CHAPTER 35

Scoresbysund turned out to be a vast almost landlocked sound, full of bays, islands and winding fjords. It was surprisingly free of ice and the smooth red granite mountains around it looked oddly warm in the short but sunny last days of October. The glittering ice of glaciers that pressed to the sea between the mountains, the odd indigo color of the water and the spectacular blazes of color at sunrise and sunset created breath-taking scenery, but the endless maze of ice, rock and water was a nightmare for anyone looking for a German weather station. The settlement there was about twice the size of the one at Angmagssalik, with similar wooden cottages and sod huts. The dozen or so Danes that Paul found were all old, but unlike the people at Angmagssalik, almost embarrassingly eager to help in any search for Germans. Paul felt ridiculous as with the aid of an armed shore party of twelve men he searched tiny attics and clothes closets in search of radio transmitters.

“Hell, any damned German would bury his equipment in the snow long before we got ashore,” Paul said to Nathan. “If they have a weather station in any of these damn fjords it would be in a sod hut covered with snow. They wouldn’t even have to have a radio tower. They could rig a damn aerial to the side of a mountain and take it down when they saw us coming.”

“They’d have to get supplies,” Nathan said wearily.

For two weeks they explored Scoresbysund. When Nathan was not on the bridge he sat hunched over his radio equipment. No signals came from the immediate vicinity, but on high frequencies he often picked up scraps of code which might have skipped from almost anywhere.

They visited two small Eskimo settlements in Scoresbysund in addition to the main one. Here the natives lived in sod huts hardly bigger than dog kennels. They appeared childlike, eager to please and ultimately inscrutable. Regardless of what they had heard about the Germans, Paul was sure that they would help any white man who arrived with a few boxes of sugar, booze and canned meat, or even if he had nothing to offer them but a smile. Apparently the Eskimos really did love everyone, but these had been told not to fornicate with sailors. When the men in Paul’s shore party gave them gifts of tea and Spam and kept repeating the word, “ping-ping,” the Eskimos giggled, laughed, shook their heads and retreated en masse into their huts.

Soon everyone aboard the Arluk felt completely frustrated, and no one was sorry when Commander GreenPat ordered the ship to go back to patrolling the coast. More radio activity had been picked up near Cape Farewell, and the Arluk was told to steam south.

Just as the pilotbook had warned, November marked the beginning of the Greenland winter. On October 30, low-scudding gray clouds wiped out the last scrap of blue sky, a northwesterly wind began to howl and the temperature took an abrupt dive to forty below zero. The only good part of this situation was that the northwesterly wind moved the ice pack a few miles off shore, leaving a sheltered belt of sea at the foot of the mountains in which the Arluk could maintain full speed. Although the clouds obscured the moon and stars, there was an eerie glow caused by the surrounding ice reflecting the slightest amount of light. The long Arctic nights were not as black as Paul had feared. With the radar turned on every hour long enough to give brief glimpses of the surrounding terrain and icescape, Paul found his job of navigation surprisingly easy.

As the ship approached Angmagssalik, Paul could not help but start toying with the idea of stopping there to see Brit. Any number of excuses could be found—he could tell Commander GreenPat that he had to put in to find a quiet spot for engine repairs, or that they were receiving more radio signals which needed investigation. For such deceptions the cooperation of the entire crew would be needed, however, and that he would not get in a port where the men were not allowed ashore. From reports of the crew of the whaleboat, the men had learned that Paul had met a Danish woman, and though neither he nor Nathan had said anything about it, they had accurately guessed why he had disappeared for three hours. If he brought the ship back to Angmagssalik without orders, their genial envy would turn to scorn, with even the possibility of official complaints from a few when they got back to the base. And although those could be handled, there was a certain code which even men like Mowrey would not break. Commanding officers were not supposed to run Coast Guard cutters like yachts, stopping at any port where a woman was available.

Shortly before they reached the latitude of Angmagssalik, the wind let up, shifted to the east and brought in heavy fog. The ice pack slowly began to close with the shore, and the Arluk took to twisting slowly through the bergs in search of sea room. Nathan was becoming skillful at this and was better than anyone else at interpreting the glowing masses on the radar screen. Paul spent much of his time in his bunk, trying not to think of Brit, who was now only about twenty miles away, but the strong delicate hands with which she had held his head while she kissed him were impossible to forget. Unrequited love—that was a funny old-fashioned phrase, but he felt he had suffered that all his life before meeting Brit. Maybe not unrequited love, but unrequited passion, a sense of that had eaten at him during most of his nights with Sylvia. He didn’t blame his wife or tried not to, but there had been so many wasted nights, and without Brit, he might have died feeling that there was something badly the matter with him.

It was a pleasure to dream of going back to Brit after the war. He could find a pilot who could fly him in a PBY into Angmagssalik. They would anchor the seaplane off the end of the wharf and Brit would come out to meet him in the launch. The first thing he’d do when he got ashore was tell off old Swanson, tell him never to go near the girl again. Then they’d fix up the little ketch enough to sail her to Newfoundland for a complete refit. After that the world, the South Sea islands, where the wind was always warm and there was no ice outside of a highball glass.

