High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  There was a pause, and in that pause I sensed the barge faltering. Then Cornish’s voice again, not speaking to me, but to the tug, warning the Gabriello to heave to and await the Coastguard escort into Victoria. ‘I have you clear and very close on my radar. Do not attempt to make contact with your tow. I repeat — you are not to make contact with or attempt to board that barge. Any such attempt will be resisted by force.’

  Fists began pounding at the under side of the trapdoor, a man shouting to be let out. The door to the deck slid open and Brian thrust his head in. ‘Tow released,’ he said. And he added, ‘It slipped away over the bows like a whiplash. Can you feel the difference?’

  I actually could. The barge seemed to have gone dead, and I thought it had turned slightly to port, broadside to the wind and the waves. The wind force I estimated at about 4, the rate of drift possibly as much as 2 knots - an hour and a half, maybe two hours before we were blown onto the coast below that lighthouse. It was ridiculous. Long before then the tug would be alongside and ourselves overwhelmed, or else swimming for it.

  ‘Did you raise the cutter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How far away?’

  ‘He was wise enough not to say.’

  In fact, the cutter was then about six miles seaward of us, steaming at the same speed and on a parallel course, but keeping several miles astern. When he had failed to pick us up on his radar at Pearl Rocks, or to identify us amongst the traffic west of the Rankin Shoals, he had headed south at full speed with the intention of intercepting and identifying the tow as it entered the Queen Charlotte Strait. Only after he had wasted most of the night lying in the fairway between the BC mainland and the top of Vancouver Island watching for us on his radar did he finally come to the conclusion that the Gabriello was taking the open sea route. It had then taken him almost eight hours to catch up with us so that it was well past midday before he had finally taken station to seaward waiting for the fog to clear so that a helicopter could fly in with police and customs.

  Knowing it would take him at least twenty minutes to close with us, and having got no reply from the Gabriello, Cornish came back to me, asking who was on board beside myself. Then he wanted to know about Tom Halliday, and when I told him he had been killed and his wife had been held prisoner in a lakeside hut high in the mountains above High Stand, he didn’t waste time asking for details but began a series of calls, first to the lighthouse, then to any other vessel that might be close to us. As it happened a fisherman out of Friendly Cove was just clearing Yuquot Point heading south-west out of Nootka Sound. Cornish asked him to close us at all possible speed and monitor our drift. All this came out on the loudspeaker of our VHP set. What we didn’t know was that at the same time he was in radio-telephone communication with the RC Centre at Victoria and that, despite the fog, a helicopter was being scrambled.

  It was at this point that the lights of the tug suddenly loomed out of the fog, her blunt bows thrusting towards us, her superstructure a dim outline. By then the barge was virtually stationary, wallowing in the wind with the waves slapping noisily at her rusty sides. The tug struck us amidships, thumping and scraping as the bows rose and fell, men scrambling for’ard to leap aboard us. Brian had retrieved the rifle and was standing in the open doorway of the wheelhouse so that they could see he was armed.

  They paused. A voice shouted to them over a loudhailer and at the same instant a klaxon sounded very loud and just astern of us. A searchlight beam stabbed the shifting grey banks of fog, white bows and a wheelhouse with rods like antennae either side of a short mast festooned with aerials. It was the fishing vessel out of Friendly Cove. The radio was suddenly full of talk as the fisherman spoke to the skipper of the tug and Captain Cornish’s voice broke in with instructions to the tug: ‘You will stand off from the barge. I repeat, stand off from the barge.’

  For a moment everything seemed to freeze as though in a picture, the tug with its bows thrusting against us and three men up for’ard with another coming out of the wheelhouse with a rifle in his hand, and just off our starb’d quarter the white shadow of the fishing boat hanging there in the fog.

