Authors: Sloan Wilson
No, machinery could not be counted on, but some men could, and Nathan would not be suckered, not in his chosen field, Paul was suddenly sure. Feeling deliciously safe, he slept the sleep of the self-deluded.
This time he was able to sleep his fill. It was dawn when he awoke, the start of a short but bright winter day. As the sun rose over the tops of the mountains, the whole fjord glittered so brightly that the crew began searching frantically to find enough dark glasses for all hands. Paul was drinking coffee in the forecastle and nibbling the end of a fresh croissant, when the general alarm went off and Flags came running in to shout, “Light plane, skipper! He don't look like he could hurt a flea, but Mr. Green said to sound the general alarm.”
Paul hurried to the bridge. He could hear the drone of a distant plane as he ran, but when he first scanned the sky, he could see nothing. Looking in the direction in which Nathan pointed, he spied a ski plane that looked hardly bigger than a fly as it flew just above the silvery ridge of the mountain across the fjord. It didn't look as though it could drop a bomb much bigger than a hand grenade, but probably it was already radioing the position of the
Arluk
to Fatso and it could send high-frequency weather reports great distances.
“Can you take over, skipper?” Nathan said. “I better radio GreenPat. If he's got a Lightning in the air, it might get here in time to catch the guy.”
“Give it a try,” Paul said, but the ski plane had already disappeared on the other side of the mountain. When a Lightning roared in almost an hour later, its pilot had to content himself with swooping in futile circles over the frozen wastelands, the banshee shriek of his engines and wings echoing off the mountains loudly enough to rattle the dishes in Cookie's galley.
After the Lightning had gone, Nathan said, “Skipper, do you want to inspect the prisoner camp? Mr. Williams and Boats are kind of proud of the way they've set it up.”
“I guess I should have a look at it,” Paul said, though the idea of seeing the prisoners for some reason upset him unreasonably.
“Before we go, I'd like to do something that may seem silly,” Nathan said, looking oddly embarrassed.
“What?”
“I'd like to practice with this damn pistol,” he replied, putting his hand on the handle of the .45 automatic in the holster on his belt. “I keep carrying the thing around and I even waved it at a few of the prisoners when we were getting them settled, but I've never actually shot it. I've figured out how to put the safety off and how to change clips, but I wouldn't know what the hell to do if it jammed and I doubt if I could hit anything I couldn't practically touch. Do you mind if I get Guns to give me a lesson before we visit the prisoners?”
“That's a good idea,” Paul said. “I've shot mine, but I doubt if I could hit much of anything and I wouldn't know what to do if it jammed. Let's get Guns to show both of us.”
For a few minutes no one could find Guns aboard the ship and Paul wondered whether he had gone crazy enough to jump overboard, perhaps in pursuit of Germans. Finally he was located in the engineroom. From Chief Banes he had got a big flat file, the hardest steel available aboard the ship, and he was in the process of grinding it down on an emery wheel to make a murderous knife. He carried this half-finished scimitar to the well deck, and before giving his officers a lesson in the care and use of .45 automatics, demonstrated how he planned to take off a German's head with a single swipe.
After discovering that the mechanism of the pistols was not as complex as it looked, Paul and Nathan engaged in target practice, blasting away at empty bottles and cans which Cookie provided. At first they could hit nothing, and the assembled crew mixed their laughter with jeers. After firing three clips, both Paul and Nathan could sink a can at a distance of about ten yards.
“Do you want to practice quick draws?” Nathan asked Paul with a grin.
“I'm still afraid I'd shoot my foot off. I'll have a shoot-out with you, though. You take ten shots and I'll take ten. Guns, throw the cans as far as you can. Nathan, I bet ten bucks I can sink more of the bastards with ten shots than you can.”
“You're on!” Nathan said. “You take the first ten. Get the cans way out there, Guns.”
Guns went to the flying bridge to achieve more distance with throws. He managed to toss a big peach can so far that Paul needed three shots to sink it. Next Guns threw a catsup bottle even further.
