“One of them now,” Nevsky said, “as the down payment.”
Sergei gave it to him, and after looking around the room to see that no one was watching, Nevsky took a good long look at it and rolled it between his fingers. Satisfied, he wrapped it in his red handkerchief and stuck it in the pocket of his shirt. Then, leaning back in his chair with a skeptical expression, he said, “But where would someone like you have come by something like this?”
It was a question Sergei and Ana had been asked before.
“The Winter Palace,” Sergei confided, as if ashamed of his own actions.
“The Tsar’s treasures belonged to the people,” Nevsky said, feigning indignation and coughing into the back of his hand. “When the Winter Palace was stormed, that loot belonged to the proletariat.”
“I am part of the proletariat,” Sergei replied, and at this Nevsky laughed.
“An enterprising one, I’ll say that for you.” Then, leaning close, he explained that Sergei and Ana were to meet him at the airfield as soon as it was light out. “Keep behind the hangars, and for God’s sake, don’t call any attention to yourselves. Don’t bring anything heavier than a handful of straw. The plane won’t carry any more weight.”
That night, in return for an exorbitant charge to the innkeeper, Sergei and Ana bedded down between the beer barrels in the cellar of the tavern and waited anxiously for the dawn. Ana had never been in an airplane before, and she was quite sure Sergei had never been, either. She didn’t ask him because she knew he liked to pretend to be more worldly and experienced than he was, although, in her eyes, he was just a boy—a gangly creature with loose limbs and a cowlick and a long face that reminded her of her favorite pony. And she loved him.
Not only because he had saved her life—though wouldn’t that have been enough?—but because his heart had remained pure and righteous. She loved him for his innocence, for his devotion … and because he loved her in turn. Ana had lived a life of extravagant luxury and immense privilege, but she had also been cloistered and cosseted and confined, and it was only in the past year, when all of that had been stripped away, that she felt she had learned so much of what life was really like. Father Grigori had always told her she had a special destiny—the emerald cross beneath her blouse attested to the unbreakable bond between them—but only now did she feel she might be moving toward such a thing, whatever it might turn out to be. And without Sergei, she would never have escaped the makeshift graveyard at the Four Brothers, where everyone else in her family lay.
It sickened her that the official Soviet press still claimed that only her father had been shot and the rest of the family was safely sequestered somewhere. Once she made it to freedom, even if that freedom was only an island in the middle of the Bering Sea, she would find a way to expose these butchers for what they were.
It wasn’t yet dawn when Sergei nudged her. She doubted that he had been able to sleep any more than she had. They gathered their few things together in a bundle and crept up the stairs from the cellar. The innkeeper in a nightshirt was lighting a fire in the grate and pretended not to see them. Outside, the air was frigid, but the sky was lightening enough that she could see there wasn’t even a wisp of a cloud in any direction. Surely this would be good weather for the flight to St. Peter’s Island. The thought of being in a place, no matter how barren and remote, where she could openly be herself, where she did not have to fear every encounter and dodge every stranger, where she would be embraced by friends and followers of Father Grigori, promised such relief that it eradicated any fear she might have had of boarding the plane.
By the time they got to the hangars, the plane, with a red star freshly painted on its nose, was already on the runway. Nevsky, a leather cap clinging to his bald head and tinted goggles hanging down around his neck, was circling it, checking the tires and the struts and the wings. There were two wings, a wider one above the tiny cabin and a shorter one below, connected by a latticework of wires, and a long tail that reminded her of a dragonfly. It looked to her almost as flimsy as a dragonfly, too, and she could hardly imagine it carrying them for miles over an icy sea. Sergei had stopped where he stood, and was staring at it with slack-jawed wonder and evident dread, when Nevsky noticed them and, taking a quick look around the empty field, waved them over.
“Come on,” Ana said, taking Sergei by the arm and drawing him out of the shadows of the hangar. “We have to hurry.”
