“That’s a coffin,” he exulted. “We did it, man!”
Harley told him to step back, then, lifting the pickaxe, he brought it down with a crash. There was the sharp crack of the blade cutting into wood.
Eddie was pumping his arms in anticipation of the treasure chest he thought they were about to uncover.
Harley wanted to tell him to cool it, but his own blood was up, too. If something did turn up in the casket, he’d have something to throw in Charlie’s face. Who’s the fuckup now?
He raised the pickaxe again, its dull iron blade framed against a sky of the same color, and even as he ripped it down into the coffin, something on the far horizon caught his eye.
The pick, as a result, missed its mark, and landed with a bone-aching thud in the frozen soil to one side.
“Watch what you’re doing,” Eddie said. “You gotta hit the spot that’s clear already.”
But Harley was watching that speck on the horizon again. It was just a black dot, but it was coming in their direction.
Eddie was using the spade to make a greater target on the top of the coffin. And when Harley didn’t lift the pick for the next blow, he said, “You want me to do it?” He reached for the pick. “Give it to me, ya *.”
Harley let him, not taking his eyes off the approaching speck. Which was now distinctly coming into view—it was a helicopter, undoubtedly the one from the hockey rink in Port Orlov—and it was coming right at them.
“Duck!” Harley said, and Eddie looked at him in confusion.
“From what?”
“From that!” he said, pointing at the oncoming chopper.
Now they could hear the racket of its engines and its rotating blades on the ocean wind.
Harley flattened himself against a wooden cross and Eddie huddled at the foot of the broken angel, his arms folded over his head. Unless the chopper stopped to hover above the cemetery, it would pass over them so fast they wouldn’t be seen … though their spade and pickaxe lay in plain sight on the snow. Damn. Harley reached out one arm and grabbed the spade and dragged it under him.
There was a rush of wind and noise as the chopper swooped low overhead, zooming straight over the graveyard and the trees and aiming for the colony grounds. Once it was safely past, Harley leapt to his feet and watched as it did indeed slow down and make a circular pass over the spot where the stockade walls enclosed the old settlement. Red and white running lights adorned its fuselage, blinking on and off, as the chopper, built like some huge green praying mantis, seemed to suspend itself in midair, before descending below the tree line, and out of Harley’s view.
“Fuck me, man,” Eddie said. “They’re here already?”
He was right about that, Harley thought. They were well and truly fucked if these guys were here for anything more than a quick stopover, or, as those douche-bag pilots had claimed, a “routine training mission.”
His eyes went back to the splintered coffin in the partially exposed grave. And so did Eddie’s.
“No way I’m letting those assholes get what we dug up,” Eddie said, rising from the foot of the tombstone.
And neither was Harley, though he knew there wasn’t much time. Brushing the dirt and ice from his gloves, he raised the pick and taking a deep breath first, swung it high above his head, then brought it down one more time with a satisfying thwack.
Chapter 23
Dr. Slater, ever the hospitable team leader, had offered the virologist, Dr. Lantos, who had arrived in Port Orlov just a few hours earlier, a window seat on the Sikorsky Skycrane, but she had demurred.
“I’m not a fan of flying,” she said, “and looking out the window of a helicopter is about the last thing I want to do.”
Even now, as the chopper flew toward the forbidding cliffs of St. Peter’s Island, she was sitting very still in the seat facing him, her eyes closed behind her thick glasses and her hands clutched tightly in her lap. Professor Kozak, whose ample bulk was strapped into the seat at Slater’s side, was craning his neck for a better view out of his own window.
“We’re coming up on the cemetery,” he said over the headphones, and as they whooshed over it, he pressed his forehead against the Plexiglas for a better view.
Slater took a look, too, but they were over it so fast it was all he could do to catch a glimpse of the spot where the cliff had given way.
“You see that?” Kozak said, and Slater asked him what.
“Something moved.”
“What do you mean?”
“Might have been a wolf down in the graveyard.”