Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  “There’s a ridge between Clip Bay and the old camp. It will mask our approach.”

  I glanced back into the cabin. Lily was scrolling through something on her phone. Mitzi sat with her arms crossed and her lips pressed tight, glaring out the window.

  By the time we reached the gray expanse of Lac de Gras, a black bruise was spreading through the sky. The cockpit darkened and the instrument lights glowed. The wind came out of the north like a boxer—jab, jab, punch. The airframe shook with the blows. My headset clicked. Pete’s voice was terse. “Bad one coming.”

  34

  We flew east along the southern shore of the lake. A fringe of ice lined the granite coast. The twin pits of the Diavik diamond mine came into view offshore, gaping holes that vanished into the depths. A coffer dam protected the pits from the waters of the lake. Waves with fifty miles to build broke against the dam, exploding into sheets of spray.

  We left the mine behind, dropped to a thousand feet, and began a long, slow turn to the left across an archipelago of snow-covered islands. On the mainland, a straggling herd of caribou came into view. At the sound of the plane, they broke into a run. Their white rumps thrashed into the twilight. Ahead of us, a long white smudge stretched inland from the shore of Lac de Gras—the ridge. We began a steep descent.

  In the gloom the altimeter needle moved swiftly around the phosphorescent dial, peeling off the feet as we scraped across a jumble of hills. Ahead, the wall of the ridge towered into the sky. Stripes of ice on the rock face gleamed in the fading light. The cliffside rushed toward us until the black water of a bay suddenly appeared. The right wingtip dipped as Pete cranked the plane into a tight turn. We flew up the narrowing inlet for a mile and landed in a gusting crosswind near the shore.

  A draft of frigid air blew into the cabin as Mitzi opened the door. She clambered onto a pontoon. Waves lapped at her as she inched carefully forward with an axe. Grasping a strut with one hand, she reached out and smashed a path through the shelf of ice along the beach. We were pegging the mooring lines into fissures when the blizzard struck.

  * * *

  We sat in the harsh fluorescent light drinking tea while the storm howled and shrieked around the container. The generator hammered away outside, and the heater blew warm air. Pete doled out energy bars while Mitzi unrolled a topo map and pinned it to the table. We clustered around while she adjusted the angle of a light.

  “So this is us right here.” She tapped the paper. “And Clip Bay is over here. We’ll hike inland about a half mile”—she traced a route—“to a low saddle. That’s where we’ll cross the ridge. From there it’s an easy couple of hours to a hill that will give us a good view of the Chinese camp.”

  “And what exactly will you be looking for?” I said.

  Mitzi kept her elbows on the table and her eyes fixed on the map. Lily inspected her fingernails. Pete folded up the wrapper of his energy bar into a neat rectangle and put it in his pocket. When another three seconds ticked by without Mitzi answering, he stepped away to fiddle with the heater. Finally Mitzi turned her head to look at me.

  “That’s a strange question, isn’t it? Aren’t you here to spy on Fan?”

  “I’m here to spy on everybody. The real question is, what’s your excuse? Fan’s got operational control of your target. He’s got your garnets. Presumably he’s checked them out. Now he knows they’re very good diamond indicators. So what does he do? He has a diamond pipe, and he has minerals that came from the pipe that say it’s rich in diamonds. What’s the next step? The next step is he flies in a bunch of stuff and drills the target. Stop me when I say something that doesn’t make perfect sense.”

  I left out that I knew the garnets the twins were relying on hadn’t come from Clip Bay. I suspected Mitzi knew that.

  She put her fists on the table and jerked her chin at the map. “Nobody has ever ramped up exploration at a remote site as fast as he has. Wouldn’t you like to know why?”

  “Sure, but I don’t have the right to fly in and ask. You do. You own more of that pipe than he does. I understand he has the right to run the project, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ask how he’s doing it. So I’m wondering why you have to camp out in a blizzard and wait for a chance to trek across the hills instead of landing at Clip Bay and making them show you around.”

