Hmm, I’ve thought about diamonds. I’ve wondered about oil and pipelines. I’ve thought strategic. I considered medicines, personal grudges, land acquisition, bioweapons, cover-ups, even Mikael Grandy’s inheritance.
I’d not really thought about the eco lodge.
Nah. How?
Eco lodge?
EIGHTEEN
It seemed impossible that the temperature could drop further, but the big red needle on the thermometer outside the front door of the polar spa read minus five, a record for the end of October. My breath hovered. A Humvee patrol crunched past. I heard, from across the street, from ice pack that had only a week before been ocean, a hard, steady cracking, as if the last atoms of water there were solidifying into granite, making fluid a memory, a petrified artifact from long ago.
Eco lodge?
The borough police headquarters was in a rectangular two-story building with blue metal siding, across from Borough Hall and the Wells Fargo Bank building and ASRC headquarters. It was Barrow’s power intersection. Blue-and-white Ford Expeditions — four-wheel-drive Arctic patrol vehicles — were tethered by electrical wires to outlets outside, like horses a century ago, connected by reins to hitching posts. The stairway was steel, mud-catching in summer, and the steel was slippery with an ice sheath that made me slide around despite the rubber soles on my insulated boots. The railing was also coated with ice. Overheated air enveloped me when the front door swung shut. Light seemed yellowish, and cops stopped what they were doing to stare as I made my way to the duty sergeant at a front desk. They knew who I was. I was the guy who gave their kids vaccinations, but I was also the one who might have unleashed illness in their town.
“I asked you not to come here,” Merlin said.
His office was glass-enclosed. There were framed eight by ten photos on the desk of Merlin and his kids on vacation in New Mexico, hiking; Merlin and his wife throwing a feast when his crew had brought in the first bowhead of a season. Happy shots. His living room packed with neighbors eating fresh meat, pouring on hot sauce, sipping the peach juice infusion that Merlin had made.
The family scenes were at odds with the opposite corkboard wall plastered over with tacked up eight by tens of the Harmon research camp; the bodies, the angles, the huts. There was a Barrow map, with X marks showing homes in which rabies victims had resided.
My eyes stopped at the shots of Karen, a whole series: her body from a frontal angle, a side shot, a blown up facial showing pale skin and bruises, a shot of the neck where a blade had ripped through.
Merlin said, somewhat more softly, “It’s better if you stay away from my guys. Everyone’s on edge. We had a near riot in the church last night. Luther talked them down.”
“I need to ask you about the eco lodge.”
His head inclined. His eyes narrowed. He sat up straighter and put down the photos.
“Why?”
“The last lake the Harmons were supposed to visit. The one they never got to. Number nine. It’s slated for the lodge, right?”
If I learned something important, my agreement with General Homza was that I’d call him on the encrypted phone. Homza had told me, Even my adjutant won’t know about our deal. That stays between you and me.
Merlin regarded me neutrally for some moments. His eyes flickered to the corkboard. He must have decided that his resentments were secondary to any possibility that I might have stumbled on a meaningful theory or bit of information.
“What about the eco lodge, Colonel?”
Now he calls me Colonel instead of Joe.
“Is the lease sale final, Merlin?”
“It will be signed in a few days in Anchorage. Our signatory was down there when the quarantine began. The quarantine won’t stop the closing. They’re hacking out final details now.”
“Outsiders will own the lodge?”
“The land remains ASRC land. It will be leased out for fifty years to the eco outfit.”
“What outfit is that?”
“Great Arctic Circles, from L.A. They came up here and made an impressive presentation. They showed maps and statistics. Over a million tourists visited the Arctic last year, mostly in Europe. Ships. Treks. Polar bear safaris in Canada. Ice hotel in Sweden. Hunting in Siberia. It’s a booming industry, they said. The annual lease fee is substantial. Low impact use. Other proposals we get involve mining or drilling. This seemed… friendlier.”
“Who owns Great Arctic Circles, Merlin?”
He sat back and regarded me flatly. One advantage of working in a small place, I thought, was that in Barrow, things were not as compartmentalized as they are down south. Merlin was not only a police chief, but a whaler, a board member of the ASRC. He was a pillar of the community, a member of the local elite.
“A consortium,” he said. “Hotels.”
“They’ve built other eco lodges?”
“They own two in Siberia. They sent up a fellow by the name of Klimchuk, a lawyer. They’ll put ten million dollars in escrow. If they can’t finish the job, they forfeit it. They’re guaranteeing twenty percent of the jobs to locals. The North Slope will be an Arctic Serengeti, Klimchuk said. He showed profit charts on eco tours in Tanzania. He said Arctic tourism is the future. If they make ten percent of that African haul, they’re ahead.”
I asked him if I could see the plans and he shrugged, Why not, and opened a file cabinet. Minutes later I was bent over a photo of the lake and a ratty-looking cabin that was there now, alongside of an artist’s sketch of the proposed eco lodge. It was a long one-story ranch-style structure, its twin wings enveloping the curved end of the two-mile-long tundra lake. There were viewing platforms on the roof. There were, in the sketch, tourists sipping drinks and watching a herd of caribou pass. Those people, in the artist’s mind, probably came from homes in New York and London, Munich and Rio. They were people who paid to climb Kilimanjaro, to dive for sharks in the Marianas, to go on motorized big game photo safaris in South Africa. People who had killed off even the raccoons in the guarded communities in which they lived. But who paid tens of thousands of dollars to watch lions kill gazelles while they sipped beverages.
In the sketch, I saw big-tired tundra vehicles, glass-enclosed rolling living rooms, parked near the lodge. There was an airstrip. Small boats hugged a dock. Visitors walked from a private plane toward the lodge, with staff carrying luggage. Everyone seemed happy. Huge flocks of migrating birds blanketed the sky.
I said, thinking out loud, “Do the new owners get mineral rights, too, if they happen to change their mind, decide to dig or drill?”
“No. When you lease land in Alaska, you only get surface rights. Not below.”
“Oil? Diamonds?”
Merlin shook his head. “That would violate the lease. They’d forfeit the bond. They do the lodge, or nothing.”
“What about a rerouted pipeline aboveground.”
“Nope. That would violate terms.”
Maybe this is just one more bad idea. Drop it.
I said, “Number nine is the only lake that the Harmons were supposed to visit that they never reached.”
Merlin’s eyes left mine, slipped outside the office. Lots of police had gathered by one of the desks.
I said, “Is there anything special about this lake, Merlin? At all?”
Now more officers were at the desk. Merlin’s eyes came back. “Not that I can think of. I mean, they’re all different, but nothing particular about nine stands out. It’s on the edge of the Porcupine herd caribou migration. But so are other lakes.”
“I want to go there,” I said.