Arch Patton

by James Strauss

  I finished my analysis. He stared back, inhaling a few more tokes.

  “Somebody like maybe an Assistant Cruise Director who drinks too much?”

  I thought about his conclusion, with surprise. I could place everything but motivation. Drinking didn’t seem to be an issue, although I was dead sure that Dutch was out under the pines somewhere drinking from the bottle he’d reclaimed from his trip back aboard the Zodiac.

  Right at that instant, the Easter Islander appeared back under our giant White Pine. He had no branches or firewood. In his hand was a half empty bottle of Bacardi Light, the cap off. He crawled to the base of the tree, and then leaned his back into it, holding the bottle out, as if offering us a drink.

  “I did it. I cut the chain,” he announced and then started to cry.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  The High Cliffs of Russia

  Dutch moved the bottle of Bacardi back to his lips, runnels of tears falling from his cheeks. I pried the half-empty bottle out of his clenched hand. I propped it back into a cleft between two nearby rocks.

  “Stop blubbering and get back out there,” I pointed toward the direction he had crawled in from. “Go on, we’ve got to have some warmth no matter what you’ve done, or might have done.”

  Dutch looked at me in shock, wiped his cheeks and got back to his hands and knees. He gave a quick glance over to Don before disappearing into the bracken.

  “What the hell?” Don blurted, eying the Bacardi bottle. “He just admitted that he’d sabotaged the ship and you send him away before he can say anything else?”

  I cooled to his words but waited until his upraised hands sank back to the needle bed. I replied to him, in my best Mission Commander voice.

  “We’ve got to survive here for God knows how long. Let’s pay attention to that mission first. You take the knife. Go cut some of those smaller branches for protection from the wind.”

  I shuddered from the cold, as another draft of icy damp air penetrated through to our camp. Our wet clothes had to be dried, and quickly, or our energy would begin to bleed away.

  “What about a shot from that bottle?” Don replied, without moving.

  I took the bottle in my hand, held it up, and drank down four long swallows. The Bacardi burned, but I didn’t cough. The fire of it revived me instantly. I handed the bottle over.

  “I don’t drink,” I said.

  Don mumbled without smiling, carefully cleaned the top with the palm of one hand, and then rubbed it on his sleeve, before drinking. When he brought the bottle back down there were only a couple of inches of liquid left in it. He handed it back.

  “What if he doesn’t say another word about the anchor?” he asked.

  I poured the rest of the rum onto the pile of dead dry needles I’d assembled for my fire pit base. Then I set it aside. I had plenty of experience in survival situations. One rule was to discard nothing. The prime rule, however, was to stop and think. Survival usually depended upon clear rational thought. More people died from bad decisions than from any other reasons, when lost in the bush. We were not lost, but we were completely cut off for an undetermined time. Don made no move to follow my previous instructions.

  “Botany Bay, you want to lead this expedition?” I inquired. He shook his head. I sighed. “Alright, but this is the last explanation I give until you do your part. We’re trapped on a small remote island in the Bering Sea. What is the likelihood that Dutch is not going to tell us even more than we want to hear before we get off?”

  He warmed to that, and then took the knife I had stuck into the ground in front of him. He crawled away.

  Within two hours of both men going out to perform their assignments we had a very comfortable fire going, clothing mounted on sticks around it, and a windbreak of intertwined pine branches encircling us. It was late in the day, according to my Breguet. I looked at the bezel of the expensive dive watch, turned to allow for the passage of eight hours, and dropped my arm back.

  “We’ll sleep when the clothes are dry,” I stated, then turned the steaming pieces once again. I sat back. Dutch appeared to be ready to fall asleep or pass out at any minute. Don was fully alert, although strange comical in only his undershirt and boxer shorts. We had the tops of our dry suits thrown over our shoulders. A warm fire heated only one side of a person at a time. Dutch had his undershirt on but leaned against the thick trunk of our sheltering pine. I pointed at him.

  “What about the anchor?” I asked.

  I put my hand down, then took a stick and poked the hot coals of our fire, not looking at Dutch. I waited in silence reflecting on just how great it was to have gasoline and 80 proof booze as accelerants.

  “I can’t go in,” Dutch forced out.

  I waited again, but he said no more.

  “Why can’t you go in?” I eventually asked, with some exasperation.

  Words rushed from the man, “Immigration is waiting for me. I don’t have papers. I had forged papers. They know. They’re waiting in port for us to land.”

  I focused on the man, little more than a huge boy.

  “In Russia? They’re waiting for you in Russia?” I could not believe what I was hearing. “Who the hell is waiting in Russia for you? We don’t need a Visa. The ship pays off the Commissar, and that’s it!”

  I tossed my stick into the fire to illustrate my disbelief. It threw bright sparks up as it hit. I had to quickly brush little hot embers from our drying clothes.

  “Russia?” Don said. “Who said that we’re going to Russia?”

  My mouth gaped wide.

  “We aren’t going to Russia?” I asked, weakly, beginning to reflect again that I had thrown my lot in with the expedition ship from hell, wherein normal physics did not apply. Don found my unease humorous.

