Ice Brothers Page 31

  “Maybe somebody wrote her that he had been unfaithful to her with a polar bear. Do you suppose she could name a dead bear as corespondent?”

  “It’s no joke. He’s so mad he damn near took a poke at Boats. Boats is riding high because he got the son he wanted.”

  “I imagine there was more good news in the mail than bad.”

  “But the good news may be even worse for morale. Now Boats can hardly wait to go home and Sparks is clawing down the sides of the radio shack. His wife sent him a picture of herself in the buff. He’s showing it around with great pride. I must say, she has the biggest tits I ever saw. Now his mind is entirely off his work. I’d hoped that he could help me to scrounge radio parts—sometimes the radiomen are better at that than the officers. Now all he can think about is getting a picture of himself taken to send back to her. He’s taken one of himself with the new ensign’s camera. Do you have any idea where he can get a blue picture developed up here?”

  “Love will find a way. How are you coming with your supplies?”

  “It’s going to be tougher than I thought. It seems that a lot of these guys who are permanently based here have built illegal ham stations to communicate with home. They’ve rigged up so many aerials that they call the barracks section radio city. Building this stuff is a regular craze up here, and the radio parts depot has been stolen blind. So now there’s a big crackdown. My friend Errol Flynn is trying his best to help, but he says there’s such a shortage it’s hard to get stuff even legitimately.”

  Paul thought for a moment. “If you can’t steal where the thieves stole, steal it or buy it from the thieves. Can’t you get the equipment from one of those illegal stations? I could put up maybe three grand.”

  “Money isn’t worth much up here, but a radio that can bring home in is valuable. And there’s a lot of specialized stuff I need that wouldn’t go with a ham station. My job would be a lot simpler if I knew the frequencies of German radar. I’ve got to build something that will cover quite a range. Without any kind of testing apparatus, it’s not going to be simple.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Look, I believe in the can-do spirit and all that, but if I have to leave here with nothing much more than a spool of copper wire and a pair of pliers, I can’t guarantee you much except all-out effort.”

  “Give me a copy of your list,” Paul said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  For more than a week Paul searched out people in base radar and radio, and used all his powers of persuasion to get the material on Nathan’s list. He was not used to failures of this kind and could hardly believe it when forced finally to realize that some of the key items simply were unobtainable, did not exist in Greenland except in operating radar stations which were closely guarded. He asked Commander GreenPat to repeat urgent requests to Washington so often that Sanders became angry.

  “Look, I appreciate your initiative and I understand your reasons,” he said to Paul finally, “but when you come right down to it, you are demanding unauthorized equipment. We’re still getting German weather signals from the east coast, and the fly-boys are really putting pressure on me to get a ship up there that can do some spotting for them. The big cutters are needed for convoy duty. My other trawlers are busy on supply runs, weather patrol, or have broken down. Now if you can’t take the Arluk up there within forty-eight hours, I’m going to have to replace you with someone who can, even if I have to take an exec from one of the big cutters.”

  The thought came to Paul that if he was really smart, he would let himself be replaced. Probably nothing would happen to him except an assignment to a boring but safe shore base. His emotions, however, would not agree with his mind. The Arluk was his hard-won command, and he was not going to give her to anyone else.

  “All right, we’ll leave within forty-eight hours,” he said softly and gave Sanders a fairly good copy of Mowrey’s sweet smile.

  Paul had surprising faith in his own good luck, and he kept thinking that somehow the necessary equipment would arrive at the last minute. An hour before he sailed he sent Nathan ashore to make one last check of all possible sources. As soon as he saw Nathan return he knew their luck had run out. Nathan’s gaunt body was stooped with dejection and his sad face looked more morose than ever.

  “Sorry, skipper,” he said, throwing out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I got zilch.”

  “Tell Boats to pipe the men to mooring stations,” Paul said, and rang the engineroom telegraph to “Stand by,” a signal which the chief answered immediately with a jingle of bells. Instead of calling the men to take in lines, however, Boats came to the pilothouse. “Skipper,” he said, “before we go, can we send somebody up to see if any more mail has come in for us? God knows how long it will be before we get more.”

  “Okay—run up there yourself if you want, but make it snappy.”

  Boats jumped ashore and ran toward the post office. Wondering why he was really in such a hurry to start toward whatever was waiting for them on the east coast, Paul went to his cabin and studied his charts.

  In only a few minutes Boats came racing back. He was carrying a rather limp mail sack, which Nathan immediately opened. After passing out the letters to the enlisted men, Nathan brought six envelopes to Paul. Five were from Sylvia and one from his brother Bill. Finding that he did not really want to learn more about the decoration of the house in Wellesley and Bill’s exploits as a flight instructor right now, Paul stuck them in a drawer of the chart table and called, “All right, guys, let’s get going. I want to get out of the fjord before dark.”

  “Skipper,” Nathan said. “How about giving the guys ten minutes to read their mail?”

  “All right,” Paul replied, and feeling a little guilty because of his lack of eagerness for his own mail, went to his cabin and read his letters, starting with Bill’s.

  Dear Paul,

  I don’t want to get you upset or anything, but I think your girl Sylvia is getting way out of line, and I’d straighten her out if I were you. She’s acting as a hostess at U.S.O. dances. There’s nothing wrong with that, I guess—quite a few wives of boys who are overseas do it. Still, I was surprised when I dropped in at the Boston U.S.O. and found her dancing up a storm with some guys from my base who couldn’t be trusted with their own mothers. And she goes out drinking with them after the dances. If I were you, I’d tell her to stop it. I’m not saying she’s doing anything wrong. I’m saying she’s giving herself too much opportunity for it. I told her I didn’t like it and she got mad as hell. I imagine you’ll be hearing from her about it. Sorry to stir things up, but I got to look out for my kid brother.

