Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"
Автор книги: Robert Masello
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 35 страниц)
Chapter 39
“But what about Russell?” Eddie complained. “We gotta keep looking for Russell!”
As far as Harley was concerned, they had looked for Russell long enough. They’d gone all the way back to the graveyard, where they’d hidden behind some trees long enough to see some stocky guy with a little silver beard pushing what looked like a lawn mower around on the snow, then they’d tried to follow their drunken buddy’s trail through the woods. The only clue they picked up was his flashlight, still shining under a bunch of bushes. But it didn’t look good – why would Russell, dumb as he was, have thrown his flashlight away?
“We can’t leave a man behind!” Eddie said, his eyes gleaming in the dusk, and at that Harley had nearly puked. We can’t leave a man behind?What did Eddie think they were – Marines?
“Forget it,” Harley said. “He’s either frozen stiff somewhere, or he’s holed up in the colony right now, warm as toast and telling some bullshit story about how he got lost kayaking.”
And the colony was where Harley was heading. He’d had enough of the graveyard, and more than enough of the fucking woods. If the Coast Guard guys had dug up something special, he’d find it in the colony by now.
It hadn’t been hard to slip through the gap in the stockade wall, and just before the daylight completely vanished, he led Eddie to a secluded spot behind the generator shed. Digging into his backpack, he pulled out a pair of night-vision binoculars and looped the cord around his neck.
“Hey, where’d you get those?” Eddie said enviously as Harley adjusted the scopes.
“Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe.”
“What’d they cost?”
“How the hell should I know?” It wasn’t as if he’d paid for them. He’d swiped them along with the MREs.
The tents were glowing green, but the ground between them was dark, and it was there that the infrared-sensitive lenses came in handy. Harley could sweep the grounds, and if anybody was moving on the pathways, he’d see the blurry outline of their bodies. The only drawback was the slight high-pitched whine that the binoculars gave off, like a mosquito incessantly buzzing around your ears.
Kind of like Eddie.
“I want to see!” Eddie said, groping for the binoculars. “Let me take a look.”
Harley had to swat his hands away, and he could see now that Eddie was flying high. Somewhere along the trail, he must have ingested some uppers. And that was all that Harley needed now – a speed freak as an accomplice.
As he watched, he saw some activity up by the church – that Slater guy was running around in one of those lab suits – and he was bringing up Nika Tincook, the mayor, their arms filled with what looked like sheets and blankets and medical instrument bags. What the fuck was going on? Even over the rising wind, he could hear their voices – they sounded alarmed – but what he didn’t hear, or see, was any activity down in that big old tent by the main gates … where the flaps were waving wildly and the lights were all on inside.
“Come on,” he said to Eddie, “but keep low and keep your mouth shut.”
“What are we doing? Are we rescuing Russell?”
Harley didn’t bother to reply. Crouching low, he set off across the colony grounds, leaping over the PVC pipes and electrical cables that stretched across the snow and under the braided ropes that marked the paths. At the ramp, he slowed down for a second – was that blood on the railing? – but he couldn’t very well stay outside either. He ducked under the flaps and waited for Eddie to follow him in.
“Hey, man, did you see the blood on—”
“Shut up,” Harley said, looking around but seeing no one. There were counters on both sides, covered with beakers and vials and microscopes; it reminded him of the chemistry class he’d failed. On a computer screen, he saw what looked like a molecule – or was it an atom? – turning slowly on its axis.
“Check it out,” Eddie said, gesturing at three tanks of white mice. “Wouldn’t your snake like a taste of these little babies?”
Before Harley could stop him, the idiot had reached inside a container and lifted one out by its tail. Its back was stained with orange ink and it dangled frantically in the air.
“Drop the goddamned mouse,” Harley said.
Grinning, Eddie lifted it over his open mouth like he was about to swallow it, and Harley shoved him, hard enough that the mouse slipped free and ran squeaking for cover.
“I am going to kick your ass if you do one more stupid thing,” Harley said.
“Big man,” Eddie said, but he lowered his eyes and didn’t issue any further challenge.
