Manitou Canyon

by William Kent Krueger

  “There it is,” Bowers said.

  Out the window, Rainy could see a tiny settlement on the edge of a small lake. It lay just below the mouth of a long, narrow break in the hills to the west, which were cloaked in cloud and precipitation. A river threaded its way out of all that dismal gray. The Manitou, she guessed. They touched down on the lake, and Bowers eased the de Havilland to a little beach near the edge of the town. Daniel got out and secured the floatplane to a sign posted on the shoreline. As he did so, a vehicle appeared from the town and approached them, driving along the beach itself. It was a white Chevy Tahoe, with the RCMP insignia painted across the side. The Tahoe drew to a stop and a lone officer got out. He stood watching as Rainy and the others disembarked, then he came to greet them.

  “Constable Rudy Markham,” he said and held out his hand.

  Markham was a round little man of perhaps forty, with a ruddy face and eyes that seemed better suited to an affectionate but not very bright family dog. He wore a thick walrus mustache, which at the moment, was dabbed with what looked like hot dog mustard.

  Daniel took the proffered hand and introduced the others. Then he asked, “Where’s the rest of your team?”

  “Team?” The constable looked confused.

  “They told us an RCMP contingent would be meeting us.”

  “That would be me,” the constable said. “It’s a one-man detachment here in Gordonville. But we’ve got an incident team coming up from Thunder Bay.”

  “They’ve left?”

  “Not yet. They’re waiting for someone from CSIS to arrive.”

  “CSIS?”

  “Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Another branch of the Crown. Apparently they’ve been conducting their own investigation into the activities of the Warrior Cohort.”

  “Warrior Cohort?” Daniel said.

  “The people they think are behind all this. A First Nations terrorist network of some kind.”

  “How long until they get here?”

  “Once they get started, it would normally take three hours.” The constable looked at the cauldron of the sky and what was bubbling there. Snowflakes had begun to spill out of that dark, swirling mass. A strong wind had risen, and within it was carried the cold certainty of a storm. “But this weather coming in is sure to slow them down. So . . .” He gave a shrug.

  “We can’t wait,” Daniel said. “What if they blow the dam?”

  The constable wiped at his mustache and studied the mustard smear on his glove. “As I understand it, you don’t know for sure that’s what these people are up to. And, hell, Aaron would never do that.”

  “Aaron Commanda?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know him?”

  “Everybody around here knows Aaron. And Aaron knows that if he blew that dam, the water would come roaring down the canyon and wipe out Gordonville.”

  “What if Aaron isn’t in charge of whatever’s going down?” Daniel said. “Your NSCI folks believe there’s a much larger network involved. This Warrior Cohort, whoever they are, might not care about the good citizens of Gordonville the way you and Aaron do. We need to leave for White Woman Lake, and we need to leave now.”

  Markham thought about that. “Any idea how many of them there might be?”

  “No clue.”

  The constable’s clear, simple eyes considered the hills to the west and the mouth of the canyon, which lay a stone’s throw from the town. “I tried to call the night watchman up at the dam before I came out to meet you folks. Couldn’t get through. I just figured the phone line was down. Happens sometimes when a storm sweeps in.” He shook his head, took a deep breath, and pulled himself up, as if to make himself a bit taller. “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to drive to the Manitou Canyon Dam and secure it, if I can. Then I’ll worry about Aaron and White Woman Lake.”

  “Just you, Constable? Look, we flew up here to help.”

  “I can’t take responsibility for your safety.”

  “We’re not asking you to,” Daniel said. “And think about this. What if you get up there and discover you need backup to save that dam? Wouldn’t it be best to have it already with you? I’m a trained law enforcement officer. I brought my service weapon, and I know how to handle it.”

  The constable chewed on his mustache while he weighed Daniel’s words. “All right,” he finally said, but not decisively.

  Rainy said, “I’m an excellent shot.”

  The others looked at her with surprise. This was a new piece of information to all of them. Except, apparently, Henry. She’d never told anyone about this part of herself, part of the someone she’d once been, but nothing was hidden from him.

