Authors: Sloan Wilson
“Tell him I'll give him five rifles and thousands of shells if he brings me back really detailed information.”
“I don't think that's a good idea. The Eskimos are already exhausting their supply of game.”
“Hell, tell him I'll give him anything he wants if he'll give me detailed information on the number of men, the location of buildings and guns, and the kind of supplies. I want to know all about the topography. I want his advice on how best to attack these people.”
After another brief interchange, Brit said, “He wants your whaleboat.”
“I'll try to get him one like it. If we capture German stores, he and his friends can have those.”
Peomeenie grinned more broadly than ever as he listened to this.
“He wants to know when you want him to start.”
“As soon as possible.”
This time the interchange was very brief.
“As soon as the blizzard is over,” she said. “He's going to go to choose a woman and to see to his gear now.”
After Peomeenie had shaken hands and had beamingly left, Brit said, “Can I get you some Aquavit?”
“I'm so tired that it will probably put me right to sleep.”
“You look exhausted. You must have had a terrible time. Can't you take at least a day to rest?”
“Later maybe. I have to move the ship to a safer place. When the weather clears, the Krauts may come after me with their ship or light planes.”
“This snow isn't going to stop for a while. Often it goes on for a week or more.”
“I have to be ready,” Paul said, but he stretched out on a bunk, propping himself on pillows just enough to accept a glass of Aquavit.
“Skoal!” she said, touching her glass to his.
“Do you know what that means?”
“Skull. Let us drink from the skulls of our enemies. That's what it used to mean. Now it means âCheers.' Time has wrought quite a change, hasn't it?”
“The old meaning is better for these times.”
“Bring me a German skull and I'll drink from it. I'd drink German blood from it. They've taken everybody and everything I had.”
“And I keep thinking I'm the only one who understands this war.”
“Plenty understand it, but you're lucky to be able to do something about it.”
There was a moment of silence during which she refilled his glass and her own. He noticed that there was a slight tremor in her fingers again.
“But you can't think about the war all the time,” she said. “You can't fight if you can't rest.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“You look as though you have good Norse blood.”
“German blood. I am what I hate, or a recent transmutation of it.”
“Maybe it takes one to catch one.”
“I'm not
that
German. The Germans are me gone mad. Maybe that's why they scare me so much.”
“But you don't look scared. You seem born for your job.”
“I was born to sail around the world in an old yawl. Before the Krauts clobbered me, I couldn't think of anything but taking you with me on a voyage to the South Seas.”
“There isn't much we could do in the South Seas that we can't do here, except swimming.”
“That's true.”
“Have you ever had a Swedish massage?”
“No.”
“A Danish massage is better. Are you too tired for me to show you?”
“I was a hundred years old when I came in here. Now I'm about forty. Give me a few minutes, and I'll be back to twenty-two.”
“Is that how old you are? I thought you just looked young.”
“Twenty-three next month.”
“How did you ever get command of a ship so soon?”
“I traded the ship's launch for booze and stole a whaleboat from a big cutter.”
“Is that the way it works in America?” She smiled a little.
“That's the way it worked in Greenland.”
They were both quiet as she unbuttoned his clothes and stroked his neck, his shoulders and chest. They kissed, and then she began stroking him again.
“Your body has always trusted me,” she said. “It just took your head a long time to figure me out.”
“Some parts of my body are very smart.”
“And strong even when you're tired. God, it's great to have a man so young.”
“I'm not supposed to ask how old you are, am I?”
“Not old enough to be your mother, but nobody who's been through what I've seen is young.”
“I'm about twenty years older than I was six months ago.”
She laughed. “You have much time to make up for.”
“I'm afraid that lost time is just lost.”
“We can try like hell, but the way to do that is
not
to hurry. Hold still!”
“How come you always make me laugh? Making love was always a terribly serious matter when I was really young.”
“Laughing together is what the Eskimos call it. Only the sailors call it ping-ping. The Eskimos just laugh together.”
“Do they do it well?”
“Are you trying to trap me into confessions?”
“Just curious.”
“I've never heard them complain about frigid women or impotent men, but then they never complain about anything. That's not their style.”
“Show me how to make love like Eskimos.”
“I'd rather take off our clothes. Just laugh a lot and be kind and don't complain. Have a good time. Then you'll know how the Eskimos make love.”
Paul slept heavily for five hours when the laughing together finally ended. He might have slept another ten, but she awoke him.
“The snow is letting up,” she said. “Did you say you want to move your ship?”
“Yes. Thanks for not letting me sleep.”
“Does this prove I'm on your side?”
“Beyond doubt.”
“Will you listen to my ideas about how to attack the Germans?”
“I'll listen.”
“I'll make a model of the fjord at Supportup-Kangerdula with clay. When Peo comes back, he'll show you where everything is. We'll get as many Eskimos to help us as we can. They'll lug supplies in and some may fight. I'll go along as an interpreter. What do you think of that?”
“I'll think about itâI promise you that. The model of the fjord is a good idea.”
After a long kiss he hurried back to the ship. It was dark, but in the clearing sky the moon glowed behind a cloud. Nathan had rousted some depth charges from the hold to the well deck and was changing their firing mechanism. On the chart of Angmagssalik Fjord he had marked a shallow bay inside a crescent of rocky islets which he said would be a good place to defend with mines. The whaleboat had already been taken aboard, and except for the men guarding the prisoners and two of the wounded, all hands were present and accounted for. The ship was ready to get under way.
CHAPTER 42
The relatively shallow bay which Nathan had chosen was about six miles up the fjord, west of the settlement. Just as they were arriving, the moon broke through the clouds and set the snowy banks and icy mountains all around them glittering more brightly than they did during many Arctic days. The anchorage was in a semicircular cove protected by a string of smooth-backed granite islands which under snow were almost indistinguishable from growlers, small icebergs. Since the chart showed only one channel deep and unobstructed enough for even small ships, it was an ideal place to protect with mines.