As he thought about it, the dream began to appear like a practical plan, except maybe it would be better just to fly Brit out of Angmagssalik and buy a better vessel in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia. Maybe he could get enough money together to build a boat especially for world voyaging. In Paul’s mind the design for such a vessel was quite clear. A yawl would be faster than a ketch on the wind and Brit would be good at helping him with the big mainsail. Why did he have to keep imagining Sylvia in tears? She would have her house in Wellesley, after all, and it wouldn’t take her long to find a man who really wanted to become her father’s helper in the banking business. No, Sylvia would not weep long, and after years of misery in Greenland, Brit would deserve a voyage to the South Seas with a man she loved. By that time he would deserve a few good years.… What route would they follow to the South Seas? The Panama Canal, the Galapagos, Cocoa Island and finally Tahiti—he had read a dozen accounts of small boats that had taken that route. They would rig twin head-sails that would make it unnecessary to touch the tiller in the tradewinds—Paul was so lost in his dream that it was hard for him to come back to reality when Nathan called from the bridge, “Skipper, you better come here.” Nathan did not shout, but there was a tone in his voice that jerked Paul from his fantasy and caused him nearly to leap from his bunk. Fog made only a small circle of gray water visible, and it was already getting dark. Nathan was peering into the hood of the radar set.

“I think we got something here,” he said softly. “Whatever it is, it’s big and it’s moving.”

“How far away?”

“Twenty-three miles, bearing two five one degrees. He’s only about two miles off the edge of the ice pack. It looks like he’s following it north, on a course of about zero four five degrees.”

“How fast?”

“I can’t tell yet. Maybe about eight knots.”

“Let me see.”

At first Paul was confused by the glowing masses on the screen which were reflected from the ice pack. Then he saw one small but bright blob that was crawling slowly like a luminescent bug across the glass so close to the ice pack that it seemed to be touching it. Automatically Paul went to the wing of the bridge to see it, but the fog was so thick that even the guns on the bow were only vague outlines.

“Skipper, if we both maintain course and speed, he’s going to be about fifteen miles away when he’s abeam of us.”

“Do you think he’s picking up our radar?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Can you tell whether he’s got radar?”

“I’ve got Sparks working on it. He hasn’t picked up anything yet.”

“Stop the engine,” Paul said, remembering his plan to remain hidden as long as possible. “If we stay here, how close will he pass us?”

“About fifteen miles, if he holds his course. Shall I report this to GreenPat?”

That obviously was the ship’s first duty, to spot enemy ships and report them. Still, in this fog aircraft could do nothing, and the radio could warn the Germans, if that’s what it was, even if Nathan was smart enough to avoid direction finders.

“What are your chances of getting through to GreenPat without having him pick you up?”

“Maybe fifty-fifty.”

“Hold it for a while. Maybe it’s not a Kraut, maybe it’s one of our own cutters.”

“They’d tell us if one of ours was headed up here.”

“They’re supposed to, but there could be a screw-up. Look, you better report it to GreenPat. That’s doing it by the book.”

“How am I going to explain that we have a radar contact when we’re not supposed to have a radar?”

“Tell him how we got it. This is no time to play games.”

Nathan went to the wardroom to write the message. Word of a radar contact had quickly spread throughout the ship, and men were crowding into the pilothouse.

“Clear the bridge,” Paul said. “There’s nothing within twenty miles of us.”

It must be a trawler or an icebreaker or it wouldn’t be so close to the ice pack, Paul thought. Maybe six- or even eight-inch guns. But its job was sending weather reports or supplying shore stations, and it would probably rather run than fight. Once it knew it had been detected, it would probably try to escape in this fog before aircraft could find it. Probably the skipper of that ship would try to sink the trawler that had discovered him only if that wouldn’t take him far out of his way. The Germans weren’t crazy enough to risk air attack for revenge. Were they …?”

Hurrying to his chart table, Paul plotted the position of the Arluk and that of the stranger. That put the German, if that’s what he was, about seventy-five miles off shore, and only about thirty miles south of Angmagssalik. Studying the chart, he saw a fjord named Supportup-Kangerdula. The ship could easily have come from there. Brit had told him that the place was known for frequent foehn winds, and that the Eskimos had superstitions which kept them away from it. Had she been trying to warn him away from it? Whether or not she knew it, had the Germans picked it for a base simply because they were aware they would not be bothered there? Paul felt suddenly certain that the German ship had just left this strangely named place. Probably it had supplied a base there for the winter before the weather got really tough and had been waiting for this fog to cover its escape to sea.

And probably the people at Angmagssalik knew about the base only about thirty miles to the south of them. Maybe they were too afraid to tell the Americans about it, afraid of reprisals, and maybe they were active collaborators. The thought that Brit might be a traitor who’d made a fool of him cut deep, but now was not the time to worry about that.

Mr. Williams suddenly appeared with a plain-language report that Nathan had written and was now coding. It started by giving the Arluk’s latitude and longitude. It went on to say, “We have radar contact in thick fog with unknown vessel bearing two-five-oh degrees, range twenty-three miles. Her course is about zero four five degrees, speed about eight knots. We have radar set because we took one from wreck of DD-77. Request air support as soon as weather permits and instructions.”

Paul added two sentences: “Strongly suspect enemy base is established at Supportup-Kangerdula Fjord. Suggest air reconnaissance.”

