Ice Brothers (25 page)

Paul wondered whether he was keeping a private record of events which he planned to submit to a court of inquiry. Oh, quit it, he told himself. The guy has a right. Wasn't his pique mostly self-serving? And wasn't his stuff about Nathan's passivity and fitness as an officer mostly rationalization to take him off the hook with his own conscience if he did what Mowrey wanted? Why did he imagine that Nathan was plotting some kind of revenge? The man had never threatened that.

Without taking time to shave, Paul splashed his face with cold water, dried it on a dirty hand towel, and hurried to the bridge. Mowrey was alone there, hunched on a tall stool by the wheel. He looked pale and for once he was neither smoking or drinking.

“Where the hell have you been?” His voice was still strong.

“Sacked out.”

“I've been standing watch here myself most of the night. Remember, you and I are the only commissioned officers on duty now. I'll take the eight to twelve. We'll give Boats the twelve to four and you take the four to eight.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Bring me the log. I want to see what you wrote about Greenberg and Farmer.”

Paul took a deep breath. “I didn't write anything, sir.”

Mowrey flashed his sweet smile. “Didn't I tell you to log the charges?” he said softly.

“Captain, I was very tired, and I'd been drinking too. A lot was going on. I just plain forgot.”

“You say you'd been drinking too. Are you implying that I was drunk?”

“Captain, I'm not throwing stones. We were both drinking.”

“Maybe so, but I've been standing watch right here all night. At least a dozen enlisted men can testify to that. I made notes about the weather every hour in my own hand. Before that, I broke up the party and got the men aboard all right. I took the ship out the channel all right. Who's to say I was drunk?”

“I don't know, sir. But if we have an investigation, you'd have to court-martial just about every man aboard the ship. Can't you just forget it, sir? Can't you just write it off as a bad night?”

Mowrey gave another sweet smile and his voice continued to be sweetly reasonable. “Sure, a nice guy might forget it. But the cargo was breached and about fifty cases of booze were stolen. They weren't my property. They were consigned to the Danes all up and down this coast. When they don't get the booze they ordered and paid for, they'll complain to the authorities. Now do you want to be the one to explain that we just had a bad night?”

“Couldn't we replace the booze, sir? It would be better to take up a collection for that than to get everybody court-martialed.”

“Do you have any idea how much a bottle of booze is worth up here, even if you could find fifty cases of it?”

“Sir, I could find it and I could get the money,” Paul said desperately. “Believe it or not, I've been pretty good at getting things done when I had to—”

“Why, Yale, maybe you could buy booze at the North Pole. But even if you could, what would you do with officers who can't control the men?”

“I think I'd give them one more chance. That would be better than giving the whole ship a bad name. Any investigation would do that, wouldn't it, sir?”

“When I prove that an ensign and a warrant officer couldn't stop the men from running wild while the ship was moored to a wharf and I was ashore on official business, my name won't be hurt much,” Mowrey said mildly. “I'm already on record with complaints about the quality of the officers assigned to me. My ass is covered. All I got to do is write up a report and hang somebody. That will be a hell of a lot easier than trying to replace the booze.”

“Why? If I could do that?”

“Yale, the only place to get booze up here is army bases. They get a hundred dollars a bottle there. That's twenty-four hundred dollars a case for two dozen bottles. How much would fifty cases come to?”

Mowrey's hand shook a little as he took a pencil from his breast pocket and a scrap of paper from his wallet. “A hundred and twenty thousand dollars,” he said. “Can you take up a collection and raise that?”

“Jesus Christ,” Paul said. “Look, if we bought the booze legally, it would only be a few hundred dollars. Fifty cases! That's not so much.”

“And how are you going to buy it legally?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe there's another way. What if we say we loaded the stuff onto the wharf and it was stolen by the Eskimos. After all, they drank their share.”

“So we blame it on the poor Eskies. Do you think the Danes would go for that?”

“Can't we say we dropped the booze overboard by accident while trying to unload it? A cargo net broke. There's not a man aboard who wouldn't testify to that.”

