Two men struggled to haul the generators from far back in the truck.

"Can't we drive around?" one panted as they lowered the second generator to the road.

"Access is too far down," the foreman explained gruffly. "We're doing this the old-fashioned way." Brian Turski and three of the others hefted up the bulky portable generators. The rest of the men gathered the tools and the gas. They left the welding tanks to Joe Abady.

The foreman hooked a pair of leather straps around his shoulders and shrugged the big tanks onto his broad back.

With Abady in the lead, the group of twenty men struck off across the tundra.

Twenty yards off the path, the plain turned to hill. Brian Turski's breath was labored as he struggled under the weight of the generator. The hill had seemed gradual from the road but quickly grew steeper with each labored step.

"I'm not hauling this back," Brian panted.

"You wanna carry these?" Abady asked. The strain of the welding tanks stretched his leathery face.

"What I want is homemade apple pie," Brian said. His heart was straining in his chest. His lungs felt as if they'd been rubbed raw with sandpaper. "Or chocolate-chip cookies."

The words burned his hoarse throat.

Sweating and cursing, the men crested the hill. As soon as they reached the summit, they saw the problem.

The floor of the long, narrow valley below was stained black. Towering above the ground was a massive pipe that stretched in either direction. And in the side of that pipe, an angry hole was like the open mouth of Hell itself.

Moans rose all around.

"Swell," one man complained at the sight of the spilled crude oil. "We're gonna need a vacuum truck up here."

"Already on its way down from Wiseman," Abady said, not breaking stride. "Let's move it, ladies." Hitching up his tanks, the foreman began to pick his careful way down the far side of the hill to the wounded section of the massive Trans-Alaska Pipeline.