Harley turned back to the room; the only thing worth stealing in here might be the laptops, or maybe the microscopes, and they’d be a bitch to carry back. At the far end of the tent, there were ripped plastic curtains that extended from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like some kind of inner sanctum, but one that had been busted into. That alone was good enough for Harley.
He walked down the center of the room, noting that there was blood here, too, and even more on the strips of plastic. Even Eddie was hanging back.
Harley poked his head into what was left of this chamber, and nearly threw up on the spot.
A dismembered corpse was lying on a stainless-steel table, and there were bowls and basins of blood and organs on surgical carts and counters.
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” Eddie said, though he was so revved up he walked in mesmerized. Standing over the body and flipping back the flap of scalp concealing its face, he said, “I wonder who he was.”
One of the old Russians, Harley thought, though why they’d do something like this to him now …
“Looks like a wolf got at him, too.”
“What are you talking about?” Harley said, afraid to look too closely. How was Eddie managing it?
“Paw prints,” Eddie said, and now Harley glanced over long enough to see that Eddie was actually right about something. There were bloody paw prints – and pretty fresh-looking ones at that – on the tabletop.
Harley spun his gaze around the tiny chamber, as if a wolf might still be lurking somewhere, but all that caught his attention this time was a fridge with a wheel on it like you’d see on a bank vault.
But given everything else in the room, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to open it.
“What’s in there?” Eddie said excitedly.
Harley had come this far; there was no point in stopping now. He turned the wheel, there was a hissing sound as the seal was broken, and a bright white light came on inside.
Again, there was an array of flasks and vials, many of them marked with stickers and labels, but there was also the unmistakable sparkle of white diamonds – three of them, embedded in an old brass icon of the Virgin Mary. Eddie saw it, too, and made a grab for it, knocking over half of the bottles and tubes in the fridge, but Harley wedged it into his own breast pocket and said, “We’ll fence it in Nome.”
“Damn straight we will,” Eddie said, “and this, too.”
It was an old scrap of paper, rolled up like a scroll, and Eddie snatched it off the shelf and scrabbled it open, the page crackling and breaking in several spots.
It was a few lines long, black ink that had faded to gray, and written in Russian.
“What’d you think it was going to be?” Harley sneered. “A treasure map?”
“Maybe it is, for all you know,” Eddie said, stuffing it into the pocket of his parka. Then, to Harley’s dismay, he grabbed some of the test tubes and vials and stashed those in his pocket, too.
“That stuff’s not worth shit,” Harley said. “What are you doing?”
“It might be worth something to somebody,” he replied, “and they can pay me to get it back.” When he realized his own pocket was full, he crammed a couple more into Harley’s pockets, too. “And they can pay you, too!” Harley batted him away again – more and more, he wished he’d checked everyone’s backpacks for drugs and booze before they’d left Port Orlov – and closed the freezer door. For good measure, he gave the wheel a spin.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Harley said, and after Eddie had cast one more look at the mutilated corpse – what was he thinking of stealing now, Harley thought, a kidney? – they stepped out into the lab.
“The laptops?” Eddie said, but Harley shook his head. They were government-issue, and probably traceable; besides, he just wanted to get the hell out of this damn slaughterhouse. They had slunk no more than ten or twenty yards away when he saw a burly black guy, in an Army coat, running toward the lab tent with one of the Coast Guardsmen right behind him. They were carrying rifles and they were loaded for bear … or wolf.
Ducking behind the generator shed, Harley threaded his way back through the stockade wall. But even with the aid of the night-vision binoculars, it would be nearly impossible to find his way through the woods at night; the surest route would be to stick to the ridgeline and simply follow it around until he returned to the cove where, if he was lucky, the Kodiakmight by some miracle be afloat.
The problem was, his pal Eddie was still so stoned he could waltz off the cliff, or wander off into the woods, and for the time being at least, Harley needed him alive; the Kodiakneeded a deckhand. Taking a nylon cord out of his backpack, he tied a tight loop around Eddie’s waist – Eddie laughed and tried to twirl as it was done – and then knotted the other end around the tool belt he was wearing to hold his knife and bear mace. He’d left no more than ten or fifteen feet of rope between them.
