by Basil Sands
“Did you see what they were doing?”
“Negative. I heard the noise over here during our shift change and came by just as they were closing the gate. I heard them talking, but I was too far away to understand the details of their conversation. They weren’t speaking English at first, but when they heard my boots on the snow, they switched immediately.”
“What language were they speaking?”
“Albanian.”
“Albanian?” Eugene asked. “How the hell would you know it was Albanian?”
“I retired from the Special Forces three years ago. Knee injury. I did several years in the Baltics, and had a lot of contact with northern Albanians among the Kosovo Muslim Militias.”
“Muslim Militias?” Eugene replied. “Are you saying these guys are terrorists?”
“I didn’t say that specifically. But I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Eugene said. “What else was suspicious about them?”
The guard paused for a moment, and then said, “It’d be easier to list anything not suspicious about them. There was serious bad tension around them. They had just left and I was heading back to the pump station to make a report to send in to the troopers when I heard you pull in. I had thought it was them returning, so I came back.”
“Yeah, they almost ran into me head-on down the road a ways,” Eugene said.
Bannock nodded in reply. “Well, Mr. Wyatt, I’ve got to be getting back and file a report of contact. Everything I mentioned to you the hard facts, that is will be in my log back at the station, if you want to see it.”
“Thanks. I’ll be gone in five minutes.”
Officer Bannock turned around and started to open the door when Eugene called out.
“Hey, Bannock, could you do me a favor?”
Bannock turned back. “Sure, what do you need?”
“If those men return, or for that matter, if anyone comes in here for the next week or two, could you let your guys back there know to give me a ring on my cell phone?” He handed Bannock his card.
“No problem,” the officer replied. “You know, we could do even more than just call you. We have some pretty good surveillance gear at our disposal. With your station being in such close proximity to the pipeline, I could justify monitoring your property for our own security reasons. All I need is your permission, and we can set up round-the-clock electronic surveillance.”
“Thanks. That’d be greatly appreciated,” Eugene replied. “If your boss gives you a hard time, tell him to call me. Me and him go back a ways.”
“Have a good night, sir.”
Bannock raised his fingers to his forehead in a relaxed salute and walked out into the darkness.
Eugene logged onto the computer on the corner desk and accessed the systems report in hope of finding something that would give him any clue. The last line before the system went down showed everything running normally at the half hour checkpoint. The next lines, which had been appended upon system reboot, read:
Abnormal Shutdown 0430 hrs 081217
Error Code: 000 Unknown Source Disrupt
What the hell? The computer doesn’t even know what happened.
Eugene printed the report and rose from the desk. He zipped his parka back up, turned off the lights, and then headed out the door into the now brightly lit area outside. The mercury lamp had finally reached its full intensity and cast a pale white glow onto the building and equipment around him. White steam billowed from his nose and mouth as he exhaled in the frozen air.
From where Eugene stood, he turned to gaze around the yard. He saw no sign of physical damage. If there had been a transformer fire, it would have been on the report. Even if it weren’t, he would be able to smell the tell-tale odor of burned electrical equipment, which he did not.
As he walked toward his truck on the other side of the gate, Penny slowly trotted back from the woods and waited beside the door of her master’s vehicle. She sat down and her tail wagged happily, sweeping the snow behind her in a doggy version of a snow angel.
“My goodness, that’s a good dog. You came back without me calling” he said aloud to his canine companion.
Chapter 3
Phantom-like wisps of white steam rose from the thickly insulated tan canvas fabric of the Carhartts coveralls, Alaska’s most common winter outer garment, which hung on a peg protruding from the log wall. Heat waves like tiny translucent serpents wriggled in the air from the surface of the black iron woodstove in the corner. From within the dull, black metallic box crackled and popped the arrhythmic music of old-fashioned warmth. In a fairly new leather recliner, the only sign of modern comfort in the cabin, a man slowly awakened from a heavy slumber. The muscles in his bare arms rippled beneath a sheath of brown skin as he brought the chair to an upright position and stretched like a lion rising from the shade to hunt.
