Athabasca

“How about seven o’clock? Yes, seven will be fine.” Dermott and Mackenzie watched the two men go, looked at each other, emptied their glasses, signalled the barman, then looked out through the windows of the Peter Pond Hotel, named after the first white man ever to see the Tar Sands.

Pond went down the Athabasca River by canoe almost exactly two hundred years before. He did not take too much interest in the sands, it appears, but ten years later the much more famous explorer Alexander MacKenzie was intrigued by the sticky substance oozing from outcrops high above the river, and wrote: “The bitumen is in a fluid state, and when mixed with gum, or the resinous substance collected from the spruce fir, serves to gum the Indians’ canoes. In its heated state it emits a smell like that of sea-coal.”

Oddly, the significance of the words “sea-coal” wasn’t appreciated for more than a hundred years; nobody realised that the two 18th-century explorers had stumbled across one of the world’s largest reservoirs of fossil fuels. But had they not so stumbled, there would have been no Peter Pond Hotel where it is today nor, indeed, the township beyond its windows.

Even in the mid-nineteen-sixties Fort McMurray was little more than a rough, primitive frontier outpost, with a population of only thirteen hundred and streets covered with dust, mud or slush according to season. By now, though still a frontier town, it had become a frontier town with a difference. Treasuring its past, but with an eye to the future, it was the epitome of a boom-town and, in terms of burgeoning population, the fastest-expanding township in Canada. Where there were thirteen hundred citizens fourteen years earlier, there were thirteen thousand. Schools, hotels, banks, hospitals, churches, super-markets and, above all, hundreds of new houses were or are being built. And, wonder of wonders, the streets were paved. This seeming miracle stems from one factor and one factor only: Fort McMurray sits squarely in the heart of the Athabasca Tar Sands, the biggest such known deposits in the world.

It had been snowing heavily earlier in the evening and had still not completely stopped. Everything – houses, streets, car-tops, trees – was under a smoothly unbroken cover of white. Hundreds of lights shone hospitably through the gently falling flakes. The scene would have gladdened the eye and heart of a Christmas postcard artist. Some such thought had occurred to Mackenzie.

“Santa Claus should be here tonight.”

“Indeed.” Dermott sounded morose. “Especially if he brought along some of that peace on earth and goodwill to all men. What did you make of that telephone message to Sanmobil?”

“Same thing you did. Practically identical to the letter Finlayson received up in Prudhoe Bay. Obviously the work of the same man or group of men.”

“And what do you make of the fact that Alaskan oil people got a threatening message from Alberta, while the Albertan oil interests received the same threat from Alaska?”

“Nothing – except that both threats had the same origin. That call from Anchorage. For a certainty, from a public call-box. Untraceable.”

“Probably. Not certainly. I don’t know if you can dial direct from Anchorage to here. I don’t think so, but we can find out. If not, the telephone operator will have a record. There’s a chance that we might locate the phone.”

Mackenzie briefly surveyed Fort McMurray through the base of his glass and said: “That’ll be a big help.”

“It might be a small help. Two ways. That call came in at ten this morning. That’s 6 a.m. Anchorage time. Who except a nut – or some night-shift worker – is going to be out in the black and freezing streets of Anchorage at that hour? That sort of odd behaviour, I suggest, isn’t likely to go unnoticed.”

“If there’s anyone there to notice.”

“State Troopers in a patrol car. Taxi driver. Snow-plough driver. Mailman on the way to work. You’d be surprised the number of people who go about their lawful occasions in the dark watches of the night.”

“I would not be surprised.” Mackenzie spoke with some feeling. “We’ve done it often enough in this damned job of ours. Two ways, you said. What’s the second way?”

“If we locate this pay-phone, we have the police who have the post office remove the coin box and give it to their fingerprint boys. The chances are good that the person who made the call to Fort McMurray used more high-denomination coins than anyone else who went into the pay-box that day – or night. Get two or three large coins with the same prints, and that’s our man.”

“Objection. Coins are handled by many people. You’ll get prints, all right, a plethora, shall we say, of fingerprints.”

“Objection overruled. It’s established that on a metal surface the overlay, the last person to touch such a surface, leaves the dominant print. By the same token, we’d print the area round the dial. People don’t dial in fur mittens. Then we’d check with criminal records. The prints may be on file. If they are, we’ll get the man and ask him all sorts of interesting questions.”

“You do have a devious mind, George. Low cunning, but albeit a mind. First catch your man, though.”

“If we get a description or prints with history, it shouldn’t be too difficult. If he’s gone to ground, it would be different. But there’s no reason why he should think he has to take cover. Might be awkward for him anyway: may well be a pillar of the Anchorage business and social communities.”

“I’ll bet the other Anchorage pillars would love to hear you say that. They’d have the same opinion of you as our friend, John Finlayson, has now. What are we going to do about Finlayson, anyway? Rapprochement doesn’t seem advisable: it’s essential. With the tie-up so obvious – ”

“Let him stew in his own juice for a while. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. But just let him worry a while in Prudhoe Bay until we’re ready. He’s a good man, intelligent, honest. He reacted precisely the way you or I would have if a couple of interlopers had tried to take over. The longer we stay away, the more certainly we’re guaranteed his co-operation when we get back. Jim Brady may have been the bearer of bad news, but that call of his couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Gave us the perfect excuse to make off. Speaking of Jim – ”

“I’ve been thinking that I don’t much like any of this. Presentiments. My Scottish forebears, one presumes. You know that Prudhoe Bay and this place here contain well over half the oil reserves of North America. It’s an awful lot of oil. A man wouldn’t want anything to happen to them.”

