High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  But he just smiled and said, ‘You can keep the ammunition. I just want the gun.’

  We clattered over a girder bridge, and as we entered the tunnel I got up. I had never handled an automatic, and fumbling in my case in almost complete darkness I couldn’t find the catch that would release the magazine. He seemed strangely relaxed when I got back to my seat, sitting there smiling to himself, and when I slipped the gun into his hand I saw him fingering it, then he passed me the magazine. ‘Put that in your pocket — for the moment, just to keep your mind at rest.’ And he patted my arm, turning and peering back down the coach. He was checking on the seating position of our two shadows and I didn’t like it.

  The tourist route card we had been given indicated a view of the old steel cantilever bridge immediately after the tunnel, also Dead Horse Gulch and the original White Pass trail of ‘98. Then there was another tunnel, the original one, and after that we would be into the Glacier Loop with its series of trestles carrying the line along the mountainsides to the Skagway River crossing and Glacier Station at Mile 14, the miles measured from Skagway port where the building of the railway had begun in 1899.

  We emerged into the daylight, the mountaintops lost in cloud, everything shrouded in mist, the bridge and the old track looking weird in the veiled light. A few minutes later there was a muted bellow from the engines up front, then the drum of the wheels became louder and suddenly we were into the next tunnel, the daylight abruptly cut off and Tom getting up and pushing past me. The lights were dim, almost nonexistent, so that he was little more than a shadow as he made his way down the aisle to where the two of them sat by the cast-iron stove. The big man, Camargo, was on his feet. I half rose at the same time, tense and wondering what was going to happen.

  But nothing happened. Tom stood there for a moment, leaning slightly forward as though presenting them with something. Then he had turned and was coming back down the aisle. Daylight suddenly, the engines no longer labouring and the brakes hard on as the world dropped away to our right. ‘The Skagway River,’ he said as he slipped past me to his seat by the window.

  I caught a glimpse of the steel bridge, an old girder contraption straddled from rock to rock across a ravine. ‘What were you doing?’ I asked.

  He was smiling quietly to himself and I suddenly caught a glimpse of the man Miriam had been so attracted by. There was an almost rakish, devil-may-care look about him. ‘What were you expecting, a fight?’ I waited, knowing by the expression on his face that he couldn’t resist telling me. He looked so pleased with himself.

  ‘I bowed,’ he said. ‘Very formal, very Spanish. Then in their own tongue I said “Creo que estas les pertenecen.” And I handed the guns back to them, holding them by the barrels of course.’ He laughed gently - not that snorting neigh, but a real, genuine laugh of amusement. That was it. They were too surprised to do anything. And now they’re stuck with the things. They can hardly thrust them back at me in broad daylight with a bunch of tourists looking on.’ a And all the way down to Skagway, which we reached just - before four, he was in that same relaxed mood, constantly quoting from his father’s experiences as the train wound slowly down the pass, a great loop by the Denver Glacier trail that showed the track and the bridge high up above us on the mountainside, the brakes grinding all the time, and his voice going on and on about how it had been that winter with thousands of men back-packing the minimum of a ton of gear up through the snow, horses lying dead and dying on the trail, blizzards, disease and exhaustion making the climb to the pass a living hell.

  2

  Skagway in the late afternoon of that dismal day was as near to the Styx as I shall probably ever get in this lifetime. The rail tracks, depot and sheds, the quay and the waiting ferry, all lay close under beetling cliffs, the bare rock black with the drizzle that was falling, and beyond was the water of Chilkoot Inlet, grey and flat as polished steel, low cloud cutting everything off, a grey curtain that made it seem the end of the world. And Skagway itself, built on the silt flats of the river and hemmed in by the damp slopes on the far side, was a somewhat phoney version of a gold rush town in limbo, boarded sidewalks and wooden buildings that belonged to the dead world of Soapy Smith.

