by Jerold Last
Bob hit the nail directly on the head when he remarked, thoughtfully out of earshot of the parents, “Every time I see one of those wretched little children look like they might fall off the edge of the cliff I feel ambivalent. Wouldn’t it be nice if they all had a mild case of lockjaw for the rest of the tour?”
Nobody replied, but I suspect there was widespread agreement with him among the adults on this tour.
We learned that only a small number of visitors to the park had backpacking permits and planned to camp there, or had reservations for the Lodge. Most of the visitors took a train or bus ride from Anchorage to Denali, spent the night there, visited the park all of the next day, and planned to be somewhere else the day after that. We could probably ignore the tourists not camping in the park or staying at the Lodge as suspects. There was absolutely no practical way we could figure out who the day visitors were or why they might have committed such a horrendous crime.
We found an excuse to talk to the two guides, Elliot and Sarah, about their lifestyle. The ATV tours ran three or four times a day, seven days a week. They worked six of those days every week. Their goal was to make as much money as they could over the short summer season so as to be able to live through the long, cold winter in Anchorage with uncertain employment, so they worked all of the available shifts. Sarah was a waitress in Anchorage when not guiding tourists in Denali, while Elliot was a substitute teacher for eight months per year in the Anchorage public school system. Both of them had been too busy to visit the National Park in the last few years. Neither was a potential suspect in our minds.
Denali is a very small town. That night we bumped into Sandra and Wally Curtis sitting at the bar that occupied an entire wall of the restaurant we had selected at random for dinner. They were having a beer with Bob, John, and the two guides, Elliot and Sarah. We had stopped by at this local bar and restaurant even though it looked like a questionable choice for dinner, mainly because it was on the Main Street in Denali and it was open. Someone waved the universal “join us” signal, so we went over, ordered a couple of beers, and joined the group, walking directly into the middle of a discussion about ATV-ing. Sandra was doing most of the talking.
“We got a package deal at our hotel here in town. It included several hours of babysitting so we could get away from our rug rats for a few hours over dinner and a movie. We love our kids, but a break from them every now and then is a small slice of heaven!”
Wally mumbled something. I think he said “Amen and Hallelujah” but I’m not sure.
I looked around the dimly lighted bar and restaurant. This joint certainly could give the Curtis couple the adults-only experience they seemed to crave. The action was at the bar; half the tables weren’t occupied. Those that were seemed to be mostly rough looking men with large pitchers of beer, bowls of peanuts and pretzels, and a lot more drinking than eating going on. We were the only obvious tourists in the joint. The vibes I was getting were rough joint and a good place to not do anything to be especially noticed by the locals, many of whom acted like regulars here.
A few moments later, Sandra was talking about a short stretch of very steep hill we’d all navigated on the tour. “I have to admit to squeezing the steering wheel as hard as I could on that stretch, especially on the way down!” she exclaimed. “It was white-knuckle time for me in both directions, but it was worse when I was doing the driving.”
“Me too,” John chimed in. “Going up I thought we’d fall off the side of the hill, and going down with me driving I knew we would!”
“I’m pleased to announce we haven’t lost a tourist yet, at least not on that hilly stretch you’re talking about,” Sarah replied with a smile. “The wilderness ATV ride is one of the only guided activities you can do late in the afternoon in Denali after the train arrives here, so it’s a very, very popular attraction. We stay busy through the entire tourist season, with only one day off each week to do anything touristic on our own. And, as far as my life is concerned, that one day off is usually a lot more about doing laundry than sightseeing.”
Suddenly, there was an interruption. Two very large men wearing jeans and flannel shirts walked across the bar and stood right next to our group. They hadn’t been invited and obviously both were well into their nightly quota of beer consumption. Each already had a full bottle of beer in their hand. I was on full alert, the hairs on the back of my neck telling me that something was seriously wrong with this picture. It felt like the scene in the old western movies where the evil gunslinger was going to insult the innocent farmer to goad him into drawing his gun so he could kill him in a “fair fight”. My brain was in high gear as I wondered who in our group these guys had targeted.
The obvious possibility was John and Bob. If that was it, this was just another example of gay bashing, all too prevalent in macho cultures like the one we seemed to have been dropped into here.
The one with the green and red shirt sneered at Sandra and Wally. “It’s jerks like you tourists who are ruining Alashka,” he said to Wally for no obvious reason.
His partner, the guy with the blue and green shirt, added “my buddy’s right! It’s all your fault we can’t find no jobs around here no more since they shut down the mines.”
It looked like John and Bob weren’t the target of these two goons after all. What could Sandra and Wally have done to provoke this obvious prelude to violence? I couldn’t think of anything. The picture was even more seriously wrong here. For the first time I started to wonder whether Suzanne and I could be their targets. If we were, it had to be because of our interest in how the Roberts had been killed. Maybe we had said or done something while we were in Anchorage or during the train ride to Denali to provoke a response. Could somebody here in Alaska have hired these jerks to scare us off? If not, the possibility of the Roberts’ activities for the CIA in Chile being the motive for an unprovoked attack moved up a little higher on the list of possibilities. Either way, it looked like it was going to be my responsibility to get all of us out of this mess without any of our own blood being shed.
