The Eight: The Fire Part 31

'It appears that back in the 1950s Tatiana was captured by the Soviets. They locked her away in a Gulag, while her little son Aleksandr was put in an orphanage by his "grandmother," the never-aging Minnie Renselaas, and Tatiana's Greek husband and her other son Ladislaus escaped to America with some of the chess pieces. It was Galen who found out where Tatiana had been taken. He convinced Minnie that the KGB would never release her unless they'd been given an offer they couldn't refuse. Minnie swapped the drawing of the chessboard, which we now possess, for Tatiana's freedom. But now that some of the family had escaped with some pieces, it was clear that Tatiana would never be safe unless she went completely undercover. Galen gave her the Black Queen himself, the one you saw at Zagorsk. Then he hid Tatiana in a place where no one would ever think to look. Except for that brief foray to Zagorsk with the Queen, she's been holed up there for nigh on fifty years.'

Key paused and added, 'That's the place where we're headed tomorrow. Your dad is there.'

'But first you said Seattle and Alaska,' I protested, 'then something about the Ring of Fire. And what was all that Yellow Brick Road stuff?'

'No,' said Vartan suddenly, speaking for the first time in all this.

I glanced over at him. His face was set in granite.

'I'm afraid that it's a "yes" for tomorrow morning,' said Key.

'Absolutely no,' said Vartan. 'The place you're speaking of is more than a thousand miles long, and the worst place on earth. Thick fog and snow all the summer, winds of one hundred twenty kilometers per hour, waves of thirteen meters high that's more than forty feet!'

'As they say,' Key said 'there's no such thing as bad weather only bad clothing.'

'Yes, all right, perhaps you may fly high above it,' Vartan told her. 'But not across it or through it, as you are proposing.'

'Where's it?' I asked.

'I've looked at everything, I a.s.sure you,' Key said in exasperation. 'It's the only way to get there without attracting the attention of the entire U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, and alerting every Russian submarine under the Arctic Circle. But as I said, it's still not too late to bow out yourselves, if you're so inclined.'

'Where's there?' I repeated.

Vartan shot me a dark look.

'She proposes to fly a small private plane tomorrow, illegally into Kamchatka, Russia,' he said. 'And then somehow should we live that long ourselves, which is quite unlikely she proposes that we shall bring your father back.'

'You ain't just tootin' hay. We may need that,' said Key, when Vartan pulled out some cash, handed it to the waiter, tucked the whole bottle of our costly pear brandy beneath his arm, and headed out the door.

'We Ukrainians can't drink like the Russians,' Vartan informed her. 'Even so, I hope to get very drunk tonight.'

'Now there's a plan,' she agreed, following him. 'Too bad I can't join you. I have to catch a plane in the morning.'

Back at the condo, we quickly went through the closets and packed the duffels we'd brought with plenty of the lightweight thermal gear we found.

'Better to be safe than sorry,' said Key.

No kidding.

The condo was not only designed by a s.h.i.+pbuilder, it even looked like a s.h.i.+p inside: the long, skinny mirrored bathroom built like a galley with a large, step-in shower where the stove would be; the single bedroom like a small state-room; the high walls of the main room crosshatched with long strips of oak in a herringbone pattern, and with drop-down beds built into the wall.

Key said she hoped we didn't mind, but since she was the one who'd soon be doing all the work behind the stick, she would require a good, solid night of shut-eye. So she was relegating to herself the full-sized bed in the private bedroom, and letting Vartan and me camp out on the two bunk beds in the 's.h.i.+p's' main hold.

When she'd gone off to hit the sack and had closed the bedroom door behind her, Vartan smiled. 'Do you usually prefer to be on the top or on the bottom?' he asked, gesturing to the two bunk beds.

'Don't you think we ought to save that question until we know each other a bit better?' I asked, with a laugh.

'You know,' he said, more seriously, 'if we are in fact going where your friend Nokomis says we are going tomorrow, then I think I should mention that tonight may be the very last night you and I shall ever have to spend together or indeed, to spend anywhere on earth. This route she has chosen is the very worst on the planet. She's either the world's best pilot, or completely mad. And of course, we are both mad to go with her.'

'Do we have a choice?' I said.

Vartan shrugged and shook his head in resignation. 'Then, may a man who is certainly about to die quite soon hope to be granted one last wish?' he said, in a tone that seemed to contain not even a sliver of irony.

'A wish?' I said.

My heart was pounding. But what could he possibly wish for at least, that I had in mind when Key was asleep in just the next room, and he knew very well that we all had to be ready to hit the skies before dawn?

