A Cold Blooded Business

by Dana Stabenow

  Wednesday morning Kate called the airport first, to be assured the flight would take off as scheduled. The whole experience felt anticlimactic as she accepted her boarding pass and walked down to the gate, where the plane was already loading. At one minute past nine, the nose gear lifted off Runway 18, northbound. The rest of the passengers dozed; Kate, keyed up and restless, rooted through the seat pocket in front of her and found a brochure published by RPetCo’s Department of Public and Government Affairs.

  The North Slope, she read, stretched across northern Alaska for six hundred miles, from the Chukchi Sea to the Canadian border. A hundred-mile slide north from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean, the Slope was one enormous delta for the hundreds of rivers and streams that rose in the Brooks and flowed into the Beaufort Sea. Eighteen inches of delicate, spongy tundra insulated two thousand feet of permafrost, five thousand feet below which was the oil formation. Seven inches of annual precipitation froze the tundra into a barren, inhospitable desert for ten months out of the year, and then in June and July relented to melt into a soggy garden of arctic poppies and northern primroses and Siberian asters, where trumpeter swans and Canadian honkers and snow geese and green-spectacled eider ducks fed and bred with equal abandon.

  There followed a series of pictures in glorious living color of said wildlife frolicking through various ponds and streams. Lest visions of Thanksgiving dinner begin to dance in the head of the reader, the brochure hastened to add that firearms were not allowed within the boundaries of the oil field. For all intents and purposes, the text intoned sternly, Prudhoe Bay was a wildlife refuge. There was a picture of John King standing in the middle of the tundra, with a drilling rig rearing its derrick discreetly in the distant background, and a caribou cow and calf grazing between them, a perfect example of industry and environment coexisting in harmony. The caption read, “‘We’re all environmentalists here,’ says John King, Chief Executive Officer for Royal Petroleum Corporation.”

  Uh-huh, Kate thought, and turned the page.

  Here was matter more necessary to her immediate needs, a physical description of the area in which she was to concentrate her investigation. Prudhoe Bay proper was less than a mile across, barely a dimple in the great expanse of coastline, bordered by the Kuparuk River on the west and by the Sagavanirktok River on the east, bisected by the smaller Putuligayak River. The only measurable topography other than the rivers were the pingoes, sixty-foot circular mounds in the tundra created by frost heaves, and the hundreds of shallow, elongated lakes scattered by a lavish hand from horizon to horizon. Kate turned back to the page with the picture of John King on it and found examples of both in the background. The lake looked more like a puddle and the pingo little more than an anthill.

  She turned the page and was offered the short course in Prudhoe Bay history. A British explorer had mapped the area in 1910 and noted in his log the existence of shallow black puddles formed by oil seeps. In 1944 the United States Navy began drilling exploratory wells in Naval Petroleum Reserve Number 4. The first substantial paydirt in the form of the Sadlerochit supergiant oil formation was discovered by Royal Petroleum Company in April 1968, followed by a free-for-all lease sale in September that netted the state of Alaska nearly a billion dollars. What Kate remembered most about the lease sale was the fact that the Alaska state legislature had every dime of the proceeds spent in less than two years, a feat of pork barrel legerdemain that had elected officials gawking in admiration from the Yukon to the Potomac. It was that feat that eventually resulted in the creation in 1976 of the Alaska Permanent Fund, sort of a savings account for the state endowed by taxes on Prudhoe Bay crude. Half the interest generated by the Fund was divided among each and every Alaskan citizen in a yearly payment.

  Last year the PFD had been over $800, considerably more than Judas’s thirty pieces of silver.

  Pity the poor Alaskan, Kate thought. Caught between the Scylla of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend and the Charybdis of the RPetCo Anchorage spill. There was a picture in the brochure of a Very Large Crude Carrier negotiating the Valdez Narrows on a calm and cloudless day, a day very much like the one four years before when the RPetCo Anchorage had run aground on Bligh Reef and spilled half a day’s production of Prudhoe crude eight hundred miles across the Gulf of Alaska.

