“I remember that much,” Kate said. “Radio like our radio?”
“Yeah, I think it means the same in both languages.” Kate looked around for Demetri but he had already gone out. Old Sam scowled at her through the neck opening of a very ratty University of Alaska, Fairbanks, sweatshirt that Kate distinctly remembered buying as an undergraduate. It had gone missing after last summer on the Freya, Old Sam’s seventy-five-foot fish tender. “Okay. Tell me about them.”
Jack finished tying his shoes and went to pour coffee, which George had made before going to the strip to do a pre-flight inspection. “I only know what I read in the papers.”
“Then tell me what you read,” Kate said, accepting a mug. “After all, if you read it in the papers, it must be true, right?” She added Carnation evaporated milk straight from the can with a lavish hand.
Jack, watching, shuddered. “Yeah, right. DRG is in the computer business. From what it sounds like, they write the programs that make computers run.”
“Like Steve Jobs of revered memory,” Kate said, thinking nostalgically of her first on-the-job Mac. No electricity at the cabin, of course, so no computer.
“I don’t think Steve Jobs is dead yet,” Jack said. “Although he just went into partnership with Bill Gates, so he probably is well on his way to being eaten alive.”
“Whatever,” Kate said. “Tell me about DRG.”
“Okay,” Jack said obediently. “Where was I? Oh yeah, they write the programs that make computers run. They are, according to the Associated Press, the only European computer company that has the talent and the capital to give Microsoft a run for its money, in the European Community, that is. I forget how much of the market in operating systems they’ve managed to capture, but I remember the writer compared them to Airbus Industries, and how Airbus stacks up to Boeing.”
“Small but talented, capable and energetic?” Kate suggested.
Jack grinned and said smoothly, “Are we drawing comparisons to anything else here?”
It took her a minute to get it. When she did, she blushed and said crossly, “Yeah, yeah.” His grin widened. Old Sam snorted, stamped his foot down into his boot and slammed out the door, disgusted by the excess of sentiment. “So,” Kate said in a monitory tone, “DRG has a lot of European customers?”
“And Asian,” Jack said, “according to the articles I read, anyway. Plus it is said they are beginning to carve out a sizable niche in Canada, which, as you may or may not know, is right across the border from the U.S.” He drank coffee, ignoring the face she made at him. “And what with that new North American Free Trade Agreement, maybe you don’t get to market under your own name, but I bet you could market under someone else’s if you found a Canadian distributor willing to shift your product. Which they did. Before you ask, I don’t remember the name of the Canadian company. DRG bought a controlling interest in the stock of some distributor or other, and they started selling across the border.” He paused. “Yeah, and I think there was something about them beating everyone else into Russia, some government contract to do with monitoring oil exploration, or maybe it was gold production. It was something to do with minerals in Siberia.”
The coffee settled into her stomach and produced a warm and comforting glow. “Interesting to see how well Russia and Germany are getting along after the Germans starved everyone to death in Stalingrad and the Russians raped everyone in Berlin.”
Jack shrugged. “ ‘When war is over, it’s over forever. When it’s over, it’s as if it has never been.’ Baron Wharton,” he added at Kate’s quizzical expression. “One of Elizabeth the Great’s advisors. Or maybe Henry the Eighth’s. And I probably misquoted anyway.”
“So, ancient enemies are new pals and everything’s coming up roses,” Kate said. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
“Maybe nothing. Nothing that has been proved so far, at any rate. The U.S. government, which as you know is never, ever wrong—kind of like the newspapers—has accused DRG of—horrors!—bribing American officials to allow DRG to dump their product at vastly inferior prices to gain a foothold in the American market and has brought suit before the World Trade Commission. This, of course, has opened the door for various American makers of computer operating systems to charge DRG with industrial espionage and patent infringement. This was naturally followed by a statement from the IRS announcing its own investigation into the taxes paid by overseas corporations doing business in the U.S., and in particular corporations whose home offices were in the European Community.”