  “No, but the world is round, we’ll eventually get there, but first we go to the Pribilofs further down south.” He pointed towards the direction from which we had come in on the Zodiac. “It’s just our tradition,” he offered, by way of logical explanation.

  I shook my head and turned to Dutch. “So, you think immigration is waiting for you in the Pribilofs, wherever the hell they are?” I grilled Dutch.

  “Yeah,” Dutch replied. “Got a radio message from St. Paul, the town there, on one of the islands.”

  I thought long and hard about his motivation.

  “And you believed by slipping the anchor, at just the right spot, you’d run the ship on the rocks and everything would be okay?” I held up my hands in wonderment.

  “Yeah,” he responded. “They’d get us all off and take us to the mainland. There’d be nobody there. Nobody who knew about my papers, anyway.”

  I just shook my head in utter disbelief.

  “Who are you? Forest Gump? Like immigration doesn’t have radios? Like they wouldn’t know we’d wrecked and be waiting? Like they wouldn’t figure out that only one guy aboard had a likely motive for pulling such idiocy?”

  I pointed out in the general direction of the anchor float we’d surfaced. Dutch simply wagged his own head slowly from side to side, his inebriation evident. I was afraid he’d start to cry again. I rotated the clothing on our vertical sticks before speaking. “Here’s the deal. I have business in Russia. Important business. I also have certain powers with immigration. The kind of powers that will allow you to get a permanent visa instantly. I’m presuming that the Pribilof Islands are in the United States.”

  I stopped to think

  “You’d help me?” Dutch said, plaintively.

  “For a price,” I said.

  Dutch deflated a little. “What’s the price? I don’t have any money at all.”

  I snickered. “I don’t want money. That I have. I want you to become an assistant in my ‘business’ enterprise. You do what I tell you. And I don’t want you drinking another drop until the Lindy picks us up if you’ve got more
stashed. When we hit Provideniya, no drinking there either. That’s it.”

  I finished and sized him up.

  “That’s it? That’s all? For a permanent visa to the United States?” Dutch responded, in disbelief. “I’ll do it, whatever it is,” he said, with very little delay. After a few seconds, he went on. “What about the Pribilofs and the immigration guys?” he asked.

  I snickered a second time.

  “Leave them to me when we get there.”

  “So we’re back to who the hell are you, really?” Don chimed in.

  I killed the question with silence. So he turned to Dutch. “I’d be careful Dutch. He’s probably going in to get a nuclear warhead or something like that.” Don had tried the back door, but with the same result. But Dutch replied in a nanosecond.

  “I don’t care what he’s after. I’m in. If they send me back to Easter Island I’m a dead man walking. I’ll be a nothing for the rest of my life.”

  Don stared first at Dutch, then back at me. His expression changed. My brow furrowed, as I x-rayed him.

  “Why that look, Don, is there somebody else in immigration trouble?”

  Don grimaced ruefully back at me.

  “The Basque?” I theorized.

  Don spoke in a voice almost too quiet to hear. “You need two assistants?”

  I looked at Don, then back at Dutch, then at Don again. We laughed together. We laughed for a full minute.

  “Alright, it’s a deal,” I agreed, holding out my hand. Dutch took it but Don held back, his head going up to the side like he was listening to something faint in the distance.

  “Winds changed. Which means the current has changed. Which means the surf’s changed.”

  I took my hand back from Dutch’s huge grasp.

  “So…” I said, tentatively.

  “The Zodiac,” Don declared. “We never pulled it up. That’s no thousand-dollar item. We need to check it. Give me my clothes.”

  We moved fast, dressing, and then feeding the fire so it would be burning when we returned. In single file, on our hands and knees, we followed Don’s lead back through the bracken. We were establishing a hole-like path, I recognized. The needles were soft and pliable beneath our drumming hands and knees, but occasionally wet. We’d have to dry out our clothes again upon our return.

  Don reached the edge of the cliff first, stuck his head over, and then promptly pulled it back. He held out one hand.

  “Stay down, we’ve got company.”

  I tried to move forward, but he held me back.

  “Russians,” he warned, emphatically in a whisper.

  “Don,” I said, patiently, “we’re eight hundred feet up with the wind in our faces. You can talk. Now what the hell difference is it to us who’s down there. Let’s accept their offer to assist us.”

  I liked my own conclusion. Don shook his head, and then Dutch shook his, which gave me a sinking feeling.

  “Alright, give it to me…” I said and waited for an answer that I knew I did not want to hear.

  “These little islands are in Russia, not the United States. Five years ago some idiot American intelligence agents infiltrated the Russian coast from one of these islands. The Russkies were irate. Now here we are. There are no identification marks on that Zodiac down there. It’s the black Zodiac we never got around to putting the ship’s name on. Get my drift?”

  My eyes got wide. We were in more trouble than I would ever have considered.

  “What kind of Russians are down there?” I asked, a bit more subdued. I eased carefully to the edge of the escarpment and peeked over. A mile offshore sat a white fishing trawler. A small boat from the trawler had landed below. A few men in crummy sailor-type clothes worked through the rocks to the bottom of the riprap pile we had ascended. I watched them get back in their own small skiff. They beat their way out through the now larger surf.

