The Woods Hole scientific teams had discerned a sharp reduction in the krill population for several years. Professor Townsend believed that the krill were being wiped out by the ultraviolet rays streaming through the hole in the ozone layer that appears over the Antarctic in September. Furthermore his research studies suggested that the problem was worsening, and he now believed the ozone hole was growing steadily larger, much like the tear in Cuttyhunk’s hull.
Townsend’s conclusions had lent a new urgency to this expedition. He planned to take krill samples off the Ridge for around six days and then proceed to the US Antarctic Research Station on McMurdo Sound for another month of tests. He hoped to determine if the phytoplankton on which the krill feed were being harmed by the radiation and endangering entire species of sea creatures. Another sharp reduction of the krill population would signify to Professor Townsend that the ozone hole was increasing. The New York Times had been reporting extensively on Townsend’s research, and the eyes of the world’s environmental agencies were now fixed firmly on the Cuttyhunk scientists.
Tug Mottram’s eyes were fixed on the raging sea now rolling across his starboard beam, the white foam whipping off the wave tops by the gale making grotesque lacy patterns in the troughs.
The anchor was secure, but the men in the forepeak were having a hell of a time trying to stop the sea from coming in. Two big mattresses were jammed over the hole, held in place by heavy timbers cut to length for such an emergency. Three young crewmen, almost waist-deep in the freezing water, were trying to wedge the beams into place with sledgehammers, but it was so cold they could manage only three minutes at a time. When the ship pitched forward the water rose right over them. The job of plugging the tear in the hull would have taken ten minutes in calm waters, but it was more than an hour before the ship was watertight. Another ten minutes to pump the water out. Two hours to thaw out the shivering seamen.
At midnight the watch changed. Bob Lander came on the bridge, and the Captain, who had ridden out the worst of the storm, headed to his bunk, exhausted. At forty-eight years old, Tug was beginning to feel that he was not quite as indestructible as he had been at twenty-five. And he missed his wife, Jane, who awaited him in the Cape Cod seaport of Truro. In the small hours of an Antarctic morning he found it difficult to sleep and often spent much time reflecting on his divorce from Annie, his first wife, and the terrible, cruel half-truths he had told in order to break free and marry a much younger woman. But when he thought of Jane he usually persuaded himself that it had been worth it.
Outside, the weather was brightening a little, and although the wind still howled at around fifty knots, the snow had stopped falling and there were occasional breaks in the cloud. The worst of the cold front had passed.
On the bridge, Bob Lander would occasionally catch a glimpse of the sun, a fireball on the horizon as Cuttyhunk shouldered her way forward making seventeen knots on southeasterly 135. They would soon be in sight of the great rock of Îlot Rendezvous, which rises 230 feet out of the sea, a rounded granite centurion guarding the northwestern seaway to Kerguelen. It is sometimes referred to as Bligh’s Cap, so named by Captain Cook in 1776 in honor of his sailing master in Resolution during his fourth and final voyage — William Bligh, later of the Bounty. However, maritime law decreed that the French named the rock first, and the official charts reflect this.
Bob Lander spotted Îlot Rendezvous shortly before 0300, almost a half mile off his patched-up starboard bow. He called through to Kit Berens, who had returned to the navigation office at 0200. “Aye, sir,” he replied. “I have a good radar picture. Stay on one thirty-five and look for the point of Cap D’Estaing dead ahead forty minutes from now. There’s deep water right in close, we can get round a half mile off the headland. No sweat.”
“Thanks, Kit. How ’bout some coffee?”
“Okay, sir. Let me just finish plotting us into Choiseul. I’ll be right there. The chart is showing there’s a few kelp beds in the bay, and I think we ought to give ’em a damned wide berth. I hate that stuff.”
“So do I, Kit. You better keep at it for a bit. Don’t worry about me. I’ll just stand here and die of thirst.”
