Protocol Zero

Book 2: A Joe Rush Novel

by James Abel

Genres: War & Military; Thrillers; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers

Synopsis

NEW FROM THE AUTHOR OF WHITE PLAGUE

Marine doctor and bio-terror expert Joe Rush returns in an electrifying new arctic adventure… "sure to wow fans of Michael Crichton and James Rollins" (Mark Greaney, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect).

When authorities in Alaska receive a disturbing call from a teenage girl, their investigation leads them to discover an entire family of researchers dead. Joe Rush is called to help examine the bodies. On the surface, it looks like a brutal murder/suicide. But the situation is nowhere near that simple-nor is it over.

Upon closer investigation, Rush discovers the terrifying truth. The research team has fallen victim to something that seems impossible at first, yet the evidence looks undeniable in the lab. Now the danger may threaten thousands more.

Unfortunately, he's not the only one with knowledge of the looming disaster. The army has cordoned off part of Alaska, and Rush soon finds himself the target of trained killers. Someone suspects Rush of betraying his country. To save countless lives-starting with his own-Rush must uncover the answers hidden in the Arctic. The question is-will he find them in time?

Release date: August 4, 2015

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 352

Sample

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the following people for giving generously of their time during the research and writing of Protocol Zero.

ONE

The police chief’s emergency call had to bounce off three satellites to reach me. The first—over Russia—was snapping photos of their paratroops by the North Pole, on maneuvers. The second—over Arctic Canada—watched a U.S. attack submarine testing weapons, surfacing in ice. The last one was directly overhead above northern Alaska. North Slope Police Chief Merlin Toovik’s voice came in loud and clear, from nine miles away.

“I need help, Colonel.”

I stood, breath frosting, at the end of North America on a twenty-foot-high grass bluff overlooking the Arctic Ocean, a Mossberg shotgun over my back, in case polar bears showed up. Fire in the air, they usually turn away. My best friend and partner Marine Major Eddie Nakamura and I were trying to figure out what had killed the emaciated male bear at our feet. It looked like death by starvation. I wondered if it had been caused by a new germ.

“You know the victims, Colonel.”

No other people were visible. No buildings or roads were here. The tundra stretched south for three hundred miles to the Brooks Range, in October, in a stark undulating beauty; an ocean of olive-brown high grass, filled with dips and hummocks, and spotted with the withered remains of summer flowers: once-yellow paintbrush, bright firewood, purple Siberian phlox, bell heather, and my true love Karen’s favorite, the white-flowered anemones, which I gathered in bunches like a lovesick teenager. But it was worth her smile. Just about anything was.

The sea, thirty yards off, was black as anthracite and dotted with an early pancake glaze of ice. Locals had told me that the big pack would come in soon, to extend all the way to the pole, eight hundred miles north. The sky was a thick gray, the temperature hovered at thirty-six degrees. The Arctic sun looked as tiny and distant as Pluto. It rotated elliptically, staying low to the horizon, lava-colored but weak, more glow than heat, as if shy, as if frightened. Soon this remote landscape would fade to black beneath three months of night.

“Four people in trouble, Joe,” Merlin said.

Ahead of us rose what looked like a mini Stonehenge; fantastic curving shapes rising up for fifteen feet; spaced as regularly as church organ pipes, and bleached gray by weather. They were bowhead whale ribs. Iñupiat hunters built the bone pile—bulldozing them there twice a year after the fall and spring hunts. The bones attracted hungry polar bears, who cracked the ribs and ate the marrow. The bone pile kept polar bears off of Barrow’s streets, its supermarket parking lot, its backyards, and away from America’s Arctic capital’s kids.

“Joe, they were your neighbors,” Merlin said.

No roads led in or out of Barrow. You arrived by snowmobile or four-wheelers, like we drove today, or you flew in or came by boat during the four months a year when sea ice was relatively clear. The nearest highway was three hundred miles away, at the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay.

The voice said, “Can you bring your medical gear?”

“Couple questions first, Merlin. How did you hear?”

I hit the intercom so that Eddie could listen. He was kneeling by the carcass, looking up, a small skull-saw in his gloved hands, and an unrolled scalpel kit in the grass. This bear had been sick, that much was evident from the fur patches stripped away. But what had killed it? Something usual and natural? Or the type of thing we secretly sought?

