The Provider

by John Hunt

  FIFTY-SIX

  It was late evening when Dad and I got back. We talked for hours.

  “I can’t believe this, that people can be that evil,” said Mom, tears running down her face. “It can’t be true.”

  “It is, Mom,” and I told her about meeting Ethan.

  “Oh, no, what’s going to happen to us. How can we possibly stop them?”

  Bess stood up. “If I can kill a bear, I can kill a man, lots of them,” she said, bravely. “I’m not scared.”

  “That’s the spirit, Bess,” Jessie replied. “I bet we can shoot better than they can.”

  “But it sounds like there are so many of them,” Mom stumbled the words out.

  “Mary, that’s why we need to join up with more people,” said Dad.

  “But can we trust them?”

  “I have good vibes about this. I’m impressed by Theo. I think these are the right people.”

  “It feels like we’re going to war,” Mom replied. “It’s not what I wanted.”

  “I know. But we have to play the cards we’ve been dealt.”

  I got up and kissed Mom on the forehead. “This has to be done, Mom. Time for us kids to look after you.”

  “I’ll be sorry to be leaving here,” said Louise. “I never thought I’d say this, but it’s felt like home.”

  “Me, too,” said Dad. “But I don’t think there’s another way. Hopefully, we can come back to it. Let’s sleep now, we’ll pack tomorrow.”

  “Bob could always see ahead to the way things were going,” I said to Jessie later, in bed.

  “Then be like him, Jim. We’ll have to look after our parents, you realize that?”

  “Yes. Bess is coming along well, isn’t she? Turning into a right little warrior.”

  “Nothing like the prospect of rape and death to focus the mind,” she muttered, stroking me.

  “This could be our last night here, Jessie.”

  “Then let’s make the most of it,” and she got on top.

  It was a bit colder next morning and had snowed again overnight, but not enough to trouble us. It was just damp, our breath hanging in the air, fog hanging low on the mountain. We were loading the truck with all our possessions and stores when Theo and half a dozen other men and a couple of women arrived in jeeps.

  “Donald,” Theo said as he stepped down from the vehicle, “you know Makayla, Jeremy, Benji and Anna from yesterday. Jeremy’s a guide by trade, Benji’s a plumber, Anna ran the goods store.” We shook hands all round.

  “Nicely set-up place you’ve got here,” Makayla said. “The fence is for bears?”

  “Mostly for dogs and wolves,” Dad replied, “but it’s worked for bears as well.”

  “You got through the winter here, by yourselves? Just you lot?” Benji asked. He was a competent looking older guy, long, grey-streaked beard, seemed as if he’d been living off-grid for a lot longer than the last year.

  “Mostly, with the help of a neighbor we had back in Anchorage,” Dad replied. “But he was killed a few months ago.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Anna chipped in. She looked to be in her thirties, self-possessed. “We’ve lost so many good people.”

  “We have,” Dad replied. “It’s strange, having to start up again, with new friends and neighbors. But welcome, come in.”

  “I’ve spoken with Nat,” Theo said, as we sat around with nettle tea. We were all crammed in around the table. “I told him as little as I could, just enough to get him to unlock the tunnel. But I don’t think we’ll be able to keep this move a secret for long. It’s bound to leak out. A few cussed folk are refusing to come, but they know where we’re going. We can’t not use the radio indefinitely, so they’ll be able to track the source. There are a few in our group with military experience, but it’s very limited. Mostly grunts. I’m the only one with serving experience as an officer.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Dad interrupted.

  “Lieutenant colonel in the 75th Rangers. Afghanistan, Iraq…I retired back here, close to my home, I grew up in Anchorage. I’d guess we have a couple of dozen who’d be prepared to shoot and kill. We’ve sent one party with plenty of firepower, led by Andrew Bovotsky, used to be a miner, down to Soldotna, to see if they can find any explosives – there’s a road building company down there. Donald, you’re an engineer, and you’ve met Nat. I think it’d help if you could get to Whittier by this evening. We need to get heat working, generators, places to store food, defences. The more time we have to prepare, the better. There’ll be another dozen coming through tomorrow to help with the labor. They’re just packing up their homes first. Can you manage that?”

