A Cold-Blooded Business (7 page)

During that process, each one can produce up to 4,800,000 cubic feet of natural gas and 30,000 barrels of water. The oil has to be degassed, dry, and no more than 154 degrees Fahrenheit before we send it over to Pump One--bottom hole temperature is 220. Kate, get the door for us, would you?"

Kate, hopelessly lost in a maze of pipe and frame and grating that seemed to go on forever, now discovered to her horror that she was lost inside the skid in which they were currently standing, too. It was possibly the single most humiliating moment of her life. Kate Shugak had never been lost before. Not ever. Put her down anywhere inside 20 million acres of Park at any time of the year and she could have found her way home blindfolded, but this metal maze was something totally beyond her experience. Dazed from the din, squinting in the dim light, head hurting from three different welts, she looked back at Toni and spread her hands helplessly.

"It's okay," Toni shouted, "it takes a while to find your way around."

She reached past Kate and thumped a previously invisible bar and a previously invisible door opened. They stumbled through it in a body, grateful to leave the clamor of Skid 14 behind them.

The Honorable Levi Poulsboro was first out the production center door.

The air was cold and refreshing. Kate paused for a moment, eyes closed, sucking it deep into lungs that felt starved of oxygen.

"Oh, look! How cute! Here, puppy, come here, come on," she heard someone exclaim, followed by Toni's voice, jolted out of its usual calm. "Sir, don't do that! Don't touch them! Don't!"

Kate's eyes popped open and she pushed through the crowd and found the group confronting a half-dozen little arctic foxes, no more than kits really. The Honorable Levi Poulsboro bent over to pet the lead one, the biggest and the brashest of the litter. Toni was just moving forward to prevent contact when the kit nipped at the outstretched senatorial hand and leapt smartly back.

There was a loud, disbelieving bellow. "Ouch! Goddamnit! Why, that little son of a bitch!"

Toni shoved her way to his side, Kate right behind her. Toni grabbed his hand and Kate peered around to see blood welling from a small wound.

"God damn it," Toni said, spacing the words through her teeth.

"Everybody stay put, don't move, don't talk." She turned and approached the kits. They were almost but not quite tame, and held their ground, eyeing the brunette's approach warily.

She moved slowly, no hint of threat in her stance. The instant she was within reach her arm lashed out, exactly like a snake striking, and caught the big kit by the scruff of the neck. Before anyone had a chance to protest, she had wrung that neck in a quick, sharp twist. A high-pitched, panicked whine was cut off before it really got started.

A second later, the body hung limp from her hands. The rest of the kits scattered like marbles and vanished into holes dug in the snow beneath the Production Center's foundations.

There was a moment of instantaneous shock before exclamations of horror resounded from the tour group. Kate herself was momentarily startled into immobility. Toni was more efficient at fox killing than Mutt.

"Oh, poor little fox!"

"How could you?"

"How awful!"

"It was just a little bite, he was just scared, you didn't have to kill him!"

"Shut up," Kate said curtly, regaining her tongue. She retrieved the pups body and stowed the corpse beneath her seat on the bus. Outside she could hear Toni talking, a note of steel underlying the brunette's professionally syrupy voice. "Senator, ladies and gentlemen, please.

There is an epidemic of rabies rampant across the Slope. When someone gets bitten, we have to kill the animal involved and send the body to Fairbanks for testing." That brought silence. "If the tests are positive, if that pup was rabid, you, Senator, will have to undergo a series of rabies shots."

"Which involve a very large needle and very painful abdominal injections," Kate said, raising her voice so it would be heard by everyone in the group.

"That's right." Toni moved to the attack. "None of you were supposed to come up here without proper orientation as to how you interact with wildlife on the North Slope. Did you not know, Senator, that you were not supposed to approach the animals you encountered during your visit?"

One quiet voice, not the senator's, admitted, "We knew. They told us."

"Then you know who's at fault for that fox's death. Now then. We've got a pump station to tour. Get on the bus, please."

As they pulled off the Production Center's gravel pad, a dark shape shot up over the snow berm on the right. It passed directly in front of the bus's front bumper, and in a purely instinctive reaction Kate slammed on the brakes with both feet.

