Two Captains (66 page)

We had our emergency boats, of course, and I could have ordered the crew to bale out. But we had tested these boats near Archangel on a quiet little inland lake, and had had to clamber out of the water, shivering like dogs. And here we had below us an inhospitable, cold sea covered with sludge ice.

I shall not list the brief reports concerning the state of the machine which my crew made to me. There were many of them, too many to my liking.

After one of them, a pretty gloomy one, the navigator asked: "Sticking it out, Sanya?"

"You bet!"

We had entered a cloud, and in the double ring of a rainbow I saw below the clear-etched shadow of our plane. Unfortunately it was losing height.

Without my having a hand in it, the plane suddenly turned sharply over on its wing, and if it were possible to see Death, we should undoubtedly have seen it on that wingtip pointed perpendicular to the sea.

I don't know how I did it, but I managed to right the machine. To lighten it I ordered the gunner to jettison the machine-gun drums. Ten minutes later the guns themselves followed them, toppling, into the sea.

"Sticking it out, Sanya?"

"Sure!"

I asked the navigator how far it was to the shore, and he answered that it wasn't far, about twenty-six minutes. He lied, of course, to cheer me up-it would take us all of thirty minutes to reach the shore.

This was not the first time in my life that I was called upon.to count the minutes. There had been occasions when I had counted them with despair and rage. There had been occasions when they had lain upon my heart like round heavy stones, and I had waited in an agony of suspense for one more crushing minute-stone to roll off and away into the past.

Now I was not waiting. With a furious abandon that sent an exultant thrill through my heart I hurried and goaded them on.

"Will we make it, Sanya?"

"You bet we will!"

And we did. Some half a kilometre from the shore, which we did not even have time to look at, we pancaked into the water, and, strange to say, we did not go to the bottom. We had hit a sandbank. On top of all our troubles we now had icy waves drenching us from head to foot. But what did these waves matter or the fact that our aircraft had been staggering about in the sky for over an hour till we reached the shore, or the thousand and one new labours and troubles that awaited us, compared with that laconic phrase in the current communique of Sovinformbureau: "One of our aircraft failed to return."

What made me think that this was Middendorf Bay, and that consequently we had landed far from any habitation? I don't know. The navigator had had no time to work it out while we were passing over the sea-the only course that interested him was the shoreward one. And now he was too busy, as I had ordered the machine to be made secure, and we worked at this until we dropped from sheer exhaustion on dry patches of the beach among the sun-warmed rocks. We lay there quietly, gazing up at the sky-a clear, wide sky without a cloudlet in it-each occupied with his own thoughts. But each one's thoughts were tinctured by the same common feeling-victory.

We were so exhausted that we did not even have the strength to brush the clinging sand from our faces, and it dried in the sun and fell away in pieces. Victory. The navigator's dead pipe lay on his chest. He suddenly gave a loud snore and it rolled off. Victory. We wanted nothing but to gaze at the radiant blue majesty of the sky and feel the warm pebbles under our hands. Victory.

Everything was victory, even the fact that we were ravenously hungry and I couldn't force myself to get up and fetch the sandwiches from the plane which Anna Stepanovna had given me for the journey.

There is no need to describe how carefully we looked over the plane.

Evidently the cause of the smoke which the gunner had reported was a shell, which had exploded in the cabin. Apart from a couple of hundred shot holes, the aircraft seemed in fairly decent shape, at least compared with the heaps of scrap iron I had often had occasion to land. The only thing wrong with it was that it could no longer be flown, and we did not have the means to put the engine right.

Over our dinner-we had an excellent meal: the first course, a soup made of dried milk, chocolate and butter, and second course, the same soup in dry form-it was decided:

(a) that the aircraft be made fast where it lay, embedded deep in the sand-in any case we could not raise it on to the shelving beach;

(b) that the gunner be left to guard the machine;

(c) that we go in search of people and assistance.

I forgot to mention that while we were limping across the sea one of us-I believe it was the radioman-noticed on the shore what looked like a house or a wooden towerlike structure. It disappeared round a bend when we came inshore. It may have been a landmark, one of those structures raised on a shore which is seldom visited by ships. If so, it could be of little use to us. But if it was not?

On the other hand, we could stay where we were, and after our meal, lie down again among the rocks, choosing a cozy, sheltered spot, relaxing and gazing at the bluish ice-floes drifting past with the water running off them, glistening and tinkling. But our radio, worse luck, was smashed, and no matter what the dogged radioman did to it, it stayed mute as a stone.

In short, there was nothing for it but to push on. Where to? Obviously, towards the landmark, which might prove to be an electric lighthouse or a fog-warning station or something else of that kind.

"But first of all," I said to the navigator, "where are we?"

It took him no less than a quarter of an hour to answer that question; he gave coordinates which though differing from those I had named when Ledkov had asked me where I thought the remains of Captain Tatarinov's expedition could be found, were so close to that point-the point on which I had put my finger on Ledkov's map- that I couldn't help looking round me, as if expecting to see the Captain himself standing within two paces of me, behind that rock there...

Another book would have to be written to fully describe how Captain Tatarinov's expedition was found. Strictly speaking I had very many clues, much more than, for instance, the famous Dumont d'Urville had, when, as a boy, he showed with amazing accuracy where he would find La Perouse's expedition. I had it easier than he, because the life of Captain Tatarinov was closely interwoven with my own, and the conclusions which these clues led to concerned me as well as him.

This is the route he must have taken if it be accepted that he returned to Severnaya Zemlya, which he had named Maria Land: from 79°35' latitude, between meridians 86 and 87, to Russian Islands and the Nordenskjold Archipelago. And then, probably after wandering around a good deal, from Cape Sterlegov to the mouth of the Pyasina, where the old Nenets had come across the boat on the dog-sledge. Then to the Yenisei, because the Yenisei was his only hope of finding people and assistance. He had kept to the seaward of the offshore islands, going in as straight a line as possible.

