Still, that smell wasn't as bad as this one. He heard a sound next to him and turned to see Trooper Prince's pale face going even paler. He didn't bother asking if she was okay. She had to be.
So did he. He took a shallow breath, stiffened his spine and opened the door to the smoke-stained cabin.
It looked like one of the rings of hell in Dante'sInferno.It seemed as if there were charred bodies everywhere he looked, on the floor, fallen forward across the galley table, at least one under it.
He pulled his head out and took a deep gulp of air. “Go get the body bags,” he told Prince.
Her head snapped up and color returned to her face with a rush. “I'm fine, sir, I-”
“I know you are,” he said. “We still need the bags.”
She hesitated. He pulled a pair of rubber gloves from a pocket, pausing to raise an eyebrow in her direction that said clearly,And you were waiting around for-what, exactly?She turned and stepped to the float, her boot heels echoing against the metal grating. The set of her shoulders looked stiff, as if she were holding them straight by sheer effort of will.
Liam took two steps and leaned one hand against the mast, unmindful of the soot smearing his palm.
He'd been a trooper for almost twelve years now, and he had seen his share of carnage. There was the time Norman Murdy shot five people at a holiday camp on the Tonsina River, and then shot a trooper pursuing him in a helicopter. Ray Doucet had ambushed a husband and wife goldpanning on the Telaquana, had shot the husband and raped and murdered the wife. Billy Svenson had taken his father's AK-47 to Tok Middle School for a show-and-tell that resulted in the death of two students, one teacher and the principal and the wounding of nine others.
He had responded to all of those scenes and more, and contrary to popular belief, the emotions inflicted on the people who saw such things first did not, over time, diminish in any way, shape or form. Time numbed your reactions, allowing you to pretend something like composure, but the horror was always there, and the disbelief, and the shock. It still amazed Liam to see how much blood there was in the human body. He opened his eyes and looked around him.
Kulukak was a small village of two hundred, mostly Yupik souls. It sat on the northwest side of Kulukak Bay, a circle of water eight miles across and ten miles north to south, enclosed by rolling hills and thick green vegetation that reminded Liam of Puget Sound without Seattle. It was calm and still, not a ripple marring the surface of the bay, each hill and tree and rock and narrow beach represented on that surface with mirrorlike fidelity. A low-lying mist clung to the tops of the trees, which reflection gave the scene an eerie black and white look, and a still, moody, almost sullen air.
There was no road to Kulukak, and the bay froze over in winter, so the only means of year-round transportation in and out was by air. As an indication of its importance to the life of the village, a gravel airstrip had been carved out of the center of the tiny settlement. There was an orange wind sock on a pole stuck in the ground at one end, today hanging limp, inert. On the other side of the strip was a hangar, and inside it a road grader equipped with a twelve-foot blade.
A few of the homes were built of aged logs, the rest of prefabricated materials shipped up from Outside in a kit, green and blue and cream siding beneath shallow-pitched corrugated metal roofs. A big building set apart from the others on a small hill behind the village had dark blue siding and the American and Alaskan flags hanging out front. Probably the school. The building was too big for a post office in a village this size. The Postal Service probably contracted out to one of the locals, who would run the post office out of his or her living room, as was the practice in the smaller Bush villages.
The boat harbor was a quarter the size of Newenham's, with one dock extending from the narrow strip of gravel and sand that formed Kulukak's waterfront, one gangway descending from the dock and slips enough for forty boats, most of them occupied today. The boat he was on was tied up to the slip farthest from the dock, the closest boat moored three spaces distant. The rest of the fleet seemed to be pressing against the sides of the harbor, keeping as far as they could get from theMarybethia.
He realized he was stalling. A soft croak came from above and behind him. He whipped around and beheld a raven sitting on top of one of the light poles illuminating the boat slips. “What the hell?” Liam said involuntarily. “What are you doing here?”
The raven cocked his gleaming black head. His black beady eyes met Liam's, unblinking, as he let loose with a stream of even softerkuk-kuk-kuks.
There was a stir behind him and a few muttered phrases. He dropped his hand from the mast and stood erect. It couldn't be. Newenham was fifty miles to the northwest; there was no way that this was the same raven that had been haunting his steps since his arrival at his new posting. He turned his back on the shiny black incubus and tried not to flinch when a long, derisive caw came from the top of the light pole.
Five men were standing on the slip, waiting, and he turned to meet their eyes, one at a time. All of them bore traces of at least a partial Yupik heritage-one had the high, flat cheekbones, another the thick, straight ebony hair, a third the narrow, tilted eyes. Four of them had the seamed faces of elders, age lending them at least the illusion of wisdom and authority. The fifth was younger, a short, thickset man in his mid-forties with steady dark eyes. He didn't look friendly. The other four looked, not unfriendly, exactly, but more like they were reserving judgment.
Liam doffed his cap and bent his head as a gesture of respect to the authority of the elders. “My name is Liam Campbell, of the Alaska State Troopers, Newenham post.” He waited. It never helped to rush anything in the Bay, and it was offensive to the Natives besides, who had made a pretty good living for thousands of years by waiting: waiting for the fish to come up the river, waiting for the caribou to come down out of the mountains, waiting for the bears to wake up in the spring, waiting for the berries to ripen in the fall. Patience wasn't just a virtue for the people of the Bay, it was a way of life. Liam, as new as he was to his posting, knew that much.
The younger man said, his voice curt, “Walter Larsgaard. I'm the council chief. This is the council.”
He didn't introduce them. Liam forced the issue, stepping down to the slip and extending his hand to each man in turn. “Willie Kashatok.” “Robert Halstensen.” “Mike Ekwok.” “Carl Andrew.” They spoke English easily, albeit with the guttural inflection and heavy rhythm common to those whose first language was Yupik.
“How do you do,” Liam said gravely. “In any other circumstances, I'd be glad to meet you. This…”-he gestured behind him-“this is awful.”
This frank acceptance of the horror of the situation and the open way in which he shared it caused a perceptible relaxation among the four older men, who exchanged glances and looked back at Liam, still watchful but less on guard. One of them- Ekwok, he thought-even went so far as to give an approving nod, and mutter something to the man standing next to him- Halstensen?-that sounded like, “Tookalook,” which probably wasn't anything close to what it was. Yupik was allk's andt's and pretty much all of it sounded like “tookalook” to Liam's Anglo ears. The two old men looked from Liam to the raven on the light pole and back again, and said no more.
Larsgaard alone showed no sign, of approval, or anything else. He waited, silent and wary. His straight black hair fell across his forehead and shadowed his eyes, so that Liam couldn't get a read on what he was thinking.
“Who owned this boat?” Liam said. “I see that her home port is registered here.” He pointed at the stern,Marybethia,and below thatKulukak, Alaska,in no-nonsense lettering, spare, neat, easy to read, no unnecessary serifs or flourishes. Some of the names painted on the sides of boats were so elaborately curliqued they were next to impossible to decipher. This boat even had the state registration number lettered on the bow beneath the name, something you almost never saw on anything bigger than a skiff.