  Kate had taken the ferry from Cordova to Whittier the previous summer; during the entire ten-hour trip she had seen two sea gulls and three mountain goats on a cliff on the way into the Whittier harbor. That day, too, had been a day like the day of the spill, and on days like that on previous ferry trips she could expect to see rafts of sea otters, pods of killer whales, lone eagles soaring high, arctic terns swarming low, schools of silver salmon smacking their way toward shore and the cold, clear streams that had seen their first days and now would see their last.

  That day, she saw two sea gulls and three goats.

  She took a deep breath. The job, she reminded herself firmly, she was on a job, a job for which she would be very well paid. Her breath released on a long sigh, and she went back to her history lesson.

  When construction of the pipeline was complete and the Prudhoe Bay field fully delineated and the bookkeepers done adding up all the numbers, the fourteen minority owners took a back seat to the two majority owners, RPetCo and Amerex, who would operate the field in tandem. Prudhoe Bay now consisted of a Base Camp for each operator; six Production Centers, three on a side; the field’s power station, which ran off natural gas produced from the field; a compression plant that reinjected produced natural gas back into the formation until such time as a gas line would be built; Pump Station One, the first of twelve pump stations to push oil down the TransAlaska Pipeline to Valdez; and a collection of service camps dotting the field between. A gravel road called the Backbone connected the main facilities with the haul road that paralleled the pipeline, and access roads shot off in every direction to well pads and flow lines and old drilling sites and mud pits and God knew where else.

  A lot of room to run and hide, should the need arise. She wondered how one lone investigator was supposed to cover that much territory, and for the first time began to doubt her ability to get this particular job done.

  The brochure deteriorated at that point into a lengthy discussion of the Permo-Triassic period, faulted subsurface sandstone structures, and the difference between porosity and permeability and how the absence of either would have rendered the Sadlerochit reservoir, the largest oil field on the North American continent, unrecoverable. The slightly horrified tone of the text conveyed the impression that this outcome was utterly unthinkable.

  Yawning, Kate closed the brochure and looked out the window. Anchorage in March looked a lot better from thirty thousand feet up, but you could say that about the whole state, except for Denali, which looked the same at any time of the year, all 20,320 dazzling, blue-white, sharp-edged feet of her. The Alaska Range receded, succeeded by the rolling, thickly forested and rivered landscape of the Interior, itself to be replaced by the Brooks Range.

  It was the first time she’d seen the Brooks Range. A wrinkled fold of Mesozoic skin over spare Paleozoic bones (the brochure’s description and, Kate had to admit, not a bad one), it rippled as far east and as far west as she could see. She stared down at it, cheek pressed to the plastic window. During this mountain range’s formation the dinosaurs had evolved and roamed the earth, masters of all they surveyed, only to lay down their collective lives for, 70 million years later, RPetCo’s bottom line, the state of Alaska’s legislative budget, Niniltna Public School’s gymnasium and the gas tank on Jack’s Blazer.

  She leaned back and replaced the brochure in the seat pocket. Nothing in this world put the significance of human life on earth in perspective better or faster than a geologic timetable.

  Moments later they began their descent, landing under a sky as white as the ground. The 727 rolled out to a stop on the apron, the rear airstairs dropped and she followed the rest of the passengers to the bus parked at the foot of
the stairs. A jumbled mass of buildings passed in review as they left the airport. The fog hung close to the tundra, causing the windows on the bus to weep long, rolling tears of condensation that collected along the sills and dripped on the shoulders of the passengers. The little lakes visible at the fog’s edge were frozen hard. The fog, the snow flurries, the white, icy surface of the road and the endless length of frozen tundra melded into each other and distorted the horizon. It was disconcerting to have to remind oneself which way was up.

  It didn’t look anything at all like the pictures in the brochure. It looked like a Sahara of snow. Kate didn’t realize she had said the words out loud until she caught the sideways glance of the tiny blonde sitting next to her. “Robert Lowell,” she added.