Kit Berens chuckled. He was loving his first great ocean voyage and was deeply grateful to Tug Mottram for giving him a chance. Tug reminded him of his own father. They were both around six feet three inches tall, both easygoing men with a lot of dark curly hair and deeply tanned outdoor faces. Tug’s was forged on the world’s oceans, Kit’s dad’s was the result of a lifetime spent in south Texas oil fields working as a driller. In Kit’s opinion they were both guys you could count on. He liked that.
N.W. KERGUELEN. The icy bays and fjords of the island at the end of the earth — where Cuttyhunk sought shelter.
The young navigator pressed his dividers onto the chart against a steel ruler. “There’s a damn great flat-topped mountain on the headland,” he called to Bob. “It’s marked right here as the Bird Table. It’s probably the first thing we’ll see. We’ll change course a few degrees southerly right there. That way we’ll see straight up into Christmas Harbor. I don’t think it’ll give us enough shelter from the wind, though. We’ll have to run on a bit farther.”
“What the hell’s Christmas Harbor? I thought the whole place was French. Why isn’t it called Noël Pointe or something?”
“My notes say it was named by Captain Cook. He pulled in there on Christmas Day, 1776. The French named it Baie de l’Oiseau around that same time. Shouldn’t be surprised if no one’s been there since. I’m telling you, this place is des-o-late.”
At 0337 Bob Lander steered Cuttyhunk around Cap D’Estaing. They were in daylight now, but the wind was still hooting out of the Antarctic, and it swept around the great northwestern headland of Kerguelen. Fifteen minutes later Kit Berens was gazing up at the turmoil of white-capped ocean swirling through Christmas Harbor.
“Forget that,” he said. “I’d say the wind was blowing right around D’Estaing but somehow it’s also sweeping round that damn great mountain and into the harbor from the other direction. It’s like a wind tunnel in there. The katabatics are gonna give us a problem. We’re gonna have to run right up into one of the fjords.”
“Fjords?” said Bob. “I thought they were more or less a northern thing.”
“According to this chart, Kerguelen’s got more fjords than Norway,” said Kit. “I’ve been studying it for hours now. The whole place must have been a succession of glaciers once. The fjords here cut so deep back into the land I can’t find one spot on the whole island more than about eleven miles from saltwater. I bet if you measured every inch of the contiguous coastline it’d be about as long as Africa’s!”
Lander laughed. He liked the adventurous young Texan. And he liked the way he always knew a lot about where they were, not just the position, course, speed, and distances. It was typical of Kit to know that Captains James Cook and William Bligh had sailed through these waters a couple of hundred years ago.
Just then Tug Mottram returned to the bridge, bang on time, as he always was. “Morning men,” he said. “Is this goddamned wind ever gonna ease up?”
“Not yet, anyway,” said Lander. “The cold front is still right here. I guess we should be thankful the darned blizzard’s gone through. Wind’s still sou’westerly, and it’s freezing out there.”
“Kit, you picked a spot for us?” asked the Captain.
The Texan stared at his chart. “Kind of,” he said slowly, without looking up. “About another eight miles southwest there’s a deep inlet called Baie Blanche — a fjord really, ten miles long. A mile wide and deep, up to four hundred feet. At the end it forks left into Baie de Français, which I think will be sheltered. But it also turns right into another fjord, Baie du Repos. This one’s about eight miles long, narrow but very deep. The mountain range on the western side should give some shelter. The swells shouldn’t come in too bad, not that far up, and I don’t see any kelp marked. I’m recommending we get in there.”
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“Sounds good to me. Oh, Bob, on your way to your bunk tell the engineers to be ready to start work on the hull at around 0800, will you?”
“Okay, sir. I’m just gonna catch an hour’s sleep. Then I’ll be right back for a bit of sightseeing.”
Kit Berens finally looked up and informed the Captain he was about to put a message on the satellite, stating their position and describing the minor repairs that would delay them for less than a day.
In the communications room, positioned on the port side of the wide bridge, Dick Elkins, a former television repairman from Boston, was talking to a weather station when Kit Berens dropped his message on the desk. “Intercontinental. Direct to Woods Hole,” Kit said.
And now, at last, they were getting a lee. The water was flatter, and Cuttyhunk steadied, sheltered by the rising foothills on the starboard side as they ran down to the Baie Blanche.
