Secret Tales of the Arctic Trails: Stories of Crime and Adventure in Canada's Far North

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Introduction

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold."

Robert W. Service,

The Cremation of Sam McGee

(Songs of a Sourdough)

The High Arctic has long been a land of romance, a magnet drawing adventurers. From the sixtieth parallel to the North Pole, across the tundra and the Barren Lands, the Far North has beckoned the brave, the foolhardy, and the curious. The mystery of the Land of the Midnight Sun has fascinated poets and writers, painters and sculptors, no less than scientists and explorers. In this anthology, a spectrum of Canadian writers explore in their imaginations crime and malfeasance and thrilling danger under the flickering Northern Lights.

The Northern is Canada's own particular form of popular fiction, and although we let many foreigners mine this rich vein of suspense and adventure, we haven't done too badly ourselves. Many Canadians have recorded and recreated tales of suspense and adventure, of discovery and exploration, in the vast imponderable of our northernmost territories. The first adventure novel set in the exotic and romantic Canadian North was Sir Gilbert Parker's Pierre and His People: Tales of the Far North (1892), which was followed by An Adventurer of the North: being a continuation of the Histories of Pierre and His People and the latest existing records of Pretty Pierre (1895), and A Romany of the Snows, second series of An Adventurer of the North: being a continuation of Pierre and his people (1896). Parker also wrote The Chief Factor: A Tale of the Hudson's Bay Company (1892), and Northern Lights (1909), a Mountie novel. An historian and novelist, Parker was born in 1862 and died in 1932. He settled in England in 1889, and became an MP and figured largely in Imperial affairs. He was knighted in 1902 and received a baronetcy in 1915. Although he died in London, England, he is buried in Canada.

Headon Hill's Spectre gold: a Romance of the Klondyke (Headon Hill was a pseudonym of Francis Edward Grainger, an English author of romantic, mystery, and detective fiction) in 1898 was the first novel to exploit the fictional possibilities of the Klondike Gold Rush and was followed by, inter alia, Robert W. Service's The Trail of ’98: a Northland Romance, (1910), and The Great Gold Rush: A Tale of the Klondike (1913), by William H. P. Jarvis, which deals with the actual attempt by American annexationists to seize the Yukon and the foiling of their nefarious plot by the historical Sam Steele. Jarvis was a journalist born in Prince Edward Island in 1876 who died in 1944.

The Northern, the Mountie novel, and other tales set in what Sir William Butler called the Great Lone Land (The Great Lone Land, 1872, his report of his official survey of the Canadian Northwest in 1871–1872, of which his recommendations therein led to the forming of the North-West Mounted Police, later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, in 1873), entwine to ravel the Gordian knot. The Northern depicted that country of the mind with Men with iron wills and steel strengths and relentless laws and only the strong surviving as the Canadian critic Hilda Glynn Howard, who commented as by H. Glynn-Ward, put it in her article Weird tales of the Canadian wilds: Canada through American eyes in Canadian Bookman in 1925. The Mountie novel gives to the world British North America's own unique and most enduring image: a stalwart, red-coated, fur-hatted policeman on snowshoes, accompanied by his trusty husky, pursuing mad trappers across the trackless wastes of the Barren Lands, or, exchanging his ear-flapped winter headgear for a Boy Scout Stetson, riding alone into a camp of hostile Indians. Foreign authors remembered Samuel Taylor Coleridge's advice to writers of romances to set their adventures in remote lands, for the unknown thrills whereas what is familiar can be blasé and an author can get away with less fact and more imagination in settings that few of his readers can check for accuracy. Canada, before the global village, was suitably remote.

The exponents of the Northern in the early years of the twentieth century were Ralph Connor (i.e., the Rev. Charles William Gordon, 1860–1937), the Rev. Hiram Alfred Cody, 1872–1948, both of whom spent many years in missionary work in the Canadian Northwest, and the American novelist James Oliver Curwood, 1878–1927, who was actually commissioned by the Canadian government to write novels popularizing Canada. To his credit, he travelled extensively in the Canadian Northwest and though his novels could be mistaken for the script for a version of Rose Marie, he is noted for his authentic description of scene. The Northern has never been abandoned as a literary form by Canadian writers and contemporaneously novelists as diverse as Farley Mowat and Scott Young have ventured into the territory respectively, with the former's Snow Walker (1975) and two juveniles, Lost in the Barrens (1956), which won a Governor General's Award, and its sequel, The Curse of the Viking Grave (1966); and the latter's Murder in a Cold Climate (1988), and The Shaman's Knife (1993), two mysteries featuring RCMP Inspector Matthew Matteesie Kitologitak, a full-blooded Inuit.

Come mushing down these secret trails in with John Ballem, John Buchan, Rose De Shaw, Carol Newhouse, Marjorie Pickthall, James Powell, Peter Sellers, Robert W. Service, and Eric Wright, as they probe the wilderness of human evil in this entertaining mélange of stories old and new. From the Paleolithic to high-tech oil drilling, the enduring saga of crime and punishment is told by these talented story-spinners in these tales of detection, mystery, and adventure.

John Ballem

Rigged to Blow

(An original story)

Biographical and bibliographical information about the author will be found at the back of the book.

Rigged to Blow is a neat little detective story by an author whose knowledge of the oil industry is second to none and whose skill as a thriller writer is equivalent. Follow along with Gordon Boyd the trail of deductions that enables him to thwart massive extortion.