  “If I have to, I will shoot to kill. It won’t be the first time.” Again to the obvious amazement of those present. Except Henry. She was relieved when, despite their surprise, no one asked her to explain.

  “I get my deer every year,” Bowers offered. “And I’d draw a bead on a man, if it would save Cork.”

  “I don’t know about this.” The constable looked suddenly overwhelmed and completely unsure.

  “The lives of everyone in Gordonville might be at stake,” Daniel said. “We don’t have time to stand here and argue.”

  The constable tugged nervously at his mustache. “I’ll need to check in with Thunder Bay.”

  “Know what they’ll do?” Daniel said. “They’ll order you to stand down until they arrive. And if they arrive and find that the town’s been destroyed along with everyone in it, probably us included, they’ll blame you officially because you knew about the danger and did nothing. You want that to be your legacy here, Constable?”

  The officer thought that over.

  “Alternatively,” Daniel went on, “you can secure the dam and report that to them. Maybe a commendation’ll come from it.”

  “I . . .” the constable began, then hesitated. “I guess so,” he finally said. He eyed Henry. “We’ll be a little crowded. I think you’d best stay back, old-timer.”

  “A mouse would take up more room,” Henry said.

  “No disrespect, gramps, but a mouse would be of more use to me than you.”

  Rainy said, “Henry needs to be there.”

  “Right,” Daniel and Stephen agreed together.

  Constable Markham was wearing a dark blue ball cap with a maple leaf on the crown. The wind gusted suddenly, throwing a flurry of snowflakes at the gathering. The constable’s cap lifted off his head and tumbled across the beach. He ran for it, snatched it up, and settled it firmly on his head. He marched back to the others, trying, Rainy thought, not to look like a complete doofus.

  “Okay,” he said with authority. He nodded to Bowers. “You stay here. We might need that floatplane of yours before this is all over. We’re going back to my office and gear up. What’s the frequency on your plane’s radio?”

  Bowers told him, and the constable gave him the frequency he’d be using on the radio in his Tahoe.

  “Stand by, and if you hear us holler, you come flying,” the constable said.

  Bowers looked up at the storm clouds that had already enveloped Gordonville and the lake. “Not sure I’ll be able to help.”

  “Then get the word to those who can.” The constable turned and, as if commanding troops, said, “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Fox stood with his back to the fireplace and listened as John Harris explained the situation of the Manitou Canyon Dam. Fox had probably heard some of it before, the part about the dam itself being a hopeless target. The possibility of blowing the rock that served as anchor on either side was a new and, judging from the look on Fox’s face, intriguing twist.

  “There’s no guarantee it will work,” Harris said. “But in my opinion, that’s the only chance you have of bringing that dam down.”

  They’d all gathered in
the main room. Cheval and Mrs. Gray stood beside the map of White Woman Lake that hung on the wall. Cork and Lindsay sat together on the divan. Behind them, still holding a rifle, loomed Brown, whom Cork now knew as Isaac McQuabbie. Harris was alone in a chair. Aaron stood near him, the rifle still in his grip. Indigo was tending to the fireplace, using an iron poker to move and resettle burning logs.

  “If it works,” Fox asked, “will it go right away?”

  “It might. I can’t say for sure. But it will certainly screw with the integrity of the dam. Its viability will have to be completely reassessed. They’ll have to cease filling the reservoir behind it. At the very least, your Manitou River will be given a reprieve.”

  “What do you think, Mr. Indigo?” Fox asked his cohort.

  Indigo rose, the iron poker still in his hand. “I think he’s telling the truth. If he isn’t, we can still kill O’Connor.” He gave Cork a pleasant smile and lifted the poker in his direction.

  “All right. Let’s get started,” Fox said.

  “We need to get word to Gordonville,” Aaron said.

  “Why?” Fox seemed surprised by the suggestion.

  “If that dam goes, those people will be wiped out.”

  “Many of those people helped build the dam.”

