CHAPTER 16

The Dorchester moored at a new wharf to unload her troops. The Arluk moored nearby. The army base and airfield did nothing to satisfy any curiosity the men of the Arluk had about the mysteries of the north. The rows of Quonset huts were so familiar that for a moment, Paul wondered whether he had ever left Argentia. This thought reminded him of the poker hands he had won and he wondered whether they played cards at the officers’ club here.

“Captain, can I go ashore for a few hours tonight?” he asked Mowrey shortly after they had moored at a long, low wharf beside a Norwegian freighter.

“You can after you see if there’s any mail for the men, after you discharge our cargo and load anything they got waiting for us here. I’m going ashore to see when the hell they’re going to let us start north.”

Much to the disappointment of all hands, no mail was waiting for anyone aboard the Arluk, despite the fact that letters from the States came in every day aboard planes. Boats, who had left Boston while his wife was momentarily expecting a baby, swore softly.

“I bet Headquarters has forgot all about us,” he said. “Talk about the legion of forgotten men!”

“As soon as I can get ashore I’ll try to straighten things out,” Paul said. “Let’s get this hold unloaded.”

Nathan checked packing cases off an invoice as their cargo boom swung them ashore to waiting trucks. Most of their cargo consisted of bales of winter clothing and boxes of radio equipment, the lightness of which had contributed to the instability of the ship. Near the bottom of the hold were several boxes of spare parts for radar sets at the airbase.

“Damn, I don’t think these would have fit Hansen’s old set, but I sure would have liked to have tried to work something out for him,” Nathan said. “To think I was sitting here on all this equipment, while that poor guy goes off with a busted set.”

“I wonder where he is now,” Paul said.

“From what I’ve read, he’s probably trying to work his way through the ice. They say the ice is a lot worse over there. That’s one big reason why all the big settlements are on the west side.”

Paul had a quick mental image of Hansen’s trawler caught helplessly in ice which a big German icebreaker might get through easily enough. Well, he could call in aircraft. How long would the planes take to get there? Suddenly, he was glad that he had no more to worry about than Mowrey’s insults. Perhaps it was wise, after all, not to try to change the hand that the fates dealt to him.

When he called the operations officer from a dockside telephone, Paul was told that a new cargo for the Arluk was still being assembled, and that inquiries about their mail had been radioed to Headquarters. Since both Seth and Nathan were interested only in getting some sleep, Paul set off for the officers’ club with a clean conscience.

Or almost a clear conscience. The idea of winning at poker and bridge from rich, often spoiled fraternity brothers and from the people who hung around yacht clubs had seemed to him to be cause for more pride than shame, but the concept of a Coast Guard officer, the executive officer of a cutter on the Greenland Patrol, acting as a card sharp with his brother officers did bother him a little. Of course, he was not really a card sharp because he never cheated, but so few of the people who played poker or bridge really studied the games seriously and so few even bothered to stay sober enough while they were gambling to remember what cards had been played that he knew he was taking advantage of them. But now he had a reason for trying to win all he could: when he mailed the money he had won in Argentia to Sylvia, he had said he would try to send more for her house if his luck at cards held. When she had first mentioned it, the thought of her father lending her money for a house in Wellesley had not exactly thrilled him, but now he understood what the building of a home meant to her, and he was enthusiastic, especially when he imagined the greeting she would give him when he returned, maybe in only about six months. It was the job of a husband to keep his wife happy, wasn’t it, and if his “gift” for playing cards well helped him to satisfy some of her desires, why feel guilty about it?

Whatever reservations Paul had about the morality of preying on his fellow Coast Guard officers stopped bothering him when he realized that the club at this base was frequented almost entirely by army air force officers, many of whom were majors and colonels while still in their twenties, and almost all of whom had wallets swollen with flight pay. As the evening wore on and the stacks of chips in front of him grew, Paul also realized that the people at this club changed too much with in-going and out-going flights for a hustler to be recognized, no matter how many nights he won. Apparently convinced that their lives would be short, many of the baby-faced majors and colonels gambled with reckless abandon. This airbase, probably all Greenland officers’ clubs, were absolute heaven for a man who really understood poker and bridge.

Before that eight-hour poker game was over, Paul had won close to nineteen hundred dollars. With his pockets full of rolls of twenty-dollar bills, he went back to the ship to devise a package for mailing it home, a task which was made much easier by the fact that he had designated himself the naval censor aboard the Arluk.

His thoughts of mailing the money and soon going back to win more were rudely interrupted, however, as he started across the wharf to his ship. Five trucks were just beginning to disgorge an avalanche of foodstuffs for transportation in the Arluk’s hold. Mowrey himself was supervising the loading.

“Where the hell have you been, Yale?” he bellowed. “I lit a fire under the operations officer and we got our cargo. The folks all up and down this whole coast, clear up to Thule, haven’t had supplies all winter. I bet even the dogs are starving. Get your ass aboard here, Yale, and make ready to get under way.”

