There wasn’t much to see, and at the rate they were going — roughly 120 miles per hour — the tiny town, cradled by a rocky ridge, was already disappearing from view. But Slater knew its sad history well. It wasn’t so different from that of its neighbor, Port Orlov.
Called Kingigin, or “high bluff” by its native inhabitants, it had once been a thriving Eskimo village and a lively trading post for deerskins, ivory, jade, flint, beads, and baleen. On the westernmost point of the North American continent, lying just south of the polar circle and with nothing but a dogsled trail leading to it from the mainland, the town should have been as safe from the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 as any place on earth. There wasn’t even a telegraph connection. But through a series of calamitous events, Wales, like a handful of other Alaskan hamlets, wound up suffering the highest mortality rates in America.
In October of that year, the steamship Victoria sailed into Nome, and the city’s doctor, aware of the danger, met the ship at the dock, where he insisted on examining the passengers and crew; he even went so far as to quarantine several dozen at Holy Cross Hospital. But when only one of them got sick after five days there (and even that illness was chalked up to tonsillitis), the doctor permitted the patients to be released. A hospital worker died of the flu four days later, and within forty-eight hours the whole city of Nome was placed under quarantine.
But by then the damage had been done. Mail had been unloaded from the ship, and even though every shred of it had been fumigated, the sailors who handed the bags to the local mail carriers had been unwitting bearers of the virus. Now, the mailmen, too, riding their dogsleds to every far-flung outpost in the territory, acted as the plague’s deadly agents. Wherever they went, they brought with them the contagion, and by the time rescuers reached the village of Wales, three weeks after the mail had been delivered, they found scenes of utter devastation — decaying corpses piled in snowdrifts, packs of wild dogs tearing at the remains. In one hut, a man was found with his arms wrapped around his stove, frozen solid, and he had had to be buried, still kneeling, in a square box. The survivors were found starving, drinking nothing but reindeer broth, in the one-room schoolhouse.
“Look at that!” the professor exclaimed, pointing to Cape Mountain now passing below them. “That, my friend, is the end of the Continental Divide.” His breath reeked of spearmint gum, which he was chewing assiduously to keep his ears from getting plugged.
A jagged brown peak, slick with snow and ice, Cape Mountain sat atop a gigantic slab of granite, shaped like an axe. The natives liked to say that the slab was the spot where Paul Bunyan had put his hatchet down, after he’d chopped down every tree in the Arctic. Slater could see how the legend got started.
“When we get to St. Peter’s,” the pilot said, “I’ll come in from the east, do a complete three-sixty, then we can hover wherever you want.” He consulted the fuel gauges, then added, “But not for long.”
At the thought of finally seeing the island, Slater felt his heart race, and he straightened up in his seat, which wasn’t easy given the bulk of the parka he was wearing and the over-the-shoulder restraints. The professor didn’t leave him much room, either, but he was enthusiastic company, and for that reason alone, Slater knew he’d picked the right man for what could prove to be the very bleak job ahead.
As the chopper approached, Slater could see — straight ahead and framed between the pilots’ shoulders — a gnarled hunk of black stone, surrounded by jutting rocks that broke the surface of the roiling waters. Its foundation was largely obscured by ice and mist. Slater could see snatches of beach, though they looked too steep and small for a helicopter, much less this one, to land on. Chiseled into the stone cliff, there appeared to be a winding set of steps.
“That whole island, it is from a volcano,” the professor observed over the headphones, admiringly. “Basaltic lava, two million years old.” He took off his spectacles, blew some dust from the lenses — filling the cabin with the scent of spearmint again — then hastily put them back on.
The chopper banked to the right, and now Slater got a better view out his own side window. Steep cliffs, dotted with nesting terns, rose to an uneven plateau, raggedly forested with deep green spruce and alders.
“Can you get closer?” Slater asked.
“Will do,” the pilot replied, “but the winds get tricky around the cliffs.”
The chopper descended and made a closer pass. But that was when Slater suddenly saw something, camouflaged by the patchy forest, which made him grab Kozak’s sleeve and point down.
An onion-shaped dome, made of rough timber and pocked with holes, poked its head up through the trees.
“The Russian colony,” the pilot said, circling.
Although the helicopter was buffeted by nasty crosswinds, the pilot was able to hold it steady enough that Slater could get the lay of the land. The old church was surrounded by several other ramshackle structures — old cabins teetering on their raised foundations, empty livestock pens, a well with a rusted bucket. A stockade wall, partly dismantled, enclosed what was left of the village.
But where was the cemetery?
The same thing must have occurred to the professor, who plucked at Slater’s sleeve and pointed off toward a trail leading away from what was once the main gate. It disappeared into a dense grove of evergreens.
“Could you move west?” Slater requested, and the pilot said, “Roger. But we’ve only got a few more minutes before we have to head into Port Orlov for refueling.”
The Sikorsky turned, its propellers churning even more loudly in hover mode than they did when flying, and followed the trail over the tops of the trees, until a rocky promontory appeared below. It jutted out from the plateau like an ironing board, its windswept ground dotted with old wooden crosses, toppling over, and gray-stone slabs.
It made sense, Slater thought. The graveyard had been sited as far from the colony as possible.
And in the gathering gloom, he saw a ragged spot at the very end of the promontory, where the earth and stone hung precariously above the cliffs, as if a limb had been ripped away from the body of the island … and now he knew precisely where the coffin found floating at sea had originated.
“Lights out,” the pilot said, and the last rays of the sun vanished as abruptly as a candle’s flame being snuffed. Darkness descended over the island, and the helicopter swiftly banked away from the steep, unforgiving cliffs.
But one question remained in Slater’s head. This had been possibly the most isolated colony on the planet, surrounded by ice floes and rocky coastlines, with no mail, and no intercourse with the locals. It should have been the safest place on earth during the 1918 pandemic. But even here, the Spanish flu had managed to insinuate its deadly tentacles, and he wondered if he would ever find out how. Not for the first time, he felt a flicker of grudging admiration for his terrible foe. Damn, it was wily.
“Those are crabbing boats below,” the pilot observed, as Slater looked down to see their running lights bucking in the choppy seas. “Worst job in the whole world.”
Funny, Slater thought. He had often heard his own job described that way.
Chapter 13
The Winter Palace was never more beautiful than when it was done up for the Christmas Ball. Anastasia looked forward to it every year — particularly in a year as tragic and bloody as this one had been. Although millions of ill-equipped Russian soldiers were still desperately fighting the Germans along the far-flung borders of the empire, here, tonight, you would never know it. As she gazed down at the vast, snowy forecourt, hundreds of sleek carriages and gleaming motorcars, jingling sleighs and bright red troikas, drew to a halt in front of the massive entry hall of the palace, and the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s guests, decked out in all their finery, disembarked, laughing and chattering among themselves. Even from the window seat in her room, the young grand duchess could catch some of their exchanges — most of them spoken in French as it was so much more fashionable than Russian — and spot some of the more familiar faces; just then, in fact, stepping out of one of the most ornately gilded carriages, drawn by four splendid white horses with golden tassels in their manes and tails, she saw the young Grand Duke Dmitri, her father’s cousin, and his fast friend, Prince Felix Yussoupov, scion of the richest family in Russia.