The Bone Seeker (21 page)

Derek closed his eyes. When he opened them, the bolder, better version of himself stepped forward.

‘Let's check it out,' he said.

After yesterday's five-minute phone call with a junior counsel at the Defence Department confirming that the clean-up at Glacier Ridge had been postponed indefinitely, Sonia Gutierrez had spent most of the night rereading the land claims papers and her head was spinning. The papers, with their endless delicately negotiated clauses, subclauses and technical addenda, served as a reminder of just how hard she'd worked, as well as how much she'd sacrificed to get the agreement in the first place. The indignation of yesterday had given way to a more considered determination. Somewhere in the papers she was confident there would be some grounds for an appeal against the department's decision. By appealing she hoped to be able to expose whatever it was that the department was trying to hide. Enter by stealth through the back door then open the whole thing wide. In any case, if any formal move were to have real traction it would have to be based on a careful weighing of the legal position rather than some knee-jerk sense of injustice or outrage.

Bundling herself up in her robe, she padded down the stairs to the guest kitchen and switched on the coffee drip, intending to get herself showered and dressed before going to see the Salliaqs, who were now back in their own house. Charlie needed to hear this latest development along with her reassurances that she was doing everything in her power to right the situation. That no one at Camp Nanook or in the Defence Department had thought to contact her directly so that she could forewarn Charlie was an affront to them both. Her client was a difficult man but he'd had a tough life and beneath all the bluster there
lurked a kind, if wary, heart. It was more than enough that his daughter had been murdered. To lose the land claim he'd worked so hard and fought so long for was a cruelty too far.

She sprayed herself with insect repellent and walked out to her ATV, zipped herself inside its reassuring plastic cover and sparked up the engine. On the way over, she rehearsed her spiel. The message she wanted to get across was that, however it seemed, the people of Kuujuaq were not powerless against the Defence Department's decision. She would tell Charlie that she had demanded an explanation, along with reassurances that the investigation into Martha Salliaq's death would continue under military police jurisdiction and for an undertaking that the planned decontamination works would start this season and the land returned to Inuit control once they were complete next year. She wouldn't mention her deeper fears of a cover-up until she had something more concrete to offer. And she certainly wouldn't bring up the tricky business of her bank balance. What the Salliaqs needed right now was reassurance and encouragement.

Charlie was on the couch in the living room. He struggled to get up when she came in. Alice had gone back to bed, he said, and Lizzie was at Markoosie's house. The old man was to all intents and purposes alone.

She made tea, sat down beside him and began. He listened to her as he almost always did, respectfully and without interrupting.

‘This is bad news. I don't think much of that mixed-dough police but I think even less of the
unataqti
,' he said.

Her heart went out to him. His face looked like an old tarpaulin left out in a storm. She patted his hand.

‘This is just a setback. We've got over enough of those in the past. The evidence against Namagoose and Saxby is overwhelming. While we're waiting for the legal stuff to go through we can continue to put the pressure on, publicize the case some more.'

She watched his face cloud over, the skin on his cheeks the colour of rotten ice. Some thought moved across it. He looked very sick.

‘The clean-up can wait,' he said. ‘I want my daughter's killer found.'

‘It's two sides of the same coin,' she pressed, regretting the phrase the moment it came out of her mouth. Using the language of money to an Inuk was like speaking in tongues to an atheist.

He looked at her as though she'd brought in a bad smell.

Then he waved his hands and grunted to signal that he was no longer willing to listen.

•   •   •

She left the house feeling disappointed with herself. She'd failed to get Charlie to understand that the clean-up and the search for Martha's killer were linked. But seeing him in such a fragile physical state only made her more determined to carry on. It occurred to her that she hadn't yet checked for new information in the local archives at the town hall. This was where she went now.

The broad historical facts of the Distant Early Warning line had etched themselves in her mind over the years. The line, which wasn't actually a line but rather a series of overlapping radar stations, was one of the outstanding initiatives of Cold War politics. Built in the late fifties, the DEW consisted of a string of sixty-three stations stretching nearly ten thousand kilometres across Arctic North America from Alaska in the west to Baffin Island in the east. Three types of facility had been built, the largest of which, the main stations, were like small cities, each with its own electricity, water, heat, an airstrip, and housing and recreation areas. Then there were mid-level, intermediate stations and small, unmanned ‘gap filler' stations. Though initially funded by the United States, the sites flew both the Canadian and US flags until they were deactivated and sole jurisdiction given to the Canadian government in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was partly what had delayed the land claim. It was only after the station at Glacier Ridge had devolved fully into Canadian government hands that the Defence Department had been free to engage in discussions on returning the site back to the Inuit.

It was public knowledge that the stations had produced large
amounts of hazardous waste. In 1996 the Canadian and US governments came to an agreement, with the United States contributing $100 million to the estimated $600 million clean-up effort. This was why, when Sonia had pushed for an independent organization to run the decontamination programme, the Department of Defence had insisted on contracting the work to Defence Construction Canada with Environment Canada supervising. What she didn't know then was that they would be working from Defence Department reports.

The papers had always referred to Glacier Ridge as an intermediate station and set the decontamination budget accordingly and neither Sonia nor any of the previous lawyers had contested this. She saw now that this was a mistake. She'd been working off the 1974 set of plans without comparing them either to earlier plans or to any of the other intermediate stations in the line. But, as she knew now, the site had been massively expanded and at least some of the additions, like the underground bunker, had not been marked on the set of plans from 1974 or indeed subsequently. What she needed in order to advance her case was proof that the station at Glacier Ridge had taken on some new role which the Defence Department was, even now, prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to keep secret.

