Ice Brothers (28 page)

After the
Arluk
left the air base and headed north for the small village of Upernavik, Nathan had a strange feeling that nothing was going to change much. The fact that the sun never set created a sense of timelessness. The scenery of the ice pack and the distant rust-colored mountains was spectacular, but except for shifting veils of cloud, always the same. Often they spent days jammed in the ice, and Mowrey, happy with his endless supply of Southern Comfort and assorted brandies, spent more and more time in his bunk, leaving the operation of the ship up to Paul. No one was in a hurry to go anywhere. Sometimes they stopped the ship to drift in clear water while the men fished. The cod were so thick that it was unnecessary even to use bait. Seth showed the men how to lash hooks together to make jigs, and men soon learned how to snag fish in great quantity. Cookie invented dozens of ways to prepare fresh cod, and Farmer salted down barrels of fillets. When it became clear that they were not going to spend much time in port, and even less in places where the enlisted men were allowed ashore, Mowrey gave permission to give a few parties for the men off watch while the ship was jammed in the ice. Paul stood on the well deck, with the men washing down strips of salt cod with beer and green créme de menthe as gulls circled all around the surrounding mountains of ice, swooping in occasionally to claim morsels of fish tossed to them by the men. On such occasions Flags often played the harmonica, and the men sang to the plaintive tones of “The Wabash Cannon Ball” or “You Are My Sunshine,” which somehow seemed the theme song of the Greenland Patrol.

As spring drifted into summer, the weather never seemed to change much, the intense blue of the sky obscured by fog near noon when the sun was hottest, but clear most of the rest of the time. Despite Greenland's reputation for being eternally cold, the men often worked in shirtsleeves when there was no wind.

The only person who seemed impatient with this changeless life was Nathan. “Damn it, shouldn't we get to Upernavik, drop our stuff and go on with the run?” he asked Paul.

“The skipper says there's no point in hurrying. From Upernavik we're supposed to go to Thule, and he says the ice won't open up there until July. Hell, Thule is less than nine hundred miles from the damn North Pole.”

“I never thought the war would be like this,” Nathan said. “All we do is drift around.”

“Don't be in such a hurry to get shot at.”

Nathan smiled, but he did not appear amused and soon went to the radio shack, where he spent most of his time trying to garner news about the
Nanmak
, and other news about the war in Europe and the Pacific.

Before reaching Upernavik, they received orders to stop at a small Eskimo settlement about a hundred miles to the south of that village, which had run out of dog food.

“Dog food!” Nathan exploded. “People are fighting for their lives and we're off to deliver
dog
food.”

“That's as important as gas to these people,” Mowrey said. “They don't go nowhere without it. Maybe the Eskies here will be the real thing, without a lot of Danes watching over them.”

This settlement lay in the center of a large bay, which was shaped like a horseshoe, instead of a narrow fjord. The water lay as smooth as polished steel, and there were only a few icebergs inside the embrace of the rocky points. No wind blew as they approached, and smoke from the sod huts which Nathan studied through his binoculars rose straight up to ash-colored clouds, behind which the eternal sun glowed like a small pile of embers. The still air was much warmer than usual, and the men unbuttoned their parkas. Mowrey returned to his bunk after identifying the settlement, and Paul felt confident as he approached the shore slowly, keeping an eye on the fathometer. When the bay shoaled to fifty feet, he stopped the engine and waited for the vessel to glide to a stop before dropping the anchor. Just as he was about to give that order, Mowrey appeared on the bridge beside him.

“Hold it,” he said. “Wait a minute.”

Through the binoculars Mowrey studied the gravel beach ahead. “You seen any kayaks?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

Lowering his glasses, Mowrey stared all around and inhaled sharply several times.

“I don't like the weather,” he said, tapped the barometer, inspected the wet and dry thermometers on the wing of the bridge, and returned to his cabin to study his chart.

“We won't anchor,” he said. “Bring her up to full ahead. Course one-three-eight.”

“Where are we going, sir?”