Thirsty, Jack drained his mug and went back for more. Kate accepted a warmup. “What about Dieter? What about his crew?”
Jack brightened perceptibly. “Ah, Dieter, now, that lovely lad. Dieter likes to party with large quantities of money and nubile and preferably famous young women.”
“Is he married?”
“He’s European,” Jack said superbly. “Being married in Europe isn’t the same as being married in America.” He thought about that for a moment, and added, “Sometimes even being married in America isn’t like being married in America. It’s probably all Norman Rockwell’s fault.”
“Right,” Kate said faintly. She rallied. “And Dieter?”
“Dieter also likes to have his picture taken. Barely a month goes by without an episode of Entertainment Tonight featuring footage with him frolicking on the beach in Cannes with Julia Roberts, or a front page of the National Enquirer given over to the tragic but absolutely true story of how he fathered a three-hearted, two-headed, one-legged son on the Princess of Scienfictia, third planet out from Rigel.”
“What’s Entertainment Tonight?” Kate said.
Jack looked at her, saw that she was serious, and said with becoming gravity, “This, Kate, is why I love you.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s better you should not know,” Jack said, still grave.
He wasn’t going to tell her, so Kate left it for another day. “So Dieter’s a publicity whore.” She reviewed what she had seen of the man so far, and it seemed to fit. Dieter liked being the center of attention, and if the reactions of his people were any indication, didn’t like it when that attention wandered. Even Eberhard didn’t make the mistake of ignoring Dieter when Dieter was performing, and Eberhard didn’t seem like that kind of guy. Kate wondered what happened if someone didn’t say “How high?” when Dieter said “Jump!” “Do you know anything about any of the rest of them?”
Jack shook his head. “Dieter’s the CEO, he gets all the press.”
“Did he buy or build?”
“Neither. He inherited, from his father, who manufactured transistors for radios and who by all accounts was one of those Germans who managed to sail close enough to the Nazi wind to coast by most of the nastier squalls of World War Two, and at the end of the war have enough breeze left in the luff to land softly on the Allied shore.”
“Nicely put,” Kate said, admiring. “And very illustrative.”
Jack inclined his head in gracious acceptance of praise earned and duly received. “Thank you. Anyway, he left all to his only son.”
“Dieter.”
“Dieter,” Jack said, nodding, “who sniffed out the trend of, well, hell, the world and everything in it toward computers, and shifted the focus of the company there.”
“So it’s partly his creation and partly his birthright,” Kate said.
“Yes.”
“He’d be doubly determined to protect it.”
“Kate,” Jack said dryly, “on a bad year DRG grosses enough to fund the yearly budget of the state of Alaska.”
“Wow,” Kate said, impressed.
“So don’t kid yourself. Dieter will be keeping very close tabs on his assets.” Jack raised his second cup and paused to regard her over the rim. “So? Why do you want to know?”
“Because last night, on the way back from the outhouse, Hendrik buttonholed me and told me that Dieter—”
The screen door slammed and they turned to
see Berg standing there, blinking like an owl through his glasses. “George is about to take off. He would like to talk to you first, Frau Shugak.”
Frau, Kate thought. What, it was written on her forehead that she was about to take a permanent live-in mate? “It’s Kate, Berg,” she said.
Berg held the door open for her with a quaint little bow that spoke of early and intensive training on the part of a pair of very old-fashioned parents.
*
“You’re taking the Cessna?” Kate said in surprise.
“It’s faster,” George said. “I’ll be back that much quicker. And Demetri can do any spotting you need done better in the Cub.”
“True enough,” Kate said, but still, she wondered. It wasn’t like George to burn gas that fast for the benefit of a dead man, especially when it would have been so easy to pull the rear seat from the Cub and fit Fedor’s body into the vacant space remaining with his legs extending into the tail, or under the front seat for that matter.
Instead, George had taken the shotgun seat and the seat behind it out of the Cessna and strapped Fedor, the blue tarp duct-taped around him now, to the floor in the vacant space.