Marcus Johnson was but one member of a small community of rural Alaskans who lived partway between the old-fashioned frontier lifestyle and the 21st century.
Half the residents of Salt Jacket existed without at least one of the major modern conveniences of power, plumbing, or telephone. A good number of those folks were missing all three. Marcus was in the latter group.
For most, it was the lifestyle they preferred. They commuted to their jobs at Eielson Air Force Base twenty miles to the west, or all the way down to Fairbanks, thirty miles past that. After spending the day in high tech offices or running noisy construction equipment, they unwound on the drive home, where they would enter the world of silence. It was a world unknown to urbanites in the lower forty-eight.
Few city people have any idea just how quiet the world can be off the grid. More accurately, what they do not understand is how noisy their urban surroundings are. In the quiet of the small cabins and houses of this deeply forested paradise, there is no hum of electricity, no buzz of fluorescent lights, no whir of computer terminals. No television noise or constant droning of traffic. No human chatter or incessant scraping of people walking the streets all hours of the day and night.
The only sounds are the natural sounds of life, of the living world. When a person relaxes enough, the wilderness comes alive with the light tick of a bird’s bony toes as it walks on a fence, or the muffled snort of a moose snuffling at a willow branch fifty feet away. At times, one can hear the crackling of a leaf falling off a branch and drifting to the ground.
That’s why most of the residents of the forest stayed here. That’s why Marcus came back to his hometown after twenty years of service in the military. He returned to a town and lifestyle where he could actually live reasonably well on the modest pension of a Marine Corps Master Sergeant.
No more noise. No more crowds. No more looking over his shoulder. No more war. He was glad to be home.
Marcus rose from the comfortably thick Lazy-Boy recliner next to the woodstove and again stretched his aching muscles. He had been chopping firewood all afternoon, until it got too dark to continue. Although Marcus had only been out of the Corps, and daily physical fitness training, about six months, he found the work of splitting wood to be exhausting. Maybe his friend Linus was right—military life had made him soft, at least as far as the Alaska bush was concerned.
He crossed the main room of the small cabin and looked in the mirror that hung on the wall above an old-fashioned washbasin. After twenty years of hard living his medium brown skin was still smooth and wrinkle-free. Few people properly guessed his real age of thirty-seven. They usually dropped ten or more years and assumed him to be in his mid-twenties. Large, deep brown eyes with almond-shaped lids belied the genetics of his Athabaskan mother. Tight, black curls of closely cropped hair atop a high forehead matched those of his father. While his skin and hair were that of a black man, an angular jaw, pointed nose, and high forehead revealed his grandfather’s quarter-Puerto Rican ancestry.
Marcus was born and raised in Salt Jacket. He had been gone with the Marines for nearly all of his adult life, serving in
Force Recon for most of that time, the “Elite of the Elite”. He would never have imagined being so tired after swinging an axe for a few hours. Not a person who was typically prone to perspiring, he was surprised by how much water there was in his clothes by the time he was done.
The two-hour nap by the woodstove had both revived him and dried him out. Upon waking, he had a taste for some hot coffee, soup, and a fresh sandwich down at the store. He put on some relatively clean jeans, a fresh undershirt, and a flannel shirt. He narrowed the vent and turned down the damper on the woodstove and then slid into his tan Carhartt insulated coveralls and jacket and drew a black knit cap over his head. In the center of the room, he rotated the knob on the Coleman white gas lamp suspended on a chain that hung from the log beam that supported the roof, where it lit the main area of the cabin. He picked up his black and silver snowmobile helmet and headed out the door of the small cabin on his fifty acres of paradise deep in the quiet Arctic forest.
He hopped on the snowmobile parked in front of his cabin and pulled on the helmet. It squeezed his head snugly. The padding was warm against his ears and cheeks from the heat it had absorbed in the cabin. He started the engine and headed for the snow-covered trail that ran parallel to and slightly below the road to make the ten-mile run to the store that sat alongside the Richardson Highway.