“You haven’t worried about such things before. An investigator is supposed to be cold, clinical, detached.”

“That’s about other people’s oil. This is our oil. Massive responsibilities. Awesome decisions at the highest levels.”

“We were talking of Jim Brady.”

“I still am.”

“You think we should have him up here?”

“I do.”

“So do I. Must be why I raised the subject. Let’s go call him.”

3 (#u8166f809-f4cf-5130-8b11-e5a9ca712c09)

Jim Brady, that passionate believer in leanness, keenness, fitness and athleticism for his field operatives, stood five feet eight in his elevator shoes and turned the scales at around 240 lbs. Never a believer in travelling light, he brought with him on the flight from Houston not only his attractive, blonde wife Jean, but also his positively stunning daughter Stella, another natural blonde, who acted as his secretary on these field trips. He left Jean behind at the hotel in Fort McMurray, but kept Stella with him in the minibus that Sanmobil had sent to ferry him out to the plant.

The first impression he made on the hard men of Athabasca was less than favourable. He wore a superbly-cut dark-grey business suit – it had to be well cut, even to approximate to a frame as spherical as his – a white shirt and a conservative tie. On top of these indoor clothes, however, he wore two woollen overcoats and a vast beaver fur coat, the combined effect being to render his vertical and horizontal dimensions approximately equal. He sported a soft felt hat the same colour as his suit, but this too was almost invisible, anchored by a grey woollen scarf that passed twice over the crown and under his chins.

“Well I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed. His voice was muffled by the ends of the scarf, tied across his face just below the eyes, which were the only part of him that could be seen. Even so, it was clear to his companions that he was impressed.

“This sure is something. You boys must have a lot of fun digging away here and building these nice little ol’ sand-castles.”

“That’s one way of putting it, Mr Brady.” Jay Shore spoke with restraint. “Not much, perhaps, by Texas standards, but it’s still the biggest mining operation in the history of mankind.”

“No offence, no offence. You don’t expect a Texan to admit there’s something bigger and better outside his own State?” One could almost feel him bracing himself for a handsome admission. “That beats anything I’ve ever come across.”

“That” was a dragline, but a dragline such as Brady had never seen before. A dragline is essentially an engine-housing with a control cabin which operates a crane-like boom. The boom is hinged and swivelled at the base of the engine-housing, and so can be both raised and lowered and swung from side to side: control is achieved by cables from the engine-housing which pass over a massive steel superstructure and reach out to the tip of the boom. Another cable, passing over the tip of the boom, supports a bucket which can be lowered to scoop up material, raised again, then swung to one side to dump its load.

“Biggest thing that ever moved on earth,” said Shore.

“Move?” Stella said.

“Yes, it can move. Walks, shuffles would be a better word, on those two huge shoes at the base, step by step. You wouldn’t want to enter it for the Kentucky Derby – it takes seven hours to travel a mile. Not that it’s ever required to travel more than a few yards at a time. Point is, it gets there.”

“And that long nose …” she said.

“The boom. The comparison most generally used is that it’s as long as a football field. Wrong – it’s longer. From here the bucket doesn’t look all that big, but that’s only because everything is dwarfed out of perspective: it scoops up eighty cubic yards at a time or enough to fill a two-car garage. A large two-car garage. The dragline weighs 6,500 tons – about the same as a light-medium cruiser. Cost? About thirty million dollars. Takes fifteen to eighteen months to build – on the site, of course. There are four of them, and between them they can shift up to a quarter of a million tons a day.”

“You win. This is a boom town,” Brady said. “Let’s get inside. I’m cold.” The other four – Dermott, Mackenzie, Shore and Brinckman, the security chief – looked at him in mild astonishment. It seemed impossible that a man so extravagantly upholstered and insulated, both naturally and otherwise, could possibly feel even cool; but if Brady said he was cold, he was cold.

They clambered into the minibus which, if a bit short on other creature comforts, did at least have heaters in excellent condition. Also in excellent condition was the girl who sat down in the back seat, lowered her parka hood, and beamed at them. Brinckman, who was much the youngest of the men, in his thirties, had not paid much attention to Stella. Now he touched the rim of his fur cap and lit up like a lamp. His enthusiasm was hardly surprising, for the white fur parka made her as cuddly-looking as a polar bear cub.

“Wanna dictate anything, Dad?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Brady grunted. Once safely sheltered from the vicious cold, he undid the ends of the scarf that concealed his face. Somewhere in the distant past there must have been signs of the character that had driven him from the back streets of poverty to his present millions, but years of gracious living had eradicated all trace of them: bone structure had vanished under a fatty accumulation which had left him without a crease, line or even the hint of crow’s feet. It was a fat, spoiled face like a cherub’s. With one exception: there was nothing cherubic about the eyes. They were blue, cool, appraising and shrewd.

He looked through the window at the dragline. “So that’s the end of the line.”

“The beginning of it,” Shore said. “The tar sands may lie as deep as fifty feet down. The stuff above, the overburden, is useless to us – gravel, clay, muskeg, shale, oil-poor sand – and has to be removed first of all.” He pointed to an approaching vehicle. “Here’s some of that rubbish being carried away now – it’s been excavated by another dragline on a new site.