Authors: Sloan Wilson
“Yes sir,” Boats said, and went out the door of the pilothouse. Glancing at Nathan, who was standing just beside him, Paul saw that he was grinning, and so were the other men on the bridge, but suddenly he felt ashamed of a cheap-shot victory. So as captain of the ship he had crushed a boatswain's mate, and probably made an enemy of him for life. That certainly was no triumph in the art of handling men. Once more he had fucked up, and the sound of Mowrey's sardonic laughter seemed to ring out louder than ever.
At noon Paul took a latitude sight which indicated that the ship was making only about five knots against the wind and currents. The sextant was beginning to feel familiar to his hands and he had learned to make the mathematical computations rapidly, but he still was unable to feel any great faith in the line of position he drew on the chart. When Nathan appeared on the bridge, Paul handed him the sextant and awaited the results of his computations with interest. He felt something close to panic when Nathan's line of position turned out to be a good thirty miles from his own. In the wind he could almost hear Mowrey's contemptuous jeer. “I told you you'd fuck up.”
“One of us must have made a mistake,” Paul said, handing his notebook to Nathan. “You better check my figures and I'll check yours.”
Neither of them had made a mathematical error. “The big variable,” Paul said, “is the damn horizon. With this sea it looks lumpy as hell, and with the ship jumping all around, I can't see how we can be sure of it. When you bring the image of the sun down in the mirrors of the sextant, do you just kiss the tops of the waves with it, or do you try to guess where the horizon would be in a dead calm?”
“I've just been kissing the tops of the waves with it.”
“I've been taking it a little below that. Hell, it's all guesswork and practiceâthere's really nothing precise about this damn navigation at all. Let's try it again and see how close we can come to each other.”
For most of the afternoon Nathan and Paul took sights. Finally their lines of position came to within ten miles of each other fairly regularly, and as Paul said, if a man knew his position within ten miles, he ought to be able to make a proper landfall.
Still Paul worried as the ship slogged five hundred miles northward. In gathering clouds the tall mountains of Greenland and the ice pack disappeared and there was nothing but slate-gray sea and a sky hardly different in color. According to the charts and the pilotbook, the mountains around Angmagssalik Fjord did not look much different from any other part of the Greenland coast. During the four days it took to reach a dead reckoning position forty miles at sea in the latitude of the fjord, Paul had nightmares of finding nothing but mountains, of searching endlessly without discovering any entrance to a fjord. Standing on the bridge, he glanced at the door to the captain's cabin and almost wished that Mowrey would suddenly walk from it. Drunk or sober, abusive or sweetly reasonable, Mowrey at least had always known where he was.
Shortly after making his turn to close with the ice pack, Paul was able to get a moon sight which crossed reasonably with his lines of position from the sun. The sky was still too overcast to permit a glimpse of the stars or planets, and he could get no simultaneous lines of position that would give him a precise little triangle such as he saw in the books, but he still guessed that his estimated position probably was not more than ten miles off. If he closed with the coast and found no fjord, should he steam north or south? If he guessed wrong, he could work his way through the ice for days without really knowing where the hell he was. How would he send position reports to GreenPat and how would he explain his wanderings to the crew?
“Let's face it, men,” he imagined himself saying. “We're lost. Got to be honest about it ⦔ And to GreenPat he could radio a message such as this: “U.S. Coast Guard cutter
Arluk
is now blundering around in the ice within sight of some unknown part of Greenland, we think.”
Then, of course, GreenPat would send Mowrey back aboard at the first opportunity.