  “Uh-huh,” the blonde said, who looked like a scowling Madonna with more clothes on. She also looked vaguely familiar, but Kate couldn’t place her immediately. She hoped she hadn’t arrested her at some point in the past. Across the aisle and up two rows sat a brunette with glossy hair and languishing brown eyes. Beside Kate they were the only two women on the bus. The rest of the passengers and the driver were men, and everyone was enveloped in the same dark blue, company-issue parkas that turned them all the approximate size of gorillas.

  Next to her the blonde stirred. “Dale Triplett, production operator. First time up?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Kate Shugak. New hire.”

  “Hey, Dale,” someone yelled from the back of the bus, “how’d Xaviera do in the time trials?”

  “I don’t know,” Dale yelled back over her shoulder, “call me this afternoon. Which department?” she asked Kate.

  “Uh, field transportation? I was hired as a roustabout.”

  “Ah.” The blonde nodded as if that explained everything. She eyed Kate curiously. “Where are you from, originally?”

  “Niniltna.”

  The blonde smiled suddenly and her whole face changed. “I’ve been there. I’m from Cordova myself.”

  “No kidding!”

  “No kidding.”

  “What did you say you did?”

  “Production operator.”

  Like Chuck Cass. In the trade this was what was known as a lead. “Production operator,” Kate said with well-feigned interest. “Did you have to go to school for that?”

  “No, but I did. I got my degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks in 1981.”

  For a split second Kate debated what to say next, and decided on the truth as being easier and inevitable. The brochure on the plane had made mention of how RPetCo made a point of local hire to stay on the good side of Alaskan legislators, and it was even odds she’d be running into people she knew all over the Slope. “Me, too,” she said. “I mean I went to UAF, too. Class of ‘83.”

  “What in?”

  “Sociology,” Kate lied.

  “Another useless liberal arts degree that’ll never get you a job. Well, well. A sister Nanook. Welcome to the asshole of the world.”

  “Thanks. I think.” And a mouth like Madonna, too.

  The bus left the Backbone to lurch around a corner onto an access road that led through a chain-link fence. The fence surrounded a mammoth collection of two-story prefabricated metal buildings set twelve feet above the gravel pad on steel pilings, all connected with arctic walkways suspended above the ground. A sign next to the double door read:

  Production Center Three

  Royal Petroleum Company

  Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

  Dale and half a dozen others got up and collected their gear. “This is where I get off. Meet you for dinner?”

  A native guide, just what she needed. “Okay.”

  The bus doors closed behind Dale and the bus lurched back onto the gravel road. Another ten minutes and the driver drew up to the Base Camp’s front door with an air of visible relief.

  The Base Camp was similar in construction to the production center; boxy three-story buildings elevated on twelve-foot pilings, connected by elevated, enclosed walkways. Unlike the production center, these modules were sheathed in a copper-colored metal that gave off a warm glow in the half-light.

  A security guard seated behind a glass partition examined her badge and waved her inside after the rest of the busload had passed through. Up the stairs from security was a U-shaped counter beneath a sign that said simply FRONT DESK. Behind the counter Kate saw the brunette from the bus through an office window. She was speaking in animated fashion to a man seated behind a desk who replied in monosyllables while staring fixedly at the brunette’s chest.

  Following the instructions of the front desk clerk, Kate fumbled her way down a hallway, found a corridor that led onto another corridor that hung an immediate right into a third corridor she thought was a dead end but in which, after some investigation, she discovered a door into a stairwell. None of the corridors had flat walls or ceilings; all the doors were set back at various distances from the hallway; the ceiling went up and down and back up again every few feet; and all surfaces were covered in bright primary colors: blue, red, yellow, green, orange. Kate felt like a rat in a Technicolor maze, and was thankful for the neutral, napless carpeting beneath her feet. She descended the stairs, opened the door at the bottom and discovered yet another corridor with offices opening off either side and a hum of industry throughout. She paused in the doorway as a female voice full of grit and gravel announced over the loudspeaker, “Attention, sports fans, three days to race day, three days to race day and counting, all racers must be registered by seven P.M. this evening, seven P.M. this evening, or they will be disqualified from participating. Odds on Xaviera have gone up to five-to-one. Thank you, and start your engines.”