Merlin Toovik said, “The daughter called me, hysterical, screaming about sickness. She was crying too hard to make out words. But then I heard a shotgun. And the call went dead.”

“You called back?”

“Yeah, tried both parents, her, too. No one answers.”

“What sickness?” I felt a wave of fear hit my stomach.

“I don’t know. I could barely hear. It was a bad connection. And there were funny noises in the background.”

“Please describe them.”

Eddie was frozen now, frowning.

“Grunting. An animal, maybe, but not one that I know. Too high for a wolf. Too low for a bear. Plus, she was inside their hut, she said, not outside. So whatever made the sounds was in there with her. Right beside her, sounded like. Weirdest, spookiest sounds, Joe.”

Admiral Galli—who ran our small, secret unit—had been adamant when he’d ordered us not to get involved in local matters. Our mission had a public aspect, which Eddie and I had explained to Iñupiat leaders; but it also had a secret component, which we had reluctantly held back.

—For their own good, Joe, the admiral had said.

—Sir, I disagree and think I ought to tell them.

—Not a chance.

We were behind schedule with winter rapidly approaching. We needed to finish our study and go south.

Now, for a fraction of a second, the admiral’s orders warred with Merlin’s plea. I was seeing something in my head and it wasn’t anything my boss said about an upcoming Arctic war game, due to start in the spring, about billions of dollars in weapons appropriations at stake, about national security. Barrow will be flooded with VIPs, Joe: White House, State, Pentagon. We’re behind the Russians in the race for control. And the Russians are getting belligerent again in Europe. If we don’t get our act together, it will be too late. Something will happen up there, and we won’t be able to handle it.

What I saw in my head was a fifteen-year-old girl, and our neighbors for the last few weeks in the old World War Two–era air base where I’d been stationed with Eddie, where we’d lived in a Quonset hut among the university types who spent summers studying walruses, potential oil finds, ice melt, or, like our neighbors, nothing more threatening than seeds and moss. Our neighbors were a couple with whom we’d become friendly, two professors from a small New Jersey college, Ted and Cathy Harmon, and their daughter, Kelley. The parents were quiet academics who invited us over sometimes for poker games, cocktails, tirades on the warming Arctic, or rose hip tea.

The kid was smart and likable and wanted to be a scientist also. But she was also just a girl who liked normal teenage things. She’d sneak over to our Quonset hut at night—I had given her a key—to watch TV shows that her parents banned next door—American Idol, The Vampire Diaries—shows that Ted told me would “rot Kelley’s mind.” She also talked for hours with Karen Vleska, my fiancée, who’d flown in to visit a couple of weeks ago.

Cathy Harmon had taken me aside one day, squeezed my shoulder and said, “Thanks for giving Kelley a place to go. Every kid needs a friendly uncle. She doesn’t have real uncles, so you and Eddie seem to be her choice.”

“Colonel,” Merlin said now, urgently. “I’ve got deputies ready and a copter gearing up. I’ve got Dr. Ranjay Sengupta along from the hospital. But I’d appreciate having you and Major Nakamura along, too.”

I wanted to go. “Merlin, are you sure the noise you heard on the phone wasn’t just static?”

A pause. From the silence, I knew I’d insulted him. “I know the difference between static and grunting. Also,” Merlin said, “you and Major Nakamura have been visiting the villages all summer, asking about new diseases, rashes, hives, fevers, right?”

Eddie’s brows rose. Despite the danger, I broke out smiling. It was impossible to hide anything from people here. They were scattered throughout an area the size of Wyoming, a county comprising America’s northernmost outpost. America’s Arctic Serengeti, filled with hundreds of thousands of caribou, wolves, grizzlies, foxes. There were about twenty million birds. But the human population was only 7,500, concentrated in eight small villages, with the capital, Barrow, home to 4,500 Iñupiats and a smattering of whites, blacks, Samoans, and Asians. Although hundreds of miles separated villages somehow the Iñupiats seemed to know everything that outsiders did within days of their arrival. I’d told this to the admiral, advised him to let me speak plainly, warned him that lies backfire here.

Now I admitted, “We’ve asked a few questions about diseases, now and then.”