Paul started to sweat, despite the icy wind. Glancing at his chart, he found that they were approaching a tiny circle he had drawn to mark the spot where the
Nanmak
had sunk, or at least where her boatful of corpses had been found. According to her last radio report, the
Nanmak
had been caught in heavy ice, but now the wind had scattered the pack and only a half dozen huge bergs surrounded the empty sea where their sister ship had disappeared. Paul wondered whether he should stop to say a few reverent words over her grave, but no ship should present a stationary target in waters where the enemy might still be lurking. How had the
Nanmak
been lost, anyway? Had a huge German icebreaker suddenly steamed from behind one of those icebergs, perhaps the one that lay vaguely in the shape of a great crouched lion on the sea? Or had a Kraut submarine been patrolling the edge of the ice pack? A long-range German plane could suddenly have appeared flying low, just above the ice peaks, or an enemy trawler hardly bigger than the
Nanmak
and the
Arluk
might have demonstrated bigger guns, better fire control. There was of course no way to know. The great combers from the Atlantic rolled on, serenely erasing all tragedies only moments after they happened. Paul decided not to tell the crew when they passed the grave of the
Nanmak
.
The north wind had scattered the ice pack closer to shore than Paul had expected, and though they had to zigzag a lot, they were able to maintain full speed as they closed with the mountains. Climbing to the crow's nest with his binoculars, Paul studied every inch of the coast, trying to find the entrance to the fjord. Rust-red mountain slopes, icebergsâhe might as well be approaching the west coast. Sometimes nightmares can come true, but it was necessary to press very close to this forbidding shore even to make sure that he was lost. In the mist to his left the coast seemed to fall away in what might be a bay, a fjord or just a valley between mountains. To his right there was a high point of land which seemed to extend many miles to sea, with more points vaguely outlined in the mist beyond.
“Come left slowly,” Paul shouted to the bridge, glad to hear that his voice at least sounded confident. “Steady now. Steady as she goes!”
For about half an hour they twisted through the ice in the general direction Paul had indicated. The bay ahead kept deepening, perhaps to end only in a dry valley or in glaciers, but there was a glint of water between the mountains. Holding a folded chart, Paul stood in the crow's nest comparing peaks and points to the outlines on paper. Gradually everything seemed to fall into place, and as they rounded a great granite peninsula, the entrance to the fjord clearly opened ahead. Holding the folded chart in his teeth, Paul slid down the rigging and hurried to the bridge. He kept his voice casual when he said, “Angmagssalik is dead ahead.”
“I can't help feeling it's a damn miracle,” Nathan said.
“Just natural sea sense,” Paul said with a straight face.
CHAPTER 33
Angmagssalik Fjord was surprisingly free of ice. Like the other fjords Paul had seen, it resembled a river at the bottom of a great rocky canyon but it was about five miles wide. As the
Arluk
steamed into it, a dozen kayaks put out from shore to greet her, their ivory-tipped double-bladed paddles flashing in the sun. They relieved any last doubt in Paul's mind that he had found the right place. According to the pilotbook, the only Eskimos within hundreds of miles lived at Angmagssalik.
The first kayak to reach the ship was paddled by a diminutive Greenlander in a sealskin parka. The man had the nearly circular copper-colored face of a full-blooded Eskimo and long black hair streaked with gray, despite the fact that his laughing eyes looked young. As Paul stopped the engines, the Eskimo paddled his kayak on a parallel course, his narrow but powerful shoulders and short arms wielding the double-bladed paddle with astonishing skill and force. The kayak leapt through the water. As the ship slowed, it darted alongside the well deck. To Paul's surprise, its occupant tossed his paddle to the deck of the ship and leapt aboard. He took the end of a bow painter with him and speedily hauled his kayak over the rail. It all happened in one quick blur of motion, as though Eskimo and kayak had jumped simultaneously from the water to the deck.
“Me Peomeenie,” the man said. “Me pilot.”
“Come on up to the bridge,” Paul called.
Peomeenie marched to the bridge with great assurance. The top of his head came only to Paul's shoulder as he pointed up the fjord. “You go there,” he said with authority.
The chart was on too small a scale to give details and Paul was glad to have Peomeenie aboard when they skirted a group of rocky islands and approached a cove. Through his binoculars Paul could see a half-dozen of the little red houses the Danes built and more sod huts. A miniature church with a tall white steeple and the incongruous sight of a white yacht, a small ketch on the ways on a rocky beach, made the settlement look a little like a New England village.
