White Plague (8 page)

Now I did. I remembered the ads for it. Shots of four women in a blizzard, on cross-country skis, hauling sleds. I’d not read her file on the way up, figuring she was already security-cleared since she’d helped design the sub. Now I envisioned a different sort of body beneath those thick clothes, tight and muscular, like the hands.

Karen Vleska ignored the looks. She said reasonably, “Look, we’ve got a security leak, and I will not take the chance—however remote—that the person responsible is among us. So I go down first. I cover up anything sensitive. Then you gentlemen are welcome to drop in and have a big cocktail party, do whatever you want.”

“There’s something toxic in that sub,” I argued. “There will be bodies in there.”

“I go in first.”

“How about we discuss this later?” I suggested.

“If by that you mean after I go in, Colonel, fine.”

There was a coughing sound from the intercom. The director was fading like Marley’s Ghost, but he was still there, a pale outline, a consciousness from afar. But his voice came out strong and clear. “You’ll go in together.”

That convinced me.
He’s not running things.

He was disappearing as if his essence were being sucked away to be deposited in whatever Situation Room, Pentagon room, State Department, or task force room he’d be reporting to next, to face the usual round of Washington high-level second-guessers.
You should have sent more Marines! We should have asked our allies for help!

The director was gone.

“I’m going, too,” Andrew Sachs said.

All eyes went to the Assistant Deputy Secretary, who had drawn himself up in his chair, fortified by a satellite phone call with the Secretary of State.

“
She’s
going. The
Marines
are going.” He sounded like a ten-year-old to me. “The Secretary has instructed me to go, too.”

Sachs sat taller, the overhead light gleaming off the bald spot on his narrow head. His thin lips were tucked together. He was the stern New England schoolmaster or preacher. The iron gray eyes dared anyone to disagree.

Sachs was one of those men who lecture rather than talk. “The last thing we want is an international incident. There’s going to be a U.S. claim to territory up here and we’ll need all the support we can get. Negotiation may be required.
You
are not trained to do it. The issues are greater than the fate, however important, of one submarine. To be honest,” he said, using a phrase that in my experience identifies consummate liars, “confrontation must be avoided at all costs.”

Karen bristled. “Meaning, give them my submarine?”

“Meaning no trigger-happy posse, Wild West style.”

Eddie said, aghast, “What about the sick crew?”

Sachs’s lecture finger was up, wagging. He answered to one God and it was the Secretary of State, and he had spoken from his C Street Mount Olympus. “The fate of one hundred and fifty people versus three hundred and twenty million. You are
not
to fight.”

“That’s not what the director said.”

“The Secretary assured me, that’s what the President said, and your director, last time I checked, doesn’t run Washington. If we get there first, fine, do what you want, recover the sub, sink it. But if we . . .
I’m coming along!
”

It was a surprise voice beside me that spoke up. Clinton Toovik, the Iñupiat marine mammal observer, said softly, very calmly, “May I ask a question?”

Sachs glared at the interruption. “What question?”

Slowly, he said, “Well, what if we don’t
get there ahead of the Chinese because, well, because of you, sir?”

“Me? What? Me? Ridiculous!”

“Mr. Secretary,” Clinton asked, unperturbed, “have you ever been in an ice storm?”

“If
she
can do it, I can.”

“I’m sure that is true. I’m just saying. We might need to climb ice ridges thirty feet high. And wade through seawater ponds . . . That wind peels skin from your face. My uncle Dalton, he likes his vodka, and he came in too late once and had
no skin left
on the right side and had to be airlifted to Anchorage
.
”

“Your uncle Dalton? What does he have to do with this?”

But I noticed that Sachs, envisioning a different sort of future, had turned slightly paler, as he said, “I’ll wear heavy clothes, like everyone else.”

“Uh-huh. Also, anyone could fall in. The ice looks safe. You might even see a bear walk on it. Then you walk on it. Down you go. It’s all about weight distribution. But don’t worry. We’ll be roped together. We’ll move extra slow for you. And then, when we report back, we’ll explain how we
had
to go slow—lose time—because we didn’t want anything to happen to you.”

