The Romanov Cross: A Novel (51 page)

“Shit.”

He heard that. It was Harley’s voice. He was alive—but where?

Gradually, other sounds came to him, too. The dripping of gasoline, the creak of mangled steel, the tinkle of falling glass. The world was returning … and with it, agonizing pain.

Charlie tried to turn, but the seat belt was coiled like a snake around his waist, and his legs of course were as useless as ever. He tried moving, but only one arm came up from the wreckage. He tried to reach for the buckle on the seat belt, but the bulk of his coat was bunched up and in the way.

“Where are you?” he asked through gritted teeth.

He heard a moan, and something twitched behind his head. He had the impression it was a foot. “Try not to move,” he said, mindful of his own paralysis. “They’ll get a medic out here.” But how long would that take? They were in the middle of nowhere, in a snowstorm.

“I told you,” Harley groaned. “I told you I was gonna die tonight.”

Charlie had to admit he hadn’t been far off. But the good Lord still seemed to have some other plan in mind for them.

And then, under the howling of the wind, there was the sound of running feet. And a guy in some kind of white lab suit was crouching down beside the wreck. He had a gauze mask on, and rubber gloves. How could medics have gotten there this fast, he wondered?

Peering in at Charlie, he quickly assessed the situation, and said, “Can you breathe?”

“Barely,” Charlie replied. “The seat belt.”

And then the guy’s hands were working the buckle, prying it loose. When it popped open, Charlie’s belly fell and he felt a rush of cold air entering his lungs. Then his coat was being opened, and the medic took a long look without saying anything. Two of the spokes from the gearshift were sticking out of him like bent twigs.

“Hang in there,” he said evenly, “you’re gonna be okay.”

Christ, that’s exactly what they’d said to him after he’d hit those rocks running the Heron River Gorge.

Then he closed the coat again, and moved beyond Charlie’s narrow field of vision, to tend to Harley in back.

“Can you move your head and neck?”

Harley groaned again and swore, but the medic was slowly extricating him from the wreckage. “Don’t move anything you don’t have to,” the medic said. “Just let me do it.”

Through the empty space where his window had been, Charlie could see his brother’s mangled body being pulled from the van and onto the asphalt. Heavy snow was falling, mixing with a widening pool of something wet and viscous. For a second, Charlie thought,
Could that be blood?
But then he realized it wasn’t. It was gas.

Harley’s groaning was becoming more of a scream. And he was shouting something about Eddie again. “Goddamn it, Eddie, it wasn’t my fault!”

And he was struggling with the medic. It seemed like he thought the guy
was
Eddie.

“Calm down,” Charlie mumbled to his brother. Funny how his guts were growing colder by the second. “He’s not Eddie.”

“Fuck you,” Harley spat at the medic, his arms flailing under the blanket drenched in blood. And then, in a flash, one of his hands broke free, and it was holding the goddamned Glock semiautomatic.

“I told you to quit it!” Harley shouted. “I
told
you!”

The medic grabbed for his wrist, but not before a sudden spray of shots went wild into the snowy night sky.

The medic twisted the wrist, banging it on the road and trying to free the gun, but Harley managed to pull the trigger one more time. Charlie saw a blazing arc of light, a bright and beautiful orange parabola that nearly blinded him, as the bullets ripped into the overturned van and punched holes in the gas cans. That was when the whole world lifted off, painlessly and effortlessly, with an all-enveloping
whomp
, and Charlie was carried up into the air, as if by the Rapture itself … up out of the wreckage, out of his own maimed body, and into a darkness so deep, so dense, and so comforting that he could actually
feel
it …

Nika froze, the radio handset dropping into her lap, as she watched the fireball unfurl and the ruined van shoot up into the air. A moment later, the impact of the blast reached the ambulance, shattering the splintered windshield and raining glass down onto the dashboard.

The boom sounded like a distant thunderclap, and the chassis of the ambulance shimmied.

“What was that?” a static-y voice asked over the radio. “Are you still there?”

Pieces of the van started crashing down on the asphalt, while others flew in flames over the side of the bridge.

“Please reply,” the operator insisted. “Are you okay?”

