Village of the Ghost Bears (27 page)

“This has to be Russian, right?”

Long shrugged and Cowboy reached for the passport.

“Think so,” Cowboy said. “I took a Russian photographer into the Gates of the Arctic park a couple years ago. His passport looked like this.”

Active took it back and looked at the name fields beside McAllister’s picture. Even in the foreign script—Cyrillic? was that what the Russians used?—it seemed reasonably clear that he hadn’t been known as Dood McAllister on the far side of the Bering Strait.

The wallet contained a driver’s license, McAllister’s pilot’s license and medical certificate, a Visa card, and a few bills Active didn’t bother to count. He undid the drawstring of the sealskin pouch and shook the contents out onto the canvas of the knapsack.

Long whistled. Cowboy said, “That’s something you don’t see every day.”

Active picked the stack up by its edges and flicked through a few of the bills. “Looks like about ten thousand, huh?”

Cowboy nodded. “If all of ’em are hundreds, yeah.”

“We should count it,” Long said.

Active considered, then shook his head. “The chances are infinitesimal, but there could be fingerprints on some of these, even wet. No touch.” He slipped the bills back into the pouch.

“Ten thousand bucks,” Cowboy said. “Just like Pingo said they paid Jae Hyo Lee to kill McAllister.”

“Apparently,” Active said.

“And a Russian passport,” Long said. “I guess he was headed over there to stay with his relatives on the other side. Just like Pingo said.”

“Lucky we ran him off the ridge,” Cowboy said. “Otherwise, we never would have known for sure what this was about.”

“Technically speaking, he never confessed,” Active said. “Without that wire-twister, or some other direct evidence, I’m not sure we do know that McAllister started the Rec Center fire.”

“Geez, even with all this?” Long said. “I thought you believed Pingo.”

Active gazed silently at him.

Long wrinkled his nose in dismay. “
Arii
, you don’t still think it was me, do you? Have we found one thing Pingo told us that didn’t turn out to be true?”

“You mean like channeling Budzie in his dreams?”

Long’s face fell. “But other than that?”

Cowboy scuffed a wader in the snow. “I believe him. Other than the stuff about Budzie giving him orders, I mean.”

“We have to find two things,” Active said. “Pingo and that wire-twister.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE SNOW STOPPED AT about two o’clock while they were eating lunch, but the clouds stayed low over the lake.

“Still no hope of getting off the ridge,” Cowboy growled as he studied the rumpled gray belly of the overcast. “And we’re way overdue on our flight plan. I oughta to get up there and see if I can catch Alaska Airlines or a military jet on the radio and let them know we’re okay. Plus, we should see what we can do about clearing that runway.”

Long groaned.

Active grimaced and tossed an MRE envelope on the fire. “And how do we do that? I didn’t see any snow shovel in the plane.”

“You found the snowshoes, right?”

Active nodded.

“That’s our snow shovels,” Cowboy said. “Or we can use them to pack it down if we have to.”

Active started down the lake, but Cowboy spoke from behind him. “What about Dood?”

Active turned. Cowboy was pointing at McAllister’s corpse, still encased in the blood-soaked sleeping bag under the lean-to. “We taking him back with us?”

“Yeah, I guess we are,” Active said. “Any ideas?”

Ten minutes later, the sleeping bag containing Dood McAllister was lashed to his body with several turns of the camp cord, the Visqueen from the lean-to was wrapped around that and fastened in place with more camp cord, and Cowboy had rigged a harness from the tie-down ropes they had used to drag McAllister’s Cessna ashore. The pilot lashed the tail of the harness to McAllister’s ankles, grunted in satisfaction, and stood up, pulling on his gloves.

“There you go,” he said. “He’ll slide along in the snow so easy, we won’t hardly know he’s there. Till we hit the ridge, anyway.”

Active slipped one of the loops in the harness over his shoulder and gave an experimental tug. Cowboy was right. Here on flat ground with several inches of new snow, McAllister’s corpse offered practically no resistance. Lost again in silent admiration of the pilot’s present-mindedness, Active hitched the other two loops over his shoulder as well, figuring there’d be no need for help from Long or Cowboy till they reached One-Way Creek.

At the crossing, Cowboy and Long each took a loop, and they dragged McAllister through the water and started up the ridge. Soon they were in the clouds, McAllister’s corpse a hundred and eighty pounds or so of dead weight on the harness. Active calculated it was like dragging a sixty-pound pack uphill.

Finally they reached the crest and stopped, gasping, sweating, throwing off their parkas, bending over, hands on knees, too done-in even to curse.

Active’s breathing finally slowed, and he peered along the crest of the snow-covered ridge. They were at the lower end. The Lienhofer Cessna was several hundred yards away and slightly uphill, invisible for the moment in the mist. “What about bringing the plane down here and picking him up?” he suggested.