  “Damn,” Don said, they didn’t try to take the Zodiac.” He turned to face me. “They couldn’t have missed our tracks. They didn’t take the valuable boat because they’re afraid we’re up here, armed, and watching them, or because they’ve already radioed the Russian Navy and the big guys are on their way here.”

  All three of us lay there and thought. I looked back over. The small boat had reached the trawler. It was taken up quickly. The ship was underway in less than a minute. Don and Dutch both closed their eyes at the same time. Their expressions were not good.

  “You got any pull with Russian immigration?” Dutch asked.

  We made it back through the rabbit hole channel to our makeshift camp.

  “We’ve got to sleep,” I insisted. “It doesn’t matter what’s coming, or who’s coming. We have to be in shape to meet whatever it is or whoever they are. In the morning we’ll haul the radio out and start calling. Maybe the World Discoverer will be close enough to hear.”

  Don laid back, his clothes drying on him, steam coming up from the side that was facing the fire.

  “If they come back,” he said, calmly.

  I rolled over on the bed of soft but prickly pine needles. “Oh, he’ll be back. That Nazi Borman will come for his anchor. That’s a lock. And Yemaya doesn’t leave her charges to die in the wilderness, either.”

  I preferred that thought. I wondered how Yemaya’s charges did die, just before I dropped off into a deep sleep.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  Down to the Sea

  I awoke to find the fire burned out. Not even a plume of smoke came from the pile of ash. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and face. We had the Bic and my Stryker flint if re-ignition were necessary. If we remained atop the island plateau for another day, we’d need the fire. I was hungry, but there would be no food. I scanned my fellow adventurers. My men. Both slept the sleep of the dead, as there was not a snore to be heard. I moved closer and tapped Don’s boot. He opened his eyes with a start and then grimaced.

  “I used to be able to drink that stuff by the gallon,” he complained, massaging his temples between both hands.

  Dutch sat up. He didn’t rub anything. I assumed that his lack of obvious pain, from the amount of alcohol imbibed the day before, had to do with just how much he was accustomed to consuming on a regular basis.

  “I’ll build a fire,” I announced, gathering together pieces of branches and twigs we had not burned the night before. I took the Stryker out of the canvas bag. It took only three “punches” down on the device to catch the wood afire. No kindling, or even dry needles. It was amazing. I piled on the smaller branches.

  “What are you guys going to do?” I asked Dutch and Don.

  They looked rather puzzled.

  “What is it that you command, oh great leader?” Don joked.

  Then they both looked to the heavens. I glowered. Mutiny in the ranks was ways down the road, but the condition of enlisted troops bonding together to resist officer commands was already evident. It would have to be monitored.

  “Don, is there chicory or maybe green sorrel on this chunk of stone?”

  Don nodded. “Probably. It’s damn near everywhere at this latitude. I’ll see what I can find.”

  Dutch looked at me with a question on his forehead.

  “Tea. With one of those herbs we can make morning tea,” I explained. “Go find a puddle of water where you can rinse out the outboard cover. Fill it with about a quart, or so, then come back.”

  Both men made ready to move out.

  “Don,” I said, stopping them. “Give me the radio. While you’re gone I’ll head to the north rim and give it a try.”

  I held out my hand. He plopped the Icom transceiver into it. He pointed at the radio.

  “Turn it on, modulate the squelch, and then push the red button to transmit. Don’t worry about having to wait to listen. It’s dual band.”

  Both men went to hands and knees and then disappeared into
the passageway we’d worn through the bracken.

  When the fire was going strong, I crawled away toward the North rim. It wasn’t far, maybe fifty yards, but the going was rough. There were a lot more broken up and downed pines as I got close to the edge. Finally, I reached a clear area of stone just before the drop-off. I peered over a dizzying drop. Eight hundred feet straight down, but I noted that the waves did not actually strike the base. There were many broken stones piled between the surf and face of the cliff. The ten to fifteen-foot surf struck those rocks. One could not possibly land any craft there. Nonetheless, the way things were laid out gave me an idea.

  I pushed the button on the transmitter and called for the ship. I felt funny calling for the Lindy, as it sounded like I was calling for Charles Lindbergh. Lindy was a lousy name for a ship, even if it was only a nickname, I concluded. I called constantly like my son had called me early in the morning when he’d been four or five years old. “Dad … Dad … Dad … Dad … Dad …” and on and on forever, until I came out of the warm bed and took care of him. After what seemed an hour, but was more like ten minutes, I received a scratchy transmission.

  “Thank you, God,” I said to the clouds and the surf. “What’s your position?” I asked, hopefully.

  “This is Third Mate Günter, on duty. Our position is approximately twenty-seven miles north of your position. We should arrive in position at the anchor float in three hours. We are making eight knots.”

  I distanced myself from the radio as if it was a foreign object under scrutiny. Typical German, I thought to myself. No questions about our condition, exactly where we were or anything. The object was to retrieve the anchor. The three of us, abandoned, were merely there to be picked up. I pressed the red button angrily.

  “Third Mate Günter, you would be advised to proceed at flank speed, as we have a visual at the location of the float. A foreign trawler has laid to, and the crew is examining it.”