The Boy from Reactor 4

by Orest Stelmach

  “Up. Up,” the soldier shouted, stabbing the air with the point of his rifle. “Get your hands up.”

  He’d let some slack develop near his elbow. It was a big mistake. Now the soldier was even further on edge. He raised the rifle to eye level and pointed it between Adam’s eyes.

  “The order is shoot if necessary but don’t kill,” the soldier said. “So wounding is okay.” He lowered his aim to Adam’s right knee. “You want to live in a wheelchair the rest of your life?”

  Adam raised his hands as high as he could and shook his head. No. Not the knees. If he got shot in the knees, he might never skate again. Better the heart or the head than the knees.

  “Why are you staring at me, boy? You shouldn’t have stared at me, boy.” He cocked his head to the side, moved one eye to the sight, and closed the other.

  A figure rushed out of the fog from the soldier’s blind side and rammed him with a shoulder. The soldier and his gun went flying. He landed hard on the ice. Didn’t move.

  Adam glanced at the figure. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was Nadia. Of course it was, he thought. Who else could it have been? But it was a woman. An American woman had knocked out a Russian soldier.

  “Awesome,” Adam said.

  A look of pride washed over Nadia’s face. Replaced with her usual intensity. “Quick, get your bags,” she said.

  Adam grabbed his knapsack and satchel.

  They disappeared into the fog.

  CHAPTER 74

  “THEY’RE GETTING AWAY,” Kirilo said.

  “It’s the damned fog,” the colonel said. “My men can’t see anything. The helicopters are useless.”

  “Tell them to go lower,” Major General Yashko ordered.

  “They’re getting away,” Kirilo said. “Lower, dammit.”

  The colonel said, “Any lower and they will collide. Do you want to be the one who explains to the highest authorities why two helicopters collided in the fog over Gvozdev? Do you want to explain the nature of the mission to your superiors, Major General?”

  Major General Yashko glanced alternately at Deputy Director Krylov and the fog in the observation window. The two men shrugged at each other.

  “Call the choppers back,” Yashko said.

  Kirilo pounded his fist on a table. “No, no, no. Are you people out of your minds? Do you know what’s at stake? Do you? Get those helicopters lower. Now.”

  Yashko glared at Kirilo. No doubt he wasn’t used to being screamed at by a civilian. But Kirilo had to give him credit. He wasn’t fuming. He was thinking. He turned to the colonel.

  “Call the choppers back,” Yashko said, “but radio the coordinates where we last saw the woman and the boy to the men you have out there. Quick.”

  “They cannot cross the international date line,” the colonel said. “That’s less than two kilometers from where we saw them last. That could be interpreted as an act of war. And we cannot have any incidents.”

  “Do it,” Yashko said.

  The colonel radioed the coordinates. The soldiers formed a line and marched in the fog toward the American island. But it was an impossible assignment. All the woman and the boy had to do was detour half a kilometer east or west and take a circuitous route to the American island, and they’d never be found. That assumed they had a compass, and Kirilo was certain they did. The woman was too resourceful to be unprepared.

  The solders searched in the fog to no avail.

  Victor stood quietly in the corner through the entire event. He never said a word. Kirilo kept peering through the telescope even though he knew there was nothing more he could do. His influence had reached its limit. The Tesla woman, the boy, and the formula had been so close he could have touched them, but now they were gone.

  They were in America.

  CHAPTER 75

  NADIA AND ADAM forged onward for two hours until they were stranded on the ice. The wind whipped their faces. They made fists constantly to keep the blood flowing in their hands. Nadia felt as though her nose were frozen. Adam said his feet ached. He knew he had blisters.

  As the fog broke up and the clouds rolled over the strait, the cliffs of Little Diomede flashed in and out of sight a quarter mile to the right. Seabirds screamed as they swooped to the water from their bluff-side perches. Excluding the birds, this side of the island was completely deserted.

  Ten minutes after they stopped moving, a skiff circled to them from the far side.

