Ancient Shores

8

During the course of the afternoon, the GeoTech team found nothing. When at last they quit for the day, Max exchanged reassurances with the Laskers, and flew home. The second day of the search, a Friday, also produced no results, and the operation shut down for the weekend.

April had encouraged Max and the Laskers to say as little as possible about the find. She had followed her own advice and revealed nothing to her colleagues at Colson. But she needed someone to talk to. Max’s enthusiasm matched her own, and so, during the succeeding days, while the radar unit searched Tom Lasker’s property without result, they found themselves meeting after hours for dinner and drinks and long intense conversations.

These conversations had the effect of fortifying their hopes and creating an informal alliance. However, they rarely produced specifics about what those hopes really were: hers, that a way might be found to master transuranic technology; his, that there had indeed been unearthly visitors, and that proof might lie nearby. But Max suspected that a more mundane explanation would eventually surface, that April had to have overlooked something. Nevertheless, she could usually, over beer and pizza, allay those doubts. For a time.

For her part, April had no one to lean on. She considered herself rock-solid, not the sort to be carried away by passion or gulled by ambition. Nevertheless, she would have liked a second opinion, some confirmation from one of the experts in the field. But the stakes were so high that she knew where premature disclosure might lead: The heavyweights would move in and Cannon would be pushed aside.

She needed someone to talk to. The Laskers, sitting on what might turn out to be the discovery of the ages, seemed to look on the entire business with a degree of complacency that irritated her. They were interested, the possibilities intrigued them, and yet they lacked fire. It was her impression that had Tom Lasker been informed there was a crashed UFO on his land, he’d go look at it, but only after feeding the horses.

Max was different. And during this difficult period, he became her sole support.

They tended to approach the more electrifying possibilities obliquely: They joked about the effects they would have on their personal lives. April conjured up an image of Max on the cover of Time, stepping down from the cockpit of the Lightning, his flying jacket rakishly open. Man of the Year.

And he speculated about a Nobel for the woman who had given the world the lifetime automobile guarantee.

Meantime, the days passed without tangible result from the ground-radar unit, and Max’s conviction returned that it was all just too good to be true. April pointed out that the search was a long shot, but even if they found nothing else, they already possessed an artifact of incalculable value. “Nothing is ever going to be the same,” she said, adding that she had written a paper revealing her findings. “Which I will not publish until we can be reasonably sure there’s nothing else out there. We don’t want to start a treasure hunt.”

“I agree,” said Max. They were sitting in a food court in the mall at the intersection of the two interstates in Fargo, splitting a pepperoni pizza. “If there really is something out there, what would you think our chances are of finding it?”

Her eyes fluttered shut. “Almost nil. There’s too much lake bottom.” She stirred a packet of artificial sweetener into her coffee. “We’re talking about substantial pieces of the U.S. and Canada. For that matter, there could be something here.” She indicated the floor. “The Fargo area was underwater, too, for a while. Who knows?”

Max looked down at the tiles. “I wonder what the yacht is worth?”

“If it is what we think it is, Max, you couldn’t put a price on it.” She watched a mother trying to balance a squalling child and an armload of packages. “I hope we can actually get some answers to the questions. Truth is, I have a bad feeling that we’re likely to be faced with a mystery no one will ever solve.”

“It would be nice,” he said, “to find something that would help pin down who owned the boat.”

“Remains,” she said. “What we need are remains.” Her manner was so intent that two kids trooping past with balloons turned to stare. “Look. They left the boat. That suggests something unexpected might have happened. A storm. Maybe they were attacked by natives.”

“Or,” suggested Max, “maybe they just never came back for it.”

“It’s a nice boat,” said April. “I’d sure take it with me when I left. I wouldn’t just leave it somewhere. No, I think there’s a good chance something went wrong.” Her voice softened, became very distant. “Oh, Max, I don’t know. I hate to speculate about this thing.” She took a bite of pizza and chewed very deliberately before continuing. “If something did go wrong, there’s a decent chance their means of transportation is still here.”

