Ice Brothers

by Sloan Wilson

  Bob Williams, the new ensign, was one of those kept aboard, and he looked puzzled as he approached Paul on the bridge soon after the boat cast off.

  “Sir, may I ask why we’re sending a boat in there?”

  “To see if we can find anything we can use.”

  The ensign looked worried. “Pardon me for asking, sir, but is it legal to take stuff from the navy?”

  “Call it salvage.”

  “Couldn’t we get in trouble?”

  Paul gave him his newly acquired sweet smile. “Mr. Williams, everyone aboard this ship is in trouble. I suggest that you just get used to it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But it’s our business to survive trouble, and so far, we’ve done all right.”

  “Yes, sir.” Looking a little more hopeful, Bob Williams went to the forecastle for coffee, and, no doubt, deep thought.

  As the whaleboat steered a circuitous course through the ice, Nathan kept studying the destroyer with his binoculars. The fear that men would suddenly appear on deck to forbid all depredations grew in him, for this discovery of a goldmine of military hardware seemed much too good to be true. Nothing moved on the decks and a thin layer of snow on the top deck there was innocent of footprints. As the whaleboat found a narrow lead it could follow through the ice directly to the waist of the destroyer, Nathan could see why the ship had been abandoned. From a short distance she looked intact, but the big icebergs had pressed progressively smaller ones against her, and some flinty blue growlers had been shoved right through her surprisingly thin steel skin, ripping it open in jagged slits both above and below the waterline from bow to stern. The torn metal was already rusty, and Nathan could see why destroyers were called “tin cans.” Caught between the rocks and the ice, the whole hull had been bent as though it had died writhing in a desperate attempt to escape.

  The ornate boarding ladder had been left over the side, but it led only to crushed ice. Coming alongside the derelict thirty feet farther forward, Nathan told Guns to climb aboard, which he did, after tossing his tools to the deck, where they clattered loudly enough to awaken anyone sleeping below. No head appeared above a hatch as the men of the Arluk tied up their whaleboat and swarmed over the rail.

  “Stick together,” Nathan said. “We’ll start aft and examine everything, first on deck and then below.”

  Although the light covering of snow at first concealed it, the deck was littered with articles of clothes, life jackets and other objects which had been dropped in an apparently hasty abandonment of the ship. Perhaps the ice had closed in on her suddenly in a fast midnight gale, Nathan thought, imagining how the rending of all that steel must have sounded. No boats were in the davits and the empty falls swung in the wind. Probably the boats had ferried the crew to the waiting tanker, or the salvage tugs if they had ever arrived.

  The destroyer’s depth charges, 600-pound monsters twice the usual size, were still on their racks at the stern. They would have been removed if anyone had taken Mowrey’s drastic plan seriously. Several hatches had been left open, more evidence of panic. On the bow a short length of the steel towing cable lay in a tangle, its broken end exploded by strain into a huge cone of wire splinters. Apparently the salvage tug had arrived and had towed with all its power.

  Returning to the stern, Nathan led his men down an open hatch to the petty officers’ quarters, a confused mass of overturned chairs, mattresses which had slid from the upper tiers of bunks, half-packed seabags, blankets and a scattering of playing cards. Apparently there had been quite a jolt when the ice ground into the hull.

  Suddenly impatient with an orderly search of the derelict, Nathan led his men directly to the bridge, which was as neat as that of a ship under way. His eyes went directly to a gray metal box on a pedestal near the wheel. A black plastic cone extended from the top of it. Nathan’s heart beat fast as he ran to it and put his hands on the knobs on a control panel. Peering into the cone, he turned the set on. There was no hum of electricity, no trace of a glow on the screen. Of course the batteries and generators were dead, but the set certainly looked intact.

  “Hell, we can hook it up on our ship,” Nathan said. “Let’s get it off here. I’ll make it work!”