“Nathan, we don't have to mess with the mines tonight,” Paul said. “If he is going to come after us, he'll have to figure out where we are first.”
“It's no sweat,” Nathan replied. “All we have to do is drop the stuff. I have everything ready. The only thing that will take any time at all is I have to lead wire to the nearest island and rig an aerial there. I'll need the whaleboat.”
“The wire goes from the aerial to the charges on the bottom?”
“That's right. It's a pretty crude rig, but I guarantee it.”
“Is the wire waterproof?”
“Come on, skipper! Do you really think you have to tell me to be sure to put waterproof wire underwater?”
“Where did you get the stuff?”
“The tin can, of course. Do you think I got nothing but ice cream and steaks when I kept sending the boat over to her?”
The diffident Nathan was fast disappearing, Paul noted, and was being replaced by a man damned near as cocky as Mowrey in his own way. Nathan was getting so he wouldn't take any crap from anybody, including his about to be twenty-three-year-old skipper.
The job of laying the mines did not take much time, but the men grumbled at the heavy work involved in dropping three 300-pound depth charges overboard without fouling the wire. “Christ, they don't mess around with mines even at the big bases on the west coast,” Flags said.
The aerial which Nathan placed on the icy rocks nearest the channel was as slender as a trout rod stuck in the snow and as difficult to see. When Nathan came back aboard, Paul towed the whaleboat to an anchorage as near to shore as possible. That would make the ship harder to see from the air, and he wanted to put as much distance as possible between the vessel and a total of 900 pounds of TNT. The spot he chose for dropping the anchor was about a mile from the entrance to the channel, far enough to reduce the shock and the vulnerability of the
Arluk
to the all too well remembered machine guns of the hunter-killer if she opened fire before the mines got her.
As soon as the ship was anchored, Nathan set up a black box with an innocent appearing white button in the pilothouse near the engineroom telegraph. Paul assembled all hands to listen while Nathan explained that a touch of that button would blow up the whole entrance to the bay. A few of the men, including Seth Farmer and Cookie, looked impressed, but Chief Banes was skeptical and some of the men obviously thought it was, so to speak, going a little overboard.
Maybe his precautions were excessive, Paul thought as he toured the ship before going to his bunk, making sure that a good man and an officer would always be on watch in the pilothouse, that the red decks on the forecastlehead and flying bridge were covered with snow, that the radar would always be manned in periods of bad visibility and the 20-millimeter antiaircraft guns at the ready whenever the skies were clear. With the sound of machine-gun bullets smashing into the superstructure of the trawler still reverberating in his ears, it was not necessary to remind himself that there was no such thing as excessive precaution.
Lying in his bunk that night, Paul tried to imagine what the captain of the hunter-killer, the
Valkyrie
for Christ's sake, was like and what he would do. In his mind, Paul even gave the man a name and an image: Fat Herman. Fat Herman had succeeded in outwitting Hansen and everyone else aboard the
Nanmak
. He had been ruthless enough to gun down the survivors instead of trying to cope with the problem of prisoners aboard a small ship. He had been clever enough to sucker Paul himself for fair with his damned outboard skiff or timed charges. What was he thinking now?
Probably he's as mad at me as I'm mad at him, Paul thought. After all, I called in the planes to sink his supply ship. Fatso must be aware that I know where his base is and am just trying to figure out the best way to attack it. He must know about all the air power we've got. Probably in the back of his mind Fatso even knows that Germany will lose the war. He thinks of himself as the underdog, just like all captains of small ships do, but with far more reason than I have. Being that the blimp boy is a Kraut, he will be both brave and stupid about everything in war except the mechanics of battle. He will love the idea of a last-ditch stand, dying for his fatherland, going down in a blaze of glory. Even in defeat he will long to show how well he can handle a bloody battle ax. So he will probably attack me. He will figure that I've crawled into the nearest port to lick my wounds and plan my next move against him. He probably knows this country well, or has good charts modernized with aerial photography. He has a fast torpedo boat. What could be more to his taste than a quick dash into the enemy's fjord to catch him all unprepared at a wharf or at anchor and to sink him with a torpedo fired at point-blank range? German subs had sneaked into a great British naval base at Scappa Floe. Stealing into an undefended Greenland fjord to sink a trawler should not appear difficult to him. Maybe he had thought enough by now to be kicking himself for not finishing off the
Arluk
while he had a chance and was eager to complete his job.
When would he come? He'd plan to arrive off the mouth of the fjord in darkness, but to enter at dawn or in bright moonlight. First he would have to make sure of the
Arluk
's exact position. If his light planes were not yet ready to fly, he might have spies among the Danes or Eskimos, or he could send a scout to Angmagssalik, just as Paul had sent one to his base. If the Germans had not made friends with any Eskimos, one of them might know enough about the Arctic to try a thirty-mile journey on the ice himself.
Of course this was all pure speculation, Paul reminded himself. Perhaps the hunter-killer was repairing her engines, perhaps she was preparing an elaborate hiding place in expectation of air attack, or maybe Herman was just drinking his Polish vodka and taking it easy for a few days. Even in time of war, nothing was what usually happened. Still, it was comforting to think that old Seth, who was now standing watch in the pilothouse, could blow up any ship that tried to get into their cove by placing one of his gnarled, arthritic fingers on a small white button.
What if the damned thing didn't work? No machinery could be counted on entirely and as far as Paul knew, Nathan had not tested his rig. Maybe Fatso would have the last laugh after all, and the last thing the men of the
Arluk
would see would be one more glimpse of that sleek, speeding hunter-killer with the machine guns blazing from her decks as a torpedo jumped from her bow.