“Excuse us for a minute or two,” I asked the drunk in the green and red shirt as politely as I could. “We need a bathroom break.” I herded Sandra and Wally back towards the bathrooms, indicating with an almost imperceptible nod to Suzanne she should join us. As soon as we got to the back of the bar I told Sandra and Wally as softly as I could, “Those guys are looking for a fight. Someone’s likely to get badly hurt if we hang around. There’s got to be a back door here, probably that one at the end of the hall there. Let’s get out of here while we still can.”
We found ourselves in a narrow alley behind the bar. All four of us headed east looking for a way to get back to the main street. All of a sudden the two guys in flannel shirts were there directly in our path, about ten yards in front of us blocking the alley to the street. Green and red shirt waved a big hunting knife, while his partner blue and green shirt had a broken beer bottle in his hand. “Thought you were pretty shmart, didn’t ja?” asked the leader of the pair. “Didn’t know there’s a shide door to the bar, did ja? Now we’re gonna show you what we do to outshiders here in Alashka.”
He walked slowly toward us, savoring his big moment while he brandished the knife in front of him.
I motioned for the others to stay back. Suzanne stepped between the two thugs and Sandra and Wally, where she could protect them if anyone else showed up to help the two men in flannel shirts, who were slowly advancing toward me.
I held my ground waiting for the two men to come to me. The one wielding the hunting knife took the lead while his friend trailed a few feet behind. All of a sudden the entire focus of the two goons had shifted to me. Unfortunately, it seemed like I was right about Suzanne and me being their target. Someone must have hired them to discourage us from continuing on to Denali National Park to investigate the Roberts’ deaths. I went through my mental checklist of the possibilities again: mysterious Chileans, spies from somewhere else who’d been active in Chile,
the two FBI agents we’d met in Anchorage, and Forrest Bednor, the much too curious National Park guide we’d sat next to on the train to Denali. That pretty much exhausted the list of possibilities.
I had a hunch that these goons didn’t know who hired them to rough me up. Whoever set this up wanted to remain in the background. There were lots of ways to hire guys like this without revealing your identity. In a way, that made my job here a lot easier. If I didn’t have to interrogate them afterwards, I could just put then down as hard as I could and walk away. That’s a lot easier than putting two armed muggers down and out while keeping them in a condition to answer questions.
Green and red shirt took his time, savoring the situation and assuming I was standing still rather than backing away because of being paralyzed by fear. Bad assumption!
I stopped thinking and went into action. As he got to a spot a few feet away from me, flannel shirt’s world suddenly turned upside down, literally and figuratively. There was a blur of motion as I drove my right foot directly into green and red shirt’s solar plexus. As he doubled over in pain trying to get a breath, there was another blur of motion as my hands struck, side edge on, the left and right shoulder bones at the base of his neck. You could hear both bones crack with a sickening sound. Green and red shirt dropped the knife as he fell to the ground gasping for air, vomiting and moaning.
Blue and green shirt held his ground waving the broken bottle. He clearly had little appetite for hand-to-hand combat, especially after what he’d just seen happen to his partner. I feinted with my leg and body before diving low to avoid the broken beer bottle and taking him down with a jiu-jitsu move. Immediately I had the arm with the broken bottle in a lock and was twisting his arm up higher and higher behind the man’s back. Flannel shirt number two dropped the bottle and screamed. I didn’t want to have to worry about either of these two guys coming out of a dark alley some night while we were still here, so made no effort to stop. A fraction of a second later the arm in the blue and green sleeve dislocated and the bone broke. He screamed again, then lay there moaning.
The entire fight had lasted no more than ten or fifteen seconds. I stood up suggesting, “This would be a good time for all of us to get out of here. I don’t think any of us wants to spend a couple of days explaining all of this to the local cops when we could be enjoying our vacations instead. I’ll call 911 anonymously so these two get to a hospital as soon as we’re clear of the alley. There’s a public phone out in the street a few doors up on the way to the hotel shuttle pickup area.”
After I made the 911 call and we were all walking to the passenger pickup area where a shuttle van stood conveniently waiting, I turned to Sandra and Wally. It occurred to me that we didn’t want them having an attack of conscience and calling the cops to confess what I’d done in the alley. “Why don’t you come back to our hotel with us and join us for dinner? Maybe we can figure out what that was all about while things calm down a bit here in town before you head back to your hotel.”
I could hear an emergency vehicle’s siren in the distance as the shuttle vehicle drove us towards our hotel.
