Dangerous Ground

by Grant, Rachel

  Cara might be able to give him information on Pollux and Dylan’s role in the company, but she hadn’t been here when the project had ended abruptly five weeks ago, so it wouldn’t be worth cozying up to her to find out what she knew.

  No. He had to focus all his energy and attention on Fiona Carver. Even if it meant hitting on his brother’s girlfriend.

  The landing on Adak was bumpy as usual, and Fiona found herself gripping the straps that pinned her to the seat as she prayed this wouldn’t be the time the pilot missed the runway. She let out a sigh of relief after the wheels touched down and the jet finally came to a screeching halt. Still, she sat there with her hands clenched tightly on the straps and breathed deeply.

  She should be used to the hard landings by now, but each time, she felt the terror anew. She was fine with flying in general; it was the unpredictable weather in the Aleutians that terrified her. At least the next leg would be a helicopter, which generally meant an easier landing.

  After taking one last deep breath, she unbuckled her harness and stood and stretched. Her gaze met Hot Bird Man’s, and he gave her a sympathetic smile. Clearly, she hadn’t hidden her fear as much as she’d hoped.

  She hated showing weakness, especially to the male scientists on these expeditions. Two decades into the third millennium, and many of her male colleagues still looked for ways to minimize or belittle the contributions of women in the field. Bill Lowell’s smile was friendly, though, so maybe he wasn’t one of those.

  She’d find out soon enough. One thing about working on Chiksook—you got to know everyone on the team well. Camp was a series of rubberized tents—two researchers per tent, gender-matched. They would all dine in the same cook tent and share the laundry/shower tent. Her off-hours would be spent in the cook tent playing cards and sharing stories or alone in her solitary cot, passed out from exhaustion.

  Weather days happened often. When it was impossible to work, they spent their time in the cook tent socializing or in the office tent working on their reports, or helping others with their analyses if there was nothing that could be done on their own portion of the Environmental Impact Statement.

  Even though some were contractors and some were government employees like her, they were a team in the true sense of the word, because if one part of the project got behind, they’d all lose. This EIS needed to be finished so they could all move on to the playoff round—remediation.

  For that reason, Fiona would be on the lookout for the gray buntings as she recorded the prehistoric site, and she expected Bill to be on the lookout for World War II debris hidden in the six-foot-tall grasses.

  She grabbed her backpack, which contained her most urgent supplies—laptop, change of clothes, Rite in the Rain notebooks, waterproof camera, sleeping bag—and followed the others down the open ramp at the rear of the jet. The rest of her gear would be unloaded with the field supplies and sent via barge to Chiksook. Weight restrictions on the helicopter made prioritizing supplies necessary.

  “What happens next?” Bill asked as he descended the ramp beside her.

  “If the copter is ready and the weather clear, we’ll hop right to Chiksook,” she said.

  An hour later, they were still in the tiny airport terminal. There’d been a mix-up with the helicopter charter, and it wasn’t due back to Adak for another hour.

  Fiona rubbed her temples. Nothing was going right. To make matters more difficult, they couldn’t charter a boat because it was too late in the day to set out to sea.

  “You okay?” Bill asked.

  She let out a heavy sigh. “Not really.” She closed her eyes and, for the ten thousandth time, pictured the housepit she’d been excavating five weeks ago. Untouched. Dug into the earth.

  For the first time in her career, she figured she’d experienced the same awe and excitement the archaeologists who’d excavated Ozette in Washington State or Pompeii in Italy must have when they’d realized what they’d discovered.

  Ozette had been capped by a mudslide, Pompeii by a volcanic eruption. Both had happened in an instant, capturing a moment in time. Dylan Slater had visited the site with her that last week they’d been in the field together, and he’d surmised that the mudslide that had engulfed the village had been a lahar flow triggered by a volcanic eruption that had occurred fifteen hundred years before.

  What she’d uncovered of the housepit was so utterly pristine, she wouldn’t be surprised if a half-cooked salmon dinner remained in the hearth. Except she hadn’t been able to properly protect the site, and it had been exposed for five agonizing weeks.

  She huffed out a breath and answered Bill’s question. “I was yanked out of the field unexpectedly—I mean, even more unexpectedly than usual for the Aleutians—and I was in the middle of recording the most amazing find. I’m worried about what the intervening weeks have done to the site and am pretty much desperate to get back.”

  She didn’t think she’d ever said those words out loud before. She didn’t want to believe she was superstitious, but part of her worried verbalizing her fears would make the damage real.

  There was something in Bill’s eyes that echoed her desperation. Like he had the same frustration at the delay, but considering he was new to the project, she couldn’t imagine why that would be, except for a general irritation at the hurry up and wait aspect of fieldwork.

  “How about you? What does this delay mean for your work?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t really know yet. I guess I’m still hoping we’ll be able to get to the island today.”

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth, though, than the charter company manager stepped out of his office. “Sorry, folks. A medical emergency means the helo is now on the way to Dutch Harbor. It’ll be back in the morning to take you to Chiksook.”