The bus plunged violently three times, like a recalcitrant horse, and stalled. The shape scooted across the road, skidded down the snow berm on the left and vanished into the fog. Kate sat where she was, gripping the steering wheel tightly in both hands and trying not to shake, her burgeoning confidence in her ability to drive this monster withered on the vine.

"What's the problem?" Toni inquired from the seat behind her.

Kate swiveled and stared. "What's the problem? Didn't you see that snow machine?"

"So what?"

"Toni, I almost hit it."

"Nan." Toni shook her head. "That was Cindy Sovalik. She doesn't run into buses." Kate asked what seemed like a logical question. "What's she doing out here on a snow machine in the first place?"

Only apparently it wasn't. "She's on her way home, of course," Toni said impatiently.

"Home?"

"Yes. To Ichelik. It's a village thirty miles east of the Sagavanirktok.

It's her home. She commutes back and forth to work from there."

"Commutes?"

"Uh-huh."

"On a snow machine?"

"During the winter, yes. Anything wrong with that?"

Kate looked out at the blowing snow and fog, through which she could see maybe two feet, and said, "What could possibly be wrong with that?

I suppose during the summer she drives a four-wheeler?"

"Yes."

Kate restarted the bus. "Did I see a rifle on her shoulder?"

"Probably."

"I thought no one was allowed to have firearms in the field."

"No one is, except for the field manager and Cindy. Polar bears do wander ashore from the ice pack now and then, you know. They must have mentioned something about it during orientation."

A voice from the back of the bus added, "Right after they told us about not interacting with the wildlife."

Kate looked in the mirror to see Chris Heller's out thrust jaw and indignant eye, and restarted the bus. The drive to Pump One was accomplished in record time in a cold silence that rivaled the temperature outside. Kate heard the Sierra Club commando pounce on the pump operator who greeted them at the door, the Wilderness Society's representative close behind. "Slickem?" the operator drawled. "Well now, slick em That'd be a long-chain polymer, kind of a gooey plastic, reduces the turbulent flow of the oil in the line so that it'll expend its energy getting down to Valdez instead of tying itself in knots north of the Brooks Range."

The short man said, "Well, we heard it greased the inside of the line to make the oil go down faster that way."

The operator stared for one incredulous moment, and then threw back his head and laughed. He laughed loud, and he laughed long, and when he was done laughing neither the tall man nor the short man had anything more to say.

The pump station wasn't as noisy as the Production Center had been and everyone walked and talked a lot slower and softer. They paid their respects to the three enormous pumps that hied the oil on its way, genuflected before the three Rolls-Royce generators that powered the pumps and from this shrine were ushered outside to make their curtsy to the line itself.

It looked pretty much the same as it did five hundred miles to the south where it crossed the western border of the Park, Kate decided, a silver snake four feet in diameter, except that this one appeared to be shedding its skin. Large strips of the thin metal outer layer had peeled away, big chunks of the second, foam like layer were gouged out seemingly at random and a green plastic sub derma hung in strips like velvet from a caribou rack, leaving the darker, slowly oxidizing layer of steel pipe exposed to the elements and Kate's astounded gaze.

Upon inquiry, the pump station operator shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another and sent Toni an agonized glance, who said smoothly,

"Yes, well, insulation restoration and repair is a priority in next year's budget, have I shown you the cutout where you can feel the heat of the oil flowing down the line?"

She slid down the side of the gravel pad and crunched across the snow to a spot thirty feet farther on. On any other day the two pit bulls would have sunk their teeth into the insulation story, but the station operator's laughter rang in their ears and they followed Toni mutely.

The rest of the group, who had already learned everything they ever wanted to know about oil production in the frozen north and were still shaken by the fox pups death, straggled behind in less than enthusiastic pursuit.

Kate, following more slowly in the rear, cast a casual upwards glance and halted in her tracks.

It appeared that two-inch silver duct tape was a primary means of interim insulation maintenance. Strips of it wound around the pipeline, binding the peeling layers of insulation to the line with the grim determination for which duct tape is known as an all-purpose utility fix-all in the Arctic.

