Ice Brothers (19 page)

At the time Paul, of course, had no way to know that the
Dorchester
would be sunk the following year near this spot with the loss of hundreds of lives, including those of the four chaplains who gave their life jackets to other men, but the old liner looked so helpless and out of place on the edge of the ice pack with her hundreds of soldiers waving like a holiday crowd that even then there was an aura of doom about her.

“They got no business sending an old liner like that up here,” Mowrey growled.

The deep-throated whistle of the
Dorchester
gave a melancholy moan of greeting to the
Arluk
and another in farewell to the destroyer which dashed southward as soon as she had delivered her charge to the trawler. Paul drew pride from the knowledge that the lethal-appearing destroyer, with her thin plates and great screws set so far from her keel, would be able to survive the ice pack no better than the trawler could be expected to survive her kind of war.

Mowrey cut across the bow of the troop ship at the
Arluk
's full speed.

“Get on your blinker light,” he said to Flags. “Say, ‘Follow me a distance of two thousand yards, speed eight knots.'”

While the lights were still flashing Mowrey closed with the ice at about a 45-degree angle. When he was just near enough to study the configurations of the pack, he changed course to parallel it.

“Now, Yale, do you think you can keep her going like this, no closer and no farther out?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'm going aloft. Station three seamen to relay my orders.”

Buttoning his parka tightly, Mowrey lumbered over the well deck to the rigging of the cargo mast. With surprising agility he clambered up the ratlines until he embraced the mast near its truck. There he paused for a moment before hoisting himself into the barrel-like crow's nest. Standing there like a priest in his pulpit, he lit a cigar before studying the ice pack through the binoculars which had been swinging from his neck.

“There are no leads within sight,” he called. “Bring her a little closer.”

The edge of the ice pack, Paul saw, lay in bays and points like a rocky coastline. For about two hours they followed it until they reached one bay which appeared much deeper than the rest.

“Flags,” Mowrey called, “tell the
Dorchester
this: ‘Lay to here. Go no closer to ice but stay within signal distance. Wait for me.'”

The seamen stationed to relay his orders did so, but the captain's voice was so loud that this was a useless exercise. While the lights were still flashing, Mowrey swiftly came down to the deck and stamped up the steps to the bridge. Before ordering a change of course, he went to his cabin and quickly emerged with a newly filled coffee mug.

“Come right slowly now,” he said to the helmsman. “Ahead half.”

As they entered the ice cove, the sea became much calmer and they cut through the undulating white area to find smooth black water stretching for several hundred yards to what looked like the entrance to a river. The icebergs near the mouth of this lay quiet, for the grinding, smashing sounds came only from the outer edge of the pack. Proceeding more slowly, Mowrey explored this river, which twisted between ice peaks that towered far higher than the masts. The lead was perhaps a hundred yards wide at the mouth. Occasionally it broadened into small sounds, but it grew narrower as they continued to follow it, and finally they saw that one gigantic iceberg, which was more than a mile long, separated it entirely from the red granite mountains beyond.

“Well, that's the end of this one,” Mowrey said, lighting a fresh cigar. “Stop the engine, right full rudder. We'll go back and see what else we can find.”

As soon as they again reached the open sea, Mowrey told Flags to signal the
Dorchester:
“Follow me at distance of two thousand yards, speed eight knots.” He began again to parallel the pack, and as the troop ship fell into his wake like an obedient Great Dane following a mouse, he spat over the side.

“Now, Yale, I'm supposed to teach you to be an ice pilot,” he said after taking a sip from his mug. “The first thing is, be patient—sometimes you have to spend weeks looking for a lead, but one will always open up sooner or later. That ice ain't nowhere near as stationary as it looks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now finding a lead and following it is the easy part. The hard part is knowing when the pack is going to close in on you and crush you like a bloody sausage in a meat-grinder.”

“How do you tell when that's going to happen, sir?”

