by Stan Jones
“Yes, but—”
“ ‘Yes, but’ my butt! There’s going to be no sign of Uncle Frosty up there and Robert Kelly’s not going to have any idea what you’re talking about and you’re going to come back with not a shred of evidence, nothing but a fifteen-hundred-dollar hole in our travel budget. What, are you guys taking your rifles? Is this just a caribou hunt on the state nickel?” He pushed the travel authorization back across the blotter to Active.
Active couldn’t help grinning.
“What?”
“I don’t own a rifle,” Active said.
Carnaby shook his head, but appeared to calm down.
“You want to listen now?”
Carnaby shrugged, but put on a somewhat less baleful expression.
“I think there’s a good chance Kelly won’t have had a chance yet to hide Uncle Frosty—”
“And why—”
Active held up a hand. “—because of this storm. Cowboy says judging from what we’ve been getting down here the past few days, the pass is probably getting sixty-, seventy-knot winds, blowing snow, visibility maybe fifty feet, maybe less.”
“But if this Robert Kelly spends all his time out in the country anyway maybe he could—”
“Cowboy says not,” Active said. “Not in that kind of weather. Not in that pass.”
“I don’t know,” Carnaby said. “There’s something about this that still doesn’t feel right. Let’s say it is Robert Kelly. He steals Uncle Frosty from the museum Wednesday night, maybe the wee hours of Thursday morning, right?”
Active nodded.
“Why would he wait till Thursday night, Friday morning, to kill Victor Solomon? Twenty-four hours later. What was he doing for a whole day?”
“I don’t know,” Active said, uneasy that Carnaby had put his finger on the same soft spot as everyone else. “But Robert Kelly’s all we’ve got. If we don’t go talk to him, the case is basically dead, as far as I can see.” He pushed the travel authorization across to Carnaby again.
“I still like Calvin Maiyumerak for this,” Carnaby said. “Maybe we should sweat him a little more.”
Active shrugged. “We tried. He’s unsweatable, unless something turns up to shake his alibi with Queenie Buckland.”
“How about Johnny Bass? He doesn’t even have an alibi.”
“He’s pure sleaze, but I got the feeling he was telling the truth. For once in his life.”
Carnaby sighed. “What about this past weekend? You canvass old Victor’s neighbors?”
Active nodded. “Silver’s people did. Nobody saw nada. I went through his house, too. More nada.”
Carnaby frowned at the travel authorization, making no move toward his pen.
“I don’t know,” Active said. “Maybe I should take somebody with me. This Kelly, if he’s our guy, already killed somebody. This could be dangerous. Maybe I should get a bigger plane, take Dickie Nelson along for backup.”
Carnaby’s frown deepened to a glare of pure suspicion.
“Cowboy says the only other plane that can get in up there is probably the Lienhofer Beaver . . .”
Carnaby reached for his pen.
“. . . which goes for eight-fifty an hour.”
Carnaby signed the authorization and handed it to Active. “You’re like a goddamn toothache.”
“Just doing my job.” Active folded the authorization and put it in an inside pocket.
“But seriously,” Carnaby said. “I am a little nervous sending just one guy on this.”
“Goes with,” Active said.
Carnaby nodded. “Uh-huh. But be careful. Wear a vest, take one of our rifles, use whatever cover you can find up there. You guys going up this afternoon?”
Active shook his head. “The storm’s starting to peter out, all right, but Cowboy doesn’t think there’s any point trying to get in up there before morning.”
“So it’s first light?”
“Yup,” Active said. “The dawn patrol.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS JUST AFTER six-thirty the next morning when Active stopped the Ladies’ Model beside the right wingtip of the red-and-white Lienhofer Super Cub. The plane was parked on the sea in front of Chukchi, roped down with two metal anchors frozen into the ice, and facing into what felt like about thirty miles an hour of west wind. The plane’s nose was draped in a blue insulated engine cover, oil stained on the underside. Occasionally a gust rocked the kitelike craft, yanking the tie-downs tight.