  “It was a good-paying job,” Aaron said. “Rare up here. I don’t hold that against them.”

  “And some of those people in town are relatives,” Isaac McQuabbie protested. “We’re not killing family.”

  “In this war, sacrifices will be necessary,” Fox said. “Mr. Gray understood that.”

  “It was Flynn’s choice,” Aaron said, emphatic about the man’s real name, as if it gave his death weight and meaning. “That’s something you haven’t offered those people in Gordonville.”

  “And I don’t intend to,” Fox said. “If that dam goes and those people are killed, the message it sends to Ottawa is all the more powerful. I thought you wanted the dam gone. Otherwise, why am I here?”

  “You’re here because it serves your own purposes,” Aaron said. “Don’t give me a lot of crap about caring about us. Before we set off those charges, we send word to Gordonville. That’s all there is to it.”

  “You’ll never be a true warrior, Aaron.”

  Without warning, Indigo swung the poker and clipped the tall man a glancing blow across the side of his head, not hard enough for serious damage but enough that he dropped his rifle and fell back upon the floor. Cheval jumped to his feet, but Indigo had his Glock out.

  “Don’t anyone move,” he said.

  Isaac McQuabbie raised his rifle. “Drop your gun, Indigo.”

  Indigo didn’t.

  “I thought you were one of us,” Fox said.

  “I’m not like you,” Isaac said. “I just want to save the river. You promised no one would get hurt.”

  “Things change.” Fox slowly bent and reached for the rifle Aaron had dropped.

  “Don’t,” Isaac said.

  Fox ignored the warning and lifted the rifle while Isaac stood wavering.

  “You can shoot me, or you can shoot Mr. Indigo, but you can’t shoot us both,” Fox said. “If you kill me, Mr. Indigo will shoot you, then he’ll shoot Ms. Harris. We don’t need either of you anymore. If you choose to shoot Mr. Indigo, then I’ll be the one to kill you both. If, on the other hand, you put that rifle down, I promise no one gets shot. We do our work tonight, and we’re gone. The choice is yours.”

  The struggle of decision was clear on his young face, but Isaac finally set the rifle on the floor.

  “All right,” Fox said. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us tonight.”

  As Fox had indicated, they’d stockpiled plenty of high explosives. In one of the empty cabins, there were cases of dynamite, TNT, and C-4. Stacked against one whole wall, like sandbags in a bunker, were sacks of ANFO, ammonium nitrate. There were boxes filled with boosters, detonators, caps, and fuse coils. Two new Cobra gas-powered rock drills stood in a corner, with a dozen carbide bits arrayed on the floor around them like goods in a bazaar.

  John Harris decided on the dynamite. “Considering the conditions we’ll be working under, it’s the safest choice,” he explained.

  Fox and Indigo, always with their weapons at the ready, kept a watchful eye as the others loaded a pickup parked near the cabin. When the truck bed contained everything Harris thought necessary, Fox said, “Okay, everyone back into the lodge.”

  After they’d assembled, he said, “We’ll need lots of muscle tonight. Harris, Cheval, O’Connor, Aaron, you’re coming.”

  “What about the rest of us?” Isaac said.

  “You, your girlfriend, and Mrs. Gray will stay here.”

  “No,” the sour woman said. “I want to be there. It’s what we came for, what Flynn died for.”

  Fox studied her and finally said, “All right.”

  “So Lindsay and me, we just stay back and wait?” Isaac said. The young man clearly liked that idea.

  “Yes, but in the cooler in the kitchen.”

  “What?”

  “Dress warm,” Indigo said with a grin. “We might be a while.”

  After they’d donned their coats and gloves and stocking caps, Lindsay and Isaac were herded into the small walk-in cooler.

  “If we don’t freeze, we might suffocate,” Lindsay said.

  “There’s plenty of air for a few hours. That’s all we’ll be gone,” Fox assured them. “This is just a little insurance, so we know you won’t be tempted to interfere.”

