by Bill Granger
“You like submarines,” the old man said.
Kools said nothing.
“Ever think about all that cold water up there?” He touched the bulkhead. “But I guess I can’t scare you none.”
“You brought me here to scare me?” Kools’ voice was a natural tenor, very flat and playing it cool. He blew out smoke that filled the compartment a moment before the passive air-ducts began moving it to wherever it was taken.
“Watching you two boys,” the dark man said. He said it slow, in good humor, the way he had talked the native tongue those five days he had spent in the settlement with them, when he had brought his stories and his magic to the old people and convinced Kools to work with him. Kools knew that his sister, Narvak, would do anything for the dark man.
“What you watching for?” Kools said.
“Don’t know. Know it when I see it. But I don’t have a whole lot more time to waste on this. You like life at B43?” It was the code name of the camp where they took their training.
“Remind me of Palmer. ’Cept you could get out of B43.”
“That’s what I was looking for, I guess,” the old man said. “You got out the second night, went and got yourself Siberian nookie. You had a few parties.”
“I had parties,” Kools said. Damn. They really did have eyes in the back of their heads.
“Why you think you were brought across? Given that final bit of training?”
Kools looked at the browning end of his filter cigarette. He hadn’t expected the old man. The dark-faced old man with eyes like oil pools had come into the settlement two years ago. He had known all about Kools. The only thing was, they didn’t know anything about the old man except that he was in charge of something. Maybe he was in charge of them. He told them how to set up ULU, the name he gave to the native terrorist movement. He had money for the settlement and he showed Kools and Noah how to get the plastique, how to make a bomb, how to bomb the pipeline. He never got around to telling them why, except for the usual crap about fighting for their own land and the environment. It didn’t bother Noah, who invented his own why. Noah was a believer in causes. He had gone to university in Fairbanks. He studied the native cultures. He took his name—it wasn’t his real name—from the biblical character who had saved the earth in the flood. He tried to speak the native tongue. He screwed a native girl, Kools’ sister. The whole thing had only bothered Kools, who didn’t believe a damned thing the old man said. Or anything that the silence was supposed to imply.
“You don’t answer a lot of questions,” the old man said. He made a frown, made the dark eyes deeper.
“I ain’t got a lot of answers,” Kools said. “You keep yourself better that way. I notice you got the trick, too.”
The old man let himself smile. His teeth were white and even in that dark, burned face. “You ask me a question, maybe I’ll tell you.”
“Who are you?”
“Is that it? Jesus Christ, that’s easy. Ask me something harder.”
“You didn’t answer it.”
“The man your sister shot.”
Kools didn’t let it show. He put out the cigarette in the tin ashtray on the stand next to the bunk. The windowless cubicle was gray on gray. Everything was too cold and there was sweat on the bulkhead.
“Well, she didn’t exactly,” the man continued. “She shot someone, a trapper, down in Nome. She’s got guts. I thought for a while it was going to have to be her, if you two boys didn’t work out.” The old man let the words sink in.
“Work out what? What about Narvak?”
“She’s got another errand. She won’t be there to meet you when you get back. I’m starting to move and I had to decide about you two boys. I decided, I guess, on you. Noah is useful still and he makes your sister happy.” The old man grinned and yet it wasn’t a smile. “Noah believes in all this shit but I figure you’re too smart a con to do that. Figured that from the beginning. Believers got their place. I used believers before. You don’t have to tell a believer too much, just enough to keep the candles burning. But you don’t believe in it, do you? So if it turned out you weren’t smart enough, I’d have to get rid of you.”
“I don’t believe you, if that’s what you mean.”
“You believe I’m gonna shut down the pipeline?”
Kools thought about it, staring at the old man in the coffin of the submarine. He thought about going across three times, getting supplies and training. About the sneaking around they did in the polar dark, blowing up sections of the line.
“No,” Kools said.
“You might be wrong.”
“You stir them up,” Kools said. “You get us to take the chance, you get this stuff out about the ULU movement. Ain’t no ULU movement.”
“Thing is, Koolie, you see it from the inside. That’s the wrong side to see things from. See it from their side. They hear the talk, they see the natives getting restless, they think every damned Yup’ik is part of the thing. They know they got no business being there.”
“You start to sound like Noah.”
For a moment, the old man’s eyes went dead. “I ought to sound like him. I gave him his words.”
“You did that,” Kools said.
“You get too sure of yourself, Kools, I’ll drop you in a crevice.”
Kools let his face go passive. He had a good, round face with flat eyes that looked steadily at you. He was very thin, which was part of the Indian blood that had gotten mixed in with the Yup’ik Eskimo over the generations. His body was hard and now he let his face lose all expression. It was the trick you learned in prison when the big ones decided you were going to be their Mary for the night and you knew you’d have to convince them it wasn’t going to be that way. Never give them an edge. Wait quiet until they got close enough and stick the knife right into their gut. Maybe they’d live and maybe they’d die but the next one would think about the price of loving.
The old man let the silence hold.
