A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  “I didn’t even know you’d been gone.”

  “I was only gone a week, in February, just long enough to track this puppy down and arrange for it to be brought back.”

  “Is it a turbo?”

  “Yup.” He didn’t bother hiding his pride. “Came home by way of the shop in Vancouver.”

  “Going turbo, isn’t that kind of expensive?”

  “It sure as hell is,” he said. “It’s run me a million and a quarter so far.”

  “I didn’t know you had that kind of cash.”

  “I don’t. I got a loan.”

  “Global Harvest?” she said, not really guessing.

  He looked a little furtive, and then decided to confess straight up. “Yeah. Mandy said they want to buy and hire local as much as they can, so I went into Anchorage to talk to Bruce.”

  “Bruce O’Malley?”

  He nodded, looking almost happy, something of a triumph for a guy whose natural gloom rivaled Abraham Lincoln’s.

  Bruce O’Malley was the chief executive officer of Global Harvest Resources Inc. In January, with much fanfare, he’d bought a building in downtown Anchorage and opened what would, he claimed, be the headquarters of the Suulutaq Mine. “The buck doesn’t go to Houston,” he said, beaming at the television cameras, which clip Kate had viewed on YouTube on Bobby’s computer. “It stops right here in Anchorage, Alaska.” He’d moved his family to Anchorage, too, enrolled the kids in local public schools, and it was rumored that he was about to declare his intention of becoming an Alaskan citizen, to the extent that he was even going to turn in his Texas driver’s license in exchange for an Alaskan one.

  “At least GHRI is putting their money where their mouth is,” Kate said. She was aware even as she spoke that she was damning with faint praise.

  “It’s been a godsend, Kate,” George said, and he was dead serious now. “As you well know, the population in the Park has dropped every year for the past five years. For a while there I was scared I was going to lose the mail contract, because the volume of mail was dropping like a rock right along with the population.”

  Alaska, because of the remote location of so many of its communities, lived and died by air mail. The U.S. mail contracts were all too often what kept the wolf from the Alaska air taxi door.

  “You know how the Postal Service likes to contract for larger aircraft because they get a lower rate for bypass mail. I was really sweating out the last negotiations, I thought for sure they’d award the contract to Bill Taggart at Ahtna Aviation because he runs Caravans. And then they discovered the gold.”

  “And O’Malley rode in like a white knight.”

  He met her eyes without flinching. “Pretty much. I’m self-employed, Kate, just like you. I don’t have health insurance and I’m not Native, so if I get sick I lay down and die. I don’t have a retirement plan, so about all I have to count on is Social Security, which is a joke.”

  This was inarguable and they both knew it. “We should have gotten jobs with the state,” she said.

  He snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, right, like anyone in Juneau in their right mind would hire us to put out the trash.”

  “ ‘Anyone in Juneau in their right mind’ is an oxymoron anyway.”

  “Or just a moron,” they both said together, and laughed. A safe moment to change the subject. “Got something going out to Suulutaq?”

  He looked at the Beaver on the horizon. “You just missed it. Gold shift crew change.” He nodded at the Otter. “Blue shift is headed for town.”

  Indeed, the young men waiting to board the Otter looked thirsty and horny. She saw a Kvasnikof and a couple of Moonins in the bunch who until now had been able to afford the trip into town only when they settled up with the fish processors at the end of the salmon season. She didn’t even want to think about the kind of trouble they could get into going into town twice a month year round with money in their pockets.

  A man in a flight jacket, someone else Kate had never met, came up to George with a clipboard. George scanned, nodded and signed, and handed it back. They both watched him trot out to the Otter and climb into the pilot’s seat, and the engine begin to whine.

  “Well, hell,” Kate said. “I need a ride out to Suulutaq. Jim needs me to talk to some people out there.”

  “Well, hell,” George said with another grin—it seemed to be his expression of choice nowadays—“if it’s on the state’s dime I’ll fire up the Cessna and take you out myself. They got good Danish in the mess hall.”

  “Where’s the Super Cub?”

  “I sold it.”