“Tell Boats I want all our mooring lines and spare anchors rousted out on deck, especially the stern anchor. On the double. See to it. I'll take over here.”

While the deck force hurried to carry out these orders, Paul returned to the bridge and watched with astonishment while Mowrey paralleled the shore of the bay, staying terrifyingly close to the high rocky cliffs, which towered over the ship. Finding a tiny bay within the bay, not much more than a cleft in the rocks behind a small granite knoll, Mowrey stopped the engine, reversed it, and briskly executed a complex maneuver. After dropping both bow anchors, he backed the ship into the cleft of the rock. Placing the stern with fenders against a granite slope, he sent men scrambling ashore to place small anchors in any crack they could find. With these, he secured the ship in a spiderweb of mooring lines. While he was still using the winch to take up the slack on the bow anchor chains, Paul heard a roar like the approach of an express train. The onslaught of the wind was so sudden that he didn't even see it come across the bay. He was blinded by a shrieking gale which beat the surrounding water to a froth and sent sheets of heavy salt spray across the decks even in that snug niche. The ship trembled and reared like a demented horse in a stall. Some of the men were blown off their feet and rolled across the deck, while others clung to rails. Even shouts could not be heard. The canvas cover of the new whaleboat suddenly ballooned and took off like a huge flapping bird. Ducking into the pilothouse, Mowrey turned on a clear-view screen, a whirling glass disk set in a big port. With that deflecting the sheets of spume he could see over the bow. Peering over his shoulder, Paul saw that the wind had whipped the water in the bay into rapids of white water which were going out like a rushing tide, leaving a seething caldron of rock and whirlpools behind.

Almost as soon as it had started, the hurricane, tornado, or whatever it was, died. The sea rushed back into the bay, swirling. The pewter clouds overhead parted, and the sun shone warmly on the dripping decks and the bewildered men. It was cold. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees.

“Boats, any damage done?” Mowrey called.

“Just the boat cover, sir, as far as I can see. What the hell was that, sir?”

“Wind,” Mowrey said sweetly, and lit a long cigar.

“Is there a name for it?” Paul asked with awe.

“Foehn wind. Do you want a lesson in Greenland weather?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, only a few miles back there, hidden in fog and clouds, is the ice cap, thousands of miles of ice piled up ten thousand feet above sea level. The temperature sometimes goes more than a hundred degrees below there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now here, only three or four miles away, we have the sea, warmed by the Gulf Stream and the sun. Right now you got a surface temperature of fifty-two degrees, despite all that floating ice. So you got a temperature difference of maybe more than a hundred degrees in a few miles. Cold air is lots heavier than warm air. Usually all that heavy cold air just sits on top of the ice cap, but sometimes something moves it and the edge of it falls into the warm air like a bloody Niagara Falls of melted lead. That shoves all the air at the bottom of the, ice cap out, and you get wind like an explosion. The first gust is usually warmer than what went before and what will come after. Foehn wind means warm wind.”

“How did you tell it was coming, sir?”

Mowrey flashed his sweet smile. “Sea sense.”

“There must have been signs.”

“My balls ached.”

“Any other?”

“There were no Eskie kayaks out. They had carried them all up from the beach. There were no birds anywhere. Didn't you notice that?”

“No, sir—”

“The temperature and the barometer were going
up
like crazy. Then my cock began to twitch, and there was sure no tail around to cause that, so I knew we were in for it.”

“That's something, sir.”

“Just sea sense. Do you know what would have happened if you had been in command of this ship and had anchored out in that bay?”

“We would have been lost, sir. Dropped on the rocks and then flooded or smashed on the beach.”

“You're fucking A. Many a ship has gone that way.”

Ducking into his cabin, Mowrey poured himself a half tumbler of Southern Comfort. After taking a swallow, he said, “Yale, do you think you can untangle this ship and anchor close to the beach?”

Paul had no small talk left in him. Only some respect.