Mr. Williams, the new ensign, who had made such an art of sort of hiding himself aboard the ship that Paul had almost forgotten about him, suddenly appeared on the bridge. He had put on a new uniform. Taking a pair of binoculars from a box, he attempted to stare at the town through them for several seconds before realizing that rubber caps still protected the lenses. When he got these off, he said, “It doesn't look like much of a town, does it, captain?”
“What did you expect, Broadway and Forty-second Street?”
Paul was ashamed of treating the new ensign almost as badly as Mowrey had treated him, but he couldn't help it. He didn't like Mr. Williams. That was unreasonable, of course, but there was something about the young man's scrawny neck and acne-marred face that infuriated Paul and almost everyone else aboard the ship, except Seth, who was fatherly toward the newcomer, and Nathan, who kept trying to teach him things, even though Mr. Williams obviously was incapable of learning even how to tie his own shoes. One of his laces always dragged. The fact that he never appeared with both shoelaces tied had begun to fascinate Paul.
“Damn it, tie your shoelace!” Paul said now. “If you trip and fall overboard, this water will turn you to ice inside of about thirty seconds.”
“Aye, aye sir,” Mr. Williams said. “Do you want me to send a message of arrival to GreenPat?”
“Get Mr. Green to check it before it goes out.”
Peomeenie pointed to a small cove behind a point. “Anchor there.”
“Boats, pipe the men to anchor stations,” Paul called to the chief petty officer, who was laying out mooring lines, and the red-haired boatswain's mate gave him a murderous glance that clearly said, “Why didn't you tell me that before I got out these lines? Are you letting a damn Eskimo run the ship?”
After the trawler let go her anchor, Paul stopped the engine. In the moment of silence that followed they all heard the distant drone of a plane.
“It's probably one of ours, but we better man the guns,” Paul said. “They say the Krauts run patrols here.”
Before the men had the guns loaded, the plane broke through the cloud cover and headed toward them. Clearly it was American navy, PBY. Paul's relief was swept away by the thought that it might have been sent to return Mowrey to his ship. If Mowrey recovered, as he had promised, this would be the logical place for him to be flown in the fjord made a good place for a PBY to land. Paul could almost see the old pilot arriving aboard, his uniform freshly starched, his red face blazing. The men, no doubt, would cheer.
Circling low over the trawler, the PBY dipped its wings, and to Paul's immeasurable relief headed north, following the edge of the ice pack.
A heavy black launch with a pilothouse on the stern put out from a small wharf and headed toward the
Arluk
. An Eskimo crew brought her smartly alongside the well deck and a stout white-haired man in a heavy blue greatcoat climbed aboard with such difficulty that Boats rushed to help him. Although this visitor had to be hauled over the rail almost like a sack of potatoes, he quickly recovered his dignity. Standing up as straight as his round body permitted, he said, “I wish to see your captain.” Although his words were correct, his heavy Danish accent made them difficult to understand, and he had to repeat himself three times, each time louder and more authoritatively before Boats led him to the bridge.
The Dane sported a thin white mustache which looked incongruous on his fat florid face. His first words to Paul were, “I'm Swanson. I am the authority here. We do not allow enlisted men ashore, the common sailors. It is the law. Too much trouble there's been.”
“I see,” Paul replied icily.
“We have to protect the native population.”
Paul understood that, and in his heart even sided with the Eskimos, but he also felt for his men, most of whom were already changing into dress blues. “Perhaps you can assign us a field away from the native population for recreation,” he said.
“No. The common sailors must stay aboard.”
“We have no common sailors here. They are all uncommon.”
“What you say?”
“Let it pass.”
“What you here for? You have supplies for us?”
“No supplies for you.”
“What you here for?”
The Dane's tone was definitely hostile, just what one might expect if the village had Nazi sympathizers, Paul thought, and said, “We have been picking up enemy radio signals coming from this vicinity. We want to see if you know anything about them.”
“Don't understand.”
“How many Danes live here?”
“Just me and three families. Nine people.”
“I want to come ashore and talk to them.”
“All right, but no common sailors.”
“I'll bring my
executive
officer, he's very uncommon.”