By the time the second Sikorsky flew to the island with Nika and Sergeant Groves aboard, piles of equipment had been off-loaded into the central area of the compound, and temporary landing lights had been arranged in a wide circle. The lights were more than a precaution; although it was only midafternoon, the dark was falling fast.
The sergeant and his crew had arrived that morning, and Nika had been able to bring Groves up to speed. He was a powerful figure, with a thick neck and an intense expression, but she immediately took to his no-nonsense attitude and the quickness with which he grasped everything she had to say, from the topography of the island to the sensitivity of the local Inuit population about what was going to go on there, on ground still considered theirs. She also had the feeling that he would do anything for Dr. Slater; apparently, they’d been through some very tight spots together, and the bond between them was strong.
The moment their chopper landed on the spot now vacated by the first one, Sergeant Groves leapt from the cabin and began directing the crew members on the unloading and disposition of the remaining materiel. He and Slater exchanged a look or two, a few words, and the rest of their communications seemed to be done telepathically, working together seamlessly to get the first things done first, and as rapidly as possible. A generator shed was erected, and thick coils of wire were run across the ground along grid lines that they must have worked out beforehand. A mess tent was set up, and Dr. Lantos was quick to go inside and open her laptop computer on top of a rations crate. In just an hour or two, electric lights were up and running, a lavatory was discreetly but conveniently placed in the shelter of a stockade wall, and flags had been stuck in the ground where the prefab labs and residential tents would be constructed the next day. Nika, impressed by the military precision and speed, did her best just to stay out of the way.
Not that she didn’t feel she had her own duties to perform. Dr. Slater might have thought that she had been using her status as the tribal elder simply to secure herself a berth on the island, but he was wrong. She took her duties seriously. She was an anthropologist by training—a scientist—but she was also imbued with a powerful spiritual urge, one that connected her not only to the Inuit people but to the worldview that they maintained. She was not someone to discount the legends and practices of her people, or to deny the possibility of things simply because our ordinary senses could not see or hear or smell them. So long as 90 percent of the universe was composed of something routinely called “dark matter,” who was she to set any limits on what might, or might not, be true?
The night had truly fallen now, and while the others gathered in the mess tent—its green walls glowing like a firefly in summer—Nika pulled her collar up around her face and walked into the blackness of the compound. She listened to the wind, hoping to hear the voices of the souls who had once lived—and died—here. She peered into the cabins and open stalls, trying to imagine the settlers’ faces peering out. And all the while, she was trying, in her own way, to communicate with them. To reassure them that she, and the others with her, had come not to pillage or intrude, but to accomplish something of great magnitude … something that might help keep others from succumbing to the same terrible fate that they had.
Despite whatever benign intentions she was trying to telegraph, however, she was getting no such messages in return. Just a howling, empty void.
Stopping in front of the church, which sloped ever so gently to one side, she felt that she had come, not surprisingly, to the fulcrum of the colony. The one place where the power—and the essence—of the sect had been most concentrated. And even as she heard Sergeant Groves bellowing out into the darkness that it was dinnertime—“and we close the kitchen at eight!”—she dropped her backpack and sleeping bag on the church steps. Precisely because it gave her the willies, and because it had been the one place she could be assured that all the souls here had regularly gathered, she knew that this was where she would need to bunk down later that night.
Chapter 24
Rasputin had been right.
But Anastasia had to struggle to remember his very words.
He had predicted that if a member of the aristocracy, or more specifically her family, were responsible for his murder, it would signal the end of the Romanov dynasty. Pamphlets secretly published by his irate followers proclaimed that the streets would run with blood, brother would turn against brother, and no one in her family would be safe.
And lo and behold, so far it was all coming to pass.