“Tell Nathan to send this with the addition,” he said handing the clipboard to Williams.

“Are we going to close with the radar contact?” Williams asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

Paul wondered whether he really wanted to rush to meet a vessel that was bound to be more heavily armed. There could not be any real urgency in stopping an empty supply ship homeward bound, if he had guessed right about that, but maybe he should give it a try. Still, he’d done his main job of spotting what probably was an enemy ship and a German base. Now he should track the ship as long as he could and hope like hell for the sky to open up enough for the planes to get in their licks.

The sky gave no promise of clearing. Nathan returned to the bridge, chased Guns away from the radar set, and stared at the glowing insectlike image of the stranger, who had made no obvious change in course or speed. As he studied his chart Paul realized that the Nanmak had been sunk at a spot only about twenty-five miles to the south of their present position in the early summer. Maybe she had blundered onto this German while he was on his way in to build the base.

“I’ve got Sparks sending out the message,” Nathan said. “We’re using frequencies an ordinary ship wouldn’t monitor, but this guy may not be ordinary. If he picks us up, he may change course and speed.”

For five long minutes Nathan peered into the radarscope. “There, I’m afraid he picked us up, skipper. He’s making a sharp left turn. He’s ducking right into the ice pack. Damn it, he’s going to be hard to track when he gets into that big stuff.”

“Then we better follow him,” Paul said. “Give me a course.”

“Two-five-five. He’s slowing down, skipper. He’s not going to be able to go very fast through that ice.”

“Ahead slow. Come right to two five five. Come up to full speed. Tell the chief to give us everything he safely can.”

“How close to him are you going to go, skipper?”

“Close enough to keep tracking him. Hell, if he has six-inch guns and radar fire control, how close can we come to him without getting hit?”

“I’d guess we’d be safe if we stay five miles from him,” Nathan said. “We haven’t been able to pick up any radar signals from him yet.”

“So we’ll try to ride his tail. I don’t want to lose him.”

“Skipper, there’s some scattered drift ice about three miles ahead. I may not be able to pick up all the growlers on this thing.”

“Post a double bow lookout and tell them to look sharp. I want to close with him before we lose him in that ice.”

It was almost completely dark now, as well as foggy. The old trawler trembled and leapt ahead as Chief Banes pushed the engine to flank speed.

“Better come right about twenty degrees,” Nathan said. “There’s a fairly big berg dead ahead.”

Paul changed course. A few minutes later he thought he could hear the waves breaking against ice a few hundred yards to his left, but he could see nothing.

“You can come back on course,” Nathan said. “We’re beginning to close with him now. He’s down to about four knots, and he’s steering a crooked course through the ice.”

“What’s the range now?” Paul asked a few minutes later.

“Down to about nineteen miles. I’ve just lost him behind a big berg. He’ll come out. I think he’s trying to get back into a fjord.”

“Growler,” the bow lookout called. “Dead ahead!”

“Right full rudder.”

The trawler’s bow swung. Going to the port wing of the bridge, Nathan saw a twenty-ton hunk of blue ice lying only a few inches above the black water. It was almost within spitting distance.

“Come back to course now,” he said. “Ahead half. He’s not going anywhere very fast in that ice.”

The distance between the two ships diminished slower now, but they still gained a mile and a half in the next hour. When the range was down to fifteen miles, Nathan reported that the edge of the ice pack was only a mile ahead, and Paul slowed down.

“I don’t see any really good leads, but the stuff isn’t very close-packed on the edge,” Nathan said. “He got into it all right.”

Paul climbed to the flying bridge, where he could see a little better. There wasn’t as much fog now and there was a trace of moonglow. He ducked around the end of a huge mass of ice looming ahead and twisted between two smaller bergs. He had become skilled at maneuvering his ship through ice. Damn it, I bet no Kraut can beat me at this, he thought, and rang for more speed.

“We’re still gaining on him,” Nathan called a few minutes later. “He’s down to about two knots now. The ice is heavier where he is.”

“Range?”

“About fifteen miles.”

Mr. Williams appeared on the flying bridge holding a clipboard under his arm as he climbed the ladder.

“Message from GreenPat, sir.”

“What’s he say?”

Williams took a flashlight from his pocket.

“Jesus, don’t put that thing on! Just tell me what the bastard says.”

“Sorry, sir. He just says our radar contact can be presumed enemy. He wants us to keep tracking her but not to get closer than necessary. He says he’ll send air support as soon as the visibility improves, but according to his weather reports that might not be for twenty-four hours or more. Then he says that reconnaissance planes have photographed Supportup whatever-it-is fjord and found nothing, but there still could be a camouflaged base there. Then he ends with ‘Proceed to investigate when present mission is accomplished. More on this later.’”

“Marvelous,” Paul said. “What are we supposed to do, steam right into an enemy base?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Give the message to Mr. Green,” Paul said, and called into a voice tube, “Come right slowly. I see a pretty good lead. Ahead full.”

