The Romanov Cross: A Novel (39 page)

Ducking behind the generator shed, Harley threaded his way back through the stockade wall. But even with the aid of the night-vision binoculars, it would be nearly impossible to find his way through the woods at night; the surest route would be to stick to the ridgeline and simply follow it around until he returned to the cove where, if he was lucky, the
Kodiak
might by some miracle be afloat.

The problem was, his pal Eddie was still so stoned he could waltz off the cliff, or wander off into the woods, and for the time being at least, Harley needed him alive; the
Kodiak
needed a deckhand. Taking a nylon cord out of his backpack, he tied a tight loop around Eddie’s waist—Eddie laughed and tried to twirl as it was done—and then knotted the other end around the tool belt he was wearing to hold his knife and bear mace. He’d left no more than ten or fifteen feet of rope between them.

With the edge of the forest on one side and the ocean on the other, Harley set off along the cliffs, picking his way over the rocks and brambles with his flashlight beam and occasionally feeling the drag of Eddie as he slowed down or missed a step. It would have been an arduous task on a summer day, but in the dark, with an Arctic wind slicing across the Bering Sea, it was nearly impossible. Once he was well away from the colony, he breathed a little easier and let his flashlight pan out over a wider stretch of ground. The snow was crusting, and his boots crunched with every step he took. But one false move, he knew, and they could both go tumbling off the ridgeline.

With no landmarks to go by, it was impossible to calculate the distance they’d traveled. All he could do was plow ahead and count on spotting the cove where the
Kodiak
was anchored; from there, he could easily find his way back into the cave. But if he missed it, or overshot the mark, both he and Eddie could wind up either lost in the storm, or worse. Already, his feet and hands were starting to lose some sensation from the unrelenting cold. As soon as they got back to the cave, he would light the camp stove and make some hot soup or stew. Nobody was going to be out doing reconnaissance on a night like this.

Several times, Eddie stumbled, and Harley had to stop to let him get back on his feet. The farther they went, the more he thought he was carrying Eddie rather than leading him.

“Wake up!” Harley finally shouted at him. “I’m not gonna keep hauling your ass for you!”

“Fuck you!” Eddie shouted back. “I’m freezing back here.”

“Yeah, right,” Harley said, “like it’s warmer in front.”

Harley kept plodding forward, glancing at the ground, then off at
the turbulent black sea crashing below. It was only when he thought he caught a glimpse of the boat that he deliberately stopped to clear his vision and make sure. He turned the flashlight in its direction, but the beam couldn’t penetrate that far. Taking out the night-vision binoculars, he tried to draw a bead on it, but there was so much snow flying in the air now, and so little light, that it was useless.

Still, he thought he could hear the groaning of its hull over the roar of the surf.

“Almost there,” he said to Eddie, whose presence he could sense right behind him. He left the binoculars looped around his neck.

But Eddie didn’t say anything.

“Maybe we’ll even find Russell there.”

Again, there was no reply, which was odd for such a motormouth as Eddie.

Turning around, Harley raised the flashlight and saw someone—but definitely not Eddie—standing right behind him.

It was an old woman, in a long skirt and a kerchief tied around her head. He lifted the beam to her face and saw two blue eyes, hard as a husky’s, sunken into a leathery face, lined and creased as an antique map. She was staring, but not at his face; her eyes were trained on the breast pocket of his coat, where the icon was stashed.

She didn’t have to say a word; he knew what she wanted.

And he swung at her with the flashlight.

But somehow missed.

He was grabbing for his knife when Eddie stumbled up, and said, “Holy Christ.”

Harley was weirdly relieved that Eddie could see her, too, but when he wheeled around, holding the knife out and searching for the old woman in the snow, he got so tangled up in the rope that it was Eddie he nearly stabbed.

“Watch the fucking knife!” Eddie shouted, as he backpedaled as fast as he could go.

Too fast, as it happened.

Harley suddenly felt the rope jerk tight on his tool belt, and a second later, he was staggering toward the cliff. Eddie was screaming,
already sliding backwards down the icy slope. Harley flailed around, trying to grab hold of anything in reach.

