The Boy from Reactor 4

He’d let some slack develop near his elbow. It was a big mistake. Now the soldier was even further on edge. He raised the rifle to eye level and pointed it between Adam’s eyes.

“The order is shoot if necessary but don’t kill,” the soldier said. “So wounding is okay.” He lowered his aim to Adam’s right knee. “You want to live in a wheelchair the rest of your life?”

Adam raised his hands as high as he could and shook his head. No. Not the knees. If he got shot in the knees, he might never skate again. Better the heart or the head than the knees.

“Why are you staring at me, boy? You shouldn’t have stared at me, boy.” He cocked his head to the side, moved one eye to the sight, and closed the other.

A figure rushed out of the fog from the soldier’s blind side and rammed him with a shoulder. The soldier and his gun went flying. He landed hard on the ice. Didn’t move.

Adam glanced at the figure. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was Nadia. Of course it was, he thought. Who else could it have been? But it was a woman. An American woman had knocked out a Russian soldier.

“Awesome,” Adam said.

A look of pride washed over Nadia’s face. Replaced with her usual intensity. “Quick, get your bags,” she said.

Adam grabbed his knapsack and satchel.

They disappeared into the fog.

CHAPTER 74

“THEY’RE GETTING AWAY,” Kirilo said.

“It’s the damned fog,” the colonel said. “My men can’t see anything. The helicopters are useless.”

“Tell them to go lower,” Major General Yashko ordered.

“They’re getting away,” Kirilo said. “Lower, dammit.”

The colonel said, “Any lower and they will collide. Do you want to be the one who explains to the highest authorities why two helicopters collided in the fog over Gvozdev? Do you want to explain the nature of the mission to your superiors, Major General?”

Major General Yashko glanced alternately at Deputy Director Krylov and the fog in the observation window. The two men shrugged at each other.

“Call the choppers back,” Yashko said.

Kirilo pounded his fist on a table. “No, no, no. Are you people out of your minds? Do you know what’s at stake? Do you? Get those helicopters lower. Now.”

Yashko glared at Kirilo. No doubt he wasn’t used to being screamed at by a civilian. But Kirilo had to give him credit. He wasn’t fuming. He was thinking. He turned to the colonel.

“Call the choppers back,” Yashko said, “but radio the coordinates where we last saw the woman and the boy to the men you have out there. Quick.”

“They cannot cross the international date line,” the colonel said. “That’s less than two kilometers from where we saw them last. That could be interpreted as an act of war. And we cannot have any incidents.”

“Do it,” Yashko said.

The colonel radioed the coordinates. The soldiers formed a line and marched in the fog toward the American island. But it was an impossible assignment. All the woman and the boy had to do was detour half a kilometer east or west and take a circuitous route to the American island, and they’d never be found. That assumed they had a compass, and Kirilo was certain they did. The woman was too resourceful to be unprepared.

The solders searched in the fog to no avail.

Victor stood quietly in the corner through the entire event. He never said a word. Kirilo kept peering through the telescope even though he knew there was nothing more he could do. His influence had reached its limit. The Tesla woman, the boy, and the formula had been so close he could have touched them, but now they were gone.

They were in America.

CHAPTER 75

NADIA AND ADAM forged onward for two hours until they were stranded on the ice. The wind whipped their faces. They made fists constantly to keep the blood flowing in their hands. Nadia felt as though her nose were frozen. Adam said his feet ached. He knew he had blisters.

As the fog broke up and the clouds rolled over the strait, the cliffs of Little Diomede flashed in and out of sight a quarter mile to the right. Seabirds screamed as they swooped to the water from their bluff-side perches. Excluding the birds, this side of the island was completely deserted.

Ten minutes after they stopped moving, a skiff circled to them from the far side.

“You made it,” a man said in perfect English. He wore a hooded parka made of animal skin and resembled the Chukchi. “My name is Sam. Get in quick. The Border Patrol rarely comes out this way and the fog is thick this morning, but we heard helicopter noise coming from Imaqliq.”

“Your cousin said to say hello,” Nadia said after they got in the boat.

“Which cousin?”

“The grumpy one who’s mad the US didn’t buy Chukotka, too.”

“I have twenty-six cousins on Imaqliq and in Chukotka. You’ve just described every one of them.”

He rowed to a rocky beach. After Adam helped him hide his skiff behind a giant boulder, he guided them along a rocky path for half a mile to a cluster of huts on the other side of the island. Nadia focused on each step. Her breath was labored and her legs were expiring, but she refused to fall behind.