High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  He gave it a kick and it fell into the truck at our feet, and we were looking at a new butt-end with a hole in the centre of it about eight inches in diameter and white powder dribbling from it. The American reached forward, took some of it in his hand and stood staring down at it. ‘Jeez! It’s pure. •Virgin pure coke. Uncut.’

  Customs men gathered round, dipping their fingers in, staring at the powder. ‘Let’s see how much they’ve stowed there. Is it plastic bags?’

  The foreman shook his head. ‘A container more like.’ His big hands were already working round the broken edges of the hole. ‘Yeah, plastic container - long one by the feel of it.’

  It took three of them to drag it clear and lower it to the truck. It was a clear plastic tube measuring 20 cms by 4.5 metres and it was packed from end to end with cocaine.

  ‘Not much difference, is there?’ The Drug Enforcement agent had straightened up and was staring at the great pile of logs. ‘Why the hell didn’t I think of that?’ He turned to me. ‘Walking sticks! It’s just a matter of scale, isn’t it? If you can hollow out the one, you can hollow out the other.’

  ‘If you’ve got the right equipment,’ I said, ‘and it’s available in the right place.’ I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it, or Tom, looking down on the Cascades logging camp and seeing that mobile drilling rig and a tree trunk up-ended against that cliff.

  ‘Yeah.’ He took off his glasses, nodded to himself as he wiped the rain off. ‘Neat. Oh, so very neat.’ He put his glasses on again, staring at the stack of logs. ‘Wonder how much we got in that pile? One hell of a lot, that’s for sure. And only a few days back we checked out a barge-load and let it through.’

  The elder of the two Canadian customs officers patted his shoulder. ‘Not your fault. You’d no means of knowing —’

  ‘Of course I hadn’t. I wasn’t there. But we had our suspicions — a tip-off. Reliable, too. And we never had the sense to relate that special stand of trees to the drug concealment potential. The barge-load we let through a few nights back will have been trundled through the passes and across the plains, and right now it’ll be in the SVL Company’s timber yard in Chicago, or maybe it’s already out in the street… Just think what that means in terms of road accidents, muggings, rape. God! I never thought I’d be faced with something as big as this.’ He turned to the foreman. ‘Better take me to the manager’s office. I need a phone - lots of calls - Chicago.’ He was already clambering down from the truck. The other followed.

  Suddenly we were on our own, the police hurrying back to their car, which had a radio, the customs officers heading towards the pier where the Coastguard cutter was now the only vessel. ‘I need a drink,’ Miriam said in a small voice. ‘I feel slightly sick.’ And I heard her murmur to herself, ‘Tom was right all along.’

  There wasn’t anywhere to get a drink. We stood around for a while. Then more police arrived to mount guard over the High Stand logs and it began to rain again. We were finally given a meal in the mill canteen and shortly afterwards a police car arrived to whisk us half across Vancouver Island, through Campbell River and down the coastal highway to Victoria, where Brian and I were put up at that lovely creeper-clad relic of Victorian days, the Empress Hotel. It faced the inner harbour and the BC Parliament Building and was conveniently close to the Provincial Courts.

  Miriam, after throwing a fit of temperament that was more than justified in the circumstances, was allowed to go out to Oak Bay with the Canadian family she had stayed with before, while Brian and I settled down to drink ourselves into a more relaxed frame of mind. It had been a long journey from Ocean Falls, longer still from the Yukon, and now we were being told we had to wait in case further evidence was required from us when those on the tug, who had now been arrested and charged with drug smuggling, made their first appearance in court.

  That might have been the end of it if the authorities, both in Canada and the States, had not decided to go for Wolchak. It was a mark of the size of the operation that he had been on the spot and running it himself, and as a result he was more exposed than he had probably ever been before. He was arrested at his home in Chicago the day after we reached Victoria, but despite pressure from the public and the media, the courts released him on bail of half a million dollars pending extradition proceedings. Roy McLaren, when I saw him in his office in Vancouver two days later, told me proceedings of that sort could drag on for months. Meanwhile, Barony had already successfully avoided arrest, the SVL Timber lawyers pleading that neither he nor the company was responsible for anything that had been done in the remoteness of the Halliday Arm of Cascade Inlet. The company had purchased the trees, that was all. The felling had been arranged through the owner’s representative and delivery through Angeles Georgia Towing.