Sachs was blinking more rapidly. Looking at Clinton, the big body, Hawaii barbeque T-shirt, the open, amiable expression, I knew I’d just seen one of the best conference ambushes I’d ever witnessed. I wanted to applaud.

Clinton said, “It’s not your fault if you’re the one who has never been on ice. I know the Secretary of State will understand if you cause us to lose out.”

Sachs insisted weakly, “I won’t slow us down.”

I said, joining in, “Secretary Sachs is right, Clinton. If anyone falls behind, we’ll just leave them.”

Clinton nodded thoughtfully. “That is for the best.”

Sachs looked sick.

I felt a tap on my leg, from Clinton. He pushed a folded piece of paper into my hand. I looked down. He had good handwriting.

Sachs = asshole.

Clinton brightened. “Well, if you do come, you can help carry packs, fifty-pounders, well, feels more like eighty in a storm. We’ll suit you up . . . Can you snowshoe? Or maybe we’ll need crampons to get up and down the ivus and—”

Sachs broke in. “Ivus? What’s ivus?”

“Mountains of ice that just come, suddenly, out of nowhere. My aunt Martha, once she was out on the beach, and . . .”

Sachs poured himself water from a carafe.

Sachs said, pompously and thoughtfully, “You make some points, Clinton. Thank you for providing this perspective, yes, interesting. A need for speed. Speed is crucial. Hmm.”

He’s going to drop out
, I thought.

“We don’t have to decide right at this minute,” Sachs said, trying to save face.

The screen remained dark but suddenly the director’s voice was in the room again, amid static.

“Secretary Sachs is to come along if contact is imminent,” he said, as if he’d heard the last exchange. I knew then that Sachs had been right about one thing. If he was coming, backroom Washington was now fully in the mix.

As if the director understood my thinking, had given me a moment to catch up, he added, in a tone I understood, and which was also clearly intended for whoever sat with him, “Colonel Rush, you remain in charge, of course.”

Meaning:
I’m sorry he has to come with you. Ignore Sachs if you have to fight
.

Easy for him to say. Sachs would be with me, not him.

“Last thing. Security,” I said. “I want all phones checked on the ship, see if anyone even tried to call out. I want all deck cameras checked to see if anyone was outside at any time, trying to call out.”

DeBlieu okayed it, but said, “Colonel, the better sat phones can access out from the cabins. You don’t need to go outside to use them.”

“Do it anyway,” I said, angered at the lapses. “Also, from now on when we open sat channels, the crew goes on the buddy system. Two-man teams.
And
you’ll announce that anyone trying to call out for any reason will be violating national security laws, and arrested.”

DeBlieu stared down at the table, and when he looked up, I saw a quiver of anger on his lips. But I’d misread the reason. He had no problem with security precautions. It was my attitude that pissed him off.

“I don’t know where you got the idea that my crew is not professional, Colonel. They’re every bit as patriotic as your goddamn Marines anywhere on Earth. You tell my people the sub’s in trouble? Well, they’re working at one hundred percent now, but they’ll up it even more. You tell ’em this is high security and they’ll button their mouths faster than my ex-wife used to when I’d call her during the divorce. I
welcome
the chance to show you what we do. We’re the eyes of the United States in the Arctic. We’re up here in the snow while you’re lying in the goddamn sun in summer. So tell us what you need. But you will not disrespect my crew. Understand?”

I liked him tremendously, the little engineer with the quivering mustache and dark, goofy military glasses and very real rage. And I saw pride in their captain in the eyes of the chief exec and the communications officer.

“Captain, I apologize. I’m asking for your help.”

“For my
crew’s
help.”

“Yes, your crew’s help. Thank you.”

DeBlieu told the exec, in a dry voice I’d not heard from him previously, “Make sure to interview the Marines who came aboard, too. Colonel Rush and Major Nakamura also.”

“Everyone,” I agreed.

“That’s better,” DeBlieu said. “That’s just a damn sight better. I get sick and tired of you guys sometimes.”

Chief Exec Gordon Longstreet calmly absorbed the information. Clinton Toovik looked resigned, as if he’d expected bad news all along. Marietta Cristobel seemed weighed down with despair, her inability to help more. The worst-looking face belonged to the ship’s medical officer, whose fingernails drummed on her yellow pad, and whose trembling made me decide to drop a pen, and look under the table. Her right knee was bouncing. She was terrified.

