Authors: Sloan Wilson
Paul and the other men did not have long for morbid musings. As the trawlers entered Davis Strait, they ran into their first real Arctic gale. The fog was ripped off the ocean like a dirty sheet and all around them lay jagged seas, a nightmare of boiling, constantly heaving mountain peaks. Ahead of them the
Nanmak
disappeared entirely in every trough. The 3-inch gun on the
Arluk
's bow was smothered in white water every time they finished one of their rollercoaster descents before shaking free and shooting up toward the sky like an express elevator. During these ascents there was a dreadful sucking noise under the bow, as though the ship herself were in frantic need of air for one last convulsion.
Although it was May, spray froze on deck and those few men who could walk at all hung frantically to hastily rigged lifelines. Every man aboard, even the old brig hands, was seasick, except Mowrey, who continued to smoke his cigar on the bridge, Boats, the rather sardonic chief boatswain's mate, one second-class machinist's mate, Seth Farmer, who volunteered to stand watches in the engineroom because fishermen know engines as well as deck work, and in defiance of all odds, Cookie, who stood cursing amongst his flying pots and pans, but continued to prepare gourmet food for anybody who could face it.
For both Nathan and Paul “seasickness” was not a term anywhere near drastic enough to denote the disease that beset them. The moment the gale hit they were turned into zombies or less than that, for their corpses could not walk but could only crawl up to the bridge, cling to a rail for four hours of semiconsciousness, then collapse in a bunk which offered blessed oblivion most of the rest of the time.
Paul found that he cared about nothing whatsoever, not even about staying alive, never mind clean or dry. It was always daylight now, and when he glanced at his wristwatch, he had no idea whether it was ten in the morning or ten at night. When the general alarm shrieked, he went skidding out on the frozen decks expecting to see a submarine preparing to gun them down and was not really much relieved to see only a small iceberg which Mowrey was considering a fine opportunity for gunnery practice. Paul was also not either surprised or angry to discover that the retching men on the violently rolling and pitching decks could not hit the iceberg until Mowrey steamed almost close enough to touch it, and then the
Arluk
's guns, which had seemed so lethal in silence, succeeded not in demolishing the iceberg, but only in sending up small splashes of chips.
“If you boys can't learn to shoot, you better start writing condolence letters to your mothers right now,” Mowrey said as he ducked into his cabin to pour whiskey into his coffee mug.
Nathan, if possible, was even more out of it all than Paul was. He could keep neither food nor liquid in his stomach, and his already thin face appeared to age twenty years in a week. His tall gaunt body was bent forward like that of an octogenarian. When he staggered on deck in the regulation garb for general quarters, a .45 pistol at his belt, a life preserver and a tin hat, he looked like a cartoon figure of wretchedness which was made even more ridiculous by the bucket he clutched.
“Don't worry, boys!” Mowrey said as Nathan painfully crawled up the steps to the bridge, sprawled on the deck as the ship took a particularly vicious lurch and slowly pulled himself up, clutching a rail. “Germany has Hitler and all those Prussian officers, but we've got Greenberg on our side. Greenberg, here, is our secret weapon. He may not look like much now, but wait until the going gets really tough!”
It is doubtful whether Nathan even heard him. He was intent on recovering his bucket, which had escaped his grasp and was now rolling noisily back and forth across the pilothouse. Managing to trap it with his foot without falling, he grabbed it, his lips spreading to a thin desperate grin of triumph before he retched into it.
Neither Paul nor Nathan had any idea how many night-less days went by before the general alarm again brought them from their bunks. This time they saw a big horned mine bobbing almost in their wakeâthe lookouts had failed to see it and they had almost hit it. After wasting a good deal of ammunition, the men on the 20-millimeter guns finally hit it and it exploded, producing the first roar of German violence that the men of the
Arluk
had ever heard.
“Captain,” Nathan gasped, “just as a matter of technical curiosity, did Hansen's radar pick up that thing?”
“Hansen's radar quit about two days ago,” Mowrey replied with apparent satisfaction. “Since we now know it was invented by guys like you, there's no reason to be surprised.”
Even with an understanding of Mowrey's growing madness, Paul still found it difficult to accept the fact that the captain's anti-Semitism now embraced radar, which correctly or incorrectly, he assumed to be the work of Jewish scientists. It wasn't long before Mowrey was referring to radar as “Jewish magic,” or “The Jew Box.”