  I was booked out the next day on the Wardair flight back to Gatwick, and feeling I owed myself the luxury of a view over the water, I was staying the night at the Bayshore. Brian had already left for the north again, back to Ocean Falls. That evening, after lazing for an hour in the circular pool beside the parked charter cruisers, I stood in my room with just a towel round my waist, smoking a cigarette and watching the lights come on along the North Shore. I had two windows to my room, one facing across Coal Harbour and Burrard Inlet, the other towards the city where the glass of Vancouver’s mini-Manhattan was reflecting the last of the sunset glow. A cargo ship disappeared slowly beyond Deadman’s Island and the black silhouette of the trees of Stanley Park.

  It was all so beautiful, a floatplane landing, a yacht going alongside the refuelling raft and the lights twinkling right up the slopes to the ski-lift high above the First Narrows. All that was missing was somebody to share it with and my thoughts turned to Miriam, wondering what she was doing tonight, whether to ring her. And then, just as I had seated myself on the bed and started to look up the Oak Bay number of her Canadian friends, the phone rang.

  Later, of course, we said it must have been telepathy. She was downstairs and wanted me to have dinner with her. ‘Something very exciting. I must tell you.’ And she added, her voice bubbling with it, ‘You’re not doing anything, are you? I must talk it over, and now Brian’s gone there’s nobody -nobody who knows it all and how Tom would feel. Can you come? Can you join me for a sort of quiet celebration?’

  ‘Of course,’ I told her. ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘Later.’ And almost in the same breath she muttered, ‘It’s all so ironic. I’ll wait for you in the Verandah Room.’ And she rang off.

  I dressed quickly and went down to find her with a tall glass in front of her frosted with ice and eating roasted nuts as though she hadn’t had a meal for weeks. I don’t know what she was wearing, trousers I think and a light woollen top, a very ordinary outfit, but she looked radiant. She had another drink with me and then we left the hotel and strolled across the lit driveway to the dim, mysterious labyrinth of the old Coal Harbour quay. She had booked a table at the Keg where I had dined the night I arrived in Vancouver. ‘We’ll have fish and lots of wine — a lovely, simple atmosphere. Then I’ll tell you.’ We passed the broken sleeper palings of the old boatyard and went round by a lot of parked cars and the entrance to the marina, laughing at the tow-away signs, her arm linked in mine. I could feel the movement of her hips against me and I was filled with a warm glow, sensing that we would sleep together in my room overlooking the harbour and that it would be a night to remember.

  We stood for a time looking down at the boats lying white and deserted against the floating wooden arms of the marina. ‘I wouldn’t mind living somewhere out here,’ she said, the huskiness in her voice more pronounced. ‘A boat, a house by the shore, and the world - the European world of demos, unions, terrorism, all the mayhem of politics - a million miles away. Or would one find it too peaceful, too removed — too dull?’ She looked up at me, smiling.

  The Keg, like the ships’ chandlery nearby, was a disused boathouse, all wood and bare simplicity. We had another drink, a salad, some fish and a coup
le of bottles of Californian wine, and we talked - about everything except what she’d come to tell me. It wasn’t until the coffee arrived, and with it the two large brandies she had ordered, that she suddenly blurted it out: ‘Stone Slide Gully,’ she said, taking a telex out and passing it across to me. ‘Jonny Epinard - he sent that from Whitehorse.’ And she went on, her words coming so fast I could barely follow her - ‘You remember that Indian, Jack McDonald - you said you’d been through the gully into that grim, volcanic-looking crater beyond - the time I saw it I thought it looked like an old-fashioned lavatory pan, the mountains rising up round it at roughly the same angle. It was always subject to rock slides - not so much where Tom and the Indian were beavering away with their tractor and sluice box, but on the opposite slope. It’s very sheer there.’ Her hand reached over, gripping hold of mine. ‘You see what he says. There’s been a slide.’

