The Romanov Cross: A Novel (11 page)

A bell went off, and the two fighters immediately let their arms fall and retired to their respective stools. Groves had his head down, and was sipping water through a straw.

“The sergeant can really kick ass,” a soldier in a West Point T-shirt observed.

“You better believe it,” Slater replied.

“I hear he’s done three tours over there.”

“Four.”

The soldier glanced at Slater, who was unfamiliar and looked out of place in his civilian clothes—jeans and a white shirt, under an overcoat—and no doubt wondered how he knew. There was the staccato rattle of a punching bag being put back to use.

The bell rang again, and the two fighters got up and started circling the center of the ring. Groves was gleaming with sweat, but otherwise looked like he was raring to go. The other guy, however, was holding his hands a little lower, his shoulders were sagging, and halfway through the round he was throwing wild punches that failed to connect with anything.

“Oh yeah, Groves is gonna take him out,” the West Pointer said.

And true to the prediction, Groves waited no more than thirty seconds before moving in like a locomotive and unleashing a sudden volley of blows that sent his opponent not only against the ropes, but unexpectedly through them. The guy landed on the mat, spitting out his mouth guard and huffing for breath, while a pal helped him off with his helmet.

“Jesus, Groves,” the guy said, “take it easy.” He took another breath. “It’s not like there’s a purse.”

Groves spat out his own mouthpiece, and said, “Gotta fight like there is, Lieutenant. You always gotta fight like there is.”

Groves separated the ropes and stepped down from the ring. He was sitting on the bench, putting his gear back in his bag, when Slater left the corner of the gym and said, “So, is this your idea of downtime?”

The sergeant didn’t have to look up. “Hey, Frank—I’ve been expecting you.”

“That was a nice fight.”

Groves snorted and vigorously rubbed a towel over the top of his sweaty, shaved head.

Slater sat down on the bench. “When are you supposed to deploy?”

“Next Friday, with the Eighth Battalion.”

“Where?”

“Does it matter?” Groves said. “It’ll be 110 in the shade, with all the sand you can eat.”

Slater nodded as a couple of other guys clambered into the ring. “I don’t see how I can compete with that,” he joked. “Sounds like a regular resort.”

Groves zipped up his bag, then turned toward Slater, who saw now that his lip was split.

“I got your messages,” Groves said, “but I still don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“Why you’re going out on another job—and in Alaska, of all places—when you’ve just been busted from the corps.”

“I’m going strictly as an epidemiologist. No Army this time, just civilian AFIP.”

“And do they know that you still get the shakes from the malaria? Since you’re the one who brought up the idea of taking time off, don’t you think you need to take a nice long furlough yourself?”

“I never know what to do with it,” Slater said, in what even he considered the understatement of the year. “And at least it won’t be the Middle East this time. Nobody’s shooting at anybody. It’s strictly medical research.”

“Then why do you need me?” the sergeant asked.

“Because I need someone I can trust to help me run the operation. In one week, we’re going to be off-loading roughly three tons of equipment on an island that I’m told is nearly inaccessible. There’s no place for a plane to land, no safe harbor for a ship of any size. We’re going to have to bring in the supplies by chopper, a lot like we did in Afghanistan, and we’ve got to hit the ground running.”

Groves blew out a breath and looked up as two new fighters feinted and jabbed.

“Why now? Why this time of year?”

“Why not?” Slater said, “It’s the holiday season—where would you rather be than the Arctic?”

“It’s dark there. Almost all the time. Anybody think of that?”

“Yes, of course we have,” Slater replied. Indeed, artificial illumination was one of the first things he had entered into the budget proposal—klieg lamps, ramp lights, and backup generators to make sure they never went down. When dealing with viral material, inert or not, a lighting malfunction could be as dangerous as a refrigeration failure. “But the job can’t wait.”

One of the fighters in the ring landed a low blow, and the other one complained loudly.

“Walk it off!” Groves shouted.

The match resumed, and Slater waited. In spite of all the sergeant’s objections, Slater knew his man. The call to duty in Afghanistan would be strong, but the plea from his old major would be stronger. Groves’s sense of loyalty wouldn’t allow him to let Slater go off on his own, much less after such a personal appeal.