They could not hear the engines, only feel the movement. It was an act of faith to let yourself be entombed on a ship beneath the icy sea for thirty-six hours, crawling slowly toward the top of the world in utter silence. She was rigged for silent running and all their nerves—especially those who waited—were on edge.
“Noah knows everything now about explosives,” the old man said at last. “Took six months training in the army at Indianhead EOD school. Plus what we give him on the Siberian side.” The old man spoke in a curious, rolled flat accent, like that of a Kansas farmer. The words were clipped off oddly, the tense changed for emphasis. “Could put an atom bomb on the line. Talk about an oil spill, Koolie, you’d make the news for months, make Chernobyl look like a Boy Scout bonfire.”
“You gonna do that?”
“I think, Koolie; you do.”
“I ain’t gonna put no atom bomb on the line.”
“But Noah is.”
“Noah is crazy.”
“But I know that and you know that. You figure we got them thinking that now? I mean, the other side?”
Kools made his eyes narrow now, not passive as they had been a moment before. “What’s the other side, man?”
The old man grinned.
“Good, Koolie. Maybe I got what I was looking for. The question is the right question, Koolie. I need an outside man and an inside man. Can even use your sister, she proved she got a lot of guts.”
“How’d she prove that?”
“Killed me,” the old man said. “I told you that. Down in Nome. Put two bullets in me. Crack, crack, just like that, killed me dead and never thought another thing about it.”
Kools saw the way it was and lit another cigarette.
“You ain’t gonna really blow up anything.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“Is that what it has to be? A bet?”
“You want two hundred thousand dollars?”
Kools said, “Sure. Who do I have to kill?”
“Eventually, Noah.”
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Kools thought about it. He thought about Noah screwing his sister. That didn’t matter but it was one more thing to put on the other side if he needed to make an accounting to get himself ready to kill Noah. But he already knew it didn’t matter. He would find enough things to kill Noah for two hundred large.
“Why I gotta kill Noah?”
“Because there’s a hundred apiece for you boys. Just a simple little job and you don’t even have to blow up anything unless things turn out different. You know what this is?”
The old man reached under the bunk and pulled out the suitcase. He snapped it open. It was a cheap vinyl hard-sided suitcase. He opened it and there was a Westclox quartz alarm clock and a number of wires and two containers joined to a third container. The containers were rounded metal of different sizes, as though one container might contain something that triggered another container and then both went into a third.
“A bomb,” Kools said. “We worked on those. You gonna leave it in the Fairbanks terminal? Gonna ship it on the Alaska ferry south to Juneau?” Kools was trying not to smile. The old man didn’t need anyone special for this; this was kid’s stuff. Hire anyone to take a suitcase into a terminal and leave it. Blow up some mothers and their kids waiting for the train south at Denali. That was so easy it was contemptible. Like rolling drunks instead of sticking up a gas station. That’s what Kools had done. He had done hard time and he kept reminding himself not to think about it.
The old man said, “There’s bombs and bombs, Koolie. Cartoonist named Herblock, which you never heard of, used to do cartoons drawing this fellow as a big guy with a bullet head who needed a shave, was supposed to be the H-bomb. But now we get all our best ideas from Japan. Like the turbines make this ship so quiet. Like very small things that go bump in the night. Like an atomic device, Koolie.”
Kools stared at it. He couldn’t get the passive look back. He had to look impressed because he was. He stared at the thirty-six- by thirty-inch case on the bunk with quartz alarm clock attached.
“Gonna blow up the line,” he said.
The old man watched Kools’ eyes, saw them staring straight down into the depth of the bomb. It was an atomic device, no fooling about that. The whole thing was tricky but you couldn’t have fooling around to start with.
“You put it here,” the old man said. He opened a map of the line that snaked down across eastern Alaska from the oil fields in the ice on the North Slope down through mountains and immense barren valleys full of wild creatures, down to the port of Valdez on the southern coast. His finger rested on a small red x.
“All right,” Kools said.
The old man looked at him. “You’ll do it?”
“What do we get?”
“Good, Koolie. Noah would salute and carry on but you want to know what you get.”
“Yeah.”
“You get to save your people. To save the land of the north. To save the old ways. To save the immense treasury of wildlife—”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Sure it is.”
“Then what is it?”
“I got a hundred thousand for Noah and another hundred large for you. You put it down in exactly three days. You put the clock on eighteen hours. And then you get the hell out of there. The next place I see you is in Seattle. You just get a room in the Pacific Plaza and you wait there. Don’t go off bragging, don’t get drunk, and don’t get picked up by the cops.”
“What does Noah do?”
“Noah is the beard. He takes the credit. He makes the noise. And he meets you in a week in the same hotel.”
“What happens then?”
“What happens then is up here,” the old man said. He tapped his head with his forefinger. “You got any questions?”
“One.”
The man waited.
“Who are you?”
The old man smiled again. “You always ask the dumb questions, the ones that don’t matter.”
“I like to know, if I’m setting a bomb like this.”
“I told you: The man your sister killed last fall down in the Seward Peninsula. One hell of a girl, Koolie. Shot me dead just like that, without even thinking about it. Admire a girl like that.”