  Eagerly the men of the Arluk started to help him to dismantle the set. While they were disconnecting it, Nathan went to the radar room directly abaft the bridge. The big radar set for scanning the skies for planes had been smashed with mallets, one of which lay on the deck. Before abandoning ship, all such secret equipment should have been destroyed, but in the confusion the little navigational radar had been forgotten. Nathan thanked God for the ability of the navy to foul up and began looking for spare parts. He soon found lockers and drawers full of them, and with a variety of tools.

  “Mr. Green, can you really make that set work aboard our ship?” Guns asked.

  “You bet your life,” Nathan replied with a grin. “With this stuff, I could build a set.”

  “Can you keep it working at sea?” Boats asked.

  “Damn right!”

  “Will we have enough juice for it?” Sparks asked.

  “Sure, but we’ll steal a generator if we have to. Now you guys get this stuff into the boat as soon as you can. Guns, you come and help me inspect the rest of the ship.”

  Everywhere they went aboard the destroyer they saw equipment and supplies which would be useful aboard the trawler. The destroyer’s freezers had not thawed in the Greenland air and still held enough steak to feed the Arluk’s crew for years, as well as countless gallons of ice cream. Cookie exclaimed in delight when he saw racks of new kitchen equipment in the galley. The quartermaster found sextants and range finders far better than anything which had been issued by the Coast Guard. The most delighted of all was Guns, who got Nathan’s permission to stay on deck, examining the armament. His striker, a boyish seaman named Blake who wanted to be a gunner’s mate, accompanied him. In awe they stopped by the turret of a double five-inch gun which was the size of a small automobile. The wind had loosened the lacings of the canvas cover, and on impulse Guns took it off to admire the gleaming beauty of the polished barrels.

  “Boy, I wish we could get one of those babies aboard our ship,” Blake said. “Then we could talk in a language the Germans understand.”

  Guns opened a door to the turret and went in. Blake followed and they sat in iron bucket seats, fingering the polished controls and peering through the sights.

  “Could you sink a battleship with this?” Blake asked.

  “Damned near, if you got close enough.”

  “How far can this shoot?”

  “A good five miles,” Guns replied, though he was not at all sure.

  “Boy, I really wish we had one of these. With this I guess we could fight the devil himself.”

  “Come on, we got to go look at the forties,” Guns said. “We actually might be able to use one of them.”

  “What can a forty do?”

  “It’s good against planes, not much else.”

  Guns found it difficult to tear himself away from the lethal five-inchers. Since his father had given him his first .22 for hunting squirrels in Vermont, he had been fascinated with anything that could shoot, and this was the finest engine of destruction he had ever been privileged to touch. Although he had been barely able to get through high school, his intelligence was surprisingly quick and his knowledge extensive when it came to guns of any kind. Lovingly he explored the recoil mechanism of these monsters, the machinery for pointing and training them by electricity or by hand.

  “Ain’t nothing really but a damn big twenty-two,” he said to Blake.

  After inspecting the 40-millimeter guns, which looked like toys after the five-inchers, Guns returned to his loves. With a little experimentation, he learned how to disengage the power mechanisms and train the guns by hand, marveling at the ease with which it could be done. The breech mechanisms were complex, but not really difficult for him to understand.

  It did not take Natha
n long to detach the radar set on the bridge of the destroyer. While he worked at that, Boats and Sparks climbed the mast and took off the revolving metal mesh crescent which emitted the high frequency waves that produced the echoes which the complex device timed to ascertain distance. They worked so eagerly that the whole job didn’t take them much more than an hour.

  When the radar with all its components was safely loaded aboard the whaleboat, Nathan went looking for Guns and Blake. He found Guns leaning against a bulkhead staring at the five-inch guns almost in a trance. Blake was standing nervously beside him.

  “What’s the matter, Guns?” Nathan asked.

  “Sir, I think I’ve figured something out. We shouldn’t bother with those forties. They’re not much good against a ship. I think we could get one of these aboard.”

  “A gun like that would sink us,” Nathan said. “It must weigh five tons.”