She sat in front of the archive's only Internet-connected computer and googled ‘Distant Early Warning Line', following links until she came to a complete list of all sixty-three stations, along with their classifications. Glacier Ridge was marked down on the list as the most northerly of the intermediate stations. For a while she followed her nose, clicking on links until she stumbled on a paper drawn up by the DEW's budget office in 1954, listing the radar equipment installed in each of the three station categories. Intermediate DEW stations consisted of a single AN/FPS-19 radome, flanked by two AN/FRC-45 lateral comms dishes and an AN/FPS-23 Doppler antenna. Major stations had two radomes and four lateral comms dishes, small ‘gap fillers' only antennae. There didn't appear to be any exceptions to this rule.

The paper gave her an idea.

She found what she needed back at the hotel: the Environment Canada report on the Glacier Ridge decontamination. The report listed every building, each outpost, every last piece of machinery on the site, including the concrete bunker, which was described as ‘waste land fill'. The radar equipment had a separate section of its own. The list appeared to be consistent with that of an intermediate station. Which meant that, unless the station had been first upgraded then downgraded – highly unlikely – the construction works, including the bunker, hadn't been the result of a regrading of the station. Which in turn meant that, in addition to radar, the station must have been used for some altogether different and, it appeared, clandestine purpose. All she needed to find out now was what.

There was nothing for it but to go back to the original papers. Which meant returning to the Salliaqs' house. She sensed that Charlie would be in no mood to cooperate. The papers were still in the packing case in his shed. If she was careful she could steal around the house and into the shed without anyone noticing. It would be an easier task now she knew roughly what she was looking for. She picked up her bag, left her room, locked the door behind her and made her way along the familiar route to the Salliaqs' house and slid through the side yard to the back. The shed door was, as before, unlocked. She let herself in and pulled out the packing crate. Sifting through a pile of papers, she found what she was after: the initial Environment Canada site assessment for the decontamination works, dating from before she'd taken on the case. She knew now that this original report had been replaced by another, signed by Dr Richard Price of the Defence Department's fictitious Environmental Impact Division and countersigned by Iain Rogers-Garvin, who was Associate Minister in the Defence Department for several years in the eighties, before he'd had to resign following a sex scandal. It was always going to be in the department's interests to establish the rules of engagement and they'd forged documents in order to do it. The negotiators who'd previously worked on the land claim hadn't noticed. Not the first elementary cock-up they'd made.

What she had in her hands in the original Environment Canada site report was effectively the only independent assessment of the extent of the restitutive decontamination required on the site. Her attention was drawn to an attached memorandum from the head of the assessment team to the deputy director of Environment Canada. It struck her only because of the subject heading:
Animal Bones
. On the surface the memo seemed harmless enough, even trivial. The assessment team had uncovered an unexpected number of skeletal animal remains on the site and the purpose of the memo was simply to inform the deputy director of Environment Canada that the head of the assessment team was planning to send them for testing. What really interested Sonia though was the response. Handwritten and faint from multiple photocopying, it was still just readable.

IRG categorically forbids.

That name again, Iain Rogers-Garvin, Associate Minister for Defence, this time actively stymieing what was supposed to have been an independent report into contamination at the Glacier Ridge DEW station. Here was proof that the department had actively interfered in a supposedly independent assessment report then, finally, buried it and replaced it with their own.

Last time they'd spoken, Sonia had picked up Klinsman's uneasiness about his role as Department of Defence stoodge. If the colonel didn't already know about this, then it might be the piece of evidence he needed to help him begin to push back. It was worth a try.

•   •   •

The guard at the Camp Nanook sentry gate informed her that the colonel wasn't seeing any visitors. She'd already allowed for this possibility.

‘You won't mind if I use the bathroom? I've been here before, so I remember where it is.'

The guard looked uncomfortable, then relented, on condition that she leave her vehicle at the barrier and wasn't long about it. Sonia slipped under the barrier and along the boardwalk. At the corner she
turned back to check that the guard had returned to his screen, then slipped around a corner and hurried towards the administration block. Klinsman was in his office. The instant he saw her, his hand went to the phone.

‘Really? For a woman?'

Klinsman flushed and waved Sonia to a seat. His eyes cut to the clock on the wall. ‘I'll give you four minutes.'

Sonia smiled to herself. This was just like court. She suddenly felt very firmly on home turf.

‘I have evidence that the installation at Glacier Ridge was more than a DEW radar station and that it was engaged in covert activities during the seventies and eighties,' she began.

Klinsman looked up from his desk briefly and shrugged. His indifference took her by surprise.

‘It was the Cold War,' he said blandly.

She tried again.

‘I can also prove that the Defence Department was actively manipulating impact and assessment reports on the decontamination. Which was illegal at the time.' ‘Prove' was maybe stretching it, but right now that didn't matter.

Klinsman glanced at the clock again. He'd already decided that she was wasting his time.

‘I'm sure that's all very interesting but you need to make your representations to the appropriate body, Miss Gutierrez. Now, if you don't mind?' He leaned forward in his chair as if about to stand and see her out.

She lifted a manicured hand.

‘As I recall you said four minutes, colonel. Unless time moves more quickly at these latitudes, I believe it's been two.'

Klinsman sighed but conceded the point.

‘I know about the underground bunker. The only rationale for a bunker that size is armaments. My money is on nuclear.'

Klinsman blinked. Something hard moved across his face.

‘If you need to speak with us again, Ms Gutierrez, I suggest you call counsel office.' His fingers tapped on the desk.

She stood and brushed herself down. ‘I'll see myself out.'

•   •   •

The hotel phone was ringing as she entered. She picked up.

‘Sonia? This is Chris Tetlow. Doesn't anyone up there believe in answer machines?'