Frozen in Time (23 page)

HARRY SPENCER (LEFT) AND DON TETLEY ABOARD THE RESCUE PLANE.
(U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH, COURTESY OF CAROL SUE SPENCER PODRAZA.)

Soon after the walkie-talkie’s arrival, however, the three men at the PN9E had no one to talk to but each other. During most of February, Greenland’s weather behaved as though enraged by the audacity of Balchen’s plan and Dunlop’s flying feats. Blizzards roared to life for three weeks, during which no planes could fly.

With their stove broken, the remaining PN9E survivors had no reliable heat. Soon they ran out of candles, so they spent long stretches in darkness. Desperate for warmth and light, they kept a fire burning in the bombsight case. Without a vent, toxic fumes filled their cave and soot blackened their skin and clothes. With no other way to defrost their rations, Monteverde, Spina, and Best burrowed deep into their sleeping bags and held the cans and packages under their armpits. Eight hours of this made the food soft enough to chew. Some ration cans broke when they were dropped from Turner’s B-17, and when they thawed the juices leaked onto the men’s bedding. The smell of rotten food mixed with the stench of burned fuel, body odor, and human waste.

HARRY SPENCER (LEFT) AND DON TETLEY SHORTLY AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL AT BLUIE EAST TWO.
(U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH, COURTESY OF CAROL SUE SPENCER PODRAZA.)

Spina’s broken right arm continued to pain him, but his frostbitten left hand regained some feeling and movement. However, all of his fingernails had fallen off, so it hurt whenever he touched something with the tips of his fingers. Monteverde’s feet remained painful, but he hobbled around as much as he could. Physically, Best was the most able among them.

They hadn’t bathed or shaved since the crash, but Turner dropped fresh uniforms, so they made a practice of changing their clothes and underwear at least once every two weeks. They hated stripping down in the cold, but clean underwear and socks always made them feel warmer. As soon as they dressed they’d climb back into their sleeping bags. Spina laid his head on a five-gallon can of dog food. The sled dogs hadn’t reached them, so the can remained full. Monteverde and Best each used an airman’s boot as a pillow.

To fight cabin fever, they played word games. They named all the countries, rivers, capitals, islands, and every other geographical feature they could think of. They told and retold their life stories and talked about whatever came to mind. Still they ran out of things to say, so they spent long periods in silence. The isolation, the wind, the moving glacier beneath their cave, and the relentless cold preyed on their nerves. They seemed to take turns breaking down, wishing their ordeal were over, one way or another. Each time, the other two would comfort the crying man. When the cycle unraveled, all three sank into despair at the same time. They hatched a suicide pact.

They’d been on the ice cap for almost three months. Three men who’d been sent to rescue them were dead, as were two of their crewmates. As Spina put it: “Why should someone else stick his neck out to save ours?” They talked about tying themselves together and hurling themselves into a crevasse. Or maybe they’d leave their igloo and walk until they dropped from exhaustion. Finally, they decided to go quietly. They’d stop fighting, stay in their hole, and let Greenland freeze them to permanent slumber. They agreed that the next time Pappy Turner’s B-17 flew overhead, they’d tell him to end his supply flights, cancel all ongoing rescue plans, and, in Spina’s words, “scratch our names off the books.”

Days passed before the next supply flight arrived, and in that time they reconsidered. They steeled themselves and agreed that suicide was a coward’s way out. They vowed not to break down again, but it was a vow they couldn’t keep. They resumed the cycle of hopelessness, as one man gave up, then the next, and then the next. Pappy Turner’s plane returned as they wallowed in despair. They told him via walkie-talkie that they appreciated all that he and his crew had done, but supply- and morale-sustaining services were no longer required.