Mowrey smiled again. “There's one thing that Headquarters would never believe, and that's the loss of booze by accident. I'd rather try to sell them the idea that the whole damn ship just took off and flew. No, Yale, we have to hang someone, and if we have to hang someone, why not hang the two officers who couldn't control the crew?”

“Mr. Green may not be so easy to hang,” Paul said quietly.

“What does that mean?”

“Captain, Mr. Green is not stupid. He may figure that he and Mr. Farmer shouldn't have to take the rap alone. After all, they're the only ones who stayed sober. I don't think that they feel they did anything wrong—”

“So they can throw dirt in our faces. Headquarters is not going to court-martial the entire crew. They're not going to take me off this ship because they don't have a replacement. Greenberg and Farmer they can hang and maybe you, if you take their side.”

“Couldn't we just transfer them, sir? Wouldn't it be easier?” Paul was getting desperate.

“I've thought of putting Farmer in a supply depot and Greenberg on a weather ship that would keep him out in Davis Strait almost all the time, but how is that going to help us to explain the loss of the booze? There's no way out of hanging someone.”

Paul was fresh out of ideas, said nothing.

“Farmer we might let go,” Mowrey continued. “He can stand a watch and he's not bad on deck, except he can't handle men. But Greenberg was the senior officer aboard. He had the duty. There's no way I can save him, or ought to.”

“You know, sir, maybe no one could control those men once they got going. And if he was asleep when it started—”

“Do you think it would have happened if I'd been aboard?”

“No, sir.”

“Would it have happened if you had been aboard?”

“I don't know, sir. I suppose I would have yelled a lot but—”

“I bet you would. You were beginning to shape up, Yale. Too bad you've fouled up now.”

Paul flushed. “What do you mean?”

“You disobeyed my direct order to log charges, or you were too drunk to carry it out. I don't plan to bring charges against you, Yale, but how can I give you a good fitness report? And how can I keep you aboard here or recommend you to any ship? You're seasick as soon as we hit open water, and you're not reliable in port.”

“I had an idea I was getting better, sir.”

“So did I for a while there. And I might give you one more chance. First of all, log the charges against Greenberg. Leave Farmer out of it if you want. It will be a little easier to hang just one man. One more thing. They not only stole from the cargo, they got into my cabin and took my personal supply. Almost two cases. Since you say you can get booze at the North Pole, try it. We'll be at an air base before long. Your cooperation with me might change my mind about you.”

Before going to his quarters, Paul went to the forecastle for a cup of coffee. He drank two before going to the wardroom to see Nathan, who was still sitting at the table writing in his notebook. He glanced up as Paul came down the companionway, his narrow, craggy face looking more mournful than ever.

“How's the captain?” he asked.

“Oh shit, Nathan. He wants to hang you.”

Nathan shrugged and said nothing. Seth sat up in his bunk. “I suppose he wants to hang me too,” he said.

“No, I guess I talked him out of that.” Which was true, Paul felt, and he wanted to get credit for it. In his mood he needed all the credit he could get.

“Good for you,” Nathan said wryly.

“You can fight him,” Seth said. “By God, I'll back you up.”

Nathan shrugged again. The silence seemed to hum.

“Are you going to ask for an investigation?” Paul asked.

For the third time Nathan shrugged, a nervous reflex with him.
Not
indifference, Paul now realized. “When you come right down to it,” he said, “he can't charge me with anything except incompetence when it comes to handling men, and I've got to admit there's truth in that. Knute Rockne, I'm not. So hang me.”

“He can block your promotions,” Paul said. “He can get you a lousy assignment.”

“Well, Paul, I never exactly had any career ambitions in the service and as for getting a lousy assignment, what could be worse for me than this?”

Nathan was certainly not crushed the way he himself would be in such circumstances, Paul realized with admiration. And he also suspected Nathan was putting on just a bit of a show of bravado to make Paul feel less guilty about writing him up in the log, as he knew he had to do.

