“Well, it would have been easier all around if Slade had been flying. But it worked out anyway, didn’t it? The Secretary saw fit to recommend that the glacier be preserved for posterity as a National Monument, the sole remaining stomping grounds of the Great Blue Glacier Bear, and thanks to our environmental impact statement, there’s no problems in a directional drilling operation to utilize the vast oil reserve beneath the glacier. Or whatever the report says. Hell, once we’ve got the son of a bitch drilled, you won’t even know we’re here. We’ll mask the pumps with fake rocks and bury the pipeline. All that will be visible of our presence is the road, and that’ll bring birdwatchers and bear lovers and campers directly to the beautiful scenery. You’re happy: I’m happy. Like that.” He grinned his wide happy grin and for a moment Danforth thought he looked like somebody else—who was it? Some old movie actor or other.
“Whatever,” Danforth said. Outside the blizzard was howling, and he wondered if he shouldn’t send some men out to relieve the watch. Or maybe bring it in altogether. Slade wouldn’t be moving in this weather.
“What do we do next?” Healey asked.
“Can’t fly in this weather, and it looks like it’ll blow all of tomorrow, maybe the next day as well. Once it clears, though, I’m going to call in some choppers and we’ll see if we can’t locate him.”
“You’ll never find him in the Dead Mounties,” Healey said. Again, he seemed almost happy about it. “Too high for helicopters, all kinds of crazy crosscurrents in there. The country is a jumble, with no two valleys running the same direction. Frankly, I don’t think Jack will bother us anymore. He wanted to make his gesture of defiance and blow up a bit of our property. I figure he’ll be content with that and take off for Canada.”
“We’ve got to go after him,” Danforth said. “He destroyed government property and wounded a government agent. He’ll have to stand trial for that.”
Healey took his drink over to the woodstove and warmed his backside. The wind hooted and whistled outside the quonset. Healey wondered what his old buddy made of the weather.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SLADE LAY snug in his down-filled sleeping bag, his head cushioned by the bulky pack, under an uprooted cedar deep in the intervales of the Dead Mounties. He had made fifteen miles since leaving the site of the bombing, most of it through the fury of the blizzard. Along the way he had spotted three grouse huddled in a spruce thicket and clubbed them for his dinner, which he cooked over a fire fueled with small chunks of C-4 and spruce sticks. The grouse would last him until the storm ended. No one would be following him, he figured. He hoped that Dude hadn’t got caught in the weather.
Toward evening the following day, the wind backed to the south and the snow let up. He set out, following a compass course to the northeast. The mountains were empty—not even a raven flapping over the blanket of new snow that turned the whole world white. The aurora came out, allowing him to move faster than he would have if it had been total darkness, and he made good time. By sundown the next afternoon he was nearing the rendezvous, and he paused in his progress to climb a small peak and scout the country ahead. Below him lay a heavily wooded valley with a frozen stream bisecting it. A curl of woodsmoke rose from an oxbow of the stream and looking through the scope he could just see the wingtip of Dude’s Piper showing at the far edge of the woodline. Good, the kid had made it.
In fact, he was waiting as Slade slogged in, a crooked grin on his face and a cup of hot rum steaming in his hand. He was an ugly young man with a face like a monkey-fist knot and thick, Coke-bottle glasses, small in stature like his father but wiry. He stood hip-shot, his bandy legs bowed in worn Levis, his stained brown Stetson cocked back on his forehead. As always, he was wearing cowboy gear, and a dirty green down-filled vest over his Western-style wool shirt. He fancied himself a cowpoke, always had, and that’s why people in Alaska called him Dude. He was, however, the best damned wrangler Jack had ever seen work.
“You’re late, Pop,” he said, offering the cup to Slade.
“Ran into a bit of weather. I’m glad to see you got through okay.”
“We got in just ahead of it,” Dude said. He helped Slade slip the big pack off his shoulders.
“We?”
“I brought Suzy with me. She’s in the cabin.” He gestured to the low log hut back in the trees. The cabin was one of their spike camps, used for moose and bear hunting back in the days when Jack hunted professionally.