“Catsup bottles aren't fair!” Paul said. “I can hardly see it.”
“Have you got a catsup bottle for me?” Nathan asked.
“I got two left,” Guns replied.
“Then we each get one catsup bottle and nine cans.”
“You can't take your nine cans first,” Paul said after firing and missing the bobbing neck of the almost invisible bottle. “These things are almost impossible to hit.”
After the fourth try, Paul shattered the bottle. His final score was one bottle and two cans. When Nathan's turn came, he held his pistol in both hands and steadied the barrel on a rail.
“No fair!” Paul said.
“All's fair in love and war,” Nathan replied.
The crew cheered as Nathan won the contest by sinking a bottle and four cans. Paul took a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and gave it to him.
They took the whaleboat about three miles in the direction of the settlement. The island lay only about a hundred and fifty yards off the end of a point, where Boats and Nathan had set up a .50-caliber machine gun to command the whole area. Fast tidal currents jostled small pieces of ice as they swirled around the island. Obviously this was a place from which no man could escape without a boat. Three sod huts with squat tile chimneys from which acrid coal smoke rose filled the middle of the island and no one was visible outside. The Eskimos had built a kind of igloo only about six feet from the machine gun on the point. They had inserted a pane of glass through which the guards could watch any activity on the island. A portable searchlight from the ship with its box of batteries was on top of this structure.
“We don't have any guards on the island at all,” Nathan said. “I figured it would be too easy for the Krauts to jump them and hold them hostage. I commandeered the Danes' launch. It's tied up on the other side of the point. I can't see any way those men can escape.”
Before visiting the prisoners, they stopped at the point. Boats, who had the watch, came to meet the boat and held the painter while Paul took a brief look into the ice hut. There was an oil heater there under a small hole in the roof, a tarpaulin on the ice floor, a canvas cot on which a seaman napped and packing boxes for chairs under the window overlooking the island. Six automatic rifles were stacked in a corner. The place hardly looked comfortable, but it at least was warm. As Paul and Nathan climbed back into the boat, Boats said, “I'll pipe them out to meet you.” Putting his boatswain's whistle to his lips, he blew a piercing blast. Immediately a parka-coated figure came from the door of each hut.
“I've got them trained pretty good,” Boats said. “If they don't come out smartly when I pipe for them I shoot a few rounds right around their damned huts.”
“What do they do when they want to get in touch with you?”
“I gave them a mouth foghorn. If they want something, they send one man out of the huts, no more. We send the boat in for him and talk here. That way they don't have much of a chance to start something.”
“Do they give you many complaints?”
“They did at first.”
“What did you do?” Paul asked.
“I don't know. Mr. Green talked to them.”
Paul decided to inspect the prisoners from the boat without going ashore.
Boats got a megaphone and yelled at the three men standing outside the huts. They came as close to the end of the point as they could to hear. In English Boats was telling them to have all hands line up on the shore of their island for inspection. They gestured that they did not understand.
“Some of them know English and some don't, skipper, or maybe they just understand when they want to. Can you tell them in German?”
Paul repeated the order in German. The prisoners ran to their huts, and soon all the men tumbled out, buttoning their parkas and pulling on mittens. A limping figure whom Paul recognized as the lieutenant who had tried to escape gave an order, and the prisoners fell into a single file facing the machine gun, behind which Boats now stood. They waited, shifting nervously and rubbing their mittened hands together while Paul and Nathan got in the boat. The water obviously was deep right up to the icy beach of the island. Circling around to approach with his bow into the swirling current, Paul found he could parallel the shore only about fifteen feet from the line of men. Again he was struck by the fact that they resembled his own crew so closely. Most of them in their twenties, they stared stolidly at the two American officers in the boat. Neither fear nor anger showed in their faces, only discomfort from the cold. Only one man, one of the oldest and the fattest, returned the stare of Nathan and Paul with anything which could be interpreted as defiance. He stood near the end of the line, and when the boat came abreast of him, he spat and wiped his lips with the back of his right mitten.
