Then another glint caught Zubov’s eye, this one far off through the fog and drawing closer. It was the deck lights of the Phoenix — a brilliant, manmade constellation moored to the floe less than a mile away. The ship was straight ahead, moored to the ice itself, and on the far side of her was the manmade berg of Ulva-laden ice.
Now Zubov could see ships all around the Snocat — to the left was the Sovietsky Soyuz and to the right was the North Sea. By some combination of dead reckoning and blind luck, he had found the one peninsula of fast ice that jutted directly into the very middle of the containment operation. Never before had he been so relieved to see a landing ramp: the steel plates that angled sharply up from the ice to the gunwales of the Phoenix.
The Snocat’s engine finally ran out of fuel, sputtered, and died within fifty yards of its destination.
“Nice driving, Serg,” Garner said from the other side of the cab.
“Just like I planned it.” Zubov exhaled with relief. “Really.”
With the engine silenced, they could now hear the sounds of the other two ships, the generators and winches working tirelessly to draw the ice into the containment booms. The ships were moored all around him, thousands of tons of iron and steel gathered around the floating pen.
A crowd of people was gathered on the Phoenix’s deck and they all began streaming down the landing plank to greet the new arrivals. They were wrapped with hoods, scarves, and goggles, and Zubov couldn’t identify any of them. He realized it didn’t matter who they were, for he didn’t really know any of them — Junko wasn’t among them, Byrnes was gone, and his only two other confidants were slumped on the seat beside him. Then Zubov felt a twinge of regret: though he was too tired to admit it, he wished there were someone there to welcome him back. Someone important. Someone he loved, who loved him back.
Sooner rather than later, he wanted that someone to be Junko.
As he climbed out of the cab, Zubov passed a prayer of thanks to whoever had been looking down on them that day. He wanted to believe it was his family, and all the others who had perished in Pripyat in 1986. They understood hardship.
“Thank you,” he whispered aloud, but the words were lost to the wind.
Susan was the first to reach them.
“Thank goodness you made it!” she said with cautious relief. There was still too much she did not know about the condition of the new arrivals to be unreservedly happy.
Garner was already off the seat and attending to Carol.
“Is she?” Susan began, looking at Carol.
“She’s alive,” Garner said. “Badly broken leg, maybe some frostbite. Come on, let’s get her inside.” Garner started to pick Carol up, but instead four of the Phoenix’s crew stepped in with a back board to carry her.
“Oh no you don’t,” Susan scolded Garner as he tried to help. “Not with that head wound of yours. Follow these guys inside and I’ll take a look at that too.”
Garner followed them back toward the ship.
“Cleopatra never had it so good,” Carol said as the board was carted along.
“He carried her about thirty miles,” Zubov explained to Susan as the others moved off. “And carried himself twenty more before that, if you can believe it. I doubt I would have found them if he hadn’t… I mean, I wouldn’t have…”
The emotion of the blessed serendipity silenced him.
“It’s okay, Sergei,” Susan said, comforting him. “It’s gonna be all right now.”
Zubov suddenly realized that only he and Susan had lagged behind the others. He glanced expectantly toward the Phoenix.
I’ll take a look at that too, Susan had said to Garner. Then it hit him. “Where’s Junko?” Zubov asked.
When Susan turned back to him, there were tears in her eyes.
“In the infirmary,” she said. “She’s ” She choked on her words. “Oh, Sergei, I’m so sorry.”
Zubov turned on his heel and began galloping toward the ship, Susan close behind him. He sprinted past Garner and the others carrying Carol before they reached the base of the landing ramp, then bounded up the ramp. First into the airlock, he began stripping off his outside clothing. He was now in a frantic hurry and Susan struggled to keep pace with him.
“What happened?” Zubov demanded.
Tears streamed down Susan’s cheeks.
“She didn’t let on how badly she was exposed the first time, because…”
“Because why —”
Dressed in his inside clothes, Zubov stepped out of the airlock into the lab.
“She still could have told me. Now she’s probably made it worse—”
Susan stopped him at the end of the corridor leading to the infirmary.
“Serg, listen to me: Junko’s dead. She died this morning.” Susan struggled to add some words of comfort to the news to make it seem less devastating. Something like she died in her sleep or she died peacefully; she didn’t feel a thing. But Susan had been a witness to Junko’s final hours aboard the Phoenix and she knew firsthand that none of those platitudes were true. The horrors of Junko’s death, how system after system in her body had shut down, how she had slowly burned to death from within, would haunt Susan forever.
Zubov knew none of this. He only knew that he had never felt colder in his entire life.
Carol was taken immediately to the infirmary, where Susan set her broken leg in a cast, treated her surprisingly mild frostbite, and meticulously went through Junko’s checklist for radiation poisoning.
Susan was just completing her examination when Garner came in. He had begun to return to life, if only from the warm, familiar confines of the ship.
Carol managed a weak smile.
“Hi, honey,” she said.
Garner leaned close, kissed her on the forehead.
“Safe and sound,” he said. “Told you so.”
Carol was about to reply when Garner hushed her.
“I know,” he said.
Carol squeezed his hand once, then drifted into a deep sleep.
Garner looked at Susan.
“Where’s the big guy?” he asked quietly.
Susan nodded toward the adjoining cabin just as Zubov exited the room. His eyes were rimmed red and sunken with despair. He looked smaller, somehow.
It was the first moment the two had been together since returning to the ship.
Garner studied his friend carefully, then embraced him.
“I’m sorry, man.”
“I could have been here,” Zubov said, his voice strained and fighting back his tears. “If I’d only known.”
“You can’t look at it like that,” Susan said, coming up behind them. “If you’d stayed, Carol and Brock would be dead too. There was nothing we could have done to save her here.” In truth, Junko had measured her own exposure at over eight Sieverts — enough to start destroying her central nervous system almost immediately.
“She knew she wasn’t going to survive more than a few hours and that these two needed you more.”
“She wanted to spare the rest of us a lot of pain,” Garner said. He could see Zubov was waiting to hear something else. “You can’t watch over everyone. No one can.”