With the edge of the forest on one side and the ocean on the other, Harley set off along the cliffs, picking his way over the rocks and brambles with his flashlight beam and occasionally feeling the drag of Eddie as he slowed down or missed a step. It would have been an arduous task on a summer day, but in the dark, with an Arctic wind slicing across the Bering Sea, it was nearly impossible. Once he was well away from the colony, he breathed a little easier and let his flashlight pan out over a wider stretch of ground. The snow was crusting, and his boots crunched with every step he took. But one false move, he knew, and they could both go tumbling off the ridgeline.
With no landmarks to go by, it was impossible to calculate the distance they’d traveled. All he could do was plow ahead and count on spotting the cove where the Kodiakwas anchored; from there, he could easily find his way back into the cave. But if he missed it, or overshot the mark, both he and Eddie could wind up either lost in the storm, or worse. Already, his feet and hands were starting to lose some sensation from the unrelenting cold. As soon as they got back to the cave, he would light the camp stove and make some hot soup or stew. Nobody was going to be out doing reconnaissance on a night like this.
Several times, Eddie stumbled, and Harley had to stop to let him get back on his feet. The farther they went, the more he thought he was carrying Eddie rather than leading him.
“Wake up!” Harley finally shouted at him. “I’m not gonna keep hauling your ass for you!”
“Fuck you!” Eddie shouted back. “I’m freezing back here.”
“Yeah, right,” Harley said, “like it’s warmer in front.”
Harley kept plodding forward, glancing at the ground, then off at the turbulent black sea crashing below. It was only when he thought he caught a glimpse of the boat that he deliberately stopped to clear his vision and make sure. He turned the flashlight in its direction, but the beam couldn’t penetrate that far. Taking out the night-vision binoculars, he tried to draw a bead on it, but there was so much snow flying in the air now, and so little light, that it was useless.
Still, he thought he could hear the groaning of its hull over the roar of the surf.
“Almost there,” he said to Eddie, whose presence he could sense right behind him. He left the binoculars looped around his neck.
But Eddie didn’t say anything.
“Maybe we’ll even find Russell there.”
Again, there was no reply, which was odd for such a motormouth as Eddie.
Turning around, Harley raised the flashlight and saw someone – but definitely not Eddie – standing right behind him.
It was an old woman, in a long skirt and a kerchief tied around her head. He lifted the beam to her face and saw two blue eyes, hard as a husky’s, sunken into a leathery face, lined and creased as an antique map. She was staring, but not at his face; her eyes were trained on the breast pocket of his coat, where the icon was stashed.
She didn’t have to say a word; he knew what she wanted.
And he swung at her with the flashlight.
But somehow missed.
He was grabbing for his knife when Eddie stumbled up, and said, “Holy Christ.”
Harley was weirdly relieved that Eddie could see her, too, but when he wheeled around, holding the knife out and searching for the old woman in the snow, he got so tangled up in the rope that it was Eddie he nearly stabbed.
“Watch the fucking knife!” Eddie shouted, as he backpedaled as fast as he could go.
Too fast, as it happened.
Harley suddenly felt the rope jerk tight on his tool belt, and a second later, he was staggering toward the cliff. Eddie was screaming, already sliding backwards down the icy slope. Harley flailed around, trying to grab hold of anything in reach.
“Help me!” Eddie shouted, and Harley managed to snag a low-lying branch heavy with snow. The knife dropped to the ground.
But even as he hung on with one hand, his gloves stripping the snow and then the needles right off of it, the branch slid free, and he crashed to his knees. He heard the crunch of test tubes breaking in his pockets, and a moment later the sharp pain of broken glass cutting into his thigh. He was being dragged off the edge of the cliff, too, by the weight of Eddie on the rope.
“Christ Almighty!” Eddie hollered in terror, his boots scraping the rock for any kind of ledge or crevice.
