Ice Brothers (51 page)

“Sorry, sir. He just says our radar contact can be presumed enemy. He wants us to keep tracking her but not to get closer than necessary. He says he'll send air support as soon as the visibility improves, but according to his weather reports that might not be for twenty-four hours or more. Then he says that reconnaissance planes have photographed Supportup whatever-it-is fjord and found nothing, but there still could be a camouflaged base there. Then he ends with ‘Proceed to investigate when present mission is accomplished. More on this later.'”

“Marvelous,” Paul said. “What are we supposed to do, steam right into an enemy base?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“Give the message to Mr. Green,” Paul said, and called into a voice tube, “Come right slowly. I see a pretty good lead. Ahead full.”

With both ships in the ice pack, Paul found he could gain on the German at the rate of about one mile an hour if he pushed the
Arluk
as fast as he could. He was in a hurry because he was afraid that if the German reached the maze of fjords which were now about fifty miles ahead she could find a niche in some ravine where she could disappear entirely. The German skipper was adept at placing large icebergs between himself and his pursuer. He often faded entirely from the radar screen, and as he zigzagged from one lead to another he sometimes popped up in unexpected places. The thought occurred to Paul that he might suddenly double back to destroy his tormentor, but the radar would give warning of that. Although the German followed an erratic course, he was obviously trying to gain the shelter of the fjords as quickly as he could.

The important thing was to keep track of his position so that he could report it to the planes, Paul knew, and the closer he could cling, the less the chance of losing him. He kept the
Arluk
barreling ahead.

At about midnight the north wind piped up, scattering the fog and occasionally blowing the clouds away from the moon. The chances for a dawn clear enough for an air attack looked good. The
Arluk
men were excited, and even those off watch stood on deck. It was a wild night, with the ice on all sides of them glittering brightly for a few minutes when the moon sailed between the clouds, and the trawler careened through crooked channels which sometimes narrowed so much that she had to push her way through. Standing on the flying bridge and shouting commands through the voice tube to the helmsman and the quartermaster at the engineroom telegraph, Paul felt curiously elated, as though he were chasing something much better than a ship he did not really want to catch. Now for a while at least, the
Arluk
was really the hunter, an avenger of sorts. No man aboard would have admitted such a thought, but they all felt something like that.

“Skipper,” Nathan called suddenly at about two in the morning. “It's stopped dead. He's in heavy ice. Maybe he's stuck.”

“What's the range?”

“Eight miles.”

“Stop the engine.”

In the sudden quiet Paul was aware that the wind was no longer blowing so strongly. The moon had retreated behind the clouds, and in the dim glow that was left he could see tendrils of fog advancing again like the scouts of a great army. He could see nothing ahead.

“The visibility is closing in again,” he said. “So what? If he's stuck, we can wait him out all winter.”

“Do you suppose he knows we're this close to him?” Williams asked.

“I don't know. Nathan, tell GreenPat the Kraut is stuck and get a weather report from him,” he said.

GreenPat had apparently been sitting glued to his radio receiver. Without a moment of delay his answer came back. “As long as German is motionless, wait for weather clear enough for air attack. Best guess is that will be two days. Well done. GreenPat.”

“Nathan,” Paul said, “maintain sea watches. Let's you and me take turns on the radar. If he gets loose I want to know it right away.”

“Sure, skipper. I've got it for the next couple of hours.”

Paul returned to his cabin and lay down in his bunk. Well, he thought, we have met the enemy and he is stuck. So far the advantage is ours.

And suddenly Paul wondered what it must be like to be aboard the enemy vessel. She probably was not an icebreaker, the ice was not thick enough to stop a ship of that kind. She probably was a big trawler, or more likely, one of the small freighters rugged enough for light ice conditions. A freighter would make a better supply ship. He might have just left his base after having waited for heavy fog to cover his escape through the ice to sea and home. Although Paul had fallen into the habit of thinking of the Germans in Greenland as sailing big ships with huge guns that made them almost invulnerable, in the short run, at least, this German must feel like the underdog, no matter what the caliber of his weapons. Greenland was already full of American air bases which sent whole flights of Lightnings roaring low over the ice whenever the weather cleared. Darkness and fog were the only friends of the Germans here, as they were the friends of criminals everywhere. With this heavy fall fog and the long nights of winter already on them, the German must have been confident as he started home. Then suddenly his radioman must have said something like, “Captain, I think I have something here …” Maybe they had radar and maybe they did not, but they certainly had picked up the
Arluk
's radio, which had been close enough to blast the eardrums of the German Sparks if he had been monitoring the right frequencies.

Had the German been scared? Had he felt that chilling of the intestines and testicles, that foretaste of death which Paul felt when he imagined a great enemy ship looming out of the fog? Or had he thought, hell, the Americans are crazy enough just to send little trawlers up here with popguns. I'd like to eat this fellow for breakfast, but my orders say to get out before he can call in aircraft without taking the time to fight.

Maybe this German captain was the one who had sunk the
Nanmak
after managing to take her by surprise while the
Nanmak
's radar was broken down. Perhaps he hadn't been sure whether the
Nanmak
had had time to report him, and maybe he had gunned down the lifeboat as well as the ship because he soon expected to hear the roar of the Lightnings, as the German captured by the
Northern Light
had about six months before. Fear breeds hatred and hatred produces cruelty, a chemical formula they don't teach in the basic ROTC courses. If this German captain had sunk the
Nanmak
and machine-gunned the survivors, he might feel guilt, and that might redouble his fear, his hatred and his cruelty. Even though he probably had orders to run not fight, he was probably itching to use those big guns he probably had if an American trawler were foolish enough to chase him too closely, unlucky enough to catch him.