“I’ve already got my orders,” Groves finally said without taking his eyes from the ring. The two fighters were in a clinch, heads butting like rams. “Who’s gonna get my deployment changed?”

“Don’t sweat it. Everything will be taken care of.” Slater put out his hand and said, “Don’t forget to pack warm.”

“Yeah,” the sergeant replied, taking his hand resignedly, “I’ll do that.”

All in all, Slater thought, it had been a successful day. What he needed now was a good, solid night’s rest. Looking down the suburban street, he saw a door open, a dog come out and lift its leg on a tree, then scamper back inside. Still feeling drowsy from the drugs, he heated up the car, then closed his eyes, for what he planned would be a ten-minute nap before driving the rest of the way home. But when he awoke, stiff and sore in his seat, he heard a light tapping on his window. When he opened his eyes, Martha was standing there in a jogging suit, a key in her hand.

Slater, suitably mortified, touched the button and the window rolled down.

“Please don’t tell me you’ve been here all night,” she said.

Slater glanced at his watch. It was five thirty in the morning. A
gray dawn was breaking. Christ, he wondered, was he becoming narcoleptic from all the drug interactions?

“Don’t tell me you jog at this hour,” he said, hoping to strike a tone that would mask his embarrassment.

Martha shook her head ruefully. “You want to come in and warm up?”

“I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”

“No,” she said, “it wouldn’t.”

There was an awkward moment before Martha said, “I’m glad the court-martial went as well as it did.”

“All things considered,” he said, “I got lucky.”

“So, are you posted here in the States again?”

“Not for long.”

“Where are you going next?”

“It’s classified,” he said, and they both smiled. They had had almost this identical conversation so many times in the past that to be having it again now—on a chilly suburban street, with Martha in her jogging suit and Slater slumped in his car—struck them both as absurd.

For a moment, they held each other’s gaze, with a thousand things to say but all of them said before. For Slater, it was like looking at a vision of what might have been, the life he could have led—and right now, with his back feeling like a plank and his legs half-asleep and his brain in a muddle—it didn’t look so bad. He had to keep himself from lifting one cold hand through the window simply to caress her cheek for a moment. As part of the annual exam for field epidemiologists deployed on high-stress missions, an Army psychiatrist had recently told him there was a notable lack of intimacy in his life. “You can’t run from it forever,” he’d said. “Given what you face on the job, you’re going to need some human anchor, some safe harbor, in your life.” After a pause, the shrink had added, “Or else you can find yourself drifting off the emotional map and into uncharted waters.”

Slater knew he was right, because look where he had just washed up. “Well, okay then,” he said, as if he and his ex had just concluded
the most casual confab. Turning the key in the ignition, he said, “It’s been great catching up.”

“Yeah,” she said, playfully batting at his window as he raised it, “don’t be a stranger.” She had a bittersweet smile on her face, and for a second or two he wondered if she, too, had been running through that same little might-have-been scenario.

He lifted a hand in farewell as he pulled the car away from the curb, and then he slowed down to watch in his rearview mirror as she set off down the street, an ever-diminishing figure in a blue jogging suit. She turned the corner without looking back and, like so much in his life, was gone.

Port Orlov wasn’t always called that. Originally, it was a little Inuit village, built to take advantage of a natural harbor. For hundreds of years, the natives had lived in rough but sturdy dwellings made of caribou hides and sealskins, each family’s totem pole raised beside the door. Their slender kayaks, in which they had chased down bowhead whales migrating through the Bering Strait, had lined the shore.

But in the late 1700s, one of the many Russian trading vessels that ventured into these waters in search of furs, skins, and walrus tusks had discovered the village, and there the Russians had enacted the same play—the same grim tragedy—as they had all over the Aleutian islands and along the coast of what the natives themselves called Al-ak-shak, or “Great Land.” First, the visitors came in peace, offering to buy all the sea-otter pelts and ivory and bearskins that the Inuits had on hand. Then they traded rum and guns for as much as the native hunters could go out and capture. Then, when the Inuits began to offer some resistance—arguing that to kill so many of the creatures, and in such a wanton manner, was not only wrong, but ultimately threatening to the natives’ way of life—the Russians savagely beat them into submission, enslaving and slaughtering them by the thousands. By the time Captain Orlov and his like were done, less than a
hundred years later, the Inuits, who had numbered over eighteen thousand on their arrival, had been winnowed down to a precious few, and the otters, cormorants, and sea lions that they had once relied upon for their own survival had been hunted to the brink of extinction.

