Ice Brothers (30 page)

“I thought we needed a little target practice,” Boats said, slurring his words. “We got to be ready, don't we, sir?”

Blasted from his sleep by the sound of gunfire, Mowrey groped his way to the bridge. “What the hell is going on?”

“Guns shot the bears.”

“Oh crap, is that all?” Trying to go back to his bunk, Mowrey stumbled, and Paul had to help him, straining to lift his heavy body.

Standing on the bridge, Paul watched, stomach turning, as the Eskimo carpenters scrambled out on the ice with a long line. When they had made that fast to the mother bear, the men winched her toward the ship. She left a long trail of blood behind her. When the Eskimos returned carrying the cub, they too were drenched with blood, and in the golden rays of the early morning sun, their hands and faces looked lurid. More lines were used to hang the bears from the mast, apparently in preparation for skinning.

Paul went to the stern and stood looking out over the endless jumble of ice castles, from the tops of which a rising wind was blowing snow spume. If that wind kept increasing, it wouldn't be long before the ice pack broke up and freed them. How long would it take them to get to the east coast, and what were the chances that the Germans who probably had sunk the
Nanmak
were waiting for them? Then there might be more blood on the ice.

Suddenly Paul suffered from a dizzying sense of unreality. He was going to go hunting a German icebreaker, and all the
Arluk
had was a three-inch gun, two twenty-millimeters and a drunk skipper. Since Mowrey appeared to be sinking lower and lower every day, Paul would, in effect, be in command. Neither he nor his two sober officers really were more than hopeless amateurs when it came to fighting battles in the Arctic. How long could they expect to last?

Shaking his head, as though to clear it after a bad dream, Paul went back to his bunk. For what seemed many hours he lay there, his whole body too tense for sleep. The sound of a lot of shouting came from the well deck. For a while it quieted, but suddenly it reached a crescendo. Leaping from his bunk, Paul ran to the bridge, followed closely by Nathan. They did not have to ask what was happening. The mother bear had been skinned and her great red body lay in a pool of blood on the deck. On top of it Guns was pumping while a ring of men cheered.

“Jeez, I never thought I'd see a man fuck a bear,” Boats said.

Nathan went to the rail, where he was sick. Paul went to the bridge and pushed the button which sounded the general alarm. Picking up the megaphone he returned to the gun deck.

“Now this is a fire drill! Break out the hoses and wash down those decks. Wash Guns down too if he stays there. If you don't get moving, I'm going to get a hose and wash you all down myself.”

The men scrambled to their fire stations, and Guns, covered with blood, bolted for the forecastle. Soon the fire hoses were washing off the decks and causing the scuppers to run red with blood.

“Cookie, get two men to help you hack what meat you can use off that carcass. Then I want the rest thrown overboard, Boats, all of it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Within an hour the decks were clean and there was no sign of the bears except red streaks on the topsides of the ship under the scuppers.

“Secure from fire drill,” Paul said.

Suddenly the decks were strangely quiet. All the men except those on watch on the bridge had disappeared.

“What are you going to do to Guns?” Nathan asked.

“Take the bastard to war, I guess. Maybe he's the only one of us who's really made for it.”

CHAPTER 22

As though it had been waiting for them to get their orders, the wind continued to rise and the ice pack freed them. Somehow Paul was becoming more and more superstitious, omen-seeking, full of dire premonitions. Blood on the ice, the wanton killing of the bears and the rape of the mother had been a very bad sign, and the willingness of the elements to let them go south after refusing them permission to go north for so long seemed part of a dark design. Mowrey's rapid decline to a trembling alcoholic seemed an even worse part of some inscrutable scheme for the destruction of the ship and all aboard her.

As he stood on the flying bridge piloting the ship through the broadening leads of the ice floe, Paul suffered more and more from a sense of doom. He had learned to love the strength of the trawler, her blunt power and ability to twist and turn as nimbly as a racing sloop, but the
Nanmak
had been a twin sister, and now, no doubt, she was lying a hundred or more fathoms below the icy surface of the seas, and crabs were probably feasting on the bodies of the men who had been trapped in the engineroom. The three-inch gun on the bow of the
Arluk
and the twenty-millimeters reminded Paul that their exact counterparts had failed to save the
Nanmak
, and were now pointing at fishes.