  “This evening! OK.”

  “Jim,” Theo continued, “perhaps you could come with us now. You know the ground, I’d like to reconnoiter it with you.”

  “So you’re taking over, just like that?” asked Louise.

  “Well, not quite just like that,” Theo replied, looking at her. I’m the mayor of the largest community involved here and the leaders of the others have agreed that I should run this transition. Are you comfortable with that?”

  “Not entirely, but I appreciate in these times we have to take short cuts. So, yes.”

  “I’d be happy to talk about this with you again, Louise, but for the moment we need to move fast.”

  “I’m glad you’ve come, and that we’ve met,” said Mom. “It’s like a door opening for me, meeting decent people again. Real neighbors. I’ve missed that so much.”

  “Donald’s told me you’re a nurse, Mary, and I just can’t tell you how valuable that’s going to be. We don’t have any doctors in our group. I’m sure we could have saved some lives over the winter if we’d known what to do. A lot of people died simply because they had no support, no medicine, and couldn’t contact anyone. And yourself, Louise,” he continued, nodding to her, “we have a couple of dozen kids who’ll need teaching. Matthew.” He turned to him. “Donald’s told me how well you’ve been doing here, feeding everyone. In Whittier, we’re going to have up to a couple of hundred to feed. With no electricity in the apartments, it’s going to have to be done centrally. We’ll need a big kitchen. So I’m very glad we’ve met up with you guys.”

  I packed a bag rapidly, and turned to Jessie, standing quietly, twirling a lock of hair as she stared at nothing in particular. “Jessie, I have to go. Do you want to come with me?”

  “I’d better stay to help pack. I’ll see you tonight,” she whispered in my ear, as we kissed.

  “Say goodbye to the place for me,” I whispered back.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  We left almost straightaway, back to the Portage Glacier Road. A couple of hours later, we reached the tunnel. Nat had opened it and we drove through.

  “Hullo everyone,” he said as we shook hands. “Really good to see you. It’s been a long and lonely winter. Theo said you’d be coming. I’ve started to get things ready. Want some food? I’ve got an omelette frying, I can rustle up more.”

  “You’ve got chickens?” I asked.

  “No, but the birds are nesting. I go foraging. Here, let me show you people around.”

  “I’ll leave you to it,” said Theo. “Me and Jim are going to head up to the ridge, to have a look around.”

  “How well can you shoot with that?” Theo asked, as we got back into the jeep and drove up the Portage Pass Trail. I was carrying my Winchester .30.

  “At two hundred yards on a still day, I can put a bullet through a moose’s eye,” I replied.

  Theo whistled. “Not bad. Now I guess these two guys you killed, it was an immediate thing, right up, close range, you didn’t have to think about it?”

  “That’s right,” I replied. “How did you know?”

  “It’s one thing to fight for your life, spur of the moment, adrenaline flowing. It’s another to shoot at a distance, in cold blood. When your opponent doesn’t even know you’re there. You need to calm your breathing, slow down your pulse, focus. Allow for wind and weathe
r. Focus again. Aim to kill. Think you could do that?”

  I thought about Bob, about the family, about Jess. “No problem.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You betcha.”

  “Even if it meant shooting someone in the back, who was running away?”

  I hesitated. “Yes. We’re outnumbered. They could be back with reinforcements.”

  “OK, I want you to have this, practice with it for the next few days.”

  He reached across the back and passed me a rifle, one I’d never seen before. It lay perfectly balanced in my hands, metal gleaming in the sunlight, exuding power and threat. Compared to the Winchester, it was something else again. Holding it, I felt like Thor with his hammer, invincible. Thinking back, I can’t remember what happened to it, I ran out of bullets many years ago. It’s probably now propping up a hen coop somewhere.

