Midnight come again by Dana Stabenow Page B

was on call, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and they knew that, too. Fixed wing or rotor, whatever it took, First Sergeant Jim Chopin would have it in the air within fifteen minutes, partly because it was his sworn duty, partly because he was paid very well, partly because, deep down, he revered the oath he had taken the day he graduated from the trooper academy, and mostly because, hell, let's face it, he felt like Zorro every time he responded to a call. Zorro minus the mask.
    It was a far cry from San Jose, where the air was too thick to breathe, the roads were too crowded to drive, and a cop's chance of being shot by a gangbanger was infinitely higher than was his chance of being stomped by a moose. Jim would take the moose any day.
    The Park was his home, and now they wanted him to leave it, detached duty, temporarily assigned as liaison to the goddamn FBI, which, to Jim's jaundiced eye, was a less than stellar supplement to the law enforcement community, being as how they spent most of their time in Alaska arresting people cutting down the wrong trees in the Tsongas National Park and killing the wrong walruses off Round Island. Not to mention getting caught doing the lap dance with hookers on Fourth Avenue in Anchorage and shooting caribou out of season on the Glenn Highway.
    He knew the Park, every rill and rivulet, every glacier and game trail, every village and town. But all he knew about Bering could be fit into one of Katya's shoes. He vaguely remembered a case where a bootlegger, Armenian by birth, got caught shipping one hundred and two cases of cheap whiskey into the still, last time he looked, damp town. When brought to court, the guy claimed it was provisions for his daughter's wedding. Upon investigation, it was revealed that the wedding was five months off. The jury, three members of which were related to the accused by way of a providential marriage into a local Yupik family, came back with an acquittal in less than ten minutes. The prosecuting attorney later allowed as how he should have petitioned for a change of venue. No shit, Jim had thought at the time.

    Now he said, "If there are only five thousand people in the whole goddamn town, most of whom are each other's first cousins once removed, how is it I am not going to stick out like a sore thumb?"
    "You'll be a seasonal worker," Gamble said. "There are a ton of them around this time of year."
    "Something to do with fish, no doubt," Jim observed in a deceptively pleasant tone.

    "It is salmon season," Gamble pointed out reasonably. "And one of the trawlers contracted to the Bering IFQ is Russian, so it's reasonable to expect that our boy is somewhere close by."

    "What the hell do you think he's getting up to on a goddamn fish trawler? And if he's as hot as you say, why don't you just waltz in and arrest the bastard?"
    Gamble's smile vanished. He leaned forward and tapped one finger on the desk, like a college professor making the point that would justify his whole seminar and screw you on the exam. "We want to know what he's up to, Jim. If even half of what his file reads is true, this Ivanov is a very, very bad boy. Drugs, prostitution, weapons smuggling, money laundering, industrial espionage, military weapons thefts, you name it, he's in it up to his eyebrows. Which is why we don't want just to catch him, we want to catch him in the act."

    "In the act of what?"

    "We don't know. That's what we want you to find out. He's too smart and too successful for whatever he's doing in Bering to be penny-ante. And there is a strong Russian presence in the Bering Sea lately. Lots of trawlers catching lots of fish, and delivering them, and who knows what else, who knows where, who knows to whom? Plenty of opportunity out there for those criminally inclined to take advantage of the slackening of tensions between East and West."
    "You sound like my poly-sci instructor in college," Jim muttered. He changed tactics. "Why me? Why