THEY GATHERED AT SIX the next morning in Cave’s office at the North Slope Borough Department of Public Safety. The building perched above the tundra on the usual stilts and had a snow-blasted plywood exterior of faded blue, set off by fire-engine-red doors.
Cowboy Decker and Cave were there already when Active and Long showed up fresh from their night at the Roscoe. Cowboy wore an uneasy frown.
“Apparently you got yourself a situation here,” Cave said with an air of malicious satisfaction as he passed around cups and poured coffee. He nodded toward Cowboy.
Active and Long looked at the pilot.
“McAllister may know we’re coming,” Cowboy said with a sheepish look.
“How could that be?” Active asked, feeling like he already knew the general outline of it.
“After we landed yesterday, I called Delilah to let her know we’d be bringing Pingo Kivalina back with us,” Cowboy said. “Then, after you called and briefed me last night about the search warrant and all, I called her again to say we’d be coming back by way of McAllister’s camp.”
“And?”
Cowboy paused and sighed. “She told me McAllister was there to pick up a client and get some gas when I called the first time, and he overheard her say Pingo’s name. He asked her what the deal was after I hung up.”
“And Delilah told him?”
“Well, you know how women are,” Cowboy said. “Can’t keep a secret.”
“Women, huh? How about bush pilots?”
“It was a prisoner transport,” Cowboy said in an offended tone. “I had to let the boss know. What was I supposed to do?”
“It’s probably on Kay-Chuck by now,” Long said.
Active shut his eyes for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Did McAllister say anything?”
“He told Delilah he heard Pingo was killed at the Rec Center.”
“We never released anything about him being in the fire,” Long said heatedly. “We never even heard of Pingo till we called the health aide in Cape Goodwin, and he was already here in Barrow by then.”
“Exactly,” Active said. “But if McAllister set the fire—”
“Then he would know Pingo was there that night,” Long finished.
Active lifted his eyebrows, yes. “McAllister tell Delilah where he was going?” he asked Cowboy. “Carnaby told me just now he heard McAllister was up on the Katonak.”
Cowboy nodded. “Loaded up the client and blasted off for his camp, according to Delilah.”
“At night? Is that doable? It was nearly dark when we landed here.”
“It’s doable if you want to bad enough and you know the strip,” Cowboy said with a shrug. “His 185’s got landing lights, of course, and whoever he left in camp probably went down with a four-wheeler and parked at the end of the runway for reference when he buzzed the place.”
“Well, I don’t see that this changes anything,” Active said after some thought. He swung his gaze around the room. “If he’s figured out we’re coming, it’s all the more reason to get there before he runs.”
“Your call,” Cave said in a tone of malicious satisfaction. “He’s got hunters in camp, maybe a cook, and an assistant guide. You could end up with a big fucking hostage crisis a million miles from nowhere.”
Active chewed his lip and thought it over. “We can’t just leave him out there, and if he’s going to take hostages, he’s already done it. I still say we’ve got no choice.”
He turned to the pilot. “Cowboy, you been in there?”
Cowboy nodded. “I’ve hauled clients in and out for him a couple times.” He walked to the map on Cave’s wall and swept a hand over the fantastic corrugations of the Brooks Range, which ran like a dragon’s back across the top of Alaska.
He stopped with an index finger on the point at the state’s northern tip. “Here we are at Barrow, and south of us we got the Keating Mountains, with Driftwood along here, halfway between.” He touched the spot, then swept his hand south. “Down here below the Keatings is the Katonak River valley, and south of that you cross the Laird Mountains into the Isignaq River valley, where Nathan found his dead Korean at One-Way Lake.”
He looked up and everybody nodded again.
“All right,” Cowboy said, moving his hand back up the map a little. “McAllister’s camp is here, in these foothills north of the Katonak.” He tapped the spot. “Kind of midway between the Driftwood strip and One-Way Lake.”
Active stepped up and studied the map. Even though he had known all of this in a general way, the whole thing came into focus as Cowboy sketched it out visually.