  “It’s an M24. Standard army issue. Very reliable, any conditions. It’s the one the army snipers use, though you can detach the sight. The magazine takes five rounds. I’ve got a case in the back. You’ll need to lie down to shoot it. See how close you can get to a bulls eye. It’s accurate to a couple of inches, at a thousand yards. We’re going to need a sniper.”

  “OK, thank you, sir.”

  “Call me Theo.”

  Clearly, since the tunnel had been built back in the Second World War, the Portage Passage Trail had fallen into disuse. After a few miles the gravel track, overgrown as it was, simply petered out. We left the jeep and started hiking to the top of the ridge. Theo made easy conversation. I found myself telling him about how we left Anchorage, and about Bob.

  “He sounds like a guy it’s a shame to have lost. We’re going to need more like him. You and Jessie are an item?”

  “We’re going to get married, though I haven’t asked her yet.”

  “Then we should think about holding a potlatch for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A tribal ceremony, a feast, where people give things away. It used to be practiced all along the Pacific Northwest. It kept goods circulating and prevented individuals from getting too rich. The missionaries got it banned in the nineteenth century, because it stopped the natives from becoming Christians. Never figured out why, I thought that was what the gospels were about. But I’m no minister. Looks to me, though, like we might need to get back to some of those old traditions.”

  “You sound like Louise. She keeps talking about the old times. But people weren’t civilized then, were they?”

  “You think we are now? Did Anchorage look civilized to you? I’d like to get better acquainted with Louise, from the little I saw of her this morning. Is she by herself?”

  “She told us that she was married once, but her husband and child died many years ago and she’s never wanted to remarry.”

  “Sorry to hear that. My wife died as well, four years ago. I had two boys in the army. One was serving in Europe and is in Washington now. The other…” his voice trailed off…“I’d sooner not talk about it. I haven’t seen the grandchildren for a couple of years now.”

  “I’m sorry, it hadn’t occurred to me, about your family…I guess we’ve been really lucky, our family, still being together. Dad has a brother in England, had a brother, I don’t know now…”

  “Count your blessings, Jim, though in my experience luck is usually what you make of it.

  Anyway, perhaps I could talk with Louise a bit more. She seems to have her head screwed on right. Remember, Jim, the Indians have been living here for ten thousand years. Us whites have barely been here a couple of hundred, and right now, I wouldn’t bet on our being here in another hundred.”

  At the top of the ridge we could see for miles around: the Portage Lake glimmering below, surrounded by the mountains and glaciers of Chugach.

  Theo scanned it through the binoculars, and then handed them to me.

  “Now, tell me, Jim, if the enemy was coming for us, along the road there, where and how would you stop them?”

  I didn’t have a clue. Then I started thinking about it as if it were a war game on the computer. The landscape in front of me was the screen. There were significant elements there, factors in the game – the road, tunnel, mountains, boat, lake, bogs, rocks, things you had to take into account, which you could play with. I imagined units of men, with vehicles. There were other elements as well, like the weather, time of year, how many resources – supplies, weapons, skills – we’d managed to accumulate. I visualized them, shuffled them around in my head.

  After a while, Theo interrupted my thoughts. “Have to come to a decision, Jim…if they were coming now, we’re losing valuable time here while you make up your mind.”

  “They’ll try the tunnel first,” I finally said, “and find that blocked. If we had dynamite, I’d leave a few guys at this end of the tunnel, wait for them to go in and then blow up this end, shooting any guards they left to cover their backs. But that probably wouldn’t work, because if I was them, I’d have come with at least a couple of dozen guys and plenty of empty spaces to take prisoners back, so that means a number of vehicles. So I’d send one vehicle forward, with just the driver, to check out the tunnel first. So if that were to happen, and we don’t have dynamite anyway, we’d need to fight them when they’ve left the Humvees and are on foot. So they’d come around the lake here, aiming for this trail. They’d have to walk. Unless they could use that cruise boat on the other side. So I’d sink that first, in case they got it going, to slow them down. We don’t know which side of the lake they’d come. If they went looking for a boat first, then the other side is shorter, but there’s a glacier to cross. So maybe they’d come around this side, but we couldn’t be certain and we wouldn’t want to give ourselves away by moving. If they came now, that area below us looks really boggy and it would slow us down trying to get through it. I think I’d wait here, positioning ourselves around those rocks there, and create an ambush. Hit them while they’re still in the bog, in open territory, just before they got to hard ground.”