“That one always does that when he sees me,” Nathan said calmly. “I thought of having the boys throw a bucket of water on him, but what the hell. If I was in a concentration camp, I'd probably spit.”
“And the Krauts would probably bash your face in with a rifle butt,” Paul said. “I don't like it. I'm not in a mood for disrespect.”
Paul slowed the engine enough to keep the boat stationary in the current before he called in German, “Lieutenant, bring your men to attention.”
The lieutenant barked, and the men stiffened.
“Lieutenant, tell your fat man near the end of the line that if he spits again in the presence of an American officer, we'll have him wetted down with a bucket. He'll make a nice ice statue. Is that clear?”
“Yes, captain,” the lieutenant said with what appeared to be respect and he shouted at the fat man, whose face became corpse-like, pale and motionless.
“Lieutenant, do you have enough food, water, shelter and heat?” Paul shouted.
“A bare minimum for survival, captain, but conditions here are intolerable. I shall have to make a complaint through official channels as soon as I can.”
“You're better off than the men from the
Nanmak
. Don't give me any shit, lieutenant. You might not live long enough to complain.”
Paul gunned the engine of the boat and returned to the
Arluk
. Although he did not regret anything he had said, he felt shaken. Maybe I'm too damned used to thinking of myself as the underdog, he thought. Glancing at Nathan, he saw that he too looked unhappy. The role of the victor is hard to learn, but it's better than being a loser, he thought. Still, how come there's no pleasure on any side of this damn war?
CHAPTER 43
Paul found the men of the
Arluk
busy trying to patch up the damage inflicted by the hunter-killer's guns. Plywood was being sawed to replace shattered ports, and was being screwed over jagged holes in the superstructure. Nathan lay down to get some much needed sleep, and there wasn't much for Paul to do. Feeling almost unbearably restless, he paced the gun deck. Suddenly the future appeared disconcertingly clear to him. In a couple of weeks or so Peomeenie would come back with enough information to pinpoint the German base and artillery positions in the long fjord. This Nathan would radio to GreenPat and the army air force would send in enough bombers to blow hell out of whatever the Germans had. The Germans, however, would lie low in caves or underground shelters they had constructed for the purpose. After the planes had gone, they would rebuild at least enough of their base to enable them to send out the weather reports to their own air force in Europe. To stop that flow of important information, there would have to be more scouting to pinpoint the latest targets and more bombing raids, but there would always be enough survivors to keep the weather reports going out until men arrived on the ground to kill or imprison every last Kraut. The men on the ground were going to be the
Arluk
's crew, because ground troops on the west coast couldn't cross the ice cap. Planes couldn't land anywhere near Supportup, and no icebreakers were available to bring in men. So the
Arluk
was on her own. Maybe some of the Eskimos could be induced to help, but the Danes here were too old. It was difficult to guess how many of the Germans would survive the air raids, but since they had undoubtedly prepared for them, quite a lot could be expected to live. Since more than a hundred Krauts were probably there now, the
Arluk
's thirty-four men, and less now that two were dead and more wounded, might well find themselves outnumbered. Almost certainly the Germans were trained for ground fighting in the Arctic and were well armed. Some, maybe many of the
Arluk
's men would probably die. These men were Paul's responsibility and in some profound way now, his brothers, even though he knew little about the private lives of many of them. Their survival would depend on their commanding officer's ability to outwit the Germans. Incidentally, his own personal survival was at stake too, and he wished he could think of that as an unimportant detail. He couldn't. So why was he pacing around doing nothing when he should be making a plan for attack?
There was no reason to do nothing until Peomeenie got back. Paul could guess a lot about the kind of facilities the Germans must have for a central weather base with about a hundred men and one ship which he had had ample opportunity to observe. The only real question was where in the thirty miles of the fjord these facilities were hidden. No matter where they were exactly, how could they best be mopped up after the planes left?