Ice Brothers (42 page)

“What's the matter, Guns?” Nathan asked.

“Sir, I think I've figured something out. We shouldn't bother with those forties. They're not much good against a ship. I think we could get one of these aboard.”

“A gun like that would sink us,” Nathan said. “It must weigh five tons.”

Sparks and Boats grinned.

“Sir, will you listen to me a minute?” Guns said.

“Sure.”

“The
guts
of these guns, the barrels and the breeches and the recoil mechanism, don't weigh so much. Most of the weight is in the turret and in the mechanism for pointing and training them. Our ship could stand the weight of the guts of one of these guns without the mounts.”

“You want a gun you can't train and you can't point?” Boats asked.

“Boats, you ever see a fighter plane?” Guns retorted with a withering glance.

“You plan to put wings on the
Arluk
too?”

“The guns of a fighter plane are fixed,” Guns replied. “You aim them by pointing the whole plane at the target. I bet we could fix the guts of one of these guns on the bow of the trawler. That could give us a chance if we ever met a big Kraut. It sure would surprise hell out of him.”

“How much would the guts of one gun weigh?” Nathan asked.

“Maybe less than a ton.”

“How would you hold it in place?”

“That's the hard part. But I bet we could bolt it or even wire it down with steel cable secure enough to let us get off a few rounds. Even one shot could make the difference if we were fairly close.”

“You might have something there,” Nathan said.

“If we could lash one gun down on the head of the forecastle, we could service the breeches from the well deck. That way it would be almost invisible.”

“Do you think we could find any specs on those guns?”

“I found a pamphlet in a ready box. I don't understand most of it, but I understand them guns.”

“I'll come back and look it over with you when I get this radar working for us,” Nathan said. “I don't know if we can make it work, but you sure got one hell of an idea.”

Paul was waiting on the well deck when the whaleboat came alongside the
Arluk
.

“Request permission to bring radar aboard, sir,” Nathan said with a grin.

“You got it! Can you make it work?”

“I got enough spare parts to build a set if I have to. It shouldn't take long to get the whole thing together.”

It took Nathan only about four hours to install the radar set on the bridge of the
Arluk
, to hook it up with the ship's electrical system, and to install the antenna on the signal mast. When the job was done the men gathered around the pilothouse to watch him turn the set on. Bending over the hood, he adjusted the knobs. Gradually the little screen turned from gray to green. A thin beam of light turned like the sweep hand of a watch and traced a rough glowing chart of the surrounding fjord.

“Take a look, skipper,” Nathan said with a smile.

Paul bent over the hood and looked with something like reverence as he imagined what this magic eye could mean in fog or Arctic night while they were chasing a German ship or being chased.

“Nathan, you've probably just saved all our lives,” he said.

Nathan smiled but said, “Don't forget that the Krauts probably have some kind of radar too. What we need now is a bigger gun.”

In considerable detail he explained Guns's idea about putting one of the destroyer's five-inch guns in a fixed position on the bow of the trawler. “It could work only at point-blank range,” he said. “It would be like the guns on the old sailing ships.”

“Look, you're the engineer,” Paul replied. “Make it work if you can.”

“I'd like to steal some depth charges too. I think I can figure a way to activate them with time fuses or even by radio. We might be able to set them out as mines. There should be lots of ways to use all that explosive force.”

Paul nodded. “I was afraid the rattlesnake on the stack looked too much like a worm. Damned if I'm not beginning to hear it rattle.”

CHAPTER 30

With the tools they found aboard the destroyer, Guns was able to disassemble one five-inch gun, but the job of loading the barrel aboard the
Arluk
at first seemed impossible. Paul finally found a way to moor the trawler on the seaward edge of the ice pack which pressed against the destroyer. With steel cables the heavy barrel was winched over ice peaks and through ice valleys to the decks of the trawler. The men worked night and day, afraid that some passing ship would observe and report their activities.

