The Apothecary Page 0,81
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