Ice Reich (16 page)

It was the snuggest harbor Hart had ever seen: a bowl with a gate, perfectly protected from storm. If the sea channel and lagoon were deep enough the
Schwabenland
could obtain ideal shelter. Drexler uncharacteristically whooped and pounded on Hart's shoulder. "We found it!"

Then it was gone again, shrouded by storm. Hart looked at the fuel gauge. They might just make it. "Can you find the ship again?"

The German nodded, newly determined. "Of course." With purpose the old confidence was returning. He studied his notes. "Steer west-northwest for two hundred and eleven kilometers." He peered down at the whitecaps on the ocean. "We still can't land, can we?"

Hart shook his head. "The wind would flip us like a toy before they could pick us up. We need to find the ship, drop instructions, and get back to that crater before we run out of fuel. I wish these planes had a spare radio."

Drexler nodded. "Already planned. For next year's expedition."

The galley had prepared three old flour sacks as aerial "bombs," filling them with dried peas for weight. Drexler calculated the island's direction and distance from the
Schwabenland,
copied it three times, and inserted each in a sack and tied it up.

Hart flew on through squalls, the seaplane rattling, fuel slowly eroding, always looking for the ship. At Drexler's calculated rendezvous point they were flying in milk. He dropped to three hundred feet to get below the ceiling. No such luck. He swung north.

"Christ!" It was the German. The tooth of a towering iceberg passed just beneath the belly of the plane. "Can't you pull up, Hart?"

"Not if we're going to find the ship."

Then they broke clear and there it was, tilted to starboard in a stormy sea streaked with foam, its lights blazing as requested. Waves were throwing spray across the catapult deck. "Get ready!" Hart said. "I'll pass over. Aim for the stack!"

Drexler nodded, crawling back to the hatch. There was a shriek of wind as he opened it. The American approached the ship from its starboard side, tiny figures waving. He shot by at two hundred feet, banked hard... and the first bomb whizzed briskly past the smokestack and made a neat splash in the sea. Damn. One fewer pot of pea soup on the way home.

Drexler crawled back up. "I missed."

"Let's try again! I'll come in lower, up the length of the ship!" He began to turn. The stern of the ship came into view again.

Come on, Hart breathed to himself. It worked with Ramona. "Let go just before we reach the stern!"

This time the pilot aimed his airplane directly for the stack, determined to just barely clear it as he flew the length of the ship. He roared over close enough that some of the sailors ducked... yes!

He circled. A group had clustered around the sack of dropped peas and then waved madly. The hatch shut and Drexler came back, his face raw with cold. "Perfect hit," he said, grinning. "One to spare." He held up the third message sack.

"Save it until we get to a post office."

Hart turned to the east again, glancing at the fuel gauge. One third left. The German handed him the course and coordinates, all business now, his fear of the airplane under control. "Good job, Jürgen." The partnership gave him new respect for the man.

"And good flying," the German allowed. "The message aboard, my stomach intact... maybe God's on our side after all."

"We'll know that when we put down inside that lagoon."

The island was not difficult to find on the return trip. The overcast was breaking up and the volcanic shape became more distinct as they neared. There were two main mountains, Hart saw: the crater with its harbor and behind it a higher, steeper, narrower volcano with a wispy plume of steam coming off the top. Ridges and valleys connected the two and glaciers stuck out from the flanks like tongues, feeding ice into the sea. The crater looked too deep and narrow to fly into from above so he dropped to fifty feet and aimed for the slot in the volcano's flank, skimming the wave tops. No second chances: the gas gauge was on empty. The pilot hoped winds wouldn't blow them into the cliffs.

Eruptions of spray were coming off rocks near the narrow entrance. The seaplane passed over a small flat berg, a sapphire in an otherwise monochrome world. The engine coughed and the plane dipped an instant, its propeller on fumes. Don't give up yet! Then they were in the slot through the side of the crater, water welling up from the ocean swells below to curdle with foam, wet basalt cliffs on either side, spray spattering the canopy... and on into the foggy caldera, its shorelines shrouded, the surface relatively calm. Hart dropped the seaplane quickly, the floats skidding with a hiss. They were safe, the
Boreas
at heel. Its nose slowly rotated, looking for a place to tie up.

"My God."