Nika was lifting the mike when something slammed down on the hood of the ambulance, then ricocheted through the gaping hole and onto the seat beside her. She looked down at it—half a leg, in blue jeans, soaked in blood, the foot still attached. And then, in shock, she bolted out of the car.

She was running for the bridge, right past the patrolman who was standing outside his damaged car, mike in hand and the cord stretched to its limit. She heard him saying, “Emergency! Now!” She just kept
telling herself, Frank wasn’t wearing blue jeans. He was wearing the white lab suit. He could still be all right.

When she got to the ramp of the bridge, she could see bits of burning wreckage still wafting to the bottom of the gorge. The wind reeked of gasoline and carnage. She ran on, toward the cloud of black smoke and destruction, but as she got closer she had to slow down and pick her way, while squinting her eyes against the acrid fumes, through the smoldering debris.

“Frank? Can you hear me? Frank?”

The storm was whipping the smoke and ashes into an evil, dusky brew. As she stopped for a second to clear the tears from her eyes, the cop ran past her, sweeping his flashlight back and forth. Its bright beam picked out hunks of torn metal and wood and fabric … and chunks of scorched body parts.

Please, God
, she thought.
Please, God, let me find him
.

“Frank!” she called again, the dirty air searing her lungs as she plowed ahead. She remembered the face mask hanging around her neck, and quickly fixed it over her mouth and nose. She was never so glad to have it.

An axle of the van, with two wheels still connected, lay like a barbell in the middle of the roadway.

The side of her foot bumped against something that rolled, like a black bowling ball, down the white line of the bridge. It was only as it rotated that she saw it was a perfectly smooth, perfectly burned, perfectly unrecognizable head.

She stopped in her tracks, afraid to move another step or see another horror. Gusts of wind kept picking over things that had fallen back to earth, blowing them around as if for further inspection, but Nika couldn’t bear to look. She lowered her eyes, breathing hard, and saw something shining in the glow of a burning seat cushion. It was a cross, made of silver. With emeralds that sparkled in the light of the fires crackling all around them. What on earth would that be doing here?

“Over here!” the patrolman cried, holding the mask away from his lips.

He was crouched by the railing.

“Over here!”

Nika jumped over a twisted muffler pipe and went to the railing.

A body, nearly ripped in half, was lying with a shredded blanket wrapped around it. Already she could tell it was missing a couple of limbs.

Her heart plummeted like a rock, but then the patrolman, pointing his flashlight, said, “Underneath! Look underneath!”

She brushed the cinders out of her eyes.

And then she saw that someone else lay there, too, shielded by the mangled corpse.

“Help me,” the cop said, snapping his mask back into place and starting to disentangle the two.

They allowed what was left of the body on top to slither to one side. Enough of it remained, even now, that she could recognize Harley Vane.

And beneath him lay Frank, his lab suit soiled with blood and ash, the ivory owl on its leather string draped over one shoulder. When she said his name, she saw his eyelids flutter. His mask was gone, and his face was seared and bleeding. But she saw his lips move.

“Lie still,” she said, tenderly brushing soot from his cheek. “Don’t try to talk.”

But he tried to, anyway … and she could swear he said “Nika.”

Turning to the cop, she said, “Call for a medical evacuation. We need a helicopter as fast as they can get here!”

But he was shaking his head. “I radioed already, and every chopper is on duty enforcing the quarantine. It’ll be hours before any help gets here.”

Hours was not something Nika had to spare.

“Then I’ll need to take your patrol car.”

“Have you seen what’s left of it? You’ll be driving with no hood.”

Her brain was racing. Her only option was the ambulance with the missing windshield, the lone headlight, and not enough gas. “Can you drain your gas tank into the ambulance for me?”

“That I can do,” he said, plainly relieved that he could finally offer some sort of help, and headed back across the smoldering minefield.

Nika bent low over Frank, trying to assess his injuries, but he was so saturated in blood it was hard to tell. His face was covered with cuts and abrasions, and she carefully raked her fingers through his hair, stiff and matted, in search of any gash or obvious wound. To her relief, she found none. Loosening his hazard suit and trying to peer inside, she could see no open wounds or protruding bones, but internal injuries, even she knew, could be a lot less apparent and much more deadly.