Pappy Turner couldn’t believe his ears. Normally even-keeled, he flew into a rage. He and his men had busted their humps to keep the PN9E crew alive, and now they wanted to die? Turner bawled them out, telling the trio that until now he’d thought that they had guts. He’d thought that they were strong enough to stick it out, that they were soldiers, but he must’ve been mistaken. Gaining steam, Turner called them “a bunch of weaklings.” He told them he was so revolted that he felt half tempted to accept their plan and let them freeze or starve to death. But the choice wasn’t his or even theirs to make. Turner told Monteverde, Best, and Spina that they were the last three pieces of the most expensive rescue of the war. The U.S. government had invested too many lives, too much time and effort, and too much money to let them die now. When he calmed down, Turner promised that he and his crew wouldn’t stop flying until the three men were off the ice. In exchange, he made Monteverde, Best, and Spina promise that they’d refuse to quit.

Even if Turner was exaggerating for effect, his outburst had the desired result with Armand Monteverde and Paul Spina. Clint Best was another story.

S
EVERAL DAYS AFTER
Turner’s tirade, Best sat in the ice cave, warming C rations over an improvised stove made from a can filled with leaded gasoline. He usually cooked carefully, knowing that the flames might ignite nearby tanks of gas or even the fuel-filled wing above them. But Monteverde and Spina watched as Best sat motionless as food atop the can began to burn. They called to him, but Best didn’t react. As flames rose, Best stared blankly at his companions. Spina felt chills down his spine. He called it “the coldest look I ever seen in my life.” Monteverde ignored Best and snuffed out the fire himself.

Best began to shake, so they covered him with blankets. Still he shook. Monteverde thought Best’s strange behavior might be a delayed result of the head injury he suffered in the crash. Not knowing what else to do, Monteverde and Spina agreed that a shock might snap Best from his catatonia. Monteverde snuck up from behind and slapped Best in the face. Stunned, Best emerged from his trance and asked what had happened. When Monteverde explained, Best said he felt as though he’d been lost in another world. In his hallucination, he told his companions, he was surrounded by people saying that he’d abandoned his post and would be court-martialed for going AWOL.

As Best told his story, Spina saw the glassy, vacant stare return to his eyes. Best began to shake again. They zipped him into his sleeping bag and covered him with parkas. When Best fell asleep, Monteverde and Spina discussed whether to tell Pappy Turner about Best’s breakdown. They decided to wait and hope that he snapped out of it, knowing that Best had applied for officer candidate school. Word of mental problems could destroy that dream.

They tried to sleep, but Best and Spina bunked next to each other on the floor. Whenever Best shook, Spina woke. Spina stared into the darkness as Best twisted in his bag. Best’s delirium returned and his movements grew erratic. He yelled that three men were fighting with him. Defending himself against phantoms, he reached out and grabbed Spina’s left hand. Fearing that Best might break his good arm, Spina called for help. Monteverde slapped Best a second time, and again Best woke from his trance and asked for an explanation. They told him that he’d had a bad dream and that everything was fine. Monteverde and Spina stayed awake, watching Best as he slept, shook, and sweated through the night.

The next morning, Best remained in a trancelike stupor. The other two tried to keep him covered, but he ripped away the sleeping bag and pressed his head against the snow, as though trying to cool his fevered mind. When they offered him breakfast, he accused them of trying to poison him. Best muttered throughout the day, “talking about things drawn from another world,” as Spina put it.

That night, Monteverde and Spina alternated keeping watch over Best. During the first shift, Spina heard Best stumbling around in the darkness. Spina turned on a flashlight that they saved for emergencies, but he couldn’t find Best in the small cave. He called to Monteverde, who grabbed the flashlight and went to the entrance tunnel. The flap at the far end was open.

Best was gone.

20

ICEHOLES

AUGUST 2012

F
IVE HOURS INTO
the C-130 flight, we crowd against the windows to watch the sunset over the southern tip of Greenland. Jagged, gray-black mountains rise at the coastline, and beyond them the white shag carpet of the ice cap stretches to the horizon. No settlements are visible, no signs that anyone has ever set foot there. From twenty-seven thousand feet, it looks like the proverbial last place on earth. Bil Thuma asks, “Can you imagine being an airman who goes down out there and says to himself, ‘It’s OK, we’re going to get out of here’?”