With both ships in the ice pack, Paul found he could gain on the German at the rate of about one mile an hour if he pushed the Arluk as fast as he could. He was in a hurry because he was afraid that if the German reached the maze of fjords which were now about fifty miles ahead she could find a niche in some ravine where she could disappear entirely. The German skipper was adept at placing large icebergs between himself and his pursuer. He often faded entirely from the radar screen, and as he zigzagged from one lead to another he sometimes popped up in unexpected places. The thought occurred to Paul that he might suddenly double back to destroy his tormentor, but the radar would give warning of that. Although the German followed an erratic course, he was obviously trying to gain the shelter of the fjords as quickly as he could.

The important thing was to keep track of his position so that he could report it to the planes, Paul knew, and the closer he could cling, the less the chance of losing him. He kept the Arluk barreling ahead.

At about midnight the north wind piped up, scattering the fog and occasionally blowing the clouds away from the moon. The chances for a dawn clear enough for an air attack looked good. The Arluk men were excited, and even those off watch stood on deck. It was a wild night, with the ice on all sides of them glittering brightly for a few minutes when the moon sailed between the clouds, and the trawler careened through crooked channels which sometimes narrowed so much that she had to push her way through. Standing on the flying bridge and shouting commands through the voice tube to the helmsman and the quartermaster at the engineroom telegraph, Paul felt curiously elated, as though he were chasing something much better than a ship he did not really want to catch. Now for a while at least, the Arluk was really the hunter, an avenger of sorts. No man aboard would have admitted such a thought, but they all felt something like that.

“Skipper,” Nathan called suddenly at about two in the morning. “It’s stopped dead. He’s in heavy ice. Maybe he’s stuck.”

“What’s the range?”

“Eight miles.”

“Stop the engine.”

In the sudden quiet Paul was aware that the wind was no longer blowing so strongly. The moon had retreated behind the clouds, and in the dim glow that was left he could see tendrils of fog advancing again like the scouts of a great army. He could see nothing ahead.

“The visibility is closing in again,” he said. “So what? If he’s stuck, we can wait him out all winter.”

“Do you suppose he knows we’re this close to him?” Williams asked.

“I don’t know. Nathan, tell GreenPat the Kraut is stuck and get a weather report from him,” he said.

GreenPat had apparently been sitting glued to his radio receiver. Without a moment of delay his answer came back. “As long as German is motionless, wait for weather clear enough for air attack. Best guess is that will be two days. Well done. GreenPat.”

“Nathan,” Paul said, “maintain sea watches. Let’s you and me take turns on the radar. If he gets loose I want to know it right away.”

“Sure, skipper. I’ve got it for the next couple of hours.”

Paul returned to his cabin and lay down in his bunk. Well, he thought, we have met the enemy and he is stuck. So far the advantage is ours.

And suddenly Paul wondered what it must be like to be aboard the enemy vessel. She probably was not an icebreaker, the ice was not thick enough to stop a ship of that kind. She probably was a big trawler, or more likely, one of the small freighters rugged enough for light ice conditions. A freighter would make a better supply ship. He might have just left his base after having waited for heavy fog to cover his escape through the ice to sea and home. Although Paul had fallen into the habit of thinking of the Germans in Greenland as sailing big ships with huge guns that made them almost invulnerable, in the short run, at least, this German must feel like the underdog, no matter what the caliber of his weapons. Greenland was already full of American air bases which sent whole flights of Lightnings roaring low over the ice whenever the weather cleared. Darkness and fog were the only friends of the Germans here, as they were the friends of criminals everywhere. With this heavy fall fog and the long nights of winter already on them, the German must have been confident as he started home. Then suddenly his radioman must have said something like, “Captain, I think I have something here …” Maybe they had radar and maybe they did not, but they certainly had picked up the Arluk’s radio, which had been close enough to blast the eardrums of the German Sparks if he had been monitoring the right frequencies.

Had the German been scared? Had he felt that chilling of the intestines and testicles, that foretaste of death which Paul felt when he imagined a great enemy ship looming out of the fog? Or had he thought, hell, the Americans are crazy enough just to send little trawlers up here with popguns. I’d like to eat this fellow for breakfast, but my orders say to get out before he can call in aircraft without taking the time to fight.

Maybe this German captain was the one who had sunk the Nanmak after managing to take her by surprise while the Nanmak’s radar was broken down. Perhaps he hadn’t been sure whether the Nanmak had had time to report him, and maybe he had gunned down the lifeboat as well as the ship because he soon expected to hear the roar of the Lightnings, as the German captured by the Northern Light had about six months before. Fear breeds hatred and hatred produces cruelty, a chemical formula they don’t teach in the basic ROTC courses. If this German captain had sunk the Nanmak and machine-gunned the survivors, he might feel guilt, and that might redouble his fear, his hatred and his cruelty. Even though he probably had orders to run not fight, he was probably itching to use those big guns he probably had if an American trawler were foolish enough to chase him too closely, unlucky enough to catch him.

Perhaps the Germans had debated whether they should run or fight, but then in the murk of the fog they had seen the ice pack closing around them. A freighter could not twist and turn the way a trawler could, it could not push aside even the smallest bergs. The ice would grind at her sides. If the German panicked, as even Germans might, the captain would call for all the power he had. Then a thud as he tried one turn his ship couldn’t make and the bow glanced off one iceberg to hit another. He would try to back her down, but if he had hit with any speed, she would be too firmly embedded in the ice. The current and wind would soon move more ice into her wake, and she would be frozen in, stuck until the next gale broke up the pack or the spring thaw.

