Slater heard the chambering of two new rounds, but he wasn’t about to wait for Rebekah to improve her aim. Throwing open the side door, he rolled out onto the snow. A tuft of dirt and ice exploded behind him as he dodged behind a tree. He heard the crunching of the snow under Rebekah’s feet as she ran after him, and when he glanced around the trunk, another shotgun blast tore a big chunk of bark loose, throwing chips and splinters into his face.
But that meant both barrels were empty again, and he had a few seconds at most before she could reload.
Wiping his eyes clean, he bolted out from behind the tree. She had just slapped in a fresh round when he leapt for her. But his booties slipped, and all he could do was bat the barrel away in time for the shot to rip through the treetops and send a flock of birds screeching into the night.
She grunted in anger, and he groped for the gun. She tried to swing it away, but he held on, and with a violent wrench managed to yank it out of her hands. With her fingers extended like claws, she let out a bloodcurdling scream and sprang at his face, and he had no choice but to jerk the stock of the rifle up under her chin. Her jaws smacked shut like a bear trap, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she was out cold by the time she hit the ground.
When the din of the rifle blast had at last stopped echoing in his head, Slater heard Nika over by the snowbank, crying for help.
Chapter 51
The lights flickered and dimmed as an Arctic blast pummeled the walls of the mess tent, and for a few seconds Professor Kozak thought his computer was about to crash. But the generators kept humming and, despite the muffled roar of the wind, the structure held firm. He poured himself another shot of vodka.
It was only a few hours since the helicopter had left with Slater and Nika aboard, but already the colony felt increasingly forlorn and abandoned. Dr. Lantos was gone, and though he hoped for a miracle, he did not think that one would be forthcoming. He didn’t see how she could have possibly survived her injuries, or the protracted evacuation to Juneau. Besides himself, only Sergeant Groves and Rudy remained, and they were out on patrol, making sure the island had no other intruders, and that nothing further occurred to disturb the eviscerated corpse of the deacon. Presumably, the poor man was still lying on the slab in the autopsy chamber.
The professor did not envy Frank Slater. This was not a mission report he would ever want to write. Whatever could go wrong, had gone wrong … and badly. He could only assume that it spelled the end of Slater’s career as a field epidemiologist.
He returned his gaze to the images on his computer, pictures of what the Russian Orthodox church called the Theotokos. All were representations of the Virgin Mary and Child, but in four traditional poses. The Hodigitria, in which the Virgin pointed to the child as a guide to salvation. The Eleusa, in which the child touches his face to his mother’s, symbolizing the bond between God and mankind. The Agiosortissa, or Intercessor, in which Mary holds out her hands in supplication to a separate image of Christ. And, finally, the Panakranta, depicting Mary on a royal throne, with the Christ child in her lap; according to the Fourth Ecumenical Council, it was in this configuration that the two were represented as presiding over the destiny of the world.
Although Frank had given him only the roughest description of the icon they had freed from the deacon’s frozen hand — and which had now been stolen by some unknown hand — Kozak was confident that this last design, more regal than the others, was the right one. The red veil over her head was a symbol of her suffering, the blue dress a mark of her bond with humanity. The three diamonds that Slater had mentioned — on the Virgin’s forehead and shoulders — were meant to suggest the Holy Trinity.
From the communications desk in the corner, there was a burst of static, and then a ghostly voice from the Coast Guard station in Point Barrow, warning of another storm front swooping down on the Bering Strait. How, and why, Kozak wondered, had these settlers decided to plant their colony in this most unforgiving of places? The wind howled around the tent, and he was reminded of the terrors he had felt as a boy, reading late in his tiny room at the top of the stairs of the summer dacha. Every June his family had left their palatial flat in Moscow — high on Kutuzovsky Prospect — and gone to this wretched house in the middle of nowhere for “the fresh air.” As far as Vassily was concerned, the air was plenty fresh in the city libraries. The house had no electricity, and he had had to read his books by the light of a kerosene lantern. He could smell its smudgy odor even now and envision the rough log walls. Every time a branch had brushed against the eaves, or a window frame had whined, he had imagined that a rusalka was beckoning to him from the riverbank. Pale maidens, garlanded with flowers, they were said to lure the unsuspecting to their watery lairs and drown them there; the gardener told him that he had once chased a rusalka off the end of the dock with his pitchfork. “So don’t you worry, young Vassily,” he’d said. “They won’t be coming around here anymore.”
But young Vassily had worried, all the same.
There was a question from the Coast Guard operator in Point Barrow—“Do you read me, St. Peter’s Island? Do you read me?”—and Kozak had finally gotten up from his chair and replied.
“Yes, we read you, loud and clear. This is Professor Vassily Kozak, of the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics, and Mineralogy.”
There was the crackle of static, then an uncertain, “The what institute? Are you also with the AFIP mission? Under Dr. Frank Slater? Over.”
Apparently, word had not yet traveled everywhere that Frank had been officially relieved of his duties.
“I am.”
“Okay then. Well, we’re clocking winds speed of over one hundred miles per hour and barometric pressure that’s dropping like a stone — ninety-eight millibars at last reading. You might want to batten down the hatches real tight, for at least the next twenty-four hours.”
“Thank you for that warning,” Kozak said, stifling a belch. “I will batten down all hatches. Over.”
Then he had shuffled back to his seat, poured another stiff shot of vodka, and riffled through the tattered pages of the book found in that dead boy’s pocket. Nika had said his name was Russell.
The book, as Kozak had surmised at first glance, was the sexton’s register, a record of the burials in the colony’s graveyard. Where Russell had come by it, no one knew, but Kozak had a pretty good idea. Somewhere in the woods, not far from the cemetery, there was probably an old hovel, tumbled down and overgrown by now, where the sexton had kept his tools, his ledgers, and the headstones. Once the storm had passed, he would have to recruit Sergeant Groves and go looking for it.
The bottle of vodka was running low. Fortunately, he had packed several others.
The pages that had been left in the book showed a surprising scrum of entries all dating from the autumn of 1918, along with some notes on the dynamite the colonists had used to blow open graves to a sufficient depth. Eight-inch sticks, made in Delaware by DuPont. Manufactured to kill the Germans on the battlefields of the First World War, the dynamite had instead been used to help bury Russian pacifists thousands of miles from any front. Kozak was pleased to find this proof of his theory. No wonder this cliffside was crumbling faster than even global warming could have predicted.
But it was when he turned to the last few pages of the ledger, written in a more feminine hand, that he put his glass down and sat up straighter in his chair. The ink was considerably faded, and the pages still damp around the edges, but it was clear that the sexton was no longer their author. Had he died? Was this new writer his replacement? Where the book had been a cursory list of names and dates, there were suddenly plaintive appeals, mixed in among the last death entries, and all written in a more formal Russian.