In his pause I heard desperation. “If you won’t do it for that reason, do it as a favor for me. Their bear guard is my cousin, Joe. Please.”

That did it. People here did not ask favors lightly. Favors were more important than money. Favors were contracts. Favors were life. I told Merlin, “We’re at the bone pile. Give me twenty minutes to get into town.”

“Go to the rescue squad,” Merlin Toovik said, and added, “I’m sure they told you not to do this.”

“I was told to give you every assistance,” I lied.

•   •   •

MY NAME IS JOE RUSH AND YOU WON’T FIND A DESCRIPTION OF MY REAL job in my files at the Marine Corps. When I was seconded to the unit, my records were sheep-dipped—altered—to contain enough truth to fool a casual observer, the rest lies to protect the Corps, unit, and country from learning things that my bosses in Washington believe you ought not to know. Sometimes I agree with them. But often we fight.

Forty years old, the file says, and that part is correct, at least. Marriage status single; which was true that day, but happily due to change in three months. Six foot two. The photo shows blue-black hair, dark as the coal veins mined by my Welsh great-great-grandfather, eyes as light blue as those of great-great-grandma, daughter of a Norwegian cod fisherman, who met Gramper Bowen on the foredeck of the rusting steamer that brought them into New York Harbor as immigrants, 131 years ago.

They settled in Massachusetts, as the stumpy green Berkshire Hills reminded my ancestor of Wales. I grew up in the dying textiles mill town of Smith Falls, population 250, nestled between a thin, rocky river and a granite quarry, ten miles south of the Vermont line, on a two-lane cracked rural road.

There, generations of Rushes manned the assembly line of Brady Textiles, making button-down shirts in peacetime, Army uniforms during World War Two and Korea and Vietnam, but when the Brady company fled Massachusetts for cheaper labor in Honduras, the Rushes became roofers and plumbers catering to summer-home owners from New York or Boston, who returned to their cities when the air turned chilly each autumn, and I climbed onto the creaky bus heading for my leaky country school.

I thrilled to TV commercials showing Marines—strong, confident men just a few years older than me—storming ashore on foreign beaches, rescuing hurricane victims, safeguarding the flag that we saluted every morning at Colonel David Harding High, named after the Massachusetts Civil War hero, killed during the Union’s failed amphibious landing attempt to capture Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on September 8, 1863.

I never traveled farther than forty miles from home. I had friends, and girlfriends, but their smiles and invitations were, to me, traps to keep me in town.

So I left Smith Falls, and the higher-education part of my file correctly indicates that I attended UMass on an ROTC scholarship. The early Marines history is right, too: Parris Island, Quantico, antiterrorist guerrilla action in the Philippines. All of it real until Iraq and the secret germ lab I stumbled on there with Eddie Nakamura, when we were both lieutenants. The sick monkeys we found there—intentionally infected with disease . . . convulsing, terrified, dying—changed our lives, sent us to medical school, and made us experts on a kind of danger that most people fear, but put in the backs of their minds, not wanting to think about it, not wanting to remember it exists, not wanting to know.

Our enemy became smaller and traveled in vials and hypodermics or on air currents, in subway vents, or in bombs.

Awards? The Silver Star is there for Iraq, and a Navy and Marine Corps medal for actions taken in combat during the global war on terror—although the exact actions I took part in are secret. Our director once said that I’d saved “Thousands of lives, in Afghanistan and in the Arctic. Too bad we can’t release either story, Joe. But we can promote you. You’re young for a full colonel. Congratulations.”

Under “skills” my file says that I can hit a running enemy at three hundred yards with an M4 carbine; and then, thanks to my M.D. degree, extract the bullet, clean the wound, administer antibiotics, and run any field hospital or bio lab in the world, to identify chemicals or germs.

I am also qualified to lead an assault on an enemy bioweapons facility, secure it, decontaminate it, and then interrogate its staffers, and kidnap them home to be tried and hung by military tribunal, under more obscure laws of the Republic. If my skill set seems contradictory to you, you’re getting an idea of why I have fewer friends than I used to, other than Eddie, and my fiancée, Karen. It’s also why my first marriage failed three years back, after I told my wife some things about my job. She’d been my college sweetheart and a loving, patient partner. But that disclosure—my attempt to save the marriage—came too late and put the last nail in a union that had been dissolving for some time.

