A Cold-Blooded Business (3 page)

"Is that so?" Kate said, fascinated with this new insight into the art of dog mushing. "And here I always thought it was because they trained better teams and ran better races."

Jack was betrayed into a laugh.

"Something else I've always wondered," Kate pursued, "why is it that when Rick Swenson mushes into a blizzard to win the Iditarod he's fearless and heroic, but when Libby Riddles does the same thing she's reckless and foolhardy?"

Jack surrendered unconditionally. "Just lucky, I guess." He let his hand slip again. "Did I tell you Michael Armstrong asked me to fly for him this year?"

"Is that right? You could have been a member of the Iditarod Air Force?"

He nodded, and she said, "Well? What the hell are you doing sitting here?"

He pointed at the TV screen. "Did that look like fun to you? When they're sick them dogs run from both ends. No, thanks. The Cessna'd never smell the same again."

They sat quietly for a few moments. After a bit Kate let her head rest on Jack's shoulder. Encouraged, he said in a low voice, "I know how torn up you were over that damn spill. If you think you can't handle this, I can find someone else."

He couldn't see her face, and she didn't answer at first. Eventually she stirred and said, "We knew the spill was going to happen."

He looked down at the top of her head. "Who's we?"

"The people who live on the Gulf. The Cordova Aquatic Marketing Association, the Cordova District Fishermen United, the Lower Cook Inlet Fishermen's League. Locals. They're fishermen. They know the Narrows.

They know the Mother of Storms. They knew it was just a matter of time.

They spent a lot of their own money lobbying for the pipeline to go overland through Canada."

Jack kept silent, knowing she wasn't finished. "I wrote a letter to the governor after the spill, did I tell you?"

"No." "I told him we ought to kick RPetco out of the state as an example to other oil companies. Thou Canst Not Shit in Our Nest and Get Away With It. I suggested that with all the lawyers running around Juneau surely to God there had to be some kind of provision in the leases requiring the oil companies to maintain at least minimal environmental standards on pain of revocation of their lease agreements, and that RPetco had as surely violated that provision, and let us boot them out forthwith."

"You get any answer back?"

"No. So I went down to the offices of the Division of Oil and Gas and looked up the leases, and of course, it's not that simple."

"It never is."

"No. The lessors have to post bonds, but some of the bonds for the smaller contractors are as low as ten grand. The highest one I found was for a million, and that one was for a drill site on the Slope. Some of the leases even say that restoration of the site shall be ' the discretion of the commissioner."

"The commissioner of the Department of Oil and Gas?"

"Yeah."

"Who is a political appointee."

"Yeah."

There was another silence, which Jack broke. "So you would kick RPetco out of the state if you could."

"Yeah."

"But you can't."

"Nope."

"So you'll work for them instead."

"For a thousand a day."

"Plus expenses."

Kate stretched. "You heard him. Won't be any."

"I guess you'll just have to make up some to justify that two-fifty allowance, then."

"I guess." He felt good against her side, warm and hard. "Besides, given the restricted access and the restricted employee roster, I can't imagine this job is going to take very long. I'll probably be up and back in forty-eight hours."

"You think King really thinks it's a UCo employee?"

"No, and neither does he, or he'd have Childress handling it. Tell me about the DB."

Jack tucked her head back into his shoulder. "Chuck Cass, thirty-four, production operator, worked for RPetco since 1980, they brought him up to Prudhoe in 1987 from their Lima plant."

"Lima, Peru?"

"Lima, Ohio."

"Oh. Did he drown?" "Yeah. But the coroner says he was ready to fly. He was probably on takeoff when he fell into the pool. Childress--"

"He sure is on the prod." Jack grunted. "Sloper syndrome."

"What's that?"

"Childress makes too much money. He's afraid King's going to take some of it back if you find the dealer before he does." He paused. As security chief Childress was in a perfect position to spot the weak links in the security chain between Slope and town. And Kate was right, he had been on the prod. It might only have been the territorial imperative; it could as easily have been apprehension, even fear.

