Read Online Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero by James Abel - Free Book Online Page A

eater and dedicated gym rat, with a Johnson City twang. The pudgy features gave him a cherubic air accentuated by the thick, curly hair cut close to his head. The red face said drinker, eventual heart attack, or both. The eyes were merry but the mouth was not. Dave was an engineer by training and his mission was to drill.
    Deborah, mixing vodka and tonics, was small, skinny, and had the same facial features, except on her they were squeezed into a narrow face—big blue eyes, slightly bulgy midsection, small mouth but striking cheekbones—and she moved with a sexy walk that drew glances in town. She ran the daily morning phone tree conferences—from their hut—between company copter pilots, Eskimo elders in outlying villages, and headquarters. The elders would alert the company if fishermen or hunters were in an area, to keep copters away that day. The pilots were freelancers out of Anchorage. Longhorn had two seismic ships going back and forth offshore, looking for likely oil finds.
    Dave took a long draw of Tito. “We’ve used Clay Qaqulik as a mechanic.”
    Deborah’s voice was low, as if the dead could hear and take offense. “It could have been one of us.” She smelled of Shalimar perfume and violets. She wore a moose logo sweater, background cobalt-blue, the animals white, over tight, faded blue jeans. Visitors took their shoes off usually when entering a Quonset hut, so as not to track in dirt or mud. Her socks also had a moose logo. She had small feet.
    “Joe, I hear you’re not just a colonel anymore,” Dave said. “Now you’re a gen-u-ine North Slope dep-u-tee, too.”
    “Merlin asked me not to talk about what happened.”
    Dave made a noise in his throat. “That would make you the only one in town
not
talking about it.”
    “Legal reasons,” I said, accepting a beer, taking a draught. “You know, if there’s a trial.”
    Deborah perked up. “Trial? Of who? Isn’t Clay dead?”
    “Good beer,” I said.
    “I heard they had rashes all over their bodies,” said Deborah. She had a habit of idly raising and lowering one leg like a ballerina when in conversation. Eddie believed she’d taken dance training. She had the posture for it. Eddie also thought she slept with lots of guys, or at least was always seen in town hanging on to different ones. Visiting politicians. VIP visitors. Eskimo leaders. She liked putting herself on display.
    Dave said, “Clay Qaqulik. What kind of past does this guy have? He was in the military, right? I mean, people get in trouble elsewhere, and no one asks questions here. Another beer, Joe?”
    “No thanks.”
    “Purple rashes,” Deborah said, opening the refrigerator. “You got any cheese? Rashes with little bumps all over. Is that true, Joe?”
    They were grilling me. They wanted answers. Which made them normal. A knock interrupted their questions and our second visitor walked in—an enemy of the Lillienthals.
    •   •   •
    DR. BRUCE FRIDAY WAS A RETIRED PROFESSOR TURNED ENVIRONMENTALIST from Rutgers University, in New Jersey. He was a sixty-two-year-old ex-researcher of ecosystems who Karen believed had the hots for Deborah. He grew nervous around her, fumbling during arguments with Dave, losing things: his glasses, a book. Karen always speculated, “
Something
happened between those two. Or he wants it to.”
    “Hell of an age difference.”
    “Maybe he came on to her, and she shut him down. It’s like he loses control of his thinking when she’s close.”
    Bruce was divorced, had lost his wife and two sons twelve years back to his passion for work. The wife had remarried. The boys were in business school, as if to reject his idealism, and never spoke with him anymore. He kept their photos in his hut; cracked, fading reminders of family.
    I felt sorry for him, but he seemed at home on the base—a permanent expatriate. “Ecology is a science, not a social movement,” he always said. At Rutgers he’d studied the way that all life-forms in an