Landlord in the Arctic

Chapter 337 - 266: Buying a Gun

He quickly emptied four magazines.

Feng Mountain racked the slide, confirming the chamber was clear, then casually tossed the gun to the anxiously waiting Mexican, Scar.

Just then.

He noticed four old men standing in the pistol range’s rest area, their eyes gleaming as they stared at him.

As it happened, Feng Mountain was looking for them anyway.

After all, Jeff had said he would build a highway straight to Crown Territory in five months.

He didn’t know a thing about road construction, but Old Li was a different story. As a retired chief engineer from a construction company, he was sure to know the inside details.

Just as he was about to ask, Old Liu cut in impatiently.

"Xiaofeng, what kind of gun is this? I’ve never seen one like it."

"Oh, it’s a custom gun a friend gave me. I just came to fire off a few rounds," Feng Mountain replied with a grin.

Banking on the fact that he was Jenny’s former teacher, Old Zhang shamelessly asked, "So, uh... how about letting us try it?"

"No problem. As it happens, I have a construction question for Elder Li. I was wondering if he’s free."

The moment Feng Mountain finished his request, the other three old men shoved Old Li forward.

"No problem, he’s got nothing but time! Ask him anything you want, don’t hold back."

"Old Li, you give Xiaofeng a good lesson. Don’t you hold anything back."

"Hey, hey, hey! You three run off to play with the gun and use me as a bargaining chip? Have you no shame?" Old Li shot his three old buddies a glare, but he knew that if he didn’t help, Feng Mountain wouldn’t let them try the gun.

"Talk it over, no rush!" the three old men chirped, offering a considerate reminder as they scurried past Feng Mountain to surround Scar, who had just been handed the gun.

Meanwhile, Old Li grumpily found a chair in the rest area and plopped down.

"Alright, spit it out. What’s this construction problem?"

"Well... a friend of mine wants to build a highway to Crown Territory. Do you think something like that is even possible?" Feng Mountain finally asked the question that was weighing on him.

Building a 300-kilometer highway from Sagewang to Crown Territory, cutting across a huge swath of the Far North Tundra’s uninhabited wilderness.

The documents from the Elder Chief had laid it all out clearly, and on the surface, it looked like all the bureaucratic hurdles had been cleared. Still, Feng Mountain felt it was all a little too good to be true.

He didn’t care much about giving away the Fire Totem.

But the prospect of this highway was an itch he couldn’t scratch.

"A highway to Crown Territory? Are you drunk? What kind of nonsense is that?" Old Li eyed Feng Mountain suspiciously from head to toe.

Old Li had a long-standing professional habit.

Whenever he had to go somewhere unfamiliar, he would study local maps and read up on landmarks and other relevant information beforehand.

As for the desolate, uninhabited permafrost region of the Far North Tundra...

...very little information was available. The only real "landmark" was the Dalton Highway—also known as the North Slope Haul Road—one of the ten most dangerous highways in the world.

The entire 666-kilometer road was a series of steep inclines and declines.

In the fall and winter, the road is covered in ice and snow. Frequent blizzards have earned it the moniker of the Death Highway.

Road conditions improve in the summer, but rain and fog make the surface dangerously slick.

Furthermore, it’s an all-gravel highway; almost none of it is paved.

Gravel roads were abandoned in China long ago. Even the rural "village access" projects use concrete.

But for its time, back in 1974, building such a highway in that extremely harsh environment was an incredible feat of engineering.

And they were working in a permafrost zone, which undoubtedly raised the difficulty to a whole new level.

Feng Mountain hedged, "I’m just speaking hypothetically. Is it possible? The Dalton Highway was built fifty years ago. With today’s technology, it should be possible, right?"

Elder Li narrowed his eyes, considering the Dalton Highway from an engineer’s mindset.

"It’s possible, certainly, but the investment would be astronomical. The government never released the official cost of the Dalton Highway, but I’d estimate it was at least a billion US dollars. And you think a billion dollars in the seventies is the same as a billion today?"

"The fact that you’re even asking means you’ve already gotten some kind of green light. Don’t tell me about any under-the-table deals; I don’t want to know. Just tell me this: how would it be built, from where to where, and what’s the total distance?"

’This old fox really is sharp,’ Feng Mountain thought. ’He figured it out in just a few sentences.’

Feng Mountain chuckled. He’d skip over the shady details, but everything else was fair game.

After all, the documents had already been approved by all the relevant departments, and officials were already starting to make public announcements.

Alaska’s population in 2017 was only about 700,000, with 80 percent of them living in the southern part of the state. For most residents, the Far North Tundra was just a barren, remote wasteland with an extremely harsh environment—unfit for human life and possessing no economic value besides oil.

That’s why building a highway in the Far North Tundra was unlikely to attract much public attention.

Some environmentalists or animal rights organizations might hold a few protests.

But that wouldn’t have much of an impact on the construction itself.

Besides, protests were a daily occurrence anyway: Indigenous People protesting for fair benefits, white people protesting the price of bread, black people protesting for Black Lives Matter, and the Independent Party protesting to secede from the United States and achieve self-governance.

Who had time to care about a new road?

Besides, it wasn’t like the state government was footing the bill.

If the highway project failed because of a design flaw, those same bored citizens would probably just clap their hands and laugh at the oil company’s expense.

Feng Mountain thought for a moment.

"From Sagewang to Crown Territory. The total distance is around 300 kilometers. It’s still unclear whether it will be a gravel or concrete road."

Hmm.

An image of the terrain in Alaska’s Far North Tundra instantly formed in Elder Li’s mind. He nodded.

"Feng the kid, that’s a massive undertaking."

"Three hundred kilometers... Even with someone backing this project, you can forget about an asphalt surface. That stuff causes too much pollution, and Americans are very serious about the environment. My guess is it will most likely be a gravel road."