Rigged to Blow

We got trouble, Mel. Big time! Gordon Boyd, executive assistant to the president, blurted as he rushed into the president's lavishly furnished office and handed him a single sheet of paper. Mel Latimer, the president of Astro Canada Inc., took one look at the expression on his assistant's face, picked up his reading glasses, and hurriedly scanned the paper. The message was chilling:

We have taken over command of the drillship Arctic Grail. The remainder of the crew are on their way to Tuktoyaktuk in two of the lifeboats. Al Martin, the toolpush, is with them. He will confirm that the well is rigged to blow. Which it will unless our demands are met. They are as follows: $75 million U.S. to be deposited at La Banque Suisse in Zurich, Account No. 250071, within 24 hours from now. We will know when this has been done. When the money has been deposited, you will have a helicopter pick us up and fly us to the Tuktoyaktuk Airport where your long range Challenger jet will fly us to Havana. There are five of us. When our associate hears that we have reached a safe haven in Havana it will be safe to board Arctic Grail and defuse the well. But not before. We have the capability of blowing up the ship at any time, from anywhere. You know what all that oil will do to the Arctic.

Educated bastard, Latimer snarled. Do we know who he is?

Not yet. Although my guess is that it's the geologist.

Not necessarily, Latimer interrupted him. There are a lot of well educated people on the rigs these days.

Anyway, Gordon continued, we'll soon know. We're in touch with the Tuk office on a secure line and they're contacting the lifeboats to find out who's on board.

The Coriolis effect. Christ! muttered the president.

What's that? asked his mystified assistant.

In the northern hemisphere the rotation of the earth spins everything to the right; watch your bathtub the next time you pull the plug. Arctic Grail has encountered oil in the Kok Kok formation under very high pressure. If that well blows, the drillpipe will come out of the hole like it was shot from a cannon. Blowing wild, without a choke, that well will spew out more than five thousand barrels of oil a day.

The president got up from behind a desk that was the size of a drilling platform and walked over to a panelled wall. He pressed a hidden button and a map of the Arctic slid down with the faint whirring sound of an electric motor. First the oil would be washed up on the shores of Banks Island and then it would flow west to Victoria Island. Then when winter sets in the oil will be carried along in the ice and when spring comes and the ice melts that goddamn gunk will be dumped all along the coast, including Alaska.

Gordon Boyd was a Harvard M.B.A., a head office man who had spent very little time in the field. But surely they will have the well shut in before that.

Not a chance. The only way to shut that well in is to drill a relief well and pump tons of drilling mud into the formation to seal it off. The polar ice pack will move in over that location in another three weeks, so a relief well can't be drilled until next summer. Besides, a blowout will either sink Arctic Grail or damage her beyond repair, and there's not another offshore drilling rig within thousands of miles. Christ, this will make the Exxon Valdez spill look like a training exercise. Latimer turned away from the map. First, we've got to make sure that this threat is for real. We should have heard from…

The scrambler phone rang before he could complete the sentence. He pressed the speaker button and barked, Latimer here.

It's bad, Mel. Real bad, Perry Rutherford, the drilling superintendent in overall charge of the Arctic drilling project, said without preamble.

Spell it out.

I'll have Al fill you in on the situation on board the ship.

I'm real sorry, Mr. Latimer, the toolpush said as soon as he came on the line. There was nothing we could do. They had automatic rifles and just took over the ship. They secured the radio room and the drill floor first. One of the roughnecks tried to activate the BOPs and they shot him dead. It was Tony Webb.

In the Calgary headoffice Latimer flinched and looked at his assistant. Now there could be no doubt as to the reality of the threat. I'm truly sorry you lost one of your men, Al. Now tell me about the conditions on board, he said in a calm, controlled voice. The toolpush would be shook up enough after what he had been through without having his boss losing his cool.

They made me look at how they had rigged the hole. I've got to hand it to them. Them bastards know what they're doing. They've attached a switch to the pump that unloads drilling mud from the hole. It's operated by remote control.

What about the BOPs? asked Latimer, referring to the Blow Out Preventers, ramlike shears designed to cut through the drill pipe and seal it off if the well got out of control.

Deactivated.

Even Gordon Boyd understood the deadly simplicity of what the hijackers had done. It was only the weight of the column of drilling mud in the drill pipe that kept the oil, under tremendous reservoir pressure, from racing up to the surface and blowing wild. Reduce the amount of drilling mud in the hole and that hellish force would be unleashed on the world.

Who are the five criminals we're dealing with? Latimer asked.

You're going to love this, Mel. It was the drilling superintendent once more. Remember how tickled we were when we found five experienced hands who had worked together on offshore rigs all over the world?

I remember, Latimer replied grimly. When steadily rising oil prices had induced Astro to resume drilling in the Beaufort after an extended hiatus of more than seventeen years, there had been a frantic search for drilling equipment and crews. The Arctic Grail had been located mothballed in Galveston. She was no longer state-of-the-art, but she had worked in the Arctic when the drilling boom there was at its height, years before. Recommissioned, she sailed around Alaska's Point Barrow into the Beaufort Sea when the ice went out in early July, and took up position over the location of the wildcat well.

Rounding up the drill crew proved to be more difficult. There was a great demand for experienced hands as prospecting for oil continued all over the world. Latimer had hired a Calgary-based international recruiting company to do the job, and now he recalled the elated phone call from a recruiter that she had found five men who were fed up with the working conditions drilling offshore Nigeria and were prepared to sign on for the Arctic. Some coup that turned out to be! Latimer groaned into the speaker phone.

We were being set up, and didn't know it, Rutherford agreed, then added, I don't think we can keep the lid on this, Mel.

We're not even going to try. It's far too big. I'm going to call Houston and then the minister of energy, and I'll have Gordon draft a press release.

The CEO of Astro's parent company