  It was like that for a moment, then the picture shattered, everything happening at once. We fell off the back of a wave into a deep hollow, the barge rolling and Miriam flung against me. The trap door broke open and was flung back to reveal the heaving shoulders of a powerfully built man in an open shirt with black hair and staring eyes. I kicked out at him, an instinctive reaction with Miriam clinging to me, her mouth open and her face gone white in a blazing beam of light. The fog rolled clear, a gap in the swirling mist and the lighthouse staring at us, one-eyed like a Cyclops, across a welter of breaking waves.

  For an instant the scene was lit like a film set, the tug’s bows buried under water as they fell against us, the three men on its deck lying in a huddle of tangled limbs and the ghostly fishing boat rolling its gunnels under, mast and rods dipping towards us. ‘Philip! I’m going. Come with me. It’s so near.’

  The grip on my arm loosened. She was turning, reaching for the door. I saw the fear on her face, had the odd experience of sensing her sudden uncontrollable terror transmitted right through me. Then the beam passed on. Twilight for an instant, then blackness. And in that abrupt dark I felt the barge roll back as it was lifted by an incoming comber, saw the top of it curl and break in a blur of grey foam that burst against the tug, slewing it round, then hit us with a crash, spray spattering the wheelhouse and the man I had kicked in the face falling back down the ladder with a cry, the trapdoor banging shut over his head.

  Then we were sliding down the surf-flecked back of the wave, falling into the hollow of it to end up with a jarring crash that jabbed right through my body and shook every part of the barge. We were on rock, and until we lifted to the next breaker, we were grinding our bottom plates against its surface, the din appalling.

  I don’t know whether it was because he realized the barge had struck, and that he was in shoaling water among the rocks, or whether it was the sense of being so abruptly exposed, a gap torn in the fog and all three vessels made visible to the shore by the beam of the lighthouse … Whatever it was, there was a sudden rumbling sound as the skipper of the tug put his engines full astern and backed off. Another crash, a splatter of breaking water and then we were lifting, the tug below us and ourselves looking down on it. The lighthouse beam was back, everything lit with blinding clarity, and the tug turning broadside-on to us. And as the beam passed on another light flashed out, this time from seaward.

  The cutter was actually in sight. I think I went slightly mad at the sight of the tug hauling off from us and the cutter closing in; I was shouting my head off and doing a little dance. Brian, too - he was making strange war-whoop sounds deep in his throat. And Miriam suddenly burst into tears, clutching hold of me and sobbing, her head bent down as though in prayer, and I heard her say something about stars, and then quite distinctly, ‘If only he hadn’t taken that last snort - his luck was turning.’ Her head was up then and she was looking at Brian with an expression I didn’t understand. It wasn’t exactly hatred, more an accusation … I think if she had had the means she would have killed him then.

  PART VI

  Mayday! Mayday!

  1

  It was dawn before we were taken off that barge. By then the fog had disappeared and as the sun rose above the tree-clad mountains of Vancouver Island we were able to see how close we had come to disaster, for in the six hours since we had hit that first rock tide and wind had bumped the barge along the iron-hard coast of Maquinna Point and the southern extremity of Nootka Island until it had found deeper water between Maquinna and Yuquot. By then police and customs had boarded the tug by winch from a helicopter and it was the Gabriello herself that towed the leaking barge clear of the rocks past Friendly Cove and the entrance to Cook’s Channel and into the quiet of the Zuciarte Channel. This took us south and west of Bligh Island to the grey rock of Muchalat Inlet and so up to the pulp mi
ll some eight miles south of Gold River.

  That was where we stayed the night, in a motel, and in the morning Cornish came to tell us the customs officers had found no drugs. They had had every log lifted out and been over the barge inch by inch - no trace of cocaine or any other contraband. We were interviewed then, each of us separately, by the police and the customs, and most of the time there was a member of the Federal Drug Enforcement Bureau present. This was at the motel. Statements were taken, not just from us, but also from the captain and crew of the tug, and while the police were chiefly concerned with Tom’s death and Miriam’s account of her kidnapping and long incarceration in the lakeside hut, the customs officers concentrated on our rendezvous with the South American vessel among the islands of the Spider. After hours of searching, then more time interrogating the crew of the tug, I think they found it very frustrating that we hadn’t been able to poke our heads out and see what was going on. What they wanted was confirmation of the nature of the cargo being transferred to the barge and where it had been hidden. ‘You state there was a lot of hammering?’ The question was addressed to me, and when I nodded, the officer asked me where the hammering had been coming from. ‘For’ard, aft, amidships — where?’