  George disappeared into the office, leaving Kate gawping after him.

  George Perry was a Bush pilot. Bush pilots didn’t sell Super Cubs. They just didn’t.

  “You sold your Cub?” she said when he came outside again.

  “Yeah, there’s a guy in Ahtna who’s been after it for years.” He looked at Kate and registered her shock. “It didn’t fit into what the business is becoming, Kate. What I’m looking for now is another Single Otter. Maybe two, with one of them dedicated full time to freight runs running direct between Anchorage and the mine.”

  “Jesus, George,” she said, caught between respect and dismay. “Coming on pretty strong, aren’t you?”

  “The mine needs a lot of air support,” he said, “and it’s going to need a lot more, especially since you won’t let them build a road. Okay by me,” he said, waving off her inarticulate protest, “but if I can’t supply said air support, they’ll go looking for someone who can. I can’t serve both the mine and the Park on the equipment I have. I got a chance for the big time here, Kate, and I’m going for it.”

  She digested this while he preflighted the 206, parked in the weeds on the other side of the hangar from the office. Sitting there in the shadow of the building, the Cessna looked a little forlorn, if not downright unloved, and seemed to perk up at being called back into service. George waved Kate over and they climbed in, Mutt jumping into the back, which had been stripped of its other four seats. She sat with her head between the two humans, ears pricked forward in anticipation. The Cessna started at once and without further ado George rolled out onto the runway and lifted into the air. Half an hour later they were touching down at the Suulutaq Mine.

  Kate had been to Suulutaq the previous winter, when it was the scene of a homicide involving a couple of Park rats. At that time, it had been covered by twenty feet of snow, which had almost buried the white ATCO trailer with the gold stripe around the edge of the roof. There had been a couple of other outbuildings that only just qualified as sheds, and an orange wind sock on a pole sitting at the end of which, if you looked hard, you could see the faintest simulacrum of an airstrip outlined on the surface of the snow.

  This insignificant little outpost had been dwarfed first by the high, wide valley in which it squatted, and second by the Quilak Mountains, two rocky, out-flung arms of which embraced the valley and which permitted only the narrowest possible opening in a pass to the west that tumbled down a precipitous slope leading to the eastern edge of the Kanuyaq River. This remote location was accessible in winter by snow machines and in summer by four-wheeler and year-round by airplane, so long as said airplane was equipped with tundra tires. There was no road.

  And there wouldn’t be, Kate thought now, looking down as George made a slow right bank over the now almost unrecognizable location. Not if she, as chair (interim) of the Niniltna Native Association, had anything to say about it. Dan and George were both right about that, even if she’d never say so out loud.

  Last winter the camp had been virtually deserted, the lone employee on site a caretaker, whose isolation was alleviated only when his week was up and the alternate caretaker arrived for his shift. Or when someone was poaching game at the head of the valley, where the Gruening River caribou herd wintered.

  Now the snow had retreated to the tops of the mountains, and the mine site was a sea of mud surrounding seven prefab modular buildings and an assor
tment of heavy equipment ranging from what Kate supposed was the infamous John Deere grader to Caterpillar tractors in two sizes, a backhoe loader, a crane truck, and a couple of forklifts. Some were digging holes in the newly thawed ground. Others were smoothing rudimentary tracks to connect the buildings, airstrip, and drilling rigs. Some were shifting cargo stacked on pallets at the end of the runway to one of the buildings below. All were in operation.

  Kate looked for a fuel dump and found it, a heap of 150,000-gallon fuel bladders that must have been brought in by sling via helicopter. The bladders were surrounded by a Ready Berm, and a drive-through berm was inflated nearby, where a dump truck was being fueled with a collapsible hose connected to a fuel pump connected to one of the bladders.

  “Where they getting their electricity?” Kate said into her mike.

  “Oil-powered generators for now,” George said, the static making his voice sound as raspy as hers, “but they’re looking into wind and solar and hydro. One of the engineers told me it’ll probably be a combination of all three. And they found a low-sulphur coal deposit up the valley, they’ll probably rope that in, too.”