That day Farmer was restored to duty, but Greenberg was kept confined to his quarters, where he lay in his bunk reading night and day. He did not complain and for a while Paul was able to tell himself that he was just shrugging the whole thing off. Maybe he even was glad that he could spend his time with his books instead of standing watch on the bridge.

That's what he told himself until two nights later when Seth had the watch and he went to the wardroom with a cup of coffee and a sandwich for Nathan. He found the tall, gaunt man lying in his bunk, his hands covering his face. Nathan tried to hide his eyes in his pillow, but his shoulders shook and his sobs could not be muffled.

“Christ, get out of here!” he said. “I'm all right. It's just that I feel so fucking
useless
. The Nazis are taking over the whole goddamn world and I'm not even allowed on deck on my own goddamn ship.”

So much for passivity and not caring. Paul wanted to die.

CHAPTER 19

Although Nathan had technically been removed from duty, he continued to decipher messages. Because Sparks could not copy the fast, brief reports which
Nanmak
sent in Morse code to Commander GreenPat, Nathan soon took to sneaking up to the radio shack to do so. If the captain guessed that this was going on, he did not object. The whole crew was bored with the
Arluk
's slow passage through the ice from one port where the men were not allowed ashore to another, and they eagerly awaited information about the far more dramatic struggles of their sister ship, aboard which many of the men had friends.

Much of the news from the east coast of Greenland appeared to be mysterious. Several sources of German radio signals, some of which frequently moved, were often detected over an area of a thousand miles. No one was sure whether this meant the presence of many German ships, aircraft, shore stations or decoys of intricate design. Red paint streaks on the ice were not the only tangible evidence of the German presence. While following those tracks, the
Nanmak
picked up an empty bottle which had contained Polish vodka. The Germans, like the Americans, were usually careful to sink all trash in weighted sacks. Mowrey, however, apparently felt some guilt about empty booze bottles, and Paul had occasionally seen him sneak one over the side without bothering to weight or break it when he thought no one was looking. The possibility that some man aboard the German ship had a similar problem gave Paul a peculiar feeling. Like they said, war made strange bedfellows … and in strange ways.…

The ice floe was closer to shore and more tightly packed as the
Arluk
continued north on the west coast of Greenland. Mowrey soon hoped to reach a fjord almost exactly on the Arctic circle where a small air base was being built for emergency landings, but a narrow lead they were following suddenly closed around them and for the first time they were really stuck in the ice, unable to budge an inch in any direction.

“What do we do now?” Paul asked.

“Wait,” Mowrey said grimly. “This time of the year, it always breaks up sooner or later.”

The captain did not look well. He was pale and sweated a lot, even in the chill wind on the wing of the bridge. His hands sometimes shook so much that it was hard for him to handle the binoculars, and if possible, he grew more irritable every day. Even Guns and Boats, who had been his favorites, couldn't do anything to please him.

Lying in his bunk in the wardroom, Nathan heard the captain's voice rise almost to an hysterical pitch one afternoon when he found that a line which as an extra precaution was used to lash the depth charges in place when they were in ice had become loose and frayed.

“Guns, you're about to blow us all up if you can't learn to secure those charges properly,” Mowrey shouted. “Ice can knock them loose. In this stuff we couldn't get out of their way. We'd be blown sky high.”

“Those charges are on safe, sir,” Guns replied. “They couldn't—”

“Safe my ass! Don't you try to tell me …”

On and on he raved. “Yale, come here. Put Guns on report. I want him restricted for thirty days for gross incompetence and insubordination.”

“Is the captain drinking much these days?” Nathan asked when Paul returned to the wardroom.

“A little, but I don't think he has much left.”

“‘Has he got
any
left?”

“Cookie was bitching that he bummed some from him, and the crew is complaining that he's dipping into some beer we're supposed to be saving for them if they ever get ashore, but I think he's almost dry. I think he's trying to take himself off it. That's probably what's the matter with him.”