  ‘All over,’ I said. ‘It was loudest aft, of course, but the sound of it was not just confined to our end of the barge.’

  He had been one of those on the rummage party when the tug had been stopped the first time, and looking down at my statement, he said, ‘You say here it sounded like wood on wood, as though they were tamping something in between the tree logs.’ He looked up at me. ‘I’m considering, you see, that packages of drugs could have been forced between the logs and then at a later stage - while you people were asleep perhaps - either dumped overboard or loaded into a fishing boat or an inflatable, some inshore craft to be run in to the coast.’

  ‘We would have heard it,’ I said, and Brian nodded, adding that though he had slept quite heavily at times during the run from the Cascades to the Spider, he had been awake most of the time after that.

  ‘Wolchak,’ the customs officer said, looking down again at the statement spread out on the oilcloth-covered table still littered with the remains of breakfast. ‘We’ve checked with Bella Bella and the pilot of that Cessna confirms that he flew Wolchak and two other men, one of them answering to your description of the man responsible for Mr Halliday’s death, out to Bella Coola where there was a hire car waiting for them. Bella Coola is the coastal end of the road west out of Williams Lake and police are making enquiries now to see whether they drove on from there to board another plane. There’s an airport at Williams Lake, another at Quesnel, also at Prince George a further eighty miles or so north. In that case he could be in the States now. Alternatively, if he’d doubled back to Namu in a small hire plane he could have organized a boat …’

  But I was no longer listening, for the mention of Wolchak had taken my mind back to the scene in the mess room of the Kelsey with the rummage party sitting there talking over their coffee and that American Drug Enforcement officer describing how a man, who was also named Josef Wolchak, had risen to the head of those two mafioso families in Chicago. I was remembering the story of how he had made his first drug run from Columbia to New York. ‘Walking stick,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  I shook my head. It was impossible, of course, and yet standing there on that hairpin bend, high above the logging camp, it had seemed so extraordinary to have a mobile drilling rig parked on the edge of that cliff. ‘You’ve checked the butt ends of those logs, have you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged, feeling I was on the verge of making a fool of myself. ‘It’s just an idea.’ And then I asked the American whether they had had time to check if the Josef Wolchak involved in the High Stand selling was the same man his colleague had been talking about on the Kelsey a few days ago.

  They were already doing that. ‘I guess he’s the same man all right. That’s why we’re so sure it’s drugs.’ He was looking at Brian then. ‘I know you think those trees are valuable, but they’re peanuts compared with what’s involved if they were a cover for a regular drug run.’ He turned back to me. ‘Walking stick. You said something about walking sticks.’

  I hesitated. A tree trunk was in some ways rather like a giant version of a walking stick and with the trunk hollowed out … ‘Can we go down to the pulp mill and have a look at those logs?’

  I thought they were going to press me to say what was in my mind, but instead, after a momentary hesitation, everyone staring at me, they got to their feet. ‘Okay. Let’s go have another look at that timber.’ And I could see that all of them, the two customs officers, the American drugs man and the RCMP officer — Brian and Miriam, too — were mulling over in their minds the idea I had given them, unwilling to put it into words for fear it would prove as nonsensical as it seemed.

  We drove down in three vehicles, turned right by the Indian Reserve on the level flats of the Gold River estuary just short of the quay and entered the pulp mill. The logs were stacked in a pile close by a great tree trunk of a boom crane. Across the water the local passenger and cargo ship, the Uchuck HI, was just pulling out from the pier past the Coastguard cutter which was still lying there. The trunks were very uniform, and in that setting, with the booming ground just below us, the great pile of the mill at our backs plumed with white smoke and the rock walls of Muchalat Inlet to the right and die even narrower gut of Matchloe Bay to our left, clouds hanging black against a shaft of sunlight, they looked so much smaller.