We found the expedition, or rather what remained of it, in an area over which our planes had flown dozens of times, carrying mail and passengers to Dickson, and machinery and merchandise to Nord-vik, and conveying parties of geologists prospecting for coal, oil and ores. If Captain Tatarinov were to come to the mouth of the Yenisei today he would meet dozens of great seagoing ships. On the islands which he passed he would have seen today electric lighthouses and radar installations, he would have heard nautophones guiding ships during a fog. Some three or four hundred kilometres farther upstream he would have come on the Arctic Circle Railway linking Dudinka with Norilsk. He would have seen new towns which had sprung up around oil fields, mines and sawmills.

I mentioned earlier that I had been writing to Katya from the moment I arrived in the North. A heap of unposted letters were left at N. Base which I had been hoping we would read together after the war. These letters were like a diary kept, not for myself, but for Katya. I will quote from them only those passages which describe how we found the camping site.

"1. I was astonished to learn how close life had come up to this place, which had always seemed to me so infinitely far away. It lies within a stone's throw of the Great Sea Route and you were quite right when you said that they had not found your father because they had never looked for him.

Between the lighthouse and the radio station there is a telephone line, a permanent one on poles. Mines are being worked ten kilometres to the south, and if we hadn't discovered the camp site the miners would have stumbled upon it sooner or later.

"It was our navigator who first picked up the piece of canvas from the ground. Nothing surprising about it! You can pick up all kinds of stuff on a seashore. But this was a canvas strap you harnessed yourself in to haul a sledge. But when the gunner found the aluminium lid of a saucepan, and a dented tin containing balls of string, we divided the hollow between the hills and the ridge into a number of squares and started going over them-each man his own square.

"I remember reading somewhere that a single inscription carved on a stone had helped scholars to reveal the life of a whole country which had perished long before our own era. Now this place, too, gradually came to life before our eyes. I was the first to spot the canvas boat, or rather to guess that this flattened pancake thicking out of the eroded earth was a boat; moreover, a boat resting on a sledge. In it lay two guns, a skin of some kind, a sextant and a pair of field-glasses, all rusty, covered with mould and moss. By the ridge which protected the camp from the sea, we found various articles of clothing, among them a mouldering sleeping-bag made of reindeer-skin. Evidently a tent had been pitched there, because the drift logs lay at an angle forming a square enclosure with the rocks. In this

"tent" we found a food basket fastened with a strip of sailcloth and containing several woollen stockings and shreds of a blue and white blanket.

We also found an axe and a "fishing-rod", that is, a length of twine with a hook at the end made from a bent pin. Some of the articles lay scattered round the "tent"-a spirit lamp, a spoon, a small wooden box containing various odds and ends, including several thick sail-needles, also home-made.

On some of these objects the rubber stamp "Trapping Schooner St. Maria" or the inscription "St. Maria" could still be made out. But this camp site was completely deserted-there was not a soul there, living or dead.

"2. It was a home-made cookstove-a tin casing enclosing a bucket with a lid. Usually an iron tray was placed underneath for burning bear or seal fat. But there stood an ordinary primus heater. I shook it and found that it still contained some paraffin oil. I tried to pump it up, and the oil squirted up in a thin stream. Next to it we found a tin marked "Borsch.

Vikhorev Cannery. St. Petersburg, 1912". Had we wished to, we could have opened that tin of borsch and heated it up on the primus-stove, which had been lying in the earth for nearly thirty years.

"3. We returned to the camp after a fruitless search in the direction of Galchikha. This time we approached it from the southeast, and the hills, which we had previously seen as an unrelieved undulating line, now presented quite an unexpected appearance. It was a single large scrap running into stony tundra intersected by deep notches, as though excavated' by human hands. We walked along one of these hollows, and none of us at first paid any attention to the caved-in stack of driftwood between two huge boulders.

There were only a few logs, not more than half a dozen, but one of them had a sawn end. It was this sawn log that struck us. Up till now we had believed that the camp had been situated between the rocky ridge and the hills. It could have been shifted, however, and before long we found that this was so.

"It would be difficult to enumerate half the things we found in this hollow. We found a watch, a hunting knife, several ski-sticks, two single-barrelled Remingtons, a leather vest and a tube containing some kind of ointment. We found the rotted remains of a bag containing photographic film. And finally, in the lowest part of the hollow, we found a tent, and under that tent, its edges still held down by drift logs and whalebone to prevent it being blown away in a gale-under this tent, which we had to hack out of the ice with axes, we found him whom we were looking for...

It was still possible to guess in what attitude he had died-his right arm flung out, body stretched out as if listening to something. He lay on his face, and the satchel in which we found his farewell letters was under his chest. Obviously, he had hoped that the letters would be better preserved under cover of his body.

"4. There could have been no hope for our ever seeing him alive. But until the word Death had been pronounced, until I had seen it with my own eyes, this childish thought had still lingered in my heart. Now it was gone, but in its stead another light burned up brightly-the thought that it was not for nothing, not in vain, that I had been seeking him, that for him there would be no death. An hour ago the steamer came alongside the electric lighthouse and the sailors, with heads bared, carried the coffin aboard covered with the tattered remains of the tent. A salute was fired and the ship flew its flag at half-mast. Alone, I wandered around the deserted camp of the St. Maria and here I am, writing to you, my own, dear Katya. How I wish I were with you at this moment! It will soon be thirty years since that brave struggle for life ended, but I know that for you he died only today. I am writing to you from the front, as it were, telling you about your father and friend, who had fallen in battle. Sorrow and pride for him fill my soul, which is stirred to its depths by this spectacle of immortality..."