Ice Brothers (29 page)

“My God, what if he doesn't have morphine?” Guns asked. “In that ice pack there's no way they could get the man off or take a doctor to him. They'd just have to slice the guy's pecker cold.”

Nathan and Sparks stayed in the radio shack and kept twirling the dials to get Hansen's answer, but none came. There was a great deal of static which sounded curiously like the roar of a wildly applauding audience.

During the following day and the next, Nathan still could not get any messages from the
Nanmak
.

“Maybe he's been sending on some frequency that we aren't covering,” he said.

“Hell,” Sparks replied, “they got exactly the same equipment we have.”

Soon they could hear GreenPat trying to contact the
Nanmak
. “CQ, CQ, CQ,” the base operator tapped out monotonously, following with the trawler's call letters, DBPH, which he also repeated endlessly. After twenty-four hours, the radio telegraph was supplemented by a calm, disembodied voice on a higher frequency. Sounding almost bored, the high male voice repeated, “CQ, CQ, Dog Baker Pilot Hypo, do you read me?”

There was no answer but the strange roar of the heavens.

“His radio must have gone out,” Nathan said.

“Maybe their generator quit.”

“Both the main and the auxiliary?”

No one made any answer to this. At dinner in the forecastle that night the men ate in silence.

Soon GreenPat began sending signals to all ships near Cape Farewell and the east coast of Greenland to relay his messages to Dog Baker Pilot Hypo. The night was alive with messages from ships saying they were complying, but no word came from the
Nanmak
.

In the days that followed the men of the
Arluk
crowded around the open door of the radio shack when they were not on watch. Nathan and Sparks had some news to report. Three PBY seaplanes were searching the area where the
Nanmak
had last reported herself, but there was heavy fog and they could see nothing.

“I bet they send us up to join the search,” Guns said excitedly. “What do you think, Mr. Schuman?”

“Maybe.”

“Why can't we volunteer?” Nathan asked.

“They'll let us know if they want us,” Paul said, and went to tell the captain of the latest developments.

“Keep me informed,” Mowrey said thickly, as he had after each of Paul's news bulletins. He was still lying in his bunk, making a halfhearted attempt to conceal a glass he was holding under the edge of his blanket. For the first time he looked and sounded too drunk to be fully aware of what was happening. Paul hesitated.

“Captain, are you all right?”

“Fine, fine, fine.”

“What do you think has happened to the
Nanmak?
”

“Maybe Wally is playing possum. Maybe he's onto the Kraut and wants to keep radio silence.”

Mowrey sighed, brought his glass into the open and sipped from it. “Or maybe he's just gone missing,” he continued. “Wouldn't be the first.”

“Do you think the Germans got him?”

Mowrey leaned over, took a bottle from the drawer under his bunk, and filled his glass before answering.

“There's lots of ways for a ship to go missing,” he said with a sigh. “It could be fire or a magazine explosion. The ice could have closed in on him fast and hard, or a big berg could have turned over near him, squashing him. Sometimes a berg will have a big ice shelf under the water. When it turns over, it can lift a ship right up in the air and drop it. That's been known to happen.”

“But Hansen knows the ice.”

“There are a lot of floating mines on the east coast. They drift over from Europe. A plane could have got him, one of theirs or one of ours. Plenty of our fly-boys are trigger-happy. Or he could have found his Kraut weather ship.”

Perhaps Hansen had blundered right onto a big German icebreaker in the fog, Paul thought. At first the enemy ship must have looked like an iceberg in the gloom ahead. Then it would materialize into the dreaded shape, the big guns slowly turning toward them.

“Do you think they'll send us up after him?” Paul asked.

“They'll throw everything bigger and nearer in first. That's a job for some of the fast new cutters.” There was a moment of silence while Mowrey drained his glass. “Somebody will have to replace Hansen's ship,” he said, allowing his head to fall back on the pillow. “That sure as hell could be us.”