Harley dug his fingers into the snow and ice, and found a ridge in the earth, a solid bit of frozen tundra, maybe three or four inches deep, and hung on for dear life, but the nylon cord was pulling him down, twisting the belt around his waist like a tourniquet. His underarms were burning from the drag on the sleeves of his coat.
He reached for the buckle on his belt, but it was pulled so tight he couldn’t loosen it.
“Pull me up, Vane! Pull me up!”
But he didn’t have that kind of purchase, and he knew his own strength was going to give out fast. His collar was choking him, the binoculars were digging into his chest. Clinging to the soil with one hand, he used the other to grope for the knife, lying only inches away, and then wedged its blade under the straining cord.
“I can’t hang on here!” Eddie grunted. “The rope’s killing me!”
With fumbling fingers, Harley sawed at the cord. It was taut as a piano wire, but he felt a thread start to frazzle. He sawed again, harder.
“Pull!” Eddie huffed, sounding as if the very air was being squeezed from his lungs.
Harley’s parka was wrapping itself around him like a python, and in a few seconds he wouldn’t even be able to move at all. Awkwardly, he worked the blade back and forth, back and forth.
“Pull!”
And then, just as he thought he would pass out, he heard a sharp twang, like a banjo string breaking, and all the pressure, all the weight on him, instantly stopped. The cord whizzed across the snow, while his fingers still held tight to the ground. And then he heard Eddie’s terrified cry, fast diminishing and swallowed in the wind. If there was a splash, it was lost in the storm.
Putting his face down, he felt the cold snow bathing his hot skin, and he simply lay there, breathing slowly, in and out, telling himself, over and over again, that he was still alive, he was still alive.
It was a long while before he had the courage, or the strength, to raise his head, look around, and see that the old woman was gone, too. He was all alone in the dark.
Chapter 40
Improvisation was the name of the game. Any epidemiologist worth his salt knew that you had to be able to turn on a dime when circumstances changed – and in the field, circumstances always did.
In a matter of less than an hour, Slater had managed to get a temporary quarantine tent rigged up inside the nave of the church, with everything from an overhead lamp to a powerful space heater, and he had put the wounded and half-delirious Lantos on a pair of IV drips; one contained a broad spectrum antibiotic to guard against the sepsis that was sure to follow from the slash of the wolf’s claw, and the other a concentrated solution of Demerol that had kept her sedated enough to allow him to do what he had to do. What he really needed was an anesthetist, but when he came to the island, he hadn’t planned to perform surgery on anyone still alive.
Groves and Rudy had been deployed to seal up the windows of the church to guard against any drafts or exposure, and Nika had been enlisted as head nurse. After her reaction to the work he’d had to do in the graveyard – drilling specimens from the deacon’s corpse – he wasn’t sure she’d be able to handle it, but to her credit, she hadn’t even balked at his request. In fact, she’d looked happy for the chance to redeem herself.
“Just tell me what to do,” she said, “and I’ll do it.”
And so she had. He’d had her suit up in everything from gloves to goggles, and now she was standing on the opposite side of the gurney, behaving as if she’d been in operating rooms all her life. When he’d needed her help to set up the IV lines, she took his instructions perfectly, and her nimble fingers did the job without hesitation. When he asked for an instrument, she instinctively seemed to know which one he meant, and when he needed her to hold a sponge, or even put her finger on a suture while he pulled the thread through the wounded flesh, she didn’t blanch – or if she did, he couldn’t see it behind her protective gear.
“You’re doing a great job,” he said, his voice muffled by his own face mask.
“Then why am I sweating so much?”
“We all do. It’s why we burn these damn suits afterward.” It occurred to him that she’d have made a fine country doctor – and from what he’d gathered in town, Port Orlov needed one.
His fears for Lantos, however, were rapidly mounting. She had been slipping in and out of consciousness, and though he’d tried to knock her out enough to perform the necessary surgery without causing her unbearable pain, it was a fine balance he was trying to achieve. He had to keep her unconscious and immobilized, but without depressing her respiratory function any further than necessary.