It was Drexler. He was looking back toward the caldera entrance. Hart turned too, the airplane slowly pivoting in that direction. The engine coughed again, then caught. "Come on baby, just a bit more..."

The pilot stared. There against the shore, its bow reaching vainly toward the harbor entrance, was a half-sunken, snow-encrusted ship, its stern underwater as if pulled down while trying to escape. Fog and flakes of snow whipped past its ice-coated superstructure. At its bow like a menacing figurehead was the muzzle of a harpoon, pointed to the cliff face above.

"I think we've found the missing
Bergen,"
the German said. "The Norwegians never came off this island."

Hart taxied the plane toward the wrecked ship. "Jürgen, there's a line in the nose compartment. You're going to have to get out on the float, tie it to the plane, and then jump for the ship when I taxi over the sunken afterdeck. Be careful. Can you manage that?"

"I can manage the careful part. I can't swim." He bent to fetch a rope.

The derelict whaler actually proved ideal as a moorage point. The seaplane's pontoons slid shallowly over its half-drowned deck, a wing tip just clearing some stanchions. Drexler leaped nimbly, caught a railing, and braked the aircraft. Hart swiftly shut down the stuttering propeller, starved of fuel anyway. Then he came out the hatch grinning.

"I guess God showed up for us after all."

Pulling up their parka hoods and tugging on their mittens, the two men stood on the ship's slippery deck and looked around. The caldera was easily two miles across, Hart guessed, maybe more, the swirling mist revealing no other sign of human habitation. Yet their protection from the storm was complete. They were in a natural amphitheater in which the swells surging in from the caldera entrance quieted to a moderate chop. It was a perfect natural harbor.

"Hitler luck!" Drexler shouted, the sound echoing away. He sucked in the cold air, obviously delighted to be out of the stuffy airplane. His earlier gloom had evaporated. "What a supreme shelter for a base, not yet recorded on any maps!" Hart could imagine the man's sudden calculation of possibilities for rehabilitation. Heroic sea battle against foreign rivals, discovery of an ideal harbor, mapping of a continent, sighting of whales...

Assuming the
Schwabenland
followed to pick them up.

"I wonder what happened to this ship," the pilot said.

They looked up the sloping deck. One lifeboat still hung in its davits but its cover was off, its hull filled with snow. The other was missing. Uncoiled lines snaked down the deck, twisted and frozen. Icicles hung off the bridge. It looked like the whaler had been abandoned in a hurry.

"Let's check inside," Drexler said.

The first hatchway was so thoroughly rusted that the two of them together couldn't budge it. A second yielded with a squeal of metal. Hart peered through the opening. The interior was dim, illuminated only by pale light from ice-encrusted portholes. He stepped over the coaming. The deck was slick with frost. There was utter silence.

"This gives me the creeps."

"It's only a boat," Drexler replied. He pushed his way to the front, glad for a chance to reassert his leadership.

The cabin doors were closed and they were reluctant to try them, but there was a companionway up to the bridge. "This way," the German said. It was as cold inside as out, their breath steaming as they climbed, the ship's dying tilt making the stairs even steeper. The wooden door to the bridge was also closed but Drexler leaned, grunting, and it scraped open to push back a drift of powdery snow. A window had shattered and let the weather in. The German stepped through.

He was silent a moment. Then: "God in heaven."

Hart followed and saw what Drexler was staring at. There was a body in the captain's chair. It was leaning backward, mouth open, back curved, one leg straight out, caught in a rictus of pain. Something— a skua, maybe— had pecked out the eyes before the corpse had frozen solid. Now it was mummified by the dry cold, a cap gone to reveal a wisp of hair on a balding head. The skin had dried a deep brown, spotted by black boils on the face. The mouth, its lips pulled back to reveal yellow teeth, displayed the look of a man who'd died quickly but not quickly enough: in agony.

"Jesus," Hart murmured, his breath making a cloud to confirm his own continued vitality. "What happened to him?"

Drexler gingerly approached. "Some kind of disease, I suspect. But why is he here, on the bridge, and not in bed?" He looked around. Charts were still on a table, stained brown from a toppled mug of coffee and spotted with bird droppings. A wall calendar had stopped at December 29 of 1937, the Antarctic season before. Sea coats still hung on pegs. Pencils had spilled. He looked at the wheel. A brass nameplate, greenish now, read BERGEN. Everything was covered with a rime of ice. "Food poisoning? I don't know. It doesn't make sense."