As he pulled out of his property, he noticed that the Hamilton’s farm was dark. Usually the light on their porch lit up the end of their driveway. There were no lights on in the house, either.
Hmm. That’s strange. Must be a power outage. Oh, well at least that’s something I don’t have to worry about. When you’ve got no power, power outages won’t do you no harm.
A quarter of a mile down the road, the lights of an oncoming vehicle reflected around the bend. The trail beside the road rose where it intersected with a farmer’s driveway. As Marcus came up the incline and drew level with the road, he sensed something large and fast come up behind him. Surprised by the abrupt motion, he turned his head and saw a rapidly moving pickup truck bearing down on him. It moved entirely too fast for the icy conditions. The truck veered onto the shoulder and headed straight for Marcus. He gunned the snowmobile up and onto the driveway and yanked the handle bar to the right, then put distance between himself and the truck.
Marcus saw the driver of the truck suddenly look up from whatever had distracted him and lurch the steering wheel to the left and back onto the road. The driver over-corrected and crossed the centerline of Johnson Road as he headed into the bend. Fifty yards ahead, it nearly collided head-on with the truck coming from the other direction and again lurched to the right.
Marcus sat on the snowmobile in the farmer’s driveway and shook his head as he saw, in the light of the headlamps, the Tanana Valley Electrical Cooperative emblem on the side of both trucks.
“Crazy,” he whispered to himself. “Someone’s going to catch hell for that near miss.”
The two trucks disappeared into the distance. Marcus continued until he came to the Richardson Highway and turned left on the trail that followed alongside it. A few minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot of the Salt Jacket General Store. The lights were on in the building and at the gas pump. The outage had apparently been repaired in the time it took him get there.
Marcus stopped the snowmobile in front of the store and took off his helmet as he rose to enter. A few yards away sat the electric company truck that had almost hit Marcus and the other truck. He noted the number on the side—forty-eight. He would call TVEC and lodge a complaint. Folks from the city seemed to think they could drive like idiots in the country, with immunity. They acted like they didn’t realize people actually lived out there. For all the driver of that truck knew, Marcus’s snowmobile could just as easily have been a child riding to a friend’s house. The other truck could have been a mom returning from hockey practice with a vanload of kids. He shook his head in disgust and mounted the wooden steps to the entrance.
A bell suspended on a flat metal spring jangled noisily as Marcus opened the door. Once inside, he was greeted by the luscious odors of rich beef stew and hot apple pie. The smiling face of Linus Balsen beamed at him from behind the cash register, where he sat on a tall, padded bar stool just inside the door. Marcus’s tension eased at the sight. He and Linus had been very close friends throughout their lives, growing up together as playmates and continuing into adulthood as close as brothers.
Joseph Balsen, a locally famous scientist and inventor, had started the Salt Jacket General Store in a metal Quonset building in 1954. Originally called Swede’s Café, it primarily served to finance his never-ending research into “Arctic Thermo-Engineering”. Over the years, it grew in successive renovations from its original postage stamp of a building to over 6000 square feet of grocery, dry goods, and hardware. While his inventions never made him wealthy, the store did pretty well on its own. Linus was the third generation of his family to run it.
They still served homemade soup, sandwiches, and pies to local residents, road workers, airmen, soldiers, and tourists who often filled the long diner bar that stretched past the register counter. Six booths provided more seating in a small, square room at the back half of the original Quonset building. Black-and-white pictures of the community’s past hung from the curved walls, evoking nostalgic memories of the region’s history.
From the register, Linus could look down the length of the rest of store, over shoulder-height racks of canned goods, bread, cereal, and medicines, and the glass doors of freezer cabinets filled with TV dinner entrées and packages of meat. A collection of “Alaska Grown” brand T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts were displayed along with a small assortment of other clothing, mainly intended for tourists. In the far back corner were the restrooms and several shelves of dog-eared paperback books, the small town’s de facto library.