But of course the German could not wait for the spring thaw, and probably not even for the next gale. His position had been reported to the airbases—the first crackle of the Arluk’s radio had told him that. And within an hour or a half hour of the time the fog lifted, the German would hear the distant roar of the Lightnings, which would shatter his ears as they approached, guns flickering on the leading edges of their wings, tracers arching toward the motionless ship.

What kind of men were now waiting this kind of death only about eight miles away? It was nice to imagine them as movie villains, short, fat, bald Erich Von Stroheim with his monocle, the man you love to hate, or athletic wooden-faced men in Nazi uniforms giving that ridiculous stiff-armed salute, a gesture that made them look as though they were trying to push the world away from themselves. But probably they were not doing much saluting now as they waited in the ice to die. Probably they were wearing not fancy uniforms but foul-weather gear much like his own. And probably they didn’t look like movie villains. In the first place they wouldn’t put a senior officer in command of a supply ship bound for Greenland. He was probably some young guy. Why did Paul imagine him confident, cocky, a little taller, a little stronger than himself, the image of his brother, Bill?

Brothers, we are all brothers, Nathan had wryly observed when he had heard about the empty vodka bottle discovered by the Nanmak. Brotherly love—that had been a phrase which had struck Paul as ironic ever since he could remember, because his own brother had mostly loved beating him in the endless competition of their life together. But the Germans of course were not really brothers, not even distant cousins. They were simply enemies, legally declared such by the majesty of the United States government and their own …

Love thy enemy—had Christ himself ever been able really to do that? Maybe that was why he had been remembered two thousand years—no one else had ever been able to manage it. Carefully as he might search his soul, Paul could find no trace of love for the men who had gunned down the Nanmak and her helpless crew.

Love—the very word suddenly seemed to ring with irony.

“I think I love you,” he had said to Brit, and she had told him, “Don’t be ridiculous, you’d love an iceberg if you could fuck it.” He sort of loved her for that reply, the kind of answer a woman would have to spend a year in Greenland to make.

For the first time in his life Paul found himself wondering what in the world love really was. He had, in his fashion, loved Sylvia, loved her for years, no doubt about that, despite the fact that he had never really been convinced that she loved him, and their whole relationship had been mostly a study in frustration. And love or no love, he had been unfaithful to her the first chance he got. In his heart he suspected she probably would be no more faithful to him if some young officer danced with her very well at the U.S.O. and told her she was the prettiest girl in the world.

Love. Maybe the reason everybody kept talking about it so much was that it was so rare. He didn’t love his enemy, he didn’t love his brother, he didn’t love his wife enough to remain faithful to her, and even his mistress, if that’s what Brit had briefly been, had told him that talk about love was ridiculous. Had he ever loved anybody? How about his own father and mother? Once he had loved them—it was oddly comforting to be sure of at least that. When Paul had been a small child, his father had been such a warm, exuberant man. Before the great crash had knocked out his business and before the Depression had taken all hope of making a comeback from him, his father had seemed to Paul to own the world, or at least run it. Aboard his big yawl Paul’s father had seemed to command the elements themselves, laughing at summer thunder squalls, always able to find his way in fog or dark of night. Paul never had been able to understand why the people of the United States weren’t smart enough to kick Hoover out and make his father President. If they did that, the country would have had no problem at all. And in those early days, before the Depression had changed his father’s swinging walk to the hesitant pace of an old man, Paul’s mother had also laughed and hugged a lot. While they had lived in the big house on Beacon Street, she had read Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer aloud to her sons on winter evenings in front of a glowing grate of pine logs in a marble fireplace, and had played a game called Mousie which mostly had involved tickling them.… “Money isn’t important,” his mother had often said. That had been her favorite sentence, along with, “We all must love each other,” but after the money had mysteriously disappeared and they had moved to the cramped cottage in Milton, love or most of its outward manifestations had also taken flight. The great lie, an affectionate deception no doubt, but a lie as hurtful as any other because it meant the truth could not be faced—the great lie about his father being an artist of genius had begun, had been started more by his mother than his father, but the whole family had gone along with it. And after giving up her circle of friends in Boston, such fine Boston ladies who valued friendship until a friend got suddenly poor, his mother had become president of the garden club in Milton, despite the fact that she really didn’t have a garden at all, and had gone on to more garden club triumphs, which took her mind off a husband who couldn’t sell his paintings, despite his genius, and two sons who were growing more and more difficult to handle each day—

“Skipper,” Nathan said, poking his head into the cabin. “We can hear a plane coming. Probably they’ve sent a PBY to feel out the weather.”

Or it could be a German JU-88 sent to try to help its brother. Running to the wing of the bridge, Paul saw that the fog was still much too thick to give any plane a target. The Arluk was as safe as the German ship was. He listened hard for several seconds before he heard the drone of engines far overhead. Undoubtedly the German heard them too. Even if it was a JU-88, the Lightnings would take care of it if it stayed around while the fog lifted.

Probably the German captain was out on the wing of his bridge too, listening to the plane far above the fog banks. As Paul returned to his cabin, and told the quartermaster to have coffee brought from the galley, he wondered whether the German captain were doing that too, if they were two men bound to duplicate many of each other’s actions until the Lightnings closed in to stop the game.