Cowboy, still panting, lit a cigarette and squinted up the ridge. “I guess. Probably wouldn’t hurt to taxi the runway after we get it ready, anyway. Just to be sure.”

They left McAllister where they had dropped him and trudged through the fog to the plane. Cowboy lit a small catalytic heater and put it in the engine compartment, then draped an insulated cover over the nose. Active dug out the snowshoes and eyed the other two men.

Cowboy jerked a thumb at the plane, layered with the same four or five inches of snow as everything else around them. “I gotta get the wings and tail cleared off if we’re gonna go anywhere. I’ll do that while you fellas get to work on the runway.”

Long groaned once again.

“Pilot’s prerogative,” Cowboy said. “Just strap on the snowshoes and sidestep down the hill. I only need about eight feet, just wide enough for the main gear. You come to any drifts or low spots, dig ’em out. Otherwise all you need to do is pack it down.”

The gray around them was deepening toward black when they had finished the runway to Cowboy’s satisfaction. He had even taken a turn on the snowshoes himself for the last pass, to be sure everything looked and felt right. Back at the top of the ridge, he pulled the nose cover off the Cessna, snuffed the catalytic, and stowed it all away.

They climbed in, and he hit the starter. The prop jerked and spun, the engine coughed, caught, and settled down to a steady rumble. Active was surprised how reassuring the sound was after a day and night in the cold with no machine noises to affirm their ability to keep nature at bay.

As the engine warmed up, Cowboy got on the radio and put out a call for “any traffic” in the vicinity of One-Way Lake. He tried four different frequencies before a lazy drawl came back from the sky. “Cessna Eight-Eight-Lima, this is Alaska One-Three-Five. That you, Cowboy?”

Cowboy looked at Active, raised his eyebrows, and spoke into the mike. “Affirmative, One-Three-Five. Who’s this?”

There ensued a small-world, whatcha-been-up-to conversation, from which Active gathered that the copilot seat of the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 now passing above the murk shrouding One-Way Lake was occupied by someone named Randy, who had done a year and a half in the Cessnas and Super Cubs at Lienhofer Aviation under the tutelage of Cowboy Decker.

“So the FAA in Chukchi asked us to keep an ear out for you on our way up to Barrow,” Randy said finally. “What’s the deal down there? They sounded kind of worried.”

Cowboy explained their situation and asked Randy to advise the FAA they’d lift off for Chukchi as soon as the weather cooperated.

“Stand by,” Randy said. “Let me see if I can get you a forecast.”

A few seconds passed, then Randy was back. “You’re looking good. That stuff down there is supposed to clear out tonight. Should be pussy weather by morning.”

“Airline-pilot weather, you mean,” Cowboy said. “Thanks for the help.”

“Our pleasure,” Randy said. “One-Three-Five, out.”

“Eight-Eight-Lima, out.” Cowboy looked at Active. “Good kid.” The pilot paused for a moment. “But I wouldn’t want his job.”

Active stared at him. “You’d rather be stuck on this ridge figuring out how to put a dead guy in your plane?”

“Absolutely.” Cowboy opened his side window and eased the Cessna down the crest, peering out at the trail packed by the snowshoes. When they reached McAllister’s corpse, he pivoted the plane to point uphill, cut the engine, and grunted. “Not a bad runway, guys. I think we’re good to go when the fog lifts.”

They climbed out and horsed McAllister—who was not fully frozen and mercifully still free of rigor mortis—into the space behind the seats. Active and Long started back to camp as Cowboy restarted the Cessna for the gingerly crawl back up the ridge to the tiedowns.

ACTIVE AWOKE easily, warm in the sleeping bag, the pleasure intensified by how cold it was in the tent, the light seeming less blue and more yellow than the day before. Domestic sounds seeped in from outside: the fire crackling, a metallic scrape that sounded like somebody sliding the coffeepot off its rock in the fire pit. He closed his eyes. What if Grace was here? How warm her skin would be. Maybe she would use her magic hands again. He opened his eyes and, yes, the light was indeed more yellow than the previous day and, yes, it was cold as hell in the tent. Frost rimed the blue nylon overhead. Yellow light and cold weather? It could mean only one thing.

He unzipped the tent flap and stuck his head out and, sure enough, the day was breaking clear and cold, the dome overhead the same marine blue as year-old sea ice, sunlight starting to pour from the southeast into the bowl of One-Way Lake, the Cessna a toy on the ridge above, Cowboy at the fire filling his coffee cup, then scraping the pot again as he returned it to its rock. He spotted Active and raised his eyebrows. “’Bout time you got up. We’re burning daylight.”

“Looks like we’ve got plenty.” Active pulled his head back inside the tent and zipped up the flap, then prodded Long awake and they dressed, shivering in the frost that showered down their necks when they bumped the tent.