“Hey! The Marines have landed,” Linus called from across the counter. “You must have some kind of freaky control over nature, huh? The power has been out all day, and then a few minutes before you show up, it comes back on. So, how’s it going for you out there in the woods, old man?”
“Oh, it’s going,” Marcus responded. “I’ve been cutting fire wood all day, and I must say, it kicked my buttocks.”
Linus smiled. “Man, for an old warrior, you sure are a wuss!”
Marcus grinned back. “Yeah, well, that’s Master Sergeant Wuss to you, storekeeper.”
Linus snapped to attention and raised his right hand in a mock salute.
“Aye, aye, Top!”
Marcus chuckled. He glanced down the length of the room as he took a stool at the long diner bar. A man stood midway down the store, comparing the ingredients of two cans of energy drink. The scent of the food grew stronger where Marcus sat. His hunger increased exponentially as it floated from the opening to the kitchen and swirled around his head.
“All right,” Marcus said, turning back to the counter, “where’s that pretty wife of yours? I need a hot bowl of her famous stew and some strong coffee.”
“I’m here, Marcus.”
The slightly accented voice drifted from behind the swinging doors that led to the small kitchen. A somewhat plump, yet still shapely, blonde-haired woman with attractive blue eyes and a pleasant face stepped out through the door with a large bowl of stew. She put the steaming food down in front of Marcus, who leaned over it and inhaled deeply. Cara Balsen reached into the warmer under the counter and came up with a small loaf of soft, warm bread, which she put on a dish and placed next to his stew.
“Lucky for you, we cook with gas. Otherwise, there would be nothing hot for you,” she said. She turned to the back counter, took out a tiny dish with a ball of butter, and placed that next to the bread. “Even though the power was out, the stew and the bread are both fresh.”
Cara and Linus had been married almost eighteen years. They met at a party just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, while Linus was stationed in Germany in the Army. She was a college student from No
rway who, for some reason Marcus never understood, was totally enamored with his friend. Even now, all these years into their marriage, she continued to gaze at her husband as if he was some kind of ancient Greek deity. Marcus had served as best man at their wedding in Norway, where he had been training with commando teams of the Norwegian Coastal Rangers.
To Marcus, Cara was like the little sister he had always wanted growing up. While he was serving in the Marines, she wrote to him regularly to keep him apprised of the news in Salt Jacket. Cara and Linus’s two children—Connor, age twelve, and Tia, age eleven—referred to him as Uncle Marcus. They loved to spend time playing games with him whenever he came to visit.
In 1998, when Marcus went missing in action for six months, Cara took care of his mother, who had a stroke after being informed he was presumed dead. Tahana Johnson, a beautiful Athabaskan native woman who looked much younger than her fifty-two years, died in the hospital only three days before Marcus managed to get to safety at the US Embassy in Guinea.
Cara was also the first to tell him of his father’s accidental death last winter, when he had been trampled by a startled moose as he came out of the hay barn early one morning. By the time Marcus came home to stay, the cost of repaying the medical bills for his mother’s care had taken all but fifty acres of the three-hundred-acre homestead originally started by Marcus’s grandfather in the 1940’s.
The Johnson homestead was one of six original plots of free land granted by the US government in hopes of developing the area into a thriving agricultural center. Through the fifties and sixties, the Johnson homestead supplied good quantities of oats, barley, potatoes, cabbage, and beets that fed the city of Fairbanks, as well as the hay that fed the goats, horses, and cattle of the region. With the arrival of chain supermarkets in the eighties, the agricultural businesses quickly died out. Most of the remaining homesteads were now little more than self-sufficient estates.
Linus and Cara had done all they could to hold on to what land was left for their friend so he could come home to something. For this, Marcus was indebted to them both. They were the closest thing to family he had left in the world.
