White Plague Read Online Free Page B

haven’t had any problems.”
    “How would you know? Furthermore,” I said, “the civilians you carry receive only low-level vetting. And, Captain? Even if there’s
no
spy aboard, any blogger, tweeter, an innocent e-mail home saying
We’re on a rescue mission
could blow it. If a spouse back in Pittsburgh phones the local TV station, or she’s got a brother at the
Washington Post
, maybe a niece on that sub, the instant the public hears,
Arctic submarine on fire . . .
I guarantee you, our satellites would suddenly track every Russian icebreaker within a thousand miles make a run at intersection. And some of their icebreakers have artillery. You have a few M16s.”
    “You think we’d really fight?” he asked, not believing it possible in the new century.
    “If our sub is in international water, abandoned? It’s drifting. It could drift into Russian waters. Next time our boys and girls are submerged off China, Syria, you want their lives in jeopardy?” My voice hardened. “You want a test?”
    He nodded, unhappy. “So it’s a race,” he said.
    “A race.”
    He was eyeing me differently now. “Just what kind of doctor are you anyway?”
    The kind who treats worst-case scenarios.
    I said,
“Oh, hypothermia. Frostbite.”
    He sighed. It would be all right with him, at least at first. “Right,” he said. “And you won’t tell me what really happened on that submarine?”
    Finally I could tell the truth, not that this relieved me. “I wish I knew what happened.”
    Ten minutes later I learned that one of the Arktos propulsion units was broken, and could not quickly be repaired. There was no way to get the second rescue craft to the
Wilmington
. We’d have to leave with just one.
    Two hours later we were under way, heading toward the North Pole at full speed, to start, at least, seventeen knots.

THREE
    “If you spot a polar bear,” I told the man who shared my ex-wife’s bed back in Fairbanks, in a dry, academic voice, “record it in the log.”
    Major Pettit almost responded, “Yes, Colonel,” but he changed it, at the last second, to “Sure, Doctor.”
    I unscrewed a ventilation shaft door, peering in, scanning for hidden microphones, running a meter box. I kept talking because the meter was supposed to jump if a transmitter was sending. “Bears use ice as platforms for feeding. When the ice melts, the polar bear population drops.”
    My quarters consisted of a two-room suite on the level four deck, which also housed cabins for the captain, ship’s officers, scientists, and held a radio room and helicopter control station. There were electronics shops and a pantry. We were one level down from the ship’s pilothouse.
    My cabin was large, light streaming through a porthole . The sea was calm and there was no sense of movement, although I felt a low vibration from the diesel engines below. The sun outside was a hazy orb, as if viewed through gauze, a glow which would circle low in the sky, horizon to horizon, but in late August, almost never go away. If I needed to sleep, I’d close the porthole cover.
    Inside, two more Marines were silently up on steel chairs with screwdrivers in hand, reattaching grills to ventilation shafts that hung between the two single beds on opposite sides of the room, both crisply made. A lance corporal was going through the two upright steel lockers with a meter detector. A private was in the bathroom. My quarters smelled of pine-scented cleaning fluid.
    The ceiling was a mass of insulated pipes and bunched multicolored wires.
    I said, “I hope the food here is good.”
    Major Pettit slid out from under my desk and shook his head. He’d found nothing. I pointed at the screws fixing porthole cover to hull.
    A conference room abutting my cabin—which we examined next—held a bolted-down steel conference table and eight metal chairs. There was a topographical map of the sea bottom off Alaska, with areas shaded blue for “U.S. Zone” and yellow for Russian. On the