The old totem pole in town had the faces of some of these creatures carved into it—the otters and wolves playing an especially prominent role—but nowadays the pole was leaning at a crazy angle, and nobody had gotten around to righting it. A fresh coat of paint wouldn’t have been amiss, either.

Harley Vane, the hood of his coat pulled up over his head and his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his parka, kicked some gravel at it as he passed—he wasn’t into any of that native shit. He was headed for the town bar, the Yardarm, to do a little business. It was only four thirty in the afternoon, but the daily ration of sunlight was already long gone. From now on, the days would only get shorter and shorter—comprising at best an hour or two of light at midday—before the hazy sun sank below the horizon again and the stars filled the sky. The street, inordinately wide to allow for the occasional, sixteen-wheel big rig, was rutted and cracked. And, apart from the snowplow rumbling past, deserted.

In front of the Yardarm, Harley saw the usual array of rusty pickups and dented vans, including—just as he expected—Eddie Pavlik’s plumbing truck. Eddie did more business selling grass out of the back of that truck than he ever did rooting out clogged pipes.

Harley stepped into the noisy bar and threw his hood back. The sudden rush of the warm air made his hair frizz out, and he quickly smoothed it down before Angie Dobbs could catch sight of him. He spotted her now, in her waitress apron, delivering a pizza to some clowns sitting near the pool tables. Eddie was racking up the balls for Russell Wright.

Harley must have walked through this room, crammed with wooden tables and chairs, sawdust on the floor, maybe a thousand times, but ever since the night of the accident at sea he felt like things were different, like people were looking at him. At first, he was convinced
they were all impressed—his picture had been in the papers, and the story he’d told was pretty amazing. Nobody else had made it out alive. But now, he got a different vibe.

Sometimes he felt like they were snickering at him behind his back.

“Hey,” he said as Russell squinted down the length of his pool cue. Eddie was leaning against the wall nursing a beer. Harley wondered if Angie had noticed him yet.

“Hey,” they both replied, but Russell, the quiet one, started methodically putting away the balls, while Eddie went off on one of his typical tears. “You see that California is going to legalize pot? You see where it’s going to be on the ballot and everything? Shit, I don’t know whether to go down there and plant a hundred acres of the shit, or get one of those medical dispensary licenses—they’ve got those in a lot of states now—where you’re allowed to sell the stuff and use it with no hassles. I mean, you tell me why the government gets to tell me what I can, and cannot, put in my own body. Where is
that
in the Constitution?”

With Eddie, most things eventually came back to the Constitution, which Harley was one hundred percent certain he had never read. Neither had Harley, of course, so for all he knew, it really did include a whole long list of things you could and could not put in your body. But right now, it seemed like a very good idea to put a beer in.

Angie was still handing out bottles and glasses. Her blond hair was all frizzed out, too, but it just made her look hot. She had a silver ring through her lower lip and a tattoo on her shoulder that said mick—the name of a guy she’d had a baby with when she was sixteen. Sometimes Harley would see the kid around town with his grandmother, who was raising him.

“You get in any more newspapers?” Eddie asked. “I swear, you should call up some of those TV shows, like
Deadliest Catch
.”

“Yeah,” Russell said, having just scratched on the cue ball, “you could reenact the shipwreck—”

“And maybe you could even get somebody to make a movie of it. You could buy yourself a new boat with the money.”

“And a new crew,” Russell said, “while you’re at it.”

Eddie laughed and clapped his hands together. “Yeah, man, and good luck with that!” He bent over double, laughing, and that’s when Harley realized how drunk he was. “They’ll be fighting for that gig.” Then he tried to line up his own shot and missed it altogether.