by Mark Aitken
‘How’s the Aussie?’ said Gallen, looking at McCann, but loud enough for Winter to hear.
‘Knows his stuff,’ said McCann. ‘But that accent’ll have to go.’
‘At least he’s funny,’ said Winter.
‘Them Aussies are all funny, man,’ said McCann.
As the Challenger jet stopped at its refuelling berth, a large golf cart rode out to the starboard side of the craft. Standing beside the co-pilot as he opened the cabin door, Gallen felt the blast of cold rush into the cabin and he touched the SIG in his holster.
‘It’s airport services,’ said Florita, standing behind Gallen, pulling on a thick down-filled jacket. ‘They’re here to take us to the washroom.’
‘Go on,’ yelled Durville from the rear of the aircraft. ‘I’ll catch up.’
Gallen issued the order to rug up in the arctic kit and, pulling on his own goose-down windbreaker, followed Florita to the golf cart.
The private lounge was large and filled with natural light and Gallen sat on a sofa, cleared his voicemail as he waited for Florita to return. He wanted a further chat about these Eskimos.
On a kitchenette table there were donuts and coffee and he helped himself as the Canadian Border Services and Customs officers spoke with the maitre d’. Gallen pulled out his passport, happy that he’d already put the SIG and its holster under the sofa cushion.
The Customs officer approached him and Gallen stood, offered the passport.
‘In from Los Angeles, sir?’ said the officer. ‘Direct flight was it?’ ‘Yessir,’ said Gallen.
‘Carrying any explosives, chemicals, munitions, firearms or prohibited substances, Mr Gallen?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Any alcohol or tobacco over the permitted quantity? ‘
‘No, sir.’
‘You travelling alone, sir?’
‘No, my employer, Harry Durville, is in the plane.’
The officer looked out at the Challenger sitting on the tarmac. ‘Harry Durville, eh? What do you do for him?’
‘Security consultant.’
‘Carrying no weapons?’
‘In the plane, yes,’ said Gallen, wishing Florita would get back to the damn lounge.
‘Declared?’
‘I’m doing that now.’
The officer looked at him. ‘I’m waiting.’
Gallen breathed out. ‘Nine-mil handguns and spare clips. We’re a personal bodyguard.’
‘I see—and you have the permits, I suppose.’
‘Sure,’ said Gallen, at least confident that Aaron had logged and declared all the firearms under the special security permits between the US and Canada.
The officer slowly pulled a black hand-held scanner from his utility belt and ran it across the information strip of the passport. ‘Can you show me your orders?’ he asked as he looked at his tiny screen, annoyingly poker-faced.
Gallen was confused. He hadn’t carried orders since leaving the Corps.
The officer continued. ‘You’re in Canada for military purposes?’
‘No.’
‘So why are you travelling on a no-fee passport?’ said the officer.
‘Shit.’ Gallen slumped. He’d been so focused on this new gig that he’d forgotten to get himself a standard tourist passport. His no-fee version labelled him as an American soldier on active duty, and if he couldn’t produce orders, foreign officials could treat him as an unfriendly.
Florita had him out of the lock-up before Durville even made it to the terminal.
‘Thanks,’ said Gallen, emerging from the small holding room and retrieving his personal effects from the Customs officer. As they moved back to the lounge, he tried to work it out. ‘So that was your voice? You were the one telling them off?’
‘Wouldn’t say I was telling them off,’ said Florita, who’d obviously taken a shower in the washroom of the private lounge. ‘I said they could stop being so unreasonable or we could wait for Senor Durville to arrive.’
Gallen chuckled. ‘Resolve it with an oil billionaire who’s been drinking all morning.’
Florita smiled. ‘They know him. But you’ll still have to have a tourist passport for the next time you enter Canada. You can use the computer at this business centre.’
Through the glass, they watched the golf cart making a return, this time with Durville on board.
‘I wanted to talk,’ said Gallen.
‘We’ve got two minutes, then I’m the nursemaid again.’
‘I’m uncomfortable with this meeting. I like to take away the ifs and the buts, and I can’t do that when all I know is that one of the people he’s meeting is called Reggie.’
Florita led him to the sofas beside the windows. ‘Okay, Gerry, but none of this is in writing. There’s no paper trail for these meetings.’
Gallen felt the old nightmares of the intel briefers and their little secrets coming back to him. ‘Okay.’
‘The TTC is a council of Eskimo or Inuit tribes from the Arctic Circle. They don’t recognise national boundaries, so they’re from Canada, the US and Russia, mostly, with some belonging to Denmark and Finland.’
‘Any names?’
‘I think you’ll find they’re mostly represented by their lawyers, Gerry,’ said Florita as the door burst open and Harry Durville marched over to the food like he was looking to kick in someone’s teeth.
Rising to fix Durville’s coffee, Florita stopped and looked back at Gallen. ‘Oh, I suppose the thing I should mention . . .’
‘Yep?’