  “You made it,” a man said in perfect English. He wore a hooded parka made of animal skin and resembled the Chukchi. “My name is Sam. Get in quick. The Border Patrol rarely comes out this way and the fog is thick this morning, but we heard helicopter noise coming from Imaqliq.”

  “Your cousin said to say hello,” Nadia said after they got in the boat.

  “Which cousin?”

  “The grumpy one who’s mad the US didn’t buy Chukotka, too.”

  “I have twenty-six cousins on Imaqliq and in Chukotka. You’ve just described every one of them.”

  He rowed to a rocky beach. After Adam helped him hide his skiff behind a giant boulder, he guided them along a rocky path for half a mile to a cluster of huts on the other side of the island. Nadia focused on each step. Her breath was labored and her legs were expiring, but she refused to fall behind.

  Sam took them into his home, a three-room shack wedged into the bottom of a cliff. He introduced them to his wife and two toddlers. By American standards, it was a small, humble home, but Adam thought it was paradise. He marveled at the quantity of food in the refrigerator and the wide-screen TV.

  “Welcome to my home,” Sam said. “I’ll go out and melt some snow for you to drink.”

  “You don’t have running water?” Nadia said.

  “No. We store water from a spring in a tank for the winter. By March we run out and have to melt snow instead. There’s some water in the basin in the washroom, and the honey bucket is around the corner if you need it.”

  “Honey bucket?” Nadia said.

  “Only the washateria and the clinic have septic systems. My wife will prepare some food for you. You must be exhausted. After that, you can get some rest.”

  “Thank you so much, Sam,” Nadia said. “This is very generous of you. When will we go on to the mainland?”

  He frowned. “The mainland? You mean the Lower Forty-Eight?”

  Nadia figured out his reference. “No, no. I mean Alaska proper.”

  “Oh. Right. Day after tomorrow. On Monday.”

  Nadia frowned. “You mean tomorrow. Today is Sunday.”

  “No. Today is Saturday. When you crossed the international date line, the clock went back twenty-one hours. It’s one p.m. on Saturday. That’s why they call them ‘Tomorrow’s Island’ and ‘Yesterday’s Island.’”

  After Sam left, Adam tugged on Nadia’s sleeve and asked her to translate. Nadia repeated what Sam had said.

  “You’re on Yesterday’s Island,” she said. “You get to live the day again. As of today, you get to start over.”

  Nadia and Adam had developed blisters around their eyes from the wind on the strait. Adam had also earned some hard black blisters on the soles of his feet because his boots were so worn. Sam’s wife treated them with an antibiotic ointment.

  They ate, recuperated, and stayed indoors so as not to attract attention for two days. On Monday, a large helicopter delivered the mail. While his wife feigned illness and distracted the officer of the Border Patrol, Sam escorted Nadia and Adam into the back of the helicopter. The pilot, a longtime friend, took off.

  They flew south to the Nome Airport, where they met an old bush pilot with a Cessna. He flew Nadia and Adam back north to Kotzebue, a small town with a population of three thousand. It looked more like an industrial park that had been plunked down on a massive gravel pit at the tip of a peninsula on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

  A middle-aged man met them in an old Jeep at the Kotzebue Airport. While the Chukchi and Sam had the same bone structure and skin
color as Adam, this man looked like an artist’s impression of the boy himself in thirty years. The one exception was the huge smile on his face that was evident from the moment Nadia and Adam stepped off the plane.

  He hugged each of them as though he’d known them since birth.

  “Hello, Adam,” he said in English. “My name is Robert. Robert Seelick. I am your mother’s brother. I am your uncle.”

  CHAPTER 76

  KIRILO CHARTERED A plane in Magadan. Victor flew with him to Anchorage. Kirilo kept a select array of temporary business visas up to date in case he needed to travel on the spur of the moment, including the Category B visa for visits to America. Pavel and three of Kirilo’s bodyguards, who were waiting in Magadan, had similar documentation and joined him. Kirilo had been to New York City and Los Angeles three times each and enjoyed none of the visits. The excess of wealth and power reminded him that he was relatively poor and powerless on a global scale. After each of his visits, he couldn’t wait to get back to Kyiv.

