Welcome to the Greenhouse (7 page)

The long, fat freighter glided into the harbor at late morning— not the best time for a woman who had to keep out of sight.

The sun slowly slid up the sky as tugboats drew them into Anchorage. The tank ship, a big, sectioned VLCC, was like an elephant ballerina on the stage of a slate-blue sea, attended by tiny, dancing tugs.

Now off duty, Elinor watched the pilot bring them in past the Nikiski Narrows and slip into a long pier with gantries like skeletal arms snaking down, the big pump pipes attached. They were ready for the hydrogen sulfide to flow. The ground crew looked anxious, scurrying around, hooting and shouting. They were behind schedule.

Inside, she felt steady, ready to destroy all this evil stupidity.

She picked up her duffel bag, banged a hatch shut, and walked down to the shore desk. Pier teams in gasworkers’ masks were hooking up pumps to offload and even the faint rotten egg stink of the hydrogen sulfide made her hold her breath. The Bursar checked her out, reminding her to be back within twenty-eight hours. She nodded respectfully, and her maritime ID worked at the gangplank checkpoint without a second glance. The burly guy there said something about hitting the bars and she wrinkled her nose. “For breakfast?”

“I seen it, ma’am,” he said, and winked.

She ignored the other crew, solid merchant marine types. She had only used her old engineer’s rating to get on this freighter, not to strike up the chords of the Seamen’s Association song.

She hit the pier and boarded the shuttle to town, jostling onto the bus, anonymous among boat crews eager to use every second of shore time. Just as she’d thought, this was proving the best way to get in under the security perimeter. No airline manifest, no Homeland Security ID checks. In the unloading, nobody noticed her, with her watch cap pulled down and baggy jeans. No easy way to even tell she was a woman.

Now to find a suitably dingy hotel. She avoided Anchorage center and kept to the shoreline where small hotels from the TwenCen still did business. At a likely one on Sixth Avenue the desk clerk told her there were no rooms left.

“With all the commotion at Elmendorf, ever’ damn billet in town’s packed,” the grizzled guy behind the counter said.

She looked out the dirty window, pointed. “What’s that?”

“Aw, that bus? Well, we’re gettin’ that ready to rent, but—”

“How about half price?”

“You don’t want to be sleeping in that—”

“Let me have it,” she said, slapping down a fifty dollar bill.

“Uh, well.” He peered at her. “The owner said—”

“Show it to me.”

She got him down to twenty-five when she saw that it really was a “retired bus.” Something about it she liked, and no cops would think of looking in the faded yellow wreck. It had obviously fallen on hard times after it had served the school system.

It held a jumble of furniture, apparently to give it a vaguely homelike air. The driver’s seat and all else was gone, leaving holes in the floor. The rest was an odd mix of haste and taste. A walnut Victorian love seat with a medallion backrest held the center, along with a lumpy bed. Sagging upholstery and frayed cloth, cracked leather, worn wood, chipped veneer, a radio with the knobs askew, a patched-in shower closet and an enamel basin toilet illuminated with a warped lamp completed the sad tableau. A generator chugged outside as a clunky gas heater wheezed. Authentic, in its way.

Restful, too. She pulled on latex gloves the moment the clerk left, and took a nap, knowing she would not soon sleep again. No tension, no doubts. She was asleep in minutes.

Time for the reconn. At the rental place she’d booked, she picked up the wastefully big Ford SUV. A hybrid, though. No problem with the credit card, which looked fine at first use, then erased its traces with a virus that would propagate in the rental system, snipping away all records.

The drive north took her past the air base but she didn’t slow down, just blended in with late afternoon traffic. Signs along the highway warned about polar bears—even more dangerous than the massive local browns—coming down this far now. The terrain was just as she had memorized it on Google Earth, the likely shooting spots isolated, thickly wooded. The internet maps got the seacoast wrong, though. Two Inuit villages had recently sprung up along the shore within Elmendorf, as one of their people, posing as a fisherman, had observed and photographed. Studying the pictures, she’d thought they looked slightly ramshackle, temporary, hastily thrown up in the exodus from the tundra regions. No need to last, as the Inuit planned to return north as soon as the Arctic cooled. The makeshift living arrangements had been part of the deal with the Arctic Council for the experiments to make that possible. But access to post schools, hospitals and the PX couldn’t make this
home
to the Inuit, couldn’t replace their “beautiful land,” as the word used by the Labrador peoples named it.

