Landslide. Desmond Bagley
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a hard man to see. I smoked three cigarettes in his outer office while I studied the pneumatic charms of his secretary and thought about the name of Trinavant. It was not so common a name that it cropped up in my life with any regularity; in fact, I had come across it only once before and in circumstances I preferred not to remember. You might say that a Trinavant had changed my life, but whether he had changed it for better or worse there was no means of knowing. Once again I debated the advisability of staying in Fort Farrell, but a thin wallet and an empty belly can put up a powerful argument so I decided to stick around and see what Matterson had to offer.
Suddenly and without warning Matterson’s secretary said, ‘Mr Matterson will see you now.’ There had been no telephone call or ring of bell and I smiled sourly. So he was one of those, was he? One of the guys who exercised his power by saying, ‘Keep Boyd waiting for half an hour, Miss So-and-so, then send him in,’ with the private thought – ’That’ll show the guy who is boss around here.’ But maybe I was misjudging him – maybe he really was busy.
He was a big, fleshy man with a florid face and, to my surprise, not any older than me – say, about thirty-three. Going by the extensive use of his name in Fort Farrell, I had expected an older man; a young man doesn’t usually have time to build an empire, even a small one. He was broad and beefy but tending to run to fat, judging by the heaviness of his jowls and the folds about his neck, yet big as he was I topped him by a couple of inches. I’m not exactly a midget.
He stood up behind his desk and extended his hand. ‘Glad to meet you, Mr Boyd. Don Halsbach has said a lot of nice things about you.’
So he ought, I thought; considering I found him a fortune. Then I was busy coping with Matterson’s knuckle-cracking grip. I mashed his fingers together hard to prove I was as big a he-man as he was and he grinned at me. ‘Okay, take a seat,’ he said, releasing my hand. ‘I’ll fill you in on the deal. It’s pretty routine.’
I sat down and accepted a cigarette from the box he pushed across the desk. ‘There’s just one thing,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want to fool you, Mr Matterson. This hasn’t got to be a long job. I want to get clear of it by the spring thaw.’
He nodded. ‘I know. Don told me about that – he said you want to get back to the North-West Territories for the summer. Do you think you’ll make any money at that kind of geology?’
‘Other people have,’ I said. ‘There have been lots of good strikes made. I think there’s more metal in the ground up there than we dream of and all we have to do is to find it.’
He grinned at me. ‘We meaning you.’ Then he shook his head. ‘You’re in advance of your time, Boyd. The North-West isn’t ready for development yet. What’s the use of making a big strike in the middle of a wilderness when it would cost millions in development?’
I shrugged. ‘If the strike is big enough the money will be there.’
‘Maybe,’ Matterson said noncommittally. ‘Anyway, from what Don told me, you want a short-term job so you can get a grubstake together in order to go back. Is that it?’
‘Just about.’
‘All right, we’re your boys. This is the situation. The Matterson Corporation has a lot of faith in the potentialities of this section of British Columbia and we’re in development up to our necks. We run a lot of interlinked operations – logging-centred mostly – like pulp for paper, plywood, manufactured lumber and so on. We’re going to build a newsprint plant and we’re making extensions to our plywood plants. But there’s one thing we’re short of and that’s power – specifically electrical power.’
He leaned back in his chair. ‘Now we could run a pipeline to the natural gas fields around Dawson Creek, pipe in the gas and use it to fuel a power station, but it would cost a lot of money and we’d be paying for the gas for evermore. If we did that the gas suppliers would have a hammerlock on us and would want to muscle in with their surplus money to buy a slice of what we’ve got – and they’d be able to do it, too, because they’d control our power.’ He stared at me. ‘We don’t want to give away slices – we want the whole goddam pie – and this is how we do it.’
He waved at a map on the wall. ‘British Columbia is rich in water power but for the most part it’s undeveloped – we get 1,500,000 kilowatts out of a possible 22,000,000. Up here in the North-East there are a possible 5,000,000 kilowatts without a single generating set to make the juice. That’s a hell of a lot of power going to waste.’
I said, ‘They’re building the Portage Mountain Dam on the Peace River.’
Matterson snorted. ‘That’ll take years and we can’t wait for the Government to build a billion-dollar dam – we need the power now. So that is what we do. We’re going to build our own dam – not a big one but big enough for us and for any likely expansion in the foreseeable future. We have a site staked out and we have Government blessing. What we want you to do is to see we don’t make one of those mistakes for which we’ll kick ourselves afterwards. We don’t want to flood twenty square miles of valley only to find we’ve buried the richest copper strike in Canada under a hundred feet of water. This area has never been really checked over by a geologist and we want you to give it a thorough going-over before we build the dam. Can you do it?’
‘Seems easy enough from where I’m sitting,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see it on a map.’
Matterson gave a satisfied nod and picked up the telephone. ‘Bring in the maps of the Kinoxi area, Fred.’ He turned to me. ‘We’re not in the mining business but we’d hate to pass up a chance.’ He rubbed his chin reflectively. ‘I’ve been thinking for some time we ought to do a geological survey of our holdings – it could pay off. If you do a good job here you might be in line for the contract.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said coolly. I never liked to be tied down.
A man came in carrying a roll of maps. He looked more like a banker than J. P. Morgan – correctly dressed and natty in a conservative business suit. His face was thin and expressionless and his eyes were a cold, pale blue. Matterson said, ‘Thanks, Fred,’ as he took the maps. ‘This is Mr Boyd, the geologist we’re thinking of hiring. Fred Donner, one of our executives.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. Donner nodded curtly and turned to Matterson who was unrolling the maps. ‘National Concrete want to talk turkey about a contract.’
‘Stall them,’ said Matterson. ‘We don’t sign a thing until Boyd has done his job.’ He looked up at me. ‘Here it is. The Kinoxi is a tributary of the Kwadacha which flows into the Finlay and so into the Peace River. Here, there’s an escarpment and the Kinoxi goes over in a series of rapids and riffles, and just behind the escarpment is a valley.’ His hand chopped down on the map. ‘We put the dam here to flood the valley and get a good and permanent head of water and we put the powerhouse at the bottom of the escarpment – that gives us a good fall. The survey teams tells us that the water will back up the valley for about ten miles, with an average width of two miles. That’ll be a new lake – Lake Matterson.’
‘That’s a lot of water,’ I observed.
‘It won’t be very deep,’ said Matterson. ‘So we figure we can get away with a low cost dam.’ He stabbed his finger down. ‘It’s up to you to tell us if we’re losing out on anything in those twenty square miles.’
I examined the map for a while, then said, ‘I can do that. Where exactly is this valley?’
‘About forty miles from here. We’ll be driving a road in when we begin to build the dam, but that won’t help you. It’s pretty isolated.’
‘Not so much as the North-West Territories,’ I said. ‘I’ll make out.’
‘I guess you will at that,’ said Matterson with a grin. ‘But it won’t be as bad as all that. We’ll fly you in and out in the Corporation helicopter.’
I was pleased