Ian Slater - Arctic Front

Not one of the two thousand men in the two ANGES— Alaska National Guard Eskimo Scouts — believed that the four-foot-diameter, eight-hundred-mile-long pipeline that snaked its way from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope through the majestic Brooks Mountains, over the Yukon River and down to Valdez on Alaska’s south coast, could be adequately protected. Neither did Joe Mell.

Joe wasn’t in the Eskimo Scouts, and Mell wasn’t his real name, but white men could never get Athabascan names right, so he called himself “Mell.” “Fucking Eskimo,” was what one of the whites had called him. Joe never forgot it, along with all the other insults. “All right,” he said, taking another suck of Southern Comfort, looking down morosely at his snow-shoes — he’d made them the traditional way, from birch, and used caribou rawhide for the lacing — so the pink noses thought he was a dumb Eskimo. All they saw was a native with no teeth left and a rubbery smile.

He took another drag at the Southern Comfort. What did they know? Pink nose big shots from the oil companies down south, coming up with their prefabricated houses to give to all the natives. “No problem, pops!” they’d said. “You just stick ‘em together.” Yeah — well the pink noses didn’t think he knew about Bethel town, far to the southwest, where the Kuskokwim River flows into the Bering Sea. The big shots had guys put all the prefabricated huts up in the summer, but come the winter they all started to crack and buckle. Joe took another belt of the Southern Comfort, swallowed, and grinned. Sod houses were still the best — had a soul. They knew the Arctic winds and ice. Sod houses didn’t fight the weather like the white man. Sod houses let their earth give a little here and there, and the wind understood. No crazy stiff doors either — only sealskin storm entrances that started way back from the house in the earth and angled up to keep out the snow. All white men weren’t bad, though. Or stupid. One, from the other side of the ice bridge— the other big country — had paid him in the Cold War. A lot of money and booze, with a promise of much more if the Hot War broke out. Joe was to break the long silver snake. It wasn’t a big pipe. All you had to do was wait for the next blizzard so there’d be no tracks found after and wrap a belt of hide about the four-foot-diameter pipe with the white package attached to the belt. You pushed the white button and you had five minutes — plenty of time to get away, even in deep snow, the man said. Then the rest of the money — U.S. dollars — would come. And whose country was it anyway? When some pink noses bought Alaska, the rest of the pink noses booed them, said it wasn’t worth anything. So how come the pink noses had come up in the thousands? It sure didn’t belong to the native people anymore. The pink noses from across the strait weren’t much better. They stopped the Eskimo people from walking across the ice to meet their cousins and took everybody off the big island because some big pink nose secret had been going on there. One of the pink noses from across the strait said one of their sailors, called “Bering,” discovered Alaska. Joe had known it was there all the time. Another thing he knew: the pipeline didn’t belong here. It was like a scar on the land, as if a beautiful chukchee woman had taken her k/k — blubber knife — and slashed it across her face. It was a desecration. But if you put the strap on the silver snake, would the fire despoil the land?

“No,” the Russian pink nose had told him. “Not at all. The fire will only burn the oil.” Then Joe knew the white men sucking the oil from the North Slope would have to stop. Those who had insulted his Athabascan forebears with filthy talk about Eskimos wouldn’t try to scar the land again — they’d know what could happen.

Joe heard the wounded cry of the land in the Arctic storm and knew it would not end until he had placated its soul, healed its hurt. Unhurriedly he put on his kamleika, the gut raincoat that once belonged to his father, and taking the hide strap and its package he crawled out through the sealskin storm trap and called the dogs, now like white lumps of sugar in the swirling snow. From his sod house through the village to the stretch of pipeline that bent in a long, gentle curve in the frozen valley of the Dietrich River on to the southern side of the mighty Brooks Range — the pink noses even gave their names to the sacred places — would take only half an hour. The silver snake would now be caked in an icy sheet, running alongside the wide gravel trail from Fairbanks in the center of Alaska to Prudhoe Bay on the Beaufort Sea. The pink noses called it the Dalton Highway. He took another swig from the bottle. Worst of all, some of his people had been traitors, had gone into the pink nose courts and palavered for money to allow the silver snake to despoil the land.

Joe looked intently at the dogs. Only the lead husky had turned and paid him any mind. They were tired and he was tired and he took another suck at the bottle then murmured to the dogs in the dialect of his parents, who had come from Galena far to the west. But the dogs didn’t know his parents’ dialect, as he only used it when he was drunk. Throwing the empty bottle away, he reverted to the dialect again, shouting into the wind, the words meaning “To hell with it. I’ll use the Ski-Doo!”

Unsteadily he pulled the starter cord at least a dozen times and fell over once before the Ski-Doo gave forth its crackling roar. It backfired several times before settling into its high-pitched whine. He told himself the Greenpeace noses would be as happy as he was, because they were the only pink noses who understood about desecrating mother nature. The Ski-Doo plowed into heavy drift, but Joe gave the throttle sleeve more twist, and the steering skis went straight through it. Dogs were scattering in the village as he whooped at them — an old man shouting at Joe, telling him that he must show more respect for the dogs. But Joe was already through the hamlet, snow-curtained birch slipping by him on either side of the trail he knew like the back of his hand. The irony of the whole situation was that Joe Mell was considered by the Siberian Military Intelligence “canvasser” as one of the least reliable of the half-dozen natives they had suborned and the least likely to succeed in the mission.

On Ratmanov Island more than two hundred SPETS commandos streaming out of the exits fired at the descending shapes as they became visible only a few meters from the ground. Had they been paratroopers coming down it would have been a massacre; the SPETS’ marksmanship with the AK-74s was highly accurate. They hit everything that had been used to weigh the chutes down. It took the white-uniformed SPETS, all but invisible against the snow, only two or three minutes to realize they’d been obmanuty— ”had”—and, fearing an air attack, they quickly retreated to the exit/entrances like ants being vacuumed back into their deep hive, leaving the dozens of American chutes buffeted by wind and rain mixed with snow in the swirling blizzard now blanketing the island.

“Make sure the engineers have double-checked the exit/entrance seals,” ordered Dracheev.

“They’re already doing it, Comrade General.”

“Good! The Americans are obviously going to use their Smart bombs. They have deceived us into betraying our exit points. The chaff must have covered the approach of a reconnaissance aircraft.”

“Their Smart bombs cannot take out the Saddam entrances,” said his aide, but his voice betrayed more hope than conviction. The general asked his radar chief if there were any signs of another American air attack on its way. There were none. His aides crowded around him, the smell of sweat mixing with the oily odor of the tunnel complexes’ gun emplacements on rails behind sealed doors at the cliff face. General Dracheev was biting his bottom lip as he bent over the table’s map trace, computer consoles giving immediate zoom blowups on the screen whenever he touched any part of the island map. He was worried. The whole point of having made Ratmanov self-contained, self-sufficient, was so that it could survive without Novosibirsk having to risk vitally needed aircraft over the narrow strait. But now the American Freeman would know where the exits were, and he was bound to send in air strikes, though the heavy snowfall would work in Dracheev’s favor, effectively cutting the American flyers’ laser beams. Even so, the only exits Dracheev could now use with any reliability were the two emergency exits — R1, a quarter mile from complex one, at the midpoint of the northern half of the island, and R2, above complex two on the southern end of the island, the same distance from Dracheev’s control bunker. Two exits for up to two thousand SPETS.