So, too many potential witnesses there. The easy shoot from the coast was out. She drove on. The enterprising Inuit had a brand new diner set up along Glenn Highway, offering breakfast anytime to draw odd-houred Elmendorf workers, and she stopped for coffee. Dark men in jackets and jeans ate solemnly in the booths, not saying much. A young family sat across from her, the father trying to eat while bouncing his small, wiggly daughter on one knee, the mother spooning eggs into a gleefully uncooperative toddler while fielding endless questions from her bespectacled, school-aged son. The little girl said something to make her father laugh, and he dropped a quick kiss on her shining hair. She cuddled in, pleased with herself, clinging tight as a limpet.

They looked harried but happy, close-knit and complete. Elinor flashed her smile, tried striking up conversations with the tired, taciturn workers, but learned nothing useful from any of them.

Going back into town, she studied the crews working on planes lined up at Elmendorf. Security was heavy on roads leading into the base so she stayed on Glenn. She parked the Ford as near the railroad as she could and left it. Nobody seemed to notice.

At seven, the sun still high overhead, she came down the school bus steps, a new creature. She swayed away in a long-skirted yellow dress with orange Mondrian lines, her shoes casual flats, carrying a small orange handbag. Brushed auburn hair, artful makeup, even long, artificial eyelashes. Bait.

She walked through the scruffy district off K Street, observing as carefully as on her morning reconnaissance. The second bar was the right one. She looked over her competition, reflecting that for some women, there should be a weight limit for the purchase of spandex. Three guys with gray hair were trading lies in a booth, and checking her out. The noisiest of them, Ted, got up to ask her if she wanted a drink. Of course she did, though she was thrown off by his genial warning, “Lady, you don’t look like you’re carryin’.”

Rattled—had her mask of harmless approachability slipped?—she made herself smile, and ask, “Should I be?”

“Last week a brown bear got shot not two blocks from here, goin’ through trash. The polars are bigger, meat-eaters, chase the young males out of their usual areas, so they’re gettin’ hungry, and mean. Came at a cop, so the guy had to shoot it. It sent him to the ICU, even after he put four rounds in it.”

Not the usual pickup line, but she had them talking about themselves. Soon, she had most of what she needed to know about SkyShield.

“We were all retired refuel jockeys,” Ted said. “Spent most of thirty years flyin’ up big tankers full of jet fuel, so fighters and B-52s could keep flyin’, not have to touch down.”

Elinor probed, “So now you fly—”

“Same aircraft, most of ‘em forty years old—KC Stratotankers, or Extenders—they extend flight times, y’see.”

His buddy added, “The latest replacements were delivered just last year, so the crates we’ll take up are obsolete. Still plenty good enough to spray this new stuff, though.”

“I heard it was poison,” she said.

“So’s jet fuel,” the quietest one said. “But it’s cheap, and they needed something ready to go now, not that dust-scatter idea that’s still on the drawing board.”

Ted snorted. “I wish they’d gone with dustin’—even the traces you smell when they tank up stink like rottin’ eggs. More than a whiff, though, and you’re already dead. God, I’m sure glad I’m not a tank tech.”

“It all starts tomorrow?” Elinor asked brightly.

“Right, ten KCs takin’ off per day, returnin’ the next from Russia. Lots of big-ticket work for retired duffers like us.”

“Who’re they?” she asked, gesturing to the next table. She had overheard people discussing nozzles and spray rates. “Expert crew,” Ted said. “They’ll ride along to do the measurements of cloud formation behind us, check local conditions like humidity and such.”

She eyed them. All very earnest, some a tad professorial. They were about to go out on an exciting experiment, ready to save the planet, and the talk was fast, eyes shining, drinks all around.

“Got to freshen up, boys.” She got up and walked by the tables, taking three quick shots in passing of the whole lot of them, under cover of rummaging through her purse. Then she walked around a corner toward the rest rooms, and her dress snagged on a nail in the wooden wall. She tried to tug it loose, but if she turned to reach the snag, it would rip the dress further. As she fished back for it with her right hand, a voice said, “Let me get that for you.”

