And that was not a risk he was prepared to take.
“This is our living room,” Dr. Lantos joked, waving her arm around the long, narrow space, illuminated by a row of light fixtures attached to a single aluminum beam that ran the length of the room. Counters had been set up on either side, topped with electron microscopes, racks of test tubes, vials, flasks, beakers, rubber gloves, and antiseptic dispensers. Underneath them there were cabinets and bins with neatly labeled and color-coded drawers.
“You have all the power you need?” Slater asked, and Lantos nodded vigorously, which only served to call his attention to the pencil, and the pen, she had stuck in the frizzy mop of her gray hair. He had the fleeting impression that if he looked hard enough in there, he could find anything from grocery lists to ticket stubs. It was one of the things that had always endeared her to him.
At the rear of the tent, a second chamber — a chamber within a chamber, as it were — had been erected behind its own clear plastic curtains; parting them, he was met by a blast of much colder air. A freezer, about half the size of a normal refrigerator, squatted on the triple-insulated rubber mat that comprised the floor. Standing in the center of the space was a long, stainless-steel autopsy table, and beside it a wheeled cart that held an array of vessels and receptacles for the organs and tissue samples they would be removing from the corpses they exhumed. Slater expected to take samples from no less than three or four, drawn from all quarters of the cemetery, before he was done. After inspecting the air vents, which were serviced by a separate filtration unit outside, Slater was satisfied that the place was indeed ready to go.
“Grab your hat,” he said. “It’s showtime.”
With Dr. Lantos in tow, Slater rounded up Professor Kozak, who was buried in his geological studies, and told them to wait for him by the main gates. Then, with some reluctance, he went to fetch Nika. He wished it could be avoided, he did not want her anywhere near the site and exposed to any of the myriad dangers it might present, but he also knew she’d be livid if he tried to leave her out.
Not to mention the fact that as the duly appointed tribal representative and mayor of the closest town, she could shut him down if she really wanted to.
Poking his head into the flap of her tent, he found her typing furiously on her laptop. She was compiling field notes, he knew, for an anthropological report she hoped to write, and Slater had not yet found the heart to tell her that none of what was happening on St. Peter’s Island was likely to see the light of day, much less in some academic journal. The only official report that would ever be written would be his own, and if experience was any indication, it would be restricted to a very small cadre of AFIP scientists and directors to review.
“The digging is done?” she said expectantly.
“It should be by the time we get there and suit up.”
Twirling around on her camp stool, she grabbed a worn and faded leather jerkin that was lying on her cot and slipped it over her head. It had a long fringe that hung below her waist, and red and black stitches depicting bears and eagles and otters all over it.
“When I said suit up, I meant a hazmat suit.”
“That’s fine,” she said, winding her long black hair into a glossy ponytail and flipping it over the collar of the jerkin. “But as the tribal rep, I’ve got to wear the sacred garment.” Pulling on a parka over everything else, she added, “And I’ll need a minute to say some words over any grave you open.”
“But they’ll be Russian graves, not Inuit,” Slater said, and Nika just shrugged as she slipped past him and onto the rubber-matted pathway outside. Her boots squelched in the icy slush.
“It’s our land, our rules,” she said with a smile. “The home-field advantage.” Slater wasn’t sure what advantage it might confer, but he did know that from here on in the rules would be his own. At the colony gates, he and Nika hooked up with Lantos and the professor, and the four of them, bundled up in coats and hats and gloves against the chill ocean wind, trooped down the pathway toward the trees. Sergeant Groves and his crew had cleared a trail through the woods, but the brush had already begun to impinge again; snow-laden branches drooped down overhead and sharp twigs plucked at the puffy sleeves of his down-filled parka. It was a far cry from his usual postings, where the worst impediments were sunstroke and scorpion bites.
Even though it was technically early afternoon, the sun was so dim that the light stanchions, positioned every few yards along the pathway, were all switched on, providing an eerie glow. As Slater approached the cemetery gateposts, scrawled with their anonymous plea to “Forgive me,” he glanced over toward the promontory where he could see Groves and a Coast Guardsman, cloaked in their own hazmat suits, repositioning a jackhammer to loosen whatever frozen soil still remained at the parameters previously demarcated by Kozak. The strips of wet sod that had already been removed had been laid, according to Slater’s instructions, neatly to one side on top of a canvas ground cover. When the exhumation was finished, the grave was to be returned to a state as close to its previous condition as possible — and the canvas cover incinerated.
Meanwhile, the dressing tent had been set up just to the left of the entrance, and as Groves let loose with one more loud volley from the jackhammer, Slater guided his team into the chamber. The aluminum floor rumbled from the weight of their boots. A rack had been set up, and an assortment of white Tyvek hazmat coveralls and thermal jumpsuits were hanging from the hooks, with visored helmets on a shelf just above them and a row of white boot covers lined up below.
Although he knew that Lantos and Kozak would be familiar with the routine, he advised everyone to doff their overcoats, put on a jumpsuit over the rest, then zip themselves into one of the white coveralls.
As he expected, Kozak was already huffing and puffing to get himself into everything, and Lantos was helping Nika to get properly attired; the leather jerkin wasn’t making it any easier, especially as Slater pointed out that it had to go inside, rather than outside, the hazmat gear.
“Otherwise, it’ll have to be disposed of afterward,” he said.
“No way,” Nika said, struggling to get the zipper all the way up and over it. “This has been in my tribe for at least two hundred years.”
Once she was in, Lantos pulled on her own outfit, and Slater, similarly encased in his jumpsuit, made sure that the elastic bands at Nika’s wrist and ankles were tightly drawn. Then he helped her on with her white booties. Plucking at her sleeve, Nika said, “I think I prefer natural fabrics. What’s this made of, anyway?”
“High-density polyethylene,” Slater replied, “and it’s virtually indestructible. But it’ll protect you from any bloodborne pathogens, or dry particles as small as half a micron.”
“But aren’t we going to cook inside them?”
“Not as much as you would think,” Lantos interjected. “Even though they keep out water and other liquid molecules, they’ll still allow heat and sweat vapors to escape. Which isn’t to say,” she added, passing her the headgear that Nika studied skeptically, “you’re going to be comfortable out there.”
“Okay, helmets, too, now,” Slater said, and they all took one last breath of unimpeded air before putting on the visored hoods, the bottoms of which hung down onto their shoulders. With all four of them in the tent at once, and bundled up like sausages, it was getting hard to budge without bumping into each other. Lantos tucked a surgical kit under her arm, and with Slater holding the tent flaps, they exited with a certain amount of nervous laughter, looking like a bunch of beekeepers heading out to work in the apiary.