Of course, it could mean only that George was anxious to get back to Senta as fast as possible, but he put that thought to rest with his next words. “Turbulence,” he said, nodding at the horizon. “I want all the power I can get.”
Kate looked, and was not pleased at what she saw. A thick band of gray was lying on the southeast horizon, investing the otherwise limpid blue sky with an air of approaching menace. She was even less pleased to realize that she had been so preoccupied she hadn’t noticed it first.
George climbed into the Cessna and paused, one hand on the open door. “I’m going to take off and circle overhead while I call Flight Service in Kenai for a forecast. You fire up the radio on the Cub and I’ll relay it to you.”
“Okay.”
George slammed the door and started the engine. Kate stepped back, almost bumping into Gunther, and behind him. Berg and Senta, all with wistful expressions on their faces. The wistfulness was more for the fact that they weren’t on the plane going back to Anchorage than for Fedor’s death, or so Kate thought. And wasn’t it interesting who hadn’t shown up to see Fedor off? Not Hendrik, not Klemens. not even a ceremonial appearance by his boss, Dieter, who evidently didn’t give a damn what anyone thought, he wasn’t rolling out of bed at this hour for anyone.
The propeller roared into life and the Cessna taxied down to the foot of the runway and turned. Kate went to the Cub and climbed in as the Cessna took off behind her. The radio came immediately to life, and in a few minutes George was relaying the forecast. It wasn’t good. Kate signed off and climbed out. “Okay, guys, let’s head back to camp.”
She led the way into the yard, Mutt trotting ahead. “Folks? Folks, could you listen up, please?” She waited until they had gathered around, all of them keeping a safe distance from Mutt.
Kate looked for Hendrik but he wasn’t there. “Somebody go get Hendrik,” she said. “What cabin was he in last night?” She knew better than to look at Berg or Senta, but from the corner of her eye she saw Berg blush. Senta looked supremely unconscious, a layer of invisible, impermeable armor between her and everyone else there, possibly between her and everyone else in the world. The reason she and Dieter disliked each other so much, Kate thought, was because they shared the same brand of arrogance, although Senta just might have an edge. Kate was reminded of a line from an old blues song: “Ain’t nobody’s business but my own.” Something like that. Senta said all that and more without once opening her mouth.
“Come on, folks, this is no time to be shy. Where did Hendrik sleep last night?”
Berg mumbled something that could have been, “He was with me.”
No one very carefully looked at Senta. “Gunther?” Kate said. “Go find Hendrik.”
Gunther, still young enough to take orders without question, all but saluted and trotted off to find Hendrik. They waited, listening to him bang on doors and call Hendrik’s name. Ten minutes later he panted up, breathless. “He’s not in camp,” he said. He looked worried.
Kate remembered Hendrik’s swollen eyes from the night before, his air of barely restrained panic and above all his fear, and knew a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Anybody see him this morning?” She looked from face to face, Dieter polishing his Merkel, Eberhard cleaning his Weatherby, Berg wolfing down a second heaping plate of scrambled eggs. Hubert and Gregor were helping Demetri clean up, although they both seemed to be more hindrance than help around even a camp kitchen. Gunther stood almost at attention, as if waiting for more orders. Klemens sat apart, avoiding eye contact, nursing a mug of coffee. Senta was filing her nails, two-inch talons enameled a brilliant red the same shade as her lipstick.
No one said anything, and the pit in Kate’s stomach grew colder. “This is not good, people. We’re going to have to go look for him.”
“Why?” Dieter demanded with what looked like genuine impatience. “We want to hunt. Hendrik is lost, so what? Let him find himself. Let’s go.”
“Not until the whole party is present and accounted for,” Kate said. She would deal with George’s hunting ban after Hendrik had been found. She watched with detached interest as his face turned a brick red. No, Dieter wasn’t used to being contradicted, and he didn’t take it well when he was.
Well, hell, as George and Jack and even Old Sam had pointed out, he was a paying customer. “Look, Dieter, I’m not saying this out of capriciousness, this is something we have to do.”