Vartan whipped out the bottle of Poire William, along with a small shot gla.s.s that looked suspiciously like one from the restaurant. Then, carrying these in one hand, he took me by the arm and headed for the bathroom. 'I find that I've suddenly been overcome,' he informed me, 'by a pa.s.sionate desire to discover more about the thermal properties of exactly how heat behaves under enormous pressure. If we let the shower run for a very long while just how hot do you think we can make it?'

He shut the bathroom door behind him and leaned against it. He poured a drink, took a sip, handed it to me, and set the bottle down. Then, never taking his eyes from me for a moment, he reached over and turned on the shower. I was almost speechless.

Almost but not quite.

'It could get pretty hot in here,' I agreed. 'Are you sure you want to learn that much about burning calories tonight? I mean, with this important mission in front of us, just ahead?'

'I believe we've both absorbed the rules of this Game pretty well by now,' said Vartan, bending toward me. 'It seems that there is nothing more important than understanding the true properties of fire. Perhaps we should learn more about precisely what those are.'

He touched his finger to the lip of the gla.s.s in my hand, then touched the liquid to my lips, where the brandy burned. Then he put his lips to mine, and I felt that current of heat moving through me again. The room was filling with steam.

Vartan looked at me, still not smiling. 'I believe we've achieved the right temperature to engage in any experiment we should care to undertake,' he suggested. 'But let's not forget, when it comes to alchemy, timing is everything.'

He drew me to him and we kissed again. I could feel the heat through my jumpsuit but not for long. Vartan unzipped the thin mylar and peeled it from me. Then he began removing my clothes. By the time he got to his own haberdashery, my heart was beating so hard that I thought I might black out from an oversupply of blood not all of it headed, I must confess, to my brain.

'I want to show you something really beautiful,' Vartan told me, as soon as he'd undressed.

Good G.o.d.

He took me to the long mirrored wall, wiped away a large circle of steam, stood behind me, and pointed at the mirror. As the steam began to enfold our images in fog once more, I looked into Vartan's eyes in the mirror.

G.o.d, I could think of nothing else but wanting him.

When I found my voice at last, I said, 'You're really beautiful.'

He laughed. 'I was speaking about you, Xie,' he told me. 'I wanted you to see yourself for a moment as I see you.'

We watched as our images vanished again back into the steam. Then he turned me to face him.

'But whatever we do right now, tonight,' he said, 'and even if we both get badly burned, I may a.s.sure you of one thing. We shall definitely be following the Original Instructions just as they were written.'

Shock and Awe.

But here we must at once draw a distinction between three things...the military power, the country, and the will of the enemy. The military power must be destroyed... The country must be conquered... But even when both of these things are done, still the War...cannot be considered at an end as long as the will of the enemy is not subdued also.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, first published in 1832.

War against desert Nomads can never be pressed home: their answer to overwhelming force is wide dispersal and guerrilla tactics. An army cannot break them any more than a fist can a pillow.

E.W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors.

If I kept hanging around with Nokomis LA MAGNIFICA, I was going to get pretty used to lying around on duffel bags. Our prop jet 'charter flight' to Anchorage was a cargo plane with no seats in the back.

'Best I could arrange in a pinch,' Key told us.

I was feeling pretty pinched myself, what with the piles of boxes roped down with only fishnet cordons at every side. I hoped our ballast wouldn't s.h.i.+ft.

The flight was uneventful but long, long, long. Three thousand miles from Jackson to Anchorage, with the one stopover in Seattle to unload, reload, and refuel both us and the plane twelve hours in all. But I was d.a.m.ned sure at this point that no one would ever dream, even wildly, of following us on this boondoggle.

We touched down at Anchorage International Airport just before dawn. Vartan and I were sound asleep among the cargo and didn't even feel the landing gear grinding down. Key got us rousted and told us to grab the bags; this was becoming a habit with her. Key thanked our pilots, and just outside on the landing strip we hopped a cargo van bearing a sign that read Lake Hood.

As we rattled over the tarmac, Key said, 'We could have taken off from a smaller, much more private locale. I picked this spot not just because it's the most convenient to our proposed venue' she raised one brow to Vartan 'but because Lake Hood is the largest and busiest float plane harbor anyplace in the world. It's equipped for any manner of flight we might have tried. They dug a channel during the war, back in the forties, to connect Lake Hood and Lake Spinnard. By the seventies they had a twenty-two-hundred-foot paved runway and multiple extra tie-down channels so the craft won't blow away, and they can handle anything that lands, whether with wheels, standard or amphibious floats, or even ski planes in winter. And you know, depending on what the weather report was for today, skis might have come in handy!

