Alaska (174 page)

Then, just before leaving his apartment, he reached for his Gurkha Traveling Kit and checked its contents: shaving gear, pajamas, clean shirt. Through years of bitter experience he had learned never to board an Alaskan airliner without the wherewithal to spend the night in some unpremeditated bed.

At the huge Anchorage airport, where planes from many different nations stopped on their flights between Asia and Europe, some of them heading almost directly over the North Pole to Sweden, he was told: 'Takeoff on schedule. Slight chance of fog at Juneau.' He dismissed the information, since there was always a likelihood of fog at Juneau. Rumor had it that when there wasn't a fog, they fired off a cannon in celebration, but of course, this disturbance brought in the fog, so that you wound up, even on a good day, with a window of about fifteen minutes in which to land.

Flying in to Juneau was not for the fainthearted.

His A seat was useless on this Monday morning, for when he looked out he saw only fog, and not an indifferent gray kind of fog but one so solid that had the window been opened, he might have been able to walk upon it. 'Damn,' he told the man riding in Seat B. 'No fun landing in Juneau in a fog like this!'

'Not to worry,' the man said. 'We won't even try in this soup.'

'That's a hell of a thing to say,' Jeb replied, half seriously. 'I have a meeting in Juneau. Important one. The Feds may be throwing me in jail.'

'You'll sleep in Seattle tonight,' the man said.

'You heading for Seattle?'

'I seem to go there twice a month. But not on purpose. I aim for Juneau, but we often miss it.'

The man was right, because when the plane approached Juneau it made a valiant effort to land, dropping lower and lower among the mountains as the radar emitted signals which gave precise locations. When Jeb's knuckles were clasped so tight that no blood showed beneath the skin, he

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heard the pilot put on the gas as the big Boeing 727 wheeled sharply up and to the right. Nobody in the cabin spoke, but when the pilot went back to his starting point to try again, Jeb asked his seatmate: 'Are you as scared as I am?' and the man said: 'No. If it's too bad, he'll fly up and off. You'll know.' And once more the plane came in lower and lower into that nest of mountains which protected Juneau from storms and airplanes. For just one fleeting moment the fog cleared enough for Jeb to see the waves only a few feet below the wing and the tall dark cliffs menacingly close to the wingtips. 'Jesus Christ!' he whispered to the man. 'We're walking on water!'

But again the pilot rejected the idea of landing, and up and around he went.

'Really,' Jeb said, striving to control his nerves, 'he's not going to try again, is he?' and the man said: 'He often makes it on the third try.'

But not this time. In the plane came, skimming the water and dodging the mountains, but at the final moment there was no visibility, so as Jeb tried to keep from fainting the plane rose high and safe into the upper air, far above the mountains, and headed for Seattle. There were forty-nine passengers aboard the 727 with important meetings in Juneau, the state capital, but no one complained to the stewardesses: 'We should have tried again.' None of them wanted to spend Monday night in Seattle, but on the other hand, none of them wanted to test their fate against that fog in Juneau.

Very close to Seattle's Sea-Tac Airport there was a Vance Hotel which provided good rooms at a reasonable rate for airplane passengers hit with an emergency, and there Jeb unpacked, climbed into his pajamas, and watched Monday Night Football

At intermission he thought to call the governor's aide: Til be there on tomorrow's noon flight,' and the official assured him: 'No great loss, Jeb. The man from Washington is staying over. As you suspected, FBI, but you're not the subject of the investigation.

You're just another source. Like me.'

So on Tuesday morning, Keeler and forty-eight other Alaskans trooped over to the airport and boarded the return flight to Juneau. The plane made its scheduled landings in Ketchikan and Sitka without event, but as it approached Juneau, the weather was so bad that after three spine-tingling but fruitless passes, the 727 had to continue on to Anchorage, with Keeler sitting in his precious Seat F looking out into a fog which was, if anything, even thicker than the one the day before.

After two days of travel, and 2,876 miles of useless flight, Jeb was back in his apartment, but a phone call to Juneau 1063

assured him that the weather bureau was predicting clear weather for Wednesday: 'We all wish you'd give it a try, Jeb. The you-know-who says your information could be vital.' So early on Wednesday, with a fresh shirt in his bag, Jeb went out to the airport, saw that whereas there was some fog, it was clearing so fast that the lovely Chugach Mountains were visible. 'I'm sure it's going to be a great flight south,'

the attendant at the counter said as she gave him Seat A. 'You know, it does happen!'