Kate moved restlessly against him and he said, "Anyway, Childress says a guard found traces of a couple lines of coke on one of the benches in the sauna. They figure he tooted up there and--"

She raised her head. "Wait a minute. A saunat

Deadpan beneath that incredulous gaze, he said, "Certainly a sauna.

It's right off the pool. No well-dressed oil field should be without one."

"A sauna?" she repeated, unable to keep the amazement out of her voice.

"A banya, an honest-to-God sweat on the North Slope?"

"Yup."

She considered. "This job might not be so bad after all."

"Can't you think about anything except work?" he complained. "I was hoping to adjourn this encounter to the bedroom and discuss how long it's been since I've seen you. Possibly over a snifter or two of brandy."

She stretched her arms over her head, pulling her shirt tight in interesting places. "Real women drink Diet 7UP." He was just lovesick enough to climb back in the Blazer and slip and slide on up to Carr's for a case of the carbonated beverage of her choice. She was just grateful enough to bestow a suitable reward.

Kate presented herself at Anchorage International Airport Tuesday morning after a whirlwind Monday spent getting everything but an RPetco-certified, Grade A stamp on her forehead, only to be turned away at the RPetco ticket counter. The flight had been canceled due to bad weather at Prudhoe. "

"Bad weather' in March means blizzard," she heard someone say gloomily.

"Who cares?" someone else replied. "Let's head for La Mex. I got a three-for-one coupon for margaritas."

Wednesday morning Kate called the airport first, to be assured the flight would take off as scheduled. The whole experience felt anticlimactic as she accepted her boarding pass and walked down to the gate, where the plane was already loading. At one minute past nine, the nose gear lifted off Runway 18, northbound. The rest of the passengers dozed; Kate, keyed up and restless, rooted through the seat pocket in front of her and found a brochure published by RPetco's Department of Public and Government Affairs. The North Slope, she read, stretched across northern Alaska for six hundred miles, from the Chukchi Sea to the Canadian border. A hundred-mile slide north from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean, the Slope was one enormous delta for the hundreds of rivers and streams that rose in the Brooks and flowed into the Beaufort Sea.

Eighteen inches of delicate, spongy tundra insulated two thousand feet of permafrost, five thousand feet below which was the oil formation.

Seven inches of annual precipitation froze the tundra into a barren, inhospitable desert for ten months out of the year, and then in June and July relented to melt into a soggy garden of arctic poppies and northern primroses and Siberian asters, where trumpeter swans and Canadian honkers and snow geese and green-spectacled eider ducks fed and bred with equal abandon.

There followed a series of pictures in glorious living color of said wildlife frolicking through various ponds and streams. Lest visions of Thanksgiving dinner begin to dance in the head of the reader, the brochure hastened to add that firearms were not allowed within the boundaries of the oil field. For all intents and purposes, the text intoned sternly, Prudhoe Bay was a wildlife refuge. There was a picture of John King standing in the middle of the tundra, with a drilling rig rearing its derrick discreetly in the distant background, and a caribou cow and calf grazing between them, a perfect example of industry and environment coexisting in harmony. The caption read, "

"We're all environmentalists here," says John King, Chief Executive Officer for Royal Petroleum Corporation." Uh-huh, Kate thought, and turned the page.

Here was matter more necessary to her immediate needs, a physical description of the area in which she was to concentrate her investigation. Prudhoe Bay proper was less than a mile across, barely a dimple in the great expanse of coastline, bordered by the Kuparuk River on the west and by the Sagavanirktok River on the east, bisected by the smaller Putuligayak River. The only measurable topography other than the rivers were the pin goes sixty-foot circular mounds in the tundra created by frost heaves, and the hundreds of shallow, elongated lakes scattered by a lavish hand from horizon to horizon. Kate turned back to the page with the picture of John King on it and found examples of both in the background. The lake looked more like a puddle and the pingo little more than an anthill.

She turned the page and was offered the short course in Prudhoe Bay history. A British explorer had mapped the area in 1910 and noted in his log the existence of shallow black puddles formed by oil seeps. In 1944 the United States Navy began drilling exploratory wells in Naval Petroleum Reserve Number 4. The first substantial paydirt in the form of the Sadlerochit supergiant oil formation was discovered by Royal Petroleum Company in April 1968, followed by a free-for-all lease sale in September that netted the state of Alaska nearly a billion dollars.