Dieter looked confused.
“She’s not saying we need to do this just to piss you off,” Jack translated. His tone was deceptively amiable.
“This is something we have to do,” Kate repeated. “Hendrik doesn’t know his way around the Bush any better than you do. Maybe he went exploring. Fine. But he didn’t tell anyone where he was going, when he left or when he’d be back. He could be lost. He could be hurt. We—” she indicated the guides “—are responsible for his safety, the same way we are responsible for yours.”
The same way we were responsible for Fedor’s, they were all thinking.
“We have to find Hendrik, and we have to find him now, before he gets into trouble. You can help, or you can stay here in camp. I’d prefer that you help, because the more pairs of eyes on the job the better chance we have of finding Hendrik fast.” Also, she thought, because if even one of them decided not to help, one of the guides would have to stay with them to see that they didn’t wander off in their turn, and that was one less experienced tracker on the trail.
To Kate’s surprise, everyone volunteered. They had a search party organized in half an hour, each group led again by a guide. Dieter and Eberhard were with Kate, Hubert and Gregor with Old Sam, Gunther and Klemens with Jack and Senta and Berg with Demetri. They split into two groups, one walking up the runway and the other up the creek bank, spread out but no one out of earshot of anyone else. They began their search at the foot of the airstrip, where the Nakochna flowed into the Kichatna, and walked toward the distant outline of Blueberry Ridge.
They found Hendrik in less than twenty minutes, but by then he was already far beyond any help they could give him.
Impaled on the bare limb of a fallen cottonwood spanning the creek, he was very, very dead.
Ten
I’m starting to feel like we’re marooned On Ship-Trap Island.
KATE’S PARTY HAD BEEN TOILING up the runway. Jack’s shout brought them crashing through the undergrowth that lined the bank of the creek, to skid to a halt on the loose gravel of the creek bed itself. In the water a few late humpies switched their scraggly tails in a feeble attempt to move upstream. They wouldn’t make it. They would die here, and wash up on the bank, fodder for the eagles roosting overhead.
Two of the eagles were immature, brown in color, slightly smaller in size than the two roosting above them, whose white heads gleamed in the sunlight and w
ho were probably the parents. All four had their chins tucked into their feathery chests, great yellow beaks matching the talons clutching the limbs of the trees. Motionless, too far away to see if their eyes were open, they could have been asleep. They probably weren’t.
Kate let her eyes travel slowly back down, until they rested on Hendrik. He had fallen backward on the trunk of the cottonwood, which was polished smooth and white from the water of the creek. The limb that pierced his heart was three feet long, slender and sharp.
Too sharp, Kate thought on first sight.
Jack, who was nearer the body, came to the same conclusion, and swung around, blocking the view. “Demetri, Old Sam, take these folks back to camp. Kate, you stay.”
“He is my employee,” Dieter said, shaken but determined to establish his authority. “I’m staying.”
“Nope, Dieter, you’re going,” Old Sam said, and grabbed the president and chief executive officer of the multinational corporation known as DRG by the upper arm and hustled him willy-nilly up the bank and into the bushes.
Demetri looked at Eberhard. Eberhard met Demetri’s eyes, turned to see Kate and Jack watching the two of them, gave a small shrug and followed Dieter and Old Sam up the bank.
The rest of the group complied without demur, pale faces and wide eyes indicating a haste to put the dreadful scene behind them. Kate turned her back on them; later, when she wanted to know where everyone was and what they had been doing and when they had been doing it, she would be watching them very closely indeed. But not now.
“Guard,” she told Mutt. She didn’t want anyone sneaking up behind her.
Mutt’s ears went up, and in a graceful leap she gained the bank of the creek and slid into the underbrush, her dappled gray coat blending seamlessly with the branches and leaves, invisible except to someone who knew she was there. Mutt was better than a security camera and an alarm system any day.
“Actually,” Jack said, “the real reason I want to move in with you is that I want the dog and I don’t think I can get her any other way.”
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