  It was the butts I wanted to examine, for I was sure the ones I had seen up-ended against that cliff above the logging camp had been butt-end up. Unfortunately the stacking had been done regardless of the order in which they had been loaded on the barge and they were wet from having been off-loaded into the booming ground first, so that the sawdust clinging to the butts was sticky and very tenacious. In the end, we had to get the mill people to bring in a pump and hose them down under pressure.

  The first two dozen or so we examined had clearly not been tampered with in any way, and after that we had to use the back of a truck to give us extra height. All the time large clutches of logs were being brought in from the forests and tipped into the pen, an unnerving bustle of big vehicle activity. And then, when I was beginning to feel I had made a fool of myself, the logging boss who had been clambering over the logs without bothering to use the truck, called for the hose. ‘Something here.’ He was on his knees, leaning over the round raw wood end of a log, feeling it with his hands. ‘Sort of irregular.’ The truck was shifted slightly and the hose jet washed the sawdust clear. We could see it then, a slight protuberance and the growth rings not quite matching.

  We saw the same thing then in several others. A plug had been inserted. Brian thought it might be just that, having drilled certain logs with the intention of making a boom and then being faced with the prospect that felling would be stopped, they had decided to ship the whole lot out. But it had been very cleverly done, in most cases the growth rings matching and only the slightest crack to indicate that a plug had been inserted in the drill hole. A lot of trouble had been taken to make those plugs fit exactly.

  The foreman had scrambled down from the pile and was lumbering across to his office shack. Rain closed off the inlet, grey billows of cloud between the black rock walls. He came back with a big chainsaw. Also a piece of paper, which he handed to the RCMP officer. ‘Sign that.’ His heavy-jowled features cracked in a grin. ‘All right for you, but my people, they wouldn’t like it if they got a bill for a damaged cedar log.’ The policeman signed and the foreman stuffed it into his pocket. ‘Which shall we take first, the one I picked out?’

  The officer looked at the rest of us, then nodded. The saw was passed up to us and the foreman began directing the winch winder in the boom crane’s cabin. One by one the logs were lifted down until the one that had quite obviously been plugged was fully e
xposed. The big Canadian was standing with his feet carefully balanced. ‘I’ll take it bit by bit, okay?’ he said as we handed the saw up to him. He pulled the starter cord and the engine roared.

  That was when the rain reached us, but he took no notice, though all he was wearing was a heavy coloured shirt, and braces of course. Water spurted from the blade as he leaned forward, the grip claws positioned about two feet from the butt, the engine note deepening as the chain sliced down through the bark and into the wood, pale sawdust pouring out and all of us watching as the rain poured down and lightning flashed somewhere in the hills above us. Suddenly the saw checked and the foreman pulled the blade out, the motor idling, the chain still. He peered down, turning the saw and picking up a smear of dust and oil on the tip of his finger. ‘That’s not wood.’ He held his finger out to us, flecks of white amongst the sawdust, a pale slime, but mixed with the oil and the wood dust it was hard to see the difference. ‘Won’t do the saw much good if I try and go through it. Have to go round. There’s something there.’

  He had the crane operator lower the grappling chains, shifted the whole tree trunk several feet, so that the butt hung out over the back of the truck, and then started to cut round the trunk to a fraction over the depth of the saw blade. The rain stopped and at one point, shifting the position of the saw, he said, ‘Looks like plastic.’ Finally, with the log cut all round and hanging by just a single hinge of wood, so that the end-section trembled at a touch, he stepped back. ‘Okay boys, now see what it is.’ He paused then, looking at us. The man had a natural sense of the dramatic, holding the heavy chainsaw in his big paw as though it were a sword. Then he leaned forward, revved the motor and snicked the wooden hinge with the tip of the blade, the whole log-end suddenly hanging free.