Next to the plane’s left wing stood an avgas barrel with a hand pump on top. Next to that stood a snowmachine and sled that Active recognized as belonging to Cowboy Decker. Low dunes of snow trailed downwind from the gas barrel, from the tail of the plane, and from each of its skis.
The clamshell half-doors on the side of the cockpit popped open—one flipped up and one down—and Cowboy climbed out of the front seat, a cigarette between his yellowish teeth and a baseball cap on his head. Like Active, he wore white rubber army-surplus bunny boots and a snowmachine suit. Unlike Active, he wasn’t wearing a parka, but Active saw one thrown over the backseat. Cowboy did have a knit headband around his ears. Huge nylon-covered mittens dangled at his sides on a cord looped over his shoulders. He wore steel-framed glasses, which Active had discovered was somewhat unusual in the Arctic. Most of the bespectacled used plastic frames, because they didn’t pick up the cold as much. Metal frames, he had heard, would freeze your ears.
“Morning, Cowboy,” Active said.
Cowboy nodded. “Nathan.” The pilot cut his eyes toward the Yamaha. “Nice snowmachine.”
Active studied the pilot’s expression to see if there was going to be a remark about the color, but Cowboy only said, “What happened to your windshield?”
This gave Active an excuse to tell about his crash on the way to Whyborn Sivula’s whaling camp, which in the recounting became much more a near-death experience than it had been in reality.
The pilot held an aviation chart in his hand, which was clad in the light wool glove people wore under their mittens if the cold was more than mildly serious. After acting appropriately impressed by Active’s snowmachine accident, Cowboy signaled they should turn their backs to the wind, and they sheltered the map with their bodies as they studied it. To the east, the way they were facing, a dull orange glow on the horizon showed where the sun was just coming up over the rolling tundra behind the village.
The pilot jabbed a gloved forefinger down on the map. “The guy in Caribou Creek says Robert Kelly’s camp is around in here.”
Active bent his head to study the spot. He saw a circle marked in pen south and west of the summit of Shaman Pass. It was in an area of pothole tundra lakes between two streams that emptied into the Angatquq River, which drained the south side of the pass.
“Think you can find it?” Active asked. “That’s a pretty big circle.”
Cowboy shrugged. “I can go to the spot, sure. Can I find the camp? Probably, but it may take a while. The guy says it’s in a stand of willows on a little creek that isn’t on the map. I gotta admit, though—I’ve been through the pass a few times and I never saw a camp in there.”
“You want to go or not?”
“It’s the state’s nickel,” Cowboy said. “I get paid whether we find it or we don’t.”
Active turned and looked north, the way they would go to reach Shaman Pass. The foothills of the Brooks Range barely showed through the snow haze and the morning dusk that had not yet been cut away by the rising sun. The wind bit his face and brought tears to his eyes. It was five below, Kay-Chuck had said while he was shaving, windchill minus forty-five. Tiny streams of snow flowed over his boots like smoke. Beneath the rushing of the wind he heard a faint hiss as the snow scraped over the ice, the snowdrifts, the fabric skin of the Super Cub. “What about this wind?”
“Now who doesn’t want to go?”
“I mean, what’s it going to be like up in the pass? Will we get in?”
Cowboy looked north now
. “I think,” he said. “It’s still easing off and sometimes it’ll calm down inland before it will here on the coast, though the weather service is saying we may be about to get another one of these blows. Only way is go look.” He shrugged again.
Active said, “Let’s go, then.”
Cowboy pointed at his dogsled, where two rectangular metal cans rested in a wooden crate. “You fill those up from the gas barrel while I preflight her.”
“We can’t make it on your tanks?”
“Just barely, especially if we spend much time looking for this guy Kelly’s camp.” Cowboy flicked his cigarette into the air. The wind carried it out of sight. “Throw in an extra ten gallons, and you don’t have to worry about it.”
While Active figured out how to work the pump on the avgas barrel, Cowboy pulled the engine cover off and stuffed it through a door in the fuselage behind the cockpit. Then he pulled a little heater out of the engine compartment, snuffed it, and put it behind the Super Cub’s passenger seat. Finally, he checked the engine oil and the fuel level in the two wing tanks, then turned to Active, who was just topping off the second can of avgas. “You about done?” Cowboy shouted.