Alaska Airlines was a well-run outfit, with cabin personnel who endeavored to put their passengers at ease. This morning an affable steward announced: 'Clear weather all the way to Juneau. Glorious flight. Your stewardesses are Bubbles, Ginger and Trixie, and if anyone smokes in a nonsmoking area, the flight engineer will invite you to step outside.'

When the plane rose in the air, Jeb gasped, for the great mountain ranges glistened with such majesty that all who looked at them were dumfounded. He had the good fortune this morning to have beside him in Seat B an older woman who taught geography, and even though she leaned across him to glimpse the mountains out of his window, he did not mind, for she knew the mountains by name and could identify the vast glaciers that swept down from them to tumble into the sea.

'That's the Chugach Range. Not excessively high, but look at them! Eight thousand feet right out of the sea.' Then she caught her breath, for directly below them lay the pipeline terminus of Valdez with an ice field of enormous dimension behind it.

There must be ... How many glaciers would you say were down there?'

'Maybe half a dozen.'

'Goodness, you have no eyes. There must be twenty,' and when he looked more carefully he saw that out of this one field sprouted at least twenty icy rivers winding through the valleys, scouring the sides, grinding the rocky beds, and finally meeting the sea.

'I never realized so many different glaciers could spring from one source,' he said, and she explained that it was only this southern part of Alaska that had glaciers: 'The far north doesn't get enough rain to make snow. Very little snow up north. But down here the Japan Current. You know what that is?' When he nodded like a bright schoolboy, she said: 'Throws a lot of water on these mountains. So high and so cold, it can't melt. So it builds up into glaciers that flow very slowly down to the sea.'

He was about to ask her how she knew so much, when she said gently: 'Here's one of the parts I love most. I teach my 1064

students to revere this part. See that lovely mountain? Nearly eleven thousand feet high? Mount Steller. And that enormous glacier at its feet? Bering Glacier. Do you appreciate the significance of that pairing? Steller and Bering?' When he said 'No,'

she told him briefly of the relationship between these two remarkable men who had discovered Alaska for the Russians: 'One German, one Dane. They didn't understand each other, but there they stand, forever locked together in ice.'

Jeb was about to respond when she clutched his arm: 'Here they come! My God, I've never before seen them so glorious! Oh!' But before she could explain what had justified this outburst, the pilot came on the intercom to announce: 'Ladies and gentlemen, only rarely do we see what's out there to our left. Mount St. Elias, eighteen thousand feet, the first view the Russians had of the mainland. Behind it Mount Logan in Canada, nearly twenty thousand feet. Down their sides flow forty or fifty glaciers, including the great Malaspina.'

The teacher blew her nose, drew back from leaning across Keeler, and said softly: 'Can you imagine? Vitus Bering in a small leaky ship. Seeing that. Wondering what it signified? And Georg Steller beside him whispering: ”It's got to be a continent.

It's got to be America.”'

The pilot came back on the intercom: 'A day like this should not be wasted. Because the sky is so perfect we're going to take a little detour and swing over to the east so you can see the Fairweather Range, very high and beautiful. And then real low over Glacier Bay you'll see it as few ever do. Then, over the great Juneau ice field with its score of glaciers, and on to our landing in Juneau, where the tower is reporting clear skies and light winds coming out of the southeast. Enjoy the view, ladies and gentlemen.'

The next minutes were magical. The Fairweather Range, which few travelers ever saw, had a plethora of very high snow-clad peaks rising right from the sea, and enclosing one of the glories of North America, the quiet, gentle, mountain girt Glacier Bay, into whose waters great chunks of ice thundered off the glaciers as they made their imperceptible return to the sea, alerting the bears that prowled the shores. It was a magnificent bay, with a score of arms reaching far inland, and so many glaciers that no one, even in an airplane, could see them all.

