Ice Brothers (72 page)

“There's one more thing I want to tell you,” Brit said when the dishes had been cleared from his cabin. “Nathan said he'd talk to you about it, but it would be better if I did.”

“What?”

“I want to get out of here and get my father out. Nathan says planes go to the States from the west coast every day, and if I could get the proper authorization …”

“We can radio for permission. I don't know what they'll say.”

“We still have an embassy. If you could get in touch with the right people—it was Nathan's idea.”

“We'll do what we can. I should have thought of it myself.”

“I didn't really level with you. I'm going crazy here and my father's already crazy. Paul, we have to get out.”

Soon she asked to go ashore and he had the whaleboat take her in. When it came back, he saw Nathan standing in the stern. The tall, gaunt man in the Eskimo furs stepped awkwardly to the deck.

“Could you come up to my cabin for a minute?” Paul called from the bridge.

Nathan came up the steps. Paul met him in the pilothouse.

“Nathan, Brit told me about your wife,” he said, and to his own astonishment, found himself hugging his executive officer. He had never before hugged a man in his life, not even his brother or father. Embarrassed, he stepped back.

“Thanks,” Nathan said. “You know … well, we've always understood each other anyway. You know … we don't have to talk.”

“Not about that. But send a message to GreenPat and see if we can find a way to get Brit and her father to the States. I wish I'd thought of that myself.”

“I'll take care of it, you've been busy.”

Turning, Nathan almost ran out of the pilothouse. Paul climbed wearily to the flying bridge. It was a bitterly cold night, but a half moon was breaking through the windswept clouds as though it were fighting for life.

CHAPTER 48

As the ninth of December wore on, the days became shorter and shorter until finally sunrise merged with sunset and there was only a few minutes of ruddy red glare on the icy mountains to mark high noon. That would be time enough to allow the bombers to do their work and on clear nights the stars and the moon made that white world surprisingly light without the sun. The trouble was, there were few clear nights. One blizzard was quickly followed by another, and what the Eskimos called good weather was any wind less than fifty miles an hour and any temperature above fifty below. Still the fjord, with its swift-running currents and great tidal rise and fall, did not freeze, and the ice pack off shore was so driven by winter gales that it formed a less formidable barrier along the coast than it did in summer.

Driven by the knowledge that they must soon attack the Germans, the crew of the
Arluk
worked as it had never worked before. Every man who was not needed to guard the prisoners and the ship unloaded the heavy depth charges from the hold and carried them in the whaleboat and in the Danes' launch to the settlement. Because a dog sled could carry only one of the great charges at a time, Nathan and Brit decided that the Danish launch could carry a load of them to a point just short of Supportup, where they could be landed on the coast and dragged up low cliffs there with ropes. This operation awaited only the return of Peomeenie. Paul should not be surprised by his long absence, Brit still kept on saying. In every blizzard Peo undoubtedly would build an igloo out on the ice shelf that extended from the shore for thousands of yards into the sea. The proximity of relatively warm ocean currents there cut the cold in the shelter of an igloo, and by hacking a hole in the ice Peo could catch enough fish to last out the winter if necessary. With his whale oil lamp glowing in his crystal dome, he and Ninoo, his companion, could laugh together until the sun came back to stay.

“I should have told him I wouldn't pay him unless he got back here fast,” Paul said.

“When you come right down to it, what's the hurry?” Brit asked.

“While your friend Peomeenie and his damn Ninoo are laughing together, the goddamn Krauts are sending out weather reports, and with those their planes are bombing the bejesus out of every city from Moscow to London,” Paul said. “We're supposed to break that up.
That's
what the hurry is.”

“But not even an Eskimo can go far in a blizzard,” Brit said. “And Peo is very thorough. You kept telling him you want to know where every gun emplacement is. That means he has to cover both sides of the fjord. He'll have to go inland for miles before he can cross it. I'm sure he's doing his best and no one in this world could do better.”