Nevsky was holding open the small door to the cabin, and he frowned when he saw their bundle. “What did I tell you about the weight?” he said, taking the bundle in hand, gauging it, then grudgingly tossing it onto the cabin floor. “Get in!” he ordered, coughing, then spitting a wad of phlegm onto the tarmac.
Bending double, Ana crawled through the dented metal door and sat bolt upright on a padded plank with the bag wedged under her feet; she could barely move since, in order to keep the bundle light, she had worn the corset freighted with jewels under her coat. Sergei, his eyes wide as saucers, got in and sat on a plank opposite. The space was so small, and his legs were so long, their knees touched. Ana gave him an encouraging smile, but he looked like a lamb being led to the slaughter.
Grunting, Nevsky crawled into the cabin, latched the door behind him, and squirmed into a seat at the front of the plane; it was shaped like a bucket and cushioned by a Persian rug folded double. With thick but nimble fingers, he began turning dials and flicking switches and doing all manner of things that Ana could not fathom. What she did understand was the machine gun firmly mounted at his elbow, and aimed through an aperture in the windscreen. The sight of its black barrel and deadly snout reminded her that this plane had been designed for aerial combat, not for ferrying refugees. It was built to dispense death, not life … like everything the Bolsheviks put their hand to.
“There are straps,” Nevsky said, over his shoulder. “Fasten them under your arms and around your waists.”
Ana found the straps hanging like reins in a stable from the sides of the cabin, and did as she was told; the clasp, she could not help but notice, was embossed with a double eagle, the old insignia of the Russian Air Force. Sergei’s fingers moved mechanically as he strapped himself in; his eyes were riveted on the floor, which appeared to have been cobbled together with sheets of steel, then sealed with a coat of tar. The whole compartment felt too insubstantial to withstand the rigors of a rough road, much less flight.
But the propellers, a pair on each side, suddenly engaged, and as the sun came fully into the Siberian sky, Nevsky piloted the plane onto the runway, shouting back to them, “Hold on!” But to what, Ana wondered? There was a roar from the engines, and a rumbling from the tires as they bounced across the ground. Sergei’s eyes were closed, and he was as rigid as a stick, his head back against the wall of the fuselage. His lips were moving in what was no doubt a prayer. The roar grew louder all the time, and the cabin rocked and creaked and swayed, and at any moment Ana would not have been surprised to see the whole contraption explode. Looking over Nevsky’s broad shoulders, she saw the tundra hurtling past, so fast it was only a brownish blur now—how could anything move at such a speed? she thought—and Nevsky pulling back on an oak-handled throttle that reminded her of one of Count Benckendorff’s canes. The speed increased, the roar of the motors became deafening, and just when she thought the shuddering plane was sure to fall apart, the nose tilted up ever so slightly, the jouncing abruptly stopped, and to her amazement she saw the ground falling away. The windscreen blazed with shards of orange light, and she wished that she, too, had a pair of the tinted goggles Nevsky was wearing. There was the strangest sensation in her stomach, as if it had just dropped into her shoes, but it wasn’t unpleasant; it was like the times Nagorny, Alexei’s guardian, had swung her so high on the garden swing that she had stopped at the top, afraid she was about to spill over the bar, before swooping back down instead. In her head, she could hear Alexei begging to be swung that high, too, and his delighted screams when Nagorny complied.
/> The grief overwhelmed her again, as it often did, like a crashing wave.
But Sergei’s eyes were open now. He refused to look out through the window, but gave Anastasia a wan smile. She reached across and squeezed his hand.
“We will be flying northeast,” Nevsky shouted, his words carried back to them on a cold draft. “This damn sun will be in our eyes the whole way.”
Ana liked it—she liked the hot bright yellow light, she liked the sky around it, a cerulean blue unmarred by a single wisp of cloud, and she liked it when the dark, snow-patched ground dropped away altogether, replaced by the cobalt blue of the Bering Sea. Glaciers sat serenely in the choppy waters, a pod of breaching whales gamboled among the chunks of floating ice. The horizon was a gleaming orange line, pulled tight as a stitch, and somewhere ahead there lay an island that was no longer a part of Russia at all, an island that housed a small colony of believers. A small colony of friends.