Lou asks me to walk with him to the rear of the cargo bay. Over the thrumming noise of the engines, he tells me that he’s annoyed that Jim Blow has only now told him about the new Coast Guard–funded airborne radar survey by the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, or CRREL. Lou’s also frustrated that CRREL didn’t use a device called an airborne magnetometer that he says might have detected metal from the Duck’s engine under the glacier.

“We’re supposed to be working together,” Lou says. “If he had told me, I would have said what we need isn’t more radar, it’s a magnetometer.”

“OK, but it’s done. Let it go,” I say. “Lou, the new radar gives us more places to search, and the results gave Jim the confidence to convince his superiors to go ahead with this mission. You’re on the same side.”

“A little communication would be nice,” Lou says. “Teamwork, right?”

I stop by Jim’s seat, and he hands me the new radar report, complete with maps showing the directional flow of the glacier and the locations described as “strongly prospective targets.” Later, when I tell him that Lou would have preferred an airborne magnetometer, Jim reminds me that Lou had been working for months trying to get a private company to run just such a survey. Jim says he expected Lou to be successful on that score, so he focused on getting the Coast Guard and CRREL to provide new radar results, in the hope that the complementary studies would pinpoint search sites two different ways. When Lou’s discussions with the airborne magnetometer company fell through, Jim says, he went ahead with the radar because he wanted fresh data.

He has a point: before the results of the CRREL study, most of the radar results were four years old, from what was known as the Essex overflight of 2008. The glacier, and with it the Duck, might have moved since then.

“I think Lou felt left in the dark,” I say.

“That wasn’t the goal,” Jim says. “These results increase our chance of success.”

I walk away thinking that Lou and Jim are equally invested in this mission, and also that they aren’t seeing eye to eye. More important, I sense that the dustup over the new radar is a harbinger of clashes to come. The pressure they both face to succeed, their different natures, and their conflicting organizational cultures make disputes almost inevitable. If they don’t trust one another, or at least communicate effectively, the mission will suffer and the Duck Hunt won’t fly.

By default, I have a new role. As the one mission member not formally attached to North South Polar or the Coast Guard team, I hold passports to both. And since I’m on good terms with both Jim and Lou, I can be an honest broker and cultural interpreter. That is, as long as neither shoots the messenger.

W
E CAN’T FLY
directly to Kulusuk, Greenland, because there’s no way to refuel the C-130 at the small airport there. So after midnight local time, we touch down in Keflavík, Iceland, where we’ll spend the rest of this night and one more. Even in Iceland, the expedition shopping spree continues. After worrying for days about the crevasse fields, Lou decides that we need an aluminum extension ladder to use as a portable bridge to span deep cracks in the glacier. He sends Alberto Behar to a local hardware store to buy one, then sends Frank Marley to buy another. We’ll have to strap them to the skids of a helicopter to get them to Koge Bay. But other than buying propane, gasoline, and diesel fuel in Kulusuk, we’re finally ready.

Before we leave Iceland, Lou and Jim gather everyone in a hotel meeting room to recount the history of the November 1942 crashes and the mission operations plan. Lou explains that first we’ll use global positioning system (GPS) receivers to place marker flags at the six most promising search coordinates, known as points of interest, or POIs. Three of the POIs were spotted during 2008 and are known as Essex One, Essex Two, and Essex Three, the last of which appears to be close to where Balchen placed the X on his treasure map. It’s also the most heavily crevassed area we’ll be searching. The three other top-priority points of interest come from the new CRREL report, and are known as points A, B, and K. After the six points are marked with GPS, Jaana and the safety team will use the ground-penetrating radar to see if anything that looks like a Duck lies beneath the ice. If not, we’ll move on to two more CRREL locations, known as points N and O. If those come up empty, too, it’s not certain what we’ll do. If there’s time, maybe we’ll investigate a couple of historic coordinates. If none of those locations reveals the Duck, we’ll have to accept defeat and go home.

