The Boy From Reactor 4 (40 page)

No. It was the boy.

“The boy, the boy,” Kirilo said. “There he is.”

A chorus of voices. “What? Where?”

A soldier surprised the boy.

“Wait,” Kirilo said. “He’s one of ours.”

The soldier raised his rifle. The boy dropped his bag and raised his hands.

“We’ve got him,” Kirilo said. “By God, we’ve got him.”

CHAPTER 73

A
DAM STARED AT
the barrel of the rifle. The soldier was either going to shoot him or take him prisoner to get the locket. The first option was bad. He didn’t want to die. But the second was worse. To come this close to executing his father’s plan and then be taken without a fight was unacceptable.

The soldier had a face that could have grated potatoes. He looked as happy as the coach the morning after a vodka bender. His rifle was wedged in his armpit as he operated the radio transmitter that was attached with Velcro to his shoulder.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Standing by.”

Adam had to make a move, and he had to make it now. He had quickness and the element of surprise in his favor. Lunge, lift, wrestle. Lunge forward, lift the barrel, and wrestle it out of the guy’s hands.

“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

“T
HEY’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

N
ADIA AND
A
DAM
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

K
IRILO 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.