The loading of the cargo did not go anywhere near as speedily as Mowrey wished and there were seemingly endless delays while they waited for medical supplies and heavy generators which had been requested by settlements they were to visit. When the hold was full, drums of diesel oil were stowed on the well deck and on top of these they lashed crates of odiferous dried fish which the Greenlanders needed for dog food. It was May 18 when they finally got their orders to sail, and by this time the ship was “loaded up like a tinker’s wagon,” Mowrey said. Even the confusion of a miscellaneous deck cargo did not dampen his high spirits, for his orders were exactly those he wanted and which he had feared would be given to some other vessel. The Arluk was to sail as far north on the west coast of Greenland as the ice conditions permitted, stopping at each native settlement and Danish village to deliver supplies. From Narsarssuak Fjord to Thule, far above the Arctic Circle, the distance was only about fifteen hundred miles, a voyage of little more than ten days in open water, but not much of that could be expected in the ice pack, which might make many of their ports of call inaccessible for weeks. Mowrey knew that his superiors would not be surprised if the voyage lasted six weeks, two months or all summer. The prospect of escaping military bases and returning to the unspoiled parts of Greenland which he remembered so well made him almost genial and most of the crew reflected his mood.

Paul’s spirits were improved too when he found, soon after leaving the fjord, that Mowrey was seriously training him to pilot the ship through ice, a step he probably would not take if he expected soon to carry out his threat of transferring him to a shore base. In addition to standing his regular watch, Paul was told to remain on the bridge with the captain as long as he could stay awake and observe the way Mowrey twisted and turned through leads in the great jumble of icebergs, a process which made ordinary navigation by dead reckoning impossible. To keep track of their position it was necessary to keep identifying on the chart each mountain peak and bay which came into view, and to take frequent bearings. When a lead they were following narrowed and came to a dead end, it was sometimes possible to place the bow of the ship gently against a crack between two small icebergs and gradually increase the revolutions of the trawler’s big propeller until the barrier parted like a great white gate and let them through. Suddenly released from the grip of the ice, the Arluk sometimes lunged ahead and would have crashed into the next iceberg if the engine were not stopped or reversed at precisely the right instant. Sometimes two or three long Arctic days and sunny nights were needed to shoulder their way from one lead to another, but the process fascinated Paul so much that he needed only two or three hours of sleep before returning to the bridge. Mowrey gave him no compliments and during the first week always jammed the ship in the ice to wait motionless during the brief periods that he himself had to sleep. When, on the eighth day, he retired to his cabin and let his executive officer pilot the ship toward a distant mountain peak for a full hour without supervision, Paul felt as though Harvard had just granted him a doctoral degree. Even the fact that the captain shouted at him worse than ever when he returned after a brief nap did not dim his sense of accomplishment.

For Nathan Green time passed much more slowly. Although he stood the twelve-to-four watch, Mowrey made sure that he was never alone on the bridge and considered him too incompetent to pilot the ship even under supervision. Still, when Nathan discovered that on this voyage the ship almost never left the ice pack and that the water amidst the icebergs was as calm as a small mountain lake, his release from constant seasickness made him feel as joyful as a condemned man upon receiving a pardon. Full of a new sense of contentment, he stood by the rail while Mowrey or Paul conned the ship and admired the spectacular scenery, which changed from minute to minute less because of the motion of the vessel and of the icebergs, which drifted slowly in currents and winds, than because of the strange atmospheric conditions which made Greenland resemble a vast stage with gauzy curtains, veils beyond veils in constantly changing patterns of light. Coming to the bridge from his cabin one rosy midnight, Nathan saw a row of sparkling white icebergs like the skyline of a city silhouetted against a pink cloud which at first looked solid enough to be a wall of quartz. As he stared in awe, a sudden gust of wind dissolved the cloud, revealing a range of naked mountains which now glowed a deep burnt orange against a lavender sky. What looked like a bank of snow at their base gradually turned into a luminous mist which blew away, revealing the entrance to an enormous fjord. Heavy pewter-colored clouds hung over that great canyon and delivered a narrowly localized snowstorm which was slanted by the wind into a diagonal pattern of gray and white, a translucent nearly transparent curtain through which the rising half moon shimmered. As the sun rose higher above the range of mountains, the surface of the sea, the ice and the land were momentarily turned almost crimson.

“Good God,” Nathan said to Mowrey, who was taking a bearing on the entrance to the fjord, “I don’t know whether it looks like heaven or hell, but it sure doesn’t look like any earth I’ve ever seen.”

“Do you know what it looks like to me?” Mowrey asked, lighting the stump of his cigar. Before waiting for a reply, he added, “The entrance to that fjord looks like the biggest damn cow’s cunt I ever seen.”

