The Fire (43 page)

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 glass 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 passionate 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 glass 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 God.

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.

God, 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 assure you of one thing. We shall
definitely
be following the Original Instructions – just as they were written.’

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 shift.

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 damned 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, squishing 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 splashing 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 anticipation 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 astonishing 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 passed through the Shelikof Strait and reached the end of the peninsula where the Aleutians begin. We were still cruising at an altitude so low that I could see the massed 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 passed 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 ship 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 fashion 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 ships to williwaws in the Aleutians during World War II than to the Japanese.’

Lovely.

The
thunks
were pattering against the plane now like so many marbles, and Becky was descending as if she were flouncing down a steep flight of steps.

‘What if you can’t
see
the water?’ Vartan asked tensely.

‘The radar altimeter’s good within twenty feet,’ Key said. ‘But eyeballs
are
every experienced bush pilot’s positioning system of choice. And that’s the chief advantage of making this trip in Becky: We can go under the curtain, even if the visibility’s only thirty feet. She’s slow – so it’s true she may take a long time to get us where we’re going – but she can still remain airborne at fifty miles an hour. On skis, we can even land these babies on an ice floe or the side of a glacier. Of course, those aren’t usually
moving
surfaces
.’

The charcoal fog suddenly opened up beneath us and we could see the water’s surface less than a hundred feet below, whipping and frothing against a gravelly shore.

‘Shit,’ said Key. ‘Well, this may be our last best chance, so I’m setting her down. I don’t want to take the risk we might dunk in the water. Even with life vests and the inflatable dinghy we won’t last long – the water temp in these parts is thirty degrees. Just wish I could see anything along here, so we could lash her down.’