Suddenly the ship jolted.

There was a sound resembling steel chains dragging along a trash Dumpster. Then a crunch like a crumbling Volkswagen, and then a soft grinding noise like a 7-Eleven Slurpee machine.

Clinton looked up, almost as if he could see through the hull, to the source of the sound. Now it became claws trying to break through steel, scraping.

“We’ve reached the ice,” he said.

I do not know if fate has consciousness, but thirty seconds later, as if some higher power feared a momentary lessening of resolve, as if the Arctic felt it had to bait us to keep us going, the cabin phone buzzed. DeBlieu picked up quickly. The bridge crew was under instructions not to call unless it was important.

Answering, he listened for a full half minute, said “Thank you,” and put the phone down, lips taut.

“We picked up the
Montana
radio beam locator,” he said, standing. “They’re two hundred and seventy miles ahead.”

The storm blasted out of the north and we were blind. Satellite reception was gone now, even with the jammers off. Nature accomplished what the captain had commanded previously, blocking all communication, cutting off the ship. Visibility was reduced to radar. The bridge crew peered like Romans reading entrails at a screen that pulsated with reddish Doppler readings of wind and precipitation. Gusts at 55 mph and rising. A flag that stood straight out beyond the snow-smeared window, and seemed ready to rip from its mooring and disappear into the void. Combine wind and temperature and the chill had dropped to minus eight.

From the bridge she looked small and alone on the forward deck, amid the wet lash of flying snow. She pushed into the wind and reached the prow and stood there, looking out at the ice into which the
Wilmington
now plowed at a reduced speed, seventeen knots had become fifteen, thirteen, then eleven. I went to my cabin and zipped up my parka. I pulled a stocking hat over my head and went down the corridor, where I pushed down the steel lever unlocking the hatch.

When I stepped outside, the wind that had been muted inside the ship exploded. The steel railing was coated with ice spray and more rocketed into my face with each fierce gust. The wet lash of pounding snow drove me sideways as I left the slight protection of the overhang, marched forward toward the living figurine who stood gazing out as if the day were clear, the wind a pleasant breeze, and she a happy tourist eyeing the northern ocean ahead.

I joined her and said nothing, opting for silence over interrupting thoughts. She seemed unaware of my presence for a few moments, but she knew I was there. When she spoke, it was to shout over wind, but her face remained turned to the storm.

“It’s beautiful. The blizzard boutique.”

“Excuse me?”

The face shifted fractionally in my direction. Her presence was a physical force that shifted molecules of air. “This storm, so powerful. Yet we can just walk inside and take a hot shower and snuggle into bed. When I went to the pole, we didn’t bathe for six weeks. Each night we’d get into the sleeping bags, and our breath would condense, turn to ice. After a while we slept in it. The bags got heavier each day.” She smiled. “My least happy memory of the trip.”

“But still a happy one.”

I could not see her shrug inside the bulky parka, but I sensed her do it. Her sigh was a line of white vapor whipped away by wind. The ship had assumed an up-and-down rhythm timed to oncoming swells. “Colonel, I always feel like the best thing about anything is also the worst. People, for instance. My girlfriends and I, when we were twenty, used to play a game about men. We called it,
I married him because . . . I divorced him because . . .
”

“What was the game?”

“Ah, I married him because he was the life of the party. I divorced him because he never shut up. I married him because he was stylish. I left because he couldn’t stop buying clothes. See? If you’re not prepared to live with both sides of anything, don’t get involved.”

She seemed comfortable in her own skin, seemed to know why she did things. It occurred to me that what I’d taken for bluntness earlier, rudeness, was merely an impatience with saying things in roundabout ways.

“Why submarines?” I asked.

She looked at me sharply, as if wondering whether I’d really asked,
Why submarines for a mere woman?
But I hadn’t meant it that way, she seemed to know it, and the look subsided as quickly as it had come.

“Because submarines go places where people can’t.”

