Ice Brothers (24 page)

“Yale, see if you can find me a member of the black gang sober enough to run the engine. Find Boats and send him to me. If he's too drunk, get any boatswain's mate.”

Among the crowd of people who were sobering up and staring at the ship, Paul found both the chief machinist's mate and Boats. They ran to the captain. A few moments later the shrill sound of the boatswain's pipe cut the still air. “Mooring stations,” the boatswain's mate shouted. “All hands to mooring stations.”

Perhaps a third of the men on the wharf hurried back to the ship. A third kept on with the drunken singing and shouting and about a third lay in the shadows, passed out or busy with the Eskimo women. Going out on a wing of the bridge with a megaphone, Mowrey said to Paul, “Give one blast of the whistle.”

The unexpected shriek of the air horn produced instant silence on the wharf.

“Now hear this,” Mowrey bellowed through the megaphone. “This vessel is going under way and leaving this wharf immediately. All who do not come aboard now will be abandoned here and reported missing without leave. The Danes will lock you up in a warehouse. Garry your mates aboard if you give a damn about them. You've got exactly two minutes. Boats, single up the lines.”

About half the sailors on the wharf ran to leap aboard the ship while the others carried limp bodies to the gangway. The Eskimos suddenly ran. When the entire crew appeared to be aboard, Mowrey said, “Yale, check out every corner of that wharf and see if anybody is left.”

Paul found one unconscious seaman hidden between two crates of canned goods and had him carried aboard. The last of the Eskimos had fled, and the dock was deserted.

“All hands seem to be aboard, sir.”

“Bring the men to quarters and call the muster. Have the men sound off for friends that can't.”

This was done. The entire crew was present and accounted for.

“Yale, do we still have any cargo for this port aboard?” Mowrey asked.

“It's all been unloaded, sir,” Paul said after checking with Boats.

Mowrey spat in the water to observe the direction of the current. “Take in all lines but number two,” he said. He waited impassively on the wing of the bridge while the lines were brought aboard. “Let full rudder. Ahead slow.”

When the stern swung away from the wharf he said, “Shift your rudder. Stop the engine. Back slow.”

A crowd of Eskimos now came back to the wharf to watch the departure of the ship. Mowrey gave them three blasts of the whistle and a few clapped their mittened hands.

Paul had guessed that Mowrey would anchor in the middle of the harbor, but instead he began to thread the intricate channel that led to the sea and the ice pack. Disdaining a broad lead that paralleled the shore, he slowly followed a narrowing channel into the ice floe. Gently he wedged the ship between two icebergs which were slightly larger than the vessel.

“Finished with the engine,” he said. “Set the morning watch, and everyone else can turn in. Yale, send Cookie to my cabin.”

Almost immediately Cookie appeared. He had put on a clean apron and a freshly starched hat. Mowrey ushered him into his cabin and shut the door.

“Cookie,” he said, “I need a drink. They took all of mine. Do you have any left?”

“Only two bottles, sir.”

“Bring me one. I'll pay you back. We'll get more before long.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Paul did not hear this exchange, but he guessed at its nature when Cookie dashed out and almost immediately reappeared with an awkward package wrapped in newspaper. Mowrey took it and shut the door of his cabin.

Paul went to the washroom. Seth had gone back to sleep, but Nathan was sitting at the table, writing a letter.

“Don't worry,” Paul said with patently false cheer. “This thing will blow over one way or another. I haven't logged it and I won't unless he remembers and gives me a direct order.”

“At least it might get me off this ship. They need ice pilots. Maybe they'll come to realize that they also need radar specialists. Aboard a ship with radar, I hope.”

“They're sure to realize that,” Paul said, and wished he felt as sure as he sounded. If Mowrey wanted to do harm to Seth and Nathan, he probably would succeed. The game, after all, was being played in his ballpark. Paul's head ached and he felt violently ill. After rushing to the head, he lay down in his bunk, feeling as dizzy as though the ship were in a violent storm. His last thought before sleeping was that he should feel lucky, that probably any man aboard the
Nanmak
would be glad to change places with him. Or would they …?

