“But apart from Harley Vane’s washing up there, nobody’s set foot on that island for years. It’s got a very bad reputation among the locals. How do you know for sure?”
“We did a flyover an hour ago. We could see where the graveyard had given way. The permafrost has thawed, and the cliff is eroding.”
Nika’s phone rang, and she hollered, “Pick it up, Geordie! No calls.”
“That’s why we have to set up an inspection site there, exhume the bodies, take samples, and make sure that there is no viable virus present.”
And it suddenly dawned on her, with full clarity, why this had all been kept so secret. My God, they were talking about doing something that was, first of all, a serious desecration of old graves—the sort of thing her own Inuit people would take a very dim view of—but even worse, they were talking about the potential release of a plague that had wiped out untold millions. That was one lesson that no native Alaskan escaped.
“But why here? Those bodies have been buried for almost a hundred years. Why would you think that they would contain a live virus when there are graveyards all over the globe filled with people who died from the flu?”
“But the bodies there weren’t flash frozen and kept in that state ever since.”
In her mind’s eye, she pictured the woolly-mammoth carcass that had been unearthed, nearly perfectly preserved, when they built the oil and gas refinery just outside town. She was just six years old then, but she remembered staring at it, feeling so sad, and wondering if it had been killed by a dinosaur.
“What about the risk to this town? If there’s a threat a few miles offshore, that’s a lot too close for comfort in my book. Are we going to have to evacuate? And if so, for how long? Who’s going to pay for that, and where are we supposed to go?”
She had a dozen other questions, too, but he held up his hand and said, “Hold on, hold on. It’s all in that report.”
“Thanks very much,” she said, acidly, “but as we’ve already discussed, it’ll take me all night to read that thing.”
“The risk,” Dr. Slater said, “has been calculated to be well within reasonable limits, and just to be on the safe side, we will be proceeding under Biohazard 3 conditions at all times. Any specimens will be taken on and off the island by Coast Guard helicopter. They won’t even pass through Port Orlov. We will only need this town as a temporary staging area. We’ll have assembled, and be gone, by the day after tomorrow. Nobody needs to go anywhere.”
For the moment, she was pacified, but she still wasn’t happy. She had come back to this town in the middle of nowhere because she felt a responsibility to it, and to her native people. She knew the history of their suffering, and she knew the toll those terrible misdeeds continued to take, down to the present day. There wasn’t an Inuit family that didn’t still feel the pain from the loss of their way of life, not a family that wasn’t fractured by depression or alcoholism or drugs. She had made it out, with a scholarship first to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and then the graduate program in anthropology at Berkeley. But she had come back, to be their voice and their defender. Only right now, she wasn’t sure how best to go about it.
The phone rang again, cut short by Geordie picking up down the hall.
“I know I’ve given you a lot to digest,” Slater said, but before she could answer, Geordie hollered, “When you said no calls, did you mean the sanitation plant, too?”
“Yes!” she called back, exasperated.
“But I’d be happy to answer any other questions you have. I know you’ll have plenty more.”
A gust of cold air blew down the corridor, followed by the sound of stamping feet. Professor Kozak leaned in the doorway, his glasses fogged and his face ruddy. “Is anyone hungry? I am hungry enough to eat the bear!”
It was just the note of comic relief that Nika needed. She smiled, and Dr. Slater smiled, too. His face took on a wry, but appealing, expression. She found herself wondering where else he had been before winding up in this remote corner of Alaska. From the weariness that she also saw in his face, she guessed it had been a lot of the world’s hot spots. “I’m not sure they’re serving bear,” she said, slipping the report into her desk drawer, then locking it, “but I know a place that does the best mooseburger north of Nome.”
Chapter 15
Charlie had been in the middle of a webcast, sending out the word from the Vane’s Holy Writ headquarters—and of course soliciting funds so that the church could continue its “community outreach programs in the most removed and spiritually deprived regions of America’s great northwest”—when his whole damn house started to shake.