Despite the rush, it still took them three days to secure the big cannon on the bow of the
Arluk
in such a way that it would not interfere with the small gun already there. It was Nathan who worked out a complex method of securing the barrel to the deck, which he reinforced with steel beams cut from the destroyer with one of her own acetylene torches. Chief Banes supervised the cutting and welding of steel bands and plates which were bolted to the oak. Boats also wound the barrel with steel cables that ran through holes they bored to allow it to grip the whole deck structure. No one had ever seen a gun installed like that, and they were afraid even to fire it for target practice, but they all were sure that they could get off at least a few shots in action. The gun pointed inflexibly ahead. With its slight fixed elevation it would have a range of several miles, they guessed, though no one pretended to be sure. One thing was certain: any ship coming close to the bow of the little trawler could get a surprise. The thought of that made the men of the
Arluk
feel much better.

It took two more days to cut a path over the ice pack and to roll the heavy depth charges along it to the
Arluk
. Because he was supposed to send a weekly position report to GreenPat, Paul made up a story about being caught in the ice near the entrance to the passage that led to the east coast. If they were observed before they got there by ships or planes, the results could be embarrassing.

It was the fifth of September before they were finally ready to leave the destroyer. The
Arluk
was low in the water, but her ballast of depth charges had been carefully placed, and she was perfectly trimmed. If they ran into a gale in the open sea, she would be dangerously sluggish, but Paul counted on spending most of the winter in the ice pack. Certainly there was risk in loading the ship this way and Paul realized that the chance of hitting anything with a fixed gun was slight but at least he didn't feel like an ox driven to slaughter as he finally headed the
Arluk
's bow out of Narsarssuak Fjord.

They left at night to avoid observation as much as possible until they reached the point where Paul had already reported their position. The September gales were building and heavy clouds obscured the moon and stars. Fortunately the wind was offshore, and the sea was relatively calm five miles off the edge of the ice pack. Standing on the bridge, Paul could see nothing but blackness ahead, and it was an incredible relief to peer at the miraculous screen of the radar, which gave him his distance from both the shore and the ice pack, and warned him of stray bergs ahead. Nathan stood by the controls, occasionally adjusting them to get clear images. Several of the crew found excuses to visit the bridge and get a peek at this wondrous invention.

“Nathan, when it really comes down to helping this ship survive in the Arctic, this radar is the best thing we've got,” Paul said suddenly. “We wouldn't have it without you. Damn it, next time you get down at the mouth, remember that.”

Nathan shrugged, but Paul noticed that he was fighting a smile …

It did not take them long to get to Prince Christian Fjord, which actually was a narrow, winding pass that cut off the mountainous tip of Greenland, making an island of Cape Farewell. Glittering peaks rose steeply from both sides of the ship, and small icebergs gleamed in the light of a quarter moon in the black riverlike channel ahead. It was a splendid evening with little wind as they started that passage. Paul and Nathan stood on the flying bridge conning the ship. Suddenly northern lights, the aurora borealis, spread luminescent curtains overhead, the intensity of which pulsed in almost sexual rhythm.

“God, what a night!” Paul said.

“Very romantic,” Nathan observed wryly.

Paul was full of an odd, mounting excitement. The polished barrel of the big gun on the forecastle head gleamed in the moonlight. How many miles ahead was the German ship which had sunk the
Nanmak
waiting? The duel would not be so easy for her now. At least the
Arluk
had eyes of her own that could see through fog and night. If he played his cards right, Paul thought, he could be the attacker, he could choose the time and place to strike. If they could locate a German ship and determine her future course, they could, if luck gave them just the right circumstances, circle around and sow the mines that Nathan was making out of depth charges in her path. And if they were pursued they could sow their own wake with mines. If the Germans wanted to play tag among the icebergs …

“We're going to get them,” Paul said.

“Are you really all that confident?” Nathan asked.

“My strength is as the strength of ten, because at heart I am a dirty, tricky bastard. If all else fails I'll surrender and cry for mercy until they come within point-blank range of that five-incher.”

“We better not forget that at heart they're dirty, tricky bastards, too.”

“But I'm betting they'll be overconfident when they see we're just a trawler.”