Shortly before they reached the coast of Greenland, the gale moderated. Paul immediately felt better, but Nathan had been so weakened that he still could get out of his bunk only long enough to stand his watches.
Paul's first glimpse of Greenland came at four o'clock one bright morning when he climbed onto the bridge to start his morning watch.
“There she be!” Mowrey said as though he were bestowing a personal gift. “There lies Greenland, sixty miles dead ahead.”
At first the long ridge of mountains was hard to distinguish from the clouds on the horizon, but then one peak stood out against a steel-colored sky, a black silhouette, majestic but full of distant menace. Paul remembered Nathan saying he had read that Greenland had been called both “the Land of Desolation” and “the Land of Comfort.” There certainly did not seem to be much comfort promised by those stark mountain peaks, but he did feel some strange new excitement in them, perhaps an echo of probably phony tales he had heard about “the clarion call of the north.”
Paul was still studying the distant mountains, which appeared to change shape as they merged with clouds, when Nathan staggered to the pilothouse.
“Captain,” Nathan said to Mowrey, “I have them repeating a radio message which I have decoded. They are getting quite angry because we don't acknowledge it. Captain Hansen has already acknowledged hisâit's addressed to both of us.”
Mowrey took the clipboard from him and read the message. It said, “German weather ship detected by radio operating in vicinity of Angmagssalik Fjord, Greenland east coast.
Nanmak
will proceed to investigate immediately.
Arluk
will stand by according to original orders to escort
Dorchester
to Narsarssuak Fjord.”
“Well, good-by Wally,” Mowrey said. “Sure, acknowledge it. We won't have that bastard giving us orders anymore.”
Both Nathan and Paul stood on the wing of the bridge watching as the
Nanmak
changed to a southeasterly course. Lost amongst the whitecaps, the blue and white ship was almost invisible. It was strange to think that the
Arluk
was a sister of Hansen's shipâin a way it was just like looking at oneself, seeing oneself as little more than a chip lost in the Arctic sea and sky. Suddenly the signal light on the flying bridge of the
Nanmak
blinked briefly.
“He says good luck,” Mowrey said. “Return the sentiment. That won't cost us nothing.”
While the lights exchanged their brief farewells Nathan said, “They didn't even give me a chance to fix his radar for him again. I'd give a lot to be with him.”
“Yeah,” Paul replied, but he wasn't sure what he felt or thought except that stupid old adage about being careful not to jump from the frying pan into the fire. He stood watching the
Nanmak
until she was out of sight, and, there was nothing but sea, sky and the distant mountain peaks.
CHAPTER 15
After standing his watch, Paul slept, the usual druglike effect of seasickness expunging even dreams. When he came back on deck hours later the view of Greenland was much more dramatic. To his surprise the great mountains were smooth red granite with only a few patches of snow. Glaciers like white rivers pushed to the sea between them. These, however, were not the sights that excited Paul. Spreading out from the coast for miles was the Greenland ice pack. It was nothing like anything which he had ever seen or imagined.
If Paul had tried to visualize it at all, he had thought of flat cakes of ice jammed up. This was a vast city of ice castles, towers and crystal ramparts, all thrown together as though by some cataclysmic earthquake. Like the ruins of fortifications which some forgotten gods had erected at the dawn of time to protect the coast of Greenland, row upon row of these spires and sloping walls, some of them hundreds of feet high, stretched as far to the north and south as the eye could see. The crumbling ice palaces were astonishingly varied in color. Glittering blues and greens of all shades made the white background look anything but drab, and the sun, which was now low on the horizon behind them, gilded some of the snowy slopes, and made them glow in many tones of gold, bronze and even rose. This was not the most spectacular aspect of the ice pack. The sea in front of it was almost black, and huge combers rolling in from Davis Strait smashed themselves against the outer ramparts, sending spray high in the air and jostling the smaller icebergs together, causing a thunderous gnashing of teeth, a grinding roar which would make any sailor but a seasoned ice pilot turn his stern to it and run. The constant jostling of the icebergs in the outer walls which took the brunt of the surf produced a broad band of crushed ice which undulated on the dark waves just to seaward of the breakers, a writhing white serpentine barrier which somehow was most terrifying of all.
“Lord God!” Nathan said as he clung to the rail of the bridge and his ravaged face was transfixed.