“His camp’s on what they call Lucky Creek,” Cowboy continued. He still had his finger on the spot, but the scale was too small to show much detail. “It’s in a big, broad valley that drains into the Katonak. Strip’s about twelve hundred feet long, reindeer moss with chert gravel mixed in. About a hundred yards upstream from that, he’s got the lodge, a couple cabins, a john, and a meat cache. It’s in a fairly thick stand of willows along the creekbed.”
“So how do you do it?” Cave looked skeptical as ever. “You go roaring in there and land on his runway, maybe he’s waiting with a sheep rifle and a three-by-nine scope, and he picks you off as you come out of the aircraft. You can’t risk a flyover, so you’ll be going in blind.”
Cowboy spoke up. “You know, he’s got a radio there. We could call him when we get within range.”
“What if the radio’s off?” Cave said. “Or he tells you to go screw yourselves?”
Cowboy studied the map. “We might be able to make a flyover without getting shot. There’s a little side canyon that opens on the creek just above his camp. We could circle around behind the ridge and drop down through the canyon, then blast out of it at full throttle and come screaming along the creek, right above the willows.” Cowboy considered it for a moment, then nodded with a satisfied look. “He wouldn’t even know we were in the neighborhood till we were overhead. Nobody can aim and shoot that fast unless they’re up on the roof waiting for you.”
Cave shook his head. “What if he is?”
“If we see somebody up there when we come out of the canyon, I’ll peel off and head across the valley, and Nathan will think of a new plan.”
“Why not park down the creek and hike up?” Cave asked. “That’s what our procedures call for in a case like this.”
“When we can do a flyover?” Cowboy snorted. “You want us to hike through a couple miles of niggerheads?”
A shocked silence filled the room. Long cleared his throat and said, “Cowboy.”
Cave threw up his hands and swiveled his chair to look out his office window. “Jesus,” he said. “First I got all these village kids calling me taaqsipak, and now this half-assed captain of the clouds comes around talking about niggerheads.”
Cowboy’s jaw took on a stubborn set. “I didn’t mean anything by it. That’s just what they’re called.”
Active vaulted into the breach. “Not any more, Cowboy. Remember the fight over, um, that creek down by Fairbanks?”
The name of the stream in question had, in fact, been Niggerhead Creek, but Active wasn’t about to repeat it in front of Johnnell Cave. The term referred to the infuriating hummocks of grass, interspersed with icy water, that made traversing the tundra a nightmare until winter froze the puddles and filled the hollows with snow.
“What creek?” Cowboy asked.
“Well, there was this creek that had that name on the aviation charts, and there was a big ruckus—”
“And then what did they name it?”
Active struggled to remember. The Anchorage Daily News had covered the controversy in some detail, but what was the creek’s new name? “Actually, I think they just erased it,” he said at last.
Cowboy looked incredulous. “They erased a creek?”
“The name, yeah.”
“There’s a creek on the map with no name?” Cowboy looked accusingly at Cave. “You happy now?”
“As a pig in shit,” Cave said. “Don’t I look happy?”
Active, now regretting his effort at pacification, tried to think how to get the conversation back on track. “I doubt we’ll need to hike through anything, Cowboy. Let’s do a flyover and see what we see.”
Cowboy growled his assent with a gratified look. Cave shook his head and looked aggrieved but did offer them a ride to the airport.
“We taking Pingo?” Cowboy asked.
The others looked at him. “Why should we?” Active said.
“You might need him,” Cowboy said in his bush-pilot growl.
“What for?” Active asked.
“He’ll just be in the way if you get into it with McAllister,” Cave said. “We can hold on to him for you.”
“I dunno,” Cowboy said. “Didn’t I hear he used to assistant-guide for McAllister?”
Active nodded. “And?”
“Then he oughta know that country around McAllister’s camp pretty good. Might come in handy if you end up having to track the guy.”
“He’s scared to death of McAllister,” Active said. “He wet his pants yesterday because he thought I had brought McAllister to the jail with me.”
Cowboy shrugged. “Still and all.”
Active considered. However the thing with McAllister played out, it was a fact that Kivalina wouldn’t stay in the Barrow jail long on the bootlegging charge. It would be safer to stash him in the Chukchi jail than to trust the North Slope Borough to hold him indefinitely in Barrow on the Chukchi warrant, Johnnell Cave’s offer notwithstanding. The ancient tradition of the bureaucratic foul-up was more deeply entrenched in the Alaskan bush than any other place Active knew of.
