Virus: The Day of Resurrection (47 page)

RETURN TO THE NORTH

 1.
Operation Fireman

Although he was thinking of writing a will, there was no time to do so until just before departure. Yoshizumi had been too busy transitioning the research he was leaving behind and with the arranging of his documents, and until the very last minute there had simply been no time to spare. Now, when it was finally time to sit down and write it, he found he had nothing to say.

Yoshizumi unfolded the piece of writing paper and, after staring at it for about five minutes, slowly began to write.

“Yoshiko—listen to what everyone tells you and grow up to be a strong, wise girl.”

After writing that far, he laughed out loud, remembering that he had not yet even seen the ‘child of the South Pole’ named Yoshiko Antarctica—an infant less than a year old—nor had he had any particular interest in doing so until now. Of course, he had been single when he came to Antarctica and even afterward had not even once laid a finger on any of the women—or “mamas” as they were now called. Humans remained wishy-washy and irresponsible right up to the moments of their deaths. Or maybe they just had so many things to say that in the end all they could write were wishy-washy and irresponsible things.

As for the distribution of his possessions, Yoshizumi asked Tatsuno to handle it, wrote down simple instructions, and sealed them in an envelope. Then he got up and handed it to Captain Nakanishi, who was standing outside his room.

Dr. Nakanishi took it, blinking eyes that were lost in wrinkles behind his old glasses. He sighed. “Isn’t there some other way?”

“No, not really,” said Yoshizumi. “Thank you, Doctor, for helping me out all these years.”

“Don’t start talking like that on me!” the old doctor said sharply, even though his voice was choked up. “The plan is for you to return alive, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but …” Yoshizumi stopped.

Tatsuno appeared at the other end of the corridor and came up to stand in front of Yoshizumi. Deliberately looking away from him, he said, “The snowmobile’s leaving.”

“Yeah,” said Yoshizumi. “Hey, Tatsuno?”

“What?” Tatsuno turned his back away. “You’re a fool. Yoshizumi, there’s no reason a guy like you had to volunteer for anything.”

“But I did, and then I ‘won’ the lottery,” said Yoshizumi. “It can’t be helped. I’d rather consider myself lucky. Because I definitely wanted to go.”

“You’re a fool,” Tatsuno repeated. “A bloody fool.”

“Don’t say that. If I didn’t go, it would just mean some other guy would have to. And I think it’ll be the same no matter who goes.”

“You’re a fool …” Tatsuno left murmuring those words. “How could you volunteer?”

It was a wonderfully clear Antarctic morning. The Central Antarctic Meteorological Observatory was predicting twenty-four hours or more of beautiful weather for the whole region of Enderby Land. May was already more than halfway over, and once again, it was time to bid the sun farewell with the arrival of the long, dark winter.

Yoshizumi stepped outside the dome of Showa Station. The black silhouettes of all of the station’s personnel stood lined up on the ice outside, waiting to see him off. In the white predawn light, he looked into the faces of each of the station personnel, clapped each one on the shoulder, and shook hands with them. Hardly any of them said anything. A “see you later …” or a “take care of yourself ” was the most that any of them managed. There were some among them who said nothing as they gripped his hand, though tears welled up in their eyes. At last, he came once again to Captain Nakanishi. As though he were seeing off his own son, that older man, that great scholar of Antarctica, had tears running freely down his cheeks. “You come back,” said Dr. Nakanishi. “Make it so we can laugh someday about acting as if this were a funeral.”

“I certainly intend to,” Yoshizumi said. “Unlike Moscow, the approach coming in to Washington is easy. And by going up the Potomac River, we can get very close to the White House.”

On the ice field, the engine of the snowmobile started up. It was already looking pretty worn out, with spots of rust visible here and there, yet it was a remarkably sturdy machine, and its performance had not suffered a whit. Yoshizumi turned back to everyone once more, waved his hand, and began walking off toward the snowmobile.

Just then, the red light of the sun peeked up over the distant horizon of the ice plain. For an instant, the ice plain blazed pale pink like the wings of a crested ibis, throwing the long, long shadow of the waiting, watching captain across the ice. When Yoshizumi climbed onto the snowmobile, he waved his hand again. With the roar of the caterpillar treads, the snowmobile began to move, the sunlight glinting on its back. It was made of light alloys, so it steadily picked up speed. When it exceeded forty kilometers per hour, wide skids made of the same alloys emerged on both sides of the caterpillar treads. Both had heaters attached, and the vehicle began sledding along with brushwheels.

The white, bubble-like domes of Showa Station grew distant, and the Japanese flag that fluttered in the blue sky grew smaller and smaller, and by the time they reached Mount Tyôtô it could no longer be seen at all. The snowmobile, traveling at sixty kilometers per hour, dexterously dodged pressure rings and crevasses as it headed for the Prince Harald Coast.