Nathan winced, angry at himself for giving Mowrey the satisfaction of shocking him. “Well, captain, I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

As his days of idleness passed, Nathan began to feel more and more guilty about his status as little more than a passenger aboard the ship. He had read all the textbooks on navigation and seamanship he could find and was quite capable of using the bubble sextant, but Mowrey wouldn’t let him near the chart table to plot his lines of position. Nathan was so hungry for some useful work that he rushed to help Boats and a gang of deckhands when they were picking up a crate of dried fish that had broken and spilled onto the deck. As Nathan used his bucket to help shovel the fish into burlap sacks, Boats put a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“Sir, don’t you know that officers ain’t supposed to do work like this? This is my job.”

Finding himself apologizing for trying to be useful, Nathan ambled aft and stood by the depth charges on the stern. Seasickness had been the worst physical agony of his life, but at least it had acted like a drug to dull other pains. The grumbling of the propeller shaft under his feet and the seagulls swooping over the bubbling wake astern suddenly reminded him of the Staten Island ferry, aboard which he and his wife had often ridden during their brief marriage.

Becky. For two years now he had, for the sake of his own sanity, tried not to think of her any more than possible, and he still never talked about her to anyone. They had had only nineteen months together before she had gone to Poland to get her parents. In the two and a half years that had followed, Nathan’s grief had taken many forms. After having been forced to realize that there was no way to get information about her, he had tried to join the Canadian air force. Unable to pass the rigid physical examinations, he had accepted an offer to work on defense contracts at General Electric.

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, he had tried to join first the navy, then the marines and finally the Coast Guard. The idea of going to war to win personal revenge against the Nazis had struck him as futile, but still compelling. War was disciplined hatred, after all, and who had reason to hate the Nazis more than he? Despite his distaste for melodrama, he had imagined himself using his knowledge of electronics to sink Nazi battleships, landing in France and striding across Europe to rescue his wife.

Instead, he had landed aboard a trawler in Greenland where he was considered too ignorant and inept to give a simple order to the helmsman. And instead of working, however indirectly, to defeat the country which had swallowed his wife, he was spending weeks on end as a passenger, admiring the beautiful scenery. The fact that he at times found himself enjoying his leisure and his fantastic surroundings made him feel more guilty than ever.

About ten days after leaving Narsarssuak Fjord, however, Nathan did find a job for himself. It began when Sparks came out of the radio shack and said, “Sir, I’m picking up a message that might be from the Nanmak, but they’re sending it in Morse much faster than I can read it. Do you want to see if you can get it?”

Since the age of fifteen, Nathan had been a ham radio operator, and he had no trouble in jotting down the coded signals. He was so curious about the activities of the Nanmak that he hurried to decipher them as though they were an urgent message for his own ship.

The message was addressed to “Commander GreenPat” and was from Hansen. The first part of it had been sent before Nathan had been called to the radio shack and was not repeated, despite the fact that heavy static made reception difficult. The message was sent as fast as possible and kept as brief as possible to give as little help as possible to radio direction finders aboard any German ship in the vicinity, Nathan realized. When deciphered, the message said: “… visibility almost zero. Proceeding slowly through heavy ice. No radio activity detected. Have discovered, however, four red marks on ice which look like copper antifouling bottom paint. Deduce that some ship has been this way since last snowstorm. A course of zero four eight brings us from first of these marks to others, which were discovered in circular search pattern. One soft flat berg has been ploughed through, leaving channel sixty-two feet wide indicating passage of ship much bigger than trawler. Probably icebreaker making much better speed than us, but am tracking.”

Nathan wondered how it must feel to be a hare tracking a hound. If fog continued to reduce the visibility to zero and if the German had functioning radar, he would locate the Nanmak long before Hansen could see him. Perhaps the rush of incoming shells would be the first proof Hansen would get that the Germans were nearby. If only I were there, I probably could get that old radar set going for a little while and could at least give Hansen a chance to maneuver, Nathan thought. He was surprised and pleased to discover that he genuinely wished he were there. The thought of dying did not bother him anywhere near as much as the knowledge that he was useless in this battle that he wanted so much to fight.

Going to the bridge, Nathan found Mowrey standing beside Paul while he shouted orders to the helmsman.

“Captain, I copied a message from the Nanmak to GreenPat,” he said. “We’re not involved, but I thought you might want to see it.”

Mowrey took the clipboard from his hand and quickly read it. Handing it to Paul, he said, “Looks like Wally is making himself into a hero. That little bastard always was smart. I bet he’s holed up in the ice pack drinking that Aquavit of his and dreaming up all kinds of messages to make himself look good. One thing you can count on is that Wally Hansen ain’t going to catch up to no Kraut icebreaker. He’s too smart a squarehead for that.”

When Paul read the message he couldn’t deny his first feeling was gratitude that he was safe on the west coast of Greenland, instead of aboard the Nanmak. Which undoubtedly meant that he was a coward. But he couldn’t feel too ashamed of that. After all, he had Mowrey. Who was to say which was more dangerous—a mad dog or a German?

“Keep copying anything sent to or from the Nanmak,” Mowrey was saying. “I want to see what stories Wally invents next to keep Headquarters happy.”