Frozen in Time (19 page)

The six men on the ice had no idea what, if anything, their loved ones knew of their plight. But they understood the rules of war and the larger forces at work. Their job was to stay alive long enough to explain why they’d stopped writing letters home.

16

SNUBLEBLUSS

MARCH–MAY 2012

B
EFORE LEAVING THE
gloomy January 2012 meeting at Coast Guard Headquarters, I sought out Commander Jim Blow, the Coast Guard’s point man on the Duck Hunt. I expected Blow to confirm that we’d just witnessed a bureaucratic waterboarding.

“Now what?” I asked, as plaintive as Lou had sounded in the meeting.

When Blow answered, I suspected that he’d nodded off during the dour, you’re-on-your-own message delivered by Lieutenant Colonel James McDonough from the Defense Department’s missing-in-action office. But Blow is career Coast Guard, a man used to doing more with less. Also, he has the steady pulse of a rescue pilot. Harsh words in a boardroom don’t faze him.

He looked at me as though I’d asked a foolish question. “We’ll need a detailed mission plan,” Blow said. “This isn’t over. We’re proceeding as if we’re going.”

I nodded and left, unsure whether to feel confused, calmed, or both.

But that was two months ago. Since then, wheels have spun, calls have gone out, and hundreds of e-mails have flown, yet progress has ground to a halt. Lou’s plan to go to Greenland in May is off; it will happen in August, at earliest. As far as I’m concerned, the Duck Hunt is in peril.

T
HE
C
OAST
G
UARD
remains open to providing a huge C-130 cargo plane, but by all indications there’s no money in the service’s budget for more than that. Lou’s been seeking contributions from private supporters, but that hasn’t panned out, either. Everyone likes the idea of bringing home the remains of three brave American airmen trapped under the ice since 1942, but no one is willing to pay for it. No one, apparently, except me.

Using the advance payment from my publisher to write this book, I’ve written a check to Lou’s expedition company, North South Polar. Ostensibly, it’s a loan that guarantees me a seat on a trip to Greenland. Lou promises to return the money by May 1 or to apply it to the cost of my travel and provisions and refund the rest. But May 1 passes, the money remains in Lou’s hands, and no travel date is set. I’d like to think that my money has been sitting in a bank account, but I’m not that naive. Lou’s been floating this mission for two years, exhausting his savings as well as himself, and I’m certain that the money was used to keep things afloat. I could ask Lou about it, but I’m not sure I want to know.

In the hope of raising significant sums, Lou’s been relying on a Los Angeles–based producer named Aaron Bennet. He’s been pitching television networks on a reality/adventure show based on searches for missing airplanes and lost airmen, with Lou and North South Polar as the stars. Lou has a whole series in mind, with missions not only in Greenland but everywhere from Antarctica to the South Pacific, from planes lost in the 1930s to Vietnam-era wrecks. The Duck Hunt is first on the list. Bennet believes in Lou, and I can tell from e-mails and phone calls that he’s working hard. But so far he’s only received what I call “Hollywood yeses.” They’re better than no’s, but they’re really maybes, which makes them the contractual equivalent of air kisses.

Television networks are overwhelmed by pitches for reality shows featuring daring adventurers, as well as shows about celebrity lifestyles and dysfunctional housemates. Another problem facing Bennet’s pitch is more basic. It’s the same issue that troubled the military’s missing-in-action experts: no one is certain where to find the Duck. Like the Defense Department, Hollywood wants a sure thing.

A
T FIRST BLUSH,
the Duck’s resting place might seem relatively easy to pinpoint. In the months after the crash, the wreckage was spotted multiple times on the ice. Those sightings all but eliminated any possibility that the Duck plunged into the water and sank to the bottom of Koge Bay. The last confirmed sighting was in 1947, five years after the crash. That’s good news, because it meant that the Duck wasn’t on a fast-moving glacier carrying it swiftly toward the bay.

Also significant were the hand-drawn historical maps that witnesses made after their sightings, especially two by Bernt Balchen, each with an X marking the spot where he saw the Duck. Lou has grown spellbound by Balchen’s maps, the original version torn from Balchen’s notebook as well as a later one that Balchen did in watercolor. By comparing radar data and satellite imagery with these maps, Lou has concluded that geographic features long dismissed as fanciful flourishes correspond to real parts of the landscape. If so, they represent potential landmarks for the Duck Hunt.

WATERCOLOR VERSION OF BERNT BALCHEN’S MAP OF THE KOGE BAY AREA.
(U.S. COAST GUARD IMAGE.)

Lou has also been studying a topographical map by Herbert Kurz, the navigator on Pappy Turner’s B-17, who marked a similar spot with the Duck’s location. The maps made by Balchen and Kurz tell roughly the same story, and both fit the known facts about the Duck’s disappearance. For instance, they place the Duck’s wreckage in a spot about halfway between the PN9E and Comanche Bay, where the
Northland
waited in vain. The location matches evidence that Pritchard radioed the ship for help—his requests for magnetic orientation—about nine minutes into what should have been a twenty-minute flight.

If the Duck had crashed in a South Pacific jungle or in a European forest, searchers likely would have more than enough information to find the wreckage. Not in Greenland. The search for the Duck is complicated by three main factors: accumulating snow, glacial movement, and a mixture of errors and conflicting accounts in official reports about where it went down.