Max should have been feeling good. The Vickers Museum in South Bend was expected to get a substantial grant, an award that opened serious possibilities for the company. In addition, there had been two good offers for a Catalina flying boat on which Max had an option, and Popular Aviation had notified him they wanted to do an article on Sundown. The company’s condition looked strong enough that he was toying with the possibility of keeping White Lightning.

Nevertheless, he was restless. The ground-search radar was approaching the western limits of Tom Lasker’s farm with no indication of anything untoward. April had hinted at a vehicle. But maybe they were looking in the wrong place. After all, a vehicle wouldn’t have gone into the lake.

Maybe they hadn’t thought this out too well. What was it Lisa Yarborough had said? Think about where they might have stopped off for hotdogs.

The weather stayed cold. He took to watching the Ben at Ten news team out of Grand Forks, which came in on cable. Ben at Ten was covering the Fort Moxie story as a kind of light windup feature each evening. First there was the “devil’s boat” T-shirts. Then there had been footage of angry citizens warning the city council that more people would be frightened away than attracted to Fort Moxie by talk of a devil. They interviewed a man who claimed to have unearthed an intact 1937 Chevrolet in a rock garden in Drayton. They reported on the reactions of out-of-state visitors: The boat was a sign of the last days; it had fallen out of an aircraft; it was a publicity stunt by a boat manufacturer; it was an attempt by the American government to entice Canadian visitors.

Tom complained on the phone that the tent smelled of elephants and that for the first time in his life he was grateful the wind rarely blew out of the south. April was almost frantic that the boat was not locked away securely and not even kept away from the public, but Tom felt a responsibility to his lifelong neighbors to keep it on display. He also sent along a brochure and a T-shirt with a picture of the yacht and the slogan I Had a Devil of a Time in Fort Moxie. The artwork for the brochure wasn’t bad: The boat lay atop its ridge, silhouetted by a full moon with a devilish aspect. The story of the discovery was told in a few terse lines, below a Gothic leader proclaiming that “scientists are baffled.” There were also photos of the Lasker farmhouse and downtown scenes prominently displaying the Prairie Schooner, Clint’s Restaurant, and the Northstar Motel.

Max kept thinking they were looking in the wrong place. On the day that the T-shirt and brochure arrived, he decided to investigate the possibility.

The main branch of the Fargo library is located downtown, at the intersection of First Avenue and Third Street. It’s a square two-story structure, wedged into an area of weary stone-and-brick buildings, softened by trees and occasional shrubbery.

It was midafternoon, just before rush hour, when Max passed the police station and pulled into a parking place in front of the civic center. The temperature had risen, the snow that had been falling since lunchtime had turned to rain, and the asphalt glistened in a cold mist. The streetlights were on, creating a spectral effect, and a heavy sky sagged into the rooftops. He climbed out of the car, pulled his jacket around him, and hurried the half-block to the library.

High-school kids crowded the stacks and tables, and the air was thick with the smell of damp cotton. He went back into the reference section, pulled out all the atlases he could find, and dragged them to a table.

Lake Agassiz had been the largest of the many Pleistocene lakes of North America. It was a sea in every sense of the word, covering at its maximum expanse a surface area of 110,000 square miles. It had formed from the meltwaters of the continental ice sheet near the end of the last ice age. But within a few thousand years those same glaciers, retreating north, had uncovered access to Hudson Bay, and Agassiz had drained.

The ancient lake lived on in Lake of the Woods, the Assiniboine River, Rainy Lake, Red Lake in Minnesota, the Red River of the North, Lake Winnipeg. But in the days of its greatness, the water had filled the valley to a depth of more than three hundred feet.

He checked the dates on Native Americans. They had been here early enough to have seen Agassiz. What else had they seen?

The spruce fibers in the loops of the mooring cables indicated that the boat had been tied up rather than simply anchored. That implied a harbor. Where within a reasonable range of Tom Lasker’s farm had there been a sheltered harbor?

Where, along the shores of Lake Agassiz, would you build a pier?

