Midnight come again (8 page)

Yet."

Jim reflected. "That doesn't wash. What kind of self respecting crook would steal that kind of thing if he didn't already have a buyer?"

"Maybe he did have a buyer, and maybe the warlord he was about to sell it to got knocked off his throne before he could take delivery." Gamble looked up from his steepled fingers with a too-bland expression. ' answer your second question, the FBI has come up with a projection that estimates a ten-year trend toward an increase in domestic terrorism.

We're looking at weapons of mass destruction, Jim, biological, chemical, as well as nuclear. Hell, we don't even have to get fancy, all it takes is a couple of bar rels of fertilizer and some fuel oil in a Ryder truck. The Oke bomb was just the first shot in a long war."

Casanare examined his fingernails. Carroll looked bored.

"As for why Alaska?" Gamble said. "Because, along with Montana and Idaho, Alaska is a breeding ground for radicalism, and the numbers are only increasing. Have you taken a close look at the Juneau legislature lately? Some of those people are slightly to the right of Adolf Hitler, and there's more of them moving up here all the time. They can't get far enough away from the federal government to suit them."

"What a laugh," Jim said, "considering about ninety percent of the state of Alaska is owned by the federal government." "Yes, well, no one said these people are all that bright. Just homicidal."

Jim remembered a couple of summers ago, when Kate Shugak had run headlong into one of the radicals Gamble was referring to, a right-wing Christian pastor who had assumed the offices of judge and jury, and anointed his parishioners as executioners. Pastor Seabolt and his gang made Gamble's story at least plausible, if not entirely convincing.

He looked over at Carroll and Casanare. "What are Boris and Natasha here going to be up to while I'm in Bering, probably getting my ass shot off by renegade remnants of the Red Army?"

Carroll flushed and opened her mouth. Gamble's glance silenced her, but her eyes promised retribution.

"They'll be stationed in Anchorage," Gamble said. He didn't see Carroll and Casanare exchange glances, but Jim did. "Reaching out to informers,"

Gamble went on. "Gathering information. Amassing evidence. Building a case." Carroll stifled a yawn, Casanare a grin.

With sudden gravity, Gamble said, ' isn't a case we can afford to let slip, Jim. And we need your help to make it."

The silence stretched out. It was after ten, and the miles he'd flown and driven that day were starting to catch up to him. He rose to his feet and stretched. Through the window he could see a bunch of kids shooting hoops across the street. A truck went around the makeshift court very slowly, and speeded up once it was past. If he listened hard enough, he could almost hear the music from the Tap down the road. His mouth felt dry. He could use a beer. Or three.

"I'll go. For a month," he said, turning and raising an admonitory finger, "and only a month. If I don't find something in thirty days, there isn't anything to be found, and I'm just wasting my time and the state's money." He put his hands in his pockets and regarded them placidly. ' it or leave it."

He waited for his boss to tell Jim that Jim would stay however long his boss told him to, but the squawk box remained silent. With the price per barrel of oil more in the toilet than out of it these days, and the attendant legislative funding cutbacks, Colonel Gordon's willingness to cooperate with a brother law enforcement organization went only so far.

"Great," Gamble said, breaking into a smile. "We'll take it." Yeah, right, Jim thought, great.

Bering.

Jesus. bering, july 1

We live long time, We live on salmon, bear. We care for land. Gissak come, he go.

--Gissak Come, He Go From Norton Sound to Kuskokwim Bay, the western coastline of Alaska bulged southwest, pushing out like the belly of a pregnant woman very near her time. The drainage basin for the two-thousand-mile-long Yukon River and the eight-hundred-mile-long Kuskokwim River and all their tributaries, the Delta stretched two hundred and fifty miles from Norton Sound to Kuskokwim Bay, and two hundred miles inland from sea's edge to the Kuskokwim Mountains. The river channels doubled back upon themselves to form lakes and flow through others until from the air the area resembled nothing so much as a basket of silver snakes, skins shining in the sun. Jim Chopin, looking out the window of an Alaska Airlines 737, in fact found it hard to tell where the water left off and the land began. Most of both looked below sea level as it was.