Gradually the men of the
Arluk
began to assume that their sister ship had been lost. They gathered in small groups and talked in whispers like people at a funeral. Only Guns was brash enough to try to make a joke about it.

“Anyway, I bet that bastard's prick ain't hurting him now. He probably was one man who was glad to go.”

Nobody laughed and the men shot such angry glances at Guns that the big bearded man hurried to the forecastle for coffee.

It seemed strange to continue on to Upernavik as though nothing had happened, even stranger that nothing changed visibly all around them. The unsleeping sun still oscillated in its narrow arc overhead. The silent city of the ice floe spread all around them, glittering in many pastel colors, much as it probably was on the east coast, though Paul had heard that the ice was more closely packed there, and apparently there was more fog.

Upernavik was another neat little Danish colony with tiny wooden houses painted red and white. Mowrey stood on the bridge while Paul brought the ship alongside a wharf, but returned to his bunk as soon as the mooring lines were out.

“You go ashore and pay the courtesy visit,” he said. “I don't feel like it.”

Before Paul dressed to go ashore, a short, portly old Dane in a fur parka came aboard. He looked rather like Santa Claus and his stern expression appeared out of place.

“Please to unload your cargo as soon as possible, and please to anchor out in the harbor if you wish to stay here. No one but the captain is to be allowed ashore.”

“I guess you got the word from your friends at Godhavn,” Paul said.

“We just want no trouble. Are you the captain?”

“I'm the executive officer. The captain is not feeling well.”

“Then please to come to dinner to my house tonight. I am sorry we cannot accommodate the others.”

“I understand. I'll be too busy to go to dinner. We'll just unload and get out of here.”

While they were discharging cargo, Nathan informed GreenPat that they were at Upernavik and requested further orders. He hoped they would be told to go to the east coast, but instead GreenPat answered, “Wait at Upernavik until further notice. Arrangements being made for you to load Danish personnel and materials for establishment of weather base at Thule.”

About half the crew appeared glad for this chance to remain out of trouble, and half were disappointed.

“I bet they just want us to finish up here before sending us to take the place of the
Nanmak,
” Guns said to Paul.

“Maybe,” Paul said. “It wouldn't surprise me.”

After piling a heap of supplies on the wharf, Paul anchored the ship in the harbor without waiting for the Eskimo women to carry the stuff to the warehouses. The Danes' booze was of course missing from their consignment. If they had been more hospitable, he might have given them some of the sweet stuff, but to hell with them.

Ever since hearing about the loss of the
Nanmak
, everyone aboard the ship had been in a bad mood. The enlisted men fished, and followed radio reports of the fruitless efforts of the big Coast Guard cutters and the planes which were searching for the
Nanmak
. The days dragged into weeks.

“Maybe all those cutters and planes up there will flush out the Germans,” Paul said to Mowrey.

Mowrey was still in his bunk and his eyes looked red, vacant and swollen. He had dropped and broken the last of his dark glasses.

“They won't find the German,” he said in a newly feeble voice. “Until the search is over, he'll just hole up in the ice somewhere and keep radio silence. When the cats have gone, he'll come out and play. He'll be waiting for us.”

“You think then we'll be sent up there?”

“They'll have to replace the
Nanmak
. I have more experience than any of the other trawler skippers.”

“Why don't they send us right away?”

“They won't need us till the big cutters have got tired of looking, and I guess the fly-boys want their Thule weather station. Seeing we're here …”

“Well, why don't they get us going?”

“I don't know, Yale. Do you still think I know everything?”

Some of the delay caused by the Danes who were to man the weather station came when they took a small boat off on some mysterious business of their own government, and their return was delayed by the ice. When they finally showed up in a husky little auxiliary ketch, they said there was no point in starting right away because heavy ice blocked the whole area. They asked Paul to bring the ship into the wharf, where they loaded a huge deck cargo of lumber for building the weather station and boxes of instruments and radio equipment. Two Eskimos who had been trained as carpenters were to accompany them.

