The Romanov Cross: A Novel (35 page)

Slater breathed a sigh of relief even as the cell phone in his pants pocket suddenly rang, buzzed, and by the time he took it out, went dead.

“The aurora gives off a really strong electromagnetic charge,” Nika said sympathetically. “You probably just lost your address book and emails.”

“Let me know if either one of the generators goes down for more than a minute,” Slater said, and Rudy, not taking his eyes off the machinery, signaled that he would.

Stepping out of the shed again, Slater let himself be led down to the cliffs, where Sergeant Groves and Kozak were already occupying ringside seats, gazing out over the black expanse of the Bering Strait. A curtain of shimmering lights—green and yellow, purple and pink—were swirling and curlicuing in the air, hovering maybe sixty or seventy miles above the water and extending high into the sky.

“The solar flares are putting on quite a show for us tonight,” Kozak said, acknowledging Slater and Nika by cocking his pipe in their direction. The cherry tobacco perfumed the air.

“Solar?” Groves said. “We haven’t seen the sun for more than three hours all week.”

“The solar wind takes two days to reach us, and when the flood of electrons and protons hits the upper atmosphere, they collide with the atoms there, and go boom!” He took another puff on his pipe. “This collision gives off radiation in the form of light. Different atoms give off different colors. In Mongolia, I once saw them turn to a scarlet red. But that is very rare.”

“Yeah, well, these will do just fine,” Groves said, staring up at the pulsating veil of green and yellow bands performing elaborate arabesques in the sky. “You don’t catch anything like this in Afghanistan.”

Slater, too, was impressed—he’d never seen the aurora borealis—but the sparkling green lights bathing the horizon made him think, oddly enough, of that hellish sight on CNN, on the night the United States had initiated its much-vaunted “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad. He’d known that much of America was sitting in front of its TV sets, filled with that strange, guilty exultation that comes with war and displays of military might; when he was young and unthinking, he’d felt that way himself. But his own heart had sickened at the thought of what he knew was happening there on the ground. He had been dispatched to far too many such places in the aftermath of war, places where nothing remained standing and everything from cholera to typhus ran riot. He was aware of the human toll that was being taken before his very eyes.

“For the Native Americans,” Nika said, “the northern lights were considered a ladder to heaven.”

“I can see why,” Groves readily assented.

“Whenever they saw the lights, they thought they were looking at the spirits of their ancestors dancing and playing games as they ascended to the next world.”

“Maybe they had it right,” Groves said.

“It certainly beats the funerals in Russia,” Kozak said, solemnly. He tamped at his pipe and appeared lost in thought.

While they had all bundled up against the freezing wind, Slater noticed that Nika’s coat was loosely drawn around her, and her own long hair was streaming out like a mane. As she stood there beside him on the cliff, looking out toward the dwindling lights above the sea—the bands were swirling together now into a glowing lime-green corona—she looked so much like a natural part of this spectacle that it was no surprise to him she had returned from San Francisco to Alaska, or that she had been made a tribal elder of the Inuit people. He could see her ancestors in her.

He must have been staring because she suddenly turned to look him full in the face, her head cocked to one side. “Your first time?”

“The aurora?” he replied. “Yes.”

“I’m glad it was with me,” she said, with a wry smile.

And right then, as if the streaming display had been suddenly sucked into a black hole, the lights went out, leaving only the pinpoint pricks of the stars and the cold sea wind snapping at their clothes.

“What just happened?”

“They do that,” she said.

Still, Frank and Nika remained where they were, as did Kozak and Groves, all looking out at the ice-choked ocean like concertgoers hoping for an encore. But there was none.

And then, from far off in the woods somewhere, Slater heard a howl.

“Sounds like everyone is disappointed,” Groves joked, as the howl of the wolf became a chorus.

Nika shivered, and suddenly drew her coat tighter around her as the mournful choir, lost in the woods surrounding the colony, bayed for the lost lights of Heaven.

Russell had sat in the hut for hours, nursing the last beer he’d carried in his pocket, and waiting for Harley and Eddie to come and get him. Did they really expect him to find his way back through the woods—much less locate that shitty little cave they’d been hiding out in—all by himself?