“Help me!” Eddie shouted, and Harley managed to snag a low-lying branch heavy with snow. The knife dropped to the ground.

But even as he hung on with one hand, his gloves stripping the snow and then the needles right off of it, the branch slid free, and he crashed to his knees. He heard the crunch of test tubes breaking in his pockets, and a moment later the sharp pain of broken glass cutting into his thigh. He was being dragged off the edge of the cliff, too, by the weight of Eddie on the rope.

“Christ Almighty!” Eddie hollered in terror, his boots scraping the rock for any kind of ledge or crevice.

Harley dug his fingers into the snow and ice, and found a ridge in the earth, a solid bit of frozen tundra, maybe three or four inches deep, and hung on for dear life, but the nylon cord was pulling him down, twisting the belt around his waist like a tourniquet. His underarms were burning from the drag on the sleeves of his coat.

He reached for the buckle on his belt, but it was pulled so tight he couldn’t loosen it.

“Pull me up, Vane! Pull me up!”

But he didn’t have that kind of purchase, and he knew his own strength was going to give out fast. His collar was choking him, the binoculars were digging into his chest. Clinging to the soil with one hand, he used the other to grope for the knife, lying only inches away, and then wedged its blade under the straining cord.

“I can’t hang on here!” Eddie grunted. “The rope’s killing me!”

With fumbling fingers, Harley sawed at the cord. It was taut as a piano wire, but he felt a thread start to frazzle. He sawed again, harder.

“Pull!” Eddie huffed, sounding as if the very air was being squeezed from his lungs.

Harley’s parka was wrapping itself around him like a python, and in a few seconds he wouldn’t even be able to move at all. Awkwardly, he worked the blade back and forth, back and forth.

“Pull!”

And then, just as he thought he would pass out, he heard a sharp
twang, like a banjo string breaking, and all the pressure, all the weight on him, instantly stopped. The cord whizzed across the snow, while his fingers still held tight to the ground. And then he heard Eddie’s terrified cry, fast diminishing and swallowed in the wind. If there was a splash, it was lost in the storm.

Putting his face down, he felt the cold snow bathing his hot skin, and he simply lay there, breathing slowly, in and out, telling himself, over and over again, that he was still alive, he was still alive.

It was a long while before he had the courage, or the strength, to raise his head, look around, and see that the old woman was gone, too. He was all alone in the dark.

Improvisation was the name of the game. Any epidemiologist worth his salt knew that you had to be able to turn on a dime when circumstances changed—and in the field, circumstances always did.

In a matter of less than an hour, Slater had managed to get a temporary quarantine tent rigged up inside the nave of the church, with everything from an overhead lamp to a powerful space heater, and he had put the wounded and half-delirious Lantos on a pair of IV drips; one contained a broad spectrum antibiotic to guard against the sepsis that was sure to follow from the slash of the wolf’s claw, and the other a concentrated solution of Demerol that had kept her sedated enough to allow him to do what he had to do. What he really needed was an anesthetist, but when he came to the island, he hadn’t planned to perform surgery on anyone still alive.

Groves and Rudy had been deployed to seal up the windows of the church to guard against any drafts or exposure, and Nika had been enlisted as head nurse. After her reaction to the work he’d had to do in the graveyard—drilling specimens from the deacon’s corpse—he wasn’t sure she’d be able to handle it, but to her credit, she hadn’t even balked at his request. In fact, she’d looked happy for the chance to redeem herself.

“Just tell me what to do,” she said, “and I’ll do it.”

And so she had. He’d had her suit up in everything from gloves to goggles, and now she was standing on the opposite side of the gurney, behaving as if she’d been in operating rooms all her life. When he’d needed her help to set up the IV lines, she took his instructions perfectly, and her nimble fingers did the job without hesitation. When he asked for an instrument, she instinctively seemed to know which one he meant, and when he needed her to hold a sponge, or even put her finger on a suture while he pulled the thread through the wounded flesh, she didn’t blanch—or if she did, he couldn’t see it behind her protective gear.

“You’re doing a great job,” he said, his voice muffled by his own face mask.

“Then why am I sweating so much?”

