“There are wolves?” Dr. Lantos, said, her eyes still closed.
“A few,” Slater replied. “But Nika tells me that if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone.” He had assigned Nika to the second chopper, which would follow in a couple of hours, so she could help guide Sergeant Groves and his crew. She’d looked at him a little suspiciously, afraid that this might be some ruse to keep her off the island and out of harm’s way, after all, but he had laughed and said, “You know, you should really work in Washington.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got all the natural instincts.”
Frowning, she said, “I’ll take that as a compliment, for now.”
The helicopter started to slow down, banking to one side, and Slater saw Dr. Lantos swallow hard. For all her fearsome reputation in the lab and in academic circles, where her work was always ahead of the curve and so meticulous as to be indisputable, she was plainly as unhappy in the air as she had claimed. He wondered how she’d made it on the five separate flights that had been necessary just to get her all this way from M.I.T.
“We’re over the landing zone,” the pilot’s voice crackled on the headphones. And then, as a gag, he added, “Please make sure your tray tables are completely secured, and your seats are in the upright position.” As if these hard seats could be made to budge an inch.
Wobbling back and forth, the Sikorsky slowly settled itself on the ground, its tires giving the craft a jounce as they made contact with the ground. Dr. Lantos let out a long breath, and for the first time since boarding, unclasped her hands and let her shoulders fall.
When she opened her eyes, Dr. Slater said, sympathetically, “Maybe we can get the Coast Guard to ferry you back when we’re done here.”
“I get seasick, too.”
As the rotors wound down with a sigh, Professor Kozak unlatched the cabin door, threw it open, and clambered down. Lantos followed him, a trifle unsteadily, and Slater brought up the rear.
One of the pilots was already on the ground, heading for the cargo hold. And though Slater was eager to oversee the unloading of the lab gear—with the rest of the heavy equipment coming on the second chopper—he had to stop and simply look around. He had not actually set foot on the island, much less inside the colony, until this second, and whenever he arrived at the site of any epidemiological expedition, he immediately needed to get the lay of the land. From the first flyover three days before, he knew the general layout of the settlement, but it was only when he walked away from the helicopter now and did a 360 that he had a true sense of it.
And it felt like he’d stepped inside a ghostly fort.
Despite all the gaps in the timbers, the stockade wall was still formidable, and the abandoned buildings—with their empty windows and gaping doors—seemed eerily tenanted, anyway. He knew there was no one inside the structures, but that didn’t stop him from feeling as if he was being observed. A bucket swung from a rusty chain above an old well, and he marveled that the chain was still intact at all. At the other end of the compound, and tilted slightly on its raised pilings, stood a wooden church with its distinctively orthodox onion dome. He could imagine the hard and uncompromising lives of the Russians who had carved this place out of such an unwelcoming wilderness, making a home for themselves in this most inhospitable and inaccessible spot. A place where they considered themselves impregnable and unreachable … until the Spanish flu had found them.
Again, Slater wondered how. What sly mechanism had the virus used to journey across the frozen waters of the Bering Sea, up onto this isolated rock, and in through the wooden gates that stood behind him?
“The ramp’s down,” the pilot said. “Should we start unloading?”
Slater said yes, and turned back to supervise it. Kozak was smoking a cigar, the pungent aroma wafting in the wind, and Dr. Lantos was bundled up in her coat, the hood raised over her nimbus of frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, stamping her feet on the frozen ground to keep the circulation going. Glancing up at the murky gray sky, Slater reminded himself that he had a window of only a few hours in which to get some tents and other protective structures set up. The alternative—bunking down in the rotted cabins or the leaning church—would not, he suspected, go over very well.