Charon's landing

“Yes, I phoned earlier. I’m Philip Mercer.”

“Oh, yes, you’re here to see Andy Lindstrom.” She got up from her chair, the metal legs scraping as she shifted her considerable bulk. “Right this way. He’s not expecting you for a while, but I’m sure he won’t mind.”

Lindstrom, the terminal’s Chief of Operations, stood behind his desk as Mercer entered his office. He wore jeans and a heavy flannel shirt, his head covered by a Seahawks baseball cap. Of average height and build and still in his forties, he looked much older, his skin heavily weathered by twenty years in Alaska and a two-packs-a-day cigarette habit. His jaw was stubbled with a couple days’ worth of reddish beard, and his blue eyes were wearier than Mercer remembered from the last time he’d seen him.

The office was small and institutional, the light provided by a single window and a bank of fluorescent fixtures suspended from the drop ceiling. Lindstrom’s desk was piled with papers placed haphazardly in spiraled stacks that seemed in imminent danger of toppling. A credenza and file cabinet were also buried under papers, thick technical manuals, and parts catalogs. The only furniture not covered was a pair of old wooden chairs in front of the desk. On one wall was a large topographical map of Alaska crudely bisected by a jagged red line representing the pipeline. On the opposite wall was a garish travel poster of a well-bikinied beach.

Lindstrom acknowledged Mercer with a raised finger, then pointed at the telephone receiver clutched in his other fist. His complexion was reddened by whatever was being said on the other end of the conversation.

“Now wait just a goddamn minute. I sent the armature up to the depot in Fairbanks two days ago. If you haven’t gotten it yet, bend their ear, not mine.” He paused and rolled his eyes at Mercer. “Hey, listen to me, I’m not your fucking whipping boy. This sounds like an internal problem to me. I just tried to do you a favor. Don’t think it means I want you calling me every time you have a glitch with one of your machines. Maybe next time you’ll buy American.”

He set the phone down and blew out a long breath.

“Let me guess,” Mercer said as Lindstrom lit a cigarette. “One of the oil companies up in the Refuge.”

“You got it. Alyeska promised to help them out, and the next thing you know they’re calling me when they run out of toilet paper. Christ, it wasn’t like this when we opened up this state. Those roughnecks knew how to work.

“I was a little surprised to get your call yesterday,” Andy said as they shook hands. “I thought you’d left the state after completing those tests with Howard Small. And I’m downright curious why you wanted my Chief of Security present for this meeting. Mike Collins will be here in a few minutes. Mind telling me what you’re doing back in Alaska?”

“I’d prefer to wait until Collins gets here. It’s a pretty complicated story, and I only want to tell it once.”

“Am I right in guessing this has something to do with your project up on the hill?”

“Indirectly. Have you heard about Howard Small?”

“No, what about him?”

“He’s dead, I’m afraid. Murdered. And whoever killed him has made two attempts on me.”

“Jesus. All for that tunnel-boring machine of his?”

Before Mercer could reply, there was a knock at the door, and without pause, Mike Collins entered the office. He was big, a solid two hundred twenty pounds, and old enough that Mercer assumed the scar jagging its way across the right side of his face was a constant reminder of the Vietnam War. Like Lindstrom, he was dressed casually, jeans and a flannel shirt, a pair of Tony Lamas on his size-thirteen feet.

Because he and Mercer hadn’t met during Mercer’s earlier stay in Valdez, Lindstrom made introductions. Collins’ grip was sure and firm, his hands almost as callused as Mercer’s. The Operations Chief told Collins about the death of Howard Small and the two attempts on Mercer’s life.

“So this is about Minnie?” Lindstrom asked again.

“No, not at all. After we finished up our tests, Howard and I went fishing with his cousin in Homer. While we were out, we found a burned-out derelict fishing boat floating maybe forty miles offshore. What we found aboard her got him killed.”

“Yeah, and what was that?” Collins asked with the sharpness of a cop who couldn’t take retirement.