Paul was not convinced. His fear that Peomeenie might have been captured or killed was growing. The moaning of the wind and the ruddy glare of the sun during its brief appearances on the horizon seemed to be setting a scene only for disaster. While everyone else worked to maintain the ship, guarded prisoners or drilled with the Eskimos ashore, Paul actually had very little to do, and the long hours he spent idly in his bunk made him feel obscurely guilty. Flags reported that radio signals in a variety of frequencies were pouring from some place nearby to the south, presumably Supportup. Obviously the Germans were carrying out their mission. Perhaps it had been only cowardice that had caused Paul to make these elaborate preparations, instead of sailing into their fjord and just attacking as best he could. Each day Paul checked off on his calendar in the nautical almanac seemed a personal defeat.

There was not a book aboard the ship he'd not read and his memories of the past did not offer much comfort in introspection. For a long while he had avoided thinking about his wife. Sometimes Sylvia came to him in dreams, voluptuous, golden-haired and more eager for love than she had usually been, but such visions just made him wake up hornier than ever and when he was in that mood, he had to be careful not to get furious at Brit and Nathan. He felt peculiar now every time Nathan knew he was alone with Brit and every time he knew she was alone with him. Damn it, they weren't Eskimos, no matter how much they all respected and needed each other and so forth …

The more Paul thought about his situation, the more ridiculous he appeared to himself. He was an unfaithful husband who brooded about both his wife and mistress being unfaithful. He admired the Eskimos' freedom from jealousy and possessiveness, but needed at least the ideal of one man and one woman pledging themselves to each other forever and meaning it. Temporary love affairs in time of war were probably inevitable, maybe even necessary to stay alive sometimes, but in the future he wanted at least to hope for something more. He could accept Nathan's need for Brit and her desire to comfort him, but he found that he did not want to daydream anymore of coming back to her after the war. He didn't want to ask her to sail around the world with him. Perhaps it was only a white man's craziness, but if he took a woman on such a voyage he would not want to worry about her running off with any man who needed her, or who offered a jolly hour of laughing together without jealousy or a sense of betrayal. It seemed, in short, that he was hopelessly himself …

Suddenly he began to dream of Sylvia again. Forgetting his hard times with her, her disappointing letters, and his worries about her as a USO hostess, he remembered the day she had dived from the top of the old yawl's mast. A girl who had done that certainly could grow up to sail a small boat around the world. He remembered the flamboyant way she danced, the vitality of her face, and wondered how he had ever been interested in anyone else. After the war was over she would have outgrown her few disturbing ways and they would sail the South Seas together. Sometimes he would realize that this was an unlikely dream, but he felt that it was one he
needed …
men in the Arctic tended to create their own women, weaving memories into fantasies. Almost no man on the Greenland Patrol remembered an ugly or nagging wife.

The future with Sylvia would be wonderful, he was sure, but the truth was that he would have no future if he did not find a way to attack the German base efficiently. If he messed up that operation, he would die in the snow or in the freezing sea.

Strangely, the most comforting fantasy of all during those long, long nights of waiting turned out to be one of victory in battle, not love. In his imagination Paul could see the plans he and Nathan had devised working in magnificent detail. First the planes would bomb hell out of the fjord. Before the smoke had cleared, Nathan would explode three tons of TNT in a ring around the bewildered Germans. At that point the
Arluk
would make her magnificent entrance into the mouth of the fjord with all guns blazing. She would find the hunter-killer, this new Valkyrie, already afire, but would finish her off with one blast from the big bow gun. Then he would rake the Germans, who would be trying to set up their machine guns ashore. Before they even opened fire, Nathan, Guns and thirty well-trained Eskimos would attack them from the rear with automatic rifles, hand grenades, and finally, those murderous-looking knives the men had made. More depth charges would explode all around the Germans. They would give up—they would have no choice. They would beg for mercy, kneeling in the snow …

