Alaska (168 page)

'You a Scott man or an Amundsen man?' the scientist from Michigan asked, recalling the bitter animosities that had tormented the two polar explorers, and Rick said: 'Strictly Amundsen. He was a professional; Scott, a romantic.'

'Let's have nothing more to do with this young fellow,' the man from Michigan said.

'Rotten to the core.'

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'Wait,' Venn said as he pulled on his trousers. 'If I was writing a poem about Antarctica, I'd choose Scott every time.'

The man from Michigan laughed: 'Not a preferred type, but acceptable. Go ahead.'

It was Afanasi who spoke, and Rick was impressed by the way these scholars deferred to the wise old Eskimo: 'Rick, we used to have an Arctic Research Lab in Barrow.

Run by the Navy. Accomplished lots but the government closed it down. To save nickels and dimes. Russians leaped ahead of us in arctic knowledge, so to catch up we're going to reactivate the research we had been conducting on T-Three.'

'I read that it melted away, long since.'

'The very words I used when they broached the subject. This is a new island. They're calling it T-Seven this time. They want me to serve as kind of factotum. I want you to come along as my right hand.'

'How long? Two years, three years?'

'Who knows?'

Rick Venn was speechless, for this was what young men of ability dreamed about when they were graduate students: to be at the heart of some great enterprise in their field, to be surrounded by the top intellects of the preceding generations, to be applying all that had been learned in the past grueling years and to project learning forward. Those were the hopes of young medical students, geologists, literary critics or geographers. And rarely did an opportunity like T-7 come along.

'I'd be proud to work with you men,' he said finally, and the man from Dartmouth asked: 'What will you do with your dogs?'

'I'll cry a little and kiss each one goodbye, then pass them along to someone else.'

He looked out at them: 'They carried me to thirteenth place in the Iditarod, you know.'

'I heard you could have finished about third,' the Michigan man said. .

'You read about it? Third place? Who knows?' Suddenly he turned away from the dogs: 'Is this in any way secret?'

'No.'

'And you are going ahead? This is a job offer?'

Afanasi looked at the other three, and the chairman of this ad hoc committee, the man from Dartmouth, said, extending his hand: 'It is.'

On the flight back to Barrow in Rostkowsky's Cessna the Dartmouth man said: 'Did you notice, neither of them asked about salary,' and the Michigan man replied: 'This is their

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world. They love the north and they're a part of it. We're damned lucky to have found them.'

That afternoon, over maps left behind by the committee, Rick described his new job to Kendra, who felt a pang of apprehension on learning that the one man she loved was about to leave for an assignment of unlimited duration: 'For the past fifty or sixty thousand years, and probably much longer, over here at the northernmost tip of Canada, Ellesmere Island, immense glaciers occasionally calve icebergs that are so monstrous you can't really call them icebergs. They're ice islands, maybe three hundred square miles, a hundred and fifty feet thick.'

'That's unbelievable.'

'Everybody says that when they first hear about them. Well, they're real, and they circulate clockwise up there in the Arctic Ocean for several years before they drift off into the Atlantic. One of them sank the Titanic back in 1912.'

He showed her the track of the famous T-3 which had circulated north of Alaska for many years, and she asked: 'Why didn't it stay put?' and he said: 'Because it's floating in an ocean. Nobody seems to understand that the word arctic refers to an ocean; Antarctic, to a continent. But that's what they are.' And then he told her the most remarkable fact of all: 'The islands are so big and so flat that it's quite easy to level off an airfield right down the middle for as long as you need. You can land something as big as a 747 on an ice island, and the Russians do.'

'Do they have certain of these floating islands? And we have others?'

'Not really, not officially. But it works out that way. Or did.' And now he came to the critical reasons the Americans had decided to reactivate a research station on an ice island: 'Russia is way, way ahead of us in its ability to use the arctic.

They've had men on ice islands continuously. We had one spurt, then quit. Fact is, we've pretty well surrendered the arctic to them.'

'And the three men who flew in here?' At Desolation Point, even children knew if an important letter arrived. 'They're going to start up again?'

'Yes. And they want Vladimir to supervise the day-to-day operations.'

