Stranded (9 page)

“I know this trip has been tough. Tougher than usual, and you can all tell, it's taking longer than it should to get where we're going. Earlier today, I had some recon done to assess our situation and it appears we've … become beset.” He paused a moment to let the men vocalize their disbelief. None of them made a sound. He continued. “The ice pack appears to be consolidated and thick. The short version is: we're not going anywhere until we can free the ship.”

“How do you suggest we do that?” Theo asked.

Brewster furrowed his brow. “We're going to need to take a closer look. If the ice has closed in all around us, we'll have to break it up by hand.”

“If it pays overtime, I'm game,” Henry added. While he looked in better shape than most of the crew, it was clearly not a one-man job. No matter how much energy he and his pal could summon, it was going to take more than a couple of men.

Kevin groaned. “I don't know. If it's thick enough to hold us, can a few guys even break it up enough to bust out?”

“You only have to break away enough so I can throttle up the engines,” Brewster said. “I'm going to try to chop up what's back there with the propellers.”

“Like a blender,” Boucher added.

Brewster shot him a let-me-handle-it glance and continued. “The cavitation of the props could break up what you guys loosen. If I can move us astern, we can try to fire the engines harder and plow forward. But I need space ahead to make a run at the ice pack. That means clearing out the ice behind us.”

Noah shook his head. “You think the hull fortifications are strong enough to handle that? You're going to damage the ship or even breach the hull. If we're lucky, you'll just burn out the engines trying to get us moving instead of sinking us.”

“Stow that shit, Cabot,” Boucher snapped. He leaned away from the wall, looking ready to physically silence Noah. Brewster held up a hand.

“Why not call for a breaker?” Kevin said. “Why won't they come help us?”

“We're experiencing interference with the radio.”

“It's not just the radio,” Noah butted in. “The whole communications array is dead.”

“What do you mean, ‘dead'?” Theo asked, fidgeting in his seat. The crew seemed to be coming to life—the direness of the situation outside slowly climbing on top of their physical woes. All except Puck, who remained propped against the wall, watching through half-lidded eyes.

Brewster leaned forward, pressing his balled fists onto the table in front of him. His pallid face reddened as he admitted, “We don't know what the problem with communications is. It could be ice built up on the superstructure messing with the antennas, but given that the sat phone is down, too, my guess is the fog.”

“You can't know that for certain.”

“Nobody asked for your opinion, Cabot. We need to get out of this atmosphere before we can be certain whether we've permanently lost touch.”

“My opinion? My opinion is that you've been taking chances with all our lives. You could have skirted that storm. Instead, you steered us right into it and put Felix in the hospital. Now we're in this mess and we can't call for a medevac. We're dead in the ice because you won't admit you're not … I don't know. Not thinking clearly about what we should do.” Noah felt himself rising from his seat, as though he was being lifted. As soon as he was on his feet, he regretted it. Brewster's back straightened, his fists still balled up tight and knuckles white. Boucher looked ready to make good on his promise to tan Noah's hide. Noah decided that if he was going to take a leathering for standing up for himself and the crew, he should just lay it all out.

“You want to get out and push, go ahead,” he said. “But there are fifteen other men on this ship who want to get home to their families. For fuck's sake, look at Puck.” Whatever had gotten into the ship and its crew was affecting them all differently. Brewster was on his feet, but looking pale. Henry was more or less himself, albeit sweatier than normal. Boucher looked like he was on Puck's heels. And Puck, he looked like death. “Working sick men like you're suggesting could kill someone. We need to fix the radio and call for help.” Puck groaned and raised a hand to protest his weakened state. It was the first true sign of life Noah had seen in the man. His hand dropped back into his lap like someone cut the string lifting it.

Brewster glared at Noah with a mix of hostility and cool ill intent. He said, “You'd know something about getting people killed, wouldn't you, Noah? Being the only person in this room who's actually done it.”