  “Gravel?” They’d need a lot of gravel for roads and pads for building sites. The production life of the Suulutaq Mine was projected at twenty years. Twenty-year-old buildings in Alaska were regarded as permanent, if not downright historic.

  He pointed at a notch in one wall of the valley. “They found all they need in a creek bed thataway.”

  “They keeping to leased property? Not encroaching on Iqaluk?”

  He looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “Do you really think they’d screw around this early in the game?”

  “I think nobody’s watching them very close yet,” Kate said, “and I think they’ll try to get away with as much as they can before anybody is.”

  Scattered around the valley at various distances from the camp were five drill rigs. All five were active, the crown and traveling blocks and drill lines visible and in motion through the network of the derricks.

  George made another circle. The Beaver was just lifting off the end of the runway for the return trip back to Niniltna. “Seen enough?”

  Kate nodded, and George brought them into a neat three-point landing on the rudimentary gravel airstrip that had been bladed when the snowpack melted, which, along with everything else, had cost GHRI a whale of a lot of money.

  But at eight hundred dollars, no, Kate corrected herself, now more than nine hundred an ounce, they could afford it. Recessions always drove people toward gold and stocks in gold mining companies. It was the commodity that never failed.

  And Alaska had more of it than almost anyone else in the world, and the Suulutaq Mine had more of it than any other mine in Alaska.

  They got out of the Cessna, Mutt trotting ahead to baptize a compactor, which appeared to be the single piece of heavy equipment within ten miles that wasn’t at present in motion. Kate and George walked toward the edge of the small rise that supported the airstrip, where they paused for a moment to look down at the camp. There were five small modulars and two large, arranged in two rows. Doors were connected by rudimentary wooden boardwalks, Kate would bet at the insistence of the people who had to mop the floors.

  They followed the road down the side of the rise. The mud was beginning to dry out under the influence of the increasing strength of the sun, but it still sucked at their feet as they dodged heavy equipment to the entrance of the office building. There was a bull rail with electrical plug-ins out front with a pickup and a van nosed up to it. Placed conspicuously over a generously sized set of double doors was a large and colorful rendition of the Global Harvest sunrise-over-the-Quilaks logo. It was, Kate had to admit, very attractive.

  George pointed at the doors. “That’s the admin offices. I’ll be in the mess hall.” He pointed again. “The big building in the back. Come get me when you’re ready to go.”

  He vanished around a corner. Kate pushed one of the doors open and she and Mutt walked into a large room that took up most of the first floor of the building. There were desks interspersed with long flat gray folding tables. The walls were lined with four-drawer beige-enameled metal filing cabinets. A 1:10,000-scale map of Suulutaq dominated one wall, with a much smaller map of the Park tacked onto a corner, and a map of Alaska the size of a hardback book pinned as an afterthought to one side.

  A young woman, dark and plump and of Yupik descent if Kate was going to make a guess, was typing something into a computer. She looked up, exchanged glances with Mutt, and said with superb unconcern, “May I help you?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “My name is Kate Shugak. I—”

  “Yes, Ms. Shugak, just one moment, please.” The young woman abdicated her desk with no undue haste and made a beeline for one of the tables, where a man and a woman Kate saw was Holly Haynes were hunched over a long strip of paper marked with a continuous, spiking graph. The young woman murmured into the man’s ear, and all three looked across at Kate. He evidently found her attire—the usual blue jeans, sweatshirt, jacket, and sneakers—and perhaps her lack of entourage less than convincing. He looked back at the young woman for confirmation. She nodded.

  Holly Haynes said something. He straightened with a nearly audible snap of his spine and made brisk work of the office maze to arrive in front of Kate, where he could beam down at her with what she could not help but read as tremendous insincerity. “Ms. Shugak! I’ve heard a lot about you, it’s so nice to meet you in person!”

  Kate repressed the urge to step back from both the volubility and the slight spray of his greeting and recovered her hand before he broke any more bones in it. “Thank you. And you are?”

