“What’s wrong?” John asked, sensing her panic.
She turned to him, rubbing the tingling hairs on her arms.
Matt held the boy’s hand and followed him down the hall, back through the prison wing, and around to the outer circular hall.
Behind Matt, the Russian admiral followed. Viktor Petkov was accompanied by the two armed guards. There was no chance of a quick escape. Matt feared for little Maki’s safety. He would not abandon the boy.
While they passed through the prison section, his fellow captives cast questioning glances toward him. Dr. Ogden’s gaze traveled to the boy. Matt saw the shock of surprise on his face.
Matt clutched the tiny fingers, so warm in his palm. It seemed impossible that this was the same child who’d been frozen in ice only hours ago. He flashed back on his own son, Tyler, walking with him hand in hand. Both boys had died in ice, but now one had returned.
As the two entered the curving wall of tanks, the boy stared at the hazy figures inside. Did he know what they held? Were his own parents inside one of these tanks?
Maki pushed a thumb in his mouth, eyes round and wide. He hurried past, scared.
Petkov spoke behind them. “Does he know where he’s going?”
Matt relayed the question in Inuktitut.
The hall curved to its end. A wall appeared ahead, blocking the way. They had circled the entire level. There was no way forward. No door.
The boy continued toward the passage’s end. To the right, the tanks finally ended. Maki led Matt toward the blank section of wall. It appeared seamless and solid, but the boy’s tiny fingers found a small hidden panel. It swung in, revealing a foot-wide brass control wheel.
Maki played with the panel, swinging it back and forth. He spoke in Inuktitut. Matt translated for Petkov. “He says past here is your secret room.”
The admiral gently moved the boy’s arm out of the way and stared at the brass wheel. He stepped back and waved Matt forward. “Open it.”
Matt bent to the hole and grabbed the wheel. It wouldn’t budge, frozen solid. “I need a crowbar,” he gasped as he struggled.
The boy reached under the wheel and flipped a hidden catch. The wheel immediately spun in his hand, well oiled and preserved.
As the wide handle revolved to a stop, seals popped with a slight hiss. A full section of the wall cracked open. A secret door.
Matt was guided back at gunpoint. Another of the guards stepped forward and pulled the door open.
The cold flowed out as if from an open freezer. Lights flickered on, revealing that it was indeed an icebox inside. Similar to the service huts, it was another room cut directly out of the island. But it was no maintenance closet, but a lab sculpted from the blue ice.
Abutting the three walls were worktables carved from the ice. Shelves of slab ice rose above them, covered with an assortment of stainless-steel equipment: crude centrifuges, measuring pipettes, graduated cyclinders. But the shelves of the back wall, lit by a row of bare lightbulbs, had cored receptacles drilled into them. Inserted into each of the holes were glass syringes, their plungers sticking up. The ice was glassy enough to see through to the amber-colored liquid filling each of the syringe’s chambers. There had to be over fifty of the loaded doses.
Matt stared around as he stepped into the ice lab. Work must have been done in a totally frozen state.
The boy entered, still sucking his thumb. His eyes grew wider. He stared into the room, then back out toward the Russian admiral.
Matt understood his confused expression.
“Papa,” the boy said in Inuktitut, then repeated it in Russian.
Upon the floor slumped a figure, seated, legs out, head lolled. Even through the frost on the features, there could be no doubt who it was. The family’s snow-white hair was unmistakable.
A gasp from Petkov confirmed the identity. He shoved forward, dropping to his knees before the body and reaching out.
The elder Petkov’s face was tinged blue, the clothes frosted with rime and ice. One sleeve had been rolled up. A cracked syringe lay on the floor. Blood trailed from a puncture on the inside of the arm to the needle.
Matt crossed to the wall of syringes. He pulled one free. The liquid was unfrozen, impervious to the subzero cold. He glanced down to the figure. “He dosed himself,” he muttered.
Petkov glanced between the boy and his father. Then to Matt. From his expression, his thoughts were easy to read.
Matt spotted a journal, like all the others, on the table under the shelves. He flipped open the brittle cover to find line after line of Inuktitut script scrawled across the pages, until the notes ceased. Taught by Jenny and her father to read the language, Matt could make it out, but it made no sense. He mumbled aloud, trying to determine the meaning.
Petkov glanced up to him. “You speak Russian.”
Matt frowned and indicated the book. “I’m just reading what’s written here.”
Still on his knees beside his father’s remains, Petkov gestured for the journal. He flipped through what was clearly the last of the journals. Petkov passed it to him. “Read it…” His voice cracked. “Please.”
Maki wandered to the admiral’s side and leaned into him, tired and needing reassurance. Petkov put an arm around the boy.
Matt was in no position to argue with two pistols pointed at him. Plus he was curious. He read as Petkov translated aloud. The admiral paused every now and then to question and to ask Matt to reread a section.
Slowly the truth came out.
The journal was the final testament of Vladimir Petkov. It seemed that in the decade he’d spent here, Viktor’s father had slowly grown a conscience. Mostly because of the boy Maki. The child was born here, orphaned when his parents died during the tests. Missing his own son back in Mother Russia, Vladimir had developed an attachment and affection for the boy, which was always a mistake in research. Never name your test animals. Through this lapse of judgment, however, Vladimir inadvertently rediscovered his humanity, losing his professional detachment.
This occurred about the same time he answered the puzzle of activating the grendel hormone. The hormone had to be collected from living specimens, thawed and unfrozen. If collected from dead specimens or frozen ones, it would be rendered inert. Furthermore, once a sample had been drawn by syringe directly from a living grendel, it had to be treated carefully, maintained at a constant temperature.
The temperature of the ice caverns.
Matt glanced around the special lab, understanding its necessity now.
The answer to the puzzle was fire and ice again: the
It was this realization that had finally broken Vladimir Petkov. Sickened by his own complicity in what went on here, in the lives lost, he had refused to allow his discovery to reach the outside world, especially after hearing about the Holocaust in Germany.
“We have Russian Jews in our own family,” Petkov quietly added.
Matt understood. When it was your people being persecuted, it opened your eyes to the inhumanity of your actions. But understanding wasn’t enough. Vladimir needed a final act of contrition. The world could never benefit from what had been done here. So he and a handful of others made the ultimate sacrifice. They sabotaged their own base: damaging the radios and scuttling the station’s transport sub. Cut off and adrift on currents, they would allow themselves to disappear into the silent Arctic. Several base members attempted an overland escape, but clearly they never made it.
To protect the innocent prisoners here, Vladimir sent them into a frozen sleep.
Matt glanced out to the hall, weighing whether such an act was mercy or further abuse. Still, from the syringe in the scientist’s arm, it was clear that Vladimir took the same medicine. But had it worked?
