swung left, then right. The bursts of explosions—more disturbances in the low clouds—pockmarked the heavens. The clouds seemed about to drop on our heads.

The turbulence let up and the engine sputtered but kept going. Kukulka was sitting up the next time I looked, then lying down again, but faceup, at least. The things you recall. The things you remember. I was a kid in Massachusetts. I used to stay up late on Sunday nights and watch black-and-white horror movies on our rabbit-ear TV with Dad. One creepy one, which I loved, was
The Incredible Shrinking Man
, and this old movie, ridiculous as it sounds, came back to me now. I recalled how in the film, a man in a motorboat—out for a weekend pleasure cruise—drives through mist on the ocean. A few days later the guy starts shrinking, losing weight. At first he likes it. He’s trim! Healthy! Then, as he keeps getting smaller, he worries that he’s sick.

By the end of a month the guy is the size of a midget, then a six-year-old, a two-year-old, and finally he’s so small he lives in a dollhouse, but he keeps getting smaller, and in the end he can’t even be seen with the naked eye. He’s so small that he slips out of the house through a mesh screen, to stare in wonder at the multitude of stars above, and decide that however small you are, you are still part of something great, something larger.

Bullshit. I never felt as small as I did on that Zodiac, bumping through blackness. Time seemed suspended. There was only horror in feeling helpless and disconnected and mute.

The ocean changed. Without ice to blanket down waves, swells grew larger. We jetted up the side of a wall, and coasted down, corkscrewing. Sideways, we hit a wall of water coming out of nowhere, but somehow I kept us afloat. We passed through soaking icy spray. In the bottom of the Zodiac I saw a flopping, gasping fish. I reached down with one hand, holding the wheel with the other. I picked up the wriggling, suffocating creature. I dropped it into the sea. Let something here stay alive.

Without stars, I had no bearing. I could have been driving in any direction, through hell, the world a weightless, directionless intensity, our speed immeasurable, the velocity of despair. The speedometer had jammed. I looked at my watch. Were we moving at almost thirty miles an hour? If we were, and we’d been eighty miles from shore when Kukulka hit the throttle, surely we’d be getting close to the north coast of Alaska by now.

I tried the radio. Nothing.

I tried again. It was soaking wet, like everything here, but DeBlieu had said the thing was waterproof.

Then I heard a rumble in the sky. I thought,
Shit, thunder, another storm
. The roar came from directly ahead. It seemed to sweep toward us. The sound grew enormously and then there was a mighty
whoosh
above and I knew I’d been wrong about the source as the fighter plane swept past, leaving a vague ghost of contrail from its massive nozzle.

I tried to reach the pilot on the radio. Maybe on flight band it might work. I shouted into the set that he should leave the ship alone, that we’d found an antidote, that the sick were getting better, that he should check with Washington, tell them the news.

I heard scratchy static in my ears.

Had DeBlieu changed course?

I hoped so. But there was no way, even if he had, that the
Wilmington
could evade that monster for long.

The engine sputtered . . . and caught, slowed, and surged ahead.

I thought in prayer.
Please God, let him miss the ship.

Kukulka groaned and rolled onto his side, but his face remained above the water that sloshed in the Zodiac.

“This is Lieutenant Colonel Joe Rush of the Coast Guard icebreaker
Wilmington
. Is anybody there?

“Mayday! This is Lieutenant Colonel Joe Rush of the icebreaker
Wilmington
! If anyone is listening, please respond!

“This is an emergency. If you can hear me, I cannot hear you. Please call the following phone number in Washington and tell whoever answers that you’ve heard from me and
to call back the plane
!”