The ship struck something harder and we bounced off but continued moving. Her face was elfin inside the furred hood. The gloves made her hands huge on the handrail, and melting ice ran in rivulets down wind creases in her cheeks. Her skin was an outdoorswoman’s, abraded by nature. It would age faster than other women’s skin. Her eyes would remain younger. Her posture was an inverted bow, so that she thrust forward into the violence, as if welcoming it, and her answer came as if we’d been chatting like tourists getting to know each other on a pleasant Arctic cruise.

“Submarines,” she said, “reach a different world.”

“And going on the polar expedition? The same?”

“If two things are the same, why do them?” she said.

She kept looking forward, not ignoring me, simply not wanting to miss the view. The ship wallowed in a small open area—a gap in ice, then slugged through a mass of gust-sheared, flat-topped waves, and plowed into a new floe. But the ice was getting thicker and was clinging to us now.

I looked down. Clumped ice covered every inch of my parka, a coating of gray rubbly slush.

“If you never do anything twice,” I said, “you must get bored with people.”

She peered out through ice-rimmed lashes. I’d been overt, asking that personal question. I was surprised I’d said it, even thought it. I’d not launched into this sort of stumbling, adolescent probing session since I’d met my wife.
Some tough Marine you are
,
I thought.

“Colonel, my father was a history professor. My mother was an engineering professor. All they did was talk. Their friends, also academics. We’d sit at the dinner tables, or in backyards, at parties, and they’d talk and drink and talk and eat. They talked about fascinating places and never went there. They talked about policies and never voted. They made the world outside seem exciting and made me want to do the things they feared, and see places they avoided. For a long time I thought they were scared, and I mocked them. But I just didn’t understand them. One time, I was eighteen, having an argument with my mother, I yelled,
You never do anything! You just talk!
And she smiled, patted me on the head, and said, But, darling, we like to talk. You’re different. Do things. It’s who you are.”

It was a funny sort of talk to be having in a blizzard. It was the sort of talk you have with a girl at a small restaurant table, with a candle burning between you, with an open bottle of chardonnay. She seemed just at home with herself in a sixty-mile wind as in a restaurant.

“Sounds like you had good parents,” I said.

“I didn’t answer you just to make a chat, Colonel. I answered because now I get to ask you one,” she said.

“Oh?”

“The Marines call you ‘Killer Joe.’ Why?”

I never knew it possible to feel so much heat in a blizzard. They say that Scotch whiskey will warm a man, but it’s nothing compared to the blast I felt at that moment from my face to my toes. She explained that she’d overheard the Marines talking in the mess, at a table behind her. I’d heard the nickname at Quantico:
Killer Joe.

Her eyes turned full on me now, and through the flakes hissing between us, I saw the keen glow of scientific curiosity. For a moment I’d forgotten who I was, and why I no longer deserved things that I’d once thought a basic human right. I’d been wrong to talk with her about anything except the submarine
Montana.
I deserved this.

The coldness in my voice startled even me. “Why didn’t you just ask the Marines what they meant?”

“I don’t like gossip. If you have a question, either ask the person directly or shut up,” she said.

“Marine nicknames are hard to figure out,” I said.

“Meaning you don’t know why they call you that name? Or that you’re glad the answer isn’t obvious?”

What was I seeing in her face? Amusement at my discomfort? Challenge to the mission leader? Rampant, directionless curiosity that never stopped?

“Meaning that we all have to live with who we are.”

The answer seemed to surprise her. She studied me. “Fair enough, and who
you
are,” she said, “is the man in charge when we get off the ship, out
there
,” she said, indicating the storm with a wave, “even though you’re not the one with the most polar experience. So you’re not the only one who has to live with you, Killer Joe.”

She looked like a slush statue, eyebrows white, hood rimmed with white, shoulders coated, breath white.

I retorted, “That seems like a valid reason to ask the Marines. Why come to me?”

“So that’s your answer?” She didn’t seem angered. It was like anything I said provided information. She peered into the microscope. I was the specimen on the slide.

“Yes, that’s it,” I said.

I left Karen Vleska at the prow of the ship, and later, an hour afterward, saw from the bridge that she was still there, a lone human figurehead, her face forward into the elements, the fierce snow blowing around her, as if all else in the world was gone.

