Ice Brothers

by Sloan Wilson

  “At least there are no Krauts up there,” Ansak said, leaned back in his swivel chair and lit a cigarette.

  “We’ll probably get to the east coast too,” Paul continued easily. “Anyway, we have a long voyage ahead. It will be months before we get to any officers’ clubs.”

  “Tough.”

  “Any chance of buying a little booze to ward off the chill?”

  There was a quickening of interest in Ansak’s blue eyes and Paul knew that at least he was not in for a moral lecture or a discussion of laws and regulations.

  “How much booze do you want?”

  “Four big cases, maybe six.”

  “A hundred dollars a bottle is the going price up here if you can find the stuff. When you hit it lucky, you can get a twenty-four-bottle case for two grand.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Of course that’s for whiskey, gin or vodka. I can get you sweet stuff for less. They send a lot of cordials and liqueurs up here that don’t go so good at the clubs.”

  “What do they go for?”

  “About half the price of whiskey, but the sweet stuff has just as much kick. I’ve drunk it myself so much I’ve come to like it.”

  “Could you find me six cases?”

  “Of the sweet stuff, yes. That will be twelve hundred dollars a case, seven thousand, two hundred dollars.”

  “Can you make it six thousand cash for the lot?”

  “Six and a half grand. Can you pick it up at the warehouse or do you want it delivered?”

  “We’re anchored out in the fjord. I can bring our boat into any wharf, but we don’t have a truck. I’ll need maybe twenty-four hours to get some cash. Will you take an officer’s personal check on a stateside bank?”

  “It will be his ass if it bounces. What kind of a boat do you have?”

  “Just a twenty-five-foot launch, but it will take six cases easy enough.”

  “Is it in good shape?”

  “Brand new. Why?”

  “I’ve been looking for a boat. We don’t necessarily have to make a cash deal.”

  “Can’t you requisition a boat?”

  “Not for recreation. The guys at the base like to go fishing. And they’ve moved all the Eskies to a settlement across the fjord. Some of the guys like to visit them.”

  “You want me to trade the ship’s boat?” Paul asked incredulously.

  “You could say it sank and requisition a new one.”

  “I don’t know how long it would be before we could get one.”

  “What else have you got to trade?”

  “A little ivory we got from the Eskies. Not a hell of a lot.”

  “Do you carry cargo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me go over your manifest. Maybe you got something we need.”

  “Like what?”

  “Radios. Electric heaters. Small generators. Steaks. The guys don’t live too good up here. We can use anything that would make us comfortable.”

  “There are three generators in our cargo, but the Danes would raise hell up the line if we didn’t deliver them.”

  “Say they were never delivered to you. Manifests are messed up all the time and nobody ever bothers to straighten them out. There’s a war on.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Paul said, wondering if he really meant it.

  After arranging for the Arluk to moor alongside a freighter at the wharf and for the crew to be admitted to a recreation hall, Paul got in the motorboat and went back to his ship. He found Nathan, who was still confined to his quarters, reading in his bunk.

  “I can get the booze,” he said. “Six and a half grand for six cases, or we can trade for it.”

  “Trade what?”

  “They want our boat or stuff we can steal from the cargo.”

  “Our boat? That’s supposed to be our lifeboat for God’s sake! And we’ll need it whenever we’re anchored out. Would you really trade our only boat for booze?”

  “They also want generators. We have three in the hold. We’re supposed to take them to a weather station somewhere near Thule.”

  “You’d trade them? That would be sabotage. The weather station probably couldn’t operate without them.”

  “If we can’t trade, they want six-and-a-half grand.”

  “I’ll pay my half if they’ll take a check. Can you come up with cash?”

  “I have about twelve hundred dollars,” Paul said, remembering his winnings from past poker games. “Maybe I can get the rest.”

  That afternoon Paul went to the officers’ club as soon as it opened. The bar was crowded, but to his surprise, he found no one playing cards.