Kit Berens was back hunched over his charts, his steel ruler sweeping across the white, blue, and yellow sheets. He finally spoke. “Sir, I wanna give you three facts.”
“Shoot,” said the Captain.
“Right. If you left this island and headed due north, you would not hit land for eight thousand five hundred miles and it would be the south coast of Pakistan. If you went due west you’d go another eight thousand five hundred miles to the southern coastline of Argentina. And if you went east, you’d go six thousand miles, passing to the south of New Zealand and then six thousand five hundred more to the coast of Chile. My assessment is therefore that right now we’re at the ass-end of the goddamned earth.”
Tug Mottram laughed loudly. “How about south?”
“That, sir, is a total fucking nightmare. Five hundred miles into the West Ice Shelf, which guards the Astrid Coast. That’s the true Antarctic coastline. Colder and more windswept even than here. But they do have something else in common, Kerguelen and the Antarctic.”
“They do? What’s that?”
“No human being has ever been born in either place.”
“Jesus.”
At 0600 they swung into the first wide fjord, Baie Blanche, and immediately became aware that the wind had stopped and that the water was calm and tideless. There were four hundred feet below the keel. Tug Mottram cut the speed back because in these very cold, deep Antarctic bays, you could blunder into the most dangerous kind of small iceberg — the ones formed of transparent meltwater ice, which float heavily below the surface, absorbing the somber, morose shades of the surrounding seas. To the eye they look bluish black, and unlike white glacier ice, they are almost impossible to see.
After four miles, Bob Lander took the wheel while the skipper went outside into the freezing but clear air and gazed up at the rugged sides of the waterway. Ahead he could see the lowish headland of Point Bras where the fjord split. Beyond that, rising to a height of a thousand feet, was the snow-covered peak of Mount Richards. Through his binoculars Tug could see gales of snow being whipped from the heights by the still blasting wind.
This lee would be fine for a while, but should a gale swing suddenly out of the north, it would blast straight down Baie Blanche. That was why Kit Berens had advised running right down into the deeply sheltered Baie du Repos before they brought out the welding kit.
They turned into the long continuing fjord of Repos at 0655 and made their way over almost seventy fathoms of water around the long left-handed bend, which led to the protected dead-end waters below Mount Richards.
Bob Lander slowed to below four knots while they searched for an anchorage. Tug Mottram caught sight of two old, rusting, gray buoys spaced about four hundred feet apart, some fifty yards off the rocky western lee shore. “That’ll do just fine,” he muttered, at once wondering if it had been Captain Cook who had left them there in the first place. But then, still looking through his glasses, he spotted something beyond both his imagination and comprehension.
Speeding toward them, at about fourteen knots, was the unmistakable shape of a US-made Naval assault craft, one of the old 130 LCVP’s, complete with two regulation 7.62mm machine guns mounted on the bow. What was really disconcerting to Tug was the line of big red and white dragon’s teeth painted about two feet high across the shallow bow. Worse yet, there were ten men standing on the deck, each wearing white military-style helmets. Tug could see the sun glinting off the ones worn by the for’ard gunners.
“Where the hell did they come from?” asked Captain Mottram standing stock-still on the deserted deck. He could only guess they were French, but he called out for Kit and Bob to take a look. Lander was thoughtful. “That’s an old Type 272,” he said. “Haven’t seen one of them for a few years.”
But young Berens, sharper by nature and a frontier Texan by heritage, took one look, grabbed for a set of keys, and announced he was headed for the arms cupboard, “RIGHT NOW!”
The Captain pulled his loaded sidearm from his drawer, and Bob Lander slowed the ship to a halt. Moments later the assault craft pulled alongside, and the leader requested permission to board. To Tug’s eye he looked Japanese beneath his big helmet.
Eight of the armed military men on board the LCVP climbed over the rails. Captain Mottram offered his hand in greeting, but this gesture was ignored. Instead the visitors trained their guns on Captain Mottram and his crew. The Captain and Bob were ordered flat against the bulkhead, arms outstretched. Mottram did not reckon his pistol would be much of a match for the Kalashnikovs the raiders carried.
