The Romanov Cross: A Novel (13 page)

She drew the shawl around her shoulders, even though she did not feel the cold, and left the church. She did not know the old man’s name, but she knew where he had come from. She had seen the ship go down.

She had seen many ships go down … for many years.

Following the path she had long trodden, she drifted through the colony, remembering the sound of voices raised in prayer, the aroma of fresh fish roasting in the pan, the warmth of a blazing fire.

How long had it been since she had heard anything but the baying of the wolves—her kindred spirits—or felt anything warmer than the touch of that old man’s dying hand?

But what more did she deserve? She was the harbinger of death, and the terrible mercy that had spared her own life—not once, but twice—was less forgiving to others.

“You are a special child,” the monk had told her. “God has a special destiny in mind for you.”

The night he told her that, he had given her the silver cross on a gilded chain. It was encrusted with emeralds, green as a cat’s eyes, and he had had its back inscribed with a message meant only for her. “Let this be our secret,” he had said, as he put one of his broad hands, the hands that had healed her younger brother, atop her head. It was as if a healing balm were pouring over her; her eyes had closed, and her breathing had slowed, and even her left foot, the one that was misshapen and gave her such constant trouble, stopped hurting.

“I give you this blessing,” he said, “to protect you from all evil.” And then he had chanted some words in a low voice. Not for the first time, she could smell the alcohol on his breath, and she knew there were people who said vile things about him. “Nothing may harm you now,” he said, and she had not doubted it. “If you believe in my power—”

“I do, Father, I do.”

“—then you must believe, too, in the power of this cross.”

Holding the lantern aloft, she passed beyond the stockade walls,
down the hillside, and into the trees. Although she did not see them, she knew that the black wolves—spirits of the unquiet dead—were keeping company with her, moving stealthily through the woods. How long had it been before she learned that they did not grow in number, nor did they die? How long before she had realized that each mysterious creature harbored a soul, a soul as lost as her own, stranded somewhere between this world and the next? Or that their fate and hers were inextricably bound?

As she approached the graveyard, her companions held back, keeping to the trees and the shadows. Her fingertips grazed the wooden gateposts, tracing and retracing the words that she had once carved there.
Forgive me
, they said, over and over again, but who was there to do so?

A strong wind was blowing a scrim of snow across the ground. She walked among the toppled headstones and petrified crosses but stopped when she came to the edge of the cemetery overlooking the sea. A piece of the earth had fallen away, like a rotted tooth pulled from a gum. Even now, if she could have burrowed into the ravaged ground and found her own place there, she would have done so. But as Rasputin had told her, a special destiny awaited her.

Nearly a century had passed, and in all that time she had never been entirely sure if those words had been his blessing, meant to give her strength against adversity, or a curse upon her own head, and the heads of all her family.

But whatever their intent, his words had served admirably as both.

“We’ll be coming up on St. Peter’s Island in about ten minutes,” the pilot said, his voice crackling over Slater’s headphones; even with the phones on, the rattling of the propellers and the thrumming of the twin engines on the Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane made it hard to hear. “I just wanted to make sure you guys got a good look at the place before the light goes.” On the horizon, the sun was a copper dollar sinking below the hazy outline of eastern Siberia. “We don’t get much daylight at this time of year.”

“In Irkutsk, I had sunlamps,” Professor Kozak said into his own microphone. “Three,” he said, holding up three gloved fingers for Slater to see. “One in every room.”

Slater nodded amicably, balancing a sealed envelope on his lap. The two men were packed in shoulder to shoulder behind the pilot and copilot, and flying over the icy, teal-blue waters of the Bering Strait; below them, the Pacific and Arctic Oceans converged, and the International Date Line cut an invisible line between Little Diomede Island, which belonged to the United States, and Big Diomede, which was Russian territory. While Sergeant Groves was back in Nome, organizing the rest of the cargo and waiting to shepherd Dr. Eva Lantos on the last leg of her journey from Boston, Slater had decided to go on
ahead in the first chopper, along with his borrowed Russian geologist. There was no time to lose, and he wanted them both to get a good look at the lay of the land on St. Peter’s. Many decisions, he knew, had to be made, and they had to be made fast.

It had been an arduous and complicated trip already. Slater had flown from D.C. to L.A. to Seattle before catching a flight to Anchorage, and from there hopping on a supply plane to Nome, where the two helicopters were being loaded with the mountain of equipment and provisions the expedition would require. When the first one’s cargo bay had been filled, with everything from inflatable labs to hard rubber ground mats, then securely locked down, Slater and the burly professor, who hadn’t seen each other since picking their way across a minefield in Croatia, climbed aboard.

Unlike most helicopters, the Sikorsky was designed chiefly for the transportation of heavy cargo loads—up to twenty thousand pounds—and as a result it looked a lot like a gigantic praying mantis, with a bulbous cabin dangling up front for the pilots and passengers (no more than five people at a time) and a long, slim cargo bay with an extendable crane for lowering, or lifting, supplies from great heights. Two rotors—one with six long blades mounted above the chassis, and the other propping up the tail—kept it airborne. To Slater, it felt a lot like traveling in a construction vehicle.

For many miles, they had traveled along the rugged coastline of Alaska and over vast stretches of overgrown taiga, where aspens and grasses and dense brush thrived, and barren tundra where the soil was more unforgiving. Now and then he could make out polar bears lumbering across the ice floes, or caribou herds pawing for lichen buried beneath the frost. As they passed over a swath of land extending out into the sea, Slater tapped the copilot on the shoulder and pointed down at the gabled rooflines and crooked fences of a small town.

“Cape Prince of Wales,” the copilot said. “Founded in 1778.”