Noah's ears and cheeks went hot with blood, and all the bravado drained from his body. The words hit like a slap in the mouth. He took a step back, looking around the room at the faces of the other men. Jack and Kevin stared down at the table in front of them, leaning away, trying to distance themselves from Noah's shame. Theo's eyes grew wide while Henry's narrowed with contempt. Only Boucher appeared to enjoy the repartee with a sweaty-faced smile. Noah felt perfectly alone, like he'd been left standing on the ice after all and was watching the ship sail away.

“That wasn't my fault,” he said, not fully believing it.

“I'm sure Connor MacAllister's gal will love to hear you explain that to her when we get home. Until then, sit down and shut the fuck up. You don't get a say here.”

The sting of the dead man's name made Noah's heart pound, and his mind reeled at the memory of standing at his shipmate and best friend's funeral, trying to look his girlfriend, Sheila, in the eye and tell her how sorry he was. Sorry he'd shirked his duty, sorry he'd asked Connor to perform a task
he'd
been ordered to do. He was sorry for a lot of things. Most of all, at that moment, he had been sorry for not being the one in the box they were about to lower into the ground. And not just because of what had happened to Connor.

Noah shook his head, trying to clear away the stress and confusion of the last couple of days. Brewster's condescension wasn't anything new. Neither was his outright hostility and contempt. But his openness about it was. Noah had been pushing him, up in the wheelhouse and now, hard, in front of the crew. He knew he shouldn't be surprised when the Old Man pushed back. Noah wasn't master of the ship, William Brewster was. Then again, Noah hadn't been the one to steer them into an arctic hurricane and almost cripple the vessel by overtaxing the engines. He wasn't the one responsible for a broken man lying in a drugged stupor one deck below, and he sure as shit hadn't driven them into the middle of a field of thick “two-year” sea ice. None of that, however, meant he knew how to get them out of danger. And none of that meant he owned any less responsibility for Connor MacAllister's death a year ago.

Breaking the silence that had fallen over the room, Brewster resumed. “However we got here, we're in a bad way, and we can't sit and wait for things to get worse. I'm the master, and the call to keep going in this shit was mine. I made it, and … it was … it got us here. I am
not
going to burn out the engines. Even if we did lose one, that's why they built this ship with redundant engines. We got no choice but to try.” He looked at Puck, and for a moment, Noah thought he saw the Old Man's self-assurance crack. “On the other hand, this is a special circumstance. I'm not going to ask any of you to put your lives at risk or do anything I wouldn't get down beside you to do. I'm asking for volunteers. If none of you want to chop ice, then I guess that's a vote to focus on the radio and wait for help to come to us.”

Theo and Henry leaned in close and whispered to one another. Brewster looked at Kevin and Jack. The rockers shook their heads together like they shared a single consciousness. “This sucks, man,” Jack said. “But what choice do we have? If they don't even know we're in trouble, no one's coming to the rescue. By the time we're missed at the Niflheim, we'll be out of food and fuel and we'll be freezing.” He raised his hand. “Sorry, Noah. We have to do something.”

Kevin raised his arm.

Smiling, Brewster waved his hand to let the volunteers know they could put their arms down. “
This
is how we're going to get home. Everyone in the same boat working together.” He glared at his son-in-law as if he could drive the words home by staring them into Noah's skull. “Henry, Theo, Jack, Kevin … and you, Noah, are gonna grab some tools—pickaxes and pole choppers—and meet me at the starboard Rescue Zone in thirty minutes to start clearing ice from the aft. Boucher!” The bosun seemed to feel a shock at hearing his name. He snapped to attention as though he'd been miles away from his body and was suddenly yanked back. “You get Holden and Nevins out of their cabins and on the job. I want them working on troubleshooting and repairing communications.”

“Aye, sir.” He stood, trying to look ready for the job, but still seemed diminished and tired.

Brewster turned his attention to Puck, slumped against the wall. The deckhand's eyelids fluttered and he let out a low groan. “Jesus, will you two get him back to his bunk before we have to put a stake through his heart.” No one laughed at the joke.

The Old Man turned to walk out of the room, but stopped short of the door, looking at Noah a last time. “When we get out of this, Cabot, you're going to owe
all
these men an apology, not just Connor's girlfriend.” He disappeared into the passageway, Boucher a step behind.