Florita lowered her voice. ‘These TTC reps? Their countries and their tribes don’t necessarily know that this meeting is happening.’
Gallen tried to get more, but Florita had moved to her boss, who wanted a donut without icing.
~ * ~
CHAPTER 16
The Challenger came in low over the white peninsula on the edge of the Gulf of Boothia after four hours of flying. As they straightened for the runway, Gallen looked down and saw a white wilderness that seemed to blend into the sea with different gradations and shades of ice floe. On both sides of the plane were thousands of miles of ice and snow, contrasting with the darkness of the choppy ocean.
Captain Martin’s voice came over the speaker, informing the passengers that the plane would be ready to deboard at 12.50 local time and to rug up because the early spring meant a temperate midday high of minus twenty-five degrees Celsius, or minus thirteen in Fahrenheit.
Gallen watched his men check balaclavas and gloves as they rustled into their arctic jackets and pants, covering two layers of thermal underwear.
‘Minus twenty-five,’ said McCann, shaking his head. ‘Shit, I woke up one morning in Ghor Province and promised myself no more of that shit.’
‘Fucking Ghor,’ said Winter, pulling his balaclava down so it looked like a neck warmer. ‘The only thing I remember about that hellhole is you take a crap, it bounces.’
‘Okay, guys,’ said Gallen, smiling at the recollections of Afghanistan’s coldest regions. ‘Let’s focus. I want to run a check on the meet site, so I’ll go ahead with Donny and Florita, make sure we get the seating organised.’
Winter let the slide go on his SIG and put it on his lap. ‘I take Durville, with Mike?’
‘That’s it,’ said Gallen. ‘You check the hotel.’
Florita had booked out the Inukshuk Inns North, part of a hotel chain in Canada’s far north.
Winter looked at him. ‘What are we expecting?’
‘Oil people who can’t mind their goddamn business,’ said Gallen. ‘So, if there’s any stray vehicles or peeping Toms around the hotel, check ‘em out. There’s seven or eight people meeting with Durville today, and if I don’t like the look of them, I’ll be searching them before they enter the building.’
‘They gonna buy that?’ said McCann.
‘Depends who they are,’ said Gallen.
He bundled Florita and McCann into the first cab while the Durville party waited in the tiny terminal.
The air was cold and still as Gallen made to get in beside the driver, but a gust of wind caught him in the kidneys as he bent to enter the taxi, and the cold whistled into his ribs as though he wasn’t wearing a stitch.
He gasped as he shut the door and felt the car’s heater. ‘Holy Christ. I thought January in Clearmont was cold.’
Holding his breath for a few moments as they set off for the meet, Gallen wondered if the cold-weather gear would be enough. It was the coldest-rated kit available in the US military, the field dress worn by Marines when they did their arctic survival school in Alaska.
The ten-year-old GMC Yukon crackled over the ice and snow as they motored at thirty mph from the airport to a house two blocks behind the hotel.
‘That’s Jackie’s place,’ said the driver, nodding sagely in his Edmonton Oilers cap.
Waiting for a resolution to the sentence, Gallen realised there was no more to come. He was rescued by Florita.
‘Jackie?’ she said from the back seat. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Jackie the elder, but not this people,’ said the driver, mouth downturned and hand making a spreading motion.
Jackie’s house was a wooden-sided, gable-roofed box of the type favoured in the far north. A tendril of smoke escaped into the air, and Gallen, Florita and McCann got out of the car and walked to the dwelling.
The door was answered quickly by an old man who peered into the sunlight.
‘Jackie?’ said Florita.
‘Yep,’ said the old man.
She offered her hand. ‘Florita Mendes, Oasis Energy.’
‘Yep,’ the old man said again.
Gallen kept an eye on him as they were taken through the house and shown the large living room where the meeting was going to take place. There was a long wooden table with ten chairs arranged around it. Gallen looked under the table, searching for listening devices, then up at the ceiling where the bare beams seemed clear. He’d get Winter to sweep it later. Returning to the table, he evaluated the seating.
‘I need Harry right there,’ he said, pointing to a chair in a corner, away from the window and not within the arc of a shooter who might burst through a door firing.
As they made to leave, Gallen thanked Jackie and took Florita aside. ‘Can you ask him to insist on a no-firearms policy for his house?’
~ * ~
They stamped out the cold as the first arrivals pulled up in their cars from the airport; Gallen and McCann were in front of Jackie’s, Winter was running a final check inside and Ford was at the rear entry.
A stream of Inuit people greeted Durville at the door. He was almost unrecognisable in his arctic parka with wolverine fur lining the hood. The procession looked tame and Gallen started to relax.
‘You looked at those beams?’ he said into the mic.
‘Yep,’ replied Winter over the radio. ‘Place seems clean.’
‘Mike, how we looking?’
‘Clear, boss,’ said the Aussie. ‘But Christ, is it actually getting colder?’
Pushing into the meeting house, Gallen found Florita. ‘Which one’s Reggie?’