CHAPTER 18

When Paul woke up, the endless sunlight of an Arctic spring was flooding the wardroom. His watch said it was a little after eight o'clock, and with that oddly continuing disorientation concerning time, he wasn't sure whether it was morning or evening. Of one thing he was certain: he had the great-grandmother of all hangovers, the symptoms of which included a throbbing headache and a strong sense of impending doom. After the sunlight stabbed his eyes once, he closed them again. Slowly the dismal events of the preceding night came back to him.

Some of it was still mercifully obscure to him, but the two worst results were clear. Nathan and Seth were “in hack,” confined to their quarters pending a court-martial, and
he
had been ordered to write the charges against them in the log, a seemingly trivial task which could have dreadful effect, for once an event had been written in the log it could never be forgotten. Feeling sicker and sicker, Paul reviewed what he had learned about logs. There were two of them, a rough log written in pencil as events took place and signed by each officer of the watch, and a smooth log, a cleaned-up copy of the rough log, which he himself wrote in ink every night. Both were official documents, but the rough log, he had read, was considered the more important when investigations were held. It was against the law to make erasures in the rough log or to delete passages in any way. Every few months both logs were sent to Washington, where they were apparently preserved forever, like the final scrolls of the recording angel himself.

For these reasons Paul had written nothing in the log about Nathan and Seth, thus disobeying a direct order from his commanding officer. The idea of disobeying Mowrey had never before really occurred seriously to him, and the thought of the old man's wrath when he reviewed the log, as he did every day, now frankly terrified Paul. Soon, no doubt, he would find himself joining the others in hack, awaiting court-martial. Paul started to sweat, but he suddenly realized that there might be some safety for all of them in numbers. If Mowrey asked Headquarters to court-martial all three of his officers, he himself would look crazy, wouldn't he?

And there was more to it than that. A board of investigation would discover that every officer and man aboard the ship had been drunk on that ill-starred, sunny night, except for Nathan and Seth, the only two who were presently being punished. If they were to be disgraced, wouldn't some action have to be taken against all the enlisted men and petty officers who had broken into the liquor locker and stolen part of the cargo? And Mowrey himself had been drunk when he had taken such drastic action against Nathan and Seth. Was an executive officer wrong in refusing to carry out an order given by a commanding officer who was obviously drunk? How would the fact that he had been drunk himself affect a legal decision?

Obviously the best thing that Mowrey could do would be to forget the whole episode, wake up and laugh it off. Paul had been counting on him to do that when he neglected to make the entry in the log, but perhaps he had underestimated the vengeful aspect of Mowrey's character, the unreasoning hatred he had for Nathan and the curious contempt he seemed to have for Seth. If “Mad Mowrey” was really going mad, as he sometimes appeared to be doing, because of his vast consumption of alcohol or the growth of lifelong diseases of the spirit, a board of investigation should in normal circumstances pin most of the blame, at least, on him, but there was nothing exactly normal about this first year of the war. The Coast Guard, Paul realized, was an old-boy network, like the other services. As a mustang, Mowrey had not ranked high in it, but he certainly ranked far above the thousands of incompetent reserve officers whom the old boys were trying to sort out. As Mowrey well knew, the acute shortage of ice pilots gave men who knew the Arctic well a kind of immunity to ordinary rules and regulations. In time of war, anything which worked fast had to be done. The commander of GreenPat probably would not bother to undertake a long investigation of the doings of a trawler's drunken night in a tiny Greenland village, and he was unlikely to waste the time of his senior officers on the endless procedures of a court-martial which could end only by making everybody look bad. The practical, pragmatic course of action for “Commander GreenPat” was simply to forget all legal charges and transfer the officers whom Mowrey didn't like to some other unit. If it was necessary to find some rotten assignment for the reserve officers to keep the old ice pilot happy, that could easily be arranged. It might be wise to make an example of reserve officers who made trouble with the old hands, who couldn't fit into a military organization smoothly. If Nathan and Seth were transferred to some tiny supply depot or weather station deep in the Arctic wastes, they would have no opportunity to complain or to make recriminations. Even in peacetime, any member of the service was by honor and law bound to accept any assignment given to him, wasn't he?