  “Our C.O. cracked down on gambling hard,” a lieutenant commander told him. “Too many guys were going bad into debt. If you want a game, go up to the barracks where the civilian construction workers hang out. They got games going there around the clock, but hang onto your shirt.”

  The construction workers were playing at round tables made out of huge wooden reels which had held steel cable. A half dozen poker games and two blackjack games were in progress in the back of a bunkhouse which smelled of kerosene, tobacco, and stale sweat. As soon as Paul walked in, a burly bald man at the nearest table asked him if he wanted to take a hand, and Paul regarded his eager hospitality as a bad sign. Most of the men wore dirty khaki trousers and no shirts over their gray winter underwear. Few had shaved since coming to Greenland, and they were a piratical looking lot. Cash was used instead of chips, there were no limits and the betting appeared reckless.

  They were playing ordinary draw poker. At the beginning Paul played very conservatively, a decision which was easy because he was dealt uniformly poor hands. He had a feeling, unusual for him, that this was not his lucky night. The men were drinking only beer, and they sipped little of that. They were too intent on their cards to talk much, but Paul guessed that they were friends who had played together a lot. Obviously they were old hands at cards, casually observing all the rules, written and unwritten. The burly bald man handled the deck almost too deftly when he dealt, but not smoothly enough to be making a point of it. When Paul was dealt four tens, he bet for the first time, was raised by a hundred dollars by the bald man, called him and lost to his four queens.

  After paying for his loss, Paul said, “Thanks a lot. This is too rich for my blood,” and stood up. The men laughed and urged him to have another try, but he left the building without comment. He didn’t know whether his luck was bad, whether the others were cheating, or whether they simply were more skillful.

  His failure to win at cards depressed Paul. As he crossed the decks of the freighter alongside which the Arluk was moored, he saw a large Coast Guard cutter going alongside a wharf nearby. She carried many boats, gigs, motor whaleboats and small landing craft. Suddenly possessed by an idea, Paul went aboard her and asked to talk to the executive officer. When he identified himself as the executive officer of the Arluk, the executive officer of the cutter, a tall urbane Academy lieutenant commander, asked him to his spacious wardroom for a cup of coffee. The officers of the big cutters, Paul sensed, thought of the men on the converted trawlers as orphans, but they apparently admired them for enduring so many hardships. The lieutenant commander was sympathetic when Paul said that the Arluk had lost her only boat and hated to head north without one.

  “Hell, we can sign a boat over to you and draw a new one when we go home next month. What happened to your boat?”

  “Got crushed in the ice. We sent it ahead to scout out a lead, and two bergs just closed around it like a vise. Splintered it. We were lucky to get the men off.”

  “Boy, that ice can be a bitch! Glad to help. What kind of boat do you want?”

  “A motor whaleboat would be fine,” Paul said, reflecting that those craft were stronger and roomier than the light launches issued to the trawlers.

  “Do you want to take it right away?”

  “We’re supposed to head north pretty soon, I think.”

 
“I’ll have the papers made out and get the boat lowered. While you’re waiting, would you like some ice cream? I understand you can’t get it on the trawlers.”

  “Great,” Paul said. “Do you have strawberry?”

  Once he got the motor whaleboat, there was a good deal of fast footwork he had to do to complete the deal. Although Ansak was delighted to get the launch, he refused to give honest booze for it and they finally settled on six cases of the sweet stuff. Mowrey was appalled by the thought of drinking triple sec, crème de menthe, and crème de cacao endlessly, but the cartons included a lot of Southern Comfort and various kinds of brandy which were acceptable, and all of it was high-proof stuff. The idea of trading the launch for booze and getting a better boat in the bargain appealed to Mowrey mightily.

  “Boy,” he said to Paul, “you deserve the best fitness report I can give you. I wish you’d been with me in the bootlegging days. We’d both be millionaires.”

  The enlisted men soon learned about the deal and were also full of admiration for Paul, especially when he promised them two cases of the booze to be consumed at the next beer bust ashore. The skipper wouldn’t mind giving up some of the green crème de menthe, he figured.