"Whatever it is, I don't want to catch it."

"A boot." Drexler pointed. The German moved to the navigator's cubicle, leaving tracks in the snow. The cubicle was curtained so its light would not destroy the night vision of the helmsman and lookouts. Pushing the curtain aside they saw that a body was sprawled inside. Once again the mouth was yawning open, the eyes gone, the expression one of horror. The fingers were curved like claws as if trying to grasp what could no longer be grasped.

Next to it was a dead bird.

"Don't touch them," Drexler advised. "If they were sick, death and cold should have contained any germs, but there's no need to take chances. Certainly something bizarre happened here."

"And why the sinking? What happened to the
Bergen
?"

"Who knows? They could have hit one of those rocks when entering or trying to leave the harbor. Perhaps survivors were trying to scuttle her. Perhaps she was tied up and leaked after the crew died." He took a deep breath. "At least it doesn't smell. A benefit of Antarctica, yes?"

Hart wanted to go back to the airplane but Drexler's curiosity was obviously aroused. He insisted they explore further.

The galley was a tableau of shadows that wavered in watery light. Some dishes had slid off the tables and broken on the deck as the stern of the ship sank, but others still remained, bearing frozen leavings of half-eaten meals. Dirty pots were heaped in the sink. Cupboard doors hung open, one dribbling a leakage of flour from a mysteriously torn sack. There was another body in the pantry, reaching.

On the deck below, two cabins were empty but a third held a corpse. His spine was hideously bent, his frozen remains rigid, feet on his bunk and head on the floor. Whatever had struck the ship had been monstrous.

Farther aft, seawater lapped corridors leading to the hold and engine rooms. It was chill to the touch but apparently warm enough not to freeze over. Drexler nodded as if he somehow understood such calamity. "Amazing." He led the way back. There was a moment of anxiety when confusion led them to try the rusted door again to the outside deck and they couldn't budge it— a feeling of entrapment— but then they walked to the other hatchway and got out on deck again, breathing deeply.

"My God," Hart said. "A plague, you think?"

"Perhaps. But from where, in this icebox?" Drexler studied the snow-dusted pumice slopes of the crater. "No, Antarctica is far too cold, I think. Food poisoning, perhaps, something from a fish or whale... who knows? Maybe Schmidt or Greta will have an idea. But I think we should restrict access to this ship."

Hart nodded. He'd no desire to go back inside. The pilot would feel better when the
Schwabenland
showed up, damaged or not. The presence of the dead bodies made it seem even lonelier here, wind shrieking up on the crater rim. He watched tatters of cloud stream across and dive, dissolving in the caldera's relative warmth. And it
was
warmer here, Hart realized: not just shielded from the wind but slightly less bitter than the open sea or the continent to the south. He looked again at the mist on the far shore. Some was simply fog, he knew, but some... the beach was steaming. Yes, he was sure of it. Hot water. Well, it was an old volcano.

The
Boreas
provided a tube of shelter but the airplane's metal skin retained little heat. The men had brought blankets and wrapped themselves, suddenly realizing how tired they were. They hadn't slept for thirty-four hours. What a long, nightmarish day it had been!

The pair ate some cold sausage and bread. Hart was so exhausted he could hardly think. Still, the long day deserved comment.

"Weird, isn't it, Jürgen, to find a refuge and then make such a ghoulish discovery? Like finding life and death at the same time."

Drexler nodded wearily. "Fortune is curious."

The phrase jogged a memory. "That's what Otto Kohl told me when I met him in Alaska."

"Ah. Well, Otto is a survivor. It's the kind of thing he would say." Drexler lay back, his eyes on the ribbed fuselage ceiling. "The trick, Otto told
me,
is to recognize that every obstacle represents new opportunity. I try to remember that when things go wrong."

"Like now?"

Drexler looked at Hart with eyes unreadable in the shadows of the fuselage. "Exactly like now."

And sometimes disaster simply means the end, Hart thought, but he didn't say that. It wasn't helpful. As the pilot slipped into sleep he felt he was sinking into a well of bottomless water, azure and pure, a silver mirror above, inky darkness below. Sinking like the stern of the doomed
Bergen.
Or sinking like the harpooned
Passat,
flown into the abyss by the shattered body of Reinhard Kauffman.