“Watch the current, watch the wind. You can get a feel of the way the pack is moving by the way it bunches up where the water is shallow enough to ground it. The only thing I really trust, though, is my balls. When they start to ache, I get the hell out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's why nobody can train ice pilots fast. They can teach their heads, all right, but it takes years to train their balls. And a guy who has hardly no balls at all never can learn.”

Mowrey smiled sweetly at Paul when he said this. Then he drained the contents of his coffee cup and ducked into his cabin again.

They searched for two days before finding a suitable lead, and even that one was so clogged with small icebergs at the narrow end that the
Arluk
had to push them aside to make a channel wide enough for the
Dorchester
. When all was in readiness, Mowrey steamed back to the edge of the pack and signaled to the troop ship, “Follow me as closely as possible. Speed dead slow.”

Suddenly the whole operation looked easy. The
Arluk
led the way through a channel which twisted gradually enough for the big ship to follow. Some of the icebergs dwarfed even the troop ship, and her decks were crowded with men who stood with as much awe as though they were entering a cathedral. The great vessel edged through the narrows which the trawler had cleared, but just when the captain of the
Dorchester
sounded a mournful blast of his whistle in apparent panic, they emerged into a broad black sound which separated the ice pack from the steep red mountains.

“We'll have clear sailing now,” Mowrey said. “Tell the bastard that our speed is eight knots and to keep well astern. He's keeping so close it looks like he wants me to hold his bloody hand.”

For two more days they steamed south between the ice pack and the mountains. The water was as calm as a mountain lake and Nathan spent his off-duty hours quickly reading through books on navigation and seamanship which he had bought in Boston, as well as several volumes on Greenland.

“If we get another few days of calm,” Seth observed to Paul, “I think that Mr. Green is going to know everything in the whole world. He's apt to be giving the skipper himself lessons before long.”

The wind-polished, rust-colored mountains of Greenland, too gale-swept to hold earth or much snow, never mind trees, rose in tiers to the ice cap, which was hidden by clouds thousands of feet above the sea. This coast was spectacular but changed so little as they paralleled it that the men of the
Arluk
soon began to take it as much for granted as they had the sea. Only Seth Farmer stood on the wing of the bridge studying it, even when he was off watch. As Mowrey had surmised, Seth was not much good with chart navigation, but he had almost a photographic memory when it came to coastlines. His boast was that if he had been to a place once, he could always get back.

When Paul came on watch at four in the morning of the third day since entering the ice pack, he found that they were well into Narsarssuak Fjord. He had had no clear idea of what a fjord was and was astonished to find the ships following what appeared to be a narrow river in the depths of a grand canyon. Upon studying the chart he realized that the fjord was several miles wide, but the mountains towered so high on all sides of it that they dwarfed everything, making even the big troopship look like a tiny toy lost in the Arctic wilderness.

In most places the mountains rose almost vertically from the fjord. There were a few bays surrounded by gently sloping land, some with low points which separated into groups of islands as they approached. Near one of these they saw a flotilla of kayaks heading toward them, their ivory-tipped double-ended paddles flashing in the sun.

“Eskies!” Mowrey said, ordering the engine to be stopped. “I was afraid the damn army had chased them all away.”

Three of the kayaks approached the trawler, while the others headed for the
Dorchester
. The delicate craft looked exactly like pictures which Nathan and Paul had seen in the geography books of their youth, and so did the occupants, small, broad-faced Oriental-looking men in parkas made of skin and fur. They grinned broadly as they approached the
Arluk
. On the foredecks of their kayaks they carried ivory-tipped harpoons, inflated bladders to float their prey, and one of them had a dead seal about four feet long. Standing on the well deck Mowrey shouted at them and they looked astonished when they realized that he was using a few words of their language. Their grins growing even broader, they came almost close enough to touch the ship.

“Cookie!” Mowrey yelled. “Bring up some tins of coffee, tea, sugar, milk and Spam.”

Soon a busy trading session was in progress. In exchange for the food, the Eskimos handed up ivory beads, walrus tusks, a spiraled narwhale tusk and, at Mowrey's insistence, their seal.

“Good as young beef any day,” Mowrey said as he tossed the seal to the deck at Cookie's feet. “Cook it like steak and save me the liver.”