  Since we were booked on the ferry to Prince Rupert, and only in transit through Alaska, customs and immigration clearance was little more than a formality. We dumped our bags at an Edwardian hotel and walked along the Broadway until we ran out of shops and houses. The cloud and the damp were all-pervading and our two friends watched us from the shelter of a doorway. Whether they still had the guns Tom had handed back to them I don’t know. He had disposed of the magazines somewhere along the track where the train had crossed a small torrent that ran in from Mount Hefty and the Denver Glacier. Back at the hotel we had a very expensive beer, then went on board, the ferry sailing promptly at 19.45 local time. It was almost dark then and by the time we had had a meal we were docking at Haines, first of the five ports of call on the Panhandle route south.

  We had cabins booked and by the time we left, Tom had already turned in. Throughout our cafeteria meal he had seemed to withdraw deeper and deeper into himself so that I was quite glad to be left on my own to wander round the ship. The vehicle deck was still barely half full and the big lounges that would have been crowded in the season looked almost deserted, row upon row of empty seats and only here and there the poorer passengers settling down for the night, our two followers among them. The throb of the engines, the beat of them against the soles of my feet, the knowledge that next day, and the day after, we would be moving through coastal passages that Cook, and later Vancouver who had sailed with him, had first explored — it was all tremendously exciting, and it would probably have remained so all the way to Prince Rupert and on down to Bella Bella if I hadn’t chanced on something that virtually forced Tom Halliday to open up and tell me the whole pitiful and appalling story.

  Some time in the early hours of Sunday morning we reached Juneau. We left at five-thirty and when I surfaced a couple of hours later I found many more people in the lounges, Indians as well as Americans in every sort of dress, a queue forming in the cafeteria. We were in fog, the air on deck cold and clammy, the sound of the foghorn echoing back from the shore on either side and occasional glimpses of rock and trees, dark walls on the edge of visibility. Tom stayed in his cabin, and when I went to check that he was all right I found the door locked. He was taking it easy, he said. He had a book and he didn’t want any breakfast. He sounded half asleep, so I left him to it and spent a pleasant day talking to a variety of passengers: a driller from the oil rigs of the North Slope, two loggers from the Charlottes, a citrus fruit farmer from down near Sacramento, California, and a man who had lived half his life on the slopes of Mount St Helens and had been there during the eruption when it had covered half the state of Washington in a grey pall of ash. By lunchtime we were in Petersburg, the fog thinning and the sun breaking through, so that going through the narrows between Mitkof and Kupreanof Islands we were in a milky haze with the forests on either side glimmering almost silver with the moisture that clung to the needles of the trees. Three hours later we were at Wrangell, and at each of the day’s stops one of our South American friends would be watching the passageway that led from Tom’s cabin, the other keeping an eye on me.

  It was an eerie feeling, not being able to move anywhere on the ship without being watched. Twice I talked to Tom, but only through the door. He seemed to have sunk into a sort of torpor, his voice muffled and surly like a bear disturbed in the middle of its hibernation. Night fell on the 150-mile passage to Ketchikan and he again refused to join me for the evening meal. I had left it till late and after I had finished, when we were already docking at the last Alaskan port, I went down once more to his cabin with the intention of insisting that I brought him something from the cafeteria before it became crowded with new arrivals.

  His door was still shut and there was no answer. In sudden panic I beat upon it. A voice behind me said, ‘Is all
right your friend.’ It was Lopez lurking in a doorway further down the passageway. He smiled. ‘He is going to the toilet.’ And he added, still showing his teeth below the little down-drooped moustache, ‘You see for yourself. The door is open.’

  I stared at him a moment, then I turned the handle and went in. The reading light was on, clothes piled on the foot of the bunk, the blankets thrown back, no sign of a book and his rucksack on the floor with the contents spilling out, some papers tucked into a plastic folder, letters from Miriam — I recognized the writing - some newspaper cuttings … A headline caught my eye:

  TEENAGE DRUG MAYHEM<.i>

  Cheap Coke Floods In

  It was from a Chicago paper, the cutting two months old and faded. Another from the same paper was a few days later Violence Hits the Streets — Kids Go Crazy for Drug Money I sat down on the bunk, wondering why he should have kept the cuttings, carrying them about with him along with Miriam’s letters…

  Chicago police appear totally baffled by the sudden rush of coke onto the City streets. It’s plentiful and it’s cheap -cheaper than it has ever been before. And the pushers are everywhere. Samples analyzed show that basically it is good quality, but it has been mixed or cut with anything from amphetamines to borax or even talcum powder. ‘You cut coke with speed, which is amphetamines, and you have a killer,’ says the eminent toxicologist, Professor … ‘What the hell do you think you’re up to?’ Tom reached forward, snatching the cuttings from my hand. ‘Searching my things …’ He opened the door wide. ‘Get out! Get out, do you hear?’