  She told herself to be glad the helicopter was where it needed to be, providing aid in a crisis, and pulled out her phone to call the Aleut Corporation. The five of them needed lodging for the night. In minutes, the task was done. “I got us both sides of a duplex,” she said to the group. She led the team of five out of the terminal.

  It was a cool evening—in the midfifties—and the sun looked like it would set in another two hours or so. The wind whipped up, blowing her hair around her face. She’d forgotten to braid it earlier and would regret that lapse when it came to combing the tangles out of the curls. She glanced at her watch. “The diner closes in an hour. If we want to eat out, we should head there now.”

  John shook his head. “I’m going to grab something from the store and go straight to the rental. I’ve got work to catch up on.”

  “Me too,” Roy said.

  Cara glanced from Fiona to Bill and then at Roy and John. “I think I’ll head to the duplex too. I’m beat, and I packed sandwiches just in case we got stuck here.”

  Fiona met Bill’s gaze. Did she want to have dinner alone with Hot Bird Man?

  He smiled. He really had a stunning smile, but she suspected he knew it. “Guess it’s just you and me, then.”

  Part of her wanted to retreat, to say she’d changed her mind and would grab dinner from the store with the others. But that was ridiculous. They were colleagues who would be sharing meals and company for the next two weeks on Chiksook.

  She smiled back and said, “I guess so.”

  Cara and the others set off for the rental office to get the keys, while Fiona led Bill the short distance to a small café. They settled into a table situated on the side of the living room that had been converted to a restaurant dining room.

  “Tell me about your project,” Bill said after they’d placed their orders.

  “I found a housepit that was covered in a mudslide—likely triggered by volcanic activity, according to a volcanologist.”

  “The guy Cara mentioned on the flight? What was she talking about, anyway?”

  “Yes, that volcanologist. She was asking why he was sent home the day before we were evacuated.”

  “Sent home? He didn’t evacuate with th
e rest of you? Why?”

  She frowned. Saying he was sent home early was one thing—everyone who worked on the project knew that much—but she really didn’t want to spread rumors when a man’s professional reputation could be on the line, and as a federal employee who played a role in the contractor selection process, she didn’t want to say anything that might show bias against Pollux, given that they were unlikely to be hired again after their handling of the Chiksook EIS. Some things that happened in the field would always be beyond anyone’s control, but then there was negligent management, and she couldn’t help but believe Pollux had suffered from more of the latter than the former.

  Bill worked for Pollux, so her lips were sealed.

  “I’m sorry, but as I said to Cara, it’s not something I’m willing to discuss. So, back to my site. Assuming you don’t know Aleutian prehistory, the housepit site is a pretty amazing find. Given that there aren’t any trees in the Aleutians, the Unangas, which, I should probably mention, is the preferred name for Indigenous Aleutians in the western dialect spoken on Chiksook. Unangas is plural and Unangax̂—with a circumflex over an x on the end—is singular. Anyway, the Unangas dug their homes into the earth. They were semi-subterranean pits sometimes lined with rocks for the walls, and driftwood or whale bones were used for roof beams. Over the beams would be layers of more wood and bone, grass—whatever was available—but it all would be capped with a layer of living sod. Basically, imagine a hobbit house but with the opening at the top, with ladders to descend. From the outside, it would just look like a small hill.

  “I found what I believe is a village, but so far I’ve only uncovered one intact house and one collapsed one. The roof openings had been covered by a lahar mudslide, and it appears the interiors are pristine. Like Ozette or Pompeii. I was in the process of recording both houses when we were pulled from the field. I found some interesting artifacts—your standard stone tools but also a few nontoggling harpoon heads with bilateral barbs. Harpoons are usually made out of bone, but the barbs in this instance were hammered metal. Possibly iron. If it’s iron, it changes everything we know about trade routes from the Iron Age, but it’s also possible they were utilizing meteoric iron, which has been documented in a few prehistoric sites.”

  She held back from mentioning that Dylan had one of the metallic rocks and a harpoon with him when he’d left the island, and she was in the middle of a battle with Pollux to get both artifacts back. She’d given them to him to see if he could identify the metal, but the next day he’d been sent home without warning.

  Pollux claimed Dylan had likely left the harpoon head on Chiksook—but there was no way to find out until she got to the island. Between that and the tools left in the field—the site had been covered with tarps that were meant to only protect it overnight, not for five weeks—she was something of a wreck with worry.

  She was supposed to be on the island already, searching Dylan’s tent.

  Fifteen more hours. She could wait. It wasn’t like she had a choice.

  “Sounds like an interesting find,” Bill said, and his tone was genuine.

  “It’s the kind of site that people go into academic archaeology for but rarely find.”

  “But you aren’t an academic,” he said, his blue eyes probing.

  Goodness, those eyes. It wasn’t just that he was handsome, it was the focus and attention in his gaze. It wasn’t hunger she saw there, but it might be on the same continuum. All she knew was, she liked being on the receiving end, which in itself didn’t sit well with her. He wasn’t her type, so what was the appeal? But still, his stare triggered the same kind of fluttery feel that came with attraction that flowed both ways. A pleasant feeling she hadn’t felt in far too long.