  I nodded, my eyes on the telex text: … closing down for winter. Jack had look at new slide. Picked up 23 nuggets in under an hour, largest 0.4 oz. Looks promising subject evaluation next season. Sorry Tom won’t know. Jonny Epinard. Her grip on my hand tightened. ‘Gold!’ she said. ‘And even if it’s nothing big it would have got Tom out of the mess he was in. He’d have been able to tell those bastards in Chicago to go to hell.’ I could feel her nails biting into my flesh. ‘Why didn’t it happen when he was up there? Why now — when it’s too late?’

  She went on talking about that for some time, what it would have meant to Tom, how, if it had only happened the previous year, or better still two years ago, he would never have got in hock to the bank, would never have considered selling even an acre of High Stand. And then abruptly she veered away from that line of thought and began talking about the future, her future - ‘Me, a gold-miner - just think of it!’ Her eyes were sparkling, her face flushed and that Titian hair shining softly in the dim light. She looked just wonderful as she went on, ‘The hours I’ve listened to Tom talking about his father, about the Klondike and the fever that gripped them all when the Bonanza was discovered. And now, here I am with nuggets in the bank. Not a Bonanza. Of course not. But another Ice Cold perhaps. That would be enough. And when spring comes we can go up there, see if it really is a new placer mine. Would that make me a sourdough?’ She drained the last of her brandy, giggling to herself. ‘Me, a sourdough!’ And she shook her head, adding in a subdued voice, ‘I’m glad about High Stand, that I shan’t be concerned with those trees. Tom was right — Brian will appreciate them. He understands about trees, and after what happened there …’ She leaned across the table to me. ‘You will handle the legal side for me, won’t you? Ice Cold, I mean — you’ll come up there with me?’ And then on a lighter note: ‘I can manage a mine. At least, I think I can,’ she added with a grin. ‘But it’ll mean a company, accounts, a lot of paperwork.’ She laughed. ‘I never was any good at that sort of thing.’

  We talked it over for a while, Miriam building castles, mentally leaping ahead to a full-blown mine, and myself doing the best I could to keep her feet somewhere near the ground. It was all good fun, dreaming dreams and both of us involved. Finally she paid the bill — she insisted absolutely and I let her, because it was her evening, the start of an attempt to build a future for herself from the wretchedness of what had happened. Then we went out into the shadowy world of Coal Harbour quay, the night very still with low cloud so that the water and the old boathouses were lit by the reflected glow of the city’s lights.

  We reached the uneven, pot-holed surface of the private roadway leading westward to the hotel, walking arm-in-arm, not talking now - just content to let the stillness and the magic of the night work on us, conscious of our closeness and the hours ahead. We were approaching the entrance to the marina and stopped for a moment to watch one of those fast big game fishing boats gliding in towards the pontoon. ‘That’s what I’d like,’ Miriam said. ‘A boat like that, so I could explore -‘ She walked on.

  We were just passing the approach to one of the parking bays when a car’s engine started. The lights flicked on at high beam, our shadows leaping across the roadway. Startled, our eyes were blinded. Then the engine revved and in the instant that the car began moving down on us with a squeal of tyres, something triggered inside me, an instinct of preservation. I flung Miriam forward - The marina. Run!

  Thank God she didn’t hesitate. We made it as the car hurtled past us, scraping the wall and screeching to a halt. The sound of doors and voices calling in the darkness. But by then we were down the ramp and onto the floating pontoon. There was a crack like a backfire and something smacked into the water beside us. Feet sounded on the ramp, the pontoon swaying. I took the second bay, a pontoon full of parked boats, hoping to God I had picked the right one, the boats all dark, not a soul about.

  And then I saw it - the high, white bow of that fishing cruiser gliding in towards the end of the pontoon. ‘Jump or swim,’ I gasped. ‘We’ve got to make that boat.’ I gave one quick glance over my shoulder. ‘Can you make it?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was close behind me and even then I noticed her breasts, the way she moved. And then we were almost at the end of the pontoon and I was calling to the skipper high on the open bridge: ‘Mayday! Mayday!’ I yelled. ‘Need your help. Muggers.’

