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.”
But Nika fumbled across the table in an attempt to snag the other hand — a breach of protocol that a trained nurse would have known not to do — and before either one of them knew how it had happened, Nika flinched and said, “Ouch,” as the tip of the suturing needle pierced the palm of her glove. For a split second that seemed like an eternity, the needle stayed there, before Slater yanked it out, and looked through his visor at Nika. She was studying the tiny puncture in her glove, from which a dot of her own blood was now oozing, and then she looked up at him, her dark eyes full of disbelief … and questions.
Exactly as he feared were his own.
Chapter 41
Sergei was pushing a wheelbarrow back toward the Ipatiev house when he heard the sound of gunshots. For days, there had been the rumble of distant artillery, but this was small-arms fire, and much closer to home.
It sounded like a string of firecrackers.
The wheelbarrow was filled with several gas cans. Commandant Yurovsky had sent him into town with orders to siphon the fuel out of every vehicle he could find, and if anybody asked any questions, to refer them to the Kremlin. This was not the sort of duty the Bolsheviks had promised him when they came to his village and dragooned him the previous spring.