“Where are we going?” Noah said. He was pulling at his little beard as though it might get him an answer.
“Shut up,” Ernie said. That was the name of the first one. The second man stayed in the cabin along with the man who had opened the apartment door with a sledgehammer. They had talked in the cabin and they had both been slapped around until a radiophone call came. The radiophone was in the second room of the cabin and Kools and Noah could not understand what was being said. After the call, everything was different. The men had not touched them again. The cabin got quiet after the call and Kools knew they were waiting for something to happen. He was afraid of what was going to happen.
Then they had heard the helicopter land on the level ground at the foot of the forested hill, and the first one, Ernie, had taken them outside, his rifle held on their backs.
The cabin was the only habitation on a lake north of Fairbanks. The countryside was full of mountains and the shining faces of glacier passes that never melted. The immensity of the Alaskan countryside diminished human dimensions; the chopper sat on the ground like a child’s toy, waiting to be played with. Kools looked around at the mountains and the blue sky and he could not get rid of the feeling of something bad about to happen.
“We got rights,” Noah tried again. Noah didn’t get it. Kools looked at him with the superiority of the lifer regarding the new fish. Noah knew all about bombs and explosives and he had the Russian contacts in the first place and he fucked Narvak and he patronized Kools and the old man and he seemed to know every step before you took it. But Kools had realized since the men broke down the door of the apartment in Fairbanks that Noah was a baby, that Noah didn’t understand a damned thing, and that the whole action with ULU and setting off bombs on the pipeline had been a kind of game to him, a violent childhood carried into middle age. Kools was disgusted with Noah. The fool wasn’t even doing it for money.
“We got rights,” Noah repeated.
Ernie said he was getting tired of reminding him. He hit him in the back with the rifle butt this time.
They were in handcuffs. The bracelets were tight across their wrists and their arms were twisted behind their backs.
Kools reached the open door of the helicopter first and put one foot on the ledge but he couldn’t make it up without help because his hands were behind his back. Ernie pushed his butt and Kools stumbled inside the chopper and sat down hard on the bench. Noah was next. Noah looked very scared by everything. Kools was thinking about what these guys were going to do to them. He had decided a couple of hours ago that they were going to kill them. It wasn’t anything they said, just the way they had looked at them after the radiophone call.
Kools was working on the bracelet on his left wrist. He was skinny and the bracelet was tight but not as tight as it had been when they took them in the apartment in Fairbanks.
Ernie got into the helicopter. The pilot was a big guy with a beard and a cap that bore the name of an oil company.
They lifted abruptly and made a dizzy turn and the cabin was below and then it was gone, hidden by the white glacier on the mountainside. It was a beautiful morning, full of sunlight on the tundra and on the hills.
Ernie smiled at Noah. “You first, honey,” Ernie said. He reached behind Noah and unlocked the bracelets and Noah rubbed his wrists for a moment and stared at Ernie. Ernie was about two hundred fifty pounds and he had hands like bear’s paws.
Kools pushed at the bracelet behind his back.
Noah said he didn’t believe it. The trouble was, it didn’t matter if he believed it or not.
Ernie opened the hatch.
The helicopter chopped at the air and the violent, turbulent sound deafened everyone inside the eggshell frame.
Noah started screaming at him. Noah said a lot of things and even included a prayer in what he said. Ernie listened to him for a moment and his small eyes kept smiling. Kools watched Ernie’s eyes and rubbed his wrist against the steel bracelet behind his back. Noah kept screaming as though anyone could hear him above the roar of the chopper blades. Ernie decided it was time, and besides, it was getting cold in the chopper. Ernie grabbed Noah by the face hair and pulled him across the narrow cabin of the copter and shoved him out the hatch.
The rush of wind nearly drowned out the long, falling scream.
“Next,” Ernie said, reaching behind Kools to unfasten the bracelets.
Kools kicked him in the groin the moment the bracelets were off. The thing was, Kools had been a good prisoner and answered questions when spoken to and kept quiet the rest of the time and Ernie was in such good humor that it had not occurred to him until the last moment that Kools would do something like this.
Kools stared at him like a prisoner with those prisoner eyes that don’t have a trace of mercy in them.
Ernie stared back with eyes that were not smiling because Ernie was stumbling back through the hatch. A strong gust of wind and the sudden loss of two hundred fifty pounds on that side of the copter temporarily upset everything. The pilot held on to the controls as Ernie went screaming out the door. He fell a thousand feet before he was speared by the top of a fir tree.
Kools climbed behind the pilot and wrapped the dangling bracelet around his neck.
“I don’t want to die,” Kools said. “And you don’t want to die.”
“That’s right,” the pilot said.
“What’s your name?”
“Bill.”
“Well, Bill, what do you say?”
“I say the hell with it. Where do you want to go?”
“Where can you take me?”
“I got about ninety minutes of flying time in the tanks,” Bill said.
“Why don’t you take me to Anchorage?”
“Sure,” Bill said.
“Why don’t you find someplace to set down where there aren’t a lot of people,” Kools said.
“Sure.”
“You and me walk into town and you can tell them what happened, just the way it happened,” Kools said.
“You wouldn’t kill me.” Bill said it cool but just on this side of hysteria. He was already wheeling the copter south toward the Denali Mountains.
“No,” Kools said. “I didn’t have that in mind at all.”
“I just take orders,” Bill said.
“I understand,” Kools said. “I don’t want no trouble.”
“We’re two guys don’t want no trouble,” Bill said. He tried a smile and twisted in his seat so that Kools could see it. Kools was looking through him, all the way to Seattle.