The plane droned away above the clouds and Arctic silence reigned again.

Climbing into his bunk, Paul wondered whether the German skipper was doing that too. Did he have a wife who often did not seem to love him and another girl he had briefly met in some port who made him feel marvelous?

The coffee did not arrive. Restlessly Paul walked to the galley, where he found Cookie cleaning the range.

“I’ll have your coffee in a minute, skipper. Damn fool Blake let the oatmeal boil over.”

“No hurry, Cookie.”

The men off watch in the forecastle were playing cards, reading well-thumbed magazines in their bunks and listening to a radio announcer who was telling about German defeats in Russia and in Africa. For those Germans who understood English, these American news broadcasts must sound like the voice of doom. Did they stay tuned to German broadcasts which gave them only news of victories? Did they too feel certain that in the end they would win the war?

Returning to his cabin, Paul realized that he really knew nothing at all about his enemies. If they were unlikely to resemble movie villains, they also were unlikely to be exactly like himself, despite his German blood. What must it have been like to grow up in Germany during the much worse depression that that country had had ever since the end of the last war?

Maybe the Germans were just dumb, people who did what they were told without asking why. That was one common conception of them and maybe it was true. What American really knew or much cared when the chips were down? Life was like a cowboy movie after all, and the only important question was who got the draw first.

But he would like to talk to them in their own language. “Say, fellows,” he would begin, as he came wandering in from the foggy ice floe. “Let’s talk a bit. Would you like to give up instead of die?”

Even if he could walk through the ice floe, such a visit would be as absurd as it seemed sensible. But why not try on the radio? The idea startled Paul. Why hadn’t such an obvious move occurred to him before? Getting out of his bunk, Paul went to the bridge, where he found Nathan still glued to the radar set.

“Nathan, could you come in here a minute?”

When they were both in his cabin, Paul shut the door.

“Nathan, that Kraut doesn’t have too much of a chance. He can’t run and he won’t fight long when the Lightnings get him.”

“Maybe,” Nathan said. “Don’t be too confident—”

“I’m just trying to figure out the truth of it. What would you think of radioing him and asking if he wants to give up?”

Nathan’s lips tightened.

“I wonder if they gave the Nanmak that chance? Or the men in her boat?”

“Hell, maybe this isn’t even the same ship that got Hansen. Anyway, shouldn’t we try to take prisoners? Wouldn’t that be the best way to find out about any base they’ve got ashore, their whole weather operation?”

“I guess so,” Nathan said. “Maybe we should ask GreenPat about that. The Krauts could say they were going to give up and then clobber us when we came near. Didn’t you have something like that in mind, if we could pull it?”

“Yeah, but we could wait until the weather clears and there are planes overhead. We could order them to take to their boats or walk out on the ice.”

“They could still leave a few men behind to clobber us when we got near.”

“The planes could sink their damn ship as soon as they’d abandoned it. We could just pick up their boats.”

“Which might blow up in our faces. I’m sorry, Paul, but I don’t trust the bastards.”

Nathan was about to go on and tell Paul about his wife’s disappearance in Poland, the near certainty that she had either been killed by the Germans or put into a concentration camp. Or a brothel—the Germans had put many Polish women into their military brothels. Nathan’s whole body contracted every time that thought came to him, as it did now. How could such an emotion be shared?

“You told me once never to forget that war is a game of hard ball,” he said. “If we get a chance to kill Germans, I say kill ’em. If you give them the slightest chance, they’ll throw a hand grenade right down your throat.”

“We could make ’em stand naked on the ice and wait for us to pick ’em up. And it would be easier to get them to tell us what they’ve got ashore than to go look for ourselves.”

“They wouldn’t tell you.”

“Aren’t they the ones who are so proud about being able to make people talk? Maybe they’d tell me where their harbor is mined if I put a bunch of them on the bow of my ship as I headed in.”

Nathan shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “In any case, I’d ask GreenPat before making any direct contact.”

“Let’s do that,” Paul began, and at that moment they heard the roar of a distant explosion, followed by three more. Paul’s first reaction was that the Germans were shooting at him, but they were too far away for that. Had they blown their own ship up? No, of course they were trying to dynamite their way out of the ice, a maneuver of desperation that had often been tried and seldom worked.

Nathan ran back to his radar set. “They’re moving so much ice, I can see it here,” he said. There were three more explosions. “I think they rigged up a whole string of depth charges,” he said. “Look.”

There were two more explosions as Paul bent over the hood of the radar. He could see blips appear for a fraction of a second to the east of the blob that was the ship. “Hey, he’s starting to move,” he said. “Maybe he did make it work. Have a look.”

“He’s got a couple of miles to go before he finds any kind of a real lead,” Nathan said. “But I guess he’s got plenty of TNT—”

“We better get closer to him,” Paul said.

“I wouldn’t want to be too close when the weather clears,” Nathan said. “I don’t think the aim of our fly-boys is all that good.”

“Right. We better break out every American flag we have and spread them on the deck of the bridge. Those fly-boys are apt to sink us and congratulate the Kraut for spotting us.”

“I’ll see to the flags,” Nathan said. “What will the fly-boys do if the Krauts spread out American flags too? I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“We better tell GreenPat to tell the pilots that the Germans have the bigger ship. Are you sure of that, by the way?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s a steel ship, but I can’t guarantee how big it is.”

