The Romanov Cross

Chapter 1

“You okay, Major?”

Slater knew what he looked like, and he knew why Sergeant Groves was asking. He had taken a fistful of pills that morning, but the fever was back. He put out a hand to steady himself, then yanked it back off the hood of the jeep. The metal was as hot as a stove.

“I’ll survive,” he said, rubbing the tips of his fingers against his camo pants. That morning, he had visited the Marine barracks and watched as two more men had been airlifted out, both of them at death’s door; he wasn’t sure they’d make it. Despite all the normal precautions, the malaria, which he’d contracted himself a year before on a mission to Darfur, had decimated this camp. As a U.S. Army doctor and field epidemiologist, Major Frank Slater had been dispatched to figure out what else could be done — and fast.

The rice paddies he was looking at now were a prime breeding ground for the deadly mosquitoes, and the base had been built not only too close by, but directly downwind. At night, when they liked to feed, swarms of insects lifted off the paddies and descended en masse on the barracks and the canteen and the guard towers. Once, in the Euphrates Valley, Slater had seen a cloud of bugs rising so thick and high in the sky that he’d mistaken it for an oncoming storm.

“So, which way do you want to go with this?” Sergeant Groves asked. An African-American as tough and uncompromising as the Cleveland streets that he hailed from—“by the time I left, all we were making there was icicles,” he’d once told Slater — he always spoke with purpose and brevity. “Spray the swamp or move the base?”

Slater was debating that very thing when he was distracted by a pair of travelers — a young girl, maybe nine or ten, and her father — slogging through the paddy with an overburdened mule. Nearly everyone in Afghanistan had been exposed to malaria — it was as common as the flu in the rest of the world — and over the generations they had either died or developed a rudimentary immunity. They often got sick, but they had learned to live with it.

The young Americans, on the other hand, fresh from farms in Wisconsin and mountain towns in Colorado, didn’t fare as well.

The girl was leading the mule, while her father steadied the huge baskets of grain thrown across its scrawny back.

“I’m on it,” Private Diaz said, stepping out from the driver’s seat of the jeep. His M4 was already cradled in his hands. One thing the soldiers learned fast in the Middle East was that even the most innocuous sight could be their last. Baskets could carry explosives. Mules could be time bombs. Even kids could be used as decoys, or sacrificed altogether by the jihadis. On a previous mission, Slater had had to sort through the rubble of a girls’ school in Kandahar province after a Taliban, working undercover as a school custodian, had driven a motorcycle festooned with explosives straight into the classroom.

“Allahu Akbar!” the janitor had shouted with jubilation, “God is great!” just before blowing them all to kingdom come.

For the past ten years, Slater had seen death, in one form or another, nearly every day, but he still wasn’t sure which was worse — the fact that it could still shock him or the fact that on most days it didn’t. Just how hard, he often wondered, could a man let his heart become? How hard did it need to be?

The girl was looking back at him now with big dark eyes under her headscarf as she led the mule out of the paddy and up onto the embankment. The father switched at its rump with a hollow reed. The private, his rifle slung forward, ordered them to stop where they were. His Arabic was pretty basic, but the hand gesture and the loaded gun were universally understood.

Slater and Groves — his right-hand man on every mission he had undertaken from Iraq to Somalia — watched as Private Diaz approached them.

“Open the baskets,” he said, making a motion with one hand to indicate what he wanted. The father issued an order to his daughter, who flipped the lid off one basket, then waited as the soldier peered inside.

“The other one, too,” Diaz said, stepping around the mule’s lowered head.

The girl did as he ordered, standing beside the basket as Diaz poked the muzzle of his gun into the grain.

And just as Slater was about to order him to let them move along — was this any way to win hearts and minds? — a bright ribbon of iridescent green shot up out of the basket, fast as a lightning bolt, and struck the girl on the face. She went down as if hit by a mallet, writhing on the ground, and the private jumped back in surprise.

“Jesus,” he was saying over and over as he pointed the rifle futilely at the thrashing body of the girl. “It’s a viper!”

But Slater already knew that, and even as her father was wailing in terror, he was racing to her side. The snake still had its fangs buried in her cheek, secreting its venom, its tail shaking ferociously. Slater pulled his field knife from its scabbard — a knife he normally used to cut tissue samples from diseased cadavers — and with the other hand grabbed for the viper’s tail. Twice he felt its rough mottled surface, strong as a steel pipe, slip through his fingers, but on the third try he held it taut and was able to slice through the vertebrae. Half of the snake came away with a spill of blood, but the head was still fixed in its mortal bite.

The girl’s eyes were shut and her limbs were flailing, and it was only after Groves used his own broad hands to hold her down that Slater was able to pinch the back of the dying viper’s head and pull the fangs loose. The snake’s tongue flicked like a whip, but the light in its yellow eyes was fading. Slater pinched harder until the tongue slowed and the eyes lost their luster altogether. He tossed the carcass down the embankment, and Diaz, for good measure, unleashed a burst of shots from his rifle that rolled the coils down into the murky water.

“Get me my kit!” Slater hollered, and Diaz ran to the jeep.

Groves — as burly as a fullback but tender as a nurse — was crouched over the girl, examining the wound. There were two long gashes in her cheek, bloody smears on her tawny skin. The venom, some of the most powerful in the animal kingdom, was already coursing through her veins.

Her father, wailing and praying aloud, rocked on his sandaled feet. Even the mule brayed in dumb alarm.

Diaz handed Slater the kit, already open, and Slater, his hands moving on automatic pilot, went about administering the anticoagulant and doing his best to stabilize her, but he knew that only the antivenin, in short supply these days, could save the girl’s life.

And even then, only if it was used in the next hour.

“Round up the nearest chopper,” he said to Diaz. “We need to get this girl to the med center.”

But the soldier hesitated. “No offense, sir, but orders are that the med runs are only for military casualties. They won’t come for a civilian.”

Groves looked over at Slater with mournful eyes and said, “He’s right. Ever since that chopper was shot down three days ago, the orders have been ironclad. EMS duties are out.”

Slater heard them, but wondered if they were really prepared to stand by and let the girl die. Her father was screaming the few words of English he knew, “Help! U.S.A! Please, help!” He was on his knees in the dust, wringing his woven cap in his hands.

Her little heart was beating like a trip-hammer and her limbs were convulsing, and Slater knew that any further delay would seal the girl’s fate forever. Someone this size and weight, injected with a full dose of a pit viper’s poison — and he had seen enough of these snakes to know that this one had been fully mature — could not last long before her blood cells began to disintegrate.

“Keep her as still as you can,” he said to Groves and Diaz, then ran back to the jeep, grabbed the radio mike, and called it in to the main base.

“Marine down!” Slater said, “viper bite. Immediate — I say, immediate — evac needed!”

He saw Groves and the private exchange a glance.

“Your coordinates?” a voice on the radio crackled.

The coordinates? Slater, the blood pounding in his head from his own fever, fumbled to muster them. “We’re about two klicks from the Khan Neshin outpost,” he said, focusing as hard as he could, “just southwest of the rice paddies.”

Groves suddenly appeared at his side and grabbed the mike out of his hands, but instead of countermanding the major’s order, he gave the exact coordinates.

“Tell ’em they can finish the rations dump later,” Groves barked. “We need that chopper over here now! And tell the med center to get as much of the antivenin ready as they’ve got!”

Slater, his legs unsteady, crouched down in the shade of the jeep.

“You didn’t need to get mixed up in this,” Slater said after Groves signed off. “I’ll take the heat.”

“Don’t worry,” Groves said. “There’ll be plenty to go around.”

For the next half hour, Slater kept the girl as tranquilized as he could — the more she thrashed, the faster the poison circulated in her system — while the sergeant and the private kept a close watch on the neighboring fields. Taliban fighters were drawn to trouble like sharks to blood, and if they suspected a chopper was going to be flying in, they’d be scrambling through their stockpiles for one last Stinger missile. Nor did Slater want to go back to the outpost and ask for backup; somebody might see what was really going on and cancel the mission.

“I hear it!” Groves said, turning toward a low rise of scrubby hills.

So could Slater. The thrumming of its rotors preceded by only seconds the sight of the Black Hawk itself, soaring over the ridgeline. After doing a quick reconnaissance loop, the pilot put the chopper down a dozen yards from the jeep, its blades still spinning, its engine churning. The side hatch slid open, and two grunts with a stretcher leapt out into the cloud of dust.

“Where?” one shouted, wiping the whirling dirt from his goggles.

Diaz pointed to the girl lying low on the embankment between Slater and the sergeant.

The two soldiers stopped in their tracks, and over the loud rumble of the idling helicopter, one shouted, “A civilian?”

The other said, “Combat casualties only! Strict orders.”

“That’s right,” Slater said, tapping the major’s oak leaf cluster on his shirt, “and I’m giving them here! This girl is going to the med center, and she’s going now!”

The first soldier hesitated, still unsure, but the second one laid his end of the stretcher on the ground at her feet. “I’ve got a daughter back home,” he mumbled, as he wrapped the girl in a poncho liner, then helped Groves to lift her onto the canvas.

“I’m taking full responsibility,” Slater said. “Let’s move!”

But when the girl’s father tried to climb into the chopper, the pilot shook his head violently and waved his hand. “No can do!” he shouted. “We’re carrying too much weight already.”

Slater had to push the man away; there wasn’t time to explain. “Tell him what’s going on!” he shouted to the sergeant.

The father was screaming and crying — Diaz was trying to restrain him — as Slater slid the hatch shut and banged on the back of the pilot’s seat. “Okay, go, go, go!”

To evade possible fire, the chopper banked steeply to one side on takeoff, then zigzagged away from the rice paddies; these irrigated areas, called the green zone, were some of the deadliest terrain in Afghanistan, havens for snipers and insurgents. Slater heard a quick clattering on the bottom of the Black Hawk, a sound like typewriter keys clicking, and knew that at least one Taliban fighter had managed to get off a few rounds. The helicopter flew higher, soaring up and over the barren red hills, where the rusted carcasses of Soviet troop carriers could be seen half-buried in the dirt and sand. Now it would just be a race against time. The girl’s face was swollen up like she had the mumps, and Slater slipped the oxygen mask onto her as gently as he could. Her ears were like perfect little shells, he thought, as he looped the straps around the back of her head. She took no notice of what was being done, or where she was. She was delirious with the pain and the shock and the natural adrenaline that her body was instinctively pumping through her veins nonstop.

The soldiers stayed clear, strapped into their seats beside the ration pallets they’d been delivering and watching silently as Major Slater treated her. The one with the daughter looked like he was saying a prayer under his breath. But this little Afghan girl was Slater’s problem now, and they all knew it.

By the time the chopper cleared the med center perimeter and touched down, her eyes had shut, and when Slater lifted the lids, all he could see was the whites. Her limbs were pretty still, only occasionally rocked by sudden paroxysms as if jolts of electricity were shooting through her. Slater knew the signs weren’t good. It would have been different if he’d had the antivenin with him in the field, but it was costly stuff, in short supply, and it deteriorated rapidly if it wasn’t kept refrigerated.

Some of the staff at the med center looked surprised at the new admission — a local girl, when they’d been expecting a Marine — but Slater issued his orders with such conviction that not a second was lost. Covered with dirt and sweat, his fingers stained with snake blood, he was still clutching her limp hand as she was wheeled into the O.R., where the trauma team was ready with the IV lines.

“Careful when you insert those,” Slater warned. “The entry points are going to seep from the venom.”

“Major,” the surgeon said, calmly, “we know what we’re doing. We can take it from here.”

But when he tried to let go, the girl’s fingers feebly squeezed his own. Maybe she thought it was her dad.

“Hang in there, honey,” Slater said softly, though he doubted she could hear, or understand, him. “Don’t give up.” He extricated his fingers, and a nurse quickly brushed him aside so that she could get at the wound and sterilize the site. The surgeon took a syringe filled with the antivenin, held it up to the light, and expressed the air from the plunger.

Slater, knowing that he was simply in the way now, stepped outside and watched through the porthole in the swinging doors. The doctor and two nurses went through their paces with methodical precision and speed. But Slater was afraid that too much time had passed since the attack.

A shiver hit him, and he slumped into a crouch by the doors. This was the worst recurrence of the malaria he’d had in months, and the sudden blast of air-conditioning made him long for a blanket. But if he let on how bad it was, he could find himself restricted to desk duty in Washington — a fate he feared worse than death. He just needed to get back to his bunk, swallow some meds, and sweat it out for a day or two. The blood was beating in his temples like a drum.

And it got no better when he heard the voice of his commanding officer, Colonel Keener, bellowing from down the hall. “Did you call in this mission, Major Slater?”

“I did.”

“You did, sir.” Keener corrected him, glancing at a printout in his hand. “And you claimed this was a Marine? A Marine casualty?”

“I did,” he replied, “sir.”

“And you’re aware that we’re not an ambulance service? That you diverted a Black Hawk from its scheduled, combat-related run, to address a strictly civilian matter?” His frustration became more evident with every word he spoke. “Maybe you didn’t read the advisory — the one that was issued to all base personnel just two days ago?”

“Every word.”

Slater knew his attitude wasn’t helping his case, but he didn’t care. Truth be told, he hadn’t cared about protocols and orders and commands for years. He’d become a doctor so that he could save lives, pure and simple; he’d become an epidemiologist so that he could save thousands of lives, in some of the world’s worst places. But today, he was back to trying to save just one.

Just one little girl, with perfect little ears. And a father, off somewhere in Khan Neshin, no doubt begging Allah for a miracle … a miracle that wasn’t likely to be granted.

“You know, of course, that I will have to report this incident, and the AFIP is going to have to send out another staffer now to decide what to do about our malaria problem,” the colonel was saying. “That could take days, and cost us American lives.” He said the word “American” in such a way as to make it plain that they were all that counted in this world. “You may consider yourself off duty and restricted to the base, Doctor, until further notice. In case you don’t know it, you’re in some very deep shit.”

Slater had hardly needed to be told. While Keener stood there fuming, wondering what other threat he could issue, the major fished in his pocket for the Chloriquine tablets he was taking every few hours. He tried to swallow them dry, but his mouth was too parched. Brushing past the colonel, he staggered to the water fountain, got the pills down, then held his head under the arc of cool water. His scalp felt like a forest fire that was finally getting hosed down.

The surgeon came out of the O.R., looked at each one of them, then went to the colonel’s side and said something softly in his ear. The colonel nodded solemnly, and the surgeon ducked back inside the swinging doors.

“What?” Slater said, pressing his fingertips into his wet scalp. The water was running down the back of his neck.

“It looks like you blew your career for nothing,” Keener replied. “The girl just died.”

All that Slater remembered, later on, was the look on the colonel’s face — the look he’d seen on a hundred other official faces intent only on following orders — before he threw the punch that knocked the colonel off his feet. He also had a vague recollection of wobbling above him, as Keener lay there, stunned and speechless, on the grimy green linoleum.

But the actual punch, which must have been a haymaker, was a mystery.

Then he returned to the fountain and put his head back down under the spray. If there were tears still in him, he thought, he’d be shedding them now. But there weren’t any. They had dried up years ago.

From the far end of the hall, he could hear the sound of raised voices and running boots as the MPs rushed to arrest him.