The size of the coastline was dismaying. It stretched from north-central Saskatchewan to St. Anthony’s Falls in Minneapolis. Probably ten thousand miles of shore. Hopeless. But there was a fair chance that the boat had been moored, that it had broken loose, and that it had been driven onto a reef or sunk by a storm shortly afterward. Not a tight chain of reasoning. But it was possible. If so, then the mooring place lay in the neighborhood. Say, along the western coastline between Fargo and Winnipeg.

He looked a long time at the maps.

What did a good harbor need? Obviously the water had to be at the right level. That made it a problem of altitude. Okay, he could check that out. It would have to provide shelter from current and wind. And enough depth to tie up without grounding during low tide. That meant no shallow slopes. There couldn’t be too many places like that.

He hoped.

Max lifted off, climbed into a clear sky, and turned west, looking for the shoreline. He didn’t find it. The Red River Valley rises in the south, and the escarpment, which is so pronounced near the border, sinks to invisibility. From offshore, the coast would have looked flat. That meant there could have been no deep-water approaches.

He turned north, flying over a snow-covered landscape marked by silos and occasional towns connected by long, quiet two-lane roads. The ancient coast did not appear until he crossed into Cavalier County.

Near Herzog Dam, Route 5 passes through a cut. He went down to four thousand feet for a better look. The snowfields had been abandoned to winter, and nothing moved in all that landscape save a lone pickup, approaching from the east. It was possible the cut disguised an ancient harbor, and he flew overhead several times without coming to a firm conclusion. Unfortunately, if this was it, he doubted there would be much left to look at. He photographed it and flew on.

He found another potential landfall south of Walhalla, off Route 32.

And another candidate in Canada.

Three possibilities in all.

The site at Walhalla was closest to the Lasker farm. That one first, he thought, turning east.

He called April from the plane. “No big thing,” he said. “But it’s a possibility.”

“Sure.” She didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic. “Anything’s better than what we’re doing now. Who owns the land?”

“I can find out, if you want me to pursue it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Go ahead. Get us permission to look around.”

Tom met him at Fort Moxie International. He was equally unimpressed, but he shrugged and took the same tack. “We can ride over now, if you want,” he said.

They drove west on Route 11, past the farm, and out to the edge of the Pembina Escarpment, where they turned south on Route 32. The hills and ridges on the west side of the road formed a solid chain, with clumps of forest scattered across their summits and piles of rock at ground level. Walhalla nestled in this section, a prosperous prairie town of frame houses, lumberyards, and feed stores.

Ten minutes south of town, the trees parted, and they were looking into a horseshoe canyon.

“Johnson’s Ridge,” said Lasker.

The canyon walls were rocky and almost sheer on the south and west. The northern slope rose more gradually toward the summit. It was heavily wooded, as was the valley floor. Two men were stopped just off the road, cutting firewood, stacking it in the back of a pickup.

The canyon was two hundred yards wide at its mouth and maybe twice as deep. It narrowed by about a third toward the rear wall. An access road left the highway, plunged into the trees, and climbed the northern ridge in a series of hairpin turns.

Lasker pulled over and stopped. The sun was sinking toward the top of the western promontory, which was lower by fifty to a hundred feet than the summits on either side. “Where was the water level?” he asked.

“Depends on which period you’re talking about. It was never high enough that the southern side could have served conveniently as a harbor. But for a long time you could have taken a boat up there”—he indicated the rear wall—“tied up at your dock or whatever, and stepped out onto dry land.”

Lasker squinted through the sunlight. A squadron of birds, too far away for him to see clearly, cruised over the summit. “Could be,” he said. “I think it belongs to the Indians,” he added.

Arky Redfern’s law offices were located in a professional building on the outskirts of Cavalier, the county seat. He was flanked by an orthodontist and a financial advisor. The building was flat gray slate with maybe twenty parking places, about half of which were filled when Lasker pulled in and found an open slot next to the handicapped space.

Inside, a brisk young woman looked up from a computer terminal. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said. “Can I help you?”

She took their names and picked up a phone. Fifteen minutes later they were ushered into an interior office dominated by a mahogany desk, leather furniture, and an array of glass-door bookcases. The walls to either side were crowded with plaques and certificates; the one behind the desk was conspicuously reserved for a hunting bow and a spread of five arrows.