The next day we fly a little more than an hour to the Kulusuk Airport, where the C-130 kicks up plumes of dust as it touches down on the gravel runway. Mountains and dormant volcanoes dominate the treeless landscape that surrounds the tiny airstrip. Even in August patches of snow crown the nearby slopes.

Seventy miles south of the Arctic Circle, Kulusuk passes for a sizable settlement on the east coast of Greenland, with a general store, a school, about three hundred residents, and twice as many sled dogs. From the air, the fishing village is picturesque, a cluster of homes painted red, blue, or gray, clinging to rocks overlooking a small harbor where stray icebergs take up temporary residence like visiting tall ships. But the impression changes after a mile-long walk from the airport into town, along a winding dirt road that passes two small cemeteries filled with plain white crosses. Up close, most houses are weather-beaten and need repair. The constant threat of frozen pipes means that most have no running water, so the people of Kulusuk, most of them Inuit, haul water from a pumping station and rely on outhouses or chemical toilets. With residents isolated by ice and snow for most of the year, and with little local economy to speak of, dependency on alcohol and welfare is common.

It’s a big day in Kulusuk when we arrive, as rifle-toting hunters in small motorboats have brought back two killer whales. The black-and-white whale carcasses are hoisted onto the town’s small concrete dock, where an audience gathers as they’re butchered, the meat distributed freely among the townspeople. When the townspeople leave, plastic bags with phonebook-sized slices of blubber are left behind, and the whales’ severed heads are visible for days in shallow water alongside the bloodstained dock.

The C-130’s Coast Guard crew is eager to take off, so they quickly disgorge our gear. Lou climbs onto a giant yellow front-loader as though he’s General Patton atop a tank. He hangs onto its side-view mirror to direct its driver as he arranges four tons of equipment, including twenty-five huge Pelican cases, more than a dozen smaller Pelican cases, two Hotsy pressure washers, several ice drills, a five-foot-cube water tank, generators, mounds of duffel bags, and two aluminum extension ladders destined for helicopter airlift to Koge Bay.

T
HE FOUR-PASSENGER AIR
Greenland helicopter lifts off from Kulusuk Airport crammed with five of us aboard: me; Jim Blow; Coast Guard public affairs specialist Jetta Disco; logistics manager Steve Katz; and logbook keeper and aide-de-camp Ryan Sapienza. The Swedish pilot follows the coastline south, occasionally veering from his flight path to show us a two-hundred-foot waterfall at the edge of a cliff, or icebergs shaped like a medieval castle or a slice of cake bigger than a city block. Flying at five hundred feet, then diving toward the water, he circles twice over a bay to point out what looks like a whirlpool of boiling water. Closer inspection reveals that it’s a killer whale chasing fish in a feeding frenzy. An hour into the flight, we turn east toward the coastal mountains, flying straight toward the rocky slopes only to pull up and over at what feels like the last possible second. Soon we’re cruising over crevasse-covered glaciers toward the North South Polar–U.S. Coast Guard’s Duck Hunt 2012 base camp.

We land on the ice forty yards from the campsite, much of it already set up by team members who arrived on earlier helicopter flights. The chosen spot is a cul-de-sac tucked against a rock outcropping called a
nunatak
that overlooks Koge Bay. The rock serves as a windbreak, and the site is no more than one and a half miles from the farthest point we plan to search. Laid out before us on a barren, gently sloped, ice-covered field are a half-dozen orange-and-gray sleeping tents, their stake loops held down by rocks gathered from the
nunatak
. During the next hour, in temperatures hovering around the freezing mark, we’ll erect four more sleeping tents to complete our temporary village. Duffel bags, spools of rope, gasoline cans, and half-empty Pelican cases sit in clusters on the edge of the ice field.