“All right, let’s take him,” Active said.
Cave sighed, picked up his phone, and soon was instructing the jailers to bring Kivalina to the airport.
“All right, yeah, we’ll meet you there,” he concluded. He stood up, pulled on the parka that had been draped over the back of his chair, and led them out to a Ford Explorer.
Forty-five minutes later, Cowboy’s Cessna lifted off into the blue predawn haze, a few last stars still glinting overhead. They speared through the clear morning air toward the crests of the Brooks Range serrating the southern horizon. The sun flared in the southeast, then climbed into view, shooting long, deep shadows across the tundra beneath them.
Cowboy clicked on the intercom in a spray of static. “You know, there’s one thing I feel bad about.”
“Other than Delilah tipping off McAllister that we’re coming, you mean?”
The pilot grunted in acknowledgment. They were climbing steadily to clear the peaks ahead. Cowboy thumbed a little wheel mounted between the seats, and the nose of the plane lifted slightly. “I knew about Dood’s crash at Driftwood. I just wish I would have told you.”
Active looked at the pilot. Cowboy kept his eyes on the horizon. “Me, too,” Active said.
“You never asked.”
Another if-only. Active sighed and turned his gaze to the terrain ahead. They were still over the Arctic coastal plain, with its stippling of pothole lakes and the weird permafrost pimples for which Pingo Kivalina was named. They looked like volcanoes just emerging from the earth, but they had hearts of ice, not fire.
“You know McAllister very well?” Active asked.
Cowboy was silent for a few moments before answering. “He’s a hell of a pilot. He flew helicopters and Twin Otters for the Air Guard here before he went into guiding full-time. I always wondered how he let it get away from him like that at Driftwood.”
“How about as a man?”
Again, Cowboy thought it over before speaking. “Lot of rage there. I never knew why.”
Active glanced into the rear of the plane to make sure Kivalina wasn’t plugged in to the intercom system. He was without a headset and peering out a side window, shackled to the seat, seemingly oblivious to what went on inside the Cessna.
Active turned to the pilot. “That’s how Pingo described him. He called McAllister a man in rage.”
“Fits.”
“He says his sister liked that in a man,” Active said. “She called it ‘the great weather.’ You understand that about women?”
“Not really,” Cowboy said. “I’ve seen it, but I don’t understand it. Maybe only a woman would.”
“Or Pingo, maybe,” Active said. “Even crazy and hung over, he figured out that Driftwood thing while Cave was getting nowhere. I’m starting to think quite a few of his brain cells still work.”
Alan Long spoke up from the back seat. “Unless Cave was right. Maybe Pingo did burn down the Rec Center. He does admit being there at the time. And hiring Jae Hyo Lee to kill McAllister. And watering McAllister’s gas.”
“Nah,” Active said. “I don’t buy it. I can imagine Pingo burning McAllister’s house down, but not the Rec Center. He wouldn’t have had any reason to think McAllister was there. Plus, he wouldn’t set the Rec Center on fire with all those other people in it.”
“Yeah,” Cowboy said. “Especially Tom Gage.”
“Unless his sister told him to,” Long said.
Active was silent for a time, chewing this point over. With Pingo, questions of good, evil, and motive were sideshows. All that mattered was the disordered world inside his head and the phantasm of Viola Kivalina who visited his sleep.
Finally, Active grunted. “In any case, we have to talk to McAllister. Cowboy, you think he could do all this?” He considered enumerating McAllister’s presumptive body count, but couldn’t bring himself to wade through it again.
“I don’t know how anybody could,” Cowboy said. “But somebody did. So, yeah, of the people I know, if somebody could, I guess it could be Dood.”
In another hour, they began to see over the peaks of the Keating Mountains into the Katonak Valley. Cowboy bent over the chart on his knee, then hunched forward and peered past Active at the white folds off the right wing. “Driftwood’s over that way,” he said. “Thirty, thirty-five miles maybe.”
They crossed the crest and Cowboy dropped the Cessna’s nose slightly, angling right to follow the black braids of a river down a white-floored valley running southwest. He checked his chart again and pointed at a barren, snow-plastered crag looming above them as they followed the river downstream. “Mount Bastille,” he said. “How do you reckon they came up with that?”