By the time they emerged, Cowboy had a batch of MREs going on the camp stove. Active ended up with something that purported to be chicken tetrazzini. It tasted exceptionally good for an MRE, but perhaps that was only thanks to the thought that he wouldn’t be eating any more MREs any time soon.

After breakfast, they burned the MRE wrappers, rolled up their sleeping bags, collapsed the tent, and started down the shore, Active hoping it would be his last visit to One-Way Lake for a while. True, they were leaving behind a half-submerged Cessna, but that was somebody else’s problem. As he trudged along, he wondered: whose problem, exactly? McAllister’s insurance company, he decided, though he supposed there was some doubt the salvage value would cover the cost of getting the plane out of the lake, back to civilization, and repaired. Maybe it would become another Arctic legend as the years went by, with people passing over the lake and concocting myths about how it had gotten there.

The ridgetop runway, they were happy to see, was still clear from their efforts the previous afternoon, and soon they reached the plane. They tossed in the gear, then Active and Long untied the Cessna and threw the ropes inside while Cowboy took the heater out of the engine compartment, snuffed it, and did his preflight inspection.

Finally Cowboy gave the signal, and they piled in, Long crawling past McAllister’s folded legs to take a seat in the back, Active sliding into the right front seat beside the pilot and slipping on the headset. “Any problem getting off here with this load?”

Cowboy shook his head and muttered, “Nah, not with this slope and the weather this cold.” He tapped the outside air temperature gauge, which read twelve above. He hit the starter, and the engine settled into its reassuring rumble. Cowboy let it warm up for a few minutes, ran it through a final check, and then they roared down the ridge and lifted off, One-Way Lake dropping away to their left, the snow-covered tundra rolling off to the right, and the Isignaq River coming into view dead ahead as they gained altitude. The Isignaq was still blue and flowing, with just a little pan ice running in the middle.

Cowboy wheeled the Cessna right, paralleling the river and heading for Chukchi, out of sight a hundred or so miles to the west.

“Man,” Cowboy said over the intercom, “I don’t know if I want a steak first or a bath.”

They were approaching the first of the numerous ridges, white with new snow, that crossed their course. Active let his eyes drift along it, following the crest back into the peaks where all the ridges originated, thinking that what he wanted first was to kiss Grace Palmer’s neck and breathe in her lavender scent. But he said, “A bath for me, I think.”

“How about you, Alan?” Cowboy was saying when Active realized that the little splash of color that had barely registered in his consciousness couldn’t possibly be natural. By then they were past the ridge and it was out of sight, whatever it was.

“Cowboy,” he said. “Come around. There’s something up on that ridge we just crossed.”

Cowboy craned his neck and tried to see it out the rear window on Active’s side. “What? Where?”

“The back side, up near the head. Something red.”

“Shit,” Cowboy said. “Red? You mean like a four-wheeler?”

Long perked up from the back seat. “A four-wheeler?”

Cowboy rolled the Cessna into a hard left turn and started back for the ridge. As soon as they re-crossed it, they could all see the spot of red a few hundred yards away. Cowboy circled and passed over it a hundred feet above the snow and rock.

Now it was easy to see what it was: a red four-wheeler drifted over with snow, just the handlebars and the teardrop gas tank visible in the clear morning light.

“Can we get down there?” Active asked.

“No way,” Cowboy said. “There’s no telling how deep the snow is on that ridge, or what’s under it. We’ll have to come back with skis on.”

They were crossing the ridge again, Cowboy starting a turn to bring them around for another pass, when Long shouted from behind them. “Hey, it’s Pingo.”

Active swiveled in his seat and peered back under the wing, where Long was pointing, and caught just a glimpse of the figure in the rocks above the four-wheeler before it slid out of sight behind the plane. “Is he naked? Did I see that right?”

“I think so,” Long said.

“Naked?” Cowboy said. “What’s he doing naked?”

“Was he moving?” Active asked.

“I don’t think so,” Long said.

Active had Long pass him the binoculars from the seat back, and he put them to his eyes as they approached Pingo’s perch again. He had chosen a spot relatively free of snow, probably because it was sheltered from the wind, and he was seated on a pile of what appeared to be clothing
.
He was looking northwest, more or less toward Cape Goodwin and its polynya and the vast sweep of ice beyond, all out of sight over the folds of the Brooks Range.

“Any sign of life?” Cowboy asked.

“Nope,” Active said. “He’s all white. Frozen solid, I’d say. Probably been there since right after he settled things with Dood McAllister. Come around again, and I’ll get some pictures.”

Cowboy circled while Long dug the Nikon out of Active’s bag and passed it forward. Active flipped out the bottom of the window on his side and shot unimpeded by Plexiglas as they approached Pingo’s lookout point.