When the patrolman returned with the gurney, they lifted Frank onto it, wheeled him to the back of the ambulance. On the way, Nika’s eye was caught again by the silver cross, glinting among the broken glass and metal, so she stuck it in her pocket. She assumed it was a family heirloom that Vane’s wife would want back, and it might make a small peace offering after all that had happened. Way too small … but still, something.

After they had secured the gurney, the patrolman said, “I still don’t know how you’re gonna make it, in this weather and this vehicle.”

But Nika was already hauling out the medics’ gear stashed in back. She slung on a huge red anorak, with white crosses on its sleeves and a voluminous hood. Her face was barely visible under the dirty mask, and even the remainder she covered with a pair of protective snow goggles. Her hands, still in the latex gloves, went into thermally insulated gloves. When she was done, the cop said, “You still in there, Doc?”

Somewhere along the way, maybe because of the white suit and ambulance, he had assumed she was a doctor—and she had been savvy enough not to correct him. She nodded in answer to his question, but even that movement might have been lost in the folds of the hood.

“I’ll radio ahead and let ’em know you’re coming.”

Then she brushed the broken glass away from the driver’s seat, removed the severed leg and deposited it on the roadway, and fastened
her seat belt. The patrolman, using his flashlight like an airport worker directing a jet onto the right runway, helped guide the ambulance through the carnage and debris on the bridge—little piles were still burning like signal fires—and then waved her on her way. She lifted a hand in salute, and glancing in the rearview mirror, watched as he was swallowed up in the maelstrom of the storm.

Once the plane was completely out of sight, even the sound of its motor lost in the rustling of the wind along the abandoned airstrip, Anastasia said, “There was a village, on the cliffs. I saw it before we landed.”

But Sergei stood where he was, his black sealskin coat billowing out around him, his eyes still fixed on the blue but empty sky.

“Sergei, he’s gone. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

He was still clutching a stone—he had thrown several in impotent fury at the plane—and looked reluctant to give it up.

Ana, deciding to give him time, went to the shed and looked inside. Plainly, it was a depot for the planes, with gas cans and tools and various pieces of machinery lying around, but nothing she could see that would be of any use to them.

“I’m sorry,” she heard over her shoulder. “I was a fool.”

“We both were,” she said, remembering that it was she who had encouraged him to hand over the second diamond. “Anyone who trusts another Russian,” she added bitterly, “is a fool.”

Taking his hand, she led him across the field, favoring her bad foot, which had accumulated many blisters on their journey, and back toward the cliffs where she had seen the dismal huts. Halfway there,
she saw several figures approaching—three men, squat and broad, swathed in fur coats, with their hoods thrown back and something odd about their faces. It was only as they came closer that she saw the men had ivory disks, the size of coins, implanted in their jutting, lower lips. She knew that these must be the Eskimos; with their wide, weather-beaten features, high cheekbones and black eyes, they reminded her of the Mongolian trick riders who had once performed at Tsarskoe Selo for her parents’ anniversary.

Ana and Sergei stopped and let the men close the remaining distance. The two younger ones stood back, while the third, with woolly gray eyebrows and leaning on a staff, raised a bare hand and said, “Da?” Yes.

Ana did not know what to reply. The man was looking around, as if he, too, was puzzled at the lack of a plane, a pilot, or any explanation for their being there.

“Da?”
he repeated, and she wasn’t sure he understood what he was saying himself.

“My name is Ana,” she said, “and this is Sergei.”

The old man nodded.

How, she wondered, should she continue? “I’m afraid that we may need your help.” Did he understand any other words of Russian?

“We want to go to St. Peter’s Island,” Sergei spoke up, pointing off to the east. “Saint. Peter’s. Island.”

“Kanut,” he said, lightly touching his fingers to the front of his coat.

Ana, smiling tightly, repeated their own names, and the old man nodded in agreement again. “Do you speak Russian?” she asked.

“Da.”
Then added, “Some words.”

Thank God
, she thought. It might be possible to make themselves understood, after all, but before she could begin, he had turned around and was heading back toward the cliffs. She could only assume that they were meant to follow, especially as his two henchmen waited for them to go on before bringing up the rear. Bewildered as she was, she did not feel threatened, as she would have with her own countrymen.