That’s the problem with secrets. Keep them and you drive away loved ones. Share them and you might do the same. Still, these days I kept no secrets from Karen. The admiral—former Coast Guard commandant—didn’t like it. But I’d insisted when he asked me as a favor to stay in the unit, not retire, that I would only agree if Karen remained in the loop. The admiral had refused, argued, and then checked on Karen’s high-security clearance. He’d tried to talk me out of it one last time, and then he’d given in.

“Because we need you, Joe. But if either of you talk, I won’t be able to protect you.”

I liked the admiral. Unlike the former director, who came from Wall Street and was destroyed by a financial scandal, the admiral was a true public servant: hero of Hurricane Laticia, hero of Deepwater Horizon, he deserved to keep the unit intact and strong. So I stayed.

“Joe,” he’d said. “You’re the best I got.”

My memo to the secretary of defense six years ago—which brought me into the unit—suggested that the military should prepare for the possibility that the next big outbreak of human disease might come from a cold climate, not a hot one, not a jungle, as is usually assumed . . . but from a microorganism released by melting ice, after being encased in it for hundreds of thousands of years, or by an enemy who knew where to look for germs—new, terrible weapons—in cold latitudes.

On the day I received Merlin Toovik’s phone call I had two months remaining in my one-year extension. Then I planned to move east with Karen, and start a biotech company with Eddie, looking for cures in the wild: good germs, not bad.

That was the plan, at least. But you know what they say about plans. Or at least what smart Marines know. Once battle starts, plans fall apart.

Eddie and I sealed the dead bear’s brain and tissue samples into Ziplocs. The disease that had killed it was probably something normal, nothing new. We mounted our Honda four wheelers and turned south. We sped over the tundra, and ten minutes later I glimpsed the high cell-phone and radio towers and satellite farms ahead that constituted a first glimpse of town. Then would come the base, where Karen was waiting. She’d arrived two weeks back to train for her next polar trip, and she’d brought along a documentary filmmaker who looked at her in ways that annoyed me, trailed her around constantly, and gave Eddie and me the creeps.

I’d call her from the chopper. I’d say we’d be late. She’d be crazy with worry about the Harmons, but the filmmaker would probably be happy to have a few more hours with her, alone. The jerk.

I was thinking, Maybe they are okay. Maybe Merlin was wrong about hearing a shotgun. Maybe they’re too sick to answer their phones. Maybe, even if he did hear a shotgun, someone is still alive.

I needed to concentrate on driving or the Honda might turn over, but I kept seeing in my mind the fifteen-year-old high school girl, just a kid, who had adopted me as an uncle. I had no children of my own. You could say that I had adopted Kelley Harmon back.

The Honda skidded on slick tundra, began to go over, but the wheels caught and I righted it. I accelerated.

The biggest dangers start out small, one of my old instructors at Quantico used to say. Things sounded bad already. Four possible victims.

I had no idea how much worse things would get.

TWO

“Play Kelley’s call again,” I said.

The rescue squad’s big, twenty-year-old Bell 412 copter rose off the tarmac, spun southwest, and headed for the research camp. I was crammed with four others into the cab, and through the window had a last glimpse of Barrow. The triangular town hugging the last bit of coastline on the continent. The mass of one – and two-story wooden homes sat on concrete pilings to prevent them from heating up and melting the permafrost below. The dirt and gravel roads, at 5 P.M., were alive with taxicabs, kids on banana bikes, a truck hauling a big outboard boat toward the beach and lagoon. Probably whalers going out to scout for bowheads. The fall migration was due to start any day.

Then the city was gone. We raced over a sea of tundra, and through mist so thick that it felt like flying inside lungs . . . the land rolling out in glimpses, in patches; thousands of elliptically shaped freshwater lakes, there because permafrost kept what little precipitation falls here from draining. Wiley Post Airport was gone. It was named for the American humorist who crashed there a century ago. Barrow’s fame comes from death. The town was named for Sir John Barrow, English lord of the admiralty, who sent a thousand British explorer/sailors to their icy demise in a search for the Northwest Passage, Europe’s quick route to Asia, over a century ago. Some of them sank. Some abandoned ships trapped in ice, walked off in search of rescue, and disappeared. Others died of sickness or starvation or they ate each other.