Paul wondered whether he too were committing the military sin of overconfidence. No, he knew that the Germans probably had at least one ship bigger than the
Arluk
waiting up there in the ice, and her armament and fire control undoubtedly were somewhat more sophisticated than a gun barrel lashed on deck. As the northern lights increased the intensity of their throbbing overhead, Paul thought about the Germans mowing down the
Nanmak
's boatload of men. He wondered what the captain who had given the order to open fire looked like, and imagined a squat, bald Prussian officer with a monocle. Maybe he wouldn't look like a movie villain, but someone had given that order to open up the heavy machine guns on helpless men in an open boat. Paul was aware that the Germans stood accused of far worse crimes throughout Europe and Russia, but for him the whole war came into focus with the image of an open boat in a crossfire of machine-gun bullets. The men who had done that were probably only a few hundred miles ahead.

Part III

CHAPTER 31

After having armed and stocked his ship as best he could, Paul felt a kind of exaltation as he sailed toward the battle, but instead of meeting his enemy immediately, he just got stuck in the ice, and all the fierceness drained, leaving him frustrated as a lover whose car stalls on the way to his girl.

As the
Arluk
approached the end of the fjordlike passage through which she crossed the southern tip of Greenland from the west to the east coast, she encountered more and more ice. Even before she escaped the glittering mountains which appeared to hem her in on all sides, she was forced to push her way through small icebergs that filled the narrow channel. When she finally reached the eastern mouth of the passage it was blocked by rampart after rampart of great ice castles which had been jammed against the coast by an easterly gale and the unrelenting current. Paul finally discovered one narrow lead that twisted around mile-long islands of ice. Before long it petered out. He managed to turn the ship, but he soon discovered that the ice had closed around him, pressing him into a giant trap. Still almost under the shadow of the mountains, he could not budge one damn inch.

The ice is always moving like the hour hand of a clock, he remembered Mowrey saying, and sooner or later the wind will break it up, but now it was September and the danger of being locked in for the winter was real. If the German ship or ships were anywhere near, they too were probably paralyzed, but as long as they could send weather reports, they were still fulfilling their purpose. There was at least a kind of safety in having the enemies locked away from each other, Paul reflected, but there was danger enough in the ice, which could press the
Arluk
against rocks, as it had the destroyer. Driven by gales at the fringe of the pack, the icebergs could mount each other like great mating beasts, and pile up moving ridges that could crush and bury a ship. Even if a vessel were lucky enough to escape such cataclysms, small icebergs pressed by larger ones in current or wind could crush a hull. Modern icebreakers were built in the shape of an egg to rise above the ice when squeezed, but the trawlers, though strong, were too wall-sided for that.

Such perils were real enough, but now there was little wind and a deathlike peace pervaded the ice pack. Only the clouds above and the birds moved visibly. During this month of September the familiar pattern of nights following days of similar length was reasserted. It was too cold for the men to do much work on deck. After standing their watches, which were hopelessly dull aboard a motionless ship, they listened to radio reports of the battle of Stalingrad, won and lost their meager pay at cards and wrote endless letters, which they dropped in the wardroom mailbox for censoring despite the fact that the mail of course was going nowhere for months.

Every time the plywood mailbox filled up, Paul took it to his cabin and in his capacity of naval censor read it. This minor chore he could have assigned to one of the other officers, but he hoped that the mail would help him to understand the men better. Ever since arriving in Greenland, he had become increasingly aware of a curious fact: although they were all imprisoned together on this tiny ship with few chances to go ashore, the men in the forecastle remained almost strangers to him. One reason, of course, was that enlisted men rarely felt like confiding much to commissioned officers, and especially tried to stay away from the commanding officer as much as possible. Perhaps wisely, the customs of the Coast Guard and navy made the relationship between officers and enlisted men as impersonal as possible. Even the names of the petty officers were rarely heard aboard ship. It was hard for Paul to imagine Guns, Flags, Boats, and Sparks being called anything else. Only in the mail did Guns appear as Ralph D. Higgins, Flags as Patrick Murray, Boats as Maurice Torbot, and Sparks as George Grotsky.