‘I would say not enough.’
‘I’ve never told anyone like this before, all at once, like in a stream of consciousness.’
He laughed, and that made her laugh, a kind of belly laugh that lifted the coiled tension of months in Afghanistan.
‘So where are you from?’ she asked.
‘That’s what they say as soon as you step into an army camp,’ he said.
‘What do you tell them?’
‘Alaska.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Or if I want a game, I tell them China or Korea. A lot of people don’t like Eskimos.’
‘I thought Eskimo was a derogatory term.’
He explained that Eskimos were Alaskan and Russian, Inuit were from Canada and Greenland. It was about language, tribe, disputed history, and they were all family. Then just a few minutes after the laughter and he was telling her this, his phone had rung. Seconds later, hers rang too. Another bomb. Familiar territory.
Rake listened as Carrie, in her medical-crisis voice, challenged every reason the duty sergeant gave for not sending a helicopter for Akna.
‘There’s weather all over the state, Dr Walker,’ he said. ‘We will get to you as fast as possible.’
‘When?’
‘You need to allow twelve hours.’
Carrie no longer held back her exasperation. ‘In twelve hours, you’ll be airlifting out a corpse.’
‘Your patient is fortunate that she has you with her.’
‘She is dying.’
‘You have my word, ma’am. We’ll be as fast as we can.’
‘Make it faster.’
Henry brought in the stretcher and laid it by the sofa. He and Joan quietly prepared for the journey down to the school.
They waited until the wind dropped. Rake opened the door to check. The island glimmered in pale daylight. A line of low-lying fog spread across the shoreline. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
‘Akna. Can you hear me? Look at me, Akna,’ Carrie said.
‘What’s happening?’ Akna hadn’t spoken before. Pain creased across her face.
‘Your baby is coming early. We’re taking you to the school to wait for the helicopter.’
Akna grimaced. They wrapped her in woolen blankets, lifted her onto the stretcher, laid a seal skin on top and then another blanket. Henry made sure her face was covered, no skin exposed, and secured a rubber tube to her mouth for breathing. The temperature outside was minus 15 Celsius with a wind ferocity to double that. If they made a mistake, Akna could die on the short journey to the school. Henry and the three other men carried her.
Carrie took the rear, her medical pack slung over her shoulder. Joan walked alongside Akna. Rake led.
At the end of the walkway, he took them down steps past an old military observation post, abandoned by the National Guard nearly thirty years earlier. There had been no government presence on the island since. Step by treacherous step, he guided them past the front doors of homes marked by drying seal skins, tied meat, and the skulls of walrus and polar bears.
Rake kicked a fallen ice block off the next walkway, testing the surface underneath, and brought them off the hillside to rocky ground wide enough for Carrie to join Joan and check on the patient. On one side was a shop called the Native Store and on the other an old wooden building that housed a laundry and a clinic where Henry got the stretcher from.
Rake crossed the small playground, testing the safest way through the red swing and the yellow and blue slide and on to the ramp to the school, the sturdiest building in the village, warm, with stocks of food and hot water.
Wild birds flew out of the hillside and Rake caught their smell in the air. They swept back and forth, shadowing through the dim daylight, but seemingly going nowhere. They had distinct styles of flight to mark the weather. Henry had taught him how they flew one way as the hunting season approached and another during the summer weeks of the midnight sun. They had a way of flight with fog, early snowfalls, full moons, and the seasons. Now they were different again. This was how they flew when a helicopter was approaching. You saw the birds long before you heard the engine.
The birds went into a frenzy. Then he heard an engine.
‘There’s a chopper,’ he said, wedging open the door for Akna to be carried into the school. But how? Maybe one of the private companies had taken the risk, maybe not from Nome, but from Wales or Teller, the closer mainland settlements.
Carrie’s eyes brightened. ‘Well done, Rake!’ She looked around. ‘Where?’
‘From the north. See the birds?’
‘Amazing. You can tell from them.’ She followed her patient into the warmth inside to get her ready.
A balcony wrapped around the school. Rake ran onto it, checking his phone on the way. There was no message from Nome or Anchorage, no missed calls. To the south and north, he saw nothing. He looked back up the hillside. Nothing.
The noise became louder. Then, straight ahead, he worked out what was happening. The helicopter had been impossible to detect with the naked eye because it was camouflaged against the dark ridge of Big Diomede. Now it rose up — a Russian two-engine 38, lit like a beacon with the Red Cross of a medical aircraft illuminated clearly on its sides.
It took a second for him to absorb what was before him. What he was seeing was unbelievable. But it was there, real and close.
Navigating the icy rocks on the pathway, he ran down to the unlit helipad to guide the aircraft in. He prayed that fog and wind would keep away. He held up his flashlight with both hands, flashing the traditional SOS Morse Code emergency signal. The helicopter snapped on a search lamp that caught him full in the face. He turned against the imminent down-draught of the rotor blades, looking back towards Russia.
His tongue suddenly dried in his mouth as he sifted through what was happening. Rapidly, he processed what he saw and it didn’t make sense. It was an incredible sight, a terrifying one, and he had no idea what it meant.
Spread right across the ridgeline, seven more helicopters ascended from behind the larger island. He recognized three as troop carriers and four as new Russian attack helicopters, two on each flank, flying low and heading straight for his island.
THREE
Stephanie Lucas, British Ambassador to Washington, DC and daughter of a London used-car salesman, walked briskly past a statue of Winston Churchill, right arm raised in his famous two-fingered victory salute, his left leaning on a cane. The statue stood outside her residence, a magnificent red-brick country-style mansion that — the way things were going — might not be home for much longer.
She was hosting a small dinner for the world’s two newest leaders, America’s brash President-elect who was two days away from moving into the White House and Britain’s socialist Prime Minister who had been in office less than two weeks. Stephanie had made herself late by a few minutes to give Prime Minister Kevin Slater and President-elect Bob Holland time to gauge each other. Inexperienced, ambitious, and unafraid to speak their minds, they stood at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Diplomatic protocol dictated that Holland and outgoing President Christopher Swain should not be invited to the same event. Even though Trump had torn up the rule book on presidential transition, Stephanie had stuck to it. Holland detested Swain and, despite winning with a clear mandate, had made the presidential transition as acrimonious as if he were still on the campaign trail.