Noah leaned against a table, drained by the confrontation. Theo and Henry helped Puck to his feet and shuffled him out of the room. Kevin put a hand on Noah's arm and tried to smile. “It's cool, man. I get it'd be hard as shit to work with your father-in-law. Nobody's trying to kill anybody, though. No lie. We'll all get out of this, and then I'm buying the first round. You watch.”

The pair walked out, leaving Noah alone in the mess room. Out of the corner of his eye, a shadow seemed to tremble, like the shade of a tree on a breezy day. He tried to focus on his peripheral vision to get a look without turning to face it, remembering what Martin had said.
Like ghosts. Except I don't believe in ghosts.

The shadow got up and slipped out of the room.

Noah stood as frozen as the sea outside.

 

11

He drove the long-handled chopper into the ice. The flat blade made short scores in the surface resembling hash marks on a prison wall, counting the interminable age it would take to realize freedom, one blow at a time. Noah's knuckles ached and his joints swelled as he thrust the flat spade edge down in front of his feet again and again, hoping the next hit would create the crack showing him he'd reached the point at which the ice would give. But all he did was chip away a half inch at a time at the thick, solid layer. The tool was built to break and scrape ice accumulated on the deck of the ship. It was designed to combat an inch or two of the stuff, not thickly packed floes of sea ice. Still, he was better off than Henry with a blunt sledgehammer, beating against the surface with no effect. Noah could feel the vibrations of the impacts under foot. He thought the sensation should trouble him, make him fear he was standing too near a crack about to open and dump him through. But the surface on which he stood felt as sturdy as downtown asphalt.

The breakup crew was dressed in immersion survival suits—neon-bright neoprene jumpsuits designed for surviving in frigid water. Unofficially known as “Gumby suits,” they were waterproof and warm, with tethered mittens and boots, dye markers, radio beacons, and inflatable bladders to keep the wearer's head above the surface. They weren't formfitting, however, and moving in them was difficult. Working in them was nearly impossible, but Brewster insisted. Noah assumed it was because the Old Man was afraid of going in the water and wanted to wear one himself. He wouldn't want to be the only one looking like a Day-Glo Claymation figure out there. It impeded work, but it was sensible. If they broke through the ice and someone
did
go in, he'd be protected from the frigid temperature of the water. The suit was designed to keep people alive in open water long enough to be rescued. On the other hand, if a person slipped under the ice without a tether to pull him back toward the opening, he'd be dead no matter how warm the suit kept him. Drowning was not at the top of the list of Noah's concerns, however.

The crew had spread out at first, hoping to make headway by each breaking away a section of his own along the length of the ship's aft section. After a couple of hours without success, Brewster ordered them closer together to attack a single spot. He, wielding the only actual pickax, had chipped down farther than anyone else, but after another hour of work and dwindling daylight, they had broken away only a small portion of the ice adhering to the ship. It was thicker than any of them could have imagined, and the pace at which they were breaking it apart meant it would be days, not hours, that they'd have to spend laboring to free the vessel. If it didn't refreeze and reconsolidate when they weren't bashing at it. There weren't enough crew members in healthy condition to run shifts, and Noah imagined the nighttime temperatures would be as big an obstacle as the frozen buildup itself, even with the Gumby suits on.

The Old Man pushed back his hood and stripped off his cap; steam rose from his head in a cloud. His pulse throbbed visibly under the bright red skin of his neck. Noah thought Brewster looked like he might be having a stroke. The Old Man's breath condensed and formed ice in his closely trimmed beard, turning it from salt and pepper to just salt. He threw his pickax at the ice, shouting, “Fuck me!” and stomped in a small circle, kicking impotently at the snow. It dusted up and blew away to settle elsewhere, unperturbed.

The others stopped working and stared, uncertain what to do. Noah stepped forward. “It was worth a try,” he said. “We tried, but this is unreal. I mean, you've never seen anything like this, have you?” Brewster stared at Noah, his breath puffing out in quick gusts of mist and blowing away. He said nothing. “I didn't think so,” he continued, stepping closer and lowering his voice. “Let's get these men inside before they get sicker. We can see if Marty's had any luck with the radio and try to come up with a Plan C.”