The Romanov Cross: A Novel (24 page)

“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.

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.

By the time the second Sikorsky flew to the island with Nika and Sergeant Groves aboard, piles of equipment had been off-loaded into the central area of the compound, and temporary landing lights had been arranged in a wide circle. The lights were more than a precaution; although it was only midafternoon, the dark was falling fast.

The sergeant and his crew had arrived that morning, and Nika had been able to bring Groves up to speed. He was a powerful figure, with a thick neck and an intense expression, but she immediately took to his no-nonsense attitude and the quickness with which he grasped everything she had to say, from the topography of the island to the sensitivity of the local Inuit population about what was going to go on there, on ground still considered theirs. She also had the feeling that he would do anything for Dr. Slater; apparently, they’d been through some very tight spots together, and the bond between them was strong.

The moment their chopper landed on the spot now vacated by the first one, Sergeant Groves leapt from the cabin and began directing the crew members on the unloading and disposition of the remaining materiel. He and Slater exchanged a look or two, a few words, and the rest of their communications seemed to be done telepathically, working together seamlessly to get the first things done first, and as rapidly as possible. A generator shed was erected, and thick coils of wire were run across the ground along grid lines that they must have worked out beforehand. A mess tent was set up, and Dr. Lantos was quick to go inside and open her laptop computer on top of a rations crate. In just an hour or two, electric lights were up and running, a lavatory was discreetly but conveniently placed in the shelter of a stockade wall, and flags had been stuck in the ground where the prefab labs and residential tents would be constructed the next day. Nika, impressed by the military precision and speed, did her best just to stay out of the way.

Not that she didn’t feel she had her own duties to perform. Dr. Slater might have thought that she had been using her status as the
tribal elder simply to secure herself a berth on the island, but he was wrong. She took her duties seriously. She was an anthropologist by training—a scientist—but she was also imbued with a powerful spiritual urge, one that connected her not only to the Inuit people but to the worldview that they maintained. She was not someone to discount the legends and practices of her people, or to deny the possibility of things simply because our ordinary senses could not see or hear or smell them. So long as 90 percent of the universe was composed of something routinely called “dark matter,” who was she to set any limits on what might, or might not, be true?

The night had truly fallen now, and while the others gathered in the mess tent—its green walls glowing like a firefly in summer—Nika pulled her collar up around her face and walked into the blackness of the compound. She listened to the wind, hoping to hear the voices of the souls who had once lived—and died—here. She peered into the cabins and open stalls, trying to imagine the settlers’ faces peering out. And all the while, she was trying, in her own way, to communicate with them. To reassure them that she, and the others with her, had come not to pillage or intrude, but to accomplish something of great magnitude … something that might help keep others from succumbing to the same terrible fate that they had.

Despite whatever benign intentions she was trying to telegraph, however, she was getting no such messages in return. Just a howling, empty void.

Stopping in front of the church, which sloped ever so gently to one side, she felt that she had come, not surprisingly, to the fulcrum of the colony. The one place where the power—and the essence—of the sect had been most concentrated. And even as she heard Sergeant Groves bellowing out into the darkness that it was dinnertime—“and we close the kitchen at eight!”—she dropped her backpack and sleeping bag on the church steps. Precisely because it gave her the willies, and because it had been the one place she could be assured that all the souls here had regularly gathered, she knew that this was where she would need to bunk down later that night.

Rasputin had been right.

But Anastasia had to struggle to remember his very words.

He had predicted that if a member of the aristocracy, or more specifically her family, were responsible for his murder, it would signal the end of the Romanov dynasty. Pamphlets secretly published by his irate followers proclaimed that the streets would run with blood, brother would turn against brother, and no one in her family would be safe.

And lo and behold, so far it was all coming to pass.

This day—August 13, 1917—was to be the last one the Romanovs spent at their beloved Tsarskoe Selo. The country had been torn apart by war, then by revolution in the streets. Ana could hardly keep straight all the different factions fighting for power—Reds, Whites, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, the supporters of President Kerensky and his provisional government. All she knew was that her father had been forced to abdicate the throne, and that ever since then, she and her family had become virtual prisoners, kept under close supervision and constant guard.

And not by the Cossacks who had been their loyal defenders, or the four proud Ethiopians who had stood sentry at their doors.

No, now they were guarded by insolent soldiers and common workers, wearing red armbands and surly expressions. Men who had refused even to carry their trunks and suitcases to the train station, from which they were to depart that evening. Count Benckendorff had had to give them each three rubles to do it.

The night before, Ana had been awakened from her sleep by the sound of gunfire, but when she ran out onto the balcony in her nightgown, the soldiers had looked up and hooted, and an officer had lifted the head of one of the tame deer that they had been rounding up and shooting for sport. Her spaniel, Jemmy, barked furiously through the balustrade, and that only made the soldiers, if you could even dignify them with the term, laugh harder.

Now, that same officer was milling about the grand entry hall, poking his nose into their suitcases. Even the count could do nothing to stop him. Her mother and father were reduced to standing meekly to one side as the contingent in charge debated how and when to move their prisoners to the train station. Apparently, there was some question about their safety once outside the gates of the imperial park. It was hard for Ana to believe it was any worse out there than it had been in here.

“Just do as they say,” her father had told her, and it made her both angry and sad to see him—once the Tsar of All the Russias—so diminished. “Kerensky himself has guaranteed that he will find a way to get us out of the country.”

How could he do that, she wondered, if he could not figure out a way to get them from the palace to the train depot?

It was nearly dawn when the orders were finally given to convey the exhausted royal family, and a handful of their faithful retainers, to the station. A troop of cavalry accompanied them. The train, disguised with a sign and flags proclaiming it to be on a Red Cross mission, was stuck on a siding where there was no platform. With as little courtesy as possible, the soldiers hoisted the Tsaritsa and the other women up into the cars. Ana hated having their hands on her, and brushed her skirts madly as soon as she was out of sight inside the cabin.