Kate stood there, staring up, hands in her pockets, trying to estimate how many sixty-yard rolls of duct tape it would take to wrap around a forty-eight-inch diameter, eight-hundred-mile-long pipeline. At three dollars a roll at Mckay's Hardware, and with the current price of a barrel of oil at nineteen dollars and falling fast, she was worried RPetco and Amerex might not be able to afford it. Then she remembered that over half the pipeline was buried, and heaved a sigh of relief.

The ingenuity and foresight of the pipeline's designers had not failed her after all.

"Kate?" Toni said, coming up behind her. "Did you want to take a look at this?"

Kate turned to meet Toni's inquiring brown eyes. "Okay," she said, "I give up. What's the deal with the turtles?"

"It's not their fault," Toni said back at the airport, watching the honorable senator from the great state of Illinois and entourage file up the air stairs into their plane. "Every government employee, before he or she is allowed to move up the civic ladder, is required to pass a course entitled

"How to Be a Prick in Ten Easy Lessons."

" One of the group turned at the bottom of the air stairs and waved enthusiastically. Toni gave a wide and seraphic smile and waved enthusiastically back. "Good-bye, all you little pricks and prickettes, good-bye. Click your heels, close your eyes and say three times,

"There's no place like Washington, D. C." Thank God."

The archaeologists burst into slightly hysterical laughter. Kate decided that if she discovered Toni Hartzler was dealing dope on the Slope, Kate might have to cover up the evidence.

She negotiated safe passage back to the Base Camp and nosed the bus up to the bull rail with no small sense of triumph. Plugging the bus into the head bolt heater on the rail, she collected the pups body from beneath the driver's seat and followed Toni into camp. They were met at the front door by none other than Cale Yarborough. "What the hell is this I hear about the fox pups on H Pad!" he bellowed, at a decibel level John King might have envied.

Kate tried to pretend she wasn't holding the body of the fox in question by the scruff of the neck and waited for Yarborough to ring the charges over Toni's hapless head for allowing a United States senator to be bitten by a fox on his, Gale's, shift.

"I'm sorry, Cale, it was--" Toni began.

Cale snatched the body from Kate's hands and cradled it in his arms and stroked its dead little head. "Poor little pup," he crooned, "poor little thing." He damned both women with an impartial glare. "At least tell me he took a good-size chunk out of the Honorable Levi Poulsboro.

At least tell me that!"

"Sorry, Cale," Toni said meekly, "he only got in a little nip."

Yarborough held forth colorfully for ten minutes on the cranial capacity of the average United States senator. Ending with a blanket curse on all their offspring for generations to come, he stamped off, still cradling the stiffening body of the pup protectively in his arms.

Kate followed Toni into her office. The phone was ringing and it kept ringing for the next forty-five minutes, one call after another demanding to know if the horrible news was true. Toni assured one and all it was and at the first breathing space unplugged the phone. Her beeper whined almost immediately. She turned it off.

"Is it always like this when a fox gets killed?" Kate said.

"Hey," Toni replied with an airy wave of her hand, "those pups were the adopted children of most of the west side of the field. The production operators go out every shift change to check and make sure one of them hasn't wandered into the flare pit by mistake. Belly dumpers getting paid by the yard have been known to detour through the pad just to pay their respects. I myself have been requested to put the PR van at the disposal of various departmental delegations who want to go out and take pictures to send to relatives Outside. They're so little and round and fuzzy and cute, you see. There isn't a lot that's little and round and fuzzy and cute on the Slope, and these are the first ones to den in so close to the Base Camp." "Why's Yarborough so pissed?" Kate said plaintively.

"He drives out there himself, two or three times a week, with bologna sandwiches." Toni grinned at Kate, feet up on her desk and hands linked behind her head. "He hates bologna. I've heard him say so." "But," Kate said feebly, "but they told us in orientation we weren't supposed to feed the wildlife."

"We're not," Toni said.

"It makes the wildlife dependent on us, they told us. Makes them forget how to hunt their own food."