  Mitzi gazed at the map and ran her finger along the route to the Chinese camp. Her face was tight. “I don’t know what they’re up to.” The wind had stopped shrieking around the container. The only sound was the generator. Mitzi wouldn’t look at me, and it struck me how hard she was trying to conceal herself. She wiped a tear from her cheek with a white knuckle. “They killed my dad. I want to see what they’re doing. They’re not going to get our diamonds.”

  Pete opened the door and stepped outside. The blizzard had moved on, and the sky was clear. He was about to come back in when a wavering sound rose into the night. It started low and rose to a high pitch, when another howl began. We all stared out at the wintry scene: the plane tethered to the shore, snow on the wings, the black water spangled with stars. We listened as other animals joined in.

  “Wolves,” he said. “Six or seven. They’re on the next hill.” He came inside and shut the door and took a Winchester 30.30 lever-action out of his pack. He clipped on a shoulder strap. “You guys have guns?”

  In reply, Lily kicked one of the bags she’d brought. It made a loud clank.

  “Are they going to be a problem?” I said.

  “Don’t think so.” He rummaged in his pack until he found a box of ammunition. He loaded five rounds, pumped one into the breech, and pushed in one more cartridge. “Usually they avoid people. But they’re starving. The big caribou herds are disappearing, so they’re hungry, and they’re wolves. They’ll check us out.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, we were heading up a defile with the ridge on our left. The clouds blew away, and the stars seemed close enough to touch. We slogged through the snow. The wolves were silent. No howling now. I looked around to see if I could spot them, but all I ever saw were shadows flowing through the snow.

  35

  In half an hour we reached the low saddle that made a passage through the ridge. As soon as we topped the rise, we could see a glow beyond the next hill—the Chinese camp. The first, faint sounds of machinery drifted on the cold night air. Pete stopped and checked his GPS. He put it away and slipped off his rifle and swept the scope in a slow arc across the way we’d come. When he didn’t see any wolves, he slung the rifle and we dropped into a shallow valley.

  The snow was hip-deep in the hollow. We floundered through it slowly, stumbling and sometimes falling. Pete led, then Mitzi, then me, and Lily at the back. She was the shortest and would benefit most from having the path broken. But the drifts were soft and dry, and the snow slipped back behind us we struggled through. I checked on Lily once. The snow was up to her hips. She made a motion that she was fine, and I turned back and wallowed after Mitzi.

  As we climbed the last hill before the camp, we could hear the rattle of tracked vehicles. The air shook to the thrum of generators. Ahead, the top of the hill was outlined sharply by the lights of the camp beyond. The hill rose steeply for the last hundred yards. There was less snow cover on the slope. In spite of the steepness, we could move more easily.

  * * *

  Jimmy Angel’s ruined tent camp had been wiped from the face of the earth. Arc lights mounted on steel pylons spilled a harsh light onto the bustling site. Men in hard hats filed out of a dormitory complex of steel ATCO units. They headed for the shore, where three massive drills were belching smoke.

  Closer to the esker, a group with greasy overalls pulled on over their parkas swarmed around an open shed. A heavy machine trundled out and began to clank slowly down to the bay. A steel hydraulic arm on top of the vehicle held what looked like a thick rod mounted at an angle.

  “So he has three drills going already on the shore, and here comes a fourth,” Mitzi said. S
he leaned on a rock and slowly swept the site with binoculars. “Take a look at that rig they’re moving down,” she said, handing me the glasses.

  I fiddled with the focus until I could make out the details of the rig. “Large diameter drill?” I said.

  “Very.” She took back the glasses and watched the contraption teeter across the uneven ground. “A bigger diameter than I’ve ever seen.” She put the glasses away and stared down at the site. “I make it at least eight inches. When the drills break through into the pipe, they hit kimberlite. Kimberlite’s softer than the surrounding granite. They can get through it pretty quick. I’m just guessing, but say that drill pulls six feet of eight-inch core an hour. Got to weigh about a ton, right?”

  But she wasn’t guessing. She knew it cold.