  I had stood up, facing him. ‘I think you’d better tell me now.’

  ‘Tell you what?’ His eyes were very wide, an almost frightened look. ‘Why should I t-tell you?’

  I reached past him and shut the door. ‘Sit down,’ I told him. He was bare-legged, his anorak covering his bare chest, his hair standing on end, an unwashed smell and his face looking drawn, almost haggard. ‘Sit down,’ I said again. ‘You’ve got to tell me now.’ And I added, ‘If you don’t, then I’ll go to the police as soon as we get to Prince Rupert. I have to know what it is you’ve got yourself involved in.’ I pointed to the cuttings in his hand. ‘What’s the connection?’

  For a moment I thought he was going to lash out at me, his face gone pale and a wild, violent look in his eyes. But then he discarded his anorak and subsided onto the bunk. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose you’d b-better know.’ He nodded slowly to himself. ‘I’ve been thinking about that all day, reading those cuttings, lying here thinking about them.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t have to read them. I know them by heart, you see.’ And after that I didn’t have to drag it out of him.

  It had all begun very innocently. Almost a decade ago Jonny Epinard had warned him the Ice Cold mine was showing signs of reaching the end of its life. For one thing, starting from the lowest point, they were washing silt at least three quarters of the way up the claim. The yield per ton of silt washed was still very little changed from the first records kept by Tom’s father, but the percentage of nuggets, or indeed of anything larger than straightforward dust, had abruptly declined. At first he hadn’t taken this seriously, but when the six-monthly profit cheques paid through the Swiss bank had begun to decline, then he had started to take a much closer interest in what was happening up in the Yukon.

  This was about the time he had married Miriam, and after a couple of years of unusually heavy expenditure — ‘travelling, racing, a plane of my own, parties, concerts — she’s very musical, you know - well, it was either cut back or find some additional source of income.’ He had started playing the market, with a certain amount of success at first, and gambling, with rather less success. Finally, he had decided to take a look at the BC property. ‘I knew nothing about trees, but you didn’t have to be a forester to know that there was money standing there in the Cascades, not just in that High Stand down in the bottom along the Snakeskin River, but up on the slopes of the mountains.’

  The trees there had never been cut over and some of them were big. ‘A lot of scrub, of course, goat’s beard, devil’s club, teaberry, huckleberry and bilberry, but all through it there was hemlock, cedar and fir that just had to be worth something whatever the problems of getting it out.’

  It was the problem of extraction, of course, that had caused the original owners to concentrate on the bottom land and leave the slopes alone. But that had been back in the days of steam-powered saws, traction engines, man-built roads and primitive extraction aids. He had been put in touch with Ringstrop by one of Crown Forest’s logging-camp managers and on the basis of the forestry consultant’s report he had accepted his advice to sell the timber standing under separate agreements as and when he needed money.

  In this way he had been able to control the amount cut, so that the resulting income would roughly match the shortfall from the Yukon mine. But inside of four years the yield from Ice Cold had fallen so low that he was practically dependent on timber for his whole income, so that it wasn’t long before virtually everything, other than the High Stand his father had planted, had been clear-felled.

  By then several things had happened that were to have a bearing on future events. To increase profits he had agreed with Ringstrop two years before to put Thor Olsen in as manager and instead of selling the timber standing, to sell it felled and delivered. One of the big west coast towing companies was contracted to do the haulage. A year later the towing agreement was with a different company. By then Olsen had informed him that they had virtually run out of all the profitable areas, apart from High Stand, and it was at that point that Barony of SVL had offered to buy it standing, get their own people to do the felling and Angeles Georgia Towing the haulage. The price was a lot higher than any Canadian company had been able to offer and Ringstrop had advised acceptance, Angeles Georgia being a small one-tug company tied to SVL and operating close to cost.