When Paul stepped into Mowrey's cabin to keep the listless old pilot informed of the progress of the ship, he recalled Hansen's cabin, the same compartment exactly, but all fixed up with curtains on the ports, the sword over the bunk, a sheepskin rug on the sole, a painting of Greenland, a print of an Arctic hawk, and a picture of his handsome wife on the bulkhead. Now the dark, sullen currents of the North Atlantic were ebbing and flowing in that cabin. Hansen's body would not be there, he would have been on the bridge in any kind of action. If he had been killed by gunfire, he might have been smashed to bits, or perhaps his body had been blown clear of the ship and was floating now in the ice floe, bloated and swollen, food for the gulls and sharks.

Paul's fists tightened. He was, he realized, even more angry than he was afraid. What was the point of sending a lightly armed trawler against the big guns of one or more German weather ships? Wasn't the United States supposed to be the most powerful industrial and military nation in the world?

The theory of sending a small ship to spot the enemy for planes sounded fine, but in the fogs of summer and the darkness of winter, planes were usually useless over the Greenland ice floe. And how could he, with no training at all and only five months of experience, outwit the Germans, who had at least made war their national business?…

It did not take the
Arluk
long to go back to Upernavik and put the Danes ashore with the Eskimo carpenters. As the deck force unloaded the lumber which had been intended for the weather station. Paul remembered the old phrase, “clear the decks for action.” The crew worked fast and uncomplainingly. A rumor had started, or a possibility that was being fantasized into a conviction, that the
Nanmak
had sunk, but her crew might, indeed probably had escaped to make camp on an iceberg, where they were now awaiting help. Such things had often happened in the Arctic, Seth said. It was much more comforting to think of themselves as engaged in a heroic rescue mission than hurying to replace a dead ship as a target.

After leaving Upernavik, Paul headed for the open sea. As they left the shelter of the ice pack, the ship reared like a startled stallion. Steadying on her southward course, she continued to buck and roll, but the whistling wind on her stern gave her a speed of nine knots, fast for her. Nathan and half the crew were sick again. Paul felt queasy, but his fear and anger gave him both strength and control. Now that Mowrey rarely left his bunk, the men were depending on him, and he could not afford to look weak. Although he had to make a few quick runs to the head, Paul was able to give up his bucket and look confident on the bridge.

One thing a ship's officer cannot afford to be is honest, he realized with a sense of shock. He could not admit to the crew that he had never been more afraid in his life, not only of the Germans, but of the ice on the east coast, which was reputed to be much worse than here, and of the endless Arctic night, which would soon descend upon them. In Boston Mowrey had said that Headquarters had planned to bring the trawlers home before winter, but there had been no recent talk of that. With the
Nanmak
missing and one or more German icebreakers prowling the east coast, every ship available would be kept on station.

Constant daylight had been eerie. What would it be like to try to navigate in constant darkness? There were no radio beacons on the east coast and without radar the ship would be blind. Even the fathometer had stopped working. While bucking their way through the ice, they apparently had knocked off the metal dome on the bottom which transmitted its signals. The gyrocompass was becoming erratic, and although Nathan found ways to fix it, the machine had lost its aura of infallibility. There, practically on top of the magnetic North Pole, the magnetic compasses spun in bewilderment. What was he supposed to use to find his way through the black months in the ice—blind hope and intuition?

Perhaps the knowledge of the terrors ahead was what made Mowrey step up his drinking so much. As they rolled south, there was an hour of darkness at midnight. Mowrey celebrated it by climbing unsteadily to the flying bridge with a bottle of Southern Comfort which he no longer bothered to conceal. Straining through the gloom to keep watch for icebergs, he sang softly to himself, “One-Eyed Riley, One-Eyed Riley, Oh what a man was One-Eyed Riley.…”

For the next twenty-four hours Mowrey slept in his bunk, his slumber so deep that Paul listened carefully to make sure he was breathing. At noon he got up and prowled the decks, raising hell with Boats when he found that a painter of the new whaleboat had a frayed end. When Boats whipped it, Mowrey said, “Jesus Christ, didn't anybody ever teach you marlinspike seamanship? Bring me the ditty bag.”