She would have liked to talk to Sergei, if only to distract him, but the howling of the wind and the din of the propellers was too great. Instead, she made do with holding his hand and gazing out at the unimaginable spectacle through the cockpit window. What a pity it was tainted by the machine gun, black, gleaming with oil, and brooding like a vulture.
When the plane banked, she was pressed back against the wall—it felt like lying on a slab of ice—and this time the sensation in her stomach was not so easily dismissed. The plane was losing altitude, she could feel it, and for a second she worried that they were going to crash, after all. Glancing out the window, she saw that the world had tilted to an odd angle, and in the distance, she could see two islands, not one, both of them flat and gray and barely rising above the sea. One was much bigger than the other, and she wondered which of them was St. Peter’s. Neither looked especially welcoming.
The angle grew even more extreme, and the engines made a louder, grinding sound, as the plane descended even more, soaring across the channel that narrowly separated the islands, and the windscreen filled with the image of the bigger of the two. Gradually, the plane leveled off, and the coastline appeared. Rugged, barren, choked with coveys of squalling birds. Anastasia caught a glimpse of a collection of huts, clustered on the cliffs above an inlet, as the plane dropped onto a cleared field, its tires bouncing up again as they touched the ground. The propellers whirred down, and Nevsky clutched the throttle with both hands, pulling back on it as if he were subduing a stallion. The cabin rattled, the tires squealed, and only the machine gun remained motionless. For several hundred yards, the plane rumbled and rolled along the tundra, before the engines stopped growling and the propellers stopped spinning and everything came to a halt.
Nevsky, pushing the goggles onto the top of his head, turned in his seat and said, “You can unfasten those straps now.” Then he coughed into his handkerchief.
Ana and Sergei undid their straps, and with trembling fingers Sergei unlatched the little door. He clambered out onto the ground, then held out a hand to help Ana. When she bent over, the corset nipped at her ribs, and her feet felt so unsteady she nearly toppled over. Sergei propped her up as Nevsky disembarked. Without a word, he went to a tiny, falling-down shed, and came out lugging two gas cans, one in each hand.
Ana, bewildered, looked all around, but apart from the shed, there was no sign of any habitation nearby, or any people. Were those huts the entire colony? Her heart began to sink. And why was there no one there to welcome them?
Nevsky seemed to be studiously avoiding them, and when Sergei ventured a question, he brushed him off and said, “Let me finish with this first,” as he poured the second can of gas down the funnel he had inserted in the tank at the rear of the plane. When that was done, he returned to the shed, came out with two more, and poured them in, too. A brisk wind was cutting across the open field, and Ana huddled in the shelter of the fuselage.
Tossing the empty cans to one side and removing the funnel, Nevsky finally turned to them and said, “I’ll have that second diamond now.”
“Where is everyone?” Sergei said.
“They’ll be here. Now, where is it?”
Sergei looked uncertain, but when Ana nodded, he gave it to him. Nevsky tucked it into his pocket, and threw open the little door to the plane. Then he jumped in, threw the latches, and only appeared again through the window of the cockpit. Sliding the window panel open, he spoke across the top of the machine gun as Ana and Sergei gathered below.
“Right now you’re on what the Eskimos call Nunarbuk.”
“You mean that’s their name for St. Peter’s Island?” Sergei said.
“St. Peter’s Island,” Nevsky said, fitting his goggles back into place, and pointing due east, “is over there.”
“That’s where we paid you to take us!” Ana cried, but Nevsky just shrugged.
“They have no landing strip,” he said.
“Then you have to take us back with you!” Sergei demanded, hammering at the side of the plane.
“Watch out,” Nevsky said, as he started to close the window. “The propellers can cut you in half like a loaf of bread.”
A moment later, Ana heard the engines revving up. The propellers clicked and twitched, then began to turn, and Sergei had to duck back away from the plane. It bumped along the ground in a wide circle, protected by its four whirling blades, before quickly gathering speed and then, as they watched in shock, altitude, too. It was only as it rose high into the sky, shining in the sun and banking slowly toward Siberia, that Ana realized they had even forgotten to retrieve their bundle from under the seat.
