Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

“If they had, I’d have the owners behind bars by this time. Their collars were up to their eyes. Of course their voices would have been muffled. You ask a lot of questions, Mr Dermott.”

“Mr Dermott is a trained interrogator,” Brady said cheerfully. “Trained him myself, as a matter of fact. What happened after that?”

“They were marched across to the food store and locked in there. We keep it locked because of bears. Unless bears are near starving, they aren’t very partial to human beings, but they’re partial indeed to all human goodies.”

“Thank you, Mr Bronowski. One last question. Did Poulson or his men hear the fatal shots?”

“No. Both the men Poulson saw were carrying silenced guns. That’s the great advantage of those modern educational pictures, Mr Dermott.”

There was a pause in the questioning. Brady said: “Because I am an acute observer of character, George, I can tell something’s eating you. What’s on your mind?”

“It’s only a thought. I’m wondering if the murderers are employees of the trans-Alaskan pipeline.”

The silence was brief but marked. Then Bronowski said: “This beats everything. I speak as Dr Watson, you understand. I know that Sherlock Holmes could solve a crime without leaving his armchair, but I never knew of any cop or security man who could come up with the answer without at least visiting the scene of the crime.”

Dermott said mildly: “I’m not claiming to have solved anything. I’m just putting forward a possibility.”

Brady said: “What makes you think that?”

“In the first place, you pipeline people aren’t just the biggest employer of labour around here: you’re the only one. Where the hell else could the killers have come from? What else could they have been? Lonely trappers or prospectors on the North Slope of the Brooks Range in the depth of winter? They’d freeze to death the first day out. They wouldn’t be prospectors, because the tundra is frozen solid, and beneath that there’s two thousand feet of solid permafrost. As for trappers, they’d be not only cold and lonely but very hungry indeed, because they wouldn’t find any form of food north of Brooks Range until the late spring comes.”

Brady grunted. “What you’re saying in effect is that the pipeline is the sole means of life-support in those parts.”

“It’s a fact. Had this happened at Pump Station Seven or Eight, circumstances would have been quite different – those stations are only a hop, skip and jump from Fairbanks by car. But you don’t take a car over the Brooks Range in the depth of winter. And you don’t back-pack over the Range at this time of year, unless you’re bent on quick suicide. So the question remains, how did they get there and away again?”

“Helicopter,” Bronowski said. “Remember I said I thought I saw ski marks? Tim – Tim Houston – saw the marks too, although he was less sure. The others were frankly sceptical, but admitted the possibility. But I’ve been flying helicopters for as long as I can remember.” Bronowski shook his head in exasperation. “God’s sake, how else could they have got in and out?”

“I thought,” Mackenzie said, “that those pump stations had limited range radar-scopes.”

“They do.” Bronowski shrugged. “But snow plays funny tricks on radar. Also, they may not have been looking, or maybe they had the set switched off, not expecting company in such bad weather.”

Dermott said: “They were expecting you, surely.”

“Not for another hour or so. We’d had deteriorating weather at No. 5, so we left ahead of schedule. Another thing – even if they had picked up an incoming helicopter, they’d automatically have assumed it was one of ours and would have had no reason to be suspicious.”

“Be that as it may,” said Dermott, “I’m convinced. It was an inside job. The killers are pipeline employees. The note announcing their intention of causing a slight spillage of oil seemed civil and civilised enough, with no hint of violence, but violence there has been. The saboteurs blundered, and so they had to kill.”

“Blundered?” Mackenzie was a lap behind.

“Yes. Bronowski said the key had been left in the store room door. Don’t forget, all the engineers locked inside were engineers. With the minimum of equipment they could have either turned the key in the lock or slipped a piece of paper, cardboard, linoleum, anything, under the bottom of the door, pushed the key out to fall on it and hauled the key inside. Me, I’d have thrown that key a mile away. But the killers didn’t. Their intention was to bring the two pump-house engineers to the store room and usher them in to join their friends, and lock them in, too. But they didn’t do that either. Why? Because one of the saboteurs said or did something that betrayed their identity to the two engineers. They were recognised by the engineers, who evidently knew them well enough to penetrate their disguises. The saboteurs had no option, so they killed them.”

Brady said: “How’s that for a hypothesis, Sam?”

Bronowski was pondering his reply when the minibus pulled up outside the main entrance to the administrative building. Brady, predictably, was the first out and scuttled – as far as a nearly spherical human being could be said to scuttle – to the welcoming shelter that lay behind the main door. The others followed more sedately.

John Finlayson rose as they entered his room. He extended his hand to Brady and said: “Delighted to meet you, sir.” He nodded curtly towards Dermott, Mackenzie and Bronowski, then turned to a man seated to his right behind a table. “Mr Hamish Black, general manager, Alaska.”

Mr Black didn’t look like the general manager of anything, far less the manager of a tough and ruthless oil operation. The rolled umbrella and bowler hat were missing, but even without them his lean, bony face, immaculately trimmed pencil moustache, thinning black hair parted with millimetric precision over the centre of his scalp and the eyes behind pince-nez made him the epitome of a top City of London accountant, which he was.

That such a man, who could hardly tell a nut from a bolt, should head up a huge industrial complex was not a new phenomenon. The tea-boy who had painstakingly fought his way up through the ranks to board-room level had become a man of no mean importance: it was Hamish Black, so adept at punching the keyboard of his pocket calculator, who called the industrial tune. It was rumoured that his income ran into six figures – sterling, not dollars. His employers, evidently, thought he was worth every penny of it.

He waited patiently while Finlayson made the introductions.

“I would not go as far as Mr Finlayson and say I’m delighted to meet you.” Black’s smile was as thin as his face. His flat, precise, controlled voice belonged to the City, to London’s Wall Street, just as surely as did his appearance. “Under other circumstances, yes: under these, I can only say that I’m glad you, Mr Brady, and your colleagues are here. I assume Mr Bronowski has supplied you with details. How did you propose we proceed?”

“I don’t know. Do we have a glass?”

The expression on Finlayson’s face could have been interpreted as reluctant disapproval: Black, it seemed, didn’t believe in using expressions. Brady poured his daiquiri, waved the flask at the others, who waved it on, and said: “The F.B.I. have been notified?”

Black nodded. “Reluctantly.”

“Reluctantly?”

“There’s a legal obligation to notify of any interruption of interstate commerce. Quite frankly, I don’t see what they can achieve.”

“They’re out at the pump station now?”

“They haven’t arrived here yet. They’re waiting for some specialist Army Ordnance officers to accompany them – experts on bombs, explosives and the like.”