Perhaps the Germans had debated whether they should run or fight, but then in the murk of the fog they had seen the ice pack closing around them. A freighter could not twist and turn the way a trawler could, it could not push aside even the smallest bergs. The ice would grind at her sides. If the German panicked, as even Germans might, the captain would call for all the power he had. Then a thud as he tried one turn his ship couldn't make and the bow glanced off one iceberg to hit another. He would try to back her down, but if he had hit with any speed, she would be too firmly embedded in the ice. The current and wind would soon move more ice into her wake, and she would be frozen in, stuck until the next gale broke up the pack or the spring thaw.

But of course the German could not wait for the spring thaw, and probably not even for the next gale. His position had been reported to the airbases—the first crackle of the
Arluk
's radio had told him that. And within an hour or a half hour of the time the fog lifted, the German would hear the distant roar of the Lightnings, which would shatter his ears as they approached, guns flickering on the leading edges of their wings, tracers arching toward the motionless ship.

What kind of men were now waiting this kind of death only about eight miles away? It was nice to imagine them as movie villains, short, fat, bald Erich Von Stroheim with his monocle, the man you love to hate, or athletic wooden-faced men in Nazi uniforms giving that ridiculous stiff-armed salute, a gesture that made them look as though they were trying to push the world away from themselves. But probably they were not doing much saluting now as they waited in the ice to die. Probably they were wearing not fancy uniforms but foul-weather gear much like his own. And probably they didn't look like movie villains. In the first place they wouldn't put a senior officer in command of a supply ship bound for Greenland. He was probably some young guy. Why did Paul imagine him confident, cocky, a little taller, a little stronger than himself, the image of his brother, Bill?

Brothers, we are all brothers, Nathan had wryly observed when he had heard about the empty vodka bottle discovered by the
Nanmak
. Brotherly love—that had been a phrase which had struck Paul as ironic ever since he could remember, because his own brother had mostly loved beating him in the endless competition of their life together. But the Germans of course were not really brothers, not even distant cousins. They were simply enemies, legally declared such by the majesty of the United States government and their own …

Love thy enemy—had Christ himself ever been able really to do that? Maybe that was why he had been remembered two thousand years—no one else had ever been able to manage it. Carefully as he might search his soul, Paul could find no trace of love for the men who had gunned down the
Nanmak
and her helpless crew.

Love—the very word suddenly seemed to ring with irony.

“I think I love you,” he had said to Brit, and she had told him, “Don't be ridiculous, you'd love an iceberg if you could fuck it.” He sort of loved her for that reply, the kind of answer a woman would have to spend a year in Greenland to make.

For the first time in his life Paul found himself wondering what in the world love really was. He had, in his fashion, loved Sylvia, loved her for years, no doubt about that, despite the fact that he had never really been convinced that she loved him, and their whole relationship had been mostly a study in frustration. And love or no love, he had been unfaithful to her the first chance he got. In his heart he suspected she probably would be no more faithful to him if some young officer danced with her very well at the U.S.O. and told her she was the prettiest girl in the world.

Love. Maybe the reason everybody kept talking about it so much was that it was so rare. He didn't love his enemy, he didn't love his brother, he didn't love his wife enough to remain faithful to her, and even his mistress, if that's what Brit had briefly been, had told him that talk about love was ridiculous. Had he ever loved anybody? How about his own father and mother? Once he had loved them—it was oddly comforting to be sure of at least that. When Paul had been a small child, his father had been such a warm, exuberant man. Before the great crash had knocked out his business and before the Depression had taken all hope of making a comeback from him, his father had seemed to Paul to own the world, or at least run it. Aboard his big yawl Paul's father had seemed to command the elements themselves, laughing at summer thunder squalls, always able to find his way in fog or dark of night. Paul never had been able to understand why the people of the United States weren't smart enough to kick Hoover out and make his father President. If they did that, the country would have had no problem at all. And in those early days, before the Depression had changed his father's swinging walk to the hesitant pace of an old man, Paul's mother had also laughed and hugged a lot. While they had lived in the big house on Beacon Street, she had read
Treasure Island
and
Tom Sawyer
aloud to her sons on winter evenings in front of a glowing grate of pine logs in a marble fireplace, and had played a game called Mousie which mostly had involved tickling them.… “Money isn't important,” his mother had often said. That had been her favorite sentence, along with, “We all must love each other,” but after the money had mysteriously disappeared and they had moved to the cramped cottage in Milton, love or most of its outward manifestations had also taken flight. The great lie, an affectionate deception no doubt, but a lie as hurtful as any other because it meant the truth could not be faced—the great lie about his father being an artist of genius had begun, had been started more by his mother than his father, but the whole family had gone along with it. And after giving up her circle of friends in Boston, such fine Boston ladies who valued friendship until a friend got suddenly poor, his mother had become president of the garden club in Milton, despite the fact that she really didn't have a garden at all, and had gone on to more garden club triumphs, which took her mind off a husband who couldn't sell his paintings, despite his genius, and two sons who were growing more and more difficult to handle each day—

“Skipper,” Nathan said, poking his head into the cabin. “We can hear a plane coming. Probably they've sent a PBY to feel out the weather.”

Or it could be a German JU-88 sent to try to help its brother. Running to the wing of the bridge, Paul saw that the fog was still much too thick to give any plane a target. The
Arluk
was as safe as the German ship was. He listened hard for several seconds before he heard the drone of engines far overhead. Undoubtedly the German heard them too. Even if it was a JU-88, the Lightnings would take care of it if it stayed around while the fog lifted.

Probably the German captain was out on the wing of his bridge too, listening to the plane far above the fog banks. As Paul returned to his cabin, and told the quartermaster to have coffee brought from the galley, he wondered whether the German captain were doing that too, if they were two men bound to duplicate many of each other's actions until the Lightnings closed in to stop the game.