I resented that for a little while, but I knew she was right, and I couldn’t really imagine what they’d be going through. I tried to summon some comforting idea, but could only picture them angry and frantic, and I didn’t want to think about that. I rolled back and forth on my bunk’s thin pillow. My mind drifted back to the look in Benjamin’s eyes on deck, and his soft lips on mine, and his warm hand touching my face in the bitter cold. And finally I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 33
Nova Zembla
The next morning we crossed an invisible line, after which the air didn’t just have the nip of the Arctic in it. The Arctic had seized us in its icy teeth and wouldn’t let go. Even in our furs and woollen clothes, it was impossible to be on the deck of the boat without ducking our faces and hunching our shoulders against the freezing wind. If I breathed too deeply, I felt as if icicles were stabbing me in the lungs. Actual icicles formed on my eyelashes when my eyes watered, and if I took off my gloves, within seconds my fingers became too cold to function. The cook kept hot coffee and hot cocoa on the stove, and passed it around in mugs. The men coddled the engines as if they were unpredictable toddlers who might erupt in tantrums any minute or simply shut down, refusing to do anything their minders wanted.
The mate with the sextant tried to take his sun sightings, but the sky was too cloudy at noon for him to take a reading. He frowned over his calculations. “We’re close to Soviet waters,” he said. “I just don’t know how close. We may have crossed over.”
Not even an hour later, a lookout shouted, “A patrol vessel, sir!”
Captain Norberg took a pair of binoculars from the lookout and peered at the horizon. The apothecary stood beside him. I could see the vessel, too. It was on the horizon, but it was making a direct line for us.
“It’s Soviet,” the captain said, without putting down the binoculars. “However you’re going, I need you off the boat, now. The children also. There’s no place a boarding party won’t find them.”
So we hurried to the apothecary’s cabin, where Jin Lo was already a swift-looking bird with fierce eyes and a cap of dark feathers. She must have gone below to take the avian elixir the moment the patrol was spotted.
“A falcon!” Count Vili said. “How terribly exciting.”
“It’s appalling that you’ve never done this before,” the apothecary said. “I do hope you won’t be a flightless penguin.”
“Oh, dear, is that possible?” Count Vili said. “I’d hate to be stuck here. I do want to see Andrei Sakharov.”
“And you want to help us stop Sakharov’s bomb,” the apothecary reminded him. “This is not a fan club.”
“Of course I want to stop it!” the count said, hurt. Then he took up the bottle of elixir and drank, making a noise of surprise. His shining face and plump body began to shrink and shift. Thirty seconds later, he was a large grey bird with a rounded bill and an enormous wingspan, like the albatross we had seen soaring in the wind off the stern. It was exactly the bird he would have wanted to be, and when he stretched his wings with delight, he smacked the falcon in the face with his wing tips. Jin Lo gave him a savage look. The albatross instantly drew in his wings and ducked his grey head in apology.
The apothecary handed me another vial. “Janie,” he said, “please give this to Shiskin.”
“Is he coming with us?”
“We can’t very well leave him here.”
“I bet he becomes a stool pigeon,” Benjamin said.
I ran to Shiskin’s cabin. He was still tied up, but the bonds would be too big for whatever kind of bird he became, so I didn’t bother to untie him. “A Soviet patrol is coming,” I said. “We can’t let them catch you. You have to take this.”
Shiskin frowned at the vial. “What is it?”
“There’s no time to explain. But I’ve taken it, and it’s fine. I promise.”
I helped him drink and waited for the slow, fascinating transformation, but instead there was a small explosion in the cabin. I flinched and covered my eyes. When I looked back, Shiskin wasn’t on his bunk. The knots that had held him were empty.
I looked around the cabin for a bird, wondering if Shiskin had become something Russian, and what a Russian bird might be, but I couldn’t find him. Then I saw it on the bedcover: a tiny pile of salt. I scooped every grain carefully back into the vial, pressed the rubber cap on tight, and ran back to the apothecary’s cabin.