It was August 3 when the
Arluk
finally left Upernavik, and she had not sailed more than thirty miles to the north before she became hopelessly stuck in the ice.

“Christ, if this doesn't break up soon, we could be stuck here for the whole damn winter,” Mowrey said. “Pray for a hard north wind to break up this stuff.”

But for days the weather remained calm. Mowrey remained in his bunk and the men painted the ship. For lack of anything else to do, they even chipped the anchor chain and painted the links with red lead. The only diversion came from seals, which occasionally surfaced in cracks between the icebergs, and a big mother polar bear with a cub, which often could be seen circling the ship on the ice, jumping and swimming from one iceberg to another. Guns wanted to shoot them and ran to the 20-millimeter whenever they appeared, but the presence of the cub made most of the men protective, and they laughed him out of it.

“What do you want to do, Guns,” Sparks asked, “Paint a little white bear on the side of the bridge, the way the tin cans paint Jap flags for each plane they shoot down?”

Some of the men threw pieces of salt fish out on the ice for the bears, and before long the mother, leaving her cub safely behind, would rush up to grab these.

“If she gets hungry enough, she'll come right aboard the ship, and then you better watch out,” Mowrey said from the wing of the bridge, where he was making a rare appearance. “It's happened plenty of times. Guns, break out a Thompson gun and leave it on the bridge just in case.”

Nathan rarely left the radio shack, from which he reported with regret that no more attempts were being made to contact the
Nanmak
. The planes and the big Coast Guard cutters were sending in fewer reports of their search. Apparently they were already being ordered off on more urgent business.

At Mowrey's direction, Nathan regularly reported their position and their lack of progress to GreenPat. Usually he got nothing but an acknowledgment, but on August 11, he was told to stand by and soon received a message for the
Arluk
. Guessing its contents, he decoded it with eager fingers.

“
Arluk
will discontinue efforts to reach Thule. Take Danes and materials for weather station back to Upernavik. Proceed to Narsarssuak Fjord immediately with all possible speed to refuel and proceed to east coast. There you will search for
Nanmak
and maintain regular patrol.”

“That's it!” Nathan shouted. “We're going to the east coast!”

“What are you cheering for?” Seth asked.

“Christ,” Mowrey said when Paul gave him the message. “Well, I guess there's no help for it. Anyway, we ain't going nowhere until we get some wind to break up this ice.”

It was strange to get such an order and still to be unable to budge. Guns and some of the deck force reacted by checking all the guns and oiling them. Some of the other men who had been most eager “to go where the action is” asked Paul if he could break out some booze for a celebration. When Paul went to the captain to ask him about this, he found that he had already celebrated or mourned so much that he refused to wake up for questions. Reflecting that once they broke out of the ice, they would probably have to sail thousands of miles before there was another chance for relaxation, Paul took some of the sweet liqueurs and helped Cookie to mix them with grapefruit juice to make a punch.

The party started merrily with songs and the harmonica on the well deck. First an argument and then a scuffle began between men who said they were eager for combat and others who said only a damn fool would want to go against a German icebreaker with a three-inch gun, but that stopped when Cookie refilled the big soup tureen which held the punch. At about eleven in the evening Paul went to the wardroom, where Nathan already slept. The sun was sinking almost to the horizon now, and the wardroom was surprisingly dark. Lying down, he quickly slept.

Paul was awakened three hours later by a blast of gunfire. Racing on deck, he saw Guns shooting the 20-millimeter at the polar bear and her cub, which were racing along the ridge of an iceberg about a hundred yards away. The tracer bullets were kicking up the ice just behind the cub. By the time Paul reached the gun deck, both the cub and the mother bear had collapsed, and the tracers continued to arch into the spreading red pools where they lay.

“Stop!” Paul kept shouting, but the steady gunfire deafened the marksman, and he did not stop until Paul clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“I got 'em, I got 'em!” Guns shouted, and a drunken cheer came from the well deck.

“Get the hell to your bunk!” Paul said.

“What's the matter with you? Boats said I could shoot.”