'And he wants you to help?'

'He does.'

'And you've accepted?'

'I have.'

Desperately she wanted to cry 'What about us?' but she intuitively knew that the sure way to lose a strong man like 1028

Rick Venn was to lasso him with tears or pin him down with a sense of obligation; he would fight against that and fly off. She also suspected that he was still unprepared to make a lifetime commitment, so she approached her problem obliquely and in a most beguiling way: 'What are you going to do about the dogs?'

'I was hoping you'd look after them, and find someone who'll care for them.'

'You mean sell them?'

'If you can. If not, give them away. But only to someone who'll run them.' He looked at the dogs who had served him so well. 'They're champions. They deserve to compete.

It's in their blood.'

These words had a special meaning for Kendra; she saw Rick as a champion, destined to compete, and the ice island was an appropriate challenge, but this acknowledgment still left her isolated, and she felt like all women who have let one good man go to try for a better, only to lose both in her gamble.

'So I'm supposed to linger here, year after year, looking after your dogs.' It wasn't going the way she had intended, but it was to his eyes, not hers, that tears came: 'Kiddo! I've found me a real woman! I'll be back.'

'And you're sure I'll wait two years, or whatever. You're sure that Jeb won't come knocking and I'll say ”Oh, what the hell?”and marry him?'

'I'm sure,' he said simply, and with repeated promises that he would be back to marry her, he closed the shack where they had been so happy, turned over his dogs, and flew with Afanasi to Barrow and then four hundred miles north over the open Arctic Ocean to where a floating ice island, eleven miles long and three wide, awaited their tardy experimentation.

THERE WERE EXPERTS OTHER THAN THE UNITED STATES Commission on the Arctic who were interested in the complexities of the North Pacific, and two of the best-informed lived in small Asian villages where they spent their days and many of their nights immersed in studies which would have impact upon Alaska, either immediately or at some time in the distant future, for these two men, better than any Americans, appreciated the fact that Alaska's position, as the keystone of the great arch that encloses the North Pacific, gave her world importance.

The two men, one Japanese, one Russian, did not know each other, nor did they even realize that the other existed, 1029

but each kept on the wall of his study a large map showing all the nations bordering the Pacific, from Chile at the southeastern tip through Mexico and the United States on the east, across to Siberia and Japan on the west, and down the southwest to Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. It was a glorious stretch of terrain made more so by the proliferation of red and black dots which peppered the circumference of this vast ocean: indeed, the map looked as if a hundred bees had stung places like Colombia, Kamchatka and the Philippines, raising ugly red welts. These were the clusters of volcanoes, dead and active, that gripped the Pacific in a rim of fire. These were the soaring, explosive mountains, with lyrical names like El Misto, Cotopaxi, Popocatepetl, Mount Shasta, Fujiyama, Krakatoa, Vulcan and Ruapehu, that bespoke the violent character of these areas.

The black dots, far more numerous, indicated where in historic times huge earthquakes had shaken the land, with heavy black crosses indicating the quakes that had leveled parts of Mexico City in 1985, San Francisco in 1906, Anchorage in 1964, Tokyo in 1923, New Zealand in 1931. The most casual glance at these maps revealed the constant attack of lava and trembling earth along the edges of the Pacific, a record of the tremendous relentless forces of the wandering plates.

Thus, when the Nazca Plate subducted under the continental plate, the edges shattered and parts of Mexico City collapsed in ruins. When the Pacific Plate ground along the North American Plate, San Francisco caught fire, and when the opposite side of the Pacific Plate subducted under the Asian Plate, Tokyo's buildings fell apart.

And when, in its northern reaches, the Pacific Plate hammered its way down under the shallow continental Bering Sea, the world's most concentrated chain of volcanoes rose gloriously in the sky, while the earth's most incessant family of earthquakes shook the land and, if they were submarine, sent great tsunamis radiating through the Pacific.

Alaska, occupying the crown of this fiery rim, had a position not only of geographical dominance as the link between Asia and North America, but also of potential economic and military importance, and in these closing years of the century the Japanese expert was concerned primarily with the economic, the Russian with the military.