He'd been boning up on the area during the seventy minute flight from Anchorage, courtesy of the Alaska Geographic Society. Gamble had made him spend a week in Anchorage for something he called orientation, which consisted of looking at a bunch of mug shots and Russian Mafia organizational charts, which did not seem very organized and which seemed to chart mostly demises of said Mafia members.

He'd had to sign up at Job Service, too, one of the more humiliating experiences in his life. It didn't matter that he wasn't really out of work and that the fix was in for him for a particular job; the people behind the counter greeted all applicants with the same weary, disillusioned expression that said they'd heard it before, save the sob story for someone who cared, thanks. The people in line were tense and anxious and eager to please, some of them looked hungry, and Jim was pretty sure he saw among them a man from Wolf Lake he'd put away for child abuse ten years before, a woman who'd bankrupted her Chitina employer by writing checks to herself from his bank account in her capacity as his bookkeeper, and a kid from Tok, barely twenty, who had shot his sister while fooling around with a loaded shotgun nine years before. The district attorney had declined to prosecute, calling the incident a tragic accident. Tragic for the dead sister, certainly, Jim had thought at the time. He distinctly remembered wanting to take the kid and his father, who had left the loaded shotgun lying around in the first place, out back to beat the crap out of both of them.

The kid was the only one who recognized Jim. His eyes widened and seemed to fill with tears. Jim couldn't get out of the building fast enough.

But one afternoon he managed to get loose and visit Alaska Geographic's office on International Airport Road to thumb through the racks of quarterly publications, which featured titles from The Aleutians to Yakutat with stops at every other Alaskan location north, south and in between. A fair, pleasant woman named Kathy, plump in all the right places and whose eyes twinkled when he told her where he was going, directed him to the Society publication called The Kuskokwim. It was an engaging twinkle. Although she was wearing a wedding ring, out of habit Jim tried to strike up a flirtation, but it was soon obvious to both of them that his heart wasn't in it. He bought his book and left, worrying about the low level of his libido all the way to the hotel. What was worse, he had slept perfectly soundly that night, all alone in his queen-size bed.

The jet flew into a bank of clouds, obscuring his view, and he looked back at the book.

Bering, the largest settlement in western Alaska, was on the Kuskokwim River, maybe--he measured with thumb and forefinger and compared it to the legend on the map--forty miles upriver, on the undercurve of the pregnant belry. It had been founded by Moravian missionaries in 1886, who had wanted to call it Bethlehem. Natives protested and began a movement to call it Manilaaq, after a legendary shaman. Eventually a compromise was reached and the town was named for Virus Bering, a Dane on the payroll of the Imperial Russian Navy who was credited with the discovery of Alaska in 1728, and who died there in 1741. His memory was dim enough in everyone's mind for the partisan fervor to die down and for the missionaries to get on with moving the Yupik out of their sod houses and into the church. They were amazingly successful at both.

Twenty years later, the Gold Rush brought measles and influenza to Alaska, from which the Natives had no immunity, and from which neither the missionaries nor the missionaries' god could protect them. Half the adults and all the babies in the Delta were dead from one disease or the other within a year. Bering was one of the few towns that survived.

Tracing the curve of the belly, he saw that traditional names had prevailed elsewhere. Tununak, Umkumiut, Chefornak, Kipnuk, Kwigilh'ngok, Tuntutuliak, Napakiak, Nunapitsinchak and others he would bet had more letters in their names than people in their villages. The Alaska Geographic Society didn't provide translations, but most of the names were probably variations on the Yupik word for "mosquito." Or "salmon."

One species was as ubiquitous in the Alaskan Bush as the other, with the mosquitoes, taking up less space per unit, possibly having a slight edge.

Although the birds were giving both a run for their money. A lot of the Delta was the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, created in 1980, at the same time the Park was created around Kate Shugak's father's homestead, and just how had Kate managed to creep back into his consciousness? Annoyed, he read on.

The Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge was comprised of nineteen million acres and change, supporting the lifestyles of a hundred million shore and water birds, among them Canadian, brant, Emperor and white-fronted geese, tundra swans and duck species from mallard to green spectacled eider.

It was also, of course, the spawning ground for one hell of a lot of the aforesaid salmon. Kings, reds, silvers, humpies and dogs, so plentiful that this species alone went a long way toward explaining the presence of the largest and healthiest population of aboriginal Americans, the Yupik. Easier to catch salmon than to hunt whales or chase caribou, Jim thought, and probably a lot less dangerous.

There were also rainbow trout, Dolly Varden, sheefish, whitefish, arctic char, tomcod, and northern pike, the most rabid sports fisherman's dream date, although Jim had never seen the attraction. Pike were bony and virtually tasteless. If you couldn't eat it, why go to all the trouble of catching it?

The teeming bird and fish populations explained the teeming small mammal population, in particular aquatic mammals such as mink, otter, muskrat, and beaver. Aquatic mammals with nice pelts, Jim observed, and wondered what the trapping was like in the area. There were also red and arctic foxes, hares and voles.

Large mammals, the moose, the black bear and the grizzly generally turned up their noses at the Delta. Didn't like getting their feet wet, maybe.

Kate Shugak, a large mammal herself, didn't like getting her feet wet, either.

Goddamn it. He shook his head angrily and didn't return the flight attendant's smile when she walked down the aisle.

Below Bering, there were hardly any trees. There were stands of willow and the omnipresent alder, and occasionally a lone spruce, but that was it. The rest was virtually a sea of brush and grass.

The plane shuddered as the gear came down, and the flight attendant's voice came over the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are on our final descent into Bering. Please check to make sure that your seat back is in its original upright position and that your tray table has been stowed and locked. Please return all handcarried items to the space beneath the seat in front of you or in the overhead racks. Thank you."

She hung up the microphone and smiled again at Jim. She was attractive, a brunette in her mid-thirties with flirtatious eyes, and she had been very attentive to the big, good-looking man wearing a Sonics cap and sitting in the window seat of the exit row. She had managed to let fail the information that she flew out of Anchorage. Normally, he would have had her phone number before she had moved the drinks cart to the next row of seats.

Their shadow passed over the town, curved like a three-quarter moon around the upper bend of the river, houses and roads hopscotching over and around lakes and streams and ponds and trickles, connected by gravel roads on raised beds and a few boardwalks. Most of the dry land looked like a poorly drained swamp. Most of the swamp looked like an overgrown river. Too thin to plow, too thick to drink. The water table had to be right below the surface. Jim wondered what the sewer system was like. He shuddered to think.

Gamble had told him he was going in as ground crew for an independent airfreight business which operated out of the Bering airport. "You're a pilot, you'll fit right in," the Fibbie had said with an airy wave of his hand, and right then and there Jim should have known enough to run for his life. When he located the ramshackle building at the other end of the airstrip that housed Baird Air, he wished he had.

The hangar slanted to one side like a sailor on shore leave for the first time in months. The office, a smaller version with windows, leaned against the first building as if it was a drinking buddy the-first had picked up on the town. Both had corrugated tin roofs adorned with generously sized rust spots, and the orange-and-white logo over both doors had faded almost to invisibility. A large lake nibbled at the back edge of the property, on which there seemed to be a float plane landing or taking off every five minutes. Baird Air was directly below the approach. A seedy operation in a seedy location. Wonderful. Like most pilots, Jim was uneasy when anyone's hand but his was on the stick. He tried not to flinch each time a plane roared overhead. Adding to his unease were seven propellers of various sizes mounted on the exterior wall of the hangar, all with textbook groundloop curls to their tips. He counted to be sure. Seven times someone had dinged a plane. He hoped it wasn't the same someone. He hoped if it was that that someone wasn't still flying, in particular any of the planes taking off out back.