Arky Redfern was a lean young man in a gray tweed jacket. He was of about average height, with dark, distant eyes, copper skin, and thick brown hair. Just out of law school, Max thought. Redfern came through an inner door, greeted Lasker with easy familiarity, asking about his family, and shook Max’s hand.

“Now,” he said as they settled down to business, “what exactly is it you gentlemen want to do on Johnson’s Ridge?”

As they’d agreed, Lasker took the lead. “We’d like to have permission to conduct a ground-radar search. To look for artifacts.”

The lawyer cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “Really? Why? What would you expect to find?”

Lasker said, “It’s a general survey. We want to see if there’s anything up there. And we’d agree not to remove anything.”

Redfern took a pair of spectacles from his jacket pocket and fitted them carefully over his eyes. “Why don’t you tell me straight out what you’re looking for? Is there another yacht up there, Tom?”

Lasker looked at Max. “We’re looking at places all over the area, Mr. Redfern,” Max said. “You can never tell where you might find something.”

Lasker mouthed, “Trust him,” and Max sighed. Trust a lawyer? It flew in the face of his most cherished principles.

Redfern was apparently not satisfied with Max’s answer. He seemed to be still waiting for a response.

“We think,” said Max, “there might be some objects left over from the Paleolithic.”

The lawyer’s eyes narrowed, and he turned toward Lasker. “This is connected with the boat, Tom? Right?”

“Yes,” said Lasker. “There’s an outside possibility, and that’s all it is, that something might be buried on top of Johnson’s Ridge. It’s a long shot.”

Redfern nodded. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you know about the yacht?” he said.

“It’s been in the newspapers,” said Max.

“Nothing’s been in the newspapers. Old boat dug up on a farm. It’s in very good condition, suggesting that it hadn’t been in the ground more than a week. And it lights up at night.” He stared across at the two men. “You want access to Johnson’s Ridge? Tell me what’s going on.”

“Can we get a guarantee of confidentiality?” asked Lasker.

“I would like to be free to confer with the chairman if need be. But I can assure you that otherwise what you tell me will go no farther.”

“Who’s the chairman?” asked Max.

“The head of the local Sioux,” said Lasker. “Name’s James Walker.”

“The head of the Sioux is a chairman?”

“Movie Indians have chiefs,” said Redfern. “Now tell me about the boat.”

Max nodded. “It might be a lot older than it looks.” A tractor-trailer went by and shook the building. Max described April’s findings, watching Redfern while he talked, expecting at every moment to be dismissed as a crank.

Instead he was heard without comment or visible reaction. When he’d finished, Redfern sat silently for a few moments. “You’re suggesting,” he said, “someone sailed a yacht on Lake Agassiz?”

When people put it like that, it always sounded dumb. “We’re not sure,” Max said. “It’s possible.”

“Okay.” Redfern opened a drawer, and took out a piece of memo paper. “How much are you willing to pay for the privilege?”

Lasker pushed back in his chair. “Since we won’t be doing any damage to the land, Arky, we’d hoped you’d just let us look around.”

Redfern nodded. “Of course. And I hope you understand, Tom, that if it were up to me, I’d say yes without hesitation. But the tribal council has its rules, and I have no alternative except to abide by them.” He looked at his visitors.

“I guess we’d be prepared to invest a hundred,” said Max.

Redfern nodded yes, not yes to the offer, but yes to some hidden impression of his own. “How exactly do you intend to conduct the search?”

“We’ll be using a ground-radar unit,” said Max.

Redfern wrote on his sheet of paper. His brow wrinkled, he made additional notes. Then he looked up. “It’s hard for me to see how I can accept less than a thousand.”

Max got to his feet. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

“It’s customary,” said Redfern. He let the statement hang, as if its validity were obvious. Max thought it over. There were other places to look, but Johnson’s Ridge was an ideal harbor. If the boat had been housed anywhere in the area, it would have been there.

“We can’t manage a thousand,” he said. “But you might want to consider that if we do find something, everyone will benefit.”