In a beautiful mountain village some twenty miles west of Tokyo on the minor Tama River, Kenji Oda, the able mountaineer who had rescued Kimiko Takabuki from her fall in the crevasse, pursued his studies. Tamagata, a village of graceful wood and stone houses in the traditional Japanese 1030

style, had been chosen by the powerful Oda family as the site of their research operations.

The family had many commercial interests, but son Kenji, oldest and ablest of the third generation, had concentrated on the family's wood-pulp holdings, and to perfect himself in this international specialty, he had made himself familiar with the pulp forests of Norway, Finland and Washington State in the United States. While working with paper interests in Washington he had climbed Mount Rainier in the dead of winter with a team of American fanatics.

At thirty-nine he enjoyed his seclusion at Tamagata because it provided a serene environment in which to reflect at a distance on the balancing of these world markets, and also, easy access to the international flights that left Tokyo almost hourly for all parts of the Oda empire: the factories in Sao Paulo, the newly acquired hotels in Amsterdam and the forest leases in Norway and Finland. But the more he studied the world paper problems and Japan's diminishing access to major forests, the more clearly he saw that the almost endless forests of Alaska had to become a prime target for anyone interested in the making and distribution of paper.

'In many practical ways,' he told his study group, 'the forests of Alaska are closer to Japan than they are to the major centers in the United States. A manufacturer in the eastern United States can get his wood pulp more easily from the Carolinas, Canada or Finland than from Alaska. Our big Japanese ships can put in to Alaskan ports, load with pulp, and come back across the North Pacific to our paper and rayon plants here in Japan a lot cheaper than the Americans can handle the same wood pulp by truck or train.*

A representative of the Oda shipping lines freight only pointed out that the maritime distance from Japan to Sitka was rather longer than Kenji had indicated, whereupon the latter chuckled: 'You have good eyes. But if we go ahead with this, we're not going to Sitka. I have my eye on a rather substantial island just north of Kodiak, on this side of the bay,' and he indicated a densely forested island which could supply the Oda Paper Works for the next fifty years.

'On our mountain-climbing trips to Denali,' he explained to the men, 'our plane broke out of the clouds right about here, and below I saw this undeveloped island. Since we'd started our descent into Anchorage, we were low enough for me to see that this was prime forest, probably spruce, easy to log, easy to reduce to pulp, easy to ship back to our plants in liquid form.'

'Any chance that we can get long-term control? I don't mean outright ownership.'

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Before replying to this critical question, Oda became reflective, and looking at the big map dominating the wall facing the men, he pointed to Alaska: 'Strategically speaking, this area is more a part of Japan than it is of the United States. Every natural resource Alaska has is more valuable to us than it is to America. The oil at Prudhoe Bay ought to be coming straight across the Pacific to us. The lead, the coal and certainly the wood pulp. The Koreans aren't stupid. They're moving in everywhere.

China is going to show enormous interest in Alaska; Singapore and Formosa could use Alaska's resources to tremendous benefit.'

When the attractive hostesses interrupted the discussion to bring morning tea and rice cookies, Kenji took advantage of the break to suggest that they move into the garden, where the beauties of the Japanese landscape, so manicured compared to the wildness of Alaska, put the men at ease, and there he said as the meeting resumed: 'You can understand Alaska best if you view it as a Third World country, an underdeveloped nation whose raw materials are to be sold off to the more developed countries. The United States will never utilize Alaska properly, never has, never will. It's too far away, too cold . . . America has no concept of what it has, and very little interest in finding out. That leaves the marketplace open to us.'

'What can we do about it?' one of the men asked, and Kenji replied: 'We've already done it. On my last trip back from Denali, I started negotiations to lease that wooded island. Well, not the land, you understand. They'd never allow that. But the right to cut trees, build a chip mill, erect a dock for our ships.'

'Any luck?'

'Yes! I'm delighted to inform you that after several months of the most difficult negotiations . . . The Alaskans are far from stupid. I think they see their position just as clearly as we do. They know they're orphans in their own land. They know they have to cooperate with their Asian markets. And they know ... at least the people I negotiated with knew how intimately they were going to be affiliated with both China and Russia. They can't escape it. So I had no trouble in gaining their attention.