Active shrugged, and they continued along the river, the valley opening out as they passed the snowline and the country faded from white to brown. Cowboy rolled left to point the Cessna’s nose at the tip of a long, rumpled ridge descending from the mountains like a crocodile’s tail, then jabbed at the chart on his knee.
“Here’s McAllister’s camp on the near side of that ridge up ahead. We’ve gotta come around back of it, drop over the crest, and dive down through this canyon here.” Cowboy’s finger traced it out on the chart. “When we pop out, we’ll be about a quarter-mile from the camp and doing around one-sixty, one-seventy, so we’ll be overhead in about five seconds. That’s how long we’ve got to look things over, maybe five seconds, because once we’re past, we sure ain’t coming back.”
Active nodded. “Okay.”
“We don’t want to fly right over it,” Cowboy continued, “because we won’t be able to see anything directly under us. So I’ll angle to the left a little bit, and the camp will be off our right wing when we go past. That way I can concentrate on not hitting a mountain while you look it over. Sound right?”
Active nodded again. “Sounds right.”
Cowboy grinned. “Fun, huh?”
“Yeah,” Active said after some thought. “It is, actually.”
Cowboy worked his way toward the foot of the ridge behind McAllister’s camp, staying low and using the terrain for cover. Finally he made a turn and started along the back side of the snow-draped ridge. In another seven minutes, Cowboy pointed the Cessna up a draw toward the crest. As they sailed over the top, Active caught a momentary glimpse of a little cluster of buildings three miles or so ahead on the valley floor. Then McAllister’s camp vanished behind a rock wall as Cowboy dropped the Cessna into the canyon and began his downhill run.
Behind him, Pingo screamed “Arii! That’s Qavvik’s mountain! We can’t go here.” Active’s seatback jerked. Pingo must have been kicking it. Active turned and lunged for Pingo’s throat over the backrest. Pingo threw himself as far back as his restraints would allow and kicked Active’s seat again.
“You gotta get him under control,” Cowboy shouted over the intercom. “We’re committed here.”
Active was unbuckling himself when he saw Pingo jerk, then slump into his seat. “You’re carrying a Taser, Alan?”
“Roger that,” Long said. “Good thing, ah?”
Active settled back into his seat and returned his attention to their descent through the canyon. The needle on the airspeed indicator swept through one-fifty, one-sixty, one-seventy, and finally came to a quivering stop between one-eighty and one-eighty-five, the wind screaming through the wing struts as they plunged toward the valley floor.
The ridge to their left dropped away, and suddenly they were out of the canyon, G-forces jamming Active into his seat as Cowboy jerked the Cessna out of its dive and rocked into a hard left turn.
He leveled the wings just above the willows and they barreled down the little creek that trickled out of the canyon. Ahead on the right, McAllister’s camp was a big two-story lodge and a cluster of smaller outbuildings. Active registered impressions more than information: nobody on top of the lodge or the other buildings; on the tundra in front of the lodge, a man pausing, knife in hand, over what might be the rib cage of a caribou, his face turning up, flashing white and surprised as they roared by; another man, in the act of opening the outhouse door, letting it swing shut as he looked up to watch them.
Then they were past the camp and roaring toward McAllister’s landing strip on a patch of slightly elevated ground along the creek bank. A landing strip that was devoid of anything resembling an airplane.
Active felt the tension drain out of him as he nudged Cowboy and pointed at the strip. “I don’t think he’s here.”
Cowboy eased the Cessna’s nose up and made an arc to the right as they gained altitude. “Guess not,” the pilot said, peering under the right wing at the empty strip. “But where the hell is he? Delilah said he headed up here last night. Maybe we oughta land and search around the camp.”
“I saw a couple of guys in the yard as we went over,” Active said. “How about we try the radio?”
Cowboy looked like he wanted to say “Duh!” but he just switched on his radios and tuned one to a new frequency. “McAllister’s Camp, this is the Cessna that was just overhead, over.”
A minute or two passed as Cowboy repeated the call once, then twice. Then the headset sprayed static, and a woman’s voice said, “This is McAllister’s. Who’s that?”