Chapter 2

The waters off the northern coast of Alaska were bad enough in summer, when the sun was shining around the clock and you could at least see the ice floes coming at you, but now — in late November, with a squall blowing in — they were about the worst place on earth to be.

Especially in a crab-catching tub like the Neptune II.

Harley Vane, the skipper, knew he’d be lucky just to keep the ship in one piece. He’d been fishing in the Bering Sea for almost twenty years, and both the crabbing and the storms had gotten worse the whole time. The crabbing he could figure out; his boat, and a dozen others, kept returning to the same spots, depleting the population and never giving it enough time to replenish itself. All the skippers knew they were committing a slow form of suicide, but nobody was going to be the first to stop.

And then there was the weather. The currents were getting stronger and more unpredictable all the time, the winds higher, the ice more broken up and difficult to avoid. He knew that all that global warming stuff was a load of crap — hadn’t the snowfall last year been the highest in five years? But judging from the sea-lanes, which were less frozen and more wide open than he had ever seen them, something was definitely afoot. As he sat in the wheelhouse, steering the boat through a turbulent ocean of fifteen-foot swells and hunks of glacier the size of cars, he had to buckle himself into his raised seat to keep from falling over. The rolling and pitching of the boat was so bad he considered reaching for the hand mike and calling the deckhands inside, but the Neptune’s catch so far had been bad — the last string of pots had averaged less than a hundred crabs each — and until their tanks were full, the boat would have to stay at sea. Back onshore, there were bills to pay, so he had to keep slinging the pots, no matter what.

“You want some coffee?” Lucas said, coming up from below with an extra mug in his hand. He was still wearing his yellow anorak, streaming with icy water.

“Christ Almighty,” Harley said, taking the coffee, “you’re soaking the place.”

“Yeah, well, it’s wet out there,” Lucas said. “You oughta try it sometime.”

“I tried it plenty,” Harley said. He’d worked the decks since he was eleven years old, back when his dad had owned the first Neptune and his older brother had been able to throw the hook and snag the buoys. And he remembered his father sitting on a stool just like this, ruling the wheelhouse and looking out through the row of rectangular windows at the main deck of the boat. The view hadn’t changed much, with its ice-coated mast, its iron crane, its big gray buckets for sorting the catch. Once that boat had gone down, Harley and his brother Charlie had invested in this one. But unlike the original, the Neptune II featured a double bank of white spotlights above the bridge. At this time of year, when the sun came out for no more than a few hours at midday, the lights threw a steady but white and ghostly glow over the deck. Sometimes, to Harley, it was like watching a black-and-white movie down there.

Now, from his perch, where he was surrounded by his video and computer screens — another innovation that his dad had resisted — he could see the four crewmen on deck throwing the lines, hauling in the pots with the crabs still clinging to the steel mesh, then emptying the catch into the buckets and onto the conveyor belt to the hold. An enormous wave — at least a twenty-five-footer — suddenly rose up, like a balloon inflating, and broke over the bow of the boat. The icy spray splashed all the way up to the windows of the wheelhouse.

“It’s getting too dangerous out there,” Lucas said, clinging to the back of the other stool. “We’re gonna get hit by a rogue wave bigger than that one, and somebody’s going overboard.”

“I just hope it’s Farrell, that lazy son of a bitch.”

Lucas took a sip of his own coffee and kept his own counsel.

Harley checked the screens. On one, he had a sonar reading that showed him what lay beneath his own rolling hull; right now, it was thirty fathoms of frigid black water, with an underwater sea mount rising half that high. On the others, he had his navigation and radar data, giving him his position and speed and direction. Glancing at the screens now, he knew what Lucas was about to say.

“You do know, don’t you, that you’re going to run right into the rock pile off St. Peter’s Island if you don’t change course soon?”

“You think I’m blind?”

“I think you’re like your brother. You’ll risk the whole damn boat to catch a full pot of crab.”

Although Harley didn’t say anything, he knew Lucas was right — at least about his brother. And about his dad, too, for that matter, may the old bastard rest in peace. There was a streak of crazy in those two — a streak that Harley liked to think he had avoided. That was why he was skipper now. But it didn’t mean he liked to be told what to do, much less by some college-boy deckhand who’d done maybe two or three seasons, max, on a crab boat. Harley stayed the course and waited for Lucas to dare to say another thing.

But he didn’t.

Down on the deck, Harley could see Kubelik and Farrell pulling up another pot — a steel cage ten feet square — this one brimming with crabs, hundreds of them scrabbling all over each other, their claws flailing, grasping at the mesh, struggling to escape. This was the first full pot Harley had seen in days, packed with keepers. When the bottom was dropped open, the crabs poured out onto the sorting counter, and the crewmen quickly went about throwing them into buckets, down the hole, or — in the case of those too mutilated or small to use — whipping them back into the ocean like Frisbees.

Harley didn’t care how close to St. Peter’s he got. If this was where the damn crabs were, this was where he was going.

For the next half hour, the Neptune II steamed ahead, throwing strings of pots and bucking the increasingly heavy seas. A chunk of ice broke off the crane and plummeted onto the deck, nearly killing the Samoan guy he’d hired in that waterfront bar. But every time Harley heard one of the deckhands shout into the intercom, “290 pounds!” or “300!” he resolved to keep on going. If this could just keep up, he could return to Port Orlov in a couple of days and not hear a word of bitching from his brother.

And then, if things really went his way, maybe he’d be able to convince Angie Dobbs to go someplace warm with him. L.A., or Miami Beach. He knew that he wasn’t enough of a draw all by himself — ten years ago, Angie had been runner-up for Miss Teen Alaska — but if he could promise her a free trip out of this hellhole, he figured she’d take it. And maybe even give him some action just to be polite. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been around — Christ, half the town claimed to have had her, and Harley had long felt unfairly overlooked.

“Skipper!” he heard over the intercom. Sounded like Farrell, probably about to complain about the length of the shift.

“What?” Harley said, unhappy at the break in his reverie.

“We got something!” he shouted over the howling wind.

“Yeah, I’ve been watching. You got the best damn catch of the season.”

“No,” Farrell said, “no, take a look!”

And now, lifting himself up from his seat to get a better view of the deck, Harley could see what Farrell, the hood thrown back on his yellow slicker, was wildly pointing at.

A box — big and black, with icy water cascading down its sides — was tangled in the hooks and lines, and with the help of a couple of the other crew members, it was being hauled over the railing. What the hell …

“I’ll be right down!” Harley called before turning to Lucas and telling him to hold the boat in position. “And do not fuck with the course.”

Harley grabbed his anorak off a hook on the wall. As he barreled down the narrow creaking stairs, he pulled a pair of thermal, waterproof gloves out of the pocket and wrestled them on. Just a few minutes out on deck unprotected and your fingers could freeze like fish sticks. Yanking the hood up over his head, he pulled the sliding door open, and was almost blown back into the cabin by the driving wind.

Forcing his way outside, the door slamming back into its groove behind him, he plowed up the deck with one hand clinging to the inside rail. Even in the gathering dusk, he could see, maybe three miles to starboard, the ragged silhouette of St. Peter’s Island sticking up out of the rolling sea. That one island, with its steep cliffs and rocky shoals, had claimed more lives than any other off the coast of Alaska, and he could see why even the native Inuit had always given it a wide berth. For as long as he could remember, they had considered it an unholy place, a place where unhappy and evil spirits, the ones who could not ride the highways of the Aurora Borealis up into the sky, were condemned to linger on earth. Some said that these doomed souls were the spirits of the mad Russians who had once colonized the island, and that they were now trapped in the bodies of the black wolves that roamed the cliffs. Harley could almost believe it.

“What do we do with it?” Farrell shouted as the great black box swung in the lines and netting overhead.

It was about six feet long, three feet wide, and its lid was carved with some design Harley couldn’t make out yet. The other crewmen were staring at it dumbfounded, and Harley directed the Samoan and a couple of others to get it down and onto the conveyor belt. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to lose it, and whatever might be inside it, he didn’t want the deckhands to find out before he did.

Farrell used a gaffing hook to pull the box clear of the railing, while the Samoan guided it onto the deck. It landed on one end with a loud thump, and a crack opened down the center of the lid. “Quick!” Harley said, lending a hand and pushing the box toward the belt. Harley guessed its weight at maybe two hundred waterlogged pounds, and once they had securely positioned it on the belt, Harley threw the switch and watched as it was carried the length of the deck, then down into the hold below.

“Okay, show’s over,” he shouted over the wind and crashing waves. “Haul in those pots! Now!”

Then, as the men cast one more look over their shoulders and returned to their labors, he went back toward the bridge. But instead of going up to the pilot’s cabin, he stumbled down the swaying steps to the hold, where he found the engineer, Richter, studying the box.

“What the hell is this?” Richter said. “You know you could have busted the belt with this damned thing?” Richter was usually just called the Old Man, and he’d worked on crab and cod and swordfish boats for nearly fifty years.

“I don’t know what it is,” Harley said. “It just came up in the lines.”

Richter, pulling at his bushy white eyebrows, stood back and surveyed the box, which had come to rest at the end of the now-stationary belt. Mutilated crabs, most of them dead but some of them still twitching, lay all over the wet floor. The overhead lights cast a sickly yellow glow around the huge holding tanks and roaring turbines. The air reeked of gasoline and brine.

“I’ll tell you what I think it is,” Richter said. “This damn thing is a coffin.”

Harley had reluctantly come to the same conclusion. It wasn’t built in the customary shape of a coffin, but the general dimensions were right.

“And you don’t want to bring coffins aboard,” Richter grumbled over the engine noise. “Didn’t your father teach you a goddamned thing?”

Harley was sick to death of hearing about his father. Everybody from Nome to Prudhoe Bay always had a story. He ran a hand over the lid of the box, brushing off some of the icy water, and bent closer to observe the carvings. Most of them had been worn away, but it looked like there was some writing here. Not in English, but in those characters he’d seen on the old Russian buildings that still remained here and there in Alaska. In school, they’d taught him about how the Russians had settled the area first, way back in the 1700s, and then, in one of the colossal blunders of all time, had sold it to the United States after the Civil War. This looked like that kind of writing, and in the dim light of the hold he could also make out a chiseled figure. Bending closer, he saw that it was sort of like a saint, but a really fierce-looking one, with a long robe, a short beard, and a key ring in one hand. He felt a sudden shudder descend his spine.

“Get me a flashlight,” he told the old man.

“What for?”

“Just get me one.”

Moving his head this way and that, trying to avoid throwing a shadow onto the box, Harley peered through the crack in the lid, and when Richter slapped a flashlight into his hand, he pointed the beam into the box and put his nose to the wood.

“God will punish you for what you’re doing.”

But Harley wasn’t listening. Although the crack was very narrow, he caught again a glimpse of something glistening inside the box. Something that glinted like a bright green eye.

Like an emerald.

“The dead oughta be left in peace,” Richter solemnly intoned.

On general grounds, Harley agreed. Still, it didn’t mean they got to hang on to their jewelry.

“What did you see in there?” the Old Man asked, finally overcome by his own curiosity. “Was it a native or a white man?”

“Can’t tell,” Harley replied, snapping off the flashlight and leaning back. “Too dark.” Nobody needed to know about this. Not yet. “Get me a tarp,” he said, and when the old man didn’t budge, he went and got one himself. He threw it over the box, then lashed it in place with heavy ropes. “Nobody touches this until we get back to port,” he said, and Richter conspicuously crossed himself.

Harley climbed the slippery stairs to the deck level, then up to the wheelhouse, where Lucas was still holding the course as ordered. But with Harley back, he couldn’t hold his tongue any longer.

“St. Peter’s Island,” he warned. “It’s less than a mile off the starboard prow. If we don’t steer clear of the rocks right now, they’re gonna rip the shit out of the boat.”

Harley took off his soaking gear and resumed his chair. In the pale moonlight, the island loomed like a gigantic black skull rising up out of the sea. A belt of fog clung to its shores like a shroud.

“Take us ten degrees west,” Harley said, and Lucas spun the wheel as fast as he could.

“What was that thing in the nets?” he asked, as the ship was buffeted by another crest of freezing water.

“You worry about the course,” Harley said, staring out at the dark sea. “Leave the rest to me.”

“I was just thinking, if it’s salvage of some kind, then it has to be reported to—”

The ship suddenly juddered from bow to stern, shaking like a dog throwing off water, and from deep below there was the sound of metal groaning. Lucas nearly slipped off his feet, as Harley clung to the control panel in front of him.

“Ice?” Harley said, though he already knew better. Lucas, wide-eyed and white with fear, said, “Rocks.”

A second jolt hit the ship, knocking it to one side, as waves swept the deck and the crab pots swung wildly in the air. One of them hit the Samoan, who, windmilling his arms in an attempt to regain his balance, was carried by the next surge over the side. Farrell and Kubelik were clinging desperately to the mast, the crane, and the icy ropes.

“Jesus Christ,” Harley said, groping for the hand mike.

Lucas was draped across the wheel as if it were a life preserver.

“Mayday!” Harley shouted into the microphone. “This is the Neptune II, northwest of St. Peter’s Island. Man overboard! Do you read me? Mayday!”

From belowdecks, there was another grinding sound, like sheet metal being crumpled in an auto yard, and the engineer, Richter, was bleating over the intercom. “The bulkhead’s breached! You hear me up there? The pumps won’t handle it!”

“We read you, Neptune,” a Coast Guard voice crackled over the mike. “You have a man overboard?”

“Yes,” Harley said, “and we’re taking on water!” He rattled off their position, then tossed the mike to Lucas, as he slipped off his stool.

“Don’t leave me here!” Lucas said, his voice strained and trembling.

“Handle it!” Harley shouted.

“Where the hell are you going?”

“Down below!” Harley answered, as he lurched toward the gangway. “To check the damage!” And something else.

As Lucas clung to the wheel, Harley scrambled down the steps. But he could tell already, just from the tilt of the deck and the terrible racket in the hold, that the ship was lost. He’d be lucky to escape this night alive. They all would.

Maybe Old Man Richter had been right about that damned box, after all.

Chapter 3

For a court-martial so hastily convened, Major Frank Slater thought things were moving along pretty smoothly.

Seated beside his Army-appointed lawyer — a kid with a blond crew cut and the look of someone who had seen more action in a Hooters than he had on any battlefield — Slater had nothing much to do besides sit there in his nice clean uniform and listen to the damning testimony that he neither denied nor apologized for.

Colonel Keener, whose duties in Afghanistan had been deemed too important to send him back to D.C. for the court-martial, testified against Slater by Skype. The computer monitor had been set up on a trolley in front of the panel of five military judges, and Slater and his attorney, Lieutenant Bonham, listened closely as the colonel related the various crimes and infractions that the major—“an epidemiologist,” Keener explained, as if he were labeling him a child molester, “who has no more business being in the Army than my dog does”—had committed in Khan Neshin.

Assaulting a superior officer — which fell under Article 128 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Slater learned — was a slam-dunk for the prosecution. After Colonel Keener had made his initial statement, he was asked to stand by while corroborating evidence was supplied. That, too, was easy. A nurse had happened to be down the hall in the med center, and although she had been too far away to hear what the colonel had said to Slater just before the altercation, she had been flown back to the States to testify that she had indeed seen the major throw the punch that had decked the colonel.