Somehow the fantasy stopped there—Paul did not want to figure out now exactly what he was going to do with all those prisoners. The fantasy picked up again when Paul sailed back to his base on the west coast, to Narsarssuak. There Commander GreenPat would congratulate him, would put him up for a promotion, for command of a full destroyer, and for medals. He would be flown home for a hero's welcome. Sylvia would come running into his arms. They would take a honeymoon suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for a month. A second honeymoon much better than his first would be his prize for heroism …

Impatient with those fantasies and almost frightened by their ability to take his mind off any kind of reality, Paul kept his men at gun drill aboard the ship, made sure that Williams was adequately guarding the prisoners and watched Guns show his furry troops how to shoot mortars while Nathan kept an eye on him and Brit tried to teach the natives enough numbers to understand the concept of a weapon's range.

Finally everything was done that could be done before Peomeenie's return. Hans still piloted his ski plane for a peek over the mountain on clear moonlit nights. If it had not been for him, Nathan would have started to move his depth charges up the coast toward. Supportup, but he did not want to take any chance of giving up the great advantage of surprise. For a week there was very little to do but wait. Using clay from supplies, which had been sent from Denmark for the native children, Brit constructed a model of the fjord at Supportup-Kangerdula on a table in the schoolroom next to the dispensary for the sick. She used all the information she could get from the charts, the pilotbook and from Eskimos who had been near that place, but the model was badly lacking in detail.

“Peo will be able to finish it,” Brit said. “He sculpts beautiful things from soapstone and walrus tusks. He'll be able to make a model better than he can draw a map.”

Now all sentences began with “When Peo gets back … When Peo got back, he would be led immediately to the clay model. As soon as he had shown exactly where the Germans were, that information would be radioed to GreenPat, with a request that the place where the light planes were kept be bombed and strafed immediately. If Peo had been able to locate the position of the hunter-killer, she too should be attacked. Nathan had this message already coded and tacked to the bulletin board in the
Arluk
's radio shack. Its last paragraph said, “Except for attacking ships and planes, please delay final bombing of base until our ground forces are in position of attack as soon as planes leave. We do not want to give the enemy a chance to dig in again. Amount of time needed for this operation will depend on the weather. Our best guess is a week if conditions we can work in. All our preparations have been made.”

This message was rewritten several times as Paul and Nathan refined their plans. In their initial attack, the Lightnings and bombers should try to take out all German artillery which protected the fjord, as well as the light planes and the hunter-killer, if they could. As soon as this had been done, the
Arluk
could move into the fjord without waiting for the ground force to arrive. Without getting close enough to take losses from machinegun or small arms fire, the
Arluk
should tease the Germans into readying all their forces for an attack from the sea.

After consultation with Paul, Nathan gave all these detailed plans to GreenPat in advance. They were promptly approved. Even GreenPat started sending messages which began, “When your native scout returns.…”

“I'm beginning to think we're waiting for the Second Coming of Christ,” Paul said. “It seems to me that our whole fucking war is coming to a standstill and breathlessly waiting for one damn Eskimo and a woman named Ninoo to quit laughing together and get down to business.”

On a clear moonlit night two days before Christmas Peomeenie and Ninoo drove their dog sled back to the settlement at Angmagssalik as casually as though they had been on a brief Sunday excursion. They were more concerned with greeting relatives and friends than with hurrying to bring their information to the Americans, and Brit might not have known of their arrival for hours if she had not heard the excitement of the dogs. She and Nathan ran to the Eskimo settlement and found Peomeenie in one of the sod huts which was so crowded with his welcoming friends that no one could get in a word edgewise. Peomeenie and Ninoo were ravenously eating a feast of nicely rotted raw seal meat which had been awaiting them.

“For God's sake ask him what he saw,” Nathan said.

Brit had to push through the tight rings of Peomeenie's admirers before she could catch his attention. He grinned at her with his mouth full before gulping his food and answering the questions that she kept repeating. They shouted back and forth in the Eskimo language. From Peomeenie's grins, Nathan guessed that his trip had been successful, but Brit looked astonished when she turned to him and called above the din, “God, I don't know what's happening. He says the Germans are all going home. He says not many are left!”