The Romanov Cross: A Novel (3 page)

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.

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.