“Just one punch?” the head judge, a retired general, asked.

“That’s all it took,” the nurse said.

Slater thought he saw a tiny smile crease the general’s lips.

“And then I called the MPs,” the nurse went on.

“And you have no knowledge of what transpired just before?” the judge asked.

“I found out later on,” she replied. “The little girl had died in the O.R., and the doctor — I mean, Major Slater — just lost it.” Hazarding a sympathetic glance at the defendant, she added, “It seemed like a really momentary thing … like he’d tried so hard to save her, and then, finding out that it was all for nothing, it just sort of tipped him over the edge.”

The general made a note, and the four other judges, all officers, followed his lead and did the same. Because it was a general court-martial — more serious in nature than either a summary or special trial — all told there were five officers deliberating, including three other old men and a woman who looked as if she’d swapped her spine for a ramrod. The prosecutor offered into evidence an X-ray, taken at the med center, of a fracture to Colonel Keener’s jawline. When it was shown to Slater for confirmation, he said, “It’s a good likeness.”

“What was that?” the general asked, cupping his ear.

“My client,” Lieutenant Bonham cut in, before handing the X-ray back to the bailiff, “says that he does not contest this exhibit.” Then he shot Slater a murderous look.

But once the assault and battery charge had been duly noted and the evidence entered into the records, the court moved on to what was considered — from the Army’s point of view — the even more serious charges. While punches got thrown all the time, especially in war zones, it wasn’t often that a commissioned officer issued an order that he knew to be a lie, and in so doing jeopardized a helicopter and its crew. When Slater had called in the mission from the rice paddies, he had not only made a False Official Statement (Article 107 of the code) — punishable with a dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for a period of five years — but he had put military property and personnel at risk. (Article 108, among others.)

For Slater, the worst part of the proceeding wasn’t hearing all the charges leveled at him. That much he expected. No, the worst part was having to watch as his friend and right-hand man, Sergeant Jerome Groves, was forced to take the stand. Slater had already ordered Groves to tell the truth and let the blame fall entirely on his commanding officer, where it belonged, but he knew it would be tough. He and Groves had a long history together.

When the prosecutor leaned in and said, “Sergeant Groves, it was you who called in your exact coordinates to the air rescue — is that correct?” Groves hesitated, and Slater nodded at him to go on. No point in denying facts that were indisputable.

“Yes. But Major Slater was simply trying to save the—”

“And you knew,” the prosecutor went on, twirling his eyeglasses in one hand, “that the purpose of the mission was to airlift a civilian, not a member of the armed forces, to a medical facility?”

“All due respect, sir, but it was a kid,” Groves said. “What would you have done? She’d been bitten by a viper and she’d have—”

“I repeat,” the prosecutor interrupted again, “you knew it was not U.S. Army personnel?”

“I did.”

“And yet you remained a party to the deception?”

“On my orders!” Slater barked, lifting himself out of his chair. He was afraid that Groves was not going to muster enough of a defense. “The sergeant only did what I told him to do as his commanding officer. What I ordered him to do.”

Predictably, Slater was ordered to sit down and shut up, in pretty much those words, or he would be removed from his own trial. After he sat back down, Lieutenant Bonham rose from his chair and conducted his own interrogation of the witness, advancing more or less the same argument, but in a legally reasoned, and more dispassionate, manner. Slater had given him explicit instructions to see to it that Groves was exonerated on all charges.

When the sergeant had been dismissed from the witness stand, he slunk by Slater’s chair and muttered, “Sorry, Frank,” as he passed.

“No reason to be,” Slater said.

The general in charge of the tribunal demanded again that there be no communication between the witnesses, and after shuffling his stack of papers, asked the lawyers to proceed to the summation.

The prosecutor, who looked confident that he had a winning hand, went through the litany of charges and all the articles of the military code that Slater had managed to break — even Slater was surprised that he’d managed to commit so many infractions in such a short space of time — before sitting down again with his hands folded over his abdomen like a guy waiting for the soufflé to be served.

Lieutenant Bonham stood up with a lot less confidence and proceeded to make his own arguments in defense of Major Slater. A lot of it was legal jargon, but Slater also had to sit still for a long recapitulation of his own military and medical accomplishments.

“May it be entered into the record that Major Slater enlisted in the United States Army thirteen years ago, with a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, a specialty in tropical and infectious diseases, and an advanced degree in statistics and epidemiology from the Georgetown University Program in Public Health. Those credentials have served him — and this country — exceptionally well in some of the most dangerous and hotly disputed scenes of engagement, ranging from Somalia to Sarajevo. He has earned three special commendations, a Purple Heart, and attained the rank of major, which he holds at the time of this hearing. He is also a victim of an especially chronic strain of malaria, to which he was exposed in the line of duty but which he has never allowed to interfere with the assignments given him by the United States Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, here in Washington, D.C., where he is based. This disease, I would argue, should be considered a mitigating factor for any possible misconduct. Among its symptoms are fevers, hallucinatory episodes, and insomnia — which in and of themselves can contribute to acts of an irrational and impulsive nature. Acts which Major Slater, if he had been wholly in control of his behavior, would never have countenanced, much less committed.”

Slater had to hand it to the kid. It was a very persuasive and well-put summation … even if he hated the part about the malaria. It wasn’t the malaria that made him throw that punch or call in the chopper. Right now, sitting comfortably in the courtroom, his illness at bay and his thoughts as clear as the blue November sky outside, he would have done exactly the same things all over again. And it wasn’t just the little Afghan girl that had done it — she was just the proverbial straw that had broken the camel’s back. This explosion had been building for years. He had seen too much horror, he had witnessed too many deaths, too many barbarities. He had flown to too many desolate corners of the earth, armed with too little to offer in the way of aid or relief. Under a mosquito net in Darfur, by the light of a bright moon, he had finally gotten around to reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and he had quickly understood why that volunteer from Oxfam had so urgently pressed the book on him. Maybe, without his noticing it, he had been turning into the mysterious character, Kurtz, a man who saw so much of the cruelty that man can inflict that it had finally driven him mad.

When Lieutenant Bonham had finished his appeal to the court, the general in charge of the tribunal ordered the room to be cleared so that the judges could deliberate, and Slater was taken back to a holding cell, where he was given a Coke, a bag of chips, and an egg salad sandwich wrapped in plastic.

“You hungry?” he said, sliding the sandwich toward his lawyer.

“Yes, but not that hungry.”

“What do you think our chances are?” he said, popping open the Coke.

“Guilty on all counts — that goes without saying.”

Slater knew he was right, but it still wasn’t exactly pleasant to hear.

“But there’s a lot of mitigating factors in your favor, so the sentencing could be light. And I think Colonel Keener has a certain reputation as a prick. That could help, too.” Gesturing at the bag of chips, Bonham said, “But if you’re not going to eat those …”

“Help yourself.”

Slater pushed his chair back and stared out the narrow window placed high in the wall and covered with chicken wire. It was about a foot and a half square. Nothing bigger than a beagle could have ever made it through.

Bonham checked his BlackBerry for messages, sent a few texts, then put it away. He polished off the potato chips and brushed his fingers clean with a hankie.

“There’s no reason to stick around in here on my account,” Slater said.

The lieutenant said, “Not much I can do anywhere else.”

“How long do you think it’ll be?”

“No telling.” Bonham drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “But maybe I could try to pry some news out of the bailiff.”

“You do that,” Slater said. But before the young lawyer closed the door behind him, he added, “You did a good job.”

Unexpectedly, Bonham glowed. “You think so, Major?”

“Yeah,” Slater said. “You just had a lousy case.”

Alone in the cell, Slater sipped the Coke and waited. A couple of rooms away, his fate was being decided by five judges who’d never even laid eyes on him before. It was a hard thought to hold in his head — that in a matter of minutes, maybe hours, he would learn, from the lips of a retired general, what the dire consequences of his actions might be. Reflecting on it all now, a month later and a world away, Slater couldn’t fault himself for what he did in trying to save the girl’s life. What else could he have done and still been able to face himself in the mirror? As for the punch … well, that was ill-advised, to say the least. And it wasn’t the first time his temper had gotten him into trouble. But whenever he remembered the look on the colonel’s face, the smug tone in which he’d announced the girl’s death … well, his fist went right back into a ball and he wanted to slug him again. Only this time he wanted to stay completely awake and aware the whole time.

The question was, would he still feel that way after serving five years in a military prison?

There was no clock in the holding cell. There was no phone, or TV, or magazine rack. The walls were cinder block, the door was steel. There was nothing for a prisoner to look at, nothing to do, except sit there and contemplate his destiny, which was something Slater had been doing everything he could to avoid.

He slumped forward and put his head down on the table — the wood was worn and scarred and the smell reminded him of his grammar-school classrooms — and closed his eyes. At night he could never sleep, but during the day his weariness often overwhelmed him. A few nights before, he had called his ex-wife, Martha, in Silver Spring. She hadn’t sounded all that happy to hear from him — and that was before he told her why he was stateside again. Once he had, he could hear her sigh, mostly in sympathy, but there was also a note of relief in it — relief that she had severed their relationship when she had, and that this latest act of self-immolation was not her problem anymore.

“Where are they keeping you?” she asked, and he had explained that he was free on his own recognizance until the trial began — though without a passport, he wasn’t going to go very far.

“Do you want me to come and see you?” she said. “Would that help?”

But he really didn’t see how it would. He had only called to let her know what was up, in case she ever got curious about his whereabouts … or the Army notified her that her portion of his Army pension would be severely diminished.

Not that she needed the money.

Her new husband was a partner in a lobbying firm on K Street, and her own dermatology practice was going strong. He had seen ads for it in local magazines, and once or twice he had seen her interviewed on the local news about Botox and collagen. She had gotten what she wanted out of life … and he had got what he deserved. Or so he figured most people would see it.

When his lawyer came back to get him, he didn’t know how much time had passed. He had nodded off, and his cheek bore the impression of the cracks in the wood. At the front of the courtroom, all the judges were sitting stiffly in their chairs, but there was one thing different. In the back, on a plastic chair, was Dr. Lena Levinson, chief of the pathology institute, with a thick folder in her lap and a stern expression on her face. When he nodded in her direction, she glared back at him reproachfully, then answered a call on her cell phone.

“Will the defendant please stand?” the general said, and Slater stood up beside Lieutenant Bonham. He was surprised to find his knees a little weaker than he’d planned.

Clearing his throat, the general continued. “On the several charges brought by this court-martial against Dr. Frank James Slater, Major in the United States Army, the verdict of the court is as follows.” Slater braced himself, as did Bonham, who looked so pale it was all Slater could do not to put an arm around his shoulders.

“Guilty” was the one word Slater distinctly heard, over and over again. But then he had expected that.

It was the sentencing he dreaded.

And that, too, was going as badly as possible. He was stripped of his rank, then dismissed — dishonorably — from the Army. All pay, all allowances, and all benefits were forfeited, now and in perpetuity. It was only when the question of imprisonment came up that the general paused, while Slater waited with bated breath for the hammer to come down.

“On the subject of incarceration, which these charges normally carry, the court has heard outside counsel, and read an amicus curia brief submitted only hours ago.” His eyes flitted toward Dr. Levinson. “In view of Dr. Slater’s long and valuable service to this country, and in the national interest, the court has unanimously elected to forgo all such punishment at this time.”

No prison time? And in the national interest? Slater was stunned, and even Bonham looked confused.

The general read some summary remarks into the record — names, dates, articles of the military code adjudicated — then looked around the room, as if leaving time for any objections before saying, “This court-martial is hereby concluded.”

Slater — suddenly a civilian, even if a disgraced one, after thirteen years — could hardly believe his ears. Bonham was clapping him on the back, and even the general threw him a glance that was less condemnatory than rueful. On his way out, Slater found Dr. Levinson standing beside the door.

“I can only assume,” he said, “that your testimony here today had something to do with my reprieve?”

“It did.”

“Thank you,” he said, from the bottom of his heart. She was a tough old buzzard, but he knew that they had always understood, and appreciated, each other.

“And now we have to talk, Dr. Slater.”

“About the national interest?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “yes.”

Chapter 4

Harley Vane had become what you’d call a local celebrity. All the papers in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington State had carried his miraculous story of courage and survival, and he’d even received some national attention from an assortment of radio shows and a couple of TV stations.

At the hospital, where he’d recuperated for the first three days after his rescue, the nurses had treated him like a rock star, and Angie Dobbs had even come by to visit him. She said his drinks would be free at the Yardarm, and the way she said it made him think something else might be coming his way, too. At last.

This morning, the docs had promised him he’d be allowed to go if his numbers all checked out. Harley knew they would; he felt fine again, and he needed to see his brother Charlie. According to the nurses, Charlie had already come by, just a few hours after the Coast Guard cutter had picked him up, but Harley had been too disoriented to remember anything about it. There was a big blank spot in his memory, and there were plenty of times when he wished it were even bigger.

He remembered all too well barreling down the stairs to the hold. On the way down, he had pulled on a life vest, stuffed a flare in its pocket, then grabbed the emergency fire axe off the wall and stuck its handle in his belt. Water was gushing in from some unseen hole that had been ripped in the hull, somewhere beneath the holding tanks for the crabs. Thousands of them were suddenly loose again, scuttling up the walls, clinging to the ceiling, or paddling around on the rising tide. Old Man Richter was up to his knees in freezing water, trying to get the pumps working again.

“They won’t start!” he shouted. “They won’t start!”

“Get out!” Harley said. “Get out now!”

But Richter turned around and went back to work; he was the kind of guy, Harley knew, who would plan to go down with the ship.

Harley didn’t need that right now. He waded through the icy water, crabs nipping at his boots and thighs, and grabbed Richter by his bony shoulder. “I’m telling you to go on deck — now!”

“You shoulda let me get these serviced before we left port,” Richter said. “I told you they needed work!”

Another wave hit the ship broadside, and Richter tumbled into the water. His hand shot up, and Harley snatched it. He dragged the Old Man onto his feet again, but there were crabs all over him already, their pincers grasping at his wet clothes, or snapping furiously in the air. A big one, pink as bubblegum, was crawling up his chest, and Harley batted it off.

“Get out,” he screamed at the Old Man, “or I’ll drown you myself!” With a hard shove, he sent him toward the stairs. And then he sloshed through the debris to the coffin, still lashed to the conveyor belt. With fingers so cold they were almost numb, he fumbled at the ropes, but then gave up and chopped at them with the axe. The ropes and tarp fell away, and Harley took aim at the rusty hasps holding the lid closed. It took him several swings to knock each one loose, but when the last one went, he stuck the blade of the axe sideways into the groove and pried the lid up. It came up slowly, with a groan, and Harley had to push hard before it opened all the way and fell of its own momentum into the water. There was a splash, then the lid was bobbing like a surfboard around the hold.