“Okay, here goes,” Merlin said.

When I heard the terror in Kelley’s voice, a fist seemed to cut off the air in my throat.

“Oh, God, God, no one’s answering. I tried to reach Dr. Rush and Dr. Nakamura, and then your operator couldn’t hear me. Everyone is screaming! I’m scared.”

“Slow down, Kelley, okay? You’ve got all my attention. What’s wrong? S-l-o-w.”

We were dressed in zip-up float suits in case we ditched in water. We wore helmets equipped with mikes and earpieces and wore waterproof, calf-high Northern Outfitter boots. In the back we carried stretchers and medicines and sample bags and field surgical kits. Merlin was armed with a .45 Beretta, and he and his deputies wielded Mossberg shotguns. Eddie and I had our bear guns. Now there was a small clicking in my helmet, and over the rotor roar I heard the plaintive, terrified voice of the girl.

“We’re all sick! Daddy said not to call. Said I was wrong. He said it was just flu. But he can’t close his hand. He fell. He said a good scientist never jumps to conclusions, but I didn’t! I didn’t jump to conclusions! Oh, God! I wrote down the symptoms even before the sticking pains started. And Clay Qaqulik was babbling about little people. And Mom . . . I can’t believe she and Clay . . . And the water tastes bad and . . .”

My throat closed up. This frantic voice was not the one I usually heard from her when she came over to watch TV, or to ask Karen endless hero-worship questions about being an Arctic explorer. Aren’t you scared when you’re out in a blizzard? How did you get Coca-Cola to sponsor you? I was used to her saying things like, “Why can’t I spend summers like normal kids? The beach. Music. I’m, like, in prison. I mean, it’s not like I don’t like science, but my friends are at parties and I’m stuck here, looking at plants. I didn’t ask to be an intern. They said it would help me get into college. They don’t even pay me. I’m their little summertime SLAVE!”

My mouth was dry. My head was pounding with fear for the whole family, and I could feel my intestines clenching as the voices went on. It was Merlin now.

“Honey, slow, please, okay? Focus. What happened and when did it start?”

It was no use. Kelley was too scared.

“I saw that redheaded woman in the warehouse, bending over the water bottles! And then the water tasted funny and my throat hurt, but I thought it was just, you know, like when you wake up sometimes and it burns. And Daddy said the redheaded woman wouldn’t harm us, and Clay . . . (zzzzz) and Daddy screamed at Mommy because her underwear was (zzzzz) and I said, ‘What little people?’ And Mommy said (zzzzzzzzzzz)”

Eddie said, cocking his head, trying to hear, “The underwear was what?”

“Did she say bleeding?”

“I don’t think it was bleeding. It was something else.”

“Merlin, can you try that again?”

The voice had degenerated into a little girl’s, the use of the word Mommy, like she’d become five years old, like she was cowering under covers, afraid that the bogeyman in the closet was real. I felt trapped in the copter. My mouth was dry. I was filled with a sense of being too late. We still had a good fifty miles of tundra to go.

“And then I was looking in the shaving mirror and the glass bothered me, the sun was so bright on it, it hurt my eyes so I just . . . just BROKE IT . . .”

Dr. Sengupta, sitting opposite me, was a forty-two-year-old from Mumbai who’d taken a three-year contract at the hospital because he’d “Always dreamed of ice, since I was a little boy. So when I saw the job description, I felt I must come and see my dream.”

He said, “Hmm, extreme light sensitivity.”

Kelley babbling, jumping from one half thought to another, the words becoming run-on, loss of control.

“. . . And Mommy coming out of Clay’s tent and Daddy yelling, ‘How could you do that to me! You bitch!’”

Eddie’s eyes meeting mine across the four feet of cabin that separated the two rows of passengers. Eddie’s brown eyes baffled. I knew he was seeing the same thing I was in his head; the Harmons, two quiet, middle-class researchers who don’t use words like bitch in public, and don’t brazenly sleep with their bear guards, certainly not in a small research camp in front of a husband and daughter. But perhaps we were misinterpreting what we were hearing. Or maybe, as Eddie said, “Maybe they had a dark side, Uno. Virginia Woolf times nine.”