What Kate remembered most about the lease sale was the fact that the Alaska state legislature had every dime of the proceeds spent in less than two years, a feat of pork barrel legerdemain that had elected officials gawking in admiration from the Yukon to the Potomac. It was that feat that eventually resulted in the creation in 1976 of the Alaska Permanent Fund, sort of a savings account for the state endowed by taxes on Prudhoe Bay crude. Half the interest generated by the Fund was divided among each and every Alaskan citizen in a yearly payment.

Last year the PFD had been over $800, considerably more than Judas's thirty pieces of silver.

Pity the poor Alaskan, Kate thought. Caught between the Scylla of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend and the Charybdis of the RPetco Anchorage spill. There was a picture in the brochure of a Very Large Crude Carrier negotiating the Valdez Narrows on a calm and cloudless day, a day very much like the one four years before when the RPetco Anchorage had run aground on Bligh Reef and spilled half a day's production of Prudhoe crude eight hundred miles across the Gulf of Alaska.

Kate had taken the ferry from Cordova to Whittier the previous summer; during the entire ten-hour trip she had seen two sea gulls and three mountain goats on a cliff on the way into the Whittier harbor. That day, too, had been a day like the day of the spill, and on days like that on previous ferry trips she could expect to see rafts of sea otters, pods of killer whales, lone eagles soaring high, arctic terns swarming low, schools of silver salmon smacking their way toward shore and the cold, clear streams that had seen their first days and now would see their last.

That day, she saw two sea gulls and three goats.

She took a deep breath. The job, she reminded herself firmly, she was on a job, a job for which she would be very well paid. Her breath released on a long sigh, and she went back to her history lesson.

When construction of the pipeline was complete and the Prudhoe Bay field fully delineated and the bookkeepers done adding up all the numbers, the fourteen minority owners took a back seat to the two majority owners, RPetco and Amerex, who would operate the field in tandem. Prudhoe Bay now consisted of a Base Camp for each operator; six Production Centers, three on a side; the field's power station, which ran off natural gas produced from the field; a compression plant that reinjected produced natural gas back into the formation until such time as a gas line would be built; Pump Station One, the first of twelve pump stations to push oil down the Trans Alaska Pipeline to Valdez; and a collection of service camps dotting the field between. A gravel road called the Backbone connected the main facilities with the haul road that paralleled the pipeline, and access roads shot off in every direction to well pads and flow lines and old drilling sites and mud pits and God knew where else.

A lot of room to run and hide, should the need arise. She wondered how one lone investigator was supposed to cover that much territory, and for the first time began to doubt her ability to get this particular job done.

The brochure deteriorated at that point into a lengthy discussion of the Permo-Triassic period, faulted subsurface sandstone structures, and the difference between porosity and permeability and how the absence of either would have rendered the Sadlerochit reservoir, the largest oil field on the North American continent, unrecoverable. The slightly horrified tone of the text conveyed the impression that this outcome was utterly unthinkable.

Yawning, Kate closed the brochure and looked out the window. Anchorage in March looked a lot better from thirty thousand feet up, but you could say that about the whole state, except for Denali, which looked the same at any time of the year, all 20,320 dazzling, blue-white, sharp-edged feet of her. The Alaska Range receded, succeeded by the rolling, thickly forested and rive red landscape of the Interior, itself to be replaced by the Brooks Range.

It was the first time she'd seen the Brooks Range. A wrinkled fold of Mesozoic skin over spare Paleozoic bones (the brochure's description and, Kate had to admit, not a bad one), it rippled as far east and as far west as she could see. She stared down at it, cheek pressed to the plastic window. During this mountain range's formation the dinosaurs had evolved and roamed the earth, masters of all they surveyed, only to lay down their collective lives for, 70 million years later, RPetco's bottom line, the state of Alaska's legislative budget, Niniltna Public School's gymnasium and the gas tank on Jack's Blazer.