  Sparks and Boats grinned.

  “Sir, will you listen to me a minute?” Guns said.

  “Sure.”

  “The guts of these guns, the barrels and the breeches and the recoil mechanism, don’t weigh so much. Most of the weight is in the turret and in the mechanism for pointing and training them. Our ship could stand the weight of the guts of one of these guns without the mounts.”

  “You want a gun you can’t train and you can’t point?” Boats asked.

  “Boats, you ever see a fighter plane?” Guns retorted with a withering glance.

  “You plan to put wings on the Arluk too?”

  “The guns of a fighter plane are fixed,” Guns replied. “You aim them by pointing the whole plane at the target. I bet we could fix the guts of one of these guns on the bow of the trawler. That could give us a chance if we ever met a big Kraut. It sure would surprise hell out of him.”

  “How much would the guts of one gun weigh?” Nathan asked.

  “Maybe less than a ton.”

  “How would you hold it in place?”

  “That’s the hard part. But I bet we could bolt it or even wire it down with steel cable secure enough to let us get off a few rounds. Even one shot could make the difference if we were fairly close.”

  “You might have something there,” Nathan said.

  “If we could lash one gun down on the head of the forecastle, we could service the breeches from the well deck. That way it would be almost invisible.”

  “Do you think we could find any specs on those guns?”

  “I found a pamphlet in a ready box. I don’t understand most of it, but I understand them guns.”

  “I’ll come back and look it over with you when I get this radar working for us,” Nathan said. “I don’t know if we can make it work, but you sure got one hell of an idea.”

  Paul was waiting on the well deck when the whaleboat came alongside the Arluk.

  “Request permission to bring radar aboard, sir,” Nathan said with a grin.

  “You got it! Can you make it work?”

  “I got enough spare parts to build a set if I have to. It shouldn’t take long to get the whole thing together.”

  It took Nathan only about four hours to install the radar set on the bridge of the Arluk, to hook it up with the ship’s electrical system, and to install the antenna on the signal mast. When the job was done the men gathered around the pilothouse to watch him turn the set on. Bending over the hood, he adjusted the knobs. Gradually the little screen turned from gray to green. A thin beam of light turned like the sweep hand of a watch and traced a rough glowing chart of the surrounding fjord.

  “Take a look, skipper,” Nathan said with a smile.

  Paul bent over the hood and looked with something like reverence as he imagined what this magic eye could mean in fog or Arctic night while they were chasing a German ship or being chased.

  “Nathan, you’ve probably just saved all our lives,” he said.

  Nathan smiled but said, “Don’t forget that the Krauts probably have some kind of radar too. What we need now is a bigger gun.”

  In considerable detail he explained Guns’s idea about putting one of the destroyer’s five-inch guns in a fixed position on the bow of the trawler. “It could work only at point-blank range,” he said. “It would be like the guns on the old sailing ships.”

  “Look, you’re the engineer,” Paul replied. “Make it work if you can.”

  “I’d like to steal some depth charges too. I think I can figure a way to activate them with time fuses or even by radio. We might be able to set them out as mines. There should be lots of ways to use all that explosive force.”

  Paul nodded. “I was afraid the rattlesnake on the stack looked too much like a worm. Damned if I’m not beginning to hear it rattle.”

  CHAPTER 30

  With the tools they found aboard the destroyer, Guns was able to disassemble one five-inch gun, but the job of loading the barrel aboard the Arluk at first seemed impossible. Paul finally found a way to moor the trawler on the seaward edge of the ice pack which pressed against the destroyer. With steel cables the heavy barrel was winched over ice peaks and through ice valleys to the decks of the trawler. The men worked night and day, afraid that some passing ship would observe and report their activities.