“Well, we might as well get close enough to take a look at him when the weather clears. The fly-boys rate a description of their target.”

“I wouldn’t really know what the range of his guns are even if they knew how big they are,” Nathan said. “Sometimes I get so goddamn tired of my own ignorance—”

“Don’t worry about it. There’s always going to be an iceberg between him and us. Tell the engineroom to stand by. I’m going in close enough to get a damn good look at him when this fog lifts.”

As Paul backed the Arluk out of the ice and began exploring a narrow lead that wandered in the general direction of the German, he felt he could go quite close if he wanted to. The trawler could get through ice much better than a freighter could and he was quite sure that he was dealing with a freighter, because he couldn’t have caught up with a trawler. The advantages of maneuverability and power would be his. The only advantage the German probably had was bigger guns, and in a game of cowboys and Indians, cannon rarely were decisive. Rarely …

As Paul pushed slowly from lead to lead through the fog, using the radar to pick the areas where the pack was most scattered, he heard more explosions ahead. How were the Germans getting the depth charges, if that’s what they were using, so far ahead of their ship as they inched along through broken ice? Had they rigged some sort of K-gun to throw heavy charges over the bow? If so, the charges must be fused to explode on the surface of the ice, a job Nathan had been experimenting with, and which he had found tricky, despite his ability to do almost anything with a pair of pliers and wire.

Maybe the Germans had worked out simpler solutions. A small boat couldn’t get through the ice ahead of the ship, but in some ice formations men could climb up and down hills of ice, rolling or dragging heavy charges of explosive far ahead of the vessel. What a desperate effort that must be, yet it or something like it was succeeding. The German’s motion was barely discernible, but the ice bridge between them and the nearest lead was narrowing.

If the German got in the clear he could still escape before the fog lifted, but the lead he was working so desperately to reach didn’t go more than five or six miles before ending in a high ridge of ice castles jammed together. Maybe he didn’t have radar after all, or maybe his set was as temperamental as the Nanmak’s had been. It was hard not to feel sorry for the men sweating out there on the ice, stumbling and swearing over the heavy loads of explosives, cheering every time a short channel was blown clear, all apparently without knowledge that they were getting nowhere.

Anyway, the Krauts were trying—Paul had to give them that. Clearly they were not yet in a mood to give up. Everything in the world might be wrong with the Germans, except they rarely turned out to be cowards. After being ashamed of his German blood ever since he had first heard of Hitler, Paul was absurdly glad to find one small enduring reason for pride. The sons of bitches didn’t have any idea in the world how to fight a war when it came to grand strategy, but when it came down to blood and guts, they weren’t easy …

Just stupid, or so it seemed as the Germans kept blowing up the ice to reach a blind lead. The Arluk was doing fairly well in ice she could wriggle through, and the range shortened every hour.

“About six miles now,” Nathan called from the radar set, and later, “Five and a half. He’s just about getting to that blind lead.”

“How far can he go in that?”

Instead of answering, Nathan said, “Say, skipper, some thing’s happening here.”

“What?”

“He’s like a damn amoeba splitting in two. I think there are two ships there, a big steel one and a small wooden one that we haven’t been able to pick up until now …”

Of course, Paul thought—a supply ship with a trawler to escort her through the ice, as the Arluk had escorted bigger vessels. That would explain how the depth charges had been dropped well ahead of the larger ship. Two ships would be much harder to fight if they got close enough to the Arluk. Two would be just as vulnerable as one when the Lightnings finally arrived, but before that there was always the possibility that the German trawler would come looking for her tormentor. In the ice she would be just as maneuverable, and might well have bigger guns, though she might have to stand by her supply ship …

“Stop the engine,” Paul said. “We’ll just stay close enough to keep them both on the scope. Nathan, tell Green-Pat that we’ve got two of them now.”

The thought that the smaller German ship might come looking for him before the fog and night cleared sent a chill through Paul’s belly, but he was quite sure now that neither ship had radar that was working. If they did, why had they labored so hard to blast their way into a dead end? Without radar they were blind in these conditions, but the blessed gray box at least enabled Paul to see.

“Get Boats up here,” he said suddenly to the quartermaster.

Boats soon appeared. “Boats, we got what looks like a trawler up ahead there with a supply ship. I suppose he might leave his big baby when there’s no chance to save her and come looking for us. I don’t much like the idea of two trawlers close together out there in the ice—to the planes we’ll look just the same. So get some red lead and paint the deck on the flying bridge and the forecastlehead red.”

“Sir, it will never dry with the weather like this. The men will track it all over the ship.”

“I don’t give a damn. I want those fly-boys to know we’re us before they get close enough to see flags. Don’t paint the well deck or the fantail. We won’t have to go where the paint is until it’s time to use the guns anyway.”

“Aye, aye, sir, but it’s going to be one hell of a mess.”

“Not as much of a mess as the Lightnings could make of us. Any more objections, Boats?”

“No, sir.”

“Get it done before dawn. And tell Mr. Green about it so he can tell GreenPat. Tell him to tell GreenPat to tell the fly-boys.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Boats said, and a few minutes later Paul heard him shout, “All right, you guys, grab paint brushes. You wouldn’t believe it, but we’re going to paint our fucking decks red right now.”

