GPS Coordinates: –118.4517449, 33.9802893
March 12, 2010
Ethan had spoken with Alan via satellite phone a few short hours after the team had discovered the hydrothermal vent community at the bottom of the lake. It was a weak signal, and the two men scarcely had time to congratulate one another before atmospheric interference had crippled the transmission. Forty-eight hours later, the solar flares had subsided and they were able to speak again. This time Alan’s mind had seemed to wander, and he was vague and unresponsive when Ethan questioned him about the vent and the team’s findings. When Ethan had expressed concern, Alan explained that he was just getting over a bad cold that had kicked the crap out of the entire team. Nothing to worry about, he’d said. We’re back on our feet and it’s business as usual. As evidence of their well being, he’d mentioned a geologic survey Leonelli and Schmidt were off somewhere conducting that very moment. Ethan couldn’t say why exactly—it was just a feeling—but even though he’d popped a couple of Xanax to take the edge off it had been nearly impossible for him to sleep that night.
Maybe it was because he’d begun to believe in the existence of the organism his contact at the Department of Defense had strong-armed him to isolate. The golden goose of the DOD’s covert biological weapons research program was beginning to look like the real thing. True, there was no way of knowing with any degree of certainty that what Alan had dismissed as a case of the flu was not simply just that, but Ethan had a hunch. First, there was Alan’s shaky description of the stromatolite forest, the details of which he had communicated with an awe bordering on psychedelic rapture. Then there was the mystery illness. Although the symptoms Alan described were consistent with at least one stage of virtually every form of viral infection known to man, there was the troubling question of how.
Antarctica was fraught with innumerable dangers—hypothermia, pulmonary edema, frostbite, snowblindness—but catching a cold wasn’t one of them. Viruses needed carriers to thrive, spread and propagate, and the bottom of the world was conspicuously devoid of such. Maybe his contact at the DOD wasn’t totally crazy after all. Who knows, there might even be a shred of truth to his apocalyptic soothsaying.
Although infectious disease wasn’t his forte, Ethan knew how to run an expedition and was in too deep with the IRS to turn his back on Okum’s “offer.” Uncle Sam’s generosity was tempered with the knowledge that they had enough evidence to prosecute him on no less than ten felony counts involving tax-evasion, fraud and gross misuse of federal and state funds. The judicial system was cracking down on white-collar crime. This wasn’t about a slap on the wrist. If convicted, he could expect a lengthy stay in the federal country club. His cushy career in academia would be wrecked.
So what if he had been living beyond his means, skimming a little extra off the top here and there, using grant money to make ends meet, billing the university for personal expenses—dinners at Campanile, the lease payments on his Mercedes . . . There wasn’t a full professor in the department who hadn’t at one time or another tweaked his code of ethics to supplement what could hardly be considered a living wage. The only difference between Ethan and the rest of them was that he had gotten caught. He would’ve been wise to keep a lower profile, steer clear of the spotlight like his less ambitious colleagues. But he enjoyed his modest celebrity so damn much that he probably would’ve done it the same way all over again if given the chance.
At least he wasn’t a card-carrying drunk like so many of them. Nor did he comport himself with the social graces of a Tibetan yak. He was a functioning member of society, the department’s golden boy, and not some tired old recluse holed up in a dusty little cave of an office dying of cirrhosis and chronic dandruff. Sure, he was guilty of minor indiscretions every now and then, but not the sort of thing that hurt anyone. If there was one thing he could’ve done a better job with, it was managing his libido.
Throughout high school and college—and with, of course, the exception of Claire—he’d never come close to notching the caliber of ass that regularly enrolled in his classes. He had been an okay-looking kid, but never very athletic or socially outgoing. He was a science geek, and had garnered his fair share of beatings from what had seemed like every Neanderthal in Orange County. Rather than concentrating on the awkward teenager who would never fit in, he had dedicated himself to developing the man he would one day become, the man he now was. A winner. These days his grading policy was as loose and legendary as was his proclivity for firm young tits and ass. He often boasted to his friends outside the teaching profession that everything was “negotiable” and that he “graded on curves.” Of course he had learned to be charming—grant committees routinely favored personality above ability—but he knew that it was his position, the infinitely wise professor proselytizing from his gilded soap box, the taboo such a union entailed that lured the vampish young coeds into his bed.