He had exhausted the entertainment possibilities of the hut in the first half hour. There were old animal skins—otter, beaver, bear—covering some unfinished headstones, and an assortment of rusty old shovels and axes leaning up against the walls. The leather-bound book on the table was written in Russian, but Russell could tell, from the way that the names and dates seemed to be lined up on most of the pages, that it must have been the sexton’s ledger. A record of who was getting buried where, and when. For a while, he tore out one page at a time and tried to keep a fire going with his Bic lighter, but each page simply vanished in a puff of smoke without generating more than a second of heat. He stuck the remainder in his pocket, just in case it might prove to be worth something to some nutcase at one of those antique shops in Nome.

It was only after the last daylight had gone, and the northern lights suddenly appeared in the sky, that he realized he was on his own, that
nobody was coming to get him or offer a lick of help. He could slowly freeze to death in this hut, or he could try to make his own way back to the cave. The wind whistled through the spaces between the timbers and rattled the staves of the door so hard they sounded like castanets.

Cursing Harley, cursing Eddie, and cursing his luck, Russell stood up and instantly regretted it. He’d twisted his ankle in that pothole in the graveyard, and although he’d thought the pain would pass, the ankle had continued to swell. Rolling his sock down, he could see that the skin was a deep shade of purple already. The throbbing, too, was getting worse all the time. Slowly, carefully, he hobbled to the door, where he ripped one of the staves loose to make a crutch he could lean on.

He hated to think how much it was going to hurt when he really tried to walk with such a bad sprain.

Outside, the sky was still alight with the shimmering glow of the aurora borealis. He’d seen it a million times in his life, so the effect had definitely worn off, but he hoped that the light at least would stick around. He had a flashlight in his free hand—Harley had made sure they carried the essentials—but even among this dense brush and overhanging trees, the aurora lent enough illumination to help him pick his way through the woods. The snowy branches were tinged with the alternating colors in the sky—green and yellow and a pale dusky rose—that made the whole forest look fake and strange, like a scene from some movie. A movie Russell did
not
want to be in.

A strong wind was blowing, too, with flakes of snow and ice spinning through the air. He had only the most general sense of where he was. He knew the colony was off toward the sea, and the cave was somewhere to the west, but when he had heard the voices approaching and run wildly into the forest, he had lost all sense of direction.

The beers probably hadn’t helped on that score, either.

As he hobbled along, the flashlight beam trained at his feet to keep from tripping over any uneven ground, he told himself that if the
Kodiak
hadn’t been refloated on the tide by now, he was going to call the mainland, admit that they were stranded on St. Peter’s, and somehow
get the hell back to Port Orlov. Even if there
were
jewels inside those coffins, this guy Slater, and the Coast Guard, had gotten there first by now, so what was the point of sticking around?

When the northern lights were suddenly extinguished—it always reminded Russell of the way his grandfather would pinch a candle flame between his thumb and forefinger—the forest went almost black all around him. Only the moon and stars offered a little help to navigate by.

Trying to ignore the pain in his ankle, Russell focused on what he’d do once he got back home—he imagined himself hoisting a brew in the Yardarm and maybe shooting some pool—when he heard a bustling in an alder thicket. He stopped, expecting a covey of quail to fly out, or maybe a squirrel to scamper underfoot, but nothing did. He waited silently—if it was a bear, it would want to avoid him as much as he wanted to avoid it—and then he said, with as much bravado as he could muster, “Hey, asshole, I’m coming through.” It was always best to give a bear fair warning.

But there was no more noise, and no sign or smell of anything lingering in the brush, so he forged on. Not that he didn’t wish he could trade his flashlight for a can of that mace Harley carried. He knew there were wolves on the island, but wolves never attacked humans. They looked for herds of elk, and cut the young, or the feeble, ones from the pack. He kept going, leaning on the stave with one hand and using the other one, clutching the flashlight, to bat low-hanging branches out of his way. He never thought he’d miss driving the propane truck, but right now even that was looking good. He just hoped his boss would let him slide for missing a few days of work; he’d told him he had to visit a sick relative, but if the truth got back to him, or even worse if it got back to Russell’s parole officer, it’d mean big trouble.