  “Four drills, each pulling a ton of rock an hour. Four tons times twenty-four hours: ninety-six tons of rock a day. In a week, 672 tons. He’s not exploring that target,” she said. “He’s taking out a bulk sample.”

  We lay there for another fifteen minutes, watching the feverish activity. Drills pulled rock from the target. A fleet of small trucks carried it away and piled it in a separate area. Men poured around the site like a busy colony of ants.

  On the way back to camp, Mitzi and Lily walked together. I could hear the rustle of their voices as they whispered. The sounds of the Chinese camp faded away as we went through the saddle and turned downhill to the container. Nothing else moved in the silvery light except the starving wolves.

  36

  I recognized Tabitha from the air. She stood on the dock with her hands in the pockets of a stylish coat, her hair flying around her head in the gusting wind. A gleaming black SUV idled behind her, exhaust trailing from the pipe like a long blue snake crawling on the snow. We splashed down and taxied in.

  “Who’s the fashion plate?” said Mitzi, peering from the window.

  “Alex’s boss,” Lily sneered. “I’m not supposed to know.” She zipped her jacket up furiously. “She used to be his secretary.”

  I didn’t know what part of that was supposed to be a secret. Mitzi darted an evil grin at me, heaved open the door, and the two of them hopped onto the dock and fastened the mooring lines. Lily stomped off to the Ford. Mitzi went over and stuck out her hand.

  “Mitzi Angel,” she said. “You probably know that.”

  “A pleasure,” Tabitha said.

  “You’re another fed poking her nose in our business.”

  “Well,” Tabitha said, “not just another fed. I’m the fed they send up to ask the tough questions once we’ve got you tied up in the basement with the electrodes in place.”

  Mitzi stared at her.

  “Fed humor,” Tabitha said.

  “Ha-ha,” Mitzi replied with a stony face.

  Lily slammed the door of the F350, drove up beside me, and rolled down the window. “I won’t be back tonight,” she said. She didn’t even glance at Tabitha. “I have business to take care of, and apparently so do you.” She rolled up the window and gunned away.

  Tabitha’s SUV was the Tahoe with Mackenzie’s two-star plate. She tossed her coat in the back seat and climbed in behind the wheel. She wore a gray wool skirt and a black cashmere sweater with the sleeves pushed up. She tugged the skirt up above her knees.

  We drove off the island and through the village. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes, until Tabitha sighed and said, “Are we going to talk about exactly what business Lily has to take care of?”

  “What makes you think I would know?”

  We reached the junction with the main highway and turned left for Yellowknife. Veils of snow slid back and forth across the surface of the road. Three large ravens hopped off some roadkill and waited on the shoulder until we passed. I glanced in the side mirror as they hopped back out, indifferent to the storm of snow sucked up in our wake.

  “We are not going to go there, Alex. This isn’t the time to shadowbox. You’ve known from the moment Lily got on the plane to Yellowknife that she’d put herself in the middle of things if she saw a way to profit. That’s why you asked for the UFED, so you could find out what she was up to. I’m not sure that little scrap about the Montreal lawyer you sent Tommy is going to tell us much.”

  Tabitha and Lily were like two panthers. When their scent trails crossed, they would always have to stop and snarl. Tabitha checked her watch. I could read her like a book. There was some topic she wanted to broach. She took a breath and plunged.

  “Could the twins have another motive, do you think?”

  “Other than what?”

  “Other than finding a diamond mine?”

  “You mean the dark plan to reduce America to bondage by using all this to sneak in their cell phone network, against which we have no defense but the most powerful military in the world and a currency weaponized by us to browbeat other countries?”

  Tabitha drove in silence for a minute, cooling her temper. Finally she blew a clump of hair from her face and nicked my chin with the blade of an irritated glance.

  “Yes, I mean that plan, or maybe a much worse one. So let’s agree that you’ve got the peevishness out of your system and can now direct your attention to subjects where you actually know what you’re talking about.”

  She let me chew on that for a moment before she continued.

  “There’s a meeting in the Galaxy. That’s where we’re going. We’re having a crisis with our ally. We need you to help us make a case, so let me tell you what that case is.”