Although not technically forbidden, the administration frowned upon student-teacher relations. He’d been reminded on more than one occasion that such faculty indiscretions were the stuff of scandal and sexual harassment suits. Recently, Ethan had made a conscious effort to only ride the thoroughbreds, and not go slip-slidin’ around every wet spot that crossed his path. Be selective, discrete. So he wasn’t a goddamned saint. Christ, he was making up for twenty years of sexually-frustrated youth. He’d managed to work the system all these years without any trouble. With a little fine-tuning, he could continue to do so. He hadn’t come all this way so that he could retire on a scrawny pension and spend the remainder of his days kicking himself in the ass for all the missed opportunities, sexual or otherwise. The townhouse in Westwood didn’t come cheap. And he’d had his eye on a little villa in the hills of Ravello for some time—nothing fancy, just old world Italian charm, a few grape vines, and the sparkling waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea stretching out over the horizon.
Ethan hadn’t planned on Alan dying—that wasn’t the plan at all. Alan was his friend, one of the few people Ethan felt had ever trusted him. But the fact remained. Nothing was going to bring Alan back, not all the remorse and tears in the world. Ethan could go on with his life and finish the job, or he could curl up into the fetal position and let the IRS bleed him dry. In a way, he almost envied Alan—no more treading water in a world teeming with sharks. Sharks and vampires. Bloodsuckers, every last one of them. Sure, Ethan could have been more honest with him about the nature of their work in Antarctica, but that would have exposed him and the others to greater danger than Ivan itself. In fact, Ethan had never truly believed in the existence of the deadly pathogen the military had assured him was very real. Most of their information was strictly anecdotal—Cold War fairy tales pieced together from intercepted Soviet satellite transmissions and the farfetched testimony of former Russian naval personnel. Not exactly what you’d call hard data.
Ethan’s contact was a retired Foreign Service something-or-other who went by the name of Wayne Okum. He hadn’t been at all what Ethan had expected. This was not the slick shadowy character you saw in movies and read about in Tom Clancy novels. This was the affable-looking guy you saw cruising the interstate behind the wheel of one of those massive RV’s that populate every rest stop along the way. He had thick reddish blonde hair, the youthful luster of which had given way to a silver-gray burnish, and the uptight posture of someone who didn’t get enough fiber in his diet. He wore a khaki polo-style knockoff tucked into a pair of crisp blue jeans and secured with a shiny black belt. Ethan guessed that he was somewhere between fifty and fifty-five years old, the inevitable consequences of which were a sagging neck, face and triceps. Drip-dry flesh. He drove a forest green minivan.
“Let me get this straight,” said Ethan. “You want me to go all the way to Antarctica and find this really fucking deadly organism—”
“Ivan the Terrible,” Okum interjected.
“Right, Ivan the Terrible . . . that killed a shitload of people and that no one’s caught a whiff of since 1979?”
Okum dumped seven packets of Splenda into his iced tea and smiled. “You catch on fast, Dr. Hatcher.”
“How do you know any of this is even real? Why not an elaborate hoax—something to keep you guys looking the other way while the Russians smuggled nukes into Cuba. Forgive me if I seem skeptical—but a bunny rabbit single-handedly wiping out the crew of a nuclear submarine?”
“What was inside the bunny rabbit,” Okum clarified.
“Even so—”
“We have sources.”
“You mean spies?”
“You say tomato . . .” Okum replied glibly, stirring his iced tea with a fork.
“You said everyone on the sub died a horrible death.”
Okum nodded. “There was one—the only survivor. I think he was the cook or something. A Russian search and rescue team found him adrift in the sub’s escape pod. They debriefed him on a closed frequency and then blew him out of the water.”
Ethan chewed on his mixed baby greens and Szechwan-style grilled chicken breast. “Just like that?”
“Guess they’d heard enough.”
“Let me ask again . . . You want me to go all the way to the South Pole to find this really fucking deadly organism because of what a whacked-out cook told some Russian sailors thirty years ago?”