  He reacted quite instinctively, closing the gap to the pontoon-end just as I reached it. I jumped, landing on my feet and staggering against the wheelhouse. Miriam landed beside me. ‘Full ahead — please,’ I called up to the man above me. ‘They’re armed.’

  He must have seen them running towards him along the pontoon, for he didn’t hesitate, slamming his cruiser into gear, and as the screws bit, he increased the revs, lifting the bows half out of the water and swinging the boat away in a boiling arc towards the pale line of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club boat sheds.

  He was the owner, an American by the sound of it. ‘You want the police?’ he asked as we joined him on the open bridge. ‘I got R/T down below.’

  ‘Did you see their faces clearly?’ I asked. ‘Could you identify them?’

  But of course he had been too occupied getting his boat away. ‘If you hadn’t called Mayday…’ He shrugged, cutting down on the revs and settling back in his swivel chair, idling across the harbour as I said who we were and told him something of what I thought it was all about. ‘So you can’t identify them? You’re a lawyer and you don’t see what the police can do about it?’ He sat there for a moment, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, gazing out at the dark outline of the Coal Harbour buildings. A car was disappearing up towards Georgia Street, otherwise there was no sign of movement. ‘I’m from California,’ he said, ‘and down there we get to hear a lot about what drugs do to people, the way kids act - anything to get the next fix; and of course the millions to be made by the men running the racket. You want my advice?’ He turned his head sharply, leaning forward and staring at us through his gold-rimmed glasses. ‘You get the hell out, back to England, and fast. That’s my advice. And if they need you back over here to give evidence, you make damn sure you’re under police protection every second you’re here. You, too, lady. Okay?’ He stood up, increasing the revs again and heading in for the lit bulk of the hotel.

  He put us ashore by backing up to the bows of one of the charter cruisers. ‘Just remember what I said,’ he called down to us. ‘I’ve been in politics as well as business and I know what these boys can do, the sort of hoodlums their money buys them. It may seem all right in England, but over here …’ He laughed, raising his hand in a casual salute, screws frothing as he eased away. ‘And look after the little lady, eh?’ The American voice came faintly back to us across the water. We went up to my room and I did my best, lying there, naked between the sheets, the lights fading, the water blackening, a world of beauty nodding off to sleep. And in the dawn, in the first greying of the light, the hills upside down in the flat mirror of Burrard Inlet and the ashtray beside our bed full of stubbed-out butts, in that dawn reality stood like a silent ghost staring in at th
e big windows - a golden future for us both, and all I could think of was those bloody hunters waiting up in the Yukon, the two of us lying in each other’s arms and the shadow of the drug ring hanging over us …

  Author’s Note

  During the period I was writing Campbell’s Kingdom, and later The Land God Gave to Cain, I came to know more of Canada than all but a handful of Canadians - from the Maritimes to the Rockies and the Caribou Trail, Labrador, too, and north-west across Hudson’s Bay to the Barrens and Baffin Island. The one area I did not know at that time, but which has always called to me because of the Gold Rush of ‘98, was the Yukon.

  There was, too, another area of Western Canada that, as sailor and navigator, had a particular appeal for me - those long fingers of water reaching deep into the Coast Mountains of the Rockies between the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the southern end of the Charlottes. To explore that area, which is where Mackenzie scratched his name on a rock as the first overland to the Pacific, I knew I would require the good offices of the Canadian and BC Governments.

  Now that I have completed High Stand, I would like to record my thanks to them for arranging for me to be guest of the Canadian Coastguards on one of their cutters carrying out search and rescue duties and generally showing the flag in those little-visited and very remote fjords. In particular, I would like to thank Captain Peter Golden who, as Coastguard Regional Manager, organized the voyage for me, and Captain Peter Kalis of the Coastguard cutter Rider who was in a class more or less by himself for high-speed inshore pilotage in very narrow, rock-infested waters. It was he who took me into the Spider and gave me a week of most intricate and enjoyable charting.