Squatting on the deck like the old boatswain he was, Mowrey fitted his hand to the leather palm, waxed his thread, poked it through the eye of the big sailmaker's needle with shaking fingers, and put a whipping on the line that was as handsome and intricate as embroidery. When Boats and the seamen admired his handiwork, he went on and whipped the ends of all the signal halyards, but for the third day he didn't even bother to ask Paul to show him the position of the ship on the chart.

That night Mowrey was sick and vomited in his bunk, not because of the violent motion of the ship, but because of too many sweet cordials. Paul did not want the crew to see their captain this way, so with towels and buckets of water he cleaned up the old man.

For a long time Paul had admired Mowrey, hated him and pitied him, all at the same time, but as he washed his uniform and blankets, he found himself just hating him. What right did a captain have to destroy himself at sea while constantly stressing the need for discipline in order to survive? And what right did the damn government have to enlist men and send them into battle aboard a fishboat with a crazy alcoholic for a captain? How was he, at the age of twenty-two, supposed to make up for all these errors?

Anger sustained him more than hope. After changing his own uniform, he took star sights. In the new twilight he could for the first time in months see the stars and the horizon at the same time. He had to leaf through two books to identify the stars and the unfamiliar tables of logarithms puzzled him for an hour, but his lines of position crossed in a tiny triangle which gave him a precise position. Nathan was better than he at the mathematics of navigation, but he had not yet learned the delicate art of bouncing a faint star on a dim horizon with the mirrors of the sextant. It was necessary for Paul to remind himself that after all, Nathan did keep the gyrocompass going for the time being at least.

When it came to celestial navigation, Seth was even more helpless than Nathan. As a warrant boatswain he was not expected to be an expert with a sextant, but how could the man have spent a lifetime at sea without bothering to learn to find his way around? Neither the Arctic nor the Germans could be expected to forgive ignorance. What, Paul wondered, would all these men do if he got sick, fell overboard, or decided to take a drink himself?

The sensation of being indispensable was frightening, but not entirely painful. It was better, at least, than feeling useless, as Nathan did, and as Paul had for so long.

As the ship neared Narsarssuak, where they would refuel for the final journey to the east coast, Paul wondered what he should do about Mowrey. If Paul complained to the operations officer about him, the base doctor would examine him and send him to a hospital. With the good fitness reports Mowrey had written under duress, Paul probably would be made captain and Nathan would be made executive officer. A completely inexperienced ensign would be sent aboard to be communications officer, and the ship could sail off to face battle in the long Arctic night without one man aboard who really knew what the hell he was doing.

The thought of this made Paul sweat, despite the cold north wind on the bridge. If he had a real sense of responsibility toward the men and a strong enough desire for survival, he should tell the operations officer that after no training and only five months of sea duty, he did not consider himself capable of commanding a ship headed for Arctic battle. No doubt the big brass would respect him for such an honest assessment of his own abilities, and would assign some experienced ice pilot to command the ship. He might not turn out to be a drunk, but probably he would ride Paul's ass and make himself as insufferable with young reserve officers as most old sea dogs did. The thrill of his newfound independence of spirit would be gone and again he'd have to live in fear of bad fitness reports and withstand constant insult. And if the new captain proved to be full of more bluster than common sense, a not unlikely prospect, the ship might not be much safer than under his own command. Paul was aware that he still didn't know much, but he was at least beginning to have some confidence in his own ability to learn.

Of course a third course of action was possible, perhaps the easiest of all. He would do nothing about Mowrey, revel in loyalty to him, remain actively in command of the ship, but profit from Mowrey's experience during the old man's sober moments. True, Mowrey would probably become more and more of a problem as his disease progressed, but by the time he finally sank into total oblivion, Paul might have had a chance to absorb a little more of his knowledge. Somehow it always appeared safer to do nothing, to leave his life in the hands of fate. If he had pushed hard enough to have himself transferred to Hansen's ship, after all, he would be dead.…