Okum studied him over the rim of his glass and lowered his voice. “Any of this gets out and I’ll make sure the IRS crawls so far up your ass that you’ll have civil servants swinging from your tonsils. Copy?”
“Relax, I’m only trying to understand.”
“One of our own subs was in the area keeping tabs. High stakes surveillance. Cold War chess. Anyway, she starts picking up these noises coming from the Russian boat.”
“What kind of noises?”
“Voices mostly. Nothing out of the ordinary, except when you consider that each one of these subs is a mobile nuclear arsenal and that remaining hidden is priority one.”
“Voices?”
“Nonsense—routine chatter. Guys mixing it up. Then things started getting weird. It sounded as if they were having a party in there—banging on pipes, smashing things, laughter, calling each other names. Raising hell. Remember, this stuff wasn’t coming over the radio. It was traveling through the water—sound vibrations. The quality wasn’t exactly hi-fi, but it was clear enough. Anyway, things went from bad to worse and pretty soon it was goddamned pandemonium.”
“Mass hysteria? I’d go crazy too if I was cooped up in a submarine.”
“At first, that’s what we thought. Some sort of problem with the re-breathers—too much nitrogen in the air. Guys were beginning to hallucinate. But wait, it gets better. Out of the blue the Russian captain dials up Moscow and starts rambling on about the dancing bears he watched perform in Red Square when he was a kid. He nearly pisses himself laughing about it. The guy sounds drunk, like he’s been in bed with a bottle of vodka for a week.”
“What about the nitrogen?”
“Maybe.”
“So why didn’t they just pack it in and head home?” Ethan asked.
“I guess they couldn’t or wouldn’t. In the middle of the chat with Moscow someone cuts in on the captain: shouting, gunshots, some guy starts singing into the horn like he’s Boris fuckin’ Sinatra. After this, it’s Chinese New Year for two days straight. Brrrr!” Okum shivered for effect. “Shit’ll make your skin crawl. And then nothing. The Russian sub’s dead in the water—a true-to-life ghost ship. No one knows what’s happened. If anyone onboard is still alive, no one’s talking. The cook blows the escape pod and here we are.”
“What happened to the sub?” Hatcher asked.
“Russians scuttled their own boat. Sent her to the bottom right there. Four-thousand feet straight down.”
“. . . to get rid of Ivan.”
“You catch on fast.”
“Why the name? Why Ivan the Terrible?”
“Months before any of this a crew of Russian geologists was drilling for oil near the South Pole. But instead of oil they discovered millions upon millions of gallons of good ol’ H2O half a mile down. Hasn’t seen the light of day since our ancestors had pubic hair to their knees. A week later every last one of them is dead, so Moscow sends in a team of military scientists to poke around. No one in Russia has seen anything this bad since the reign of Ivan the Terrible: guys with their eyes gouged out, bite marks covering their bodies, sodomy, limbs missing, walls inside the rig dripping with blood. Autopsies at the site reveal that the oil crew had been eating each other. In some cases, eating themselves.”
Okum had gone on to explain that the autopsies had revealed an absence of drugs, but that other more enigmatic anomalies had been discovered. For starters, every last drop of blood examined by the team contained residual traces of what appeared to be an unidentified organism. Either it was some sort of here today-gone tomorrow mutation—a relative new kid on the block that would outlive its usefulness before coming into its own—or something infinitely older and more firmly embedded in the hierarchy of natural selection. Unfortunately, the drill rig had long since frozen over and despite their best efforts the team of scientists had been unable to procure a single living specimen by which to determine the course and consequence of its pathogenesis. Rather than simply give up, however, the scientists were ordered to hold tight for the arrival of a second drilling team.
When extensive analysis of the surface environment turned up nothing, the team concluded that whatever had infected the first group of drillers had come out of the ice thousands of feet down. The Kremlin was intrigued. The possibility of isolating such an organism for military applications was too valuable to ignore. After several weeks, the new team found what they had been looking for, some sort of microorganism living on the lake bottom.