Fifty feet from the sleeping tents, at the base of the ridge, is one of two green mini-barn tents, this one filled with mountaineering gear and two Pelican cases. The tent will serve as the command center, and the cases will double as desks to spread out maps to plan each day’s assault on the glacier. Atop a rock ledge twenty feet past the mini-barn is the big dome tent, a zippered flap open to reveal several team members drinking coffee, their faces glowing orange from the sunlight through the nylon. On the same ledge, a few feet away, is the second mini-barn tent, filled with food, cooking equipment, and the tireless Michelle Brinsko, getting an early start on lunch. Later, when the beans in her chili refuse to soften, she’ll declare that they’re a special Icelandic legume called Bierdorff Beans that are supposed to be crunchy. No one who wants to eat another meal dares question Michelle’s dubious claim. Her failure-is-not-an-option mandate remains unblemished.

On the other side of the big dome is a fifty-foot-diameter meltwater pond that becomes a reflecting pool at dusk for the setting sun. At first we pump pond water for drinking and cooking, but soon WeeGee Smith and “Doc” Harman drill a hole behind camp that fills with water flowing from inside the glacier. They rig up a pressurized, gravity-fed system that supplies us with water so fresh we could bottle and sell it as Koge Bay Glacier Melt.

On the other side of the rocks is the gray outhouse tent, complete with a small orange flag whose position inside or outside indicates whether it’s occupied. “Planting the flag” becomes the camp euphemism for a toilet trip. Lou chooses the highest point of the
nunatak
overlooking the camp for the real flagpole, where he flies the American flag and the “Honor and Remember” mission banner with the names of the three men we hope to find.

Visible in the distance to the west, beyond the
nunatak
and across the Koge Bay fjord, is the sharply rising glacier where the PN9E crashed. Now more than ever, I understand what pilot Armand Monteverde encountered when he steered the big bomber from the end of the fjord over the glacier, only to have the ice rise up to meet him. Seventy years later, the glacier where the B-17 crew awaited rescue remains laced with crevasses. The fjord is jammed with icebergs calved from the glacier’s two-hundred-foot-tall leading edge. The thunder of new icebergs being born echoes through base camp.

A VIEW OF THE DUCK HUNT CAMPSITE FROM THE
NUNATAK
OVERLOOKING THE TENTS.
(MITCHELL ZUCKOFF PHOTOGRAPH.)

The weather forecast is clear and mild for the workweek ahead, with temperatures in the teens at night and the high forties during the day. Best of all, there’s no sign of polar bears, rendering the shotgun and rifle wise but unnecessary precautions. The Snublebluss warning system that Lou ordered from England never arrived, so the absence of bears is especially good news. I compliment Frank Marley on how smoothly the camp setup has gone, but he’s not impressed. “Camping is the easy part,” Frank says. “That’s not what we’re here for.”

D
URING THE PAST
few months, Jim Blow has grown intrigued by the X on Bernt Balchen’s 1943 hand-drawn map. Our base camp is less than a mile from Blow’s best estimate of the site of Balchen’s “X.” The exact location can’t be known because Balchen didn’t include coordinates, and his ink and watercolor drawings captured some, but not all, of the coastline and the rock ridges that rise from the glacier. The sketches also simplify the Koge Bay area by omitting perhaps sixteen miles of glacier-covered land between the X and Comanche Bay, a geographic flaw that long raised questions about the map’s accuracy.

To gain a better perspective, Jim, Lieutenant Commander Rob Tucker, and I climb to the top of the rocks at the edge of camp. We imagine the flight path John Pritchard might have taken in the Duck from the PN9E over Koge Bay to the spot on Balchen’s map. It’s at once easy and chilling to envision the little biplane rising from the bomber’s crash site and sweeping over the glacier, then turning toward Comanche Bay, into whiteout conditions that would render an ice-covered hill an invisible and deadly obstacle. Jim’s mind remains fixed on Balchen’s map.