First, despite recent melting of Greenland’s ice, during the seventy years since the crash some thirty or more feet of snow and ice might have built up atop the Duck. That means finding it will require ground- and ice-penetrating radar, followed by drilling, digging, or melting for confirmation. Second, despite the 1947 sighting, it’s not certain that the Duck wasn’t on an active glacier moving toward Koge Bay. On their trip to Greenland in 2010, Lou and his team left behind tracking devices that suggest the ice in the area is barely moving. But if that’s not the case, the Duck would be nowhere near where it crashed. At some point since November 1942, it might have splashed into the bay with a newly calved iceberg.

MAP BY LIEUTENANT HERBERT KURZ, SHOWING THE CRASH SITES OF THE PN9E AND THE DUCK.
(U.S. COAST GUARD IMAGE.)

The third factor is the conflict in historical records. The Coast Guard’s John Long and other researchers have found nearly a dozen sets of reported latitude and longitude coordinates for the crash site. Some were clearly erroneous and were later corrected, but even the ones considered credible are inconsistent. Most are on a tongue of land on the east side of Koge Bay, but when plotted on a map they make a shotgun pattern. For example, the military’s official PN9E accident report from April 1943 places the Duck’s wreckage at the intersection of latitude 65 degrees 8 minutes north, and longitude 41 degrees 0 minutes west. That’s more than two kilometers, or one and a quarter miles, from the coordinates that Pappy Turner gave to Colonel Balchen in December 1942. Some points are even farther apart, but those two locations are considered among the most credible by Duck Hunt historians, notably John Long and retired Coast Guard captain Donald Taub. On the other hand, the accident report from April 1943 was focused on the PN9E, so there’s lingering skepticism about how precisely it places the Duck crash. And even if the coordinates were once correct, there’s no telling how much the Duck might have moved since then along with the glacier.

To narrow the search, Lou and the Coast Guard have collected radar data from planes that have flown over the area on scientific missions. Among their sources are the University of Kansas–based Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, known as CReSIS; a U.S. Navy plane with advanced radar equipment that was returning from Iraq and Afghanistan; and a NASA mission known as Operation IceBridge that’s collecting data on changes to the polar ice sheets. In addition, while in Greenland in 2010, Lou and his team did a boots-on-the-ground survey of one radar-identified site that the Coast Guard considered promising. It was a false lead; Lou thinks that a radar image resembling a plane was in fact meltwater that pooled atop bedrock under the ice.

Lou has spent countless hours this year combing through the historical coordinates and the radar data, and he’s become a proficient computer-aided cartographer. After plotting and cross-referencing all the potential locations on two- and three-dimensional maps, Lou declared in a memo to the Coast Guard that he’s reached “a very high degree of certitude on the [Duck’s] current location.” Lou’s target coordinates are within five miles, or less than eight kilometers, of the official PN9E crash report, and even closer to Turner’s December 1942 sighting. Privately, though, Lou knows that even the best use of radar and historical data is educated guesswork. The only way to be sure of the Duck’s location is to burrow inside the glacier and obtain hard evidence such as a photograph.

But time is slipping by, and the weather makes late spring and summer the only practical times to search Greenland for missing planes. If a green light isn’t lit soon, a year or more will pass before we step onto the ice. Momentum might wane and money might get even tighter, increasing the likelihood that the Duck and its men will be lost forever.

This prospect worries me. I’m determined to get to Koge Bay this summer, to walk the glacier in my own boots, to see the area where the men of the PN9E holed up and where the Duck went down. I’ve begun contacting private expedition companies on the east coast of Greenland, inquiring what it would take to mount a micro-mission on my own. I’m the first to admit that this would be far from ideal. I’m up for a challenge, but my experience in extreme cold consists of shoveling snow from my driveway. My poor directional sense is a source of humor for family and friends. It’s possible that I’m neither as young nor as fit as I think.

When I set aside romantic fantasies of finding the Duck, I know that I’d be lucky just to avoid falling into a crevasse, getting lost in a storm, or upsetting a hungry polar bear. I’m also aware that going alone means that I wouldn’t have access to advanced ground-penetrating radar, and I wouldn’t have the equipment or the necessary permits to dig deep enough to rule out or confirm possible sites. I’d be relying on luck, on a Greenland guide whom I’ve never met, and on the remote possibility that recent melting had exposed part of the wrecked plane. By comparison, Lou seems like a model of moderation. But I don’t see any other choice. One way or another, I’m going to Greenland.

Meanwhile, Lou’s been picking up odd jobs to stay afloat. One night he e-mails me from a work site, asking for a historical document I promised to send him: “I’ve got the computer out on top of a Dumpster working away! So shoot me anything you have. I’ll be here for a few hours.” The image of Lou using a trash bin as a desk fills me with a nauseating mix of despair and admiration. I know how hard he’s trying, how much he’s put into this, but outside sponsors still haven’t signed on; no television network has committed to film the expedition; and time is growing short. Lou remains optimistic—“Don’t worry, we’re going” is his new favorite line—but from our daily e-mails and phone calls, I know that he’s feeling the stress.

Worried that Lou is about to delay the trip, I put my backup plan in motion. I choose a guide; select commercial flights to the Kulusuk Airport on Greenland’s east coast; buy glacier glasses and new snow pants; and, with my guide’s help, tentatively hire a speedboat captain for a ride to Koge Bay.

JUNE–AUGUST 2012

Just when I’d abandoned hope for Lou’s mission, there’s an unexpected turn of events. Leading with his heart and an almost religious fervor, Lou has gained traction. A big moment comes when Lou tells me that the Coast Guard has lined up a C-130 for the expedition, with plans to depart from a small airport in Trenton, New Jersey, on August 20.