The water was up to Harley’s thighs, and he was beginning to freeze. The lights flickered, but they stayed on. Inside the box he saw what looked like a mummy — a petrified face, all teeth and hair, grimacing with empty eye sockets, the hands folded to touch its own shoulders. Still, it was recognizably the corpse of a young man, maybe nineteen or twenty, and dressed in what looked like the frozen remains of a woolen tunic, with a rounded, Cossack-style collar, and black sealskin coat. But around the young man’s neck he saw what he had come for. It was one of those old Russian crosses, the ones with three sideways beams of different lengths, but embedded in it there were several old stones, glinting green in the dim light. He tried to pull it loose, but it was still on its chain. Much as he loathed the idea, there was nothing to do but reach down and lift the corpse’s head. Touching it felt like touching a bag of old shells and crumpled paper; the skin rustled and the skull weighed on his hand like an empty, fragile egg.

But the cross still wouldn’t come loose.

The chain was entangled in the boy’s long brown hair, and it was only after he had yanked at it several times, hard enough that the head was nearly severed from the spine, that it came up and over the crown.

He stuffed it deep into the inner compartment of his anorak, then zipped the pocket firmly closed. A couple of crabs had already clambered over the end of the coffin and spilled onto the corpse. Their claws were shredding the remains of the fabric and probing the hard flesh. One was worrying a toe and would have it loose in no time.

Let ’em have it, Harley thought, and the sooner the better. The water was still rising. It was up to his waist now, and the ship was so canted over that he could barely keep his balance as he reached for the stair railing. He hauled himself up, hand over hand, as the water surged behind him, and as something — hard and persistent — batted at his calves. Glancing back, he saw that the coffin lid, carved with the saint or angel or whatever it was, was floating up the stairs with him, like a faithful hound nipping at his heels.

On deck, everything was chaos. The howling wind was ripping at the lines and the pots, and the lifeboat had already been launched. Fuck you, too, Harley thought, looks like it’s every man for himself tonight. He wondered who had made it on board and who hadn’t. A flare went up from the water, and in its dead-white glow he saw the lifeboat, cradled between two mighty waves off the starboard side. The deckhands were trying to put some distance between themselves and the Neptune, lest they be sucked under when it sank. Harley thought he could make out Farrell at the tiller and Lucas clinging to the oarlocks, but over the wind blasting in his ears he heard a voice — Richter’s — shouting from somewhere down the deck.

The Old Man, in an orange life vest, was clinging to the mast.

Harley couldn’t hear a word he was saying — what could it matter? — but he saw him lift one arm and point out to sea, toward the looming black mass of St. Peter’s Island. It was big as a mountain now, and through the spray and the waves Harley could see the jutting rocks sticking up like spikes and barricades all around its shoreline.

Another flare rocketed into the sky, this one leaving a phosphorescent green trail, and in its light Harley saw the lifeboat spinning around and around in a whirlpool, before it suddenly broke free and was dashed against the rocks. The crew spilled out like jelly beans from a jar, and the splintered timbers of the boat flew in every direction. Before the green light had dissipated, Harley saw the bobbing vests of his deckhands caught in the eddies and the swirls, each one of them being sucked under and lost beneath the angry black tide.

As he looked up at the wheelhouse, a blue computer screen came crashing through a window, and the lights went black. The deck lurched under his feet, and he was sent sprawling into the crab pots. The cages were still full; when the boat went down with the cages still sealed, the captured crabs would have to eat each other until they died.

Harley’s mind was racing, wondering whether to stick with the wreckage of the boat or try making it to the crew cabin to retrieve a raft, when a wave crashed over the bulwarks on the port side and carried him, head over heels, into the ocean. He plunged in an instant into the icy water, the breath nearly knocked from his lungs, the salt stinging his blinded eyes. He was struggling to regain the surface, but the water was churning so hard, he couldn’t tell which way was up. He tried to stay calm enough to let the oxygen in his chest, and the air in his life vest, right him and send him upward again, but it didn’t seem to be working. He panicked and kicked out, pumping his arms. He collided with something, a rocky outcropping, and used it to push himself away. Gasping, he broke the surface of the water, and reaching out in the darkness, clutched something floating nearby. It was wood, and as he grappled it more tightly in his arms, he could feel its rough carvings. And he knew it was the coffin lid.

He managed to pull himself halfway on top of it, then wrapped his arms around its sides. The waves lifted him up and threw him down, over and over again, eventually pushing him through a narrow passageway between the jagged rocks, with the sea boiling all around him. He could barely see where he was going, and his arms were so numb he wondered how much longer he could hang on. But when he felt his knees scraping on the rocks and shells of the shoreline, he somehow managed to stagger to his feet, then struggle through the pounding surf until he reached the beach. There, he collapsed in a shivering heap, with the cross, still lodged in his pocket, poking him in the ribs.

The coffin lid, gleaming in the moonlight, skimmed to a stop on the pebbles and sand.

How long he lay there he didn’t know. Cold and hard as the ground was, it felt like a warm blanket compared to the icy sea. He took deep breaths, coughing out the salt water and the gravel that now clung to his lips, but he knew that if he lay there much longer, he’d die of exposure. Rolling onto his back, he gazed up at the night sky, where even behind the banks of angry, scudding clouds, he could see the dazzling pinpricks of the distant stars. Shaking himself from head to foot like a dog throwing off water, he sat up and stared out at the sea. There was no sign of the Neptune II, or any of the other crewmen. Even their flares had long since disappeared from the sky. Harley prayed that the Coast Guard was on its way.

Fumbling at the straps of the life vest, he yanked its straps off, then groped for the flare he’d stuck in its pocket. He didn’t want to use it too soon, but he didn’t know how long he could survive in the state he was in, either. He searched the length of the beach for any kind of shelter, but there was nothing. Not even a rock large enough to huddle behind.

The only alternative was to scale the cliff somehow, and that would have been impossible even in broad daylight, with all the proper ropes and gear. Harley had always harbored nothing but scorn for climbers. It was bad enough to risk your ass crabbing, but at least there was money in it. Why do it for the glory of getting to the top of a pile of rocks?

The wind tore at the sleeves of his anorak, and the ocean spray forced him to shield his eyes and squint. He strained to hear anything besides the roaring of the wind, to see any sign of rescue.

But there was nothing. He was going to freeze to death on this island — all those fucking legends were true, and he was going to wind up as one more of the miserable souls that haunted the place — and to make it even worse, he was going to die with the first piece of good luck he’d had in ages jammed into the pocket of his anorak. He could feel the Russian cross, with the emeralds embedded in it, prodding his ribs.

Hunching down to get out of the wind and placing the flare between his soaking boots, he reached inside the coat, fumbling at the zipper, and took the cross out. It was a heavy thing, silver, with emeralds on one side, and, when he turned it over, some sort of inscription on the back. Even without knowing anything more about it, Harley knew it would be worth a fortune. Charlie would know, or Voynovich in Nome.

If they ever found his body, that is.

Once more, he scanned the night sky, and this time, far in the distance, he thought he saw a flashing light.

Just for a second.

A flashing red light.

But then he saw it again.

He rammed the cross back in his pocket and leapt to his feet with the flare in hand. He ripped the safety cap off, held it high, and yanked the cord.

The flare rocketed up into the sky, leaving a trail of white sparks, before blossoming — high, high above him — in a shower of green phosphorescent light that bathed the beach in its glow.

“Here!” Harley shouted, jumping up and down and waving his arms. “Here!” He knew he couldn’t be seen, he knew he couldn’t be heard, but it was enough to get the blood pumping again. “I’m here!”

There was no way they could have missed the flare, he told himself, no way in the world.

And even as the green streamers began to break up and scatter in the wind, Harley saw the red lights turning toward the island, and heard — or was he just imagining it? — the roar of the helicopter’s propellers.

Good Christ, he was going to make it. Maybe that cross was his good-luck charm, after all.

Or not.

No sooner had his heart lifted than he caught, out of the corner of his eye, a movement at the far end of the beach.

Just a shadow, prowling onto the sand and gravel.

The green glow in the sky was nearly gone, but in its fading light he saw the shadow joined by another. They were moving low, and slowly, as if drawn by the flare, but beginning to find something of even greater interest.

Harley stared out to sea again and saw the chopper’s lights coming closer.

Then looked back down the crescent of the beach, and saw that the two shadows had become three.

Then four.

His impulse was to shout and make himself plain to the Coast Guard pilot, but at the same time he dreaded attracting the attention of the beasts only a few hundred yards away. He knew what they must be — the black wolves indigenous to the island.

Or, if you believed the stories, the lost souls of the long-dead Russians.

He didn’t know what to do, but instinctively ran toward the pounding surf line. If he had to, he’d wade back into the sea and try to cling to one of the nearest rocks. Wolves weren’t swimmers.

But they were trackers, and as he watched in horror, they appeared to pick up his scent and raise their snouts to the wind. Harley searched for a weapon. The coffin lid lay nearby, but he could barely lift it, much less wield it in a fight. He pried a stone loose from the beach, and then another, and gripped them tightly in his hands.

The helicopter was hovering closer, but clearly feared getting its blades too close to the cliff, especially in such a driving wind.

A blazing white searchlight suddenly swiveled in his direction, sweeping first the rocks and shoals, then arcing toward the beach and centering on the coffin lid. Harley ran into its beam, waving and screaming, and a booming voice, distorted by the wind, said, “We see you!”

They were the best three words Harley had ever heard.

But glancing down the beach, he could see that the wolves had seen him, too.

“Move as far from the cliffs as you can!”

The spotlight still trained on him, Harley splashed into the water up to his ankles.

A wire basket was being lowered from the chopper, swinging on the end of a long, thick, nylon cord. The cord was unspooling rapidly, dropping the basket like a spider skittering down its own web.

But not as fast as Harley wanted it to. The wolves were picking up speed, scrabbling across the slick rocks and wet sand.

“Come on, for Christ’s sake!” Harley shouted. “Come on!”

The basket was swinging wildly, caught in the crosscurrents whirling around the beach.

The lead wolf was running headlong now — how could it have missed him framed in the spotlight like he was? — and Harley was racing back and forth trying to figure out where the basket would come down.

“Drop it!” he screamed. “Drop it!”

The basket swung like a pendulum just above his head, but when Harley jumped, his heavy boots stuck in the mud and sand.

The basket moved away, and the wolf pack got closer. The leader was splashing along the shoreline.

Harley kicked his feet free of the sand, and when the basket swung back, he leapt again, and this time he was able to grab the mesh of the basket.

“Strap yourself in!” he heard from above. “And hold on tight!”

Harley didn’t need to be told to hold on tight. He slammed his butt into the basket, threw the strap around his waist and fastened its buckle to the clamp, then clutched the rope for dear life.

The leader of the pack lunged at him just as Harley felt the winch tighten and the basket lift. He kicked a boot out and caught the wolf on its snarling muzzle. The basket swung out over the surf as the chopper maneuvered away from the cliffs.

Harley saw the rocky beach fall away beneath him, the wolf pack, denied their prey, milling around the coffin lid now. Close, but no cigar, he thought with jubilation.

Up, up he went, swinging in the frigid air, the wolves and the beach itself disappearing in the darkness. But just before he was gathered into the belly of the helicopter, he thought he glimpsed, on the top of the island’s highest cliff, a yellow light, like a lantern, hovering in the gloom.

Chapter 5

“Glad you could make it,” Dr. Levinson said, as Slater slunk into the conference room twenty minutes late.

Considering everything he owed her, the last thing he wanted to do was to be late to the first meeting she’d requested since the trial. “Sorry, but I had some trouble at the gate.”

Trouble he should have seen coming. Monday-morning traffic in D.C. was always bad, but today was the first time since his court-martial that he’d tried to enter the Walter Reed Army Medical Center through the STAFF ONLY gate on Aspen Street. His officer status, he learned, had already been revoked — the Army could be efficient as hell when they wanted to be — and though the guards knew him well, they had been obliged to hold him for clearance before letting him pass. Especially as he was attached to the AFIP — the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology — where some of the country’s most highly classified work on deadly contagions and biological warfare was done. Dr. Slater, as he was now simply known, was given a day pass, a new decal for his windshield, and instructions to enter the grounds through the Civilian Employee Gate on 16th Street from now on.

The soldier at the gate said, “Sorry, sir,” as he finally raised the crossbar.

And Slater said, “No reason to be — and no reason to call me sir anymore, either.”

“No … Doctor.”

Slater drove his government-issue Ford Taurus onto the huge campus, wondering when the car would be repossessed, then looped past several of the other buildings, including the old Army Medical Museum (now the National Museum of Health and Medicine), before parking in his reserved spot on the A level of the institute’s garage. They couldn’t take that away from him — he did still have a job as a senior epidemiologist for the Division of Infectious and Tropical Disease Pathology. And according to Dr. Levinson, his expertise was now required on a subject of national interest.

At the moment, however, all he saw was a conference table, with Dr. Levinson squinting hard at an open laptop in front of her.

“How are you feeling?” she said, but it was more than just a courtesy question. “Have you had any recurrences of the malaria?”

“I’m fine,” he said, working to keep his voice even and his gaze level. Shrugging off his overcoat — he’d rushed straight upstairs without stopping at his office — he took a seat at the table. The blue suit he was wearing hung loose on his frame; he’d lost weight in Afghanistan.

“Don’t lie to me, Dr. Slater. It’s important.”

“Whatever you need,” he said, trying to dodge the question, “I am available.”

Whether or not she believed him, or was just too intent on gaining his services to push it any further, he did not know. But leaning back in her chair and surveying him carefully, she said, “We all have a certain number of chips we can call in, and frankly, I used up most of mine at your trial.”

“I understand that,” he said, “and I appreciate it.”

“Good, I’m happy to hear that. Because now I’m going to tell you how you can pay me back.”

“Shoot.”

“We have a problem.”

So far no surprise. Slater’s job was nothing but dealing with problems.

“In Alaska.”

Now that was a surprise. Slater had been dispatched to some far-flung spots, but seldom anywhere in the United States.

“First, I want you to see some things.” She tapped a few keys on her laptop, and a slide appeared on a screen that had lowered behind her. It was a shot of a snowy road, with a long line of telephone poles running along one side, but all of them were teetering at odd angles.

“This shot was taken a few days ago, outside a town called Port Orlov.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“No one has. It’s a tiny fishing village, on the northwest tip of the Seward Peninsula. This shot was taken there, too,” she said, tapping again, and bringing up a picture of an A-frame house that had slipped off its foundation.

“And here’s the Inuit totem pole that has stood in the center of town since 1867, to commemorate the Russian sale of the Alaska territory.” Miraculously, the old wooden column, with faded paint on the faces of eagles and otters, was still standing, but at an angle that reminded Slater of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Plainly, the ground was shifting, but that was a problem for the geologists, was it not?

“Earthquake activity?” he asked, and Dr. Levinson shook her head.

“We’ve checked all the seismological data, and no, that’s not it.”

She tapped again, and a series of shots came up, of mailboxes that had fallen over, of concrete steps that had cracked, of wharves that had buckled.

“It’s climate change,” she said. “The average air temperature’s rising, the offshore currents are getting warmer … and the permafrost is starting to thaw.”

Okay, that sounded like a perfectly reasonable conclusion. But he still didn’t see how any of it fell into his bailiwick.

As if she could guess what he was thinking, Dr. Levinson clicked on the next slide. “And then this turned up,” she said.

At first he thought it was just an old dark door, or maybe an antique dining table, but then he looked more closely and saw that its surface was elaborately carved and depicted a classical figure, maybe a saint, in a flowing robe, and holding a set of keys on a ring. A long crack ran down one side of the wood.