  Victor was an American citizen, so they parted ways at US Customs and Border Protection. When Kirilo caught up with Victor at the gate to their connecting flight, Victor handed him a cell phone.

  “Where did you get this?” Kirilo said.

  Victor nodded at a kiosk for a cell phone vendor. “There’s someone on the other end of the line who wants to talk to you.”

  Kirilo pressed the phone to his ear.

  “Papa?” It was Isabella’s voice.

  “Bella?”

  “Papa.” Isabella sounded teary, as though she’d been crying.

  “Are you all right?”

  She sniffed some tears in. “Yes, I’m okay. Oh, but it’s horrible, Papa. It’s horrible.”

  “Are you hurt? Have they touched you in any way?”

  “Well, no…”

  “Are you getting enough to eat? Are they taking care of you?”

  “Well, yes…”

  “Good. Listen to me, Bella. Be good. Do whatever they tell you to do, and don’t show them any of your sass. Do you hear me, Isabella?”

  She didn’t answer. By the time Kirilo realized the line had gone dead, Victor had already stretched his hand out to retrieve the phone. Kirilo gave it to him.

  “You didn’t have a phone before,” Kirilo said. “You were worried I’d take it from you, triangulate the number you called, and find her. But you’re not worried anymore.”

  “The boys are expecting me to call every hour on the hour from now on,” Victor said. “And you’re in my country now.”

  “Yes, we’re in your country now. So why don’t you just let her go?”

  “Soon, cousin. Soon.”

  An airline employee announced that the flight to New York City would begin boarding in half an hour.

  “You have her residence under surveillance right now?” Kirilo said.

  “Yes, but she won’t go there. That would be too obvious.”

  “Where will she go?”

  “The question isn’t where she’s going. We can’t even be sure she’s going to New York. The question is, who does she trust? The question is, who’s going to know where she’s going?”

  “Why do I feel as though you’re saving the best for last?”

  “He wears his hair in an elastic band like a schoolgirl, is built like a man who worked the docks, and dresses like an Italian fashion designer.”

  “What is this abomination’s name?”

  “He calls himself Johnny Tanner, and I’m going to make him my willing accomplice.”

  CHAPTER 77

  AS SOON AS she stepped foot in Robert Seelick’s house, Nadia called Johnny Tanner.

  “How are you? Where are you?” Johnny said.

  “That’s not important,” Nadia said. “I need you to do something for me and not ask questions.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I need you to find a biologist in or around New York City. A radiobiologist would be even better. Private sector or academic. But not a government employee. You hear me? He can’t be a government employee.”

  “I hear you. What am I supposed to tell this guy?”

  “That you have a friend in possession of a scientific formula with epic ramifications. And she’ll only reveal it to an American man of science. Can you sell that, Johnny?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You have to do more than try. You have to make it happen. I need to go directly from the airport to a meeting with him as soon as I land.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Wednesday morning. I’ll call you back with the details when I have them.”

  After she hung up, Nadia whispered to Adam, “Locket?”

  He nodded confidently and pulled it out from under his shirt to show her.

  That evening, Robert’s wife served a dinner of caribou steak, steamed vegetables, bannock bread, and frozen berries. She was a slight woman, with lithe features and a kind face. After dinner, they sat in the living room and had coffee, tea, milk, and fresh chocolate chip–walnut cookies.

  “In Inupiat culture,” Robert said, “there is a supreme being called Silap Inua, but there is no afterlife. Instead, Inupiat believe that, after spending some time in limbo, the soul of a deceased is reincarnated in the body of a newborn infant.”

  He paused for Nadia to translate for Adam from English to Ukrainian.

  “There was a boy in our village some years ago named Aagayuk,” Robert said. “He vanished when he was two. He may have been kidnapped, he may have wandered off and drowned accidentally. No one ever figured it out. He had a lot of energy and showed promise to be a good hunter. He would have been seventeen in September if he were still alive. How old are you, Adam?”