“By Captain Cook,” Professor Kozak said, proud to pitch in.

There wasn’t much to see, and at the rate they were going—roughly 120 miles per hour—the tiny town, cradled by a rocky ridge,
was already disappearing from view. But Slater knew its sad history well. It wasn’t so different from that of its neighbor, Port Orlov.

Called Kingigin, or “high bluff” by its native inhabitants, it had once been a thriving Eskimo village and a lively trading post for deerskins, ivory, jade, flint, beads, and baleen. On the westernmost point of the North American continent, lying just south of the polar circle and with nothing but a dogsled trail leading to it from the mainland, the town should have been as safe from the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 as any place on earth. There wasn’t even a telegraph connection. But through a series of calamitous events, Wales, like a handful of other Alaskan hamlets, wound up suffering the highest mortality rates in America.

In October of that year, the steamship
Victoria
sailed into Nome, and the city’s doctor, aware of the danger, met the ship at the dock, where he insisted on examining the passengers and crew; he even went so far as to quarantine several dozen at Holy Cross Hospital. But when only one of them got sick after five days there (and even that illness was chalked up to tonsillitis), the doctor permitted the patients to be released. A hospital worker died of the flu four days later, and within forty-eight hours the whole city of Nome was placed under quarantine.

But by then the damage had been done. Mail had been unloaded from the ship, and even though every shred of it had been fumigated, the sailors who handed the bags to the local mail carriers had been unwitting bearers of the virus. Now, the mailmen, too, riding their dogsleds to every far-flung outpost in the territory, acted as the plague’s deadly agents. Wherever they went, they brought with them the contagion, and by the time rescuers reached the village of Wales, three weeks after the mail had been delivered, they found scenes of utter devastation—decaying corpses piled in snowdrifts, packs of wild dogs tearing at the remains. In one hut, a man was found with his arms wrapped around his stove, frozen solid, and he had had to be buried, still kneeling, in a square box. The survivors were found starving, drinking nothing but reindeer broth, in the one-room schoolhouse.

“Look at that!” the professor exclaimed, pointing to Cape Mountain now passing below them. “That, my friend, is the end of the Continental Divide.” His breath reeked of spearmint gum, which he was chewing assiduously to keep his ears from getting plugged.

A jagged brown peak, slick with snow and ice, Cape Mountain sat atop a gigantic slab of granite, shaped like an axe. The natives liked to say that the slab was the spot where Paul Bunyan had put his hatchet down, after he’d chopped down every tree in the Arctic. Slater could see how the legend got started.

“When we get to St. Peter’s,” the pilot said, “I’ll come in from the east, do a complete three-sixty, then we can hover wherever you want.” He consulted the fuel gauges, then added, “But not for long.”

At the thought of finally seeing the island, Slater felt his heart race, and he straightened up in his seat, which wasn’t easy given the bulk of the parka he was wearing and the over-the-shoulder restraints. The professor didn’t leave him much room, either, but he was enthusiastic company, and for that reason alone, Slater knew he’d picked the right man for what could prove to be the very bleak job ahead.

As the chopper approached, Slater could see—straight ahead and framed between the pilots’ shoulders—a gnarled hunk of black stone, surrounded by jutting rocks that broke the surface of the roiling waters. Its foundation was largely obscured by ice and mist. Slater could see snatches of beach, though they looked too steep and small for a helicopter, much less this one, to land on. Chiseled into the stone cliff, there appeared to be a winding set of steps.

“That whole island, it is from a volcano,” the professor observed over the headphones, admiringly. “Basaltic lava, two million years old.” He took off his spectacles, blew some dust from the lenses—filling the cabin with the scent of spearmint again—then hastily put them back on.

The chopper banked to the right, and now Slater got a better view out his own side window. Steep cliffs, dotted with nesting terns, rose to an uneven plateau, raggedly forested with deep green spruce and alders.

“Can you get closer?” Slater asked.

“Will do,” the pilot replied, “but the winds get tricky around the cliffs.”

The chopper descended and made a closer pass. But that was when Slater suddenly saw something, camouflaged by the patchy forest, which made him grab Kozak’s sleeve and point down.

An onion-shaped dome, made of rough timber and pocked with holes, poked its head up through the trees.

“The Russian colony,” the pilot said, circling.

Although the helicopter was buffeted by nasty crosswinds, the pilot was able to hold it steady enough that Slater could get the lay of the land. The old church was surrounded by several other ramshackle structures—old cabins teetering on their raised foundations, empty livestock pens, a well with a rusted bucket. A stockade wall, partly dismantled, enclosed what was left of the village.

But where was the cemetery?

The same thing must have occurred to the professor, who plucked at Slater’s sleeve and pointed off toward a trail leading away from what was once the main gate. It disappeared into a dense grove of evergreens.

“Could you move west?” Slater requested, and the pilot said, “Roger. But we’ve only got a few more minutes before we have to head into Port Orlov for refueling.”

The Sikorsky turned, its propellers churning even more loudly in hover mode than they did when flying, and followed the trail over the tops of the trees, until a rocky promontory appeared below. It jutted out from the plateau like an ironing board, its windswept ground dotted with old wooden crosses, toppling over, and gray-stone slabs.

It made sense, Slater thought. The graveyard had been sited as far from the colony as possible.

And in the gathering gloom, he saw a ragged spot at the very end of the promontory, where the earth and stone hung precariously above the cliffs, as if a limb had been ripped away from the body of the island … and now he knew precisely where the coffin found floating at sea had originated.

“Lights out,” the pilot said, and the last rays of the sun vanished as
abruptly as a candle’s flame being snuffed. Darkness descended over the island, and the helicopter swiftly banked away from the steep, unforgiving cliffs.