Chapter Two
Bob left the old gray building with a shudder; the unpleasant meeting and bleak architecture had that affect on him. The weather had deteriorated while he was indoors; icy snow crystals pelted his face when he turned the corner into the teeth of the wind which blasted down the alley behind the building. He was carrying the nylon bag, and the gale-force winds off the Knik Arm tried to rip it from his hands.
He tightened his grip; dropping the bag would be bad. Bob had just decided he needed a heavier coat while watching pedestrians in the street. Most were wearing jackets, but a couple of them were in shirtsleeves and a light vest. “What kind of person,” he wondered, “wants to get used to this?”
Getting into his rental car was a relief, because that wind was nasty. Bob was muttering to himself again: “I wonder how that man ever got a family. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be in the same room with the guy, much less sleep with him.”
He took some time to go through the bag’s contents once more. There was a transceiver there which could set off the things there from quite a distance away, and he wanted to make sure it was powered down.
“It would be bad if -”
The fireball that suddenly formed where Corbett’s rental car had been parked shattered windows in a one-block radius. Alarms rung and horns were honking as a pillar of smoke went up from the alley. His hood, bent and blackened, neatly dissected that HMS Resolution model, a half-block away.
* * * * *
Over thirteen hundred miles to the southwest, a tall man in a parka was leaving the Adak city hall.
Rick Maxwell stopped to consider his options. The supply line was making what should have been an easy installation into something of a logistical nightmare. Adak Island is some 650 miles west of the Alaska mainland, about half-way out the Aleutian Island chain. It had been a naval base dating back to 1942, in response to the Japanese landing in the westernmost of those islands, then decommissioned in the late 1990s.
The EPA had busied itself cleaning up various undesirable or toxic chemicals, fuel spills, and various other things which wouldn’t do for the government to pass on to others, and pronounced it clean in the early 2000s. Then the Department of the Navy turned the base over to the Aleut people.
The Aleuts were trying hard to make the city of Adak a going concern, including the lease of a small cannery to an Alaskan company, but the island’s remote location and distance from the mainland made that quite a challenge. Fewer than 200 people were making the island their permanent home, these days. In the meantime, the hundreds of existing buildings were rapidly falling into decay, as the wind and weather took a heavy toll.
They wanted cell phone service, which would be a logical request almost anywhere else. But here? Just getting supplies from mainland Alaska required cargo ships, and deliveries took days to arrive. In winter, that meant irregular arrivals and an unreliable schedule.
Rick walked out to one of the short piers in Sweeper Cove, and stared across the water at Razorback Mountain, one of several sharply-spined peaks a mile to the south.
On clear days, he was told, he’d be able to see the cone of Great Sitkin Island, a volcano about 25 miles to the northeast. He was still waiting for one of those “clear days”. The weather was bad; in fact, it seemed to always be cloudy and windy … and raining or snowing.
Rick heard footsteps behind him on the pier. His host, Frank Merculief, was waiting to take him back to City Hall. “There’s a phone call from the mainland,” Frank told him. “We were going to write down the number, but he said he’d wait.”
* * * * *
“Rick, this is Patterson. Are you alone?” came the voice of William Patterson, his field supervisor in the home office. “Yeah, they’ve stepped down the hall. What’s up?” “Bob Corbett just got himself killed in Anchorage.”
Rick swore, loud and long. “Do they know what happened?”
“There was a big explosion. We know that he had just taken possession of a quantity of … well, let’s just say it was military munitions, and let it go at that.”
“What the hell was he doing with THAT?”
“You know what he was working on, but that’s not important right now, Rick. You need to haul your butt back to Anchorage ASAP, and bird-dog the police and fire department until they find out what happened. You may need to lean on someone, this time.”
“They’re not going to like that. Alaskans had a bellyful of outside interference before they became a state themselves, and it seems memories here are long.”
“Can’t be helped this time, Rick. Hard feelings or not, this is going to get ugly anyway. Check in with me when you find out anything.”
To be continued ...
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