“I don’t know, kid.” She was a good girl, and for some reason totally inexplicable to Jack Slade, she loved his funny, ugly, hardboiled son. “I don’t know. It’s going to be rough when we go back in on them.”
“She can handle it,” Dude said. “How’d it go?”
“That C-4 is something else. It packs a wallop. I blew up their ’dozers and trucks with just ten pounds of it.”
“Ten pounds? That’s overkill. You could have blown up half of Saigon with that amount.”
“You hear any aircraft today?”
“Nothing.”
“They’ll send something up,” Slade said. “We’d better get the Piper farther in under the trees and cover her with spruce boughs. Tell Suzy to finish up whatever she’s doing over the 184 fire and douse it. The wind’s pretty well hidden your ski tracks. I glassed you from up on the ridge and I doubt they can spot it unless they’re flying contours, and if they come down that low they can look in the window.”
After they moved the plane and covered it, they went into the cabin. Suzy turned from a pot of stew she was tending over the now-squelched fire and smiled.
“I’m glad you made it.” She had a husky voice and a slow, easy smile and she spoke to Slade as if he had just come home from work after a long commute. She was tall—half a head taller than Dude—and had long, dark blonde hair and a lithe, willowy way to her movements that reminded Slade, painfully for a moment whenever he saw her after an absence, of his wife. He went over and embraced her, and she rubbed her cheek against his bristly beard.
“Uncle Jack,” she said. “The Wild Man of Carcajou Creek.”
“Well, Sue.” He stood back and stroked his beard. “Why don’t you dump that scrawny runt of a cowboy and come be my Wild Woman?” It was a running joke and Dude took it well.
“I couldn’t keep up with you,” she laughed. “How did you make it so fast with that blizzard yesterday?”
“I walked all night. The Lights were on and it was easy going.”
They sat down at the rough table, a smaller version of Slade’s original, and ate moose stew with carrots, onions and dumplings, and mopped their bowls with slabs of heavy black bread Dude had brought from Juneau. Then they all had a slug of rum in hot water and listened, while they talked, for the inevitable intrusion of aircraft engines.
“Where would you live if it couldn’t be Alaska?”
They were sitting in the dark, with only the glow of the stove flickering on their coffee mugs and on Dude’s thick glasses. Suzy lay asleep near the fire, her hair a reddish blonde where the light caught it.
“Damned if I know,” Dude said after thinking a while. “I really haven’t seen that much of it.”
“You know the Outside better than I do,” said Slade. “And you’ve been in Asia, or a part of it anyway. And Hawaii along the way.”
“None of those places.”
“None of them?”
“Maybe the mountains. It’s still pretty good high up. The higher you go, the poorer the people in the monetary sense, except where they ski, and the less dependent they are on the real Outside.”
“Like where?”
“Parts of northwestern Montana, across the Bitterroots into Idaho. The Gallatins and even the Shields Valley north of Livingston. Down in New Mexico along the Jemez River, but well away from Taos. The Ouachitas in Oklahoma, and southern Arkansas. Some of the Georgia and Alabama hill country. On up through western Missouri in bits and pieces, western Pennsylvania, up there near Du Bois. The Taconics and the Northe
ast Kingdom in Vermont. From what I hear.”
“I couldn’t go back to Vermont,” Jack said. “I been there.”
“It’s different from when you were a kid,” Dude said. “There’s wild turkeys now, and coyotes, and more bear than they’ve seen in a long while.”
“It’s dead country.”
“What isn’t, when you think of it? This is dead country to Charlie Blue, and to me as well now that we’re out of it.”
“What about Suzy? Where does she like it?”
“Vermont. She’s who took me there. She had a roommate at school who came from just north of Bennington and she went home with her one vacation. Good people, she said. Like Alaskans. No bullshit. Very competent.”
Jack got up from the table and went over to the bottle where it stood near the fire. He poured himself another rum and splashed hot water on it, then brought the bottle over to his son.