  “Not bad,” he said. “So how—”

  I interrupted him, wholly focused on the issue. “And we’d have to know they were coming. So I’d hide a couple of people back at the Seward Highway, as sentries, with a two-way radio, to give us advance warning. I’m not sure the radio range would reach to Whittier, so perhaps another couple of sentries at the top of the lake, and another couple about here, in a jeep, who could radio it on to us. Then that would give us time to drive up here and position ourselves before they arrived, if we were ready to move immediately. And I’d prepare the positions in advance.”

  “Pretty good!” He laughed. “Where did you learn strategy from?”

  “Playing Catan.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “It’s an online war game,” I replied. “I used to play those kind of games every night with people I met on the Internet.

  He laughed again. “Probably as good as anything they teach you in Staff School.”

  “Do you think they’re going to come?”

  “I’d be surprised if they didn’t. Compared to those militant crackpots up in Fairbanks, God’s Army, they’ll see us as easy pickings. They’ll know how many we are, and our supplies.”

  “Are you sure they’d come this way?”

  “It’s the only route through, Jim, if the tunnel’s closed, isn’t it? They’ve got to come over this pass.”

  “No, pardon, but you’re wrong. If I was them, I’d come by sea. OK, it’s ten times the distance, but I’d figure, if I was them, that we might be expecting them to come. They’ll know that we know that they know we’re here, if you see what I mean. Must be a boat they could use in Anchorage. It would take them a lot longer, maybe a few days, but we wouldn’t be expecting that. If they arrived at night, without lights, came quietly into the harbor, we wouldn’t know much about it till it was all over.”

  Theo paused and nodded. “I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right. Will bear it in mind.”r />
  “Who’s your source in Anchorage?”

  “The source is in a dangerous spot, Jim, I haven’t told anyone. It’s my ace in the hole. Need to know basis. Safer that way.”

  He thought for a while. “But look, it’s also not a good idea if I’m the only one who knows. You’ll promise to keep it to yourself? Not even tell Jessie?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “OK. I won’t tell you the real name, but their code name is Zenith.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Over the next couple of days a steady stream of jeeps and trucks came off the Seward Highway from points west, and down the Portage Glacier Road. There were heavy frost heaves on it, and if the road menders weren’t coming around anymore it wouldn’t last many years. There were about two hundred people, along with dogs, cats, even assorted livestock – some chickens, mules, goats, a couple of cows – that hadn’t been killed yet for food. It was about the same number that had left Whittier in the Fall. We took over Begich Towers, where the previous population had lived – a fourteen-story block of two and three bedroom apartments, a hundred and fifty of them. It had been built in the 1950s as the headquarters of the US Army Corps Engineers, the biggest building in Alaska at the time. There was a similar sized building, Buckner, which had been empty for a couple of decades and was pretty dilapidated, but looked like being recoverable if needed.

  Of course, the elevators no longer worked, so apartments were allocated on a need basis – the most frail at the bottom, fittest at the top, gradations in between. Three bedroom apartments for the larger families, two for the others, one for singles and couples.

  “You and Jessie take a single,” Dad said, “two singles for Matthew and Louise, Bess and Sue – OK for you to share? They’re short of singles here.”

  Apart from that, furnishings and fittings were pretty standard throughout. There were common rooms, and even carpets on the corridor floors – it was odd walking on them again. I thought Bob wouldn’t have liked it, couldn’t see him fitting in. I heard a few people grumble that they’d swapped a house for a couple of rooms, and if they couldn’t pay for something better, but nothing serious. They were given short shrift – what use was money?