'I radioed ahead,' she added, 'to have Becky all saddled up for us pontooned and ready to run.'

'Becky?' I said. 'I thought you preferred Ophelia.'

Key turned to clarify for Vartan. 'De Havilland makes the best bush planes in the world. They like to name them after animals like "Chipmunk," "Caribou" my plane back in the Tetons is Ophelia Otter. And Becky, whom you're about to meet, is a Beaver, which is the ubiquitous and definitive bush plane. Any airport where you land even with Lear Jets and Citations on the strip the pilots always walk up to this one instead.' She added, 'All the more reason to take off from a spot like Lake Hood, where we'll be just one of the "Madding Crowd."'

Whatever else you could say about her, Key thought of everything.

But there was one thing that I hadn't thought of until her comment.

'Pontoons?' I said. 'I thought last night you'd implied that we'd be island-hopping today.'

'Yeah,' said Key, with just a dash of Vartan's grimness. 'I agree, that is how everybody usually gets around in those parts one-hour hops, squis.h.i.+ng down on those fat tundra tires. That's how I usually do it myself. But as I told you, this whole scenario has taken more than the optimal round of thinking and planning. And at the end of our Yellow Brick Road, I'm afraid, we'll be splas.h.i.+ng down in water.'

The sun was well above the horizon at Lake Hood by the time Key had overseen the fueling and checked all her gauges and spare tanks; she'd had us don our life vests and weighed in the three of us and our gear so she could do her final fuel calculations.

When we were at last unlashed from the tie-down and putt-putting out to the channel to await our clearance for takeoff, I could see the foamy water below as it churned over our floats. Key finally turned and explained. 'Sorry about my fuel obsession, but it's all that private pilots like me ever think about, it's a matter of life and death. Over the past sixty years plenty of fuel-starved planes have been recovered from the rocks where we're going. Even though there are a half-dozen airports or landing strips scattered along this chain, they can't all refuel directly by the water, some are inland. Betsy here has got three fuel tanks, plus her tip tanks the fuel in the wingtips but that's still only one hundred and thirty-five gallons. In four hours, we'll be flying off the fuel from our second and final wingtip, and Becky's tummy will be starting to growl for its lunch.'

'What then?' asked Vartan, clearly trying to suppress an 'I told you so.'

'What then?' said Key. 'Well, there's good news and there's bad news. In antic.i.p.ation that we might not be able to refuel exactly when and where we want, I brought as much extra one-hundred-octane low-lead fuel as I could, in five-gallon jerry cans. I've refueled that way far out at sea. It's not too hard you stand on the float to do it.'

'What's the bad news?' I said.

'First, of course,' said Key, 'you have to find a spot that's calm enough to land the plane.'

Despite all the dire implications, imprecations, and impracticalities of these past twenty-four hours, once we were aloft and headed west-by-southwest, I was glad just to be up in the air and doing something. For the first time having overcome the awe I felt at the sight of my mother and absorbed the shock of learning that my father was alive I was able to focus on the astonis.h.i.+ng idea that we were actually going to find him.

Maybe that's why I was less grim than Vartan and Key about our prospects for this trek indeed, I felt almost ebullient. This feeling was enhanced by the fact that I really loved these bush planes. Somehow, flimsy as they might seem from the outside, once you were actually up in the air they felt safer than being trapped within one of those big, clunky jumbo jets.

Becky the Beaver herself was very airy inside, and full of light. The back of her fuselage was designed like a minivan made to seat seven; the backseats, Key said, could be removed just by loosening two bolts, and there was a sling seat in the far back that could be raised from the floor if needed. Key had left all the seats because she wasn't sure what shape my father might be in for the return flight, if in fact there was one.

We'd already refueled twice by the time we'd pa.s.sed through the Shelikof Strait and reached the end of the peninsula where the Aleutians begin. We were still cruising at an alt.i.tude so low that I could see the ma.s.sed flocks of seabirds swirling along the coastline to our right, and in the distance just beyond, glittering fields of light resembled sparkling nets of diamonds that were cast upon the surface of the open sea.

Vartan finally looked up from the map he'd been studying obsessively ever since takeoff. Even he seemed captivated by the moving view just beneath us, and as he took me by the hand, it seemed he may have lost some of his Slavic pessimism about the trip, as well. But as Key would say, appearances can be deceiving.