Active nodded and carried the cans to the side of the plane. Cowboy stowed them behind the passenger seat, shrugged into his parka, and climbed into the front seat.
Active looked at the ropes still attached to the wings, then at Cowboy. “Aren’t you going to untie it?”
Cowboy, busy at the controls, didn’t turn his head. He just yelled. “Too much wind. She’s liable to blow away. I’ll get her cranked up and hold her in place with the engine, then you untie her and jump in.”
“What? No! Is that safe?”
“You want to go or not?”
Active shook his head in resignation and trudged around the tail of the plane to the left wing as the propeller turned and the engine began to cough. By the time he reached the attachment point at midwing, the engine was running steadily. He flipped off his mittens and let them dangle beside him on their cord as he loosened the knot and pulled the end of the rope through an eyebolt fastened to the wing strut. His wool undergloves weren’t much protection. His fingers were stinging by the time he finished with the right tie-down and crawled into the passenger seat behind Cowboy. He fastened his seat belt and shoulder harness, feeling huge and clumsy in his parka with the Kevlar vest under his shirt and the Smith &Wesson poking him from its holster on his belt. He slipped on a headset for the intercom, pulled his parka hood over the headset, and put his mittens back on.
Cowboy’s voice crackled in his ears. “You ready back there?”
“Yep,” he lied.
The engine revved up but the plane didn’t move. Cowboy throttled back, then revved it up again. It still didn’t move.
“Shit,” the pilot said through the intercom. He throttled the engine back to idle. “The skis are froze in. You get out and take hold of the right wing strut there and rock her till she breaks loose. I’ll hold her to a crawl till you get back in.”
Active looked at the wing strut in question, the frozen-in skis on either side of the cockpit, and the back of Cowboy’s parka. He thought of many things he could and probably should say. But what he said was, “OK.”
He slipped off the headset, unharnessed himself, opened the doors, and crawled out of the plane into the blast of propwash. He walked over and put his right shoulder under the wing strut and heaved. The plane rocked, but the skis didn’t budge. The landing gear seemed to be spring-loaded somehow, which made sense for a plane that had to bounce down on gravel bars and snow-covered tundra. In any event, the plane and the skis appeared to be capable of quasi-independent motion, and the skis stayed on the snow however hard he rocked the wings.
He glared over at Cowboy, who gave him a grinning thumbs-up and hit the throttle. The engine roared, Active rocked the wings again, and finally the right ski broke free. The plane tried to pivot left, but Cowboy caught it with the rudder and then the other ski came loose.
Cowboy throttled back as the Super Cub began to crawl forward. Active ran to the cockpit door and got his upper half inside, then wriggled the rest of himself in. Cowboy shut the doors and let the crawl continue as Active rebuckled the safety harness.
Finally Active yelled, “Ready” over the intercom. Cowboy hit the throttle and the skis rattled across the drifts that covered the ice of Chukchi Bay. A gust caught them and the right wing started to lift. Cowboy sawed at the controls and then they were flying. “You see now why us Bush pilots get the big bucks?”
At first Active couldn’t speak. “You should pay me,” he croaked when his breathing slowed. “I’m doing all the work.”
“Goes with,” Cowboy said.
Visibility improved as they climbed out of the surface haze kicked up by the wind. The ice of the Chukchi Sea stretched away to the west, the wind pulling long ribbons of snow toward the village. To the north, they could see over the Sulana Hills into the frozen valley of the Katonak River, which crawled like a white snake toward the heart of the Brooks Range.
Lazy tendrils of snow curled off the crests of the Sulana Hills. “Shit,” Cowboy said through the headphones. “Gonna be bumpy. Your seat belt fastened real tight?”
“Now who doesn’t want to go?” Active asked.
“Not me,” Cowboy said.
Active was pondering Cowboy’s response when the first jolt of turbulence hit them. The gas cans clanked behind Active and he shot straight up until his shoulder harness arrested his flight, at the same moment his head collided with the steel tubing in the ceiling of the cockpit. His parka hood was up, so it didn’t hurt much.