“Do you expect me to butcher that thing?” Cookie asked recoiling in horror.

“I'll butcher it for you. Save all the ivory you can get, boys. The army and navy will give you cash or booze for it.”

When the crew produced cartons of cigarettes, the Eskimos found more walrus tusks in the bottom of their kayaks. Looking astern, Paul saw that the men on the
Dorchester
were lowering buckets on long ropes to conduct their trading.

Finally the Eskimos spread out empty hands to show that they had no more to sell. Mowrey smiled and said, “Ping-ping?”

Immediately they all broke into gales of laughter which was so infectious that the men aboard the ship joined in.

“Ping-ping, ping-ping!” they all repeated in delight. Then, pointing toward the head of the fjord where the ships were heading, the oldest of the Eskimos, a man with a wrinkled face and brown stubs for teeth, said, “No ping-ping.” Extending his arm toward the islands abeam, he grinned and said, “Ping-ping,
all time
ping-ping!”

Everyone laughed but Mowrey.

“I thought the army would move them miles from the big base,” he said. “I bet the brass would hang us higher than the moon if we went ashore at them islands. We ain't going to have no fun until we get about four-hundred miles north of here.”

Giving Paul the easy job of piloting the ship up the unobstructed fjord, Mowrey tied the tail of the seal to the cargo boom, got a sharp knife from Cookie, and proceeded to butcher it. Rolling up his sleeves, he attacked the seal as though it were a mortal enemy, but his big hands were expert enough to roll off the skin as though it were a garment. Newly relieved from the helm, Guns watched him with admiration.

“Damn, skipper! Can you strip an Eskie girl that easy?”

“There ain't nothing an Eskie girl can't do without stripping.”

“You reckon we're really going to find some Eskie girls?”

“If they ever let us get away from these bases, we will. Course, I never had a crew this big up here. There were only about a dozen of us on the vessels, and a lot of them were Christers who didn't even go ashore.”

“Damn,” Guns said, “if I don't find me a woman of some kind pretty soon, I'm liable to take after one of them seals. That red meat looks pretty good.”

“You wouldn't be the first to fuck a seal,” Mowrey said as he cut a huge steak off a flank. “You better make sure the bugger is dead, though. They can bite like crocodiles. I had a friend who put a bag over the head of one, and she bit right through it. It's a hell of a lot easier to fuck a holy roller virgin than it is a seal.”

Nathan, who had been half listening to this while he admired the scenery, wearily went below and picked up one of his books on Greenland. “The Eskimos,” he read, “are a gentle people who need protection from white men.”

CHAPTER 16

The
Dorchester
moored at a new wharf to unload her troops. The
Arluk
moored nearby. The army base and airfield did nothing to satisfy any curiosity the men of the
Arluk
had about the mysteries of the north. The rows of Quonset huts were so familiar that for a moment, Paul wondered whether he had ever left Argentia. This thought reminded him of the poker hands he had won and he wondered whether they played cards at the officers' club here.

“Captain, can I go ashore for a few hours tonight?” he asked Mowrey shortly after they had moored at a long, low wharf beside a Norwegian freighter.

“You can after you see if there's any mail for the men, after you discharge our cargo and load anything they got waiting for us here. I'm going ashore to see when the hell they're going to let us start north.”

Much to the disappointment of all hands, no mail was waiting for anyone aboard the
Arluk
, despite the fact that letters from the States came in every day aboard planes. Boats, who had left Boston while his wife was momentarily expecting a baby, swore softly.

“I bet Headquarters has forgot all about us,” he said. “Talk about the legion of forgotten men!”

“As soon as I can get ashore I'll try to straighten things out,” Paul said. “Let's get this hold unloaded.”

Nathan checked packing cases off an invoice as their cargo boom swung them ashore to waiting trucks. Most of their cargo consisted of bales of winter clothing and boxes of radio equipment, the lightness of which had contributed to the instability of the ship. Near the bottom of the hold were several boxes of spare parts for radar sets at the airbase.