Not a guy, but one of the women from the tech table. She wore a flattering blouse with comfortable, well-fitted jeans, and knelt to unhook the dress from the nail head.

“Thanks,” Elinor said, and the woman just shrugged, with a lopsided grin.

“Girls should stick together here,” the woman said. “The guys can be a little rough.”

“Seem so.”

“Been here long? You could join our group—always room for another woman, up here! I can give you some tips, introduce you to some sweet, if geeky, guys.”

“No, I… I don’t need your help.” Elinor ducked into the women’s room.

She thought on this unexpected, unwanted friendliness while sitting in the stall, and put it behind her. Then she went back into the game, fishing for information in a way she hoped wasn’t too obvious. Everybody likes to talk about their work, and when she got back to the pilots’ table, the booze worked in her favor. She found out some incidental information, probably not vital, but it was always good to know as much as you could. They already called the redesigned planes “Scatter Ships” and their affection for the lumbering, ungainly aircraft was reflected in banter about unimportant engineering details and tales of long-ago combat support missions.

One of the big guys with a wide grin sliding toward a leer was buying her a second martini when her cell rang.

“Albatross okay. Our party starts in thirty minutes,” said a rough voice. “You bring the beer.”

She didn’t answer, just muttered, “Damned salesbots…,” and disconnected.

She told the guy she had to “tinkle,” which made him laugh. He was a pilot just out of the Air Force, and she would have gone for him in some other world than this one. She found the back exit—bars like this always had one—and was blocks away before he would even begin to wonder.

Anchorage slid past unnoticed as she hurried through the broad, deserted streets, planning. Back to the bus, out of costume, into all-weather gear, boots, grab some trail mix and an already-filled backpack. Her thermos of coffee she wore on her hip.

She cut across Elderberry Park, hurrying to the spot where her briefing said the trains paused before running into the depot. The port and rail lines snugged up against Elmendorf Air Force Base, convenient for them, and for her.

The freight train was a long, clanking string and she stood in the chill gathering darkness, wondering how she would know where they were. The passing autorack cars had heavy shutters, like big steel Venetian blinds, and she could not see how anybody got into them.

But as the line clanked and squealed and slowed, a quick laser flash caught her, winked three times. She ran toward it, hauling up onto a slim platform at the foot of a steel sheet.

It tilted outward as she scrambled aboard, thudding into her thigh, nearly knocking her off. She ducked in and saw by the distant streetlights vague outlines of luxury cars. A Lincoln sedan door swung open. Its interior light came on and she saw two men in the front seats. She got in the back and closed the door. Utter dark.

“It clear out there?” the cell phone voice asked from the driver’s seat.

“Yeah. What—”

“Let’s unload. You got the SUV?”

“Waiting on the nearest street.”

“How far?” “Hundred meters.”

The man jigged his door open, glanced back at her. “We can make it in one trip if you can carry twenty kilos.”

“Sure,” though she had to pause to quickly do the arithmetic, forty-four pounds. She had backpacked about that much for weeks in the Sierras. “Yeah, sure.”

The missile gear was in the trunks of three other sedans, at the far end of the autorack. As she climbed out of the car the men had inhabited, she saw the debris of their trip—food containers in the back seats, assorted junk, the waste from days spent coming up from Seattle. With a few gallons of gas in each car, so they could be driven on and off, these two had kept warm running the heater. If that ran dry, they could switch to another.

As she understood it, this degree of mess was acceptable to the railroads and car dealers. If the railroad tried to wrap up the auto-racked cars to keep them out, the bums who rode the rails would smash windshields to get in, then shit in the cars, knife the upholstery. So they had struck an equilibrium. That compromise inadvertently produced a good way to ship weapons right by Homeland Security. She wondered what Homeland types would make of a Dart, anyway. Could they even tell what it was?

The rough-voiced man turned and clicked on a helmet lamp. “I’m Bruckner. This is Gene.”

Nods. “I’m Elinor.” Nods, smiles. Cut to the chase. “I know their flight schedule.”

Bruckner smiled thinly. “Let’s get this done.”

Transporting the parts in via autoracked cars was her idea. Bringing them in by small plane was the original plan, but Homeland might nab them at the airport. She was proud of this slick work-around.