  Before the door was shut and locked, Lindsay looked beyond Fox to where her grandfather stood. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “Forget it,” John Harris said. “It’s on my shoulders.”

  Fox shut the door.

  “I’ll never see her again, will I?” Harris said.

  “Don’t be such a Debbie Downer,” Indigo told him. “All this goes well, who knows? You both may be lying in the Maui sun next week. Let’s go.”

  They took two vehicles. Cheval drove the pickup, transporting with him Mrs. Gray and Indigo. Aaron drove a new-looking black Yukon, Cork at his side, hands bound with duct tape. Fox sat in back with Harris, whose hands had also been bound. Fox held a threatening handgun.

  They followed a gravel road that skirted White Woman Lake, then tunneled east through thick forest, roughly paralleling the course of the Manitou River. Snow fell heavily, and Aaron moved the Yukon slowly because the road was rough and twisting and because the snow sometimes made the way ahead difficult to see. With the storm, night had come early. The taillights of the pickup stared back at them out of the dark and the falling snow like the eyes of a demon.

  “I’m sorry we dragged you into this, O’Connor,” Aaron said as they bounced over the rugged road.

  “How’d they talk you into it?” Cork asked.

  “We didn’t have to talk much,” Fox said from the back. “A very nice convergence of mutual interests. The people of White Woman Lake wanted to save their sacred canyon, and we wanted to make a statement to those blind fools down in Ottawa.”

  “There you go with that ‘we’ again,” Cork said. “Who are you?”

  “The RCMP has taken to calling us the Warrior Cohort. I like that. And who are we? We are the Native underground. Indigenous people fed up with feeling powerless. And not just here in Canada. Thanks to modern technology, the only good thing White people gave us, this war is worldwide.”

  “Terrorism,” Cork said.

  “Justice,” Fox replied.

  John Harris asked, “How exactly is destroying the Manitou Canyon Dam justice?”

  “It was sold to the Canadian people as part of the nation’s great push to become the world’s leader in producing hydroelectric power for its citizens,” Fox explained. “But the truth is that almost none of the electricity those generat
ors produce will ever reach a Canadian household. It was built to power Caldecott’s Highland Mine, a mine that will eventually dwarf any open-pit iron operation on this continent. Am I right, Aaron?”

  Aaron nodded. “It’ll devastate the Manitou Highlands. It’ll kill the land and almost certainly contaminate the Manitou River and everything downstream.”

  Fox said, “The Caldecott Corporation, of course, insists that it will have in place all kinds of safety measures to keep that from happening. But we all know about that kind of promise. You know the Mount Polley Mine in B.C., O’Connor?”

  “Never heard of it,” Cork said.

  “The ecosystem of the entire region was contaminated by heavy metals from the spill of a massive holding pond there. The same thing with the spill at Caldecott’s West Caribou Mine in Alberta. Their high-tech holding ponds ended up releasing billions of liters of slurry into the Caribou River. The leakage has poisoned hundreds of First Nations people in Fort Saint Antoine. You can ask Mrs. Gray about that, eh, Aaron?”

  “Her entire family is sick because of it, Cork. Dying,” Aaron said.

  “But have the Canadian people learned any lessons?” Fox went on. “I look at the Manitou Canyon Dam and this new Caldecott mine, and I think not.”

  “And you find justice in blowing up the dam and killing the people in Gordonville?” Harris said.

  “The world paid very little attention to the spills in B.C. and Alberta. Know why? Nobody died, or at least not immediately. It was Grandmother Earth who suffered. When Gordonville is destroyed, people—White people—will notice. And something will be done.”

  “Do you know what will be done?” Cork said. “They’ll simply spend a great deal of time and effort hunting you down.”

  “If they find me and kill me, they’ll have accomplished little. In Iroquois myth, there are creatures called kanontsistonties. They’re disembodied, flying heads that wreak vengeance. That is the Warrior Cohort. No body but many heads. In this, one man is nothing.”

  The pickup ahead suddenly pulled off the road onto what looked like a logging trail.

  “What the hell?” Fox said. “Follow him.”