“It’s Lot’s wife!” I said. “I thought it was the avian elixir!”
“Shiskin would never have agreed to become salt,” the apothecary said. He was packing things in the cabin away. “And we can’t have the Soviets find him. Put him in that small backpack, please.”
I picked up the little backpack, which was a miniature harness attached to a hard, cylindrical case wrapped in leather, and I slid the portable Mr Shiskin inside. The backpack would fit a large bird, and had tiny buckles. “Where’d you get this?” I asked.
“I adapted it from a design by a German apothecary.” He shoved his medical bag into the bottom of a sea chest and covered it with blankets. “He used to send medical prescriptions by carrier pigeon. Will you put the rest of those vials in?”
Each of the vials on the bunk fit in the palm of my hand, and I slid them one by one into the little backpack, alongside Mr Shiskin’s vial. One contained something golden, the colour of Jin Lo’s shimmering net. One was full of clear liquid, which I knew was the Quintessence. I could smell its sweetness even through the seal. One was so cold it burned my fingers, and I had to pick it up with my sleeve. I wondered if it helped Count Vili freeze time. The fifth was an amber colour and I didn’t recognise it.
“That’s an emergency supply of the avian elixir,” the apothecary said, “in case it wears off inconveniently early.”
I was going to ask him how we were going to get the elixir out of the backpack and drink it before plunging to an icy death, but Benjamin said, “The Pharmacopoeia! Where do we put it?”
I didn’t have to think. “With Captain Norberg’s logbooks,” I said. “Like in the chemistry lab.” Benjamin ran out of the cabin with the book.
The apothecary looked around the cabin to be sure everything looked ordinary and unsuspicious, then turned to me. “You’ll be the smallest bird, Janie,” he said. “The bomb will be in a wooden shed on the southern tip of Nova Zembla. The shed has been there for years, and therefore looks harmless to spy planes. We will need to discover how the bomb is triggered, and how much time we will have until it goes off. If you can find a way to get into the shed, I may ask you to do so. I hate to keep making use of you, and I know Benjamin will object to putting you in danger again, but you may be the only one small enough to get inside.”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I want to help.”
“Thank you.” He handed me the little backpack. “You’ll fit me with this,” he said. Then he drank from the bottle of elixir. After a moment, he shrank and shifted until he was a snowy white barn owl with a heart-shaped face and piercing black eyes.
In my nervousness about fitting the harness, I pinched one of his wings, and he pecked at my hand. “Ow!” I said. “I didn’t mean it!”
His owl face looked sorry, and I realised pecking had been a reflex.
When Benjamin came back, he looked startled for a moment by the snowy owl, but then recognised it as his father. “Captain Norberg says he’ll stay near Nova Zembla until sundown, in case he can pick us up. Then he’ll wait in Kirkenes, in Norway, just this side of the Russian border.”
The owl nodded and pushed the bottle of elixir towards him with his beak.
Benjamin and I drank the rest of the elixir and became, once again, a skylark and a robin. Benjamin had thought to prop open the doors to the cabin and to the deck, and the five of us flew out and off the bow just as the Soviet boarding party came alongside.
A few of the Anniken’s crewmen stared up at us, with mouths dropped open, until their friends elbowed them. Then they fixed their eyes stonily on
the patrol, as if nothing extraordinary had happened. They were just some innocent Norwegians who had wandered mistakenly into Russian waters on a cloudy day.
The air was bracing in my feathers, although it didn’t feel as cold as when I was human, and the sky was overcast. I was smaller than the other birds, and it was difficult to keep up. Gusts of wind knocked us off course, until Benjamin, flying a little higher, zipped ahead. We rose to his altitude and found a wind moving steadily north, and rode it until we came upon a great grey ship idling in the water, with gun turrets and a monstrous grey helicopter crouched on the stern. Count Vili had said that the Soviets would station a destroyer off Nova Zembla as an observation post for the test, and I guessed this was the destroyer, which meant we were close to the island.
