But Harley was watching that speck on the horizon again. It was just a black dot, but it was coming in their direction.
Eddie was using the spade to make a greater target on the top of the coffin. And when Harley didn’t lift the pick for the next blow, he said, “You want me to do it?” He reached for the pick. “Give it to me, ya pussy.”
Harley let him, not taking his eyes off the approaching speck. Which was now distinctly coming into view — it was a helicopter, undoubtedly the one from the hockey rink in Port Orlov — and it was coming right at them.
“Duck!” Harley said, and Eddie looked at him in confusion.
“From what?”
“From that!” he said, pointing at the oncoming chopper.
Now they could hear the racket of its engines and its rotating blades on the ocean wind.
Harley flattened himself against a wooden cross and Eddie huddled at the foot of the broken angel, his arms folded over his head. Unless the chopper stopped to hover above the cemetery, it would pass over them so fast they wouldn’t be seen … though their spade and pickaxe lay in plain sight on the snow. Damn. Harley reached out one arm and grabbed the spade and dragged it under him.
There was a rush of wind and noise as the chopper swooped low overhead, zooming straight over the graveyard and the trees and aiming for the colony grounds. Once it was safely past, Harley leapt to his feet and watched as it did indeed slow down and make a circular pass over the spot where the stockade walls enclosed the old settlement. Red and white running lights adorned its fuselage, blinking on and off, as the chopper, built like some huge green praying mantis, seemed to suspend itself in midair, before descending below the tree line, and out of Harley’s view.
“Fuck me, man,” Eddie said. “They’re here already?”
He was right about that, Harley thought. They were well and truly fucked if these guys were here for anything more than a quick stopover, or, as those douche-bag pilots had claimed, a “routine training mission.”
His eyes went back to the splintered coffin in the partially exposed grave. And so did Eddie’s.
“No way I’m letting those assholes get what we dug up,” Eddie said, rising from the foot of the tombstone.
And neither was Harley, though he knew there wasn’t much time. Brushing the dirt and ice from his gloves, he raised the pick and taking a deep breath first, swung it high above his head, then brought it down one more time with a satisfying thwack.
Chapter 23
Dr. Slater, ever the hospitable team leader, had offered the virologist, Dr. Lantos, who had arrived in Port Orlov just a few hours earlier, a window seat on the Sikorsky Skycrane, but she had demurred.
“I’m not a fan of flying,” she said, “and looking out the window of a helicopter is about the last thing I want to do.”
Even now, as the chopper flew toward the forbidding cliffs of St. Peter’s Island, she was sitting very still in the seat facing him, her eyes closed behind her thick glasses and her hands clutched tightly in her lap. Professor Kozak, whose ample bulk was strapped into the seat at Slater’s side, was craning his neck for a better view out of his own window.
“We’re coming up on the cemetery,” he said over the headphones, and as they whooshed over it, he pressed his forehead against the Plexiglas for a better view.
Slater took a look, too, but they were over it so fast it was all he could do to catch a glimpse of the spot where the cliff had given way.
“You see that?” Kozak said, and Slater asked him what.
“Something moved.”
“What do you mean?”
“Might have been a wolf down in the graveyard.”
“There are wolves?” Dr. Lantos, said, her eyes still closed.
“A few,” Slater replied. “But Nika tells me that if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone.” He had assigned Nika to the second chopper, which would follow in a couple of hours, so she could help guide Sergeant Groves and his crew. She’d looked at him a little suspiciously, afraid that this might be some ruse to keep her off the island and out of harm’s way, after all, but he had laughed and said, “You know, you should really work in Washington.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got all the natural instincts.”
Frowning, she said, “I’ll take that as a compliment, for now.”
The helicopter started to slow down, banking to one side, and Slater saw Dr. Lantos swallow hard. For all her fearsome reputation in the lab and in academic circles, where her work was always ahead of the curve and so meticulous as to be indisputable, she was plainly as unhappy in the air as she had claimed. He wondered how she’d made it on the five separate flights that had been necessary just to get her all this way from M.I.T.
“We’re over the landing zone,” the pilot’s voice crackled on the headphones. And then, as a gag, he added, “Please make sure your tray tables are completely secured, and your seats are in the upright position.” As if these hard seats could be made to budge an inch.
Wobbling back and forth, the Sikorsky slowly settled itself on the ground, its tires giving the craft a jounce as they made contact with the ground. Dr. Lantos let out a long breath, and for the first time since boarding, unclasped her hands and let her shoulders fall.
When she opened her eyes, Dr. Slater said, sympathetically, “Maybe we can get the Coast Guard to ferry you back when we’re done here.”
“I get seasick, too.”
As the rotors wound down with a sigh, Professor Kozak unlatched the cabin door, threw it open, and clambered down. Lantos followed him, a trifle unsteadily, and Slater brought up the rear.
One of the pilots was already on the ground, heading for the cargo hold. And though Slater was eager to oversee the unloading of the lab gear — with the rest of the heavy equipment coming on the second chopper — he had to stop and simply look around. He had not actually set foot on the island, much less inside the colony, until this second, and whenever he arrived at the site of any epidemiological expedition, he immediately needed to get the lay of the land. From the first flyover three days before, he knew the general layout of the settlement, but it was only when he walked away from the helicopter now and did a 360 that he had a true sense of it.
And it felt like he’d stepped inside a ghostly fort.
Despite all the gaps in the timbers, the stockade wall was still formidable, and the abandoned buildings — with their empty windows and gaping doors — seemed eerily tenanted, anyway. He knew there was no one inside the structures, but that didn’t stop him from feeling as if he was being observed. A bucket swung from a rusty chain above an old well, and he marveled that the chain was still intact at all. At the other end of the compound, and tilted slightly on its raised pilings, stood a wooden church with its distinctively orthodox onion dome. He could imagine the hard and uncompromising lives of the Russians who had carved this place out of such an unwelcoming wilderness, making a home for themselves in this most inhospitable and inaccessible spot. A place where they considered themselves impregnable and unreachable … until the Spanish flu had found them.
Again, Slater wondered how. What sly mechanism had the virus used to journey across the frozen waters of the Bering Sea, up onto this isolated rock, and in through the wooden gates that stood behind him?
“The ramp’s down,” the pilot said. “Should we start unloading?”
Slater said yes, and turned back to supervise it. Kozak was smoking a cigar, the pungent aroma wafting in the wind, and Dr. Lantos was bundled up in her coat, the hood raised over her nimbus of frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, stamping her feet on the frozen ground to keep the circulation going. Glancing up at the murky gray sky, Slater reminded himself that he had a window of only a few hours in which to get some tents and other protective structures set up. The alternative — bunking down in the rotted cabins or the leaning church — would not, he suspected, go over very well.