‘Not here,’ said Florita.
Returning outside, Gallen got a tap on the arm from McCann. ‘Lookit.’
Two dark SUVs puttered towards them, steam spewing from the exhausts. The first slid along the snow as it tried to come to a stop, and Durville moved forward, Gallen beside him.
‘Reggie,’ said the oil man, arms out wide.
The round-faced Inuit smiled big as he hit the snow. ‘Harry!’
Embracing, the two men walked towards the door of Jackie’s house, each insisting the other go first.
A large man emerged from the rear of Reggie’s SUV and another from the driver’s side. The second SUV pulled up behind the first, the doors opened and Gallen watched McCann’s hand push sideways through the false pocket of his parka, towards the holster.
Gallen reached for Durville, pushed him into the door. Five men with athletic builds and soldiers’ eyes edged from the two newly arrived SUVs towards the door. McCann fronted the first as Gallen rejoined him.
‘This is a private party, ladies,’ said McCann, his LA drawl dulled by the cold.
‘We’re with Reggie,’ said the first of the interlopers, a man with a heavy build and a Russian accent.
‘You can be with Reggie out here,’ said Gallen, deciding they were all carrying. ‘Reggie’s busy.’
The Russian’s face was obscured by a big hood and sunglasses, but there was something familiar about his mouth. ‘And you would be?’
‘I’m not confused about my name,’ said Gallen. ‘But thanks for checking.’
The Russian laughed as he turned to his buddies. ‘We have the joker.’
‘No,’ said the hulking form that appeared from behind the second SUV. ‘I’m the funny guy.’
The Russian and his henchmen turned as one, took in Kenny Winter, hand in the false pocket of his arctic parka. The leader turned back to Gallen. ‘Okay, so what now? ‘
‘We’ve been asked by the owner of this place to ensure no one but the delegates come inside,’ said Gallen.
‘They usually come with me,’ came a voice from behind Gallen. He turned towards Reggie.
‘Sorry, Mr Reggie,’ said Gallen. ‘It’s easier if none of us are in there, right?’
Reggie broke into a big smile. ‘Of course, of course. Can I send out some hot drinks?’
‘Four black coffees,’ said Gallen.
~ * ~
CHAPTER 17
Sopping up gravy with his biscuit, Gallen wondered if he had been foolish to take this gig. He’d been hardly six months out of uniform, was still a little jumpy at all sorts of things—telephones with weird ring tones, truck reversing beeps, people who didn’t say their name when they shook hands. He wasn’t totally fit, and now being thrust into a bodyguard detail in the Arctic Circle, unable to get basic answers from his employers, was tuning him for combat. He’d felt the old instincts rising the previous afternoon, when Reggie’s convoy had pulled up. It was a mental state that balanced complete relaxation with the most intense awareness; it was unmistakable to anyone with combat experience and he’d entered that zone when Winter had circled behind the henchmen, hand on his gun. If the shit had started, Gallen would have drawn down, finished it. And that scared him.
‘Coffee?’ said the breakfast waitress, walking past the table.
‘Fill ‘er up,’ said McCann, Ford nodding his agreement.
Winter was stalking the halls of the hotel, looking for trouble, and two tables away Florita made calls and scribbled on her legal pad while Durville cradled his head in his hands, massaging the hangover out of his temples.
Winter appeared in the doorway of the dining room. ‘Got some tourist people here, boss. Manager says they’re okay.’
An elderly couple walked into the dining room in sealskins and fur boots as Gallen looked up.
‘My name’s Billy,’ said the man slowly. ‘This is Sami. You gotta learn how to make the kayak, before you go back to the big city.’
Gallen smiled. ‘I do?’
‘What’s he gonna do with a kayak in Wyoming?’ asked McCann.
‘Man travels,’ said Billy with a shrug. ‘Man needs a kayak.’
‘It’s fucking obvious,’ said Harry Durville, overhearing the conversation. ‘Shit, Gerry, these people make their living from the guests and you go and book the place out? ‘
‘We’re outta here in ninety minutes,’ said Gallen, tapping his G-Shock.
‘Billy, over here if you would,’ said Durville, still slurring slightly.
Pulling out a wad of cash, Durville put several hundred dollars in Billy’s hand and pointed at Gallen. ‘Billy, would you and Sami please take my ungracious employee and spend an hour showing him your kayaks? Would you do that for me?’
Standing reluctantly, Gallen let Sami grab him by the arm and sweep him off like she wanted to dance. They reached the dining room doors with laughter reverberating behin
d them.
~ * ~
Billy’s workshop was a low-ceilinged shed crowded with wooden frames and skins stretched so tight Gallen could see through them. Lengths of gut rope dried over a wood stove.
Stopping in front of a completed two-person sea kayak—seeming enormous in the enclosed space—Gallen touched the runes and symbols etched into the dried skin of the vessel, painted with dried blood and squashed berries.