We could see further as birds than as people, and soon came upon Nova Zembla. It was more desolate than any place I had ever seen before: frozen, treeless, and windblown. I couldn’t believe anyone lived there. The archipelago had open water along its long northern side, but it was almost completely connected to mainland Russia by ice on the south and east. There was a landing strip at the southernmost tip of land. Further north, there seemed to be tiny houses, spread out in little clumps. I guessed they belonged to the Samoyeds.
Near the landing strip was the nondescript wooden shed the apothecary had described as the secret housing for the bomb. The Soviets had chosen well: It looked like nothing important would ever happen there.
As we flew lower, we saw a sentry standing under the eaves of the little shed. He was wearing a white coat and a white cap as snow camouflage and seemed to be the only guard. Beside the shed was a mound in the snow, which revealed itself to be a sort of bunker as we grew closer, probably for the sentry to sleep in, with a door dug out into the ground.
When the guard was looking the other way, we landed behind the bunker, but I hadn’t mastered stopping yet, and I bowled into Jin Lo. She stepped disdainfully away on her sharp talons as I rolled through the snow. I could tell she considered all of us hopeless amateurs.
We heard the sound of helicopter rotors chopping through the air, and the sinister grey machine appeared. It hovered near the bomb shed like a giant angry insect. The sentry clutched his white cap tightly to his head against the rotors’ churning wind. Then the helicopter settled down, blowing snow into the cold air.
Two Soviet officers climbed out, one wearing a pilot’s helmet and goggles, followed by two men in civilian clothes. One of the civilians was tall and elegant, even in heavy winter clothes, and I recognised him with a start.
It was Danby, and with him was the German with the scar.
The fifth and last man was young and thin, in a long nubbly fur coat and a grey wool hat. He had a restless, distracted manner, and longish hair sticking out from the hat. From the albatross’s excitement beside me, I guessed this was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian genius Count Vili had wanted to see. In his gloved hands, the young physicist held a small metal box.
The helicopter pilot had brought a thermos of something, and the sentry sat down happily on a little three-legged stool and turned his attention to it. The older military officer, whose face was tanned and tightened like the leather on an old pair of boots, unlocked the door to the shed with several different keys and a combination lock, and the men from the helicopter all went into the shed and closed the door behind them.
I looked to the owl, and he nodded his snowy head. This was my moment to try to find out how much time we had. I flew around the shed looking for a way in, and Benjamin followed me. Luckily the sentry was too preoccupied with his soup to notice us fluttering by. Finally I found a narrow gap between the wall and the roof and squeezed my body through with some difficulty, finding a spot to rest in the eaves. Benjamin’s skylark body was too big to get through, but I could see him perched outside. I was glad he was there.
I couldn’t see well inside the shed. It was dim, and one of the officers held a flashlight. On the floor in the centre of the room was a long, horizontal cylinder with a coffinlike box lying alongside it. The box was about eight feet long, and dull grey. I had expected it to have a round nose and tail fins, like the bombs we had dropped on Japan, but they weren’t dropping this one from a plane. It didn’t even need to be mobile. It made no noise and had no markings, but it had an ominous, deadly aura. I didn’t like being in the close space with it.
Sakharov placed his small metal box at one end of the bomb. The young helicopter pilot opened a toolbox for him reverently, as if assisting a famous surgeon. Sakharov chose a wrench.
Danby walked around the bomb, looking it over. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s the design I provided?” I could tell he was looking for praise, and he seemed as pathetic as someone in one of his Latin classes, bragging about having done extra credit. Sakharov said something in rapid Russian, under his breath.
“Don’t call me a traitor!” Danby complained.
“I believe you fit the very definition of a traitor,” Sakharov said, attaching a fitting on the little metal box to the bomb. “And if you understand Russian, why must we use English?”
“I’m a little rusty,” Danby said. “I understand more than I speak.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Please, comrades,” the senior officer said. “We have important work here.”