  He gave out with a laugh that seemed to her even less sincere than his demeanor. “Of course, of course, what was I thinking. I’m Vernon Truax, Suulutaq superintendent. Come on, let’s head on up to my office. Whoa,” he said, noticing Mutt for the first time. “That your wolf?”

  “Only half,” Kate said.

  Truax, regarding Mutt with a healthy mixture of alarm and respect, said, “Only half? Well, that’s okay, then.” It sounded more like a question than an assertion. Either way, Kate didn’t answer. “Uh, Holly, join us? Thanks, Lyda.”

  The plump young woman resumed her station at the desk near the door. Haynes abandoned the strip of graph paper they’d been poring over to follow Truax, Kate, and Mutt upstairs to a corner room that, however prebuilt it looked, still had two large windows facing south and west. Executive offices were the same whether they were in Suulutaq or on Ninth Avenue in Anchorage.

  “Kate Shugak, Holly Haynes.”

  “We met in town yesterday,” Haynes said, amused. “I told you about it at dinner last night.”

  Truax didn’t like the reminder. “Of course, of course. Well, Kate Shugak.” He said it like he was referring to one of the faces on Mount Rushmore. Kate was afraid for a moment he might bow, or maybe even genuflect.

  “She’s the chairwoman of the board of the Niniltna Native Association,” Truax said, like nobody in the room knew that, “and I don’t have to tell you how important it is that we give them every access to our work here.” Like nobody in the room knew that, either.

  This instant recognition and the subsequent bootlicking were not going to be an asset in her day job. It had been foolish of Kate not to have expected it, and she realized now that it was something to which she would have to give some serious thought.

  An entire way of life seemed to be vanishing right before her eyes, and she had to put a sharp brake on the rising melancholy that recognition cost her.

  “Sit, sit,” Truax said, and instead of taking the seat at his desk pulled up a third straight chair to form a circle in front of it. She had to admire his instincts for currying favor. He was certainly better at it than she was. “Can we get you anything? Coffee, tea, water, soft drink? No?”

  Vernon Truax was a thickset man in his late forties, with a broad, ruddy face and large, scarred hands. He was balding and whil
e eschewing the ever popular comb-over he did wear his remaining hair in a thick fringe, probably in an attempt to hide the batwing ears that stuck out from his head at almost ninety-degree angles. He wore Carhartts that had seen honest sweat and hard labor. Kate had done her homework, as Jim’s agent and as Association chair, and she was familiar with Truax’s background. Degree from the Colorado School of Mines. Mining engineer twenty years in the field, the first six for Rio Tinto and the last fourteen for Global Harvest. Nononsense, bit of a temper, thought well of by his bosses, respected but not feared by his employees. The Suulutaq wasn’t his first mine. For that alone Kate was inclined to forgive much.

  Truax was waxing fulsome on the storied partnership between the mine and the Niniltna Native Association and when he got to the hands-across-the-Park refrain Mutt, perhaps sensing that Kate’s patience was beginning to fray, gave a vigorous sneeze that had just enough snarl in it to put a momentary stop to the apparently inexhaustible flow. Kate used the opportunity to interrupt Truax with a charming smile that begged forgiveness for her rudeness, partnered with the indefinable but nonetheless distinct impression that told him she didn’t give a damn if he was offended or not. “Mr. Truax—”

  “Vern, please. And I hope I may call you Kate?”

  “Of course,” Kate said. “Vern, I have to apologize for not making this clear from the get-go.” Not that he’d given her the opportunity. “In fact I am not here in my capacity as board chair of NNA. I’m here to make inquiries after one of your employees. Well, two, actually, but I’d like to start with a Dewayne Gammons.”

  Truax exchanged a glance with Haynes, who raised her brows and shrugged. “Oh. I see. May I ask why?”

  “Sergeant Chopin, the Alaska State Trooper stationed in Niniltna, hired me to.”

  “I see.” But clearly Truax did not see. “I spoke to Sergeant Chopin yesterday on the sat phone as regards this matter, and Holly here told me that he’d said he would be sending someone out. I naturally assumed it would be another trooper.”