In the lounge four people rose to their feet and Otto introduced them around. "Chris Heller, Kevin Woolley, Rebecca Bean, Karen Clark. This is Toni Hartzler, our lifeline to RPetco. Oh, and Kate Shugak." Four pairs of bright, inquisitive eyes focused on Kate. "I'm sorry, what was it you do up here?" "Besides be Aleut," one of them said, and looked to Leckerd for approval, and got it.
"Let's get some lunch, shall we?" Toni said briskly.
"Wait a minute," Kate said. "Mind telling me why I'm here?"
Toni looked at her, puzzled. "Harris gave me to understand you were my new driver."
"And you do what?" Kate inquired.
"I'm the flack." At Kate's bewildered look, Toni elaborated. "The North Slope public relations representative." Kate still looked blank.
"The tour guide."
"Oh."
"And you're my new driver. You'll be driving the bus for me on tours."
Kate remembered the bus ride from the airport and experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. "Oh."
Something in her voice gave warning. Toni raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow. "You do know how to drive a bus, don't you?"
Kate took a breath and held it. "Let's put it this way." She met Toni's eyes. "I will by tonight."
Toni's feet slowed naturally to a halt as they joined the lunch line, and Kate broke off eye contact when she nearly ran into the person in front of her, a burly man who was staring at the salad bar with a pensive expression on his square, seamed face. She followed his gaze, to encounter the un winking stare of a small green turtle peering out of a large bowl of romaine lettuce in the center of the serving table.
They regarded each other in silence for a moment. The man stirred and reached a hand forward to move a leaf to one side, disclosing a gold, five-pointed badge painted on the turtle's shell. "Deputy Dawg, I presume," he said, giving a small, courteous bow. "Pardon me." He employed the salad tongs to transfer romaine to his plate, careful not to disturb Deputy Dawg's comfy little nest, and moved on to the three varieties of salad dressing at the end of the counter.
Kate, agape, stared from the turtle to the receding back of the man to Toni, who shrugged with elaborate unconcern. "He's a photographer for National Geographic." She handed Kate a plate. Kate took it automatically. "Take some salad if you're going to, you're holding up the line."
CHAPTER 3.
They left immediately after lunch, archaeologists in tow, but they did not go directly to the airport. On their way out of the Base Camp, Cale Yarborough charged down the front staircase three steps at a time bellowing, "Hartzler goddammit the line's back at Crazy horse I want those broads off the Slope by sundown take care of it!"
He crashed back up the stairs without waiting for a reply. Toni looked at the security guard seated behind the window before the front door, who shrugged in reply. "Don't look mean at me. I volunteered to escort them off the field. So did the safety supervisor. So did the production supervisor. So did the communications supervisor, the transportation supervisor, the--"
"Okay okay I get it," Toni said. "Dammit it's not like I don't have anything else to do." She held the door for Kate. "I guess we're tossing you in at the deep end today Kate hold your breath."
Kate walked through the door with the distinct feeling of a lamb being led to the slaughter.
To her relief, the big blue fifty-six-passenger bus proved easier to handle than she had feared, although she soon learned to treat the soft shoulders of the Backbone with respect, and to swing very wide for turns. The weather was a uniform dirty white, ground, clouds and fog, and she knew a steadily growing gratitude for the fluorescent markers on four-foot sticks planted every ten feet at the side of the road.
There were moments when the next marker was all she could see. She would have driven right by the turnoff to Crazyhorse if Toni hadn't caught her in time. Thank God. The last thing she wanted to do was try to back it up.
Crazyhorse Camp was a collection of Atco trailers arranged in wings off a main corridor, and looked as if it hadn't been cleaned since its arrival on the Slope. Kate picked her way distastefully around a spill of popcorn, most of which had been ground into the cigarette-scarred carpet whose brown color was not improved by either. She followed Toni down the hall and into a corridor and up some stairs. A line of men had formed at the bottom of those stairs, wound up both flights and extended down the hall. One of them caught sight of Toni and groaned.
"Oh, shit, guys, it's Hartzler."
There was a chorus of boos and whistles and catcalls. Toni beamed at one and all and put a little extra sashay into her walk as she and Kate proceeded down the second story main hallway. The line of men (Kate, counting heads, estimated at least a hundred) had widened to three deep by the time they came to a stop in front of a door. The man closest to that door saw Toni and swore loud, long and with a facility Kate was forced to admire. When he ran out of breath he said bitterly,
"Goddamnit, Hartzler, why do you always get here just when I get to the goddam door?"
"What's the matter, Bill, your subscription to Playboy run out?" Toni asked innocently.
The man swore again and stamped off. Everyone else stayed put, staring at Toni out of hangdog faces that reminded Kate of nothing so much as a bunch of hungry bloodhounds. They made her feel slightly guilty, though as yet she had no idea why.