Sakharov tightened a small bolt, then straightened and stood. “The design is this,” he said, with clear contempt for the traitor who wasn’t a physicist and didn’t speak Russian. “In the atomic bomb, we split the atom. This is called fission. In this new bomb, the hydrogen bomb, we also split the atom, and use the energy produced to combine the nuclei of two atoms. This is called fusion. Then we use the energy released to make a second fission reaction, which will be twenty times the size of the explosion that destroyed Hiroshima. So yes, my idea is similar to what the Americans have given to the English military. But it is not the design you stole from them—which was flawed, at any rate, in ways I don’t believe you understood. It was not necessary for you to be here, as I have said. The Americans and I have come to similar conclusions. This is because there is only so much you can do with an atom. You can split, you can combine, or you can leave it alone.” He handed the wrench back to the helicopter pilot.
I tried to sort out what Sakharov had said, and realised that if this bomb was so powerful, it might overpower the apothecary’s antidotes. I was about to squeeze outside to warn him when I heard the Scar’s gravelly voice, as if observing something about the weather, say, “There is a bird.”
I felt a concussive blow of air and the room went dark. I was trapped inside some kind of tight, musty space, and couldn’t move my wings. A crack of light appeared, and I saw a scarred human face peering in. I was inside the Scar’s wool cap.
“It’s the American robin,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Danby asked.
“We should not have animals in here,” the Russian officer said. “I’ll make a note.”
“This is not the point,” the Scar said. “The bird is not native here. It is a spy.”
There was a pause of amazement at this bizarre claim. The senior officer said, “It has a camera?”
“It’s human,” Danby said. “I mean, it’s a human who became a bird.”
The senior officer cleared his throat and spoke carefully, as if talking to dangerously crazy people. “The trigger mechanism is installed,” he said. “We have twenty minutes. We must return to the ship.”
“Wait!” Danby said. “We should search the island for other birds! They may be trying to stop the test!”
“We will go now,” the senior officer said.
The Scar carried me out of the shed, inside the hat. I didn’t know if Benjamin had heard everything, and I had no way of telling him that the bomb might be too powerful for Jin Lo’s net. Then the rotors of the helicopter started up, and I knew that even my tiny robin’s scream would be drowned out.
I’d never been in a helicopter before
, and riding blind inside a not-very-clean wool cap on the lap of a Stasi murderer, when you have information that your friends might desperately need, is not the way I’d recommend trying it. The hat smelled of sweat, and the noisy, rickety helicopter swung sickeningly through the air.
Finally we landed on what had to be the deck of the destroyer.
“We need a box, or a cage,” Mr Danby’s voice said.
A hand grabbed me around the chest and pulled me out of the hat. Light flooded my eyes, and I looked around frantically. The ship was huge, nothing like the bathtub toy it had seemed from the air, but almost no one was on deck. I tried to wriggle free, and stabbed at the Scar’s hand with my beak, but he only squeezed me harder, and I gasped. I thought he would crush my tiny bones.
The young pilot appeared and thrust a toolbox into Danby’s hands. “We go belowdecks, below water level now,” he said. He pointed towards Nova Zembla. “Bomb, yes? Much radiatsii.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that,” Danby snapped.
The boy hurried away, and Danby opened the metal toolbox, which was the size of a loaf of bread, and empty. They were going to put me in it. If I became human while inside it, I would be crushed as my bones grew. I would die painfully, I was sure—half bird, half human, too big for my prison. I shut my eyes and tried hard to imagine becoming human now, my heartbeat slowing, my wings becoming arms.
Nothing happened, and the Scar put me in the box. He seemed to be trying to figure out how to close the lid with his hand still in it, or to get his hand out without letting me go. I screeched in protest.
And then it began. I felt my heart slow, and my bones get heavier, and my skull thicken, and my feathers retract, and then I tumbled to the deck in my peacoat and boots. The toolbox clattered beside me, and the Scar was so surprised that he lost his hat, which blew across the deck of the destroyer. He ran after and snatched it from the air. I stood up, feeling awkward in my human limbs.
“I knew it!” Danby said, grabbing me by the shoulders. “Where’s the apothecary? Is he on Nova Zembla?”