Over an elegant dinner in our hotel’s dining room we discussed what had happened at the bar. “That could have just been a classic example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I suggested. “But it could also have been more than that. Is it possible they were targeting you? Did you see or do anything while you were in Denali National Park yesterday or wandering around Denali today that could have gotten someone upset with you?”
Sandra seemed to be the more assertive half of the couple, and had been taking the lead in the conversation until now. “No, I can’t think of anything. How about you, Wally?”
“Our trip to the park consisted of getting on the bus, sitting on the bus forever or close to it, eating lunch at the Lodge, sitting on the bus again for forever, and coming back to the hotel. There really wasn’t any chance for us to get into trouble. We spent today at the hotel pool, on a guided tour to see eagles and hawks, and on the ATV trip. I can’t recall seeing anything we shouldn’t have.”
Wally surprised me by analyzing the situation logically. “Based on what we saw of you fighting, Roger, you look like a pro. Isn’t it a whole lot more likely they were trying to take an opportunity to put you out of action?”
Suzanne looked thoughtful before jumping in to the conversation. “We haven’t been here long enough to see or do anything to provoke a response like that. And Roger’s not a ‘pro’, as you called it. He just happens to study martial arts as a form of exercise. But I did have a thought. Could this have just been an episode of would-be gay bashing gone wrong? Bob and John were part of our group. The two guys in flannel shirts might have just assumed we were all gay when they saw us with Bob and John. In that case they just picked on the wrong man, one who can handle himself in a bar fight.”
The rest of dinner was pretty quiet. We said our goodnights and headed back to our room. I turned to Suzanne, “Good deflection there at dinner, suggesting the gay bashing as a motive. Hopefully that will satisfy Sandra and Wally that we weren’t the targets, and remove any temptation on their part to report me to the local cops. It might make a good story for them to tell at home, but that’s a long way from the local law around here. I’d guess that everyone else in the bar, especially the guides Elliot and Sarah, will deny having seen or heard anything with regard to the fight on general principles. I don’t think anyone wants to get on the police radar because of a bar fight.”
“On the other hand,” replied Suzanne, “What if it was you and me who really were the targets? What do you think is going on here?”
“You’re raising an interesting question, Suzanne. Who knows who we are or why we’re here? Or even that we’re here?
“If you’re asking for the logical answer, Roger, that’s easy. Vincent and Bruce in Los Angeles, the FBI agents in Anchorage, and the guy who sat next to us on the train, Forrest Bednor. And, I suppose, anyone who might have had access to our reservations at the hotel like Chilean spies. That’s not a lot of people, and raises some interesting questions to speculate about what we may have done, or could do, to make someone want to discourage us from being here at the National Park.”
It was reassuring to know that Suzanne’s logical mind had pinpointed exactly the same list of possible suspects as I had. It looked as if whoever might have been mixed up in the killing of the Roberts had just made their first big mistake.
Chapter5. You meet the strangest people on buses
The next morning we boarded a bus driving the guided tour through Denali National Park about ten minutes before its scheduled departure. It was already about half full, a modern and comfortable large vehicle with four seats per row with two seats on each side of a wide middle aisle. We chose a couple of seats halfway towards the back, with empty rows around us. All of the other passengers boarding seemed to prefer seats in front of the bus. Maybe they thought they’d get to the Lodge faster that way. With twenty-something rows of seats, there was room for about 100 passengers plus backpacks and whatever other hiking gear someone might bring to the park. Most of the passengers were day tourists like us. A few were hard-core backpackers with a lot more gear stored in large luggage compartments under the bus. These backpackers were outdoor enthusiasts who planned on spending days or weeks off trail in the wilderness.
The bus was wilderness transport for backpackers, taking them dozens of miles out into the park as a starting point for serious off-trail hiking and camping. This was the same bus on which Roberta and Francis Roberts had begun their ill-fated trip into the Denali wilderness where they encountered the bear that killed them.
A steady stream of passengers, mostly couples and families with children, continued to climb onto the bus after we were seated. The two seats across the aisle remained vacant while the bus was filling up. Suddenly Suzanne grabbed my arm and pointed at the short line of passengers still waiting to board the bus. “Look over there, Roger. I see a couple of
very familiar faces getting ready for thirteen hours plus with us on this trip.”
I looked over to where Suzanne was pointing. Walking slowly toward the front door through which they’d board the bus were Gretchen and Barbara Kaufman, both FBI agents from San Francisco we’d met previously on a tour of the Galapagos Islands.
As the sisters climbed into the bus I stood and waved to get their attention. They spotted me almost immediately, waved to us, and walked back to where we were sitting as rapidly as being polite to the other passengers in front of them would allow. Gretchen looked to be about 25 years old, a couple of years older than her sister. Both women were quite attractive and wore the standard young tourist uniform of jeans and backpack. They looked enough alike, sharing dark hair and brown eyes, as well as being the same size at about five foot five, to make it easy to see they were sisters. Barbara wore her hair longer and entirely skipped any makeup, while Gretchen used lipstick.