But it was embarrassing. He wondered if Cowboy had noticed. He jerked his seat belt an inch tighter, and cinched down the shoulder harness until he felt like a hunchback.
“Now is your seat belt fastened real tight?” Decker asked. Then he snickered.
Active settled down to suffer, thankful that he had at least been blessed with a stomach immune to airsickness.
Once they had jolted their way across the Sulana Hills and entered the broad lower valley of the Katonak, the turbulence subsided. Active loosened the seat belt and shoulder harness and relaxed a little.
Cowboy came on the headphones with a scratch of static. “So this Robert Kelly guy. You really think he killed Victor Solomon with a harpoon?”
Active debated how much to tell Cowboy. Since it was police business, the pilot should in theory be told nothing at all, except that the troopers needed to question Robert Kelly in connection with an investigation. Robert Kelly might be dangerous, however, in which case there should in fact be a discussion about how to minimize Cowboy’s exposure to that danger. And if Robert Kelly wasn’t dangerous—well, then this long, cold, bumpy plane ride was a waste of fifteen hundred taxpayer dollars. Just like Carnaby had said.
“Could be,” Active said finally. “That’s why I want to talk to him.”
“What if he harpoons you, too?”
“I’m wearing body armor. The harpoon’ll bounce off.”
“Uh-huh,” Cowboy said. “And what about me?”
“Let’s just find his camp and take it from there. If it doesn’t look safe, we’ll land a mile or two away and you can wait for me while I go in on snowshoes.”
Cowboy was silent for a few minutes as the Super Cub chugged over the tundra, creeks and pothole lakes of the Katonak Flats. “OK, but I’m keeping my finger on the starter button. Anybody comes my way and it’s not you, I’m outta there.”
Cowboy was silent for a few minutes, then said, “And then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if you don’t come back?”
“Fly back to Chukchi and tell Carnaby,” Active said. “He’ll figure out something.”
“Sounds like an unsafe operation to me.”
“Goes with,” Active said.
“What’s your theory on luck, Nathan?” Cowboy asked after a pause.
“Well, the more the
better.”
“No, seriously. You think you’re born with a set amount, like a quota, and when you use it up, that’s it, you’re a goner? Or are some people just born lucky and they stay lucky till they get old and die of boredom?”
“I never thought about it,” Active said. “I don’t know about the quota idea, though.”
Cowboy paused again. “Yeah, me neither. But I wonder sometimes.”
“Wonder what?”
“Where that saying came from. You know, ‘His luck ran out.’”
“I see your point.”
Cowboy nodded. “That’s why I don’t like it when somebody says I’m lucky. What if I’ve used up my last allotment and the next time I get in a tight spot I’m not gonna make it out?”
Active didn’t reply for a while. “What are you saying?” he asked finally. “Are we in a tight spot now?”
He saw the pilot hunch forward and peer up the valley toward Shaman Pass.
“Not yet,” Cowboy said. “Not that I know of.”
Active shook his head. This must be Cowboy’s version of the bullet dream. He wondered if the pilot had his own version of Nelda Qivits.
As they ascended the Katonak, the valley narrowed, the Brooks Range closing in on both sides. The peaks were buried in the clouds. Lower down, long pennons of snow waved from knife-edged white ridges.
The turbulence hit them again, the gas cans clanging against each other behind Active’s seat, the Super Cub rattling in a dozen unidentifiable places. Active tightened his shoulder harness and seat belt, and tasted salt blood from his cheek when a sudden hammer blow from beneath slammed his teeth together. After that, he kept them clenched, hoping that Cowboy would growl through the intercom that enough was enough and turn the plane around.
Cowboy didn’t say anything. Finally Active unclenched his teeth to ask if the clouds were low enough to close them out of the pass.
“Nah,” Cowboy said. “These clouds are three thousand feet, maybe four. The pass is only a couple thousand.”
They pounded on up the Katonak for another twenty minutes, then Cowboy banked the Super Cub left and pointed the nose up a white furrow that meandered away through the tundra to the north. “The Angatquq River,” Cowboy said.