Merlin trying to slow her down. The girl talked over the police chief. Merlin trying to soothe her, trying to get information. The girl was out of reach, emotionally and physically.

“I’m in the hut. They’re screaming outside. Clay says Daddy is trying to kill him! This is crazy! This isn’t happening! Lalalalalalalala . . . I’m putting my hands over my ears. LALALALAAAAAA!”

I heard a clumping on the line, and thought she’d hurled away the phone, into a corner. The lalala sounded farther away. I wanted to shut off the sound. Something awful was building. Dr. Sengupta’s eyes were huge inside his glasses, the deputies were still and silent, and the whole copter wobbled, as if the engine drew in the raw tension coming in with the call.

Then quiet, and another voice, a new one, Clay Qaqulik’s, I guess, said, strangled, choking . . .

“I have to stop it.”

A pause. Then Clay again.

“I have to. I’m sorry, Miss K.”

And then I started in my seat because I heard a bark, or a grunt, close to the phone; a throaty animal sound . . . The girl had stopped talking, Clay also. Something else was in there, in that research hut with them, sniffing at the unit. A series of more grunts followed. A flow of unintelligible sound: low and urgent, angry and primitive. Barking almost. Impossible.

Kelley screamed, “Stop it! Why are you doing that?”

Followed by the unmistakable BOOM of a shotgun.

And then nothing . . . zzzzzzz . . .

Eddie and I and the police chief and deputies bounced in the copter, transported into our imaginations. What just happened? The earbuds emitted static. The mist ahead thickened, to obscure not only air ahead, but earth below. The sky gone. The truth gone. The only sound the steady groan of engines.

“Play it once more, Merlin,” I said.

The nightmare voices started up again. I thought back to Washington, to the admiral’s small office on C Street, to the story he told us, to the secret part of our job.

•   •   •

“YOU ARE TO LOOK FOR WHAT YOU PREDICTED, JOE. FOR SOMETHING NEW and potentially dangerous popping up as the region warms.”

Eddie, the admiral, and I had been sitting in a townhouse four blocks from the State Department in Foggy Bottom.

“Why send us now?” I’d said. “Did something happen?”

To answer, the admiral spread on his large desk a map of the North Slope of Alaska. Tinged brown for tundra, it formed the shape of a wild boar, the eastern side, or hindquarters, was the border with Canada.

“New fish species up there. New birds. Even a new kind of bear: half grizzly, half polar bear,” Admiral Galli had said.

The western side, or skull and snout shape, jutted west toward nearby Russia across the Chukchi Sea, ending at the Eskimo village of Point Hope.

“Question is, are there new, dangerous germs as well?” the admiral asked.

He sat back. “We’ve been assigned a delicate task, and you two have been up there before so you’re going. All this land here, vast space, hardly any people . . . that made it a natural lab for the white-coat guys, in the past, you see.”

Eddie said, “Weapons testing.”

“And designing. This started during World War Two, and went through the end of the last century. The bad guys looking for new ways to kill us. Our brightest minds trying to anticipate what might come at us from across the Bering Strait: chemicals, gasses, germs.”

“Meanwhile, we made some, too,” I said.

“You want them to be the only ones who have it?”

“Nope.”

“Of course not. It was a race. A germ and chemical race. And then, gentlemen, a few accidents started to happen. Montana: Army nerve gas experiment goes wrong, and next thing you know, fifty thousand sheep are dead. Nevada nuclear tests: Twenty years pass and the soldiers who witnessed explosions start to die of cancers. Atomic soldiers, we called ’em. Also a few locals, who drove through clouds of radiation emitted by the tests. You know these stories. If you’re not familiar with all of them, surely you know some.”

“And in Alaska, sir?”

“First, by the late 1980s, Congress was pissed off over these accidents, and the public outcry. Plenty of people opposed testing by then. This is before the chemical test ban treaties, big nuclear test treaties.”

“So they passed a law,” I guessed.

“Yep. HR-932. An obscure provision in a military appropriations bill mandated a kind of germ and toxics census in areas that had been used for testing. Every five years the secretary of defense is required to send out teams to, quote: ‘Conduct a detailed examination of any general areas once used by the U.S. military for chemical or biological testing, in order to determine whether any lingering negative effects have harmed U.