  Despite the rush, it still took them three days to secure the big cannon on the bow of the Arluk in such a way that it would not interfere with the small gun already there. It was Nathan who worked out a complex method of securing the barrel to the deck, which he reinforced with steel beams cut from the destroyer with one of her own acetylene torches. Chief Banes supervised the cutting and welding of steel bands and plates which were bolted to the oak. Boats also wound the barrel with steel cables that ran through holes they bored to allow it to grip the whole deck structure. No one had ever seen a gun installed like that, and they were afraid even to fire it for target practice, but they all were sure that they could get off at least a few shots in action. The gun pointed inflexibly ahead. With its slight fixed elevation it would have a range of several miles, they guessed, though no one pretended to be sure. One thing was certain: any ship coming close to the bow of the little trawler could get a surprise. The thought of that made the men of the Arluk feel much better.

  It took two more days to cut a path over the ice pack and to roll the heavy depth charges along it to the Arluk. Because he was supposed to send a weekly position report to GreenPat, Paul made up a story about being caught in the ice near the entrance to the passage that led to the east coast. If they were observed before they got there by ships or planes, the results could be embarrassing.

  It was the fifth of September before they were finally ready to leave the destroyer. The Arluk was low in the water, but her ballast of depth charges had been carefully placed, and she was perfectly trimmed. If they ran into a gale in the open sea, she would be dangerously sluggish, but Paul counted on spending most of the winter in the ice pack. Certainly there was risk in loading the ship this way and Paul realized that the chance of hitting anything with a fixed gun was slight but at least he didn’t feel like an ox driven to slaughter as he finally headed the Arluk’s bow out of Narsarssuak Fjord.

  They left at night to avoid observation as much as possible until they reached the point where Paul had already reported their position. The September gales were building and heavy clouds obscured the moon and stars. Fortunately the wind was offshore, and the sea was relatively calm five miles off the edge of the ice pack. Standing on the bridge, Paul could see nothing but blackness ahead, and it was an incredible relief to peer at the miraculous screen of the radar, which gave him his distance from both the shore and the ice pack, and warned him of stray bergs ahead. Nathan stood by the controls, occasionally adjusting them to get clear images. Several of the crew found excuses to visit the bridge and get a peek at this wondrous invention.

  “Nathan, when it really comes down to helping this ship survive in the Arctic, this radar is the best thing we’ve got,” Paul said suddenly. “We wouldn’t have it without you. Damn it, next time
you get down at the mouth, remember that.”

  Nathan shrugged, but Paul noticed that he was fighting a smile …

  It did not take them long to get to Prince Christian Fjord, which actually was a narrow, winding pass that cut off the mountainous tip of Greenland, making an island of Cape Farewell. Glittering peaks rose steeply from both sides of the ship, and small icebergs gleamed in the light of a quarter moon in the black riverlike channel ahead. It was a splendid evening with little wind as they started that passage. Paul and Nathan stood on the flying bridge conning the ship. Suddenly northern lights, the aurora borealis, spread luminescent curtains overhead, the intensity of which pulsed in almost sexual rhythm.

  “God, what a night!” Paul said.

  “Very romantic,” Nathan observed wryly.

  Paul was full of an odd, mounting excitement. The polished barrel of the big gun on the forecastle head gleamed in the moonlight. How many miles ahead was the German ship which had sunk the Nanmak waiting? The duel would not be so easy for her now. At least the Arluk had eyes of her own that could see through fog and night. If he played his cards right, Paul thought, he could be the attacker, he could choose the time and place to strike. If they could locate a German ship and determine her future course, they could, if luck gave them just the right circumstances, circle around and sow the mines that Nathan was making out of depth charges in her path. And if they were pursued they could sow their own wake with mines. If the Germans wanted to play tag among the icebergs …

  “We’re going to get them,” Paul said.

  “Are you really all that confident?” Nathan asked.

  “My strength is as the strength of ten, because at heart I am a dirty, tricky bastard. If all else fails I’ll surrender and cry for mercy until they come within point-blank range of that five-incher.”

  “We better not forget that at heart they’re dirty, tricky bastards, too.”