  And that was a problem. She did not want to be attracted to Bill Lowell. She didn’t want to be attracted to anyone she met in the field. Never again.

  She felt the jab in her heart that always accompanied such thoughts. Regan had loved the field fling, but her sister had been a free spirit in a way that Fiona would never be.

  “Fiona?” Bill said softly, and she realized she’d been sucked into dark memories once again.

  She shook them off and put on a bright—but fake—smile. “No. I don’t have any interest in academia. The last thing in the world I want is to spend ten years excavating the same damn site and then twenty years writing it up. I don’t want tenure. I don’t want to teach. But hopefully some lucky grad student who does want those things will have the chance to excavate the site in cooperation with the Aleut Corporation. It’s outside the APE for the proposed base, so with the proper permits and consultation with the Unangas, it could add a great deal to what we know of Aleutian prehistory.”

  “A-P-E?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Sorry. I used the NHPA term—area of potential effect. You’d be more familiar with the NEPA term, which is study area.”

  “Ah,” he said, but he still sounded confused. “And what is NHPA?”

  She frowned. She wouldn’t expect an ornithologist to know all the regs behind her part of the EIS under the National Environmental Policy Act, any more than she knew the finer nuances of the Endangered Species Act or the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which were the drivers for his work. But she’d worked on enough multidisciplinary NEPA projects to at least know the acronyms for the laws that governed each segment of the NEPA document. This all was NEPA 101 for Dummies.

  “NHPA is the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Right. Sorry. I was just confused because if it’s outside the APE, why were you digging there in the first place?”

  She supposed that answer made sense. Sort of. “The Office of History and Archaeology and the island’s Unangax̂ residents insisted on a full historic and prehistoric inventory—even if only to define areas where navy personnel are not allowed to go. Christina—my assistant, who actually knows tons more about Aleutian archaeology than I do but who doesn’t have a master’s degree so she can’t be the principal investigator—and I were recording the site as a Traditional Cultural Property—TCP—and did some shovel test pits to determine if there were physical remains as well when we found the housepits.”

  “Christina is one of the people who will arrive the day after tomorrow with the Anchorage contingent?”

  She nodded.

  Their server returned with their waters, which Fiona gratefully took, being dehydrated from the flight. She hadn’t wanted to tempt fate by drinking in the airport terminal before an hour-long helicopter ride. The last thing she needed was a full bladder on a bumpy flight.

  She drank half her water before setting the glass down and giving Bill her own measuring stare. “So how long have you been doing this kind of consulting work?”

  “Eight years . . .” He scrunched one side of his face, like he was calculating something, then added, “Yeah, eight. I’m a recent transplant to the Pacific Northwest, though. A job with a wildlife refuge fell through. Was lucky to get this contract. Moving is expensive.”

  “How did that happen? I mean, I thought the bird box was the first one checked from the NEPA list, but then at the last minute, I hear there was a gray bunting sighting?”

  “Not a sighting. A call. I guess one of the maintenance crew who was sent in to repair the generator was something of a birder. He reported hearing the calls of a mated pair of gray buntings on one of his outings. Once it was officially reported, it became a problem.”

  “I’m guessing he won’t be hired back.” Reporting the birdcall had cost the navy thousands of dollars, and if Bill found the pair was still around, the cost could go into the hundreds of thousands.

  “You don’t approve?” he asked, tension in his tone.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t say that. I’m a firm believer that an EIS should be done right. The whole point is to determine the harm a project such as this will cause and mitigate the effects as much as possible. If a mated pair of rare birds would be harmed, we need to know abou
t it, just like we need to know the locations of all cultural materials so if the base is expanded beyond the original plans, engineers will know which areas to avoid.”

  He nodded as if satisfied with her answer. She’d bet whoever hired him at Pollux only gave lip service to the mission of environmental science and remediation, or minimization of effects on cultural and natural resources.

  Pollux was all about the engineering end of things and would skip the entire environmental process if they could—which was the attitude of a few people in the navy as well. The engineering firm hired good people, but management was very much of the mind that pleasing the client—in this instance, the US Navy—by sidestepping environmental law to save money and time was the goal.

  Fiona worked for the navy, but her job was to ensure navy projects didn’t harm cultural and historic resources, or, if they did, to mitigate or offset those harmful effects as much as possible.

  That meant her military bosses, including the admiral who commanded the base, weren’t always happy with her. The times they were happy came about when her work led to smoother relations with local tribes who had to be consulted on a government-to-government level in compliance with treaties, or when archaeological research and findings generated good publicity for the navy in the Pacific Northwest.

  “What do you think of Sylvia Jessup?” she asked, referring to the Pollux engineer who was Bill’s boss.

  “Oh, no. You won’t tell me about the volcanologist, I’m not going to talk to you about my boss—who I’ve never met in person, by the way. Technically, I’m a contractor, not an employee of Pollux, but still.”

  She grinned. “Fair enough.”

  Their dinner arrived, and they settled into eating. Their conversation took on a lighter tone as Bill talked about his work on Attu Island several years ago. He was charming and funny, sharing stories that were self-deprecating and yet still demonstrated his expertise.