“Come on,” Ana said, taking Sergei by the arm and drawing him out of the shadows of the hangar. “We have to hurry.”
Nevsky was holding open the small door to the cabin, and he frowned when he saw their bundle. “What did I tell you about the weight?” he said, taking the bundle in hand, gauging it, then grudgingly tossing it onto the cabin floor. “Get in!” he ordered, coughing, then spitting a wad of phlegm onto the tarmac.
Bending double, Ana crawled through the dented metal door and sat bolt upright on a padded plank with the bag wedged under her feet; she could barely move since, in order to keep the bundle light, she had worn the corset freighted with jewels under her coat. Sergei, his eyes wide as saucers, got in and sat on a plank opposite. The space was so small, and his legs were so long, their knees touched. Ana gave him an encouraging smile, but he looked like a lamb being led to the slaughter.
Grunting, Nevsky crawled into the cabin, latched the door behind him, and squirmed into a seat at the front of the plane; it was shaped like a bucket and cushioned by a Persian rug folded double. With thick but nimble fingers, he began turning dials and flicking switches and doing all manner of things that Ana could not fathom. What she did understand was the machine gun firmly mounted at his elbow, and aimed through an aperture in the windscreen. The sight of its black barrel and deadly snout reminded her that this plane had been designed for aerial combat, not for ferrying refugees. It was built to dispense death, not life … like everything the Bolsheviks put their hand to.
“There are straps,” Nevsky said, over his shoulder. “Fasten them under your arms and around your waists.”
Ana found the straps hanging like reins in a stable from the sides of the cabin, and did as she was told; the clasp, she could not help but notice, was embossed with a double eagle, the old insignia of the Russian Air Force. Sergei’s fingers moved mechanically as he strapped himself in; his eyes were riveted on the floor, which appeared to have been cobbled together with sheets of steel, then sealed with a coat of tar. The whole compartment felt too insubstantial to withstand the rigors of a rough road, much less flight.
But the propellers, a pair on each side, suddenly engaged, and as the sun came fully into the Siberian sky, Nevsky piloted the plane onto the runway, shouting back to them, “Hold on!” But to what, Ana wondered? There was a roar from the engines, and a rumbling from the tires as they bounced across the ground. Sergei’s eyes were closed, and he was as rigid as a stick, his head back against the wall of the fuselage. His lips were moving in what was no doubt a prayer. The roar grew louder all the time, and the cabin rocked and creaked and swayed, and at any moment Ana would not have been surprised to see the whole contraption explode. Looking over Nevsky’s broad shoulders, she saw the tundra hurtling past, so fast it was only a brownish blur now — how could anything move at such a speed? she thought — and Nevsky pulling back on an oak-handled throttle that reminded her of one of Count Benckendorff’s canes. The speed increased, the roar of the motors became deafening, and just when she thought the shuddering plane was sure to fall apart, the nose tilted up ever so slightly, the jouncing abruptly stopped, and to her amazement she saw the ground falling away. The windscreen blazed with shards of orange light, and she wished that she, too, had a pair of the tinted goggles Nevsky was wearing. There was the strangest sensation in her stomach, as if it had just dropped into her shoes, but it wasn’t unpleasant; it was like the times Nagorny, Alexei’s guardian, had swung her so high on the garden swing that she had stopped at the top, afraid she was about to spill over the bar, before swooping back down instead. In her head, she could hear Alexei begging to be swung that high, too, and his delighted screams when Nagorny complied.
The grief overwhelmed her again, as it often did, like a crashing wave.
But Sergei’s eyes were open now. He refused to look out through the window, but gave Anastasia a wan smile. She reached across and squeezed his hand.
“We will be flying northeast,” Nevsky shouted, his words carried back to them on a cold draft. “This damn sun will be in our eyes the whole way.”
Ana liked it — she liked the hot bright yellow light, she liked the sky around it, a cerulean blue unmarred by a single wisp of cloud, and she liked it when the dark, snow-patched ground dropped away altogether, replaced by the cobalt blue of the Bering Sea. Glaciers sat serenely in the choppy waters, a pod of breaching whales gamboled among the chunks of floating ice. The horizon was a gleaming orange line, pulled tight as a stitch, and somewhere ahead there lay an island that was no longer a part of Russia at all, an island that housed a small colony of believers. A small colony of friends.
She would have liked to talk to Sergei, if only to distract him, but the howling of the wind and the din of the propellers was too great. Instead, she made do with holding his hand and gazing out at the unimaginable spectacle through the cockpit window. What a pity it was tainted by the machine gun, black, gleaming with oil, and brooding like a vulture.
When the plane banked, she was pressed back against the wall — it felt like lying on a slab of ice — and this time the sensation in her stomach was not so easily dismissed. The plane was losing altitude, she could feel it, and for a second she worried that they were going to crash, after all. Glancing out the window, she saw that the world had tilted to an odd angle, and in the distance, she could see two islands, not one, both of them flat and gray and barely rising above the sea. One was much bigger than the other, and she wondered which of them was St. Peter’s. Neither looked especially welcoming.
The angle grew even more extreme, and the engines made a louder, grinding sound, as the plane descended even more, soaring across the channel that narrowly separated the islands, and the windscreen filled with the image of the bigger of the two. Gradually, the plane leveled off, and the coastline appeared. Rugged, barren, choked with coveys of squalling birds. Anastasia caught a glimpse of a collection of huts, clustered on the cliffs above an inlet, as the plane dropped onto a cleared field, its tires bouncing up again as they touched the ground. The propellers whirred down, and Nevsky clutched the throttle with both hands, pulling back on it as if he were subduing a stallion. The cabin rattled, the tires squealed, and only the machine gun remained motionless. For several hundred yards, the plane rumbled and rolled along the tundra, before the engines stopped growling and the propellers stopped spinning and everything came to a halt.
Nevsky, pushing the goggles onto the top of his head, turned in his seat and said, “You can unfasten those straps now.” Then he coughed into his handkerchief.
Ana and Sergei undid their straps, and with trembling fingers Sergei unlatched the little door. He clambered out onto the ground, then held out a hand to help Ana. When she bent over, the corset nipped at her ribs, and her feet felt so unsteady she nearly toppled over. Sergei propped her up as Nevsky disembarked. Without a word, he went to a tiny, falling-down shed, and came out lugging two gas cans, one in each hand.
Ana, bewildered, looked all around, but apart from the shed, there was no sign of any habitation nearby, or any people. Were those huts the entire colony? Her heart began to sink. And why was there no one there to welcome them?
Nevsky seemed to be studiously avoiding them, and when Sergei ventured a question, he brushed him off and said, “Let me finish with this first,” as he poured the second can of gas down the funnel he had inserted in the tank at the rear of the plane. When that was done, he returned to the shed, came out with two more, and poured them in, too. A brisk wind was cutting across the open field, and Ana huddled in the shelter of the fuselage.