“We all do. It’s why we burn these damn suits afterward.” It occurred to him that she’d have made a fine country doctor—and from what he’d gathered in town, Port Orlov needed one.

His fears for Lantos, however, were rapidly mounting. She had been slipping in and out of consciousness, and though he’d tried to knock her out enough to perform the necessary surgery without causing her unbearable pain, it was a fine balance he was trying to achieve. He had to keep her unconscious and immobilized, but without depressing her respiratory function any further than necessary.

The work was more extensive than he had anticipated; the wolf, an expert at gutting its prey with a single swipe of its claws, had wreaked havoc in her abdominal cavity, and in addition to that there was the ever-present, and far worse, threat of a viral component having come into play. The autopsy chamber had been filled with bowls of blood and organs, and Lantos had sustained a large and open wound. The Spanish flu was an airborne disease when transmitted by its living hosts, but it flourished in the blood and bodily fluids of its victims. If any of the samples they had taken were viable, then Lantos could have become directly infected, and even now, as she lay on the table breathing feebly through her own face mask, she could be functioning as a veritable flu factory.

Plainly, the entire situation was becoming untenable. Lantos was going to need to be evacuated to a proper hospital, and soon—and the biological materials left exposed in the lab tent were going to have to be gathered up, with the utmost care, and safely destroyed. In their frozen state, the specimens taken
in situ
from the grave itself had been dangerous enough. But once the body had been thawed for the autopsy and the harvesting of additional tissue, there was no telling what had happened to any virus that might still have been preserved in the flesh and viscera. Most probably, it had been inert, or rendered that way by the thermal change.

But there was always the chance that, for even a short window of time, it had been alive … and communicable.

Lantos stirred on the table, and her hands twitched. Slater had been in such a hurry to attend to her injuries that he hadn’t had time to arrange for any of the usual restraints. He nodded at Nika, and told her how to increase the Demerol drip. Their work was not yet done … even if he was only running on fumes and adrenaline at this point.

In fact, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could maintain the intense focus he needed, or keep his hands steady enough to do the delicate repairs Lantos required. As it was, he knew that he was just doing stopgap work—enough to stop the hemorrhaging and hold things in place—until a more skilled surgeon, in a fully equipped operating room, could do it right.

But how long would that be?

He heard the doors of the church creaking open again, then Sergeant Groves’s voice just outside the sealed flaps of the tent.

“Sorry to report this,” Groves said, “but no luck with the Coast Guard. One chopper’s grounded for repair, and the other’s already on a rescue mission off Little Diomede.”

“So what about sending a boat?” Slater said, his eyes still focused on his patient.

“They say the sea’s so rough, they doubt they can get in close enough right now. They’ve got to wait the storm out.”

“Which means how long?” he asked impatiently, pulling another suture through.

Lantos moaned, her head twisting on the table.

After a pause, Groves admitted, “No telling. But Rudy said the forecast’s not good.”

Even in the tent, Slater could hear the howling of the wind, tearing at the old timbers of the church, and he could only imagine the pounding of the sea on the rocks and shoals surrounding St. Peter’s Island. Small wonder the strange Russian sect had chosen to take refuge here; it was one of the most impregnable and unapproachable spots in the world. Of all the hellholes Slater had been to—and he’d been to plenty—this one felt cursed even to him.

“Get back on the radio,” he snapped, more irritated and distracted than was wise, “and tell them this can’t wait. It’s a life-or-death emergency.”

“Frank,” Nika said.

“Find out who’s in charge—go as high up the chain as you can—”

“Frank, the bleeding just got worse—”

“And tell them to call Dr. Levinson at the AFIP if they need to get a top security clearance. I guarantee—”

“Frank!” Nika insisted.

And when he looked at Nika, and saw what she was bowing her head at, he could see that there was an upwelling of blood, as if from a layer of the dermis that had been insufficiently closed, seeping between the sutures. Lantos groaned, and though she should have been rendered unconscious by the drip, her hands swung loose, perhaps in involuntary contractions. Nika grabbed at one of them, and missed, and Slater said, “Let me do it—just stand back.”