“You know how this is going to end,” he said flatly.
“Pretty well. You’re not going on from here.”
“But you are.”
“I don’t know.”
“At first I wanted you in on this. The finish. But I wasn’t really thinking. Now I want you out of it.”
“I can help you and I will take my chance.”
“I don’t want that kind of chance-taking from you. You’ve got the girl now.”
“She’s as tough as I am,” said Dude. “She will take her chance along with me.”
“Well yes. But not here. Someplace else. Like Vermont.”
They sat quietly for a long while. Outside, the snow was dancing under the blaze of the Lights and the walls of the cabin creaked with the still cold.
“You’re going to kill Sam Healey?”
“Yes.”
“And the Iranian?”
“If he’s there I will. I don’t really care that much about him.”
“I think he did it.”
“Sure he did. Or Gates. But that isn’t what’s important. Motive is nothing next to acquiescence.”
“. . .”
“Forget it,” Jack said. “I don’t want to explain. I just want to do it.”
Dude finished his drink. He went over to the sleeping bag where Suzy lay.
“You don’t have to explain, Pop,” he said. “You never explained about the bear but I know.”
“Nor you about the war. But I know.”
After Dude had settled into sleep, Slade took a notebook from his pocket and scrawled a few words on a clean page. Then he took a slip of paper from his breast pocket and enfolded it in the written page. The slip was a certified check in a six-figure amount made out to John Strong Slade, Junior. It was all that Slade had left save his love. The note read: “I’m going down to the Gulf for a while. This is for you and Suzy to spend while I’m gone.”
He tucked the papers into a toe of Dude’s cowboy boots. He knew his son would not wear the boots again until he got back to town. That would be time enough.
“Nothing,” Healey yelled over the flapping of the helicopter rotors. “I told you you couldn’t find him.” He cackled gleefully and Danforth, riding up front next to the pilot, scowled again without taking his eyes off the blinding, sprawling roll of empty country five hundred feet below them. They had searched the Dead Mounties for three days now and seen only a handful of yarded-up moose, a band of caribou in a deep valley, and one bear, wandering the snow abstractedly, as if he were sleepwalking.
The pilot, young and nervous, complained constantly that the air was too thin for his ship, and indeed from time to time they had suddenly lost altitude in stomach-jerking plunges that ended only a hundred feet from the rocks. He shouldn’t have let Healey come along, Danforth thought. The extra weight was what made the flying tough. But the old man had insisted, and the Secretary came through from Washington with a sharp message ordering Danforth to accede to his wishes. Apparently the old thief had clout to match his cackle.
“I think we’d better head for the barn, sir,” the pilot said. He pointed to the fuel gauges. “We’re nearing the limit and I’d like a little cushion.”
“Where’s the other chopper?” Danforth asked.
“West of us about twenty miles,” the pilot said. “He’s got a shorter run back in.”
“Why don’t we vector back over his way and then head home?”
“We covered that part yesterday,” the pilot said, not looking at Danforth, “but if you say so.”
“I say so.”
As they angled toward the ridges and snow cones to the west, the radio crackled and screamed.
“What’s that?”
“Sounded like Glowworm Two.”
“. . . worm One, Two here. Contact. Contact. Receiving ground . . .” Crackle screech.
“Glowworm Two, this is Glowworm One. Say again.”
“. . . ground fire. Sector Uniform Three. I say again, receiving ground fire from . . . Do you read?”
“Glowworm Two, understand you have contact and are receiving ground fire, is that Charlie? Over.”
“Roger One. I’m going in to get a firm fix and then heading base. . . .”
“They’ve got ’em,” Danforth shouted, turning to grin at Healey. Then, to the pilot, “Crank it on, kid. Let’s join up with him and nail that bastard!”
A moment later: “One, this Two. Mayday mayday mayday. Mayday mayday mayday. I’m stacking in. . . .” Crackle screech.
Tail high, the helicopter raced toward a pall of smoke rising beyond the far white ridges.