Bob Lander turned to ask by whose authority this action was being undertaken and was felled by a blow to the head from a machine-gun barrel. At just this moment Kit Berens swung around the corner with a loaded submachine gun and opened fire.
Inside the communication room, Dick Elkins heard two bursts of machine-gun fire. He raced to the bridge window and tried to assess the situation. He knew there was little time, and he charged back into his office and slammed both locks home. A half-minute later, the first ax crashed through the top of the door.
Dick had only split seconds. He opened up his satellite intercontinental link, punching out a desperate message…
“MAYDAY… MAYDAY… MAYDAY!!… Cuttyhunk 49 south 69… UNDER ATTACK… Japanese…”
At which point the message to the Woods Hole command center was interrupted by an ax handle thudding into Dick Elkin’s head.
Nothing, repeat, nothing, was ever heard from the US Oceanographic Institute research ship again. No wreckage. No bodies. No communication. No apparent culprit. Not a sign.
And that was all eleven months ago.
At forty-one years of age, Freddie Goodwin was resigned to remaining a local newspaper reporter for the rest of his days. He had always wanted to be either a marine engineer or a marine biologist, but his grades at Duke University were not good enough to gain him a place in the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic doctorate program.
Which more or less wrapped it up, deep-seawise, for Freddie. He decided that if he could not conduct scientific research on the great oceans of the world, he would write about them instead. And he would leave the academics to his much cleverer first cousin Kate Goodwin, with whom he had always been secretly and privately in love since he first met her, when she was just nineteen, after the death of her father…and his uncle.
Freddie set off into the rougher, more competitive path of journalism and was offered a place on his local newspaper, the Cape Cod Times, after submitting an incisive interview with a Greek sea captain who had been sufficiently thoughtless during a storm to dump a twenty-thousand-ton sugar freighter aground on Nauset Beach near Freddie’s family home.
He attracted the editor’s attention because of his somewhat nifty turn of phrase, and his obdurate tenacity in running the captain to ground in the back room of a Cypriot restaurant in south Boston. The purple pen, which had unhappily proved to be an insufficient weapon to impress the MIT professors, with their tyrannical insistence on FACTS, was just fine for the Times.
The news department in Hyannis also liked facts, but n
ot with the furtive missionary fervor of the scientists. Within a very few years Freddie Goodwin became the lead feature writer on the paper and could more or less pick his own assignments, unless something really big was happening over at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, where he was always a welcome visitor.
He was a bit of a hell-raiser by nature, a striking-looking man, and talented, and he probably could have made it in Boston or New York had he been able to tear himself away from Cape Cod. As it was he felt contented enough when his feature stories were syndicated to other papers, including the Washington Post. On reflection, he preferred to live along the humorous, unambitious edges of journalism.
Cape Cod, the narrow land of his youth, his family’s headquarters for four generations, would always be home. He had never married — some said because no one quite measured up to his beloved, unobtainable Kate — but he had his boat, he even had a lobsterman’s license, and he had a stream of girlfriends. In the summer he crewed in the Wianno Senior racing class, and he watched the Cape Cod Baseball League, supporting the Hyannis Mets. In the winter, when the population of the Cape crashes by about 80 percent, he tended to drink too much.
On occasional assignments “off-Cape,” as the locals referred to the world outside their sixty-five-mile-long peninsula, Freddie Goodwin quickly missed the sight of his homeland — not just Mulligan’s bar up in Dennisport, but also the great saltwater ponds, the marshes and the sweeping sandy coastline, the shallow, gentle waters of Nantucket Sound, and the soft warm breezes of the Gulf Stream, which wrap themselves around the western reaches of the Cape for six months of the year.
He particularly missed those gentle breezes as he stood alone in the shadow of the great windswept icy cliffs that surround Christmas Harbor on the island of Kerguelen. And he wept helplessly again for his lost Kate, and for all of the twenty-three Cape Cod seamen and six scientists who had vanished off the face of the earth on that fateful December morning almost a year previously.
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