White Plague Read Online Free

way. A guess as to the source would be Major Donald Pettit, who lived with my ex-wife, and commanded the rapid response squads that had been put under my control.
    I’d first learned of Pettit’s existence on the day that Nina moved in with him. She’d phoned me to make sure I heard the news from her, not from anyone else. She’d assured me that she’d met the guy eight months after our separation, and had not dated him until three months after that. I believed her. Nina doesn’t lie. But that didn’t mean I didn’t feel like taking a swipe at Pettit’s jaw when I met the big man on the tarmac in Fairbanks. I suppose he felt something of the same, and his guys sensed the extra testosterone saturating the air.
    Marine males locking horns.
    Pettit seemed to avoid looking my way.
    I suppose we’d have to deal with this eventually, but at the moment, with things to do, the clarification session would come later. I saw a copter landing. It would carry the captain. And I needed to talk to that man now.
    Get yourself under control.
    Look, I respect the Coast Guard. I’ve always admired the altruism involved in joining up, the choice to serve the country by providing humanitarian aid, helping victims of hurricanes, fires, ship sinkings. But combat-wise, even on a normal cutter you find, at most, a handful of crew allowed to carry weapons, there to arrest drug runners or smugglers. The
Wilmington
was built for science. It was a floating lab. Its crew consisted of a few veteran chiefs and otherwise mostly kids, eighteen- and twenty-year-olds whose expectations of emergencies ran to fires or sinkings, not battle, terrorism, or disease.
    The good part was, they had extensive training in first aid and rescue. I’d need both. But if fighting broke out, they couldn’t help me. I’d asked the captain ashore because, until precautions were in place, I couldn’t discuss that on the ship.

    “I shut down communications as you requested,” Captain DeBlieu said with a slight standoffishness marking his professional courtesy, “but I’ll need a reason why if you want me to keep that order in place.”
    We occupied cushioned swivel chairs in the Borough Rescue Squad office, taking the measure of each other, alone, as the pilots had given us privacy. The room was divided into comfortable cubicles with land-line phones, computers, Atlanta Braves coffee mugs, and logbooks on desks. We could have been in any town in Idaho or Arizona.
    I glimpsed boarding proceeding out a window—ship scientists to shore, crates to the
Wilmington.
Beyond the airport were some of the town’s one- and two-story wooden homes, perched on concrete pilings to keep them from melting into permafrost when they heated. I saw gravel roads. Traffic. A three-story office building. Eskimo kids on bicycles, wearing Windbreakers, even at thirty-six degrees. Satellite farms sat out on the tundra, huge dishes and golf-ball-shaped geodesic domes to protect sensitive equipment. Barrow’s radar, the old DEW line warning system, had been set up during the Cold War to warn of incoming Russian attacks. Local equipment still served as America’s Arctic front line. But it had been designed for threats from the past.
    “Colonel Rush, my crew has been at sea for three months straight without a break. They’re tired. They miss home. They want to talk to their families. I’d like a good reason why I’m telling them they can’t.”
    He was a short man, with excellent posture, an ex-academy shortstop with top grades, I’d read, Ohio born, both parents engineers. Over the years I’ve learned that small men in positions of influence tend to be more efficient, contrary to the usual view. They’ve had to prove themselves, especially the top athletes, all their lives.
    When I told him about the submarine burning, his horror was genuine. When I explained that we could not tell the crew or call out for assistance, his eyes narrowed, and I watched him process the logic. He