The rustling came again, and this time out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of movement behind a moss-covered tree trunk. He rubbed the back of his glove across his eyes to clear his vision—the snow was starting to come down faster now—and swept the flashlight beam across the brush. But everything was suddenly still.

Too still … as if the usual woodland creatures had fled, or were lying low.

He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. His feet weren’t moving, but he knew it was no time to stand still. Should he retreat to the hut, he wondered, where he could grab one of those old rusty spades and at least have some kind of weapon if he needed it? The stave he was holding wasn’t going to be much help.

But when he turned around, he realized that he had no more idea how to get back to the hut than he did to find the cave. The trees were so tightly spaced, the ground so covered with moss and leaves and damp muddy snow, he’d have to be one of the native Inuit to thread his way back. And the prospect of getting marooned in that freezing, spooky shack overnight was way too scary to think about.

He turned back in the direction he’d been going and, as stealthily as possible, hobbled on. Even if he could just keep to a straight line, he figured, he’d eventually hit the cliffs on the other side—the whole friggin’ island wasn’t that big—and from there he could just hug the cliffs until he spotted the boat down in the cove. It couldn’t be that hard, or take that long. He told himself that all he had to do was keep his wits about him, ignore the pain in his ankle, and keep making progress.

And then something skittered across the path ahead of him.

Jesus Christ
. He stopped dead, wondering what it had been. It had moved like a shadow, black and fast. He’d heard all the native legends about the otter-men, but who ever believed in shit like that? That old totem pole in town, the one that had fallen halfway over, supposedly told the story. His third-grade teacher had tried to tell the class about it one day, but Russell hadn’t paid any attention.

Now, he sort of wished he had.

He debated about whether it was better to keep quiet and get the hell out of there, or make some noise and try to bluster his way through. But that would all depend on what he was up against, and so far he hadn’t actually seen anything well enough to know.

A twig snapped behind him, on the other side, and he whipped around. A gust of wind blew the snow off a bough and into his face,
but even as he blinked to clear his vision he saw a pair of eyes—yellow and intent—peering out from the brush.

Instinctively, he jabbed the stave at the bushes, but hit nothing. The eyes were gone as suddenly as they had appeared.

But Russell wasn’t about to wait around. Clawing his way through the woods as fast as he could, the anguish in his ankle overwhelmed by the adrenaline surging through his veins, he plowed ahead, knocking branches out of his way, clambering over the trunks of dead trees, slipping on wet moss, and once, on a brackish coil of goose droppings. His boots were slick with the shit when his toe caught on something hard, jutting up from the ground, and he was thrown flat, his head colliding with a rotten log. The flashlight went flying from his hand.

He lay there, stunned for an instant, but he could sense that he was still being tracked, that something was still watching him, waiting him out. First, he heard a sound on his right—snow crunching under a foot or paw—then he heard a sound on his left, like panting. There was more than one of them. He felt like he was being studied, like his infirmity had been noted, and now the stalkers were just awaiting the right opportunity to bring him down … like a wounded animal separated from the herd.

The way that wolves would do it.

He took a hurried breath and struggled to his feet again, leaning on the stave. The more he gave the impression of weakness and fear, the more he would embolden the attackers. If a bear threatened you, it was best to stand your ground, pump yourself up to look as big as you could manage, and make a lot of racket. But if it was wolves, that was something else. They never tired of the game … and to them it
was
a game. They would shift responsibilities, one running the animal down, then resting, while another picked up the chase. They would harry and harass their prey, nipping at its heels, barking in its face, racing in circles so that the creature got dizzy just trying to keep the many wolves in its sights. Russell had once gone hunting with his uncle and watched as a pack of them surrounded a starving coyote that had had the nerve to scavenge one of their kills. They had neatly
spaced themselves out to cover any possible escape route, then crept closer, until the coyote, suddenly looking up from its feast, found itself with nowhere to run.