“The solar flares are putting on quite a show for us tonight,” Kozak said, acknowledging Slater and Nika by cocking his pipe in their direction. The cherry tobacco perfumed the air.
“Solar?” Groves said. “We haven’t seen the sun for more than three hours all week.”
“The solar wind takes two days to reach us, and when the flood of electrons and protons hits the upper atmosphere, they collide with the atoms there, and go boom!” He took another puff on his pipe. “This collision gives off radiation in the form of light. Different atoms give off different colors. In Mongolia, I once saw them turn to a scarlet red. But that is very rare.”
“Yeah, well, these will do just fine,” Groves said, staring up at the pulsating veil of green and yellow bands performing elaborate arabesques in the sky. “You don’t catch anything like this in Afghanistan.”
Slater, too, was impressed—he’d never seen the aurora borealis—but the sparkling green lights bathing the horizon made him think, oddly enough, of that hellish sight on CNN, on the night the United States had initiated its much-vaunted “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad. He’d known that much of America was sitting in front of its TV sets, filled with that strange, guilty exultation that comes with war and displays of military might; when he was young and unthinking, he’d felt that way himself. But his own heart had sickened at the thought of what he knew was happening there on the ground. He had been dispatched to far too many such places in the aftermath of war, places where nothing remained standing and everything from cholera to typhus ran riot. He was aware of the human toll that was being taken before his very eyes.
“For the Native Americans,” Nika said, “the northern lights were considered a ladder to heaven.”
“I can see why,” Groves readily assented.
“Whenever they saw the lights, they thought they were looking at the spirits of their ancestors dancing and playing games as they ascended to the next world.”
“Maybe they had it right,” Groves said.
“It certainly beats the funerals in Russia,” Kozak said, solemnly. He tamped at his pipe and appeared lost in thought.
While they had all bundled up against the freezing wind, Slater noticed that Nika’s coat was loosely drawn around her, and her own long hair was streaming out like a mane. As she stood there beside him on the cliff, looking out toward the dwindling lights above the sea—the bands were swirling together now into a glowing lime-green corona—she looked so much like a natural part of this spectacle that it was no surprise to him she had returned from San Francisco to Alaska, or that she had been made a tribal elder of the Inuit people. He could see her ancestors in her.
He must have been staring because she suddenly turned to look him full in the face, her head cocked to one side. “Your first time?”
“The aurora?” he replied. “Yes.”
“I’m glad it was with me,” she said, with a wry smile.
And right then, as if the streaming display had been suddenly sucked into a black hole, the lights went out, leaving only the pinpoint pricks of the stars and the cold sea wind snapping at their clothes.
“What just happened?”
“They do that,” she said.
Still, Frank and Nika remained where they were, as did Kozak and Groves, all looking out at the ice-choked ocean like concertgoers hoping for an encore. But there was none.
And then, from far off in the woods somewhere, Slater heard a howl.
“Sounds like everyone is disappointed,” Groves joked, as the howl of the wolf became a chorus.
Nika shivered, and suddenly drew her coat tighter around her as the mournful choir, lost in the woods surrounding the colony, bayed for the lost lights of Heaven.
Chapter 35
Russell had sat in the hut for hours, nursing the last beer he’d carried in his pocket, and waiting for Harley and Eddie to come and get him. Did they really expect him to find his way back through the woods—much less locate that shitty little cave they’d been hiding out in—all by himself?