Chapter 55
“Is that it?” Slater asked. “Is that the van?”
Nika craned forward in the passenger seat. “I can’t tell,” she said, peering through the fractured windshield. “The snow’s too thick.”
On the right side of the road, a yellow sign said, “HERON RIVER BRIDGE AHEAD. PROCEED WITH CAUTION. REDUCE SPEED.” It was pocked with bullet holes, and Slater wondered if there was a single sign or mailbox in Alaska that hadn’t been used for target practice.
He stepped on the gas, but he felt the tires starting to lose traction on the icy surface and he had to ease off again.
The road was winding its way through a rubble-strewn landscape of stunted trees and immense boulders. Sometimes, the vehicle in front of him would disappear behind the rocks, or be engulfed in a whirling cloud of snow, but each time he caught a glimpse of it, he was able to pick out another detail or two. First, he could see the boxy silhouette of a van. And then he could tell it was some dark color, blue or black.
It had to be Charlie Vane’s car.
He knew that he was driving the ambulance far too fast for the road and weather conditions, but he still wasn’t closing the distance. Vane had to be doing at least sixty-five or seventy miles per hour. At any moment, he expected to see the van go spinning off the road or crashing into the rocks.
“Do you think they’ve spotted us?” Nika asked.
“Absolutely.” But what would they be able to see? “Should I put on the siren and lights? Maybe convince them it’s the police on their tail?”
“They’d only drive faster.”
Which was pretty much what Slater had thought, too.
“There’s one more bend in the road,” Nika advised him, “but it’s a wide one, and it runs behind those hills. When you come out on the other side, you’ll see the gorge, and the bridge, off in the distance but straight ahead.”
What Slater hoped to see was a National Guard barricade, with spotlights and trucks and armed soldiers, but he was afraid it was too much to expect. There probably hadn’t been time to set up something so elaborate, and now he was wondering just how far he would have to keep trailing the Vanes. All the way to Nome? He glanced at his dashboard and saw that the gas tank was already three-quarters empty. But it was critical that he stop them before they reached any population center.
The question remained—how?
Snowy hills rose up on all sides, f
unneling the wind and snow into a dense fog that almost entirely obscured the road. Steel poles, only four or five feet high, with red reflectors on top, were the only way to stay on course, and rusty signs warned of curves, oncoming traffic, animal crossings, avalanches, hazardous ice. The ambulance clung to the road, the windshield wipers beating furiously, the lone headlight shining on the blur of falling snow. A steady stream of freezing air blew into the car through the hole in the windshield, and Slater prayed that the wipers wouldn’t catch on one of the cracks and cause the whole window to implode in their faces.
And just when he thought the hills would never come to an end, he emerged onto a broad icy plateau. Even the van must have had to slow down, as the distance between them now was no more than the equivalent of a few city blocks.
Better yet, Slater could see the steel span of the Heron River Bridge, rising into the darkness … with an Alaska Highway Patrol car parked laterally in front of it, its headlights shining and blue roof bar flashing.
It wasn’t a whole platoon from the National Guard, but it would do.
Or so he thought.
He watched the van begin to slow down, as if Charlie was debating what to do, and Slater used that chance to close some more of the gap.
“Okay, now let’s turn on the lights and siren!” Slater said, clutching the wheel with both hands as he suddenly felt the ambulance sliding on a patch of black ice. “Time to let him know he’s surrounded.”
But just as Nika got everything blaring, and Slater saw the patrolman stepping out of the car, the van shot forward, its back wheels hurling up a shower of snow and sleet as it rocketed toward the bridge.
“What’s he doing?” Nika shouted.
But it was clear seconds later, as the van accelerated to top speed and hit the front end of the patrol car, sending it spinning out of the way like a top, sparks flying and metal screeching. The cop jumped out of its path in the nick of time.
The Romanov Cross: A Novel Page 39