It took ten hours to reach Blade Station, where the Belgian team lived. From there, they took a plane to the Soviet station on the Princess Astrid Coast, and at the Soviet station a Tupolev-600 jet transport plane designed for use in the Antarctic environment was awaiting their arrival. So as not to miss the good weather, they made a single hop across the Weddell Sea to Joinville Island at the tip of the Palmer Peninsula, and finally arrived at the submarine base. The black forms of
Nereid
and
T-232
were visible on Hope Bay, which was already covered in drift ice. At the station there, which had been jointly administered by Argentina and Chile, the members of “Operation Fireman” were assembled. On the side of the peninsula facing the frozen Weddell Sea, the Larsen Ice Shelf shone whitely as it expanded outward, already displaying the winter face of Antarctica. In the cloud-swathed north, King George I Island lay across the Straits of Bransfield, and one thousand kilometers away, separated from them by the Drake Passage, was Cape Horn at the tip of South America.

The Argentine station was a spacious structure made of steel-reinforced concrete. A number of members of the Supreme Council, as well as all the members of the planning committee, were already gathered there. Yoshizumi went to his assigned quarters, followed by gazes that looked at him as if he were already dead. In the midst of his room, devoid of decoration like a barracks for soldiers, there was a stove burning, a wooden desk, and a wooden bench placed side by side.

When he entered, Major Carter, whom he knew only by sight, and Captain Nevski, were sitting in opposite corners of the room.

“Hey there,” said the young Captain Nevski. “We meet again. I never dreamed your name would turn up when we drew lots.”

Yoshizumi returned a neutral smile.

Another man whose face Yoshizumi didn’t recognize—a big man with a thick mustache who was whittling a piece of wood with a knife—turned to look at him, smirked, and raised a hand in greeting.

“I’m Marius,” the big man said. “I’m with the crew headed for Moscow.”

Yoshizumi went to stand in front of the stove, pulled off his gloves, and rubbed his numbed fingers.

“Yoshizumi, is it true there’s an earthquake coming?” Carter asked as he sat puffing on his pipe.

“It’s coming,” Yoshizumi said in a small voice. “And perhaps even sooner than my predictions.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

It was due to his anxiety about exactly that that he had volunteered for Operation Fireman. He was confident in his calculations, but even so, it had been impossible to conduct land-based observations, so a part of the work was somewhat slapdash. When he had checked his precise calculations one more time, he had learned that the margin of error was broader than he had thought. Naturally, he had reported this to operations headquarters, but when he thought of a number of men being irresistibly driven to their deaths by his calculations, he had been unable to stop himself and had volunteered for the operation.

In the end, there was only one plan that the Supreme Council had been able to come up with. There was only one way to ensure the survival of Antarctica, and that was to turn off the switch on that madman’s machine known as ARS.

Apparently, the Supreme Council had at first been loath to take at face value what it had been told about ARS, thinking it too fantastic to possibly be true. This was because such a system could have only come to be as the result of an unbelievably childish way of thinking. But when they took a step back and thought about what the world they had once lived in had been like—push-button warfare, nuclear missiles that could destroy an enemy nation in half an hour, a hotline set up between the Kremlin and the White House—they had realized probably all of it had rested on pretty childlike thinking, and so they became ready to believe in the existence of a system designed for posthumous revenge.

In this way, though the Antarcticans were constantly telling themselves that the whole idea was ridiculous, there was still that slight possibility … And so they felt compelled to send suicide teams to Washington and Moscow because if the ARS was active, there would only be one way to avert the destruction of Antarctica. Because Major Carter and Captain Nevski knew the locations of their respective switches, it was of course decided that they should go. Then, in order to provide one assistant for each of them, volunteers had been solicited from all across Antarctica. Four thousand men had applied. They had ended up drawing lots, and Yoshizumi and one other man had pulled the short straws. At the time that the names of the firemen had been decided, an elderly scholar from the French expedition had angrily wept, holding nothing back as he publicly decried, “What do you think you’re doing? What a stupid reason for these fine men to have to die! How sad that anyone should have to be destroyed for something so absurd!”

The words of the elderly scholar resounded like that famous line from Molière’s comedy: “What the devil was he doing in that galley?”

All Antarcticans knew the answer. Even the four men who were going to their deaths knew it. Long years of living amid the ice, coupled with all the tears they had shed thinking of a world that had died so young, had washed away their foolish desires for glorious deaths. The four who had been chosen were themselves well aware that there would be no glory in their ends. Neither did they even have the concept of “duty” dangling behind the cheap tinsel that was glory.