  Kate found the door marked TRANSPORTATION SUPERVISOR and went in.

  The man behind the desk waved her inside and went on talking on the phone. “Four sets of studded tires is the best I can do I’m afraid.” He listened. “Make it three cases of hard hats and you have a deal. No, three. Very well, I’ll send Dave over with the tires have the hats ready.” He laughed. “Yes I am and so are you I won’t call the unit owners if you won’t.” He hung up and looked across at Kate. “I imagine you would be Katherine Shugak?”

  “Kate,” she said. “You’re English.”

  “British actually.” He rose to his feet and offered her two fingers. “Harris Perry Ms. Shugak I’m your new supervisor welcome to Prudhoe Bay.”

  Perry didn’t look English or British or even European for that matter; he looked as if mañana should be his middle name. His face was dark, his features swarthy and he bore a distinct resemblance to a Mexican bandido Kate had seen once in a Clint Eastwood movie on Bobby’s VCR, a resemblance enhanced by the full black mustache that curved in an upside-down U over his mouth. His teeth gleamed beneath it in a practiced smile. “Flight up satisfactory I hope?”

  “Sure. Wasn’t it supposed to be?”

  He shrugged with a nonchalance Kate found peculiar in someone occupying the hot seat behind a door marked TRANSPORTATION. “You never can tell did you receive your room assignment?”

  Mutely, she held up a key dangling from a green plastic tag.

  “What’s the number 786 let’s see now OCX outside room good you’ll get some sleep and Ralph is your alternate so you might even get some closet space.” He chuckled. She didn’t know what he was talking about and she was having a hard time keeping up with his rapid speech anyway so she remained silent. “You can pick up your baggage down by Security this evening and get someone to show you your room.” He picked up the phone and punched in a number. “Toni I’ve got a live one for you new hire Katherine Shugak I’ll bring her right up.” He hung up. “Please follow me.”

  He came out from behind the desk, giving Kate time enough to notice that his jeans were ironed, a knife-edge crease running down the front of each leg. In keeping with what appeared to be the North Slope uniform he also wore a Pendleton shirt in a subdued red and black check. It fit so well she suspected he�
��d had it tailored. She followed him back out into the corridor and down more hallways, through a dimly lit garage filled with trucks covered with mud beneath which the yellow and green RPetCo colors were barely visible, and suddenly found herself passing rapidly in front of the front desk with no very clear recollection of how she’d got there.

  Perry skidded to a halt in front of an open door and Kate almost trod on his heels. “This is it let me know if you have any problems.” He turned on his heel and marched off briskly.

  Resisting an impulse to toss a salute at his retreating back, Kate poked a cautious nose in the open door. Cramped and windowless, the office was barely large enough to hold a desk, two chairs, a bookcase and a credenza. It was further cramped by the piggyback plant hanging like a parasol from one corner of the ceiling, the fig tree flourishing from another and the philodendron growing down the side of the bookcase on its way out the door. The bookcase was jammed with back issues of Petroleum Intelligence Weekly and Business Week and Forbes and plastic cups filled with water and green cuttings. Very little wall showed through the eight-by-ten black-and-white glossies of geese and polar bears and great snowy owls tacked floor to ceiling.

  On one corner of the desktop sat two wire baskets. One was labeled WAY OUT. The other was labeled DEEPER IN.

  Kate was staring at those signs with a growing sense of apprehension when the slender brunette from the bus, now seated behind the desk, became aware of Kate’s presence. She bounced immediately to her feet and grabbed Kate’s hand to sling her into a chair. The brunette beamed at her and said, “You must be new hire Katherine Shugak guess what!”