Ignoring them all, Toni knocked on the door. There was no answer. She knocked again. "Belle? It's Toni Hartzler. Come on, I know you're in there, open up."
After a moment the door cracked. A large, round blue eye peered out.
It encountered Toni and paused. There was a long sigh, and the door opened farther, to expose a six foot platinum blonde in a minuscule leather cowboy vest, a minuscule, pleated leather skirt and matching cowboy boots. A tiny cowboy hat perched precariously on top of all that platinum hair, and there was a tiny toy pistol strapped to her waist in a tiny leather holster and a five-pointed star pinned to the vest over her left breast. There was a lot more breast than there was vest. Kate sternly repressed what she assured herself was merely a momentary feeling of inadequacy that would soon pass, and wondered if they were real.
"Well, shoot?" the cowgirl said in a breathy blond voice. She spoke Deep Southrun, ending every sentence with a question mark. Her foot gave a petulant stomp, the front of the vest bounced, and the next man in line sighed like he was in love. "We was just selling a few I'll' of' magazine subscriptions? What could it hurt?"
"It is a pain, Belle," Toni agreed sympathetically, "but you know Yarborough. He's got this thing about selling printed matter of any kind on his side of the Slope."
Belle pouted. Her lips were very full and very wide and very red, and the man in line sighed again. "How's a girl s'posed to make any kind of a decent livin' if the field manager keeps kickin' her outa her place of bid ness She really said it, Kate noticed, bid ness And then she smiled, and the man in line sighed a third time. "I noticed how tense he was the last time I was up? Now there's a man I could do something for, if he'd just give me the chance?" She bit her thumb reflectively, and this time a collective sigh went up from as far back as the stairwell.
"Maybe a gift subscription to Masseuset She lowered her voice and said confidentially, "Y'all tell him I said so, you hear?"
"You could do a lot for me right now," someone called from behind them, and Toni turned and gave the assembled crowd a wide, sweet smile.
"Gentlemen, Ms. Starr has closed up shop for the day. Goodbye."
"Come on, Jane?" Belle called over her shoulder. "Time to hit the trail?" She opened the door and beckoned them in.
A gentleman was just rising from the bed, buckling his jeans. "Why, Bob," Toni cooed. "I haven't seen you in ages. Where've you been keeping yourself?"
"Up yours, Hartzler," he snarled.
"Oh, goodness me, did I knock a moment too soon?" Toni wondered aloud.
Belle and Jane both giggled as he snarled again and shouldered Kate aside on his way out.
Belle, her b
ack to them, bent over to drag a suitcase from beneath the bed, and Kate looked up at the ceiling and hoped she wasn't blushing.
Scarves were removed from over lamps, implements and ointments from the bedside table, and in a remarkably short time they were ready; almost, Kate thought, as if they were used to the drill.
"Oh, Kate can carry that other suitcase for you, Belle," she heard Toni say generously, and found herself lugging a bag weighing approximately three hundred pounds down the hall behind Toni, Belle and Jane. "How many subscriptions did you sell this time up?"
Belle pouted again. "We were going for a new record, weren't we, Jane?
Twenty thousand in two days?"
"We would have made it, too," Jane chimed in, "in another four hours."
"I'm impressed," Toni said.
So was Kate. A mathematical calculation presented itself to her fertile brain. She stopped it before it arrived at a solution. Some things it was better to not know.
The archaeologists were impressed, too, at Belle in her little cowgirl suit and Jane in her very little leopards king sheath and shark-tooth necklace. When they got to the airport, the pipe liners standing in line on their way south were equally impressed. "Praise the Lord!" one man was heard to shout, and Toni, bidding Belle and Jane a fond farewell, observed that the two might make their goal after all, and before they reached Anchorage, too. "Push Ms. magazine as hard as you can," Kate heard her tell Belle. "These yahoos could stand to have their consciousnesses raised a tad."
"I'll try, honey." They hugged, and Toni waved them out onto the tarmac and up the air stairs of the waiting jet.
Toni's official tour, arriving on a special charter, kept them kicking their heels at the airport and eventually arrived ninety minutes late.
It consisted of one United States senator from Illinois and his entourage, including various representatives of the environmental militia and the superintendent of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
They were all on their first orientation tour of the North Slope, in spite of the fact that the Honorable Levi Poulsboro sat on the Senate Energy Committee, and to a man they were determined not to be impressed.
Two of them, one tall and a Sierra Club commando, one short and a member of the Wilderness Society, both aggressively determined to find fault, occupied the two front seats on the bus and cross-examined Toni all the way across the field. As Kate listened, admiration for the other woman grew. The difference between a straight and a crooked hole, the flow status of the wells on H Pad, the intricacies of tertiary recovery techniques, current manpower status in the Western Operating Area, all these were grist for Toni's mill. The two men were stumped, but only temporarily. "What about slick em the tall one said. "That stuff they put in the pipeline to make the oil flow faster?" "Slickem," Toni said, her brow wrinkling, and Kate, who had by now abandoned any pretense of impartiality, feared they had her. But no.