  That was when he had begun selling his inessential assets. ‘N-nothing would induce me to sell - the old man on my back, his words in my ears.’ The flat in Belgravia and the villa in Monaco had already gone. His plane and his stable of old cars, pictures and the best of the silver, that was what they had lived on for the next year. Finally, he had said to hell with it and sold off the first two hectares of High Stand. ‘I thought it was the t-timber they wanted. I’d no idea …’ He sat there, crouched on the edge of his bunk in nothing but his pants, his head in his hands. ‘Dad — if he could see me now… Christ, what a mess!’

  ‘Are you saying they didn’t want the timber?’ Even then I didn’t connect, didn’t see what he was driving at. And his only answer was to turn his head so that his eyes were on the cuttings which I had placed on the top of his rucksack. And when I repeated the question, asking him what they had done with the timber, he said sharply, Towed it down to Seattle, you know that.’

  ‘Well then…?’

  ‘God Almighty, man - don’t you see?’ He was staring at me wildly. ‘SVL, the towing company, those do-it-yourself and garden shed outfits in Chicago, they’re all linked. And that’s how the drugs get into the States. Somewhere along the tow route from the Halliday Arm to Seattle, some ship, a cargo vessel, a floatplane maybe - I don’t know - but somewhere along the route a consignment of coke brought up from South America is trans-shipped. In Puget Sound a barge-load of logs is a common enough sight, and then, on the long road haul to Mandola’s company depot in Chicago, who would think of unloading a great timber truck stacked high with massive tree logs to check what’s underneath? An officer would have to be damn sure before he ordered a thing like that.’

  He gave a slight shrug, leaning forward, his head in his hands like a man praying. ‘Now perhaps you understand. That’s what I’ve been living with. Not just my father’s curse. Not just that — but all those kids, all the people who are being sold the stuff. God knows what it’s like by the time it reaches them. Something innocent like borax or talcum, that’s not so bad, but if it’s amphetamines, if it’
s being mixed with speed, then G-God help them - speed is the killer - the fastest…’ His voice tailed away.

  I asked him how long he had known all this, how he had found out. ‘Was it Wolchak?’

  He shook his head impatiently, locked in on his own thoughts and too tense to answer to questions. Suddenly he looked at me, his face strained and that nerve ticking away on the line of his jaw, the hesitancy in his speech more pronounced. ‘God help me, too,’ he breathed. ‘Me — me — I’m involved, you see. That’s why they sent me those c-cuttings, so that I’d know… I can’t go to the police, to anyone. And now they want the land, the trees, everything. They want me to sign… and if I don’t, then they’ve got Miriam. And if I go to the police, if I blow the whole d-dirty racket wide open —’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t do it, can I? Not now. And they know it.’

  And then suddenly he was half down on his knees, looking up at me, imploring. ‘What am I g-going to do?’ And he repeated it, tears in his eyes. ‘Help me, for God’s sake. Do I ignore Miriam, stop the whole thing … ?’

  I didn’t answer and he shook his head again. ‘I can’t, can I? I can’t ignore her. The poor kid’s down there somewhere and if I d-don’t d-do what they ask …’

  Even then I didn’t believe it. Terrorism, yes — that was something we in Britain had considerable experience of. But drugs … If it had been pushers, or smuggling, the sort of smuggling haul that the customs periodically unearth, but regular consignments, and on this sort of scale … ‘Who’s organizing it, do you know?’ I was thinking of Wolchak, dancing into my office with that set smile of his, and trying to visualize him as a big-time smuggler setting up a drug line that would net millions and millions over the years, destroy thousands of innocent, unsuspecting people, kids a lot of them. But he didn’t seem to fit. And the whole thing blown up too big. If it hadn’t been for that note, for the fact that both her husband and I had recognized it as her writing, then I’d have thought he had made it all up, an appalling piece of fantasizing to satisfy some psychological need. At least I could have brushed it off as wild exaggeration, the two South Americans and the cuttings from the Chicago press a coincidental basis for wild imagining.