The more Paul thought about it, the surer he was that this was the way the whole mess would be resolved. Nathan and Seth would get fitness reports bad enough to block future promotions or reassignment to any meaningful job. And if he himself tried to protect them by refusing to write their troubles up in the log, or even by trying too hard to present a case for them while talking with Mowrey, he might easily end up by joining them. It would, after all, be just as easy to transfer three reserve officers as two. If he demanded some sort of hearing, he guessed that few of the enlisted men aboard the
Arluk
would testify in his favor. To save their own skins, they would want to avoid a full investigation and would back the most powerful man aboard the ship.

Paul felt sick. Opening his eyes and squinting in the bright sunlight, he saw that Seth was still in his bunk, but Nathan was sitting at the table writing something. What would happen if Nathan turned out to be a sea lawyer and stubbornly demanded an investigation, or formally pressed his own charges? If it had to be proved that the captain was drunk, it would have to come out that Paul had not exactly spent the night as a teetotaler. Probably the Danes would be called as witnesses.

Suddenly Paul was angry at Nathan and Seth. There was no great crime, after all, in going ashore to get drunk, as the captain and he had done, but Nathan and Seth had been on duty aboard ship, they had stayed cold sober, and still hadn't been able to control the crew. If they had gone to sleep early and had awakened to find themselves in the midst of a drunken set-to they might have just given up, once they had found that the skipper and executive officer were drunk ashore, but Paul knew that Nathan, at least, was just not that weak. No, Nathan sympathized with the enlisted men, felt it was unfair to deny them a party while the officers had one ashore, and probably turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the theft of the booze at the start. Perhaps he hated Mowrey enough to get some kick out of the revenge of the enlisted men. Maybe he liked seeing Mowrey's crew fuck up after all the old man's attempts at discipline. If the whole ship was to be disgraced and punished after treating him so harshly, maybe Nathan would take pleasure in the revenge.

As he thought about this, Paul's anger built. Nathan was always so goddamn righteous, so long suffering, so
put
upon! Sure, Mowrey didn't like Jews and made no secret of it. That was wrong, ugly, but wasn't Mowrey maybe a little justified in his contempt for Nathan as an officer? Openly ignorant of everything nautical, basically disdainful of everything military, eternally seasick and a thinly disguised intellectual snob, Nathan wasn't really all that much of an asset to the ship. If as an electronic specialist he'd been assigned to a trawler as a wartime mistake, he could have had the guts to fight for a transfer instead of making a virtue of being so damn passive, couldn't he?
Passive—
that's what Nathan was, when faced by a crew difficult to control, a storm at sea, or an overaggressive commanding officer who was egged on by passivity. If they had to battle a German icebreaker, Nathan might also be too passive to return gunfire effectively. His passivity could be the death of himself and of all of them. Already, by allowing the crew to run riot, he had brought a kind of disaster on everyone aboard. And then he began to shake his head and pull himself up short. Jesus Christ, what was he doing …?

Yet this was not really a fair interpretation, Paul realized as his anger peaked. Nathan was undoubtedly doing as best he could in a situation which was nearly impossible for him. His passivity was really part of his courage, his refusal to give up and beg for a transfer. He was doing everything he could to learn an entirely new profession, and if the captain would give him a chance, could soon become an effective officer, Paul was sure. Part of Paul's anger was fear and guilt, fear that Mowrey would kill him if he tried to stand up for his friend, and guilt because he was tempted to side with strength and turn against Nathan.

Pulling a pillow over his face to shield his eyes from the sunlight, Paul tried to go back to sleep. He had just succeeded when a messenger came to announce that the captain wanted to see him on the bridge “right now.”

As Paul hurried to put on his clothes, Nathan said “Good morning” in a curiously normal voice.

“Is it? I got to go face some Mowrey music.”

Nathan shrugged, a habitual gesture, and began to write in his notebook.