The prow of the submarine broke the thin ice in Kotzebue Sound beneath Tikizat. The ice barely groaned at the pressure of the hull and gave way and the crackling sound of the ice startled a trio of polar bears prowling on the sea ice in the darkness. The ice was very thin, just a skin that had built up over two cold days. It was an hour until the first red band of light would come across the southeastern sky. It was just after midnight and the days were already twenty-two hours long. The water fell away from the black hull in sheets and clattered on the surface of the Chukchi Sea. The endless polar wind moaned across the ice and blew grains of icy snow against the bulkhead. The beast of the submarine was above the water and there were only a few lights in the immense blackness.
The hatch opened and two men clambered out and two sailors came after them with packs and a box like a suitcase. First, they lowered the inflatable raft over the side and then put the packs and suitcase down in the raft and then helped the two men down the steel ladder cast over the side of the hull. The submarine seemed to shudder as it held the position and when Kools reached the raft, he fell into it.
The night was pitch black beneath the northern stars. Lights seemed to flash from time to time against the blackness. The north was a land of endless illusions. Monsters and mountains could be seen where there was nothing but ice and snow, and the end of the world was in the stars.
Kools and Noah paddled across the inlet to the land that was Cape Krusenstern. A kilometer inland sat an immense lake and the settlement of Talikoot on the other side. The plane would land on the lake just after dawn, before the patrols began. Unless the American sonar men had spotted the submarine breaking the surface of the sea.
The two men climbed the little ridge and then trekked down to the shore of the lake and did not speak. Their breath was palpable and their eyes were encased in goggles to cut the tearing wind.
While they waited, sitting on their packs, in their parkas and flannels and Danskin underwear, Kools began to tell Noah what the old man had told him. He only left out a couple of the parts. Noah listened and asked some questions. Kools knew that Noah was smelling around at what Kools told him. Noah was a believer but not that much of a fool. Noah wasn’t sure what he was supposed to think about things.
“Why tell you and not tell me?”
“He told me why. After.” Kools stared at his mukluks. “I’m the one he wasn’t sure of,” Kools said. “He said he had to lay it out to me, and if it wasn’t going to work with me, I wasn’t going to be able to tell you. I would’ve gone back with the sub.”
“He wasn’t sure of you?”
“That’s it,” Kools said. “I didn’t know that, I figured he wasn’t sure of you, but that wasn’t what it was. He had to be sure of me, so he told me.”
“He’s sure of you?”
“I guess so. I don’t know. He’s crazy, that old man. He’s got so many ideas in his head that I can’t believe he remembers from one idea to the next what’s really going on. I ask him who he is and you know what he says to me? He says he’s the man my sister killed down in Seward. He said that twice. What was I supposed to say? And then he says my sister is doing some business for him now in Nome.”
“Narvak wasn’t part of him,” Noah said, almost jealous.
Kools was smiling but Noah couldn’t see it because of the masks over their faces. Noah was taking it all, the way the fish take the line to their guts and then deny it. Three days to a bombing, he thought, and he wondered what an atom bomb going off in the middle of Alaska would look like.
And Noah, deep in thought, was thinking about the man Narvak had been sent to kill. A man named Henry McGee. She had told him that night, beneath the furs, as he made love to her. She had shared the secret of Ulu because she thought he knew all about it. Hen
ry McGee was dead; this other Henry McGee was not dead. He tried to sort out the puzzle while they waited for the first light of the Arctic morning.
12
WAGNER’S PROBLEM
Wagner walked in the Fairmont Hotel bar as if he belonged there. He made $41,765 a year as a servant of the government in the U.S. Witness Relocation Program’s Department of Liaison. The drinks in the bar were five bucks each. Someone else was paying.
He drank the first of three Stolis on the rocks thirstily. When the Russian vodka burned the back of his throat, he slowed it down enough not to get drunk right away.
The man who would pay joined him at exactly 5:31. The second man took a handful of peanuts and tasted them, one at a time. He looked at the barman for a moment as though wondering who he was and said, “Let me have a Beck’s. Not in a chilled glass.”
Wagner sipped the vodka and felt a little better.
The second man was six feet tall and wore a dark blue suit. He had blue eyes and blond hair and a long nose. His eyes were narrow when he talked to people like Wagner.
The big ornate room was filling up with remnants of a Japanese tour group calling it a day. The small Oriental men in uniform dark-blue suits, white shirts, rep ties, and identical Nikon cameras drank big glasses full of Johnnie Walker Red Label and explained San Francisco to each other. The inevitable Muzak polluted the room and Wagner stood very close to Pell when he told him what was wrong.
“I sent down Karen O’Hare and she’s fucking it up. She’s staying down for a couple of days, which wouldn’t worry me if she was just fucking off, but that isn’t the way she works. She got a federal fucking wiretap order approved at ten this morning. She’s tapping his fucking phone.”
“You amaze me sometimes, how dumb you are,” Pell said.
“I had to send someone to Redbird.”
“So you send a Girl Scout.”
“What is this about?”
“This is about ten thousand that you got on the first of the month and it’s about nothing more than that as far as you’re concerned.”
“I want to get out of this.”