“It took the full efforts of the FBI lab in Washington to figure out that a piece of steel I’d salvaged from the wreck was a fragment of a liquid nitrogen containment tank. Our best guess is the boat was smuggling cylinders of the stuff into Alaska.”

“Why would someone do that when it’s commercially available, and why would someone then try to kill to cover it up?”

“The Feds are working on that right now,” Mercer answered. “What concerns me is what they’re going to do with it.”

“You think this may have something to do with us?” Collins asked.

Before Mercer could answer, Lindstrom spoke. “How much liquid nitrogen are we talking about?”

“Before I left Washington, I called the Harbor Master in Seward, the boat’s home port. He told me that the Jenny IV had gone out eighteen times in the past year, yet none of the canneries or fish- processing plants that I called have any record of buying fish from her. The Harbor Master also told me her captain had just paid cash for a new pickup, so he was making money somehow. Figure she went on at least eighteen runs and had a capacity of about thirteen tons. You do the math. That’s a shitload of liquid nitrogen.”

“I still don’t get it. It’s not a drug or explosives or anything illegal. I mean, it’s just cold. What’s the big deal?”

“The only thing that makes sense to me, and I believe that Dick Henna of the FBI agrees, is sabotage,” Mercer continued over the startled looks of the two men. “Liquid nitrogen can alter the molecular strength of any material exposed to it. It weakens steel so badly that it can fracture under its own weight. And there would be no trace of tampering. Say someone sprays a piece of equipment with the stuff. Later, when it’s used, the equipment would fail with no logical explanation and no detectable cause. What if they use the nitrogen to weaken a section of the pipeline? When it collapses you’ve got a major spill on your hands for no reason. You’ve been under the media microscope since work started on the new pipeline from the North Slope, so I figured you guys would be tailor-made for this kind of terrorist action.”

Mercer could see he’d caught Andy Lindstrom’s attention. But by no means was the third-generation oilman convinced. Instinctively, Mercer stayed quiet, letting Lindstrom think through the logic. But still he had to struggle not to show his agitation. He’d just dropped a bombshell on the Operations Chief’s desk, and Lindstrom didn’t know that Mercer wasn’t given to paranoid fantasies and conspiracy theories. Come on, damn it, come on. You know this could be a possible threat.

“The pipeline would make a choice target, but it wouldn’t work,” Lindstrom said at last, pulling a fifth of bourbon from a desk drawer and splashing some into three small cups. “The pipe walls are high-tensile steel, about a half-inch thick, with a maximum rated internal pressure load of nearly one thousand two hundred psi. Even if someone froze a section, they’d still need a bulldozer to crack it open, and our response team would be there long before they made their getaway.”

“What about the VSMs?” Mercer fired back, knowing he had to work fast or his warnings weren’t going to amount to anything.

The aboveground sections of the pipeline were supported above the frozen tundra by 78,000 VSMs or Vertical Support Members. The towers were spaced approximately sixty feet apart and were designed to allow the pipeline to shift within its bed up to twelve feet horizontally and two feet vertically to compensate for expansion and contraction of the pipe casing. The VSMs also served as a buffer in the event of an earthquake like the one that devastated Alaska on Good Friday of 1964. The bases of the stanchions were buried anywhere between fifteen and sixty feet deep, depending on the depth of the permafrost. They utilized passive ammonia cooling to ensure that conductive heat from the flowing oil didn’t melt the frozen soil that kept the pipeline stable.

“Same again. Even if you weakened the supports with liquid nitrogen, you’d still need heavy equipment to make them fail. Remember, it took 1347 state and federal permits to get the line constructed, and you can bet dollars to doughnuts that they covered their asses and made sure the whole system was so over-built that God himself couldn’t take it apart.”

“They said the same thing about the Titanic.” Mercer let his last statement hang in the air for a minute before continuing. “How about some of the bridges? Isn’t there one over a thousand feet long?”

“Where the pipeline crosses the Tanana River, there’s a suspension bridge of twelve hundred feet, but again,