  Nathan was pleased by the arrangement too, though he said it made him feel damn strange to get his freedom and good reputation back in exchange for a crooked deal involving a bunch of lousy booze and a stolen boat.

  “If I’d made the deal myself, maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad,” he said. “Paul, I still figure I owe you. After all, you arranged everything. You got me off the hook. Three grand or so would be a small price.”

  “Come on, Nathan … I’m not out a cent, and you were getting a raw deal.”

  “Well, I owe you one,” Nathan said. “I owe you a big one. Someday I’ll find a way to pay you back.”

  Warmed by the admiration of the captain and all the other men aboard his ship, Paul was happy for the first time since joining the service. It seemed probable that within a year Mowrey would be transferred to one of the hundreds of bigger ships which were being built every month, and with his blessing, Paul would become the captain of the Arluk, a position which he somehow felt to be a unique honor and proof of his worth. Of course Mowrey could always change his mind, but, Paul figured, it would be hard for him to contradict the glowing fitness report which he had signed without dating, and which Paul now kept hidden with his money, folded between the leaves of Knight’s Modern Seamanship, a large volume which he kept in a drawer under his bunk.

  The question of whether he actually could navigate the ship safely without Mowrey did not scare him as much as it had at the start of the cruise. The captain was letting him maneuver the vessel around wharves now, as well as in the ice, and Paul was beginning to look at his sextant as a trusted friend. It was still difficult for him to find his way in the ice pack along the mountainous coast on the many days when fog obscured the sky, but he was beginning to realize that some of Mowrey’s magical “sea sense” was simply familiarity with waters he had often sailed. The more Paul saw of Greenland, the easier the job of piloting would become. The question of whether he would be capable of taking the ship to the east coast to help Hansen look for German ships scared him too much to think about much. The radio messages which the Nanmak and Commander GreenPat exchanged told the same old story of their sister ship pushing slowly through heavy ice and poor visibility in pursuit of radio will-o’-the-wisps, paint marks on the ice and assorted bits of trash. It was possible, Mowrey said, that the Germans had given up on weather ships after losing one of them, and were making their observations entirely from long-range aircraft. Nathan pointed out that it was impossible to tell much about the wind from an aircraft, but even he acknowledged that the Germans might have found a way to do that, perhaps with the help of balloons.

  After the Arluk left the air base and headed north for the small village of Upernavik, Nathan had a strange feeling that nothing was going to change much. The fact that the sun never set created a sense of timelessness. The scenery of the ice pack and the distant rust-colored mountains was spectacular, but except for shifting veils of cloud, always the same. Often they spent days jammed in the ice, and Mowrey, happy with his endless supply of Southern Comfort and assorted brandies, spent more and more time in his bunk, leaving the operation of the ship up to Paul. No one was in a hurry to go anywhere. Sometimes they stopped the ship to drift in clear water while the men fished. The cod were so thick that it was unnecessary even to use bait. Seth showed the men how to lash hooks together to make jigs, and men soon learned how to snag fish in great quantity. Cookie invented dozens of ways to prepare fresh cod, and Farmer salted down barrels of fillets. When it became clear that they were not going to spend much time in port, and even less in places where the enlisted men were allowed ashore, Mowrey gave permission to give a few parties for the men off watch while the ship was jammed in the ice. Paul stood on the well deck, with the men washing down strips of salt cod with beer and green créme de menthe as gulls circled all around the surrounding mountains of ice, swooping in occasionally to claim morsels of fish tossed to them by the men. On such occasions Flags often played the harmonica, and the men sang to the plaintive tones of “The Wabash Cannon Ball” or “You Are My Sunshine,” which somehow seemed the theme song of the Greenland Patrol.

  As spring drifted into summer, the weather never seemed to change much, the intense blue of the sky obscured by fog near noon when the sun was hottest, but clear most of the rest of the time. Despite Greenland’s reputation for being eternally cold, the men often worked in shirtsleeves when there was no wind.