“I assume it’s the top of a coffin,” Slater said, and when she didn’t correct him, he added, “but who’s that on top?”

“St. Peter, holding the keys to Heaven and Hell.”

“Where did it come from?”

“The Coast Guard retrieved it. A fishing boat had pulled it up in the nets, and when the boat hit some rocks and went under, one of the crew was able to hang on to it long enough to get to shore.”

“He sounds like Ishmael.”

“His name’s Harley Vane, and from what I’ve read in the initial reports, he’s a piece of work. He’s claimed the lid as salvage, and he still has it.”

That seemed a bit strange to Slater, but maybe if he’d had occasion to hitch a ride on a coffin lid, he’d feel attached to it, too. “Where’s it from?”

“Our best guess is that it came from the cemetery on a place called St. Peter’s Island, a few miles west of Port Orlov.”

Another slide came up. An aerial shot of a hulking black island, with a bank of fog clinging to its shores.

“The island is nearly impregnable, but a sect of religious zealots, most of them from Siberia, did manage to settle there around 1912.”

“Don’t tell me anyone’s still there,” Slater said, though one look at the forbidding island was enough to make him wonder how anyone could ever have chosen to call it home in the first place.

“No one alive,” Levinson said, and now she leaned forward on the table, her arms folded and her expression grave. She looked at him over the top of her bifocals. “They all died, in the space of a week or two. In 1918.”

The date was a dead giveaway, and now he could see where this had all been going. “The Spanish flu?”

Levinson nodded.

It was all coming together. “So the same disturbances to the ground in Port Orlov are showing up on the island, too.”

She remained silent while he worked it out.

“And as the permafrost thaws, things that were buried are coming to the surface. Things like old caskets.”

“The graveyard was built on a cliff, away from the settlement itself,” she said, filling in another piece. “But now the cliff is giving way.”

And shedding coffins … coffins filled with victims of the flu. “Is the concern,” he said, thinking aloud, “that the Spanish flu virus might still be viable in the frozen corpses?”

“It’s a remote possibility,” she conceded, “but it’s a possibility that we have to deal with, nonetheless.”

As an epidemiologist, Slater did not need to be told what could happen if the Spanish flu was ever released again into the world. In a few short years, the Spanish flu pandemic had swept the globe, and although there were still disputes about the final death toll, the figure of 50 million was well accepted. In his own view, Slater had always thought that the casualty count on the Indian subcontinent had been vastly understated. What was not in dispute was that the Spanish flu had been the most devastating plague ever to hit the human race, and that to this day no one had ever completely figured it out, or discovered a way to combat it. Its victims died the most excruciating of deaths, literally drowning in a froth of their own blood and secretions, and although some of the most thorough research into mapping its genetic structure had been done right here, at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the scientific community was still no closer to a cure.

“And this man Harley Vane,” Slater said, continuing his train of thought. “Was he ever exposed to a body from that coffin?”

“He says no,” Dr. Levinson replied. “He says the lid alone came up in the nets.” She said it as if she wasn’t sure if she believed it. “And all the other crew members died at sea.”

A slab of wood, even one that had been part of a coffin a hundred years ago, was not going to carry any contagion; Slater was certain of that. But he was also certain of what Dr. Levinson uttered for the both of them next.

“We need to secure the cemetery,” she declared, “before any more caskets pop up, and we need to do it as expeditiously, and with as little hoopla, as possible. That kind of quick and thorough work is your specialty, Dr. Slater.”

He accepted the compliment without comment. It was a fact.

“And then we will need to exhume one or more of the bodies, take all the usual core samples, and have them meticulously examined and analyzed, under Biohazard 3 protocols.” She pursed her lips, and waited. The only sound was the low hum of the air-filtration system that serviced every inch of the institute’s offices and laboratories. Her words hung in the air, awaiting a response, but there was only one that Slater could give.

“When do I leave?” he asked.

“Yesterday.”

Chapter 6

Her brother’s cries split the night, echoing down the long marble corridors and sweeping staircases of the palace. Anastasia — or Ana, for short — sat up in her bed. Her sister Olga was already awake under her own pile of blankets. This had happened so many times before.

“Poor Alexei,” Ana said. “It’s getting worse again.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Olga said. “There’s nothing any of us can do.”

“Dr. Botkin is here.”

“There’s nothing Dr. Botkin can do, either,” Olga said, wearily. “Go back to sleep.”

Olga lifted one of her plump pillows and stuck her head under it, but Ana could not fall asleep again. Alexei screamed, there were slippered footsteps running in the hall outside, and Ana had to go and see for herself. She got out of bed, put on a padded robe of Chinese silk — a gift from the always generous Emir of Bokhara — and crept out into the hall. When her little brown spaniel, Jemmy, tried to follow, she nudged her back into the bedroom with her foot.

Several doors down, she could see light spilling from the Tsarevitch’s suite of rooms, and she could hear voices in urgent consultation. As the heir to the throne of Russia, Alexei — or Alexis, as he was known outside the family — was the most precious thing in the whole empire, more valuable than Anastasia and her three sisters combined (a point that none of them disputed; it was just a fact of life). But he was also the only one of the five children afflicted with a mortal disease. Hemophilia.

The family had all come to the royal compound only a week before, hoping for some relief from the pressures and public demands of life in the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg. Just fifteen miles from the capital, and reached by a private railway line, Tsarskoe Selo — or, “the tsar’s village”—was comprised of eight hundred immaculately groomed and guarded acres, where peacocks strutted with their brilliant tail feathers fanning out and a pack of tame deer roamed free. Cossacks on horseback, with sabers at their sides, rode the iron-fenced perimeters at all hours, and from every window of the two hundred rooms in the palace a strutting sentry could be seen. An additional garrison of five thousand troops was stationed in the nearest village.

Inside the palace, commissioned by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, every room was adorned with crystal chandeliers and richly colored Oriental carpets; huge, porcelain stoves warmed the chambers and scented the air. Fresh flowers, from as close as the greenhouses on the grounds, or as far away as the imperial gardens in the Crimea, bloomed in vases everywhere. Scores of liveried footmen, in dozens of different uniforms, silently performed every function from opening doors to carrying bowls of smoking incense from one chamber to another; it was the duty of four in particular — Ethiopians whose skin, Ana thought, glowed as hard and bright as ebony — to precede the Emperor Nicholas, or the Empress Alexandra, into any room. The mere sight of one of these fearsome black servants, in his bejeweled turban, brocade vest, and shining scimitar, alerted everyone within that one of Russia’s imperial majesties was about to enter.

Two of these guards were standing now on either side of Alexei’s door, but gave no notice of the fourteen-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia as she scurried into the anteroom. A couple of the young Tsarevitch’s consulting physicians were huddled in thought by the fireplace, stroking their chins nervously, while the inner chamber was dimly lighted by electric lamps with heavy, hooded shades. The Empress sat on the bed, her reddish-gold hair piled in a hasty knot atop her head, her long fingers smoothing her son’s brow; Dr. Botkin, a stout man who had never once been seen in anything but his black frock coat (he had even worn it on the beach at Livadia, to everyone’s amusement), stood beside her, holding a thermometer to the light. He did not look pleased, and when he spoke, Alexandra simply nodded.

Inching into the room, Ana finally could see her younger brother nestled down deep in the bed, with pillows piled up under his head and others raising his swollen leg. The day before, he had taken a spill off a swing — the kind of fall Ana and her sisters would have walked away from with no more than a scraped knee — but for Alexei any such accident could prove fatal. Growing up, Ana and her sisters had been warned a thousand times not to so much as jostle their frail brother. A cut or scratch that looked harmless on the surface could be causing deep and irreparable damage beneath the skin, as the blood — unable to clot — relentlessly hemorrhaged into the joints or muscles. His left leg was swollen now to twice its size, tightly swaddled in gauze that was changed every hour or two as the pooling blood seeped through the pores of his skin. His eyes, normally so bright and mischievous, were sunk deep in his head, surrounded by circles as black as soot.

Their father was in Poland on a diplomatic call, but Ana assumed that, as always, he had received a telegram by now and was hurrying back as fast as the trains and carriages could take him.

The question, each time something like this occurred, was, Would the young heir survive this latest attack?

Ana could not imagine such a terrible day. It would be as if the sky itself had fallen. She did not know how her parents — her mother, in particular — would be able to endure such an event. It was unthinkable … and so she tried, very hard, never to think about it.

“What are you doing up?” her mother said, suddenly taking note of her. “You should be asleep.”

“Will Alexei be all right?”

“Alexei will be all right,” Dr. Botkin put in. “We will see him through. You should go back to bed. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

Her mother smiled faintly, but unconvincingly, and Ana took a step closer to the bed. Her brother saw her and tried to smile, but a sudden paroxysm of pain arched his back, set his eyes back even farther in his head, and caused him to scream in agony. The Empress clapped her hands over her ears, and then, as if ashamed at her reaction, quickly drew them away and reached for her son’s sweaty hands.

The gong on the grandfather clock rang twelve times, and as the last peal faded away there was the sound of sentries’ voices, then the clatter of hooves in the courtyard outside. Ana ran to the window and yanked back the heavy drapes, expecting to see her father the Tsar leaping from his carriage, but instead she saw a burly man in a black cassock, dismounting from a swaybacked mare.

It was Grigori Rasputin, the starets, or holy man, from Siberia.

Her mother, standing beside her and gripping the curtain with white knuckles, said, “Thanks be to God.”

And even Ana offered up a prayer. If anyone could save her brother, it was this monk with the long black beard and the broad hands and the pockmarked face. She had seen him do it before.

Minutes later, he strode into the room, and everyone else in it, even the Tsaritsa, seemed to recede into the shadows. Although his name alone — which meant “dissolute”—should have served as a warning, he was instead treated with civility, and even deference (which was common, as long as Alexandra, his most ardent supporter and friend, was present). His robes were secured by a frayed leather belt, his boots were covered with mud, and he gave off the aroma of a barnyard stall, but it was his eyes that commanded attention. Ana had never seen such eyes as Rasputin possessed — as blue as the Baltic and as penetrating as a dagger. When he presided over the evening prayers of herself and her sisters, she felt that there was nothing he did not know, nothing in her heart he could not see, nothing in her soul he could not forgive. And though he was roughly affectionate with all of the siblings, Ana had always felt that there was a unique bond between the two of them.

“You are the youngest sister,” he had once confided to her, “but it is you to whom a special destiny is granted. Even your name — Anastasia — means ‘the breaker of chains.’ Did you know that, my child?”

So she had heard; in her honor, her father had freed some youthful political prisoners on the day of her birth.

But as for what chains she herself would ever break, the monk had never said, and she had never had the courage to ask.

Her mother was drawing the starets toward the bed, and Dr. Botkin diplomatically stepped away. Ana knew that there was no love lost between the doctor and Rasputin, but she also knew that her mother had placed her ultimate faith in the holy man and not the physician. Everyone else knew it, too.

Most of all, Rasputin.

The monk stood at the foot of the bed, towering over the ailing Tsarevitch, and with his eyes raised to heaven, began to murmur a prayer. In one hand, he clutched a heavy pectoral cross — emerald-encrusted and hanging from his neck on a silver chain. Ana had once seen it in the cabinets of her mother’s mauve boudoir, along with the rest of the renowned Romanov jewels.

His beard jutted out like a stiff black beehive, and his words rumbled like the echo of a distant train. Low, and constant, and though Ana could barely make out what he was saying, the sound alone was strangely comforting. She could see her brother’s tortured eyes turning toward Rasputin, and after a minute or two, his moaning ceased, and his breathing appeared to become more regular. It was a transformation she had seen before though neither she, nor anyone else, seemed to know what caused it. Her mother ascribed it to the power of God—“the Lord speaks through Father Grigori”—but the court physicians remained baffled.

Rasputin came around to the side of the bed and clasped the boy’s hands between his own rough paws. “The bleeding will stop,” he said, “the pain will go away.” He stroked the Tsarevitch’s hands, as the Tsaritsa looked on through a flood of her own tears. He repeated these words, again and again, before saying, “You will rest, Alexei. You will rest. And when you wake, you will be better. Your leg will not be so swollen, you will not feel the pain.” He leaned forward, his beard covering the boy’s face and the emerald cross dangling into the bedclothes, to kiss him lightly on his forehead. “And you will sing out for your oatmeal with honey and jam.” He smiled, a smile as crooked as the part that ran down the center of his matted hair, and uttered another prayer under his breath. As he stepped back from the bed, his muddy boots left a puddle on the carpet.

But Alexei wasn’t writhing in pain. He was, miraculously, asleep, and with a silent wave of his arms, Rasputin — as if he were the Tsar himself — ushered them all into the next room.

“You, too, little Ana,” he whispered, draping a hand on the shoulder of her blue silk robe, before closing the doors to the bedchamber behind him. The emerald cross, swinging against his cassock, winked in the glow from the hearth, and on a sudden impulse, she kissed it.

Rasputin said, “Ah, Christ speaks to you, doesn’t he, little one?”

Ana did not know the answer to that, any more than she knew why she had just done what she just did.

But Father Grigori smiled through his broken teeth as if he knew full well.

Chapter 7

Although Dr. Levinson had spoken with a touch of hyperbole, Slater soon discovered that she’d meant what she said. He was instructed to draw up a game plan and risk assessment, a preliminary budget (though Dr. Levinson had made it clear on his way out that cost was to be no object), put together a team of whatever specialists he would require, and have it all on her desk in seventy-two hours. Normally, it was the kind of thing that would have taken weeks, if not months — not only to be put together but to be vetted by everyone else in the chain of command. But again, Dr. Levinson had made it plain that this project would have the highest-priority clearance not only from AFIP, but from the Army, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard, all of which would have to be involved at one stage or another. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had also offered their full cooperation and support. “But I don’t want them meddling,” Levinson had said. “They take a month to make a cup of coffee.”

Dr. Slater had returned to his offices, rolled up his sleeves, and started making out the ideal roster to assist him. He would need a team of people who were as dedicated as they were skilled, and as competent as they were fearless. They would be performing some of the most sensitive and dangerous work imaginable, and under what were sure to be very tricky and adverse conditions. It was one thing to do an autopsy in a state-of-the-art lab; it was altogether another to take organ core samples in an open graveyard, on a freezing island, where the ground beneath your feet could give way at any time. He would have to choose his people very carefully.

First of all, the logistics would be crucial. There would be tons of gear — quite literally — that would have to be brought to the island site. Everything from decontamination tents to jackhammers, generators to refrigerators (even in Alaska). For a job this big and complicated, there was only one man he trusted — Sergeant Jerome Groves, who was due to be redeployed to some hot zone in the Middle East at the end of the week. All things considered, he might be glad to get the call.

Slater put his name at the top of the list.

The next thing he’d need would be that geologist he’d been thinking about earlier. Before Slater and his team put even one shovel into the earth, they would need to use ground-penetrating radar to assess what lay beneath the soil, and to make sure — before doing irreversible damage — that the coffins, and the bodies inside, had not shifted or become separated from each other over the past century. During a typhoid outbreak in Croatia, he had once worked with a Russian who had read the underground water tables as easily as if he were reading a menu in a restaurant. He was attached at the time to the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineralogy, the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but Slater had no idea what he was doing now. Still, Professor Vassily Kozak was the man he wanted, and he added his name to the list.