“We call it storis ice,” Mowrey said with grim satisfaction, as though he had created this miracle himself. “Do you think you could pilot a ship through that, Yale?”
“Not right now, sir,” Paul said.
Mowrey changed course to parallel the ice pack at a distance of about a mile, called for slow speed and went to his cabin to refresh his coffee mug. Nathan and Paul continued to study the ice pack, as did Flags, Guns, who was at the helm, and Boats.
“Where do all those icebergs come from?” Flags asked with awe. “How do they get made like that?”
“I've been reading a little about it,” Nathan said. “Apparently Greenland is shaped like a gigantic saucer with rocky mountains forming the rim. It's real cold in the interior, but warmer than you'd think around the coasts because of the Gulf Stream. In the interior, I guess, it almost never stops snowing, and you've got a mound of snow there damn near two thousand miles long, eight hundred miles wide and something like ten thousand feet high.
“It really is a big factory for producing icebergs,” Nathan continued. “The weight of the snow on top of that big mound compresses the snow on the bottom to ice and drives it out through mountain ravines at the edge of the saucer. Those rivers of ice are the glaciersâwe can't see them move, but you can't see the hour hand of a clock move either. When the ice rivers hit the sea, which has been warmed by the Gulf Stream, huge chunks break offâthey call it calving, and that's a pretty graphic term when you come to think of it. Then the relatively warm wind over the sea takes over and sculpts the icebergs into all those shapes. The warm currents melt their bottoms too, and every once in a while, they turn over. Both the currents and the winds keep changing their shapes.”
“Thank you, sir,” Flags said. Most of the enlisted men had regarded Nathan's gaunt, bent figure with contempt, but now there was a note of respect in the young signalman's voice.
Paul was interested in Nathan's explanation of the ice pack, but he was concentrating on the problem of how a ship could be worked through such barriers without being crushed, ground to bits in the outer rim, where the smaller icebergs were being smashed together. When Mowrey reappeared, he watched him carefully to see what miracle he could produce. After draining his cup of “coffee,” the old ice pilot went to the wing of the bridge, squinted through the vanes of a gyrocompass repeater and called, “Stand by to take down some bearings, Flags. The highest peak on our starboard bow is 148 degrees. The notch in twin peaks is 028 degrees. A big round mound is 152 degrees.”
When Mowrey went to the chart table in his cabin to plot these bearings, Paul said, “Do you mind if I watch you, sir?”
“Won't do you much good,” Mowrey growled. “You get to learn to identify these peaks on the chart. The Danes and the Eskies have given names to all these mountains which no one can pronounce, but I know 'em when I see 'em.”
The lines which Mowrey drew on the chart crossed in a very small triangle about fifteen miles off the spot marked Narsarssuak Fjord. Turning to a radio direction finder in a corner of his cabin, Mowrey flicked a switch, donned headphones, and turned a horizontal wheel back and forth. Returning to his chart, he plotted another bearing which came about five miles from his triangle.
“Well, we're about here all right,” he said. “Now how many days do you suppose that bloody troop ship will keep us waiting?”
The timing of the operation proved more precise than anyone aboard the trawler had hoped. After the
Arluk
had waited off the edge of the ice pack for only about six hours, a bright signal light blinked on the edge of the western horizon. Flags read the message: “
Arluk
, we have you on our radar. Stand by for us five miles off pack.”
“At least the son of a bitch knows better than to get too close,” Mowrey said and rang up full speed as he headed toward the flashing light.
A sleek gray destroyer materialized on the horizon, and was quickly followed by the boxy shape of the much bigger troop ship,
Dorchester
. As they quickly closed the distance separating them from the
Arluk
, Paul studied them through binoculars. The destroyer zig-zagged around the
Dorchester
at high speed, her bow sending up arcs of white water that flashed in the sun. Bristling with guns, the destroyer looked lean, tough and mean, a strong contrast to the
Dorchester
, which was nothing but an old passenger liner, despite her gray paint and an incongruous-looking gun on her bow. The troop ship slowed as the
Arluk
approached and lay wallowing in the groundswell, obviously as unwarlike as some great beachfront hotel which had unaccountably gone adrift. The rails on her many decks were lined by soldiers and construction workers, who stared at the tiny trawler, perhaps astonished that such a miniscule ship could survive in this Arctic sea, and grateful for the lumbering hulk on which they stood. A rising wind moaned through the complex rigging and radio aerials of the old liner, a curiously ominous dirge.