  “Sixteen,” Nadia said. She translated for Adam.

  “Sixteen,” Robert said, nodding. “This boy’s parents, the Kungenooks, were older when they had their child. They lived in a nearby village and were close friends of ours. They’ve also died since then. They had no other children.”

  Robert coughed to clear his throat while Nadia translated. When she was done, he opened the manila envelope.

  “This is your new birth certificate,” he said, handing Adam a letter with a raised stamp on it. “And this is your Social Security card. A death certificate was never issued. This will allow you to travel to the Lower Forty-Eight with Nadia. You are under eighteen. No photo ID is required.”

  Adam reached for the papers.

  “There is one thing you must do first, though,” Robert said. “You must choose an Anglo name. It can be the name of any person that you admire.”

  Nadia translated.

  Adam appeared flustered for a moment. “Can I use your name, Uncle?” he said. “Can I be Robert, too?”

  Robert didn’t need a translation.

  “Robert was my father’s name. He chose it because it was the name of a man he admired very much. It was a man he worked for as a member of his campaign for president of the United States. This man’s name was Robert Kennedy. He was the brother of the former president John Kennedy. Will you remember that name, Robert Kennedy? Will you promise to learn more about him in America?”

  Nadia translated. Adam nodded eagerly.

  “Good,” Robert said. “If I am Robert, though, then you should be Bobby. Let it be so, then. From this day forward, you will be known as Aagayuk Bobby Kungenook.”

  They started a small bonfire in the backyard and burned Adam’s Ukrainian passports. Robert’s wife trimmed and styled his hair so that it covered his ears seamlessly. Later in the afternoon, they bought him some new clothes in town, including a collared shirt, khaki pants, brown moccasins, sunglasses, and a plain blue baseball cap made of wool. Robert gave him an old navy blazer that was a little too loose in the waist but otherwise fit well. When he tried on his entire ensemble, Adam looked like a college student.

  Nadia also bought him a cheap wallet and gave him five twenty-dollar bills to put inside, fresh out of an ATM.

  “A young man should al
ways have emergency cash in his pocket,” she said.

  Nadia plotted a route back to New York with Robert’s help. After checking flight schedules on his computer, she called Johnny and gave him the details of her arrival. He called her back a few hours later.

  “I found your man,” Johnny said. “Professor John Horton, Department of Radiobiology, Columbia University. He lives near the United Nations. We can meet there. In a public place. One thing we haven’t talked about. You realize you’re returning to Victor Bodnar’s home turf, right?”

  “It’s my home turf, too. I’m tired of running, and I have nowhere else to go. Besides, I have you, don’t I?”

  Johnny remained silent for a moment. “I’m not sure I’m a match for Victor Bodnar, but yes. Yes, you do.”

  At 10:00 on Tuesday morning, they said their good-byes at the Kotzebue Airport. The bush pilot, a childhood friend of Robert’s, flew them to Seattle, stopping in Anchorage to refuel along the way. In Seattle, Nadia bought two one-way tickets for the Delta red-eye, Flight 1642, to JFK Airport.

  There were no unoccupied adjacent seats in the economy cabin when Nadia booked the flights. When they got on board, she put Adam in the front so she could keep an eye on him from the other seat fifteen rows back during the flight.

  Their cumulative flight time was fourteen hours. With the time change, they arrived at JFK on schedule at 7:13 a.m. on Wednesday. Nadia watched with pride as Adam helped an elderly lady wheel her carry-on off the plane, with his own bags slung over his shoulders. Five minutes later, it was her turn to leave.

  She hustled up the ramp to the gate to catch up to Adam. Her quads and hamstrings ached. When she burst into the terminal, six armed Port Authority policemen and four burly men in suits surrounded an unremarkable businessman in a suit and tie. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and one of the officers was searching his briefcase. Nadia looked around for Adam but couldn’t find him. She walked around the perimeter of the gate, checked the food court, and asked a restroom attendant washing the floor to check the men’s room for him. Adam wasn’t there.