As for the virology and autopsy work, Slater could take care of most of that himself. But he would still need another pair of hands, and another set of eyes, to assist him in the cemetery, and to help him run the lab. It took him only a few seconds to come up with Dr. Eva Lantos, a virologist with a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and a mind like a steel trap. The last time he’d heard from her, she’d been living in Boston with her latest girlfriend, and working on the mole-rat genome, but if anybody was up for an adventure, it would be Eva.

Slater made a few calls, left a few messages that were, because of the top secret nature of the mission, a lot more cryptic than he’d have liked, and started burrowing through the accompanying paperwork the AFIP had gathered for him. By the time he had written a preliminary request list and sent the memo back to Dr. Levinson’s office, he glanced out the window and saw that it was already dark out; he’d forgotten to have lunch and had somehow powered himself through the day with nothing but black coffee and a packet of trail mix he’d found in his desk. As a doctor — particularly one who suffered from recurring bouts of malaria — he knew perfectly well that he needed to keep to a healthy and well-regulated diet, and do whatever he could to lower his stress levels. But that was a laugh, of course. He had no sooner escaped spending five years in the brig than he’d been posted to an Arctic island on a Level-3 mission. Fishing his pill case out of his pocket, he swallowed a couple of Chloriquine tablets, flicked off the desk lamp, and went down to get something to eat.

Because of the erratic schedules of scientists and researchers, the cafeteria was kept open around the clock, so he grabbed a quick sandwich and a Snapple. A couple of people said hi, and “Weren’t you overseas somewhere?” and he realized, with relief, that the news of his assault on a commanding officer and his subsequent court-martial hadn’t received much play here. The civilians on staff had no idea of its gravity — all they knew about military discipline was what they’d seen on episodes of JAG—and the army personnel were so involved in their own projects and plans, they weren’t concerned with anyone else’s.

He ate alone, and after tossing the sandwich wrapper and the empty bottle into the trash, he considered heading home, but then he thought, to what? An empty apartment? He could always go to the gym and work out, but there was something so forlorn about the gym at night. The fluorescent lights, the acrid odor of sweat that had been building up all day, the weary attendant mopping the locker-room floor. Not to mention all the other guys who, like him, had nowhere better to go.

And even if his body was flagging, his mind was still percolating just fine right now. That was both his blessing and his curse. It always had been. If his brain were equipped with an on/off switch, he had yet to find it. Nights were the worst. His thoughts could take him anywhere and everywhere; it was like a wild ride at an amusement park that never stopped. And right now the roller-coaster car was hurtling him along toward one destination in particular — the AFIP Tissue Repository, housed next door in the archives of the old Army Medical Museum. It had been founded, with his typical foresight and wisdom, by Abraham Lincoln himself — and it hadn’t changed all that much ever since.

The most comprehensive collection of tissue samples in the world, the Repository contained over 3 million specimens — among them pieces of lung tissue from a private at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, the first American soldier who had succumbed to the 1918 flu. Before setting out for the wilds of Alaska, Dr. Slater wanted to see the slides himself and get a look at this ancient enemy he was about to confront.

But when he tried his security card on the main concourse leading to the museum, he found there was a glitch in his clearance — no doubt another problem arising from his military discharge. And though he knew he could get it fixed the next day, that didn’t help him now. He passed the laminated card, which he wore on a chain around his neck, under the scanner one more time, just for luck, and watched as the lights stayed red. A third try he suspected would set off an internal alarm. He waited around in the corridor for a minute or two, hoping to piggyback on someone else going his way, but at this time of night the offices were largely deserted and no one else was around, much less heading over to the gloomy confines of the old museum.

Still, there was another route, and though it was a lot more circuitous, it would allow him to circumvent the particular security system obstructing him now. Going back toward his office, he took a sharp right through the environmental and toxicology wing, descended the fire stairs to the garage level, then walked briskly across the unheated, and nearly empty, garage. Not briskly enough, he thought, as he felt a sudden chill. He picked up the pace, scurrying down a flight of crumbling stairs that opened into a subbasement corridor, originally designed for the discreet unloading of cadavers by horse-drawn carriages in the years following the Civil War.

The hallways here were made of red brick, faded with age, and the lights in the ceiling, each one in a little wire nest, were incandescent bulbs, and low-wattage at that. The doors he passed bore frosted-glass panes, with gold hand lettering and labels that read HISTOLOGY, WAR WOUND RECORDS, or DEPARTMENT OF PALEOPATHOLOGY. It was hard to believe that this warren was still occupied, but Slater knew that the whole Walter Reed complex had long since outgrown its campus, and no nook or cranny was allowed to lie fallow for long.

As he turned the corner toward the Tissue Repository, he came upon the old display cases that had once been part of the public exhibitions. Although they were no longer part of any organized tours, the cabinets exhibited, on dusty shelves behind thick glass, a collection of formaldehyde-filled jars. Some of them dated back to the midnineteenth century, and held specimens of gross physical anomalies — twins conjoined at the torso, or fetuses born with the fused legs and feet of sirenomella victims. Because of their fishlike tails and amphibious eyes, they were named after the mythical sirens, or mermaids, and had seldom survived their birth by more than a day. Now, many decades later, they still floated, silently, intact, and unchanged, in the limbo of their murky jars.

Just inside the doors to the Repository, a night clerk in a crisply pressed tan uniform, his head down and earbuds in place, was typing away on his computer keyboard. He looked up in surprise when Slater entered, quickly yanked the buds, straightened in his chair, and slid a clipboard across the desk for Slater to sign in.

“I’ll need your ID, too,” he said. Slater held out his security card, while the clerk jotted down the number, then checked it online against the name on the register. Slater prayed that a problem wouldn’t crop up, but the clerk nodded, and said, “What can I do for you, sir?”

Slater explained what he was after, but as the clerk started to get up from his chair, he said, “You can stay put. I know my way around in here, and I can get it myself.”

“You sure?” the clerk said, sounding like he’d love to get back to what he’d been doing. Slater caught a glimpse on the computer of some video war game.

“Yes. It won’t take me long.”

And then, inexplicably, the clerk pulled some Kleenex from a box and handed a wad to Slater.

“What’s this for?”

“Pardon my saying so, sir, but you’re sweating.” He gestured at his forehead, and when Slater dabbed at his skin, the tissues did indeed come away damp.

“Thanks,” Slater said, “I guess I was in too big a hurry to get here.”

The clerk shrugged and, surveying the spooky vault, said, “That’ll be a first, sir.”

The Repository was huge, with several chambers interconnecting under brick archways, all of them retrofitted with rows of bright track lights mounted above microscope-equipped workstations. Long aisles were lined with endless rows of metal cabinets, each of them divided into drawers, no deeper than a deck of cards, containing the tissue and bone samples. Organized first by the pathology, then by the organic or anatomical origin, and then again by era, the samples had been gathered and sent to the archives from barracks and battlefields all over the world, and unless size was an issue, the oldest ones in any category were usually deposited in the bottom drawers of each section. It took Slater, who hadn’t been down in these archives for several years, a half hour just to find his way into the right corner of the right room. It was the last chamber in the chain, and like all the others he had passed through, no one else was in it.

Crouching down, he pulled out one drawer, checked the samples, closed it, and opened another. Here, he found what he was looking for. The last remains of Private Roscoe Vaughan, an artillery trainee at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, in 1918 … and the first known Army casualty of what had been dubbed, however inaccurately, the Spanish flu. Forty-three thousand others would follow him to the grave. Though it was little known, during the Great War, more of the doughboys had died from the flu than in combat.

All that was left of the private now was a block of paraffin, no bigger than a crouton, in which the Army surgeon, Captain K. P. Hedgeforth, had embedded slices of lung tissue he had taken from the dead soldier. Preserved in formaldehyde, the block had been dispatched to Washington and kept there in a little brown box on a shelf for nearly eighty years before its deadly secrets had been explored by AFIP scientists.

Slater took the cube, now in a glassine envelope, and several of the slides that had been prepared from its contents back at Camp Jackson, to the examining table at the far end of the room. All of this material had been declared utterly inert, and was used now solely for teaching and historical research purposes. But samples taken from it in 1996, then put through the polymerase chain reaction, had yielded enough information to enable the institute’s pathologists to reconstruct the entire genetic structure of the virus. Unlike this dead source material, the results of those molecular tests were now lodged, under the strictest security precautions, in little vials in a deep freeze in an undisclosed location nearly impossible to access, especially for someone with Dr. Slater’s compromised credentials. For him to get in touch with the origins of the epidemic whose victims’ graves he was about to desecrate, this musty archival material would be the closest he could come.

But something in his gut had told him that he needed to do it. Although epidemiology was often thought to be a cold-blooded discipline, one where its practitioners exercised objectivity and disinterested judgment in the face of appalling realities, Slater had never approached the job that way. He was a fighter, and in order to fully engage in battle, he needed some visceral sense of his enemy.

Though the electricians had done their best, the lighting at this spot was dicey; the brick ceiling was curved like a barrel, and the illumination from the lights mounted overhead was too bright in some spots and too weak in others. Slater found that he had to pull his stool first this way then that in order to keep the shadows from impinging on his work surface. Behind the walls, he could hear the muffled clanging of old pipes.

Private Vaughan had been a “well-nourished” young man, according to one of the documents he’d read that afternoon; another had called him “chubby.” He stood about five feet ten inches, and was, like most of the other infantrymen, eager to get to France before the fighting stopped. He had been trained, in the scrubby dunes around the camp, to maintain and deploy field artillery. But on the morning of September 19, 1918, instead of joining his platoon, he reported to sick bay, complaining of chills and fever. He was suffering from a dry cough, a dull headache, and his face was flushed. Although his heartbeat was regular, his throat was congested, and he said he was having trouble catching his breath. The doctor, who’d seen the flu before, consigned him to a cot.

But this was not like any flu the world had ever encountered.

Over the next few days, Private Vaughan got progressively worse. His fever rose, leaving him delirious much of the time and shivering under a pile of blankets that could never get high enough. His face took on a purplish tinge and his feet turned black. A secondary infection, pneumonia, set in, and his lungs began to fill with mucus. When he tried to speak, bubbles of blood broke on his lips, and while the doctors and nurses looked on in helpless horror, Private Vaughan slowly drowned in his own fluids. At 6:30 A.M. on September 26, he was declared dead.

Private Vaughan was the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

The Spanish flu, so named because it had cut a devastating path through Spain on its way to the New World, would eventually claim the lives of 675,000 American civilians. The body counts in other countries would be immensely higher. And before it had burned itself out, the fate of nations — and the planet itself — would be drastically altered. For those who thought the carnage of the First World War was the worst calamity humanity could endure, the Spanish flu proved them hopelessly mistaken.

Slater looked at the little cube of tissue-impregnated paraffin — once a chunk cut from a candle — and marveled at the devastation that it represented. Powering up the microscope, he slid one of the original slides, prepared by Dr. Hedgeforth, into view; the glass was so much thicker than current slides that he had to lift the eyepiece and do a bit of juggling to make it feasible.

He bent his head, made a few adjustments to the magnification, and observed a pale yellow background — a thin sliver of the paraffin — and in its center a dark smudge, like a crumb of burned toast on a pat of butter.

That smudge was a tiny piece of the private’s left lung, which had been so sodden and engorged with blood that Dr. Hedgeforth had said it looked like a slab of liver.

Even after all these years, the slides and candle wax gave off a whiff of formaldehyde, and the scent took Slater back to dissection labs and all-nighters in med school. As he studied the slides, and adjusted the magnification, he was able to bring out, in one of the last, a clearer view not only of the amorphous cells, faintly lavender and forever fixed in their positions, but fragments of the deadly virus that resembled bits of barbed wire. It was, he thought, like looking at an ancient battlefield — a place of death and destruction. You were looking back in time to something that had ended long ago but whose impression was even now unaltered. It was news from a world that had ceased to exist … news conveyed, in this instance, by a young soldier whose very essence had returned to the stars.

How long Slater stayed at it, he hardly knew. He lost himself in his research and his thoughts, the silence around him broken only by the occasional, distant clang of the heating pipes behind the old brick walls. In his own way, he was girding himself for combat. The enemy was right here, safely vanquished and preserved beneath the glass slide, but it was the same foe he would soon confront in the Arctic … though there, all bets would be off.

His thoughts had become cloudy — and he might even have dozed off on his stool for a few seconds — when he became aware that there was someone in the archway behind him. He slowly turned his head. One of the track lights hit him square in the eyes, and he had to raise one hand to shield his gaze from the glare.

For a split second, it was as if he was looking at the dead doughboy whose tissues he had been studying … but then the young man in the uniform spoke.

“We’re closing up, sir,” the night clerk said. “The archives open again at eight A.M.”

Slater nodded, then removed the last slide from the microscope, put the paraffin cube back into its glassine envelope, and slipped off his stool. He wobbled for a moment, but he ascribed that to having sat in one position for too long, and a precarious position to boot. He just needed to get the sample and the slides back in the drawer, go home, and get a good night’s rest.

Even the empty apartment seemed beckoning now.

Making his way under the archways, he felt an unexpected draft at his back and had to control the impulse to shiver as he passed the clerk, standing at the door with a set of keys dangling in one hand. It was only when he had rounded the corner and was safely out of the clerk’s sight that Slater dared to take his pill case from his pocket and, while leaning up against the redbrick wall of the corridor outside, quickly down a couple of the antimalarial pills dry.

Physician, he thought, with his eyes closed and his head spinning, heal thyself.

But when he opened his eyes again, his gaze was met by the silent stare of the siren baby, forever swimming in its formaldehyde jar. Would the Russian corpses, he wondered, be so well and safely preserved?

Chapter 8

Harley Vane had been telling his story for days, but he was fast running out of new people to tell it to. By now, everyone had heard about how he had been out on deck overseeing the retrieval of the old casket, while Lucas Muller, that college boy, had altered the course of the boat to carry it too close to the rocks off St. Peter’s Island.

“I never should have left him alone at the wheel,” Harley had mused aloud to a reporter for the Barrow Gazette, “but I always liked to give a kid a chance.”

He’d also recounted how, after the boat had hit the rocks, he had single-handedly carted Richter the engineer up from the hold—“the old man was drowning in a sea of crabs”—and tried to get him into the lifeboat, only to find that the crew had already launched it. Shaking his head, he had told the local reporter, “If they’d just waited, I could have gotten them all out of there alive.”

It was only when he had assured himself that no one else was still aboard, and the Neptune II was lost, that he had reluctantly plunged into the churning sea and taken his miraculous trip to shore atop the carved coffin lid. “Sometimes, I wish I’d just let myself go down with the ship and my crew,” he’d mused, while the Gazette’s photographer had taken a shot of him gazing soulfully out to sea.