CHAPTER 21

The Eskimo settlement was a disappointment to all who had expected the kind of revel which Mowrey had so often described. True, no one was there to object to the enlisted men coming ashore, but there was nothing to see except about a dozen tiny sod huts surrounded by dog droppings, a litter of bones, racks for the drying of fish, and rusty tin cans. Paul was surprised to see how healthy, almost spiffy the people looked in britches of white bearskin and a variety of furry jackets. These Eskimos were of purer blood than those farther south. Their faces were the color of copper, and they were far more reserved as they greeted the men from the ship. They laughed with pleasure only when they saw the crates of dried fish for the dogs which the sailors carried from the whaleboat.

“Where the hell are their damn dogs?” Guns asked, looking around in bewilderment.

None of the Eskimos spoke any English, but with gestures they caused Paul to understand that most of the able-bodied people had gone off hunting and fishing with the dogs, and many dogs had died or been killed for lack of food. Only old people, children and two young mothers with babies were left in the settlement, and they soon withdrew shyly into their huts when they saw that more boatloads of men were landing.

Guns insisted upon trying to enter one of the huts. When Paul ordered him to let the Eskimos alone, the big gunner's mate said, “Damn, sir. I been dreaming of ping-ping ever since we left Boston. Now I got a chance for some, are you going to stop me?”

“Christ, Guns, those women are nursing babies.”

“I like that. If they don't want me, I bet one of the old women will.”

“Forget it. Take the boat back and get some beer. Anybody feel like a baseball game?”

Instead of reveling with the Eskimos, the men played baseball, drank beer and orange cordial. Mowrey did not come ashore at all. Nathan went back to the ship and returned with cans of corned beef, Vienna sausage and tea for the Eskimos. He was the only one who saw the inside of their sod huts.

“I can't believe it,” he said to Paul later. “Those huts are about eight feet by six feet, and I can't even stand up in there. They've glued old newspapers and magazines all over the walls, maybe for insulation, maybe for decoration. Each hut had a galvanized tin tub full of rotting seal meat, guts and all. The only heat and light came from a whale-oil lamp. The children are beautiful and so are the women in their way, but so gentle and scared that only a real bastard would bother them.”

“Maybe it was different when Mowrey was young.”

“Or maybe he dreamed up his own Greenland.”

Mowrey had said he would follow the men to the beach when the boat came back, but after studying the settlement through the binoculars, he retired to his bunk and his Southern Comfort.

After the deck force beat the black gang and radiomen at baseball and the last of the beer was consumed, the crew came back aboard, picked up the boat, and Mowrey headed for Upernavik. Although they only had a hundred miles to go, the ice had been jammed into a closely compressed ring around the bay and they had to fight their way out, making only about twelve miles the first day.

On the second day after leaving the Eskimo settlement, Nathan picked up a message from the
Nanmak
to Commander GreenPat. It was longer than those terse sentences which Hansen usually sent to avoid radio direction finders, and used the most secret cypher, instead of the ordinary operational codes. Nathan expected to find dramatic news and was startled when these words were spelled out on his stripboard:

“My exec has medical problem. Head of penis swelling to twice normal. Fiery red. He has not been circumcised. He indignantly rules out possibility of venereal disease. Has fever of one hundred and two. Please contact physician and advise. Hansen.”

Sparks read the message over Nathan's shoulder, and it wasn't long before the whole crew was talking about the penis of the
Nanmak
's executive officer. Amateur diagnoses ran the gamut from syphilis to cancer. Sparks put a copy of the message on the bulletin board in the forecastle, where baseball scores were usually posted, and everyone speculated about the treatment the base physicians would recommend.

Paul remembered the executive officer of the
Nanmak
with considerable distaste, but no one deserved to have his penis catch fire while chasing German icebreakers. He read the base doctor's reply, which came an hour later, with horror.

“Your patient sounds as though he has infected foreskin. Not dangerous in itself but can lead to complications. Suggest soaking in warm water and bandaging with vaseline. Take sulfa as described on bottle to combat infection. If infection continues and worsens it may be necessary to lance or in effect perform circumcision. This not difficult but painful for patient. Do you have full supply of morphine in your medical chest? Base doctor, GreenPat.”