Free Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero by James Abel Page A

cousin, Merlin.
    Why shouldn’t he have his secrets? Everyone else did around here.
    Report from Barrow
    Received by encrypted satellite transmission.
    I attended a small wake at Dr. Rush’s Quonset hut tonight, where many campus residents were present. So far, no one understands what has happened, what is at stake. But the police emergency operator who spread the initial story has been fired, so it will now be slightly more difficult to gain access to the department.
    The bodies have been brought to the hospital, where they are in an isolated area in the morgue. There have been no other cases so far, not in town, but that could, of course, change and if it does, there will be widespread panic. I may need a way to get out, fast.
    So far, the Eskimo Qaqulik is being blamed for the deaths. With luck, that will be the official finding.
    Plus side: I planted microphones in the Quonset hut during the evening—one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen area off the living room—that should pick up conversation in either place. I’m receiving talk in the hut loud and clear.
    Both Marine doctors and the submarine engineer Karen Vleska may need to be killed.

FIVE
    Merlin Toovik was making whale bombs when I interrupted him at eight the next morning after I heard from Valley Girl. He was at a wooden worktable in his small, cramped, detached garage, wearing a lightweight Seattle Seahawks jacket and jeans in thirty-five degree weather, concentrating and staring down at a foot-long copper-shaped missile lying on a coffee-stained blotter, tilted open at the tiny warhead area on top. I knew better than to interrupt while he poured black explosive powder from a spigoted plastic bottle into the finned missile.
    When he was screwing the cap back, I said, “You didn’t tell me everything, Merlin. Why not?”
    “Found out about the FBI, huh?” He laid the missile aside and opened the cap of a second one.
    “Merlin, not just that. He worked for you?”
    The police chief looked up, visibly impressed, the muscles on his shoulders and arms straining against the fabric of the jacket. “How’d you find that out?” he asked, starting on a second missile.
    I’d found out because “North Slope Police Department” was written on the dead man’s federal income tax form, but I did not say that. I said, “Merlin, what was one of your detectives doing pretending to work for the Harmons? Yesterday you chewed me out for keeping things from you.”
    “Technically, no lie. He
did
work for them.”
    “I put my neck on the line for you.”
    “Look, I can’t make a mistake on these bombs, Joe, or a few more relatives will be killed when we fire one and it doesn’t work, or blows too soon. Give me a minute. Then we’ll have coffee in the house and I’ll explain.”
    I folded my arms and watched, fascinated by the process despite my irritation, as he loaded two more whale bombs. Whaling captains were the most-respected men in the community. They ran crews of a dozen men, mostly relatives, and went out twice a year to harvest the big bowheads migrating past Barrow, using motorboats in fall, and paddling twenty-foot-long sealskin boats in spring, launched directly off the shore bound ice.
    At fifty, Merlin was considered young, not yet an elder. Shotguns hung in racks on the wall. There were two snowmobiles outside; fishing nets were drying in the yard. I saw three sets of rubber boots, two outboard motors against a wall, grease-smeared oilcans, clean fishing hooks.
    “Do you know how these whale bombs work, Joe?”
    Answer the question. Don’t push him. He’s testing you. You’re on North Slope time here, not D.C. time.
    “Tell me, Merlin.”
    He stood and stretched, getting the tension in his muscles out, and then he strode to the wall and easily hefted an evil-looking harpoon, about six feet long. The wooden shaft ended in a steel, wickedly barbed arrow-shaped protuberance.
    “Most people think the harpoon is the whole thing, but it’s