Not that many of the locals believed it, however. Port Orlov was a tiny town, and the Vane boys had lived there their whole lives. Their mother had absconded back when they were kids—“bewitched,” their father had said, “by a local shaman”—and the boys had grown up wild and, as they got older, downright dangerous. Charlie, the older one, had led the way, breaking and entering other folks’ cabins when they were off on hunting trips, fouling another boat’s halibut with gasoline to raise the price of his own, and finally wrecking the first Neptune by falling asleep, drunk and stoned, at the wheel. The boat had run out of fuel at sea, gotten caught up in some ice, and crumpled like a tin can. After that, nobody would sail with Charlie Vane at the helm. Now, with the Neptune II at the bottom of the sea, it looked like nobody was likely to join a crew if Harley was in command, either.

“Hail the conquering hero,” Charlie said, dryly, when Harley showed up at the family homestead. It was a rambling old structure with a lighted cross mounted on the roof like an antenna. The whole house was raised a few feet off the ground on cement pylons, and so ill conceived and built that every room felt like it had been an add-on. The floors sloped, the ceilings were either too low or too high, and ramps had been placed anywhere that Charlie’s wheelchair would have trouble going. After sinking the boat, Charlie had tried to operate a nautical sales franchise, but a couple of months in, he’d tried to run the rapids at Heron River Gorge, at the full height of the spring runoff, and when his canoe cratered on the rocks, he’d emerged a paraplegic. The burglary rate around town had dropped precipitously in the immediate aftermath of the accident. “Come on into the meeting room,” he said, turning the chair down a wooden ramp.

What Charlie called the meeting room was a big raw space with a timbered ceiling and a dozen old rugs thrown on the floor to keep the cold from coming through. A stack of folding chairs leaned against one wall, in case he ever got more than a few people to attend one of his Sunday prayer meetings. In the two years since his accident, he’d claimed to have found God, and to spread the word he’d started an online ministry called Vane’s Holy Writ, which was a strange brew of evangelism, antigovernment polemics, and conspiracy theory. Harley, who had glanced at the site once or twice and even attended a couple of the prayer meetings, was never entirely sure if his brother actually believed the crazy shit he was saying or was just pulling another con. Once he’d even asked him, point-blank, if he was serious, and Charlie had indignantly ordered him out of the house.

But that could have been part of the con, too.

“You want some tea?” he asked, and Harley, who was frozen stiff from the long walk to the house, said okay, even though the tea in Charlie’s house was all but undrinkable.

“Tea!” Charlie shouted, propelling his chair over a knotty patch where the rugs overlapped. On the trestle table he used as a desk, he had two computers — one for what he called his research, and the other permanently displaying his website and its logo: a timber wolf, fangs bared, defending a wooden cross.

Harley flopped down on a dilapidated armchair that smelled like a wet dog.

“So,” Charlie said, rubbing his stubbly chin with one hand, “I’ve been reading about your adventures. You’re a hero. What’s it feel like?”

“It’s all right,” Harley said.

“Just all right?” Charlie scoffed. “I’d have thought you’d be on top of the world by now — or at least on top of Angie Dobbs.”

That was just the kind of remark that got Harley so confused. On the one hand, his brother went around claiming to be a man of God, all pure and everything, and on the other he was exactly the same mocking asshole he’d always been — at least when nobody else was around to hear him.

“You make any money off of it yet?” Charlie asked. “I saw that article in the Barrow Gazette, and I bet you gave ’em the interview for free. You did, didn’t you?”

“You don’t charge to be in the paper.”

“That’s what they tell you, but you think movie stars and singers and baseball players don’t get paid every time they open their mouths?”

“I’m not a movie star.”

“No,” Charlie said, “that’s for damn sure.”

Rebekah, Charlie’s wife, came in with a tray of tea and some muffins that would probably taste just as bad. Harley had never been asked to any wedding, and he strongly doubted there’d been one, but then his brother had probably claimed to have channeled the Holy Spirit directly. Rebekah was a scrawny woman, and his brother had found her on the Internet, when she responded to his online ad for a “helpmeet.” She’d brought her younger sister Bathsheba along, too. She poured out the tea, made from tree bark or anything else that contained no caffeine — all stimulants were against his brother’s religion now — and served up the muffins that were sure to contain no sugar or spice of any kind. Harley figured she made them from sawdust left lying around the wood chipper out back.

Harley said hi, but Rebekah, in her usual long dress with its buttoned-up collar, just nodded. On her way out, she said to Charlie, “We’re almost out of fuel oil.” She had a thick New England accent — she was from some hick town not much bigger than Port Orlov — where she’d been living in a so-called Christian commune that had been broken up by the state. Still, Harley often wondered what had made her, and her sister, do something so stupid as to come all this way to Alaska.

Charlie grunted and, once she was gone, picked up where he’d left off. “Maybe you oughta let me handle the press from now on.”

“There’s not much left of it. Nobody’s called me today, except the Coast Guard. They want to know more about that coffin top that came up in the nets.”

“What’d they say, exactly?”

Harley knew that his brother would be intrigued by that. “They want to be sure that’s all that came up.”

“That’s what you told ’em, right?”

“What do you think?” Harley said, looking steadily into his brother’s dark eyes. “Of course I did.” He sipped the hot tea, which tasted like it was made from boiled leather.

Charlie met his gaze and didn’t blink.

Screw it, Harley thought; it was now or never. “You came to the hospital,” he said, pointedly, “and you left with my anorak.”

“What about it? You want your coat back, it’s in the hall closet.”

Harley put the cup down on a stack of old newspapers, went out into the hall, and came back with his coat. He sat down and began rummaging through the various zipped pockets, and apart from a packet of throat lozenges, came up empty-handed. “Okay,” he said, “where is it?”

“Where’s what?” Charlie answered, but with that malicious glint in his eye that told Harley he knew perfectly well what he was talking about. It was like they were kids again, and Charlie was holding out on him.

“You know what. The cross that was in the inside pocket.”

Charlie’s face slowly creased into a grin, revealing a row of crooked gray teeth. “What cross?”

Harley put out his hand and said, “Give it to me, Charlie.”

“Or what? Are you gonna beat up your own brother — your own crippled brother?”

Nobody ever milked a wheelchair the way his brother did. “If I have to, I’ll turn this whole goddamned house upside down.”

“Oh, I don’t think Rebekah and Bathsheba would let that happen,” Charlie said, and Harley knew he was right. The two sisters might be bony as skeletons, but they were tough and, though he hated to admit it, scary as hell. Their eyes were black as little pebbles, set in dead-white, pockmarked faces, and he’d once seen Rebekah wring a fox’s neck without even looking down at it. Even scarier, he had the impression Bathsheba kind of had a crush on him. It was one more reason he’d had to move out.

Before the stalemate went on much longer, Charlie seemed to have tired of the joke, and gesturing at the gun rack below the window, he said, “It’s in the ammo drawer.”

For a split second, Harley wondered if the ammo drawer was booby-trapped, but then opened it and found the cross, wrapped in a clean rag. It looked like Charlie had shined it up a bit, and the stones—emeralds, for sure—glistened in the light from the computer screens.

“Lucky you didn’t shoot your mouth off about that,” Charlie said.

Harley turned it over in his hands, marveling at the weight of it, wondering if the silver sheen was real, wondering what the gems would be worth, wondering what the Russian words inscribed on the back meant. There was a fence named Gus Voynovich in Nome — he and Charlie had used him now and then in the past — and if anybody knew what it was really worth, he’d be the one. The guy was a crook, of course, but he knew his business.

“So I figure it’s a fifty-fifty deal,” Charlie said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re going to fence it at the Gold Mine, right?” The Gold Mine was Voynovich’s pawnshop in Nome. “Well, you owe me half of whatever Voynovich gives us for it.”

“That’s bullshit. I found it. I nearly died getting it.”

“And if I hadn’t picked up your coat, the Coast Guard, or some fucking orderly, would have it by now. And then how much of a share do you think you’d have gotten?”

“I’ll give you ten percent.”

“I’m not arguing about this with you, Harley. I could just as soon have taken a gun out of that rack and told you to get the hell off of church property.” Vane’s Holy Writ was headquartered in the old house, and as a result, Charlie paid no property taxes. He also drew a tidy disability benefits check every month. “Now, there’s really only one question left for us to discuss.”

“What the hell is that?”

“How much else is there?”

“How much of what else? The coffin’s gone, it sank, same as the boat. Don’t you read the papers?”

“The coffin came from somewhere. And that somewhere would be St. Peter’s Island. It’s one of those old Russians who lived there. Who knows what else is buried in the other graves?”

Harley sat very still, the cross growing heavier in his hand by the second. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, we’ve got to go back out there, before somebody else does, and do some digging.”

“You want me to dig up graves?” Harley said, feeling exactly the same way he did when Charlie had told him to climb through the skylight of the liquor store on Front Street.

“Listen to me,” Charlie said, leaning forward in his wheelchair. “Don’t you remember the stories?”

“Sure I do. The damn place is haunted.” He didn’t add anything about the black wolves … or that yellow light he thought he’d seen on the cliffs.

“Now you don’t really believe that stuff, do you? If you ask me, the Russians made up all that crap years ago, just to keep everybody off the island.”

“There was never any reason to go on the island.”

“No, there wasn’t,” Charlie agreed. “Back then.” Everyone knew there was nothing on St. Peter’s but the remains of the old Russian village, its wooden cabins no doubt fallen to pieces by now, and guarded, supposedly, by an old lady with a lantern, who walked the cliffs at night, luring mariners to their death. “But there is a reason now.”

Harley didn’t know what to say, or how to counter what his brother was saying. That’s how it had always been. Charlie had always won the arguments — sometimes all at once, and sometimes just by waiting Harley out.

“What other options have you got?” Charlie taunted him. “You think you’re ever gonna get another boat? Or a crew? Your fishing days are over, bro, in case you didn’t know it already.” He smiled broadly and smoothed his hands on the front of his flannel shirt. “This cross is what I’d call heaven-sent … and one thing I do know is that God doesn’t knock twice.”

Harley wasn’t so sure it was God knocking at the door at all.

But nodding at the Russian artifact, Charlie added, “And you might want to leave that here for safekeeping. That tin-can trailer you live in isn’t exactly burglarproof, now is it?”

Chapter 9

Slater wasn’t proud of what he was doing — sitting in his car, in the dark, parked outside his ex-wife’s house — but he hadn’t really intended to find himself here.

At most, he’d intended to cruise slowly past the house and take a look on his way home from the AFIP, but then a wave of exhaustion suddenly overcame him, and he’d had to pull over under the umbrella of a big elm tree. In preparation for the exhumation work in Alaska, he’d put himself on an antiviral regimen that he knew could have some debilitating effects, and the coffee he’d picked up at Starbucks apparently wasn’t doing much to counteract it.

Once he’d parked, he’d turned off his lights, reclined his seat, and looked out his window at the stately Tudor house, with its white walls and its neat brown trim, its gabled roof and trim hedges. Even the driveway didn’t have a leaf on it. It was like a picture from a magazine. The first floor was dark, except for the porch light, but the windows upstairs were lighted, and once in a while he could see someone moving behind the mullioned glass. Martha and her husband had two kids, a boy and a girl.

The whole thing, he thought, couldn’t be more perfect. And it could have been his … if he’d wanted it.

He’d met Martha when they were both in medical school at Johns Hopkins. She was paying her own way, while his was being bankrolled by the Army. When he went off to Georgetown to pursue his studies in epidemiology, she had followed him there, working on her specialty in dermatology. After they got married, he knew what she was hoping for — she wanted him to hold down a nice safe Army post on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center while she built up her private practice in the Washington suburbs. And for a time, he tried. He did the whole office and administrative thing, shuffling paper, attending meetings, giving lectures, but over time he felt more and more restless. It got especially bad when he received reports from the field, detailed accounts of what was being done on the front lines to save lives and eradicate disease. That was what he had trained for, that was what he wanted to be doing — not sitting in an air-conditioned office, evaluating programs and rubber-stamping reports. He had put in for overseas duty, and Martha had reluctantly agreed to let him try it.

But if she hoped he would get it out of his system, she was wrong. The more he did it, the more he wanted to do. After a year or two, he no longer felt out of place in some godforsaken jungle; he felt out of place at a cocktail party in Chevy Chase. And much as he and Martha loved each other, they both recognized that they were going in separate directions. The night she dropped him off at the base for his morning flight to an Army camp in the Dominican Republic, where there’d been an outbreak of dengue fever, she said good-bye and take good care of yourself, but they’d both known it was more than that. When he came back nine weeks later, he opened the door to their condo with a sense of foreboding in his heart; the letter he found waiting for him on the kitchen counter said everything he’d expected, but he’d still had to read it several times just to absorb every word. To this day, if he’d had to, he could recite it line for line.

Slater took a sip of his coffee, cold now, and watched as an upstairs window was cranked open a few inches and a curtain drawn. He thought he caught a snatch of conversation on the wind, a boy’s voice saying something about homework, and a woman’s laugh. Martha’s laugh. A few seconds later, the light went out.

Slater put his seat back even farther and closed his eyes. God, he was tired. It was cold out, but he still had his coat on, and it wasn’t bad inside the car. And it had been such a long day. Long, but productive. At least the mission was chugging along, and his dream team was coming together nicely. Dr. Eva Lantos had jumped at the chance to get out of her lab in Boston—“I will be so glad to give the mole-rat genome a rest!”—and Vassily Kozak had been tracked down to an industrial waste dump on the outskirts of Irkutsk, where he was completing a study of the chemical pollutants in the soil.

“I have recommended,” he said in his heavily accented English, “they should shut the city of Irkutsk, but they do not like this idea.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Not me either.”

Slater had told him, in strictest confidence, what he wanted him for in Alaska. Vassily had listened carefully as Slater continued to outline the task ahead, finally interrupting only to ask, “This Spanish flu — it killed many Russians?”

“Ten or twelve million, by the best estimates,” Slater replied.

“Do you think that it is still infectious?”

Slater knew that Vassily was asking him an honest question, and all he could do was give him the straightest answer he could. “No, I don’t believe it is,” he said, “but I can’t guarantee anything.”

Russians, even now, knew something about death — the twentieth-century toll, from warfare and disease, had been extraordinary by any measure. Other nationalities sometimes forgot their own past disasters, but for Russians a dreadful knowledge was bred in their bones, and Slater respected the caution it inspired to this day. “If you come, I’ll want you to start on an antiviral regimen right now, the same one everyone else on the team will be on — myself included.”

“And you will send me the names of these drugs?”

“I’ll do better. I’ll have them hand-delivered to you in Irkutsk.”

Vassily grunted, still thinking things over, as Slater explained some of the clearances that Vassily would have to get both from the Academy of Sciences on the Russian end, and the National Security Council, the AFIP, and maybe even the FBI on the other. And when he was done, he said, “I rest my case,” and waited for the verdict.

“I think maybe,” the professor said, “I have done enough in Irkutsk.”

Slater smiled and clenched his fist in triumph.

“And it would be a good thing, yes, to work with you again. Maybe we can make some history.”

Although history was the one thing Slater hoped they would not be making — his most fervent wish was that the mission would prove in the end to have been utterly unnecessary — he would take his victories any way he got them.

Now, only one big piece of the team was still lacking, and that afternoon Slater had driven over to the base at Fort McNair. The adjutant told him where to find Sergeant Groves, and he’d entered the gym as inconspicuously as possible. He hung out by the back, watching the bout, and even though Groves and his opponent were wearing padded gloves and helmets, every blow echoed with a thud.