“I’m sure of that,” said Redfern. He sighed. “Okay. I tell you what I’ll do. Let me speak with the chairman. He might be willing to make an exception and come down for a worthy cause. What kind of figure can I offer him?” He smiled politely at Max.

“How about five hundred?”

Redfern’s eyes slid momentarily shut. “I suspect he’ll consider that a bit tightfisted. But I’ll try.” He wrote on the paper again. “I’ll draw up a contract.” He smiled. “Of course you understand that any Native-American artifacts you might find will remain the property of the tribe. Anything else of value, we will share according to usual conditions.”

“What are those?” asked Max.

Redfern produced another piece of paper. “In this case,” he said, “section four would seem to apply.” He handed the document to Lasker. “These are our standard guidelines for anyone applying to do archeological work on tribal land.”

“I think,” said Max, “we need a lawyer.”

Redfern looked amused. “I always recommend that anyone entering into a legal transaction seek counsel. I’ll draw up the agreement, and you can come by later this afternoon and sign, if you like.” He rose, business apparently concluded. “Now, is there anything else I can do for you?”

Max had been admiring the bow. “Have you ever used it?”

“It was my father’s,” he said, as if that answered the question.

Peggy Moore had grown up in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in the shadow of the White Mountains. She’d gone to school in New York, left three marriages in her wake, and had little patience with people who got in her way. She handled a wide range of duties at GeoTech, and running a ground-search radar team was what she most preferred to do. Not because it was challenging, but because it could yield the most satisfying results. There was nothing quite like sitting in front of a monitor and spotting the rock formations that promise oil. Except maybe the Nebraska find that had been the highlight of her career: a mastodon’s bones.

She had assumed that the hunt on Lasker’s farm had been for another boat. But now, without explanation, her team had been sent to the top of Johnson’s Ridge. What in hell were they looking for?

It was a question that had begun to keep her awake nights. Moore suspected there was something illegal going on. Nothing else explained the compulsive secrecy. Yet Max (who reminded her of her first husband) seemed too tentative to be a criminal, and the Laskers were clearly up-front types. She was not sure about April Cannon, with whom she’d spent little time. Cannon possessed a streak of ruthlessness and was probably not above bending the law, given the right reason. But that still did not answer the basic question. What were they looking for? Hidden treasure? Buried drugs? A lost cache of nerve gas?

She watched Sara track the input from Charlie’s radar. The weather had moderated somewhat, warmed up after the last few days, and Charlie was cutting his pattern across the top of the ridge. The scans were fed into the system and translated into images of rock and earth.

They’d had a couple of days of unseasonable warmth, and the snow cover had melted. The ground was consequently wet and dangerous, so Moore had drawn the survey course carefully, keeping Charlie safely away from the edge of the precipice. She kept a close eye on his progress and occasionally warned him back in, sacrificing coverage to safety.

The ground-search unit was giving them reasonable imagery to about a hundred feet. For archeological purposes—assuming that was the real reason they were here—that would be more than adequate.

The western section of Johnson’s Ridge, the summit of the rear wall, was grassy and flat, a long plateau about two thousand yards north to south and a hundred fifty yards across the spine. On the south, a ravine split it off from the rising hills on its flank. The north side ended in a wall of trees.

“Concentrate along the rim,” Max had said.

“Slower,” she told Charlie, who was still uncomfortably close to the edge.

“Roger,” said Charlie. He was wearing an outsized lumberjack coat and a woolen hat with its earflaps pulled down.

Moore wanted to find something. Not only because she wanted to know what was going on, but because she was a professional and intended to deliver a product to the customer even when he made the project unnecessarily difficult. Still, it was irritating that Max and his associates wouldn’t trust her. Nobody was going to steal their beads and arrowheads, or whatever. And that was another aspect of this that pointed toward a geological motif: These did not seem like people who would be interested in digging up old cookpots. But she had explained that if they wanted to find, say, gold, they had to tell her about it if they expected to get results.

She was seated with her feet on one of the work-benches, sipping coffee, when a very peculiar picture worked its way onto the bank of screens. “Son of a bitch,” she said, freezing the image on her personal display.