Time crawled by. The radio beacon flickered on and off . . .

Ninety-two miles separated us from the
Montana . . .

Seventy-four miles . . .

Satellite communication remained blocked, so there was no way to know if the Chinese icebreaker was ahead of us.

DeBlieu announced to the crew the truth about the crippled
Montana.
There was no point keeping the rescue quiet anymore. He told them—as they stopped work, as they stared at intercom boxes—that we were in a race to save fellow sailors, but he gave the impression that the race was only against time. He did not mention any Chinese icebreakers or submarines. He did not mention potential Russian movement in the region.

Thirty-two miles . . .

The wind was now audible, even when inside the ship, in those rare moments when we didn’t hear ice. It had thickened and both engines ran at full power—probably damaging them, DeBlieu said—and we were like a steel bronco smashing, pushing, nudging, and backing and ramming our way north. In the stairwells we needed to hold railings, moving between decks. During sleep periods the ice clawed and screamed at us on the other side of the hull. I lay in my bunk. I could not sleep. I stared at the mass of wires and vents bouncing and quivering with each impact of steel against ice.

“Colonel, good news. The floe is moving them
toward
us at a good three miles an hour. We picked ’em up for a minute. Then they were gone again.”

Twenty-two miles . . . Crewmen with ice mallets and baseball bats smashed at ice coating the railings.

As DeBlieu had predicted, once the mission was known, his crew doubled the intensity with which they worked. They brought new care to each job, more attention to detail, whether it was serving steaks in the mess, or checking on the Arktos. It was in their posture and faces and the way the crew, in ones and twos—kids to me—came up in the corridors or mess and volunteered to be part of the rescue trip, if we needed help.

“I grew up in North Dakota, sir, and can move fast on cross-country skis . . .”

“I have a sister in subs, sir. I know she’d want me to go with you.”

I was humbled by their drive, and realized that—as DeBlieu had assured me—his men and women constituted a greater asset than I’d given them credit for. I’d been the too-proud Marine.

Still, it was a race, against time, against death, against the worldly powers opposing us. The ice thickened outside. We had to stop, back and ram, then race through a lead, then hit another floe, then back and ram again. We made teeth-jarring progress. The first iceberg went past, jagged and tall and like a mini-mountain easing by fifty feet to starboard. I saw ice pillars. I saw a floating ice half moon. The bergs came and went like frozen monuments just beyond any clear field of vision.

Meanwhile the wardroom—a large, lit, comfortable lounge down the passageway from the captain’s cabin—became our headquarters. It had a long conference table, thick carpet, comfortable chairs, and was stocked with coffee machines and snacks.

A Marine guard stood outside while Karen Vleska, Eddie, and I went down a list of materials used in Virginia-class subs: rubber compounds, wiring, computer chips, plastics, and parts of strategic metals, anything new, anything that might—if subjected to extreme heat—produce toxic gas. Eddie tried to match the results with charts of toxic chemicals, trying to identify the possible source of the illness aboard the
Montana
.

Neither Karen nor I made any mention of our previous conversation on the deck.

Eleven miles . . . but we’d slowed to four knots.

Had the Chinese icebreaker gotten there yet?

The beacon failed and lit and failed and came on, and DeBlieu said we’d sailed to the east, or maybe the current had moved the submarine west . . . so we had to change direction.

Eddie and I pored over encrypted files that had blasted through from the director during the brief period when the sat line had been open. Eddie was in his bunk, me in mine.

“Listen to this, Number One,” Eddie said:

The U.S. has become more militaristic since they abandoned a draft Army for a volunteer force. Their Congress, having fewer veterans in it, is more inclined to fight. Democrats wish to prove that they are tough. Republicans see enemies everywhere. The result is a crippled giant seeking to bolster popular support at home—and gain advantages abroad—through military adventurism.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“It’s a paper that was published by Admiral Xu Lingwei Ha in 2014, identifying the U.S. as the most likely enemy China will face in a future naval war, and urging speedy preparations for a, quote, ‘wide-ranging confrontation that will occur in numerous locations across the Pacific and High North latitudes.’”