'And now comes what might be the best of all,' the teacher said. 'Look!' And as the 727 made a grand slow turn to the east, Jeb saw the vast Juneau ice field extending far into Canada, with the ominous Devils Paw mountain reaching up 1065

as if to catch the plane and drag it to an icy death. From this field came a score of glaciers, including those that crashed down into Taku Inlet on the south. It was a fitting curtain to a drama that could have been equaled nowhere else, for as the teacher said when they came in for their landing: 'On a clear day, this ninety minutes from Anchorage to Juneau must be the most spectacular on earth. I'm told the Himalayas can be stupendous, but do they have this mix of ocean, great mountains, wild ice fields and endless glaciers? I doubt it.'

'I wish I'd had you for a teacher,' Jeb said, and when she turned to thank him for the compliment she snapped her fingers and said: 'Didn't I see your picture in the papers? Aren't you the fellow whose girl proposed to the other chap by open radio?'

and when Jeb said: 'The same,' she said: 'That girl must've been crazy,' and Jeb said: 'I thought so.'

On this, Jeb's third try, they landed at Juneau in fine style, but by late afternoon when he wanted to fly home to Anchorage, the fog from the Japan Current had swept back in, closing down all airport operations. Relying once more upon the pajamas in his Gurkha bag, Jeb spent the night at the Baranof Hotel in Juneau and flew home the next morning, occupying his precious seat in hopes of seeing the glaciers again, but of course the clouds were impenetrable.

So his brief two-hour meeting with the government investigator in the state capital had consumed four complete days, Monday morning through Thursday afternoon. One never took a trip to Juneau lightly.

IN A PERVERSE WAY, THE FOUR-DAY TRIP WAS WORTH IT, because his interrogation was attended not only by the man from the Department of Justice, but by two local FBI agents and an expert from the state government. When-he saw the panel lined up across the table he began to perspire, but the man from Washington saw this and became remarkably conciliatory: 'Mr. Keeler, we want to quiz you on some ugly matters, but we assure you at the outset that we're not interested in you personally. Your record, at least as uncovered by these FBI men, is impeccable and we congratulate you on it.' He reached over and shook Jeb's hand, which was shamefully sweaty.

'Mr. Keeler,' began the Alaska official, 'what do you know about the North Slope?'

'I've worked in many parts of it Prudhoe Bay for the oil companies ... Desolation Point and its local corporation ...

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an occasional job for the big Native corporation, but as you know, Poley Markham handles most of their affairs.'

'We do know,' the man from Washington said, almost ominously. 'But have you ever done any legal work-drafting of commercial contracts, for example for the North Slope Borough?'

'No. Only the big corporation and its little satellites. Never the borough.' He was referring to an Alaskan phenomenon, a vast, empty township larger than a state like Minnesota but with a population of less than eight thousand. What it also had was an income of nearly eight hundred million dollars in taxes paid by the oil companies at Prudhoe Bay, or about a hundred thousand dollars in cold cash for every man, woman and child in the borough.

'A sudden influx of money like that tempts people to do crazy things,' one of the FBI men said, and from a typed sheet he read off a few of the more malodorous cases in which unexpected wealth had courted local officials into bizarre behavior: 'A heated subway to protect, utility lines projected cost, one hundred million; finished cost, three hundred and fifty; real cost, in Oregon let's say, eleven million. New high school-^projected cost, twenty-four million'

Jeb interrupted: 'I know about that one. Finished cost, seventy-one million.'

'Wrong,' said the FBI man. 'It's not finished yet. When it is, maybe eighty-four million.'

'What would it have cost in the Lower Forty-eight?' Jeb asked, and the man said: 'We had some school construction firms fly in from California and they gave us the figure three million, two.' But now the Alaska official broke in: 'In California, yes. Let them try to build it on the North Slope, with every nail coming in by barge or aircraft.'

The FBI man bowed: 'The California men said the same thing. So I asked them what the school should have cost in Barrow, and they said: ”It should have been done for about twenty-four, twenty-six million.”'

The man from Washington growled: ”That was the original estimate, the one that's exploded to eighty-four.' In disgust he indicated that the FBI man should terminate his recitation of horror stories. Instead, he took a piece of blank paper, scribbled on it, and passed it facedown to Jeb: 'In addition to their eight hundred million dollars in tax money, which they've spent, how much do you think those dreamers up there have borrowed on the New York and Boston markets, all of it spent, all of it representing outstanding debt?”