Paul went to the radar set. It looked as though it had gone out of adjustment. Instead of giving a glowing map of the surroundings, the screen showed nothing but a crazy pattern of pulsing green lights. With growing panic Paul turned the knobs which were supposed to focus the image, but they only made it worse. Forcing himself to sound calm, he said to Flags, “Get Mr. Green up here. Tell him the radar’s out of whack.”

During the seconds that it took Nathan to run to the bridge Paul stared at the malevolently flashing screen and thought, of course—anything that can go wrong inevitably does go wrong at the worst possible time. The radar, like the big diesel engine, had always seemed a complete mystery to him, and it made him feel sick to realize that the safety of himself and the entire ship depended on such mechanical mysteries. He was helpless. He wished that he had been born in the years of sailing ships when there was nothing to worry about but the wind, the sea and men.

Nathan arrived, his open parka flapping, and Paul stepped aside to let him look at the screen. The gaunt face was grim as he adjusted the knobs.

“Something’s the matter with it,” he said. “I’ll get my tools.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Skipper, I’ll sure as hell try.”

Nathan ran to the radio shack and a few minutes later he came back with a toolbox. Word spread quickly through the ship that the radar had gone out, and a ring of men gathered to watch Nathan remove the screws at the base of the gray metal box that covered the intricate mechanism.

“Clear the bridge,” Paul said. “Let him work.”

The men withdrew to the wings of the bridge, where they waited in unaccustomed silence. There was a very slight tremor in Nathan’s long fingers as he withdrew the screws. Lifting the box off, he turned it upside down and put the screws in it.

“You better put this on your bunk, skipper,” he said.

Paul did so and returned to stare at the nest of multicolored wires, glass tubes and a jumble of aluminum boxes projecting from other boxes. Nathan took a voltameter from his toolbox and began to probe with it. The bridge was so quiet that the tick of metal against metal sounded like a clock.

“Skipper, this may take me an hour or more,” Nathan said. “There are a lot of fuses, connections and tubes to check.”

“We’ll wait,” Paul said.

“I’ve got a lot of spare parts and the chances are I can fix it. Damn it, I’ll build us a new one if I can’t.”

Reassured some, the men on the wings of the bridge drew away from the doors and a few went forward for coffee.

Watching Nathan work made Paul nervous, and he was sure that Nathan did not need an audience. He went to his cabin and tried to figure out what he should do if it took Nathan a very long time to make his repairs, or if in the end they proved impossible. Without the eyes of radar the Arluk was certainly in much greater danger. Her edge, in fact, was gone, all the odds changed. Faced with two enemy ships and an enemy shore base, Paul’s instinct was to run or stay hidden in the ice, but now if he was to keep track of the enemy’s position he would have to press close enough to see and be seen.

Still, the odds were that Nathan could fix the set. Jewish magic, Mowrey had called radar, and the old man had said, “I don’t wonder that the damn thing goes out the minute you get to sea.”

Nathan, Paul found himself thinking, work your magic now!

Minutes, then hours went by very slowly. Too restless to stand still or sit down, Paul went to the forecastle for coffee. The men were playing checkers.

“How’s it coming, skipper?” Guns asked.

“Mr. Green is working on it. He knows his business.”

“I bet he really could build a radar set,” Cookie said. “He used to be in that business.”

Paul marveled at the men’s confidence. With a few tools and spare parts, Nathan could build a whole radar set in a few minutes, they were sure. At times like this they needed to believe that the officers they so often hated were gods. Paul was suddenly sure that now they thought even he had mystical powers. He’d better have …

Paul finished his coffee and carried a cup up to Nathan, who was still bent over the set. There was no longer a tremor in his long fingers. as he tightened a tiny screw, but he was sweating and paused to wipe his face and hands with a handkerchief.

“Want some coffee?”

“Later,” Nathan said, and Paul gave the coffee to the quartermaster …

Two hours crept by before Nathan sighed and said, “I think I’ve got it.” Paul was standing on the flying bridge.

“He thinks he’s got it,” Flags said, sticking his head above the top rung of the ladder.

Paul hurried to the pilothouse in time to see Nathan adjust the knobs. The screen glowed green again, flickered and suddenly snapped into focus, showing a clearly glowing little map of the surrounding ice.

“I guess that’s it,” Nathan said, grinning.

The men cheered and Paul found himself pounding Nathan on the back. “Do you want a drink? We can find a bottle somewhere.”

“No,” Nathan said.

The beaming approval of the men pleased but embarrassed him. He didn’t know how to respond to it and he suddenly felt exhausted. For about an hour he had fought a growing fear that he never would be able to figure out what was wrong with the set, or that he would find a defective part he couldn’t replace. In the end it had proved to be only a short circuit, a burned out connection that had taken only five minutes to fix after it had been uncovered.

With the men still congratulating him, Nathan put the gray box back in place and tightened it down. Studying the screen, he said, “Skipper, I can’t see that anything has changed while the set was out but we better keep a close watch on it. I need to lie down for a while. Can you handle it?”

“I got it,” Paul said. “Get a good rest. Tell Cookie to bring you anything you want. I wish I could give you the Congressional Medal.”