  The sun was out. The snow shone with a blinding whiteness. Tabitha slipped on a pair of Ray-Bans and brushed her hair back with an impatient swipe. She liked to drive fast. The heavy vehicle flew over frost bumps in the road and came down hard on its springs. I glanced at the side mirror again and watched the plume of dry snow spiraling out behind us.

  “China’s our biggest threat this century. Strong economy, rapidly-growing navy—you don’t have to get the president’s daily intelligence briefing to know this. We challenge them in the South China Sea. Those coral reefs they transformed into military outposts to claim sovereignty over the whole area—we sail by them just to get up China’s nose. Now they threaten Taiwan. We sent those battle groups through the Taiwan Strait to show that we will defend our ally.”

  “Except we won’t.”

  “They can’t be sure. If we have a fleet in the strait and things get hot, one of our ships could catch a missile. If American sailors die, there has to be payback, and we would make it hurt. They know that.”

  “And this involves Canada how?”

  “Because the Chinese want to show us two can play at that game. Boomers in the Arctic. We don’t need some Chinese military cat’s paw any closer than that.”

  “Diamond mining would be a way for them to get closer; is that the pitch I’m supposed to make?” I hadn’t taken any painkillers since the day before. The pain was making me angry.

  “This is the military, Alex. They’re not going to ask you to assess a threat. They can do that just fine. But in strategic terms, we think of our northern border as the Arctic coast, including Canada’s. We defend that border together, with NORAD. We’ve always seen eye to eye. Now we’re not so sure.”

  “Surely you don’t mean they have strategic ideas of their own? What a surprise. We pay zero attention to Canada, although we trade more with them than with China, share a five-thousand-mile border, and play the same sports. Their reward: illegal tariffs and punitive trade actions whenever the president needs a poll bump in the Rust Belt. And Canadians don’t love and trust us? Go figure.”

  We’d just passed the Stagg River. Tabitha put on her blinker. She eased off the highway at a boat launch and parked in the snow. She unbuckled her belt so she could turn to face me, and put her fingers tenderly against my face. It melted me.

  If I could have gone back right then to that bedroom on the airbase, I’d have crawled in beside her and taken her in my arms and crushed her long, beautiful body against me.

  I
came to know Tabitha in the year we’d spent in the basement offices on Clarkson Street. She was the smart kid seconded from the CIA so she could learn about financial crime. I’d never believed that cover. She was too well trained, too bright for a placement in an obscure little black-ops corner of the Treasury. And when I discovered that the person she’d been sent to keep an eye on was me, it didn’t poison my affection.

  Affection can survive betrayal, or there’d be no love anywhere. For me she’d always be the spirited young woman coming into the office in the morning in a pencil skirt and a plaid shirt she’d got on sale at Saks, clacking through the door in her slingbacks with a venti from Starbucks and the latest gossip from the top floor. We’d be howling in minutes. Or I’d come in from some blown operation, my face stippled with cuts, and she’d clack off to get the first aid kit and tidy me up for the showdown upstairs, then make me take her to Via Carota.

  Now she let the air out of me with those green eyes and kept her fingers gently on my face.

  “I’m sorry, Alex, but if you’ve got something for the pain, please take it now. Because this is serious. China means us harm. Fan is a Chinese government actor in all but name. They fund him and they control him. So frankly, fuck Canada. They let him in.”

  “They also put his sister in jail because we asked them to, Tab, so I’m not sure we have the high ground here.”

  She buckled the seat belt back on, checked the mirror, and gunned the big Chevy back onto the highway.

  “I’m fine with the low ground, Alex.”

  37

  They’d started before we got there. Facing each other at a small conference table in the Galaxy—Mackenzie and the Canadian brigadier. The brigadier wore battle ribbons from Bosnia and Afghanistan, and instead of insignia stitched on his collar, he wore shoulder boards. He was a rank lower than Mackenzie, but the glittering maple leaf with the crossed sword and baton surmounted by a scarlet crown made him look like the one in charge.