It didn’t take long for the Russian scientists to conclude that the pathogen slipped into a semi-dormant state once the temperature of its host fell below a certain point. It was possible for Ivan to revive, however the window of opportunity was somewhere in the range of forty-eight to seventy-two hours. After that its life functions ceased entirely. The military infected a rabbit, turned it over to the sub, disposed of the second team of roughnecks, and then lost interest in the project when the organism was . . .
“. . . deemed too dangerous to fuck with,” Okum concluded indelicately.
“Why a rabbit?” asked Ethan.
“Easier to transport a pissed-off bunny than a pissed-off man.”
“Why me? Why not someone from the CDC, someone who has experience with this sort of thing. Surely, you have people on the company payroll.”
“The CDC . . .” Okum scoffed. “News travels faster through that place than a case of syphilis at the Mustang Ranch. If we’re not careful, we could lose the project to China or the North Koreans.” Okum eyed Ethan meaningfully. “Besides, you’re our guy—a mediocre, law-breaking scientist who’s always on some kind of wild goose chase. Our interest in you is actually quite simple when you think about it. Someone who’s dedicated his life to tracking down werewolves and sea monsters won’t exactly arouse suspicion. Plausible deniability is the name of the game nowadays. Anyone asks, you tell them you’re hunting the Abominable Snowman.”
“Why now?” asked Ethan. He had to choke down an urge to tell Okum to go fuck himself. “Why wait so long to go back?”
“Administrations change. Policy changes. The war in Afghanistan got the man in the Oval Office thinking. Why risk our troops when there might be a way to encourage the enemy to kill each other? Hell of a way to keep the UN off our back. Show the rest of the world what a bunch of nuts Osama and his boys really are.”
“Nice,” said Ethan. “That’s very humanitarian of you.”
“Think of all the money it will save taxpayers like yourself . . .” Okum caught himself and shrugged. “Bad example, but you get the idea.”
“If Ivan can’t survive without a host, how am I supposed to keep it alive?”
“Gotcha covered,” Okum assured him with a slippery grin. “You any good with monkeys?”
In all probability Alan and the others never knew what hit them. They had been as oblivious of the organism thriving within their blood as the chimps had been of the purpose Okum had envisioned for the unsuspecting primates. Who was the bigger dupe, Ethan wondered, the hairy knuckle draggers or him?
He shouldn’t have kept Alan in the dark about the true nature of their expedition, but what choice did he have? Okum was very clear about concealing the mission objective until the last possible moment. If anyone found out what the United States was doing in Antarctica, the UN would have had a field day raking the current administration over the coals of international scrutiny.
From the very beginning Ethan had thought the plan was more than a little myopic. Too much had been assumed. Too much had been left to chance. He couldn’t imagine Alan and the others agreeing to infect the chimps with a deadly pathogen, especially given the fact that they themselves had been laboring under false pretenses. Okum’s assurance that they would gladly slit their own mothers’ throats when they learned of the enormous sums of money they were going to receive for their complicity didn’t exactly hold water. To Ethan it was beginning to look more and more as if he, too, had been set up.
In the wake of the explosion he did a little digging. Alan was the only team member that had a family to speak of, and he had been Ethan’s choice. In fact Ethan had insisted that Alan accompany him, a decision that now kept him awake at night. And of course there was Lim about whom Ethan couldn’t learn anything, although he had gotten the distinct feeling from the civil servant with whom he had spoken long-distance that the Chinese government was none too fond of the marine biologist. Ethan was given the impression that Lim was something of a dissenter, a thorn in the Party’s side, though admired and well-respected among his colleagues. He imagined an arrangement between clandestine sectors of the Chinese and American governments to get rid of Lim, make it look like an accident . . . But this was merely speculation—paranoia, he had to admit, that was undoubtedly nurtured by his own fear of ending up dead like the others.
Ethan would have dismissed all of it as simple coincidence had he selected the team himself. However the fact that Okum had given him a list of candidates from which to choose now struck Ethan as reasonably suspicious. No one on Okum’s list had family, save perhaps a distant second cousin living in some backwater town on the outskirts of nowhere. Ethan now believed that the chimps were merely a smokescreen, decoys to put the true lab animals at ease.