Stenseth gave him a questioning look. “It is?” he asked.

“Yes,” Pitt replied with a grin, “for I would like to know where in the Arctic you plan on locating two cases of Lone Star beer.”

Chapter 52

52

UGLUKTUK , FORMERLY CALLED COPPERMINE after an adjacent river, is a small trading town built on the banks of Coronation Gulf. Situated on the northern coast of Canada’s Nunavut province, it is one of just a handful of populated havens lying north of the Arctic Circle.

It was the deepwater port offerings that attracted Mitchell Goyette to Kugluktuk. Kugluktuk represented the closest port facility to the Athabasca oil sand fields in Alberta, and Goyette invested heavily in order to stage a terminus for exporting his unrefined bitumen. Cheaply acquiring a little-used rail line from Athabasca to Yellowknife, he financed the expansion of the line north to Kugluktuk. With special snow-clearing locomotives leading the way, a long string of tank cars transported twenty-fi ve thousand barrels of bitumen on every trip. The valuable heavy oil was then off-loaded onto Goyette’s mammoth barges and sent across the Pacific to China, where a tidy profit awaited.

With the next railroad shipment several days away, Goyette’s Athabasca Shipping Company rail terminus sat ghostly quiet. The icebreaker Otok sat at the dock, an empty barge tied to its stern. Two more of the massive barges were moored out in the bay, riding high above their waterlines. Only the rhythmic pumping of a fuel line filling the icebreaker’s tanks with diesel fuel gave an indication that the boat and dock were not completely deserted.

No such illusions were evident inside the ship, where an engaged crew made advance preparations for departing port. Seated inside the ship’s wardroom, Clay Zak twirled a glass of bourbon over crushed ice as he examined a large chart of the Royal Geographical Society Islands. Sitting across from Zak was the Otok’s captain, a puffy-faced man with gray hair cut close to the scalp.

“We’ll be refueled shortly,” the captain said in a heavy voice.

“I have no desire to spend any more of my life in Kugluktuk than necessary,” Zak replied. “We leave at daybreak. It looks to be about six hundred kilometers to the Royal Geographical Society Islands,” he said, looking up from the chart.

The skipper nodded. “Ice reports are clear all the way to King William Island and beyond, and this is a fast ship. We’ll be there easily in about a day’s sail.”