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

area— animal, vegetable, and microbial—interact. After retiring he’d signed up with the Arctic Warrior Fund and now studied the demise of polar bears. He gave speeches attacking oil companies, which he blamed for global warming. Usually, when in the same room, the talk grew heated between Bruce and Dave.
    Bruce Friday was the oldest resident of the base. He’d been coming to Barrow for thirty-two years. These days he lived on a small grant from the Warriors and testified at government hearings about offshore drilling.
You can’t clean spilled oil under ice, so don’t allow any drilling!
Tonight he just held up his hands and said to Dave, “Truce?”
    “Truce,” Dave replied. “Beer?”
    “Vodka.”
    “Tell me when to stop pouring.”
    “Don’t,” said Friday, looking wan and ill. “What a horrible day, Joe. Horrible, horrible day.”
    Visibly, he seemed poorly equipped for the rigors of Arctic research, with a hook-shaped body, skin that was the kind of white that erupted with cancers if exposed too long to sun, a mop of chestnut hair, more boyish than donnish, and round wire-framed out-of-date glasses, that enlarged his gray eyes and gave him a permanently startled air.
    But his appearance was misleading. Dr. Friday spent weeks on the ice alone, seeking bears and measuring snowmelt. He was an expert snowmobiler. He routinely went out solo to the bone pile, to gather polar bear hair, DNA. One time, I’d heard, he’d camped out on pack ice, and in the middle of the night it broke off and floated into the Chukchi. Rescued four days later by copter, the pilots found him dozing in a parka, the bones of an eaten fish beside him—and a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce.
    Friday got me in a corner, pumped me with questions.
    “Do you think Merlin capable of figuring this out?”
    “He’s a good policeman.”
    “I can’t believe that replacement dispatcher spread the story. If someone poisoned their water, the guilty person could just leave town, run away!”
    “You heard about the water, too?”
    “I heard it at the research center. I heard it at the Mexican restaurant. I heard it when I gave Luther Oz’s sled dogs a run this afternoon.”
    Eddie should be here by now.
    Bruce Friday went over to talk to Dave and Deborah. I noticed, as he got close to Deborah, that the liquid topping his glass began to shake. Deborah held Bruce’s wrist, steadying it.
    Where’s Eddie? He should be here by now.
    Without knocking, the diamond hunter walked in next.
    •   •   •
    CALVIN DEROCHERS CAME FROM ARKANSAS, THE ONLY PLACE IN THE U.S. where commercial diamonds are found. He was a home-educated geologist who insisted that, as in Arctic Canada, a huge cache lay somewhere beneath Alaska’s North Slope.
    “Canada’s pulling out billions,” Calvin always said. “I aim to find those kimberlite pipes.”
    His family had been slaves two hundred years ago; sharecroppers after that, then chicken-factory assembly-line workers. He was a short, powerful man, fullback more than cyclist, clothing bought secondhand, to save money for his project, and through sheer diligence he’d raised funding from a Chicago hedge fund—talked his way into their president’s office—to pay for the rental hut, a copter pilot, geology supplies, and gear. But his time and money were rapidly running out as autumn began. He’d not yet found any evidence of what he sought.
    “I’m sure some of those lakes were formed by meteors,” he’d told me at one of our Monday night sausage grill outs. “Meteors did it in the Yukon, and the same shower could have easily hit here. Hell, man, you know what diamonds are? They’re scabs on a sore. The meteor slams in. Then Mama Earth repairs herself and that kimberlite pipe is the bandage, and the scab shows up ten million years later as a Tiffany necklace. Uh-huh! They laughed at Chuck Fipke in ninety-one when he drove out to Lac de Gras, Northwest Territories. They laugh at DeRochers