“I did.”
“You did, sir.” Keener corrected him, glancing at a printout in his hand. “And you claimed this was a Marine? A Marine casualty?”
“I did,” he replied, “sir.”
“And you’re aware that we’re not an ambulance service? That you diverted a Black Hawk from its scheduled, combat-related run, to address a strictly civilian matter?” His frustration became more evident with every word he spoke. “Maybe you didn’t read the advisory — the one that was issued to all base personnel just two days ago?”
“Every word.”
Slater knew his attitude wasn’t helping his case, but he didn’t care. Truth be told, he hadn’t cared about protocols and orders and commands for years. He’d become a doctor so that he could save lives, pure and simple; he’d become an epidemiologist so that he could save thousands of lives, in some of the world’s worst places. But today, he was back to trying to save just one.
Just one little girl, with perfect little ears. And a father, off somewhere in Khan Neshin, no doubt begging Allah for a miracle … a miracle that wasn’t likely to be granted.
“You know, of course, that I will have to report this incident, and the AFIP is going to have to send out another staffer now to decide what to do about our malaria problem,” the colonel was saying. “That could take days, and cost us American lives.” He said the word “American” in such a way as to make it plain that they were all that counted in this world. “You may consider yourself off duty and restricted to the base, Doctor, until further notice. In case you don’t know it, you’re in some very deep shit.”
Slater had hardly needed to be told. While Keener stood there fuming, wondering what other threat he could issue, the major fished in his pocket for the Chloriquine tablets he was taking every few hours. He tried to swallow them dry, but his mouth was too parched. Brushing past the colonel, he staggered to the water fountain, got the pills down, then held his head under the arc of cool water. His scalp felt like a forest fire that was finally getting hosed down.
The surgeon came out of the O.R., looked at each one of them, then went to the colonel’s side and said something softly in his ear. The colonel nodded solemnly, and the surgeon ducked back inside the swinging doors.
“What?” Slater said, pressing his fingertips into his wet scalp. The water was running down the back of his neck.
“It looks like you blew your career for nothing,” Keener replied. “The girl just died.”
All that Slater remembered, later on, was the look on the colonel’s face — the look he’d seen on a hundred other official faces intent only on following orders — before he threw the punch that knocked the colonel off his feet. He also had a vague recollection of wobbling above him, as Keener lay there, stunned and speechless, on the grimy green linoleum.
But the actual punch, which must have been a haymaker, was a mystery.
Then he returned to the fountain and put his head back down under the spray. If there were tears still in him, he thought, he’d be shedding them now. But there weren’t any. They had dried up years ago.
From the far end of the hall, he could hear the sound of raised voices and running boots as the MPs rushed to arrest him.
Chapter 2
The waters off the northern coast of Alaska were bad enough in summer, when the sun was shining around the clock and you could at least see the ice floes coming at you, but now — in late November, with a squall blowing in — they were about the worst place on earth to be.
Especially in a crab-catching tub like the Neptune II.
Harley Vane, the skipper, knew he’d be lucky just to keep the ship in one piece. He’d been fishing in the Bering Sea for almost twenty years, and both the crabbing and the storms had gotten worse the whole time. The crabbing he could figure out; his boat, and a dozen others, kept returning to the same spots, depleting the population and never giving it enough time to replenish itself. All the skippers knew they were committing a slow form of suicide, but nobody was going to be the first to stop.
And then there was the weather. The currents were getting stronger and more unpredictable all the time, the winds higher, the ice more broken up and difficult to avoid. He knew that all that global warming stuff was a load of crap — hadn’t the snowfall last year been the highest in five years? But judging from the sea-lanes, which were less frozen and more wide open than he had ever seen them, something was definitely afoot. As he sat in the wheelhouse, steering the boat through a turbulent ocean of fifteen-foot swells and hunks of glacier the size of cars, he had to buckle himself into his raised seat to keep from falling over. The rolling and pitching of the boat was so bad he considered reaching for the hand mike and calling the deckhands inside, but the Neptune’s catch so far had been bad — the last string of pots had averaged less than a hundred crabs each — and until their tanks were full, the boat would have to stay at sea. Back onshore, there were bills to pay, so he had to keep slinging the pots, no matter what.
“You want some coffee?” Lucas said, coming up from below with an extra mug in his hand. He was still wearing his yellow anorak, streaming with icy water.
“Christ Almighty,” Harley said, taking the coffee, “you’re soaking the place.”
“Yeah, well, it’s wet out there,” Lucas said. “You oughta try it sometime.”
“I tried it plenty,” Harley said. He’d worked the decks since he was eleven years old, back when his dad had owned the first Neptune and his older brother had been able to throw the hook and snag the buoys. And he remembered his father sitting on a stool just like this, ruling the wheelhouse and looking out through the row of rectangular windows at the main deck of the boat. The view hadn’t changed much, with its ice-coated mast, its iron crane, its big gray buckets for sorting the catch. Once that boat had gone down, Harley and his brother Charlie had invested in this one. But unlike the original, the Neptune II featured a double bank of white spotlights above the bridge. At this time of year, when the sun came out for no more than a few hours at midday, the lights threw a steady but white and ghostly glow over the deck. Sometimes, to Harley, it was like watching a black-and-white movie down there.
Now, from his perch, where he was surrounded by his video and computer screens — another innovation that his dad had resisted — he could see the four crewmen on deck throwing the lines, hauling in the pots with the crabs still clinging to the steel mesh, then emptying the catch into the buckets and onto the conveyor belt to the hold. An enormous wave — at least a twenty-five-footer — suddenly rose up, like a balloon inflating, and broke over the bow of the boat. The icy spray splashed all the way up to the windows of the wheelhouse.
“It’s getting too dangerous out there,” Lucas said, clinging to the back of the other stool. “We’re gonna get hit by a rogue wave bigger than that one, and somebody’s going overboard.”
“I just hope it’s Farrell, that lazy son of a bitch.”
Lucas took a sip of his own coffee and kept his own counsel.
Harley checked the screens. On one, he had a sonar reading that showed him what lay beneath his own rolling hull; right now, it was thirty fathoms of frigid black water, with an underwater sea mount rising half that high. On the others, he had his navigation and radar data, giving him his position and speed and direction. Glancing at the screens now, he knew what Lucas was about to say.