Toni's brow cleared. "Slickem, of course. I was just reading about that in Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. It's a long-chain polymer, I believe, sort of a gooey plastic. It's injected into the pipeline at Pumps One and Four, Four being the station just this side of the Brooks Range where the oil might need a little extra oomph to get over the hump." She smiled. The two men didn't smile back. "Yes. Well.
Slickem reduces the turbulent flow of the oil in the line, and causes it to expend its energy more profitably in getting down to Valdez." She smiled again. With difficulty, Kate repressed a cheer.
The two men scowled in unison. The short one said accusingly, "Well, we heard that it greased the inside of the line and made the oil flow smoother that way."
Toni's fund of smiles was bottomless. "I don't believe that's the case, sir, but we'll be going to Pump One later this afternoon and we can check then."
A half-dozen caribou, looking moth-eaten from their long winter spent beneath the Central Power Station, climbed up on the Backbone and proceeded to cross to the other side. Kate muttered a prayer and pumped the brakes gently. The front bumper came to a stop inches from the oblivious caribou, which didn't even look around at the big bus sliding to a halt on their left, just kept on going across the road and down onto the snow- and ice-covered tundra on the other side. Kate took a surreptitious breath, her foot off the brake, and goosed the gas. The bus creaked and groaned and started forward again.
The senator spoke for the first time. "Where's the corral?"
Kate saw Toni at an unprecedented loss for an answer. "I beg your pardon?"
"Well, I assume you put the caribou away when you're done with them," the Honorable Levi Poulsboro said sternly. "Is there a corral somewhere you keep them in?"
Kate took her eyes off the road long enough to see if he was serious.
He was. She turned back and in the mirror saw the expression on one of the archaeologists' faces, Chris Heller, a thin young man with large, very expressive brown eyes, and had to look hastily away, catching her underlip between her teeth and biting hard. She heard Toni say, with no discernible trace of hysteria, "Prudhoe Bay is a wildlife habitat as well as an oil field, Senator. Some caribou drop off from the central Arctic herd during its migration every fall and winter here. They like the shelter the modules give them. They like the pads in the summertime, too. When they're on the pads, they're up off the tundra and in the wind; it keeps the mosquitoes away." "The pads," the Sierra Club commando said, "that reminds me." He waved a hand in a gesture that appeared to encompass the entire North Slope, Canadian border to Chukchi Sea. "When's the rest of this going to be graveled in?"
"The rest of what?" Toni said, puzzled.
He waved his hand again. "The field. When are you going to gravel in the rest of the field?"
This time Kate didn't dare look in the mirror, and instead concentrated fiercely on the foggy road in front of her. Toni, still with that astounding self-control, said, "Sir, the Prudhoe Bay field measures approximately twelve miles north to south, and twenty-five miles east to west. That comes to approximately three hundred square miles all told. With one mile of gravel road costing upward of a quarter of a million dollars, I don't think we can look forward to graveling in the rest of the field anytime soon."
"I see," the Honorable Levi Poulsboro said with a grave nod. "You'll probably have to wait until the price per barrel of oil goes up some more."
"Probably," Toni agreed.
Quite a bit more, Kate thought.
The tour took all afternoon, beginning with the Base Camp and including the pool and the weight room and the track ("Eleven times around makes a mile," Toni told them) and the movie theater, upholstered from floor to ceiling in red plush, and moving on to cover the entire western side of the Prudhoe Bay field in exhaustive detail. The operations module housed Production Control, where three operators sat in a darkened room surrounded by an enormous, U-shaped counter. Their faces eerily backlit by the green reflection from the computer screens, the controllers spoke in low voices over headsets and tapped out rapid commands on keyboards, looking for all the world as if they were on the bridge of a spaceship headed for lapetus, except that this computer didn't talk back.
Next door was the Communications Center and although the room was about the same size as Production Control the contrast was immediate--bright lights and constant noise and perpetual motion. This room looked like the bridge of a spaceship, too, only in this case the Enterprise, on Red Alert under Romulan attack. A bank of radios monitored traffic on three channels amid bursts of static, two switchboards rang nonstop, five telex machines cluttered out yards of yellow tape, a fax machine spewed out page after page, its twin sucking up reams going in the other direction. A tall man with disappearing red hair, bright, inquisitive blue eyes and a wickedly attractive grin rolled rapidly in a wheeled armchair from switchboard to radio to telex to fax with never a wasted move, except the occasional collision with his coworker. She was a short, pudgy woman with small, penetrating eyes that saw everything whether you wanted them to or not and a tenor squeal of a voice, th
e grit and gravel voice Kate had heard calling race odds over the public address system. "Meet Warren Rice and Sue Jordan, communications operators extraordinaire," Toni announced. "You can run but you can't hide from a communications operator."
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 04 - A Cold Blooded Business Page 5