'It's really beautiful,' Vartan told Key, in a tone I couldn't peg. 'I don't think I've ever seen a wild place quite like this one. And we've just pa.s.sed Unimak Island, so we've only perhaps a thousand miles remaining until we reach Russian waters and the peninsula.'

Key shot him a sideways glance.

He added, 'By my calculation, at the rate we are going, that is another ten hours and two or three more refuelings. Perhaps that leaves us enough time that you, as our pilot, might even consider sharing with us precisely where we are going. Not that it matters so much, since neither Alexandra nor I can fly this plane. If anything happens to you, we'll never arrive there, anyway.'

Key took a deep breath and let out a very long sigh. She reached over and switched on Otto, to captain the s.h.i.+p on his own. Then she turned to us.

'Okay, kids, I fess up,' she said. 'We're headed for a romp in my own personal sandbox. Grandmaster Azov here will likely have heard of the place. It's called pardon my Russian Klyuchevskaya Sopka.'

'Where's that?' I asked.

'Alexandra's father is at Klyuchi?' said Vartan, releasing my hand. 'But how is it possible we could ever get there from here, ourselves?'

'Where's there?' I repeated, feeling very much like an addlepated parrot.

'We don't get there,' Key went on as if I'd never spoken. 'We'll wait on the water with the plane. My colleagues and I have already established our own short-wave connection, for professional reasons, and their camp is right near the Klyuchi Sopka base. They'll bring Solarin to us, along the river to the inlet, and they'll refuel the plane from there. You do understand now, I hope, the reason why our precautions have been an absolute necessity. This was the only way to get to the spot though we can, and will, depart by a different route.'

'This is remarkable,' said Vartan. Turning to me, he added, 'I'm sorry. I seem to have underestimated your friend Nokomis once more. In her profession, she must know this place as well, if not better, than anyone.'

I was tempted to say What place? but he finally clued me in.

'The Klyuchi Group is famous,' he told me. 'It is surely the most highly active concentration of volcanoes in Russia, perhaps in all of northern Asia, and Klyuchevskaya Sopka itself is the highest peak, nearly five thousand meters more than fifteen thousand feet. This volcano erupted in August 1993, only shortly before we were all at Zagorsk that day in September. But if your father had been taken to that region at that exact moment, it would have been highly dangerous, when it was still pouring lava and shooting rocks into the sky.'

'According to Cat's sources on what happened,' said Key, 'Solarin was first hidden among the Koryak peoples of Kamchatka, but he was healed by the famous Chukchi shamans from farther north. The geyser fields of the Kamchatka Peninsula are the second largest in the world after Yellowstone and, like ours, they're reputed to have important curative properties. According to our sources, Solarin wasn't moved farther north, to near the volcanologists' camp, until only months ago, when they believed he'd recovered enough to travel and when Cat could finally arrange for the three of us to go and get him out of there.'

'So,' I said, 'these knowledgeable sources of yours would be...?'

'Well, your grandmother Tatiana, for one,' said Key, as if that were obvious to anyone. 'And of course there was Galen March.'

That name again. Galen March. Why did everyone keep dropping it as if he were the very height of fas.h.i.+on instead of perhaps the heart of a deadly, conspiratorial plot where no one seemed able to sort out right from wrong?

I was about to pursue Mr Charlemagne's role with a renewed vengeance when suddenly we all heard a frightening, unidentified thunk against the side of the plane.

Key snapped to at once and seized her pilot's job back from Otto. But I definitely feared that we might have flunked a major intelligence test in having yakked as long as we had without paying more attention to our surroundings.

The steel-gray soup that had suddenly closed around us looked pretty menacing. 'I'm going down,' said Key.

'Shouldn't we try to climb above this?' asked Vartan.

'Unlikely that we could,' said Key. 'But I need to drop down and read the water terrain to see how viable it is that we could land and take off again if we need to. Plus, for all we know this fog may go up three or four thousand feet. We don't want to be caught up there with our tongues hanging out if there's a williwaw coming in. It might slap us into the side of a volcano.'

'Williwaw?' I said.

Key gave me the grim grimace. 'Unique to these isles. It's a freaky air current of gale force, like what our friend here was mentioning earlier, that can suck a 747 out of the skies or flip an aircraft carrier upside down and slap it onto the rocks like chewing gum. They say we lost more planes and s.h.i.+ps to williwaws in the Aleutians during World War II than to the j.a.panese.'