The other soldiers had abruptly curtailed their workouts, dropping their jump ropes, giving the punching bags a rest, holding the dumbbells down by their sides. This was simply too good a match to ignore.

For somebody built like a bulldog, Groves was surprisingly nimble on his feet, bobbing and weaving his way around the ring. The other fighter was a white guy with a longer reach, though, and a couple of inches on him. A few times he let loose with a long, looping punch that caught the sergeant on his shoulder or the side of his head. Once, Groves was even rocked back on his heels by a powerful shot to the ribs.

But each time he was hit, he put his head down lower and came in again, like Mike Tyson minus the Maori tattoos.

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.

Chapter 10

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.

But this was exactly what Harley meant about the weird new vibe he got in town. At first it was all like, thank God the sea had spared even one, but then it started to be something else. People who knew him — and who didn’t in a town the size of Port Orlov? — looked at him sideways. Harley started to think that they didn’t believe him — at least not entirely. And when Lucas Muller’s dad had bumped into him at the lumberyard, he’d stared him down. Harley figured it was because he’d laid the blame on Lucas for the shipwreck. Harley had tried to stare back just as hard, but he lost. Then Muller handed him a leaflet that said there would be a memorial service for all the lost crewmen on the coming Sunday, at the town church.

“I expect they’ll want you to say a few words,” Muller said. “You think you can do that?”

He sounded like he didn’t think so, which was why Harley said, “Sure. No problem.”

The only reason the service had been put off so long was they were waiting to see how many bodies they could recover first. They’d found three — Lucas, Farrell, and that Samoan. Two others, Kubelik and Old Man Richter, were still missing.

Harley spotted Angie coming their way. She had a bowl of unshelled peanuts and three beers on the tray.

“Bring ’em on!” Eddie said, snaring two bottles and putting one of them aside for Russell, who was now back to shooting.

Angie handed the last one to Harley and said, “I hear you’re talking at the church next Sunday.”

“Yeah,” Harley said, “everybody’s been asking me to.” He threw ten bucks onto her tray.

“I’m getting off tonight at nine.”

“That right?” he stammered.

“Uh-huh. And my mom’s got little Mick.”

Why she’d named the baby after that creep, who hadn’t even stuck around long enough to see it get born, never failed to baffle Harley.

“I could come over,” she said.

“Sure,” Harley said, trying not to sound too eager. “I think I’ll be around.”

“Hey, Angie!” one of her customers called, waving an empty bottle. “We’re dry over here!” It was Geordie Ayakuk, who worked at the Inuit Community Affairs Center. Harley had never liked him, and liked him even less for breaking up his moment.

But once Angie was gone, and Eddie and Russell had tired of playing pool — with no money left to wager, they got bored fast — Harley was able to work his way around to what he’d come to talk to them about. At a table jammed between the jukebox and the men’s room door, they huddled over their beers and a bowl of unshelled peanuts while Harley did his best to pitch them his — or, more accurately, his brother Charlie’s — idea.

“I saw it myself, with my own eyes,” Harley said, as the two men listened closely. Eddie’s work shirt smelled like he hadn’t changed it since his last plumbing job, and Russell’s sleeves were rolled up to show the tattoo he’d given himself when he was in solitary at the Spring Creek Correctional Facility. It was supposed to be an eagle, but it had come out looking more like a bat.

“If you saw jewels, why didn’t you take them right then?” Russell said. “Before the ship went down?”

“Because I didn’t know that the ship was going to go down,” Harley explained, for the second time. “Obviously, if I’d known that, I’d have taken the damn thing then and there.” He did not consider it wise to let on that he’d actually snagged the cross; if he did, he’d have Eddie and Russell trying to rob him next.

“And you say it was what?” Eddie asked. “A necklace with emeralds in it?”

“Maybe. But like I said, it was hard to get a good look ’cause the crack in the lid wasn’t very big.”

“Maybe that was all that there is,” Russell said, cracking open another peanut. “What makes you think there’s more out there?”

“I don’t know,” Harley said. “I’m not making any promises. But if there’s other coffins popping out of the ground like this one did, then who knows what they’ve got inside?”

While Russell remained dubious, Eddie, Harley could see, was starting to get excited. “Didn’t you guys ever hear the stories?” Eddie said. “My uncle used to tell me about how there were these crazy Russians, a long time ago, who’d escaped from Siberia and settled out on the island because nobody could ever get to them there. They had a secret religion and lived there without any contact with the mainland.”

“How’d they get away with that?” Russell said. “That’s American territory.”

“Actually, it belonged by treaty to the fuckin’ natives around here,” Harley explained, “who saw enough wampum and said you can have it. And nobody’s gone there since because it’s got such a bad rep.”

“You mean because they all died out there?”

“Yeah,” Harley said. “And those black wolves don’t help any, either.” He could still see that alpha wolf, leaping up at his foot as the Coast Guard chopper hauled his frozen ass up off the beach. “Even the Inuit don’t go there because they say the place is haunted.”

“What a load of shit,” Russell said.

“Exactly,” Harley said, as convincingly as he could. “Exactly.” That yellow light could have been a total illusion. “It’s all bullshit. The real reason nobody goes out there is because it’s a bitch and a half just to find any way onto the island. Those rocks have fucked me up once already, and I do not mean to get fucked again.”

“You guys need another round?” Angie said, stopping at their table with a fresh bowl of peanuts. “I’m going off duty in an hour,” she added, throwing a significant look at Harley.

“Yeah, sure,” Harley said, “I’m buying.”

“Be right back.”

“I hear she’s got a ring through her nipple, too,” Eddie observed, “just like the one through her lip.” Harley could hardly wait to find out.

“How much do we get again?” Russell asked.

“Because it’s my idea, I’m taking seventy-five percent of whatever we find,” Harley said. Half of that, he knew, he would have to give to Charlie. “The rest of it you two can split.”

Russell was plainly mulling it over while Eddie was already counting his money. “I bet we can use the Kodiak,” he said, referring to his uncle’s runty old trawler. “Half the time he’s too drunk to go out fishing anyway.”

“And we’ll need some shovels, maybe a hacksaw and a blowtorch, too,” Harley said. “Even if the coffins are only a foot or two down, it’s going to be a nightmare getting through the permafrost.”

Angie plunked the beers down, and Harley paid again. He had half a mind to take the bar bill out of their cut.

They fell silent until Geordie Ayakuk had finished lumbering past their table to the men’s room, then Harley said in a low voice, “So, do you want to do this thing or not?”

“Definitely,” Eddie said, slapping his palm on the table and scattering peanut shells everywhere.

Russell still looked dubious.

“What’s bothering you?” Harley asked.

Russell stirred in his seat and rubbed the tat on his forearm. “We’re diggin’ people up. Dead people, in their graves. That’s not right.”

“We’re not going to take them out, for Christ’s sake,” Eddie expostulated. “Two minutes and they’re all covered up again, just like always.”

Geordie came out of the men’s room, and as he passed Harley he chortled, “You been on Dancing with the Stars yet?”

“Stay tuned,” Harley snarled. Then, to Russell, he said, “So?”

“Come on,” Eddie wheedled. “It’ll be a blast. Think of how many propane deliveries you’d have to make to get this kind of money.”

“If you don’t come in on it,” Harley said, “you have got to keep your mouth shut.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Russell said. “I just don’t want to wind up back in Spring Creek.”

“You won’t,” Harley said. “All we’re doing is … prospecting. It’s an old Alaskan tradition. The gold mine just happens to be a graveyard this time.”

Eddie liked that, and laughed so hard it made Russell start to smile. That’s when Harley knew he had him. He put out his hand, fist clenched, and Eddie bumped his knuckles against it. Then, a few seconds later, Russell slowly lifted his hand and bumped him, too.

When Harley left the Yardarm a few minutes later, in time to go home and throw a fresh sheet on the bed, there was a powerful wind blowing from the northwest — the direction of St. Peter’s Island. For a second, he thought he could hear the baying of the wolves. He put up his hood, drew it tight, and looked up and down the deserted street. This was going to be his lucky night. Angie Dobbs, at last. And, to get the good times rolling, he stepped to the curb, took out the hunting knife he always carried in the back of his belt, and jabbed it into the front tire of Geordie Ayakuk’s jeep.

Chapter 11

The wind around St. Peter’s Island was even stronger than usual, but instead of dissipating the fog that clung to the rocky shores, it had whipped it into a milky stew. It howled around the old wooden buildings of the Russian colony like a pack of wolves, and whistled through the breaks in the stockade wall.

Old Man Richter could hear the gusts tearing at the roof timbers, but the ramshackle church, with its onion dome, had stood for many decades, and he doubted it would collapse tonight. And tonight was all he needed.

He would be dead by morning.

He wasn’t terribly afraid of that anymore. He’d had plenty of time to get used to the idea. Ever since he was swept off the Neptune II, he had been cheating death at one turn or another … first by clinging to a piece of the shattered lifeboat, then by crawling ashore and climbing a flight of stony steps, no more than a foot wide, that led him to higher ground … and into the ruins of the old colony.

He had collapsed in this church, under a pile of petrified furs, for a day, maybe even two. In his dreams, he’d heard what sounded like helicopters and foghorns, but he’d been unable to awaken, unable to move. And who would believe that anyone, much less Old Man Richter, could ever have survived a shipwreck like that? He was sure that no one else had.

He prayed that that idiot Harley Vane was the first to drown.

He had hoped to restore his strength with sleep, and maybe some food, but all he found in his pockets were a couple of waterlogged candy bars that he’d been rationing out to himself. There was nothing in the church but some old straw that he’d chewed on like a horse, and a pool of rainwater that had dripped through a hole in the dome. Even to get to that puddle, he’d had to drag himself along on his elbows. His feet were frostbitten, and they’d gone from blue to purple to black, the discoloration inexorably rising up his legs. For days, he had drifted in and out of consciousness, astonished each time that he’d managed to awake at all.

And, truth be told, disappointed, too.

He wanted it to be over. He’d lived long enough, and he wasn’t much interested in being rescued now, when they’d only have to cut off his legs — and a few of his fingers, too, now that he couldn’t feel them either — and leave him to wither away in the corner of some nursing home. He was only sorry to be so alone. He would have liked to see one more human face before he died. He’d have liked to have someone there to say good-bye to. Someone who might even have held on to his frozen old paw while he went.

It was dark, so dark he wasn’t sure he was actually seeing anything at all, or just pictures made up in his mind. He kept seeing his wife, and she’d been dead for twenty years now. And a horse he had when he was a kid. Brown, with a white nose. Named Queenie. Why couldn’t he remember what had happened to her? He took a train once, when he was a thirteen-year-old boy, from Tacoma to St. Paul, and it was the best time he’d ever had in his life. The porter took him up and down the train cars, showing him how everything worked. He’d always liked to know how things worked.

There was a window in the church, with half a shutter still covering it. That half a shutter had been banging all night. Richter wondered how it could have stayed on at all, and for so long, loose like that. It banged again now, and a blast of wind swept into the church, stirring up the dirt and straw.

Another picture crossed his mind … of a lantern, burning bright.

It was as if it had just gone by the window outside.

His thoughts returned to the train car. He remembered how entranced he was by all the gauges and switches in the engineer’s compartment, and how he had asked what each one did. It was like entering Aladdin’s cave.

There was a creaking sound over by the door, the door that Richter had wedged shut days ago. It was opening now, and a light — a yellow light — was coming inside. Richter turned his head on the stiff old furs, and just past the corner of a pew he saw what looked like one of those old kerosene lanterns floating through the air.

He heard a shuffling sound — like a bad foot being dragged along the boards — and coming closer down the nave.

“I’m over here,” he croaked. “On the floor.” Was he going to get his wish? Was he going to be spared a solitary death?

The lantern came even closer, and as he squinted up into the darkness, he could start to make out who was holding it.

He saw a face, a woman’s face, gaunt the way his wife’s had been when the cancer had done its worst. Long gray hair, and a toothless smile … a smile that made him feel colder than ever before.

The lamp came down farther, and a hand slipped under the fur and took hold of his own. Now he wished to Christ that he had never prayed for company. Her fingers felt like twigs.

She said something — it sounded as if it was meant to be a comfort — in a language he could not understand.

He wanted to cry out, but he didn’t have any breath left in him. His blood felt like it had stopped in his veins. He gasped once or twice. Her hand gripped him tighter, and he died with his eyes wide open, staring into the lanternlight, and with his mouth frozen in a silent scream.

The woman repeated her words, then let go of his hand and hobbled away.

She drew the shawl around her shoulders, even though she did not feel the cold, and left the church. She did not know the old man’s name, but she knew where he had come from. She had seen the ship go down.

She had seen many ships go down … for many years.

Following the path she had long trodden, she drifted through the colony, remembering the sound of voices raised in prayer, the aroma of fresh fish roasting in the pan, the warmth of a blazing fire.

How long had it been since she had heard anything but the baying of the wolves — her kindred spirits — or felt anything warmer than the touch of that old man’s dying hand?

But what more did she deserve? She was the harbinger of death, and the terrible mercy that had spared her own life — not once, but twice — was less forgiving to others.

“You are a special child,” the monk had told her. “God has a special destiny in mind for you.”

The night he told her that, he had given her the silver cross on a gilded chain. It was encrusted with emeralds, green as a cat’s eyes, and he had had its back inscribed with a message meant only for her. “Let this be our secret,” he had said, as he put one of his broad hands, the hands that had healed her younger brother, atop her head. It was as if a healing balm were pouring over her; her eyes had closed, and her breathing had slowed, and even her left foot, the one that was misshapen and gave her such constant trouble, stopped hurting.

“I give you this blessing,” he said, “to protect you from all evil.” And then he had chanted some words in a low voice. Not for the first time, she could smell the alcohol on his breath, and she knew there were people who said vile things about him. “Nothing may harm you now,” he said, and she had not doubted it. “If you believe in my power—”

“I do, Father, I do.”

“—then you must believe, too, in the power of this cross.”

Holding the lantern aloft, she passed beyond the stockade walls, down the hillside, and into the trees. Although she did not see them, she knew that the black wolves — spirits of the unquiet dead — were keeping company with her, moving stealthily through the woods. How long had it been before she learned that they did not grow in number, nor did they die? How long before she had realized that each mysterious creature harbored a soul, a soul as lost as her own, stranded somewhere between this world and the next? Or that their fate and hers were inextricably bound?

As she approached the graveyard, her companions held back, keeping to the trees and the shadows. Her fingertips grazed the wooden gateposts, tracing and retracing the words that she had once carved there. Forgive me, they said, over and over again, but who was there to do so?

A strong wind was blowing a scrim of snow across the ground. She walked among the toppled headstones and petrified crosses but stopped when she came to the edge of the cemetery overlooking the sea. A piece of the earth had fallen away, like a rotted tooth pulled from a gum. Even now, if she could have burrowed into the ravaged ground and found her own place there, she would have done so. But as Rasputin had told her, a special destiny awaited her.

Nearly a century had passed, and in all that time she had never been entirely sure if those words had been his blessing, meant to give her strength against adversity, or a curse upon her own head, and the heads of all her family.

But whatever their intent, his words had served admirably as both.