The work was more extensive than he had anticipated; the wolf, an expert at gutting its prey with a single swipe of its claws, had wreaked havoc in her abdominal cavity, and in addition to that there was the ever-present, and far worse, threat of a viral component having come into play. The autopsy chamber had been filled with bowls of blood and organs, and Lantos had sustained a large and open wound. The Spanish flu was an airborne disease when transmitted by its living hosts, but it flourished in the blood and bodily fluids of its victims. If any of the samples they had taken were viable, then Lantos could have become directly infected, and even now, as she lay on the table breathing feebly through her own face mask, she could be functioning as a veritable flu factory.
Plainly, the entire situation was becoming untenable. Lantos was going to need to be evacuated to a proper hospital, and soon – and the biological materials left exposed in the lab tent were going to have to be gathered up, with the utmost care, and safely destroyed. In their frozen state, the specimens taken in situfrom the grave itself had been dangerous enough. But once the body had been thawed for the autopsy and the harvesting of additional tissue, there was no telling what had happened to any virus that might still have been preserved in the flesh and viscera. Most probably, it had been inert, or rendered that way by the thermal change.
But there was always the chance that, for even a short window of time, it had been alive … and communicable.
Lantos stirred on the table, and her hands twitched. Slater had been in such a hurry to attend to her injuries that he hadn’t had time to arrange for any of the usual restraints. He nodded at Nika, and told her how to increase the Demerol drip. Their work was not yet done … even if he was only running on fumes and adrenaline at this point.
In fact, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could maintain the intense focus he needed, or keep his hands steady enough to do the delicate repairs Lantos required. As it was, he knew that he was just doing stopgap work – enough to stop the hemorrhaging and hold things in place – until a more skilled surgeon, in a fully equipped operating room, could do it right.
But how long would that be?
He heard the doors of the church creaking open again, then Sergeant Groves’s voice just outside the sealed flaps of the tent.
“Sorry to report this,” Groves said, “but no luck with the Coast Guard. One chopper’s grounded for repair, and the other’s already on a rescue mission off Little Diomede.”
“So what about sending a boat?” Slater said, his eyes still focused on his patient.
“They say the sea’s so rough, they doubt they can get in close enough right now. They’ve got to wait the storm out.”
“Which means how long?” he asked impatiently, pulling another suture through.
Lantos moaned, her head twisting on the table.
After a pause, Groves admitted, “No telling. But Rudy said the forecast’s not good.”
Even in the tent, Slater could hear the howling of the wind, tearing at the old timbers of the church, and he could only imagine the pounding of the sea on the rocks and shoals surrounding St. Peter’s Island. Small wonder the strange Russian sect had chosen to take refuge here; it was one of the most impregnable and unapproachable spots in the world. Of all the hellholes Slater had been to – and he’d been to plenty – this one felt cursed even to him.
“Get back on the radio,” he snapped, more irritated and distracted than was wise, “and tell them this can’t wait. It’s a life-or-death emergency.”
“Frank,” Nika said.
“Find out who’s in charge – go as high up the chain as you can—”
“Frank, the bleeding just got worse—”
“And tell them to call Dr. Levinson at the AFIP if they need to get a top security clearance. I guarantee—”
“Frank!” Nika insisted.
And when he looked at Nika, and saw what she was bowing her head at, he could see that there was an upwelling of blood, as if from a layer of the dermis that had been insufficiently closed, seeping between the sutures. Lantos groaned, and though she should have been rendered unconscious by the drip, her hands swung loose, perhaps in involuntary contractions. Nika grabbed at one of them, and missed, and Slater said, “Let me do it – just stand back.”
But Nika fumbled across the table in an attempt to snag the other hand – a breach of protocol that a trained nurse would have known not to do – and before either one of them knew how it had happened, Nika flinched and said, “Ouch,” as the tip of the suturing needle pierced the palm of her glove. For a split second that seemed like an eternity, the needle stayed there, before Slater yanked it out, and looked through his visor at Nika. She was studying the tiny puncture in her glove, from which a dot of her own blood was now oozing, and then she looked up at him, her dark eyes full of disbelief … and questions.
Exactly as he feared were his own.