“Probably his cook,” Cowboy said over the intercom. He tapped the little boom microphone on Active’s head set. “You want to talk to her?”
Active nodded and identified himself to the woman. “We’re attempting to contact Dood McAllister. Can you tell us his whereabouts?”
“What you want him for?”
“I’m sorry, that’s confidential. Can you tell us his whereabouts?”
“He take off maybe couple hours ago, say he’s going to pull out his spike camp over there at One-Way Lake.”
Active gave the cook a roger and looked at Cowboy.
“You want to go in?” the pilot asked.
“We’ve got our search warrant,” Long said from behind them.
After a moment’s thought, Active shook his head, then realized nobody had seen him do it. “No, let’s go after McAllister,” he said over the intercom. “If he’s running, this may be our last good shot at him.”
“All right,” Cowboy said. “But I gotta have a pit stop.”
Ten minutes later, the Cessna was bounding to a halt on a rolling ridge a few miles from McAllister’s camp. Cowboy and Active jumped down, stepped away from the plane, and relieved themselves on the tundra. Long hauled a still stunned-looking Pingo out and allowed him the same relief.
“Why would Dood go to One-Way Lake?” Cowboy asked after Pingo had been reattached to a rear seat—ankles, too, this time. “If he knows you guys have him figured out, why doesn’t he just run for cover somewhere? Or go hire a lawyer?”
“Maybe there’s evidence over there,” Active said. “Maybe he took something off Jae Hyo Lee. Maybe he lied to the cook and he’s not even there. All I know is, we have to stay on him.”
“I don’t know,” Long said. “Go after him at One-Way Lake without backup? Serving a search warrant on his camp would be one thing, but—”
“If he’s running, I don’t see where we have any choice.”
“But he’ll hear us coming and—” Long stopped as he caught the look on Active’s face. “Yeah, yeah. Think long, think wrong.”
Active gave a slight nod of approval, wondering about Long’s reluctance to confront McAllister. He filed it away and turned to the pilot. “How far is it?”
Cowboy leaned into the Cessna and retrieved his chart. He spread it on the plane’s tail, holding it down with a forearm so the wind wouldn’t take it, and calipered the distance to One-Way Lake with a thumb and forefinger. He eyed the span for a moment. “Seventy miles, plus or minus. Half an hour, maybe.”
“So what’s your plan?” Long said in that same reluctant tone.
“Fly in there, look it over, figure something out,” Active said.
“And if McAllister’s waiting?”
“Figure something out. Okay, Alan?”
Long said nothing. Cowboy grunted and bent over the Cessna’s tail again. Active and Long leaned in to follow his finger across the map.
“This one may be a little dodgier. If he’s at One-Way, his Cessna’s going to be parked on the ridge above the lake.” Decker tapped the spot on the map. “Here. And there’s no way to come at it without being seen ourselves.”
Active studied the chart. One-Way Lake was in the foothills on the south side of the Laird Mountains above the valley of the Isignaq River. One of the canyons radiating from the mountains appeared to open onto the top of the cliff above the lake. He drew a forefinger along its route. “How about we come down through here and pop out over the ridge, like we did just now?”
Cowboy shook his head. “We got two strikes against us. Number one, McAllister’s spike camp is probably right up that same canyon. That’s why he uses that ridge to get to it. So we come down through there, he’s gonna see us. And number two, you see what’s moving in over there?”
Cowboy turned away from the map pointed at the Laird Mountains on the far side of the Katonak River. The peaks were topped with shreds of cloud and the dangling veils of gray that meant falling snow.
“In order to get over the Lairds and into that canyon above One-Way, we’d have to go right through that stuff. And even I don’t fly around in the clouds if I know there’s rocks in ’em.”
Active studied the clouds, which appeared to be moving toward the Katonak a little as he watched. “So how do we get over there?”
“We might be able to sneak through Igichuk Pass to the Isignaq side, all right. But seriously, what do we do when we get to One-Way?”
“You got binoculars?”
Cowboy nodded.
“Let’s stand off at a safe distance and glass the situation, then decide.”
Cowboy nodded again. “About all we can do, I guess.” He glanced at Active with the bush-pilot grin he got at moments like this. “Let’s jet. We’re burning daylight.”