“No one has. It’s a tiny fishing village, on the northwest tip of the Seward Peninsula. This shot was taken there, too,” she said, tapping again, and bringing up a picture of an A-frame house that had slipped off its foundation.
“And here’s the Inuit totem pole that has stood in the center of town since 1867, to commemorate the Russian sale of the Alaska territory.” Miraculously, the old wooden column, with faded paint on the faces of eagles and otters, was still standing, but at an angle that reminded Slater of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Plainly, the ground was shifting, but that was a problem for the geologists, was it not?
“Earthquake activity?” he asked, and Dr. Levinson shook her head.
“We’ve checked all the seismological data, and no, that’s not it.”
She tapped again, and a series of shots came up, of mailboxes that had fallen over, of concrete steps that had cracked, of wharves that had buckled.
“It’s climate change,” she said. “The average air temperature’s rising, the offshore currents are getting warmer … and the permafrost is starting to thaw.”
Okay, that sounded like a perfectly reasonable conclusion. But he still didn’t see how any of it fell into his bailiwick.
As if she could guess what he was thinking, Dr. Levinson clicked on the next slide. “And then this turned up,” she said.
At first he thought it was just an old dark door, or maybe an antique dining table, but then he looked more closely and saw that its surface was elaborately carved and depicted a classical figure, maybe a saint, in a flowing robe, and holding a set of keys on a ring. A long crack ran down one side of the wood.
“I assume it’s the top of a coffin,” Slater said, and when she didn’t correct him, he added, “but who’s that on top?”
“St. Peter, holding the keys to Heaven and Hell.”
“Where did it come from?”
“The Coast Guard retrieved it. A fishing boat had pulled it up in the nets, and when the boat hit some rocks and went under, one of the crew was able to hang on to it long enough to get to shore.”
“He sounds like Ishmael.”
“His name’s Harley Vane, and from what I’ve read in the initial reports, he’s a piece of work. He’s claimed the lid as salvage, and he still has it.”
That seemed a bit strange to Slater, but maybe if he’d had occasion to hitch a ride on a coffin lid, he’d feel attached to it, too. “Where’s it from?”
“Our best guess is that it came from the cemetery on a place called St. Peter’s Island, a few miles west of Port Orlov.”
Another slide came up. An aerial shot of a hulking black island, with a bank of fog clinging to its shores.
“The island is nearly impregnable, but a sect of religious zealots, most of them from Siberia, did manage to settle there around 1912.”
“Don’t tell me anyone’s still there,” Slater said, though one look at the forbidding island was enough to make him wonder how anyone could ever have chosen to call it home in the first place.
“No one alive,” Levinson said, and now she leaned forward on the table, her arms folded and her expression grave. She looked at him over the top of her bifocals. “They all died, in the space of a week or two. In 1918.”
The date was a dead giveaway, and now he could see where this had all been going. “The Spanish flu?”
Levinson nodded.
It was all coming together. “So the same disturbances to the ground in Port Orlov are showing up on the island, too.”
She remained silent while he worked it out.
“And as the permafrost thaws, things that were buried are coming to the surface. Things like old caskets.”
“The graveyard was built on a cliff, away from the settlement itself,” she said, filling in another piece. “But now the cliff is giving way.”
And shedding coffins … coffins filled with victims of the flu. “Is the concern,” he said, thinking aloud, “that the Spanish flu virus might still be viable in the frozen corpses?”
“It’s a remote possibility,” she conceded, “but it’s a possibility that we have to deal with, nonetheless.”
As an epidemiologist, Slater did not need to be told what could happen if the Spanish flu was ever released again into the world. In a few short years, the Spanish flu pandemic had swept the globe, and although there were still disputes about the final death toll, the figure of 50 million was well accepted. In his own view, Slater had always thought that the casualty count on the Indian subcontinent had been vastly understated. What was not in dispute was that the Spanish flu had been the most devastating plague ever to hit the human race, and that to this day no one had ever completely figured it out, or discovered a way to combat it. Its victims died the most excruciating of deaths, literally drowning in a froth of their own blood and secretions, and although some of the most thorough research into mapping its genetic structure had been done right here, at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the scientific community was still no closer to a cure.