Carol pushed through the door and saw Dexter, clad only in his underwear, sitting on the floor. He was hunched forward, his legs wrapped around the stainless steel base of the toilet. The bowl was filled with bright red blood, which was also splattered onto the rim and turned-up lid.
“Oh my God!” Carol exclaimed, her voice rising to nearly a shriek. The two mugs of cocoa dropped from her hand, ceramic exploding on the tiled deck.
“What’s the matter! What happened?”
Dexter appeared only vaguely aware of her presence, and nearly incapable of responding.
“Sick,” he mumbled. He coughed again, another spurt of blood erupting from his trembling lips.
“Ohhhh… shit.”
Carol snatched a blanket from the bunk and wrapped it around Dexter’s stooped shoulders. She bolted into the corridor and nearly collided with Susan Conant, the ship’s industrial first-aid officer and the closest they had to a medic on station. Susan was just twenty-seven years old, and her inexperience and potential for incompetence had never seemed greater to Carol.
“Carol, I need you to come ” Susan began.
“No,” Carol said. “I need you to have a look at this.” She pulled Susan back into her cabin and into the head.
“I know,” Susan said. “Tony’s got it too.”
Carol shook her head in disbelief.
“What? Ramsey too?”
“He collapsed on the deck a few minutes ago, and when we brought him to his cabin he started vomiting blood.”
“Why didn’t you report it!”
“I am. This is the first chance I’ve had.”
“Well, what is it?” Carol demanded.
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s food poisoning. As far as I know, no one else on board has it. But Jeff and Tony were the only ones in the water,” Carol finished, her eyes growing wide.
“Help him,” she said, pointing to Dexter in frustration. “Do whatever you can.”
Carol sprinted off down the corridor to the bridge. She told the Phoenix’s captain to radio to the Canadian Coast Guard, then recall all personnel from the ice outside. Two crewmen were down and they would need immediate medevac transport to Churchill or Cape Dorset. Anywhere but here.
If the sudden severity of Dexter’s affliction was shocking, Ramsey’s reaction was utterly terrifying. By the time Carol made it to the ship’s infirmary, Ramsey was already in an advanced state of shock. His skin was flushed an angry red; he had long ago voided the various fluids from his stomach and bowels, and both were now replaced with intermittent splutters of blood. Two of the Phoenix’s technicians had wrapped him in blankets and now held him tightly against the bunk as his body quaked and shivered uncontrollably. A small tensor bandage had been hastily jammed between Ramsey’s teeth to keep him from biting through his own tongue, and nothing in his wide, glassy eyes suggested that he heard a word of their attempted comfort.
“I can’t see!” Ramsey shrieked. “Oh, Christ, my eyes are burning up!”
A technician pressed a cold compress to Ramsey’s eyes. Within minutes the violent seizures lessened and his body went limp with exhaustion.
Seeing the robust man suddenly shivering helplessly on the bunk almost made Carol wish for a return of his frantic struggling. Dexter was brought in on a makeshift stretcher, trembling and unable to walk under his own power. Carol sat next to him on the bed and stroked his hair.
Like Ramsey, Dex’s skin had taken on an angry red pallor; like Ramsey, he was unresponsive to any queries.
A desperate list of explanations for these symptoms ran through Carol’s mind.
Both men were in prime health, with no history of epilepsy or other serious maladies. Whatever it was had happened too quickly to be viral and not quickly enough to be some kind of inorganic toxin. They weren’t hypothermic and they hadn’t been in the water long enough to get the bends, though their affliction seemed to be just as pervasive.
Yet it was as if every system in their bodies was shutting down by convulsive degrees. However quickly the medevac helicopter arrived, it might not be fast enough.
It was the strange, abraded burns on the victims’ skin that led Susan to speculate that what they were witnessing could be the acute stage of severe radiation poisoning.
“Radiation poisoning!” The words buzzed in Carol’s mind even as she spat them back at Susan.
“That can’t be it.”
“I hope it isn’t,” Susan said. “I hope to God I’m wrong.” They both knew that if Susan’s speculation proved to be even remotely correct, the two divers could potentially have exposed the ship to even more mysterious horrors. “But nothing else fits.”
“This fits?” Carol almost shouted. For the effects to be this severe, this fast, the level of exposure would have to be huge.
“What did they do? Walk through a goddamn reactor?”
“Hang on, Dex,” Carol whispered to Dexter, holding his face in her trembling hands.
“Hang on, honey.” His eyes slowly blinked once, indicating that at least he could see her.
“How long until the helicopter gets here?” Carol barked at the crowd of gawkers standing in the corridor. She knew, as they did, it was an unanswerable question. In the Arctic, even emergencies progressed only as fast as the weather allowed.
Carol made a series of frantic calls over the next several hours.
Soon-soon enough, she hoped — the search-and-rescue helicopter came and left, taking Dexter and Ramsey back to the mainland. It was only the beginning of a tag-team evacuation to the nearest appropriate medical facility, which now looked to be seventeen hundred miles away, in Toronto.
By nightfall, the vast remoteness of the Arctic suddenly seemed to drown Carol.
Despite the Phoenix and its able crew, Carol felt utterly alone and she was very frightened. Even if she hadn’t anticipated the roadblocks and dead ends produced by her calls to the various government, emergency, medical, and defense agencies, a part of her knew whom she would eventually need to contact. She realized this with a mixture of regret and comfort. Regret because he always seemed to be her last resort; comfort because she knew he would find a solution to this problem. He always did. Somehow and in some way, that was an assurance she needed very badly at the moment.
The only problem would be finding him.
2
The bow of the research vessel Alfred Lansing pushed over the crest of another thirty-foot wave, then led the ship down into the succeeding trough. The ballast water inside her 270-foot hull slammed forward with a thunderous boom as the stern rose toward the thick overcast sky, then heeled over and crashed back down toward the icy gray water of the Weddell Sea. The cables and guide wires that ran from the afterdeck to the instruments towed behind the ship slackened, then pulled taut as the Lansing nosed over the next crest. The ship had been rocked by the autumn storm for the past four days.
Clad in thick cold-weather suits clipped to the ends of safety tethers, the two men far out on the Lansing’s transom held on to anything bolted down.
“I think the weather’s letting up.” Brock Garner unzipped his jacket collar and grinned at the man gripping the rail beside him, his research assistant and technician, Sergei Zubov.
“Yeah, but now it’s letting down,” Zubov shouted back, then adjusted his footing as the angle of the Lansing’s deck reversed again.
“Now it’s letting up again.”