Slade and his son were checking their rabbit snares in a brushy draw a mile from the spike camp when they heard the gunfire. Helicopters had passed through the valley four times in the past two days and not paused or circled. Even though they had heard a chopper working the intervales to their west, they had gone out to check the line, knowing that if the pilot turned their way, they could merely flop in the snow under the heavy cover and not be seen. Even their snow-shoe tracks were obscured from above by the snow-bowed matting of dwarf willow and dense young popple.
“We’d better have a look,” said Slade.
The two men worked their way up the draw and over the ridge into another long, meandering valley, keeping to cover as they ran on their snowshoes. As they neared the top, they could see smoke over the next rise. They heard another chopper coming in from the southeast and lay hidden until it passed, then climbed carefully up to a point from which they could peer down into the next valley.
The first helicopter lay shattered and black in a wide ragged circle of fire-darkened, melted snow, its rotors snapped or bent by the impact of the crash. The second chopper hovered over it and they could see the white blur of faces staring downward. No sign of life near the wreckage or within its smoldering hulk. The hovering chopper soared up and then warped around to head back to the south, apparently having seen enough.
There were two bodies in the wreck, small black and red lumps with fire-twisted arms reaching at awkward angles from the snarl of scorched metal. A stench of burned pork mixed with the reek of hot steel. Bullet holes pocked the half-melted Plexiglas of the helicopter’s broken bubble. They circled out from the wreckage and scouted the snow nearby, looking for sign of the gunner—or gunners, more likely—who had brought the chopper down.
“Down here,” Dude yelled. Slade joined him. In a tuck of the hillside behind a stand of brush, Dude was standing over a reach of snow tamped down by many booted feet. A fire had burned itself out in the snow, just the stubs of blackened spruce sticks protruding from the hole shoveled in the surface down to bedrock. Around it, the snow was compressed in long shapes where men had slept around the fire. Dude pointed to other depressions where the men had knelt to shoot at the helicopter. They searched the snow for empty cartridge cases, but could find none. “Must have cleaned up their brass before they split,” Dude said.
“Not strange in these parts,” said Slade. “Everyone up here reloads. You don’t leave your empties if you can find them.”
&
nbsp; Snowshoe tracks led out to the northwest, toward a higher stand of country Slade knew from his sheep-hunting days. It was a tangled, steep piece of mountain where ambushes would be easy and impossible to prevent.
“We’re going to have to clear out,” he said to his son. “That other chopper will be back with help and they’ll sure as hell find our tracks, then follow them back to the cabin. Dammit. I wanted to stay another few days. I hoped that they’d figure I was over the line into Canada by now.”
“There’s only six of them,” Dude said. He had been crouched over the snowshoe tracks, trying to distinguish one from the other. “Pretty big men for Indians or Eskimos. Could there be a party of white men in here this time of year?”
“Not likely.”
“Well, you’re right about splitting. They’ll figure you to have shot down the helicopter. We could get Sue and track these fellows out, get the jump on them and bring them in. Once they check the bullets in the helicopter against their rifles you’d be clear.”
“I didn’t want to kill anyone,” Slade said, “but I don’t want to be ‘clear’ either. I’m at war with these sons of bitches, both the Feds and Healey, and I don’t want it to end now. Not until I’ve made them pay for their sins.”
When they reached the cabin they found Susan lugging packs out to the airplane. The fire was damped and the snow had been blown clear of the skis. The engine was warm.
“I heard it,” she said. “We’re ready to fly once we get the gear stowed.”
Slade walked over to the neat row of baggage and pulled his pack clear. He slung the straps over his shoulders, shrugged once, then laid the rifle across his forearm in the Indian carry.
“Get going,” he said.
“What about you?”
“This isn’t your fight. It’s mine, always has been. I’ll move out the way those gunners went. You two get back to town, don’t get involved. They want blood now and I don’t want it to be yours.”
“You’re an asshole, Dad.”
“Maybe so. But say it again and I’ll bore you a new one of your own.”
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