  The only person who seemed impatient with this changeless life was Nathan. “Damn it, shouldn’t we get to Upernavik, drop our stuff and go on with the run?” he asked Paul.

  “The skipper says there’s no point in hurrying. From Upernavik we’re supposed to go to Thule, and he says the ice won’t open up there until July. Hell, Thule is less than nine hundred miles from the damn North Pole.”

  “I never thought the war would be like this,” Nathan said. “All we do is drift around.”

  “Don’t be in such a hurry to get shot at.”

  Nathan smiled, but he did not appear amused and soon went to the radio shack, where he spent most of his time trying to garner news about the Nanmak, and other news about the war in Europe and the Pacific.

  Before reaching Upernavik, they received orders to stop at a small Eskimo settlement about a hundred miles to the south of that village, which had run out of dog food.

  “Dog food!” Nathan exploded. “People are fighting for their lives and we’re off to deliver dog food.”

  “That’s as important as gas to these people,” Mowrey said. “They don’t go nowhere without it. Maybe the Eskies here will be the real thing, without a lot of Danes watching over them.”

  This settlement lay in the center of a large bay, which was shaped like a horseshoe, instead of a narrow fjord. The water lay as smooth as polished steel, and there were only a few icebergs inside the embrace of the rocky points. No wind blew as they approached, and smoke from the sod huts which Nathan studied through his binoculars rose straight up to ash-colored clouds, behind which the eternal sun glowed like a small pile of embers. The still air was much warmer than usual, and the men unbuttoned their parkas. Mowrey returned to his bunk after identifying the settlement, and Paul felt confident as he approached the shore slowly, keeping an eye on the fathometer. When the bay shoaled to fifty feet, he stopped the engine and waited for the vessel to glide to a stop before dropping the anchor. Just as he was about to give that order, Mowrey appeared on the bridge beside him.

  “Hold it,” he said. “Wait a minute.”

  Through the binoculars Mowrey studied the gravel beach ahead. “You seen any kayaks?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  Lowering his glasses, Mowrey stared all around and inhaled sharply several times.

  “I don’t like the weather,” he said, tapped the bar
ometer, inspected the wet and dry thermometers on the wing of the bridge, and returned to his cabin to study his chart.

  “We won’t anchor,” he said. “Bring her up to full ahead. Course one-three-eight.”

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  “Tell Boats I want all our mooring lines and spare anchors rousted out on deck, especially the stern anchor. On the double. See to it. I’ll take over here.”

  While the deck force hurried to carry out these orders, Paul returned to the bridge and watched with astonishment while Mowrey paralleled the shore of the bay, staying terrifyingly close to the high rocky cliffs, which towered over the ship. Finding a tiny bay within the bay, not much more than a cleft in the rocks behind a small granite knoll, Mowrey stopped the engine, reversed it, and briskly executed a complex maneuver. After dropping both bow anchors, he backed the ship into the cleft of the rock. Placing the stern with fenders against a granite slope, he sent men scrambling ashore to place small anchors in any crack they could find. With these, he secured the ship in a spiderweb of mooring lines. While he was still using the winch to take up the slack on the bow anchor chains, Paul heard a roar like the approach of an express train. The onslaught of the wind was so sudden that he didn’t even see it come across the bay. He was blinded by a shrieking gale which beat the surrounding water to a froth and sent sheets of heavy salt spray across the decks even in that snug niche. The ship trembled and reared like a demented horse in a stall. Some of the men were blown off their feet and rolled across the deck, while others clung to rails. Even shouts could not be heard. The canvas cover of the new whaleboat suddenly ballooned and took off like a huge flapping bird. Ducking into the pilothouse, Mowrey turned on a clear-view screen, a whirling glass disk set in a big port. With that deflecting the sheets of spume he could see over the bow. Peering over his shoulder, Paul saw that the wind had whipped the water in the bay into rapids of white water which were going out like a rushing tide, leaving a seething caldron of rock and whirlpools behind.