  Things going pretty good here. I figure I’ll make first lieutenant pretty quick now, but God knows when I’ll get out of this instructor business. Did you ever think I’d wind up a schoolteacher? I do get plenty of weekend passes though, and get home almost every month. I’ll keep in touch with things there.

  Keep ’em sailing!

  Bill

  This letter made Paul so angry that he balled it up in his hand, walked out on a wing of the bridge and threw it overboard. Sylvia, he thought, was simply behaving much as she had before he left home, so why get upset? Returning to his cabin, he ripped open the envelopes from her. The first two contained more details about the decoration of the house, but the third was different.

  Paul darling,

  I’m so mad at Bill I could kill him. I wouldn’t write you about this silly thing, except I’m sure he will, and the last thing I want to do is get you all worried about me.

  This is what hapened. A few weeks ago I was asked to be a hosstess at U.S.O. dances. Practically every girl I know, married and unmarried, is helping with the U.S.O. program. The Junior League is doing it. Your mother and mine are both patruns and chaperones, for God’s sake. Nothing could be more respectable and it was presented to me as a patriotic duty. Boston is swarming with servicemen who have nowhere to go but the bars and we’re trying to do something about it. What I d
o mostly is just serve coffee to the guys and let them talk. They’re loanely and what they usually do is tell me about their wife and family. Not many even want to dance, and when we do dance it’s right there at the U.S.O. center surrounded by chaperones. I never leave the center with the guys—even if I wanted to, which beleive me, I don’t, there are strictly enforced rules against it. I’m not doing anything wrong. I thought I was doing something good until Bill came along and made something dirty out of it. He just has a dirty mind. According to him there’s not a desent man in the army or navy and I should go hide myself until the war is over. Well, I think that’s ridiculous and I know you will too. These are all nice boys and we’re all just trying to help them keep up their moral.

  I never see any servicemen outside the U.S.O. center except that Muth is working with a U.S.O. program which asks her to invite guys to Sunday dinners at home. We feed four guys every Sunday, and after the army and navy chow they get, they sure are greateful. They are more polite than anyone could imagine, and when they see my weding ring, they never ask me to go out, except to a movie sometimes, and I always refuse even to to that. Believe me, I’m faithful to you and can’t even imagine being anything else. Only Bill could imagine anything different.

  Please don’t worry about me. All I’m doing is fixing up a beautiful house for you to come home to, and trying to be patriotic.

  Much love, Sylvia.

  Paul sighed. Remembering the curious abandon with which Sylvia, even at the age of sixteen, had danced at fraternity parties, he could imagine her giving the boys at the U.S.O. encouragement, even if she thought her intentions were entirely innocent. The Sunday dinners with men who no doubt were much the same as the members of his own crew did not delight him too much either. How long would it be before Sylvia saw nothing wrong in accepting an invitation to see a movie, and after that—

  He clenched his fists. It was all very damned childish and very upsetting. After all, his own intentions had not been too pure with the fat woman at the drunken brawl with Mowrey in Godhavn. Only circumstances, not his own morality, had preserved his so-called virtue, and he doubted whether Sylvia was much less vulnerable. How many people in this war were really able to remain chaste year after year? Maybe marital fidelity was an inevitable casualty of war, nine cases out of ten. A picture of Sylvia stretched out on a bed in some motel with an enormous man like Guns flashed into his mind and he found he was sweating. Maybe she would find someone a lot better than he’d ever been …

  He threw his wife’s letters into a drawer and jammed it shut. Right now he didn’t even have time to think about her; he had no business getting himself upset. The thing to do about Sylvia was to forget her until the damned war was all over—

  The shrill blast of Boats’s pipe calling the men to mooring stations came to Paul as a relief, cutting off his personal life like a knife.

  “All right, boys, let’s get going,” he said as the men took the heavy lines from the wharf. “We’ve got a date. We’ve kept the Krauts waiting for us long enough.”

  Ten minutes later the Arluk headed out of the fjord toward the open sea and the east coast. As the base faded from sight astern, Paul found himself wondering whether that was the last of “civilization” he would ever see. Somewhere ahead something that was sending German radio signals was waiting for them in the ice. What the hell, if the Germans wanted a fight he was in a good mood for it. So what if the Krauts had bigger guns? Ingenuity could overcome superiority of equipment—whistling in the dark, of course.… He was astonished at the cheerfulness of the men as they stowed the mooring lines and checked their pea-shooter guns. Probably the men of the Nanmak had been just as cheerful as they set off on their last voyage.

  Nathan soon came to stand beside Paul on the bridge. Bob Williams, the new ensign, was also there, fumbling with the gyroscope repeaters on the wings of the bridge as he tried to learn how to take bearings.

  “If I’d just had time or had thought about it enough in advance I could have had a friend in the States send me the stuff in my personal mail,” Nathan said.

  “The censors probably would have stopped it. All electronics are top secret. You could have got in a lot of trouble.”

  “Christ, they could have put the stuff in a cake or something. If I’d only been thinking—”

  “Forget it. We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got. Show Mr. Williams how to use that gyro repeater before he breaks the vanes off it.”

  When Paul found he could see not even a smoky trace of the base astern, he realized with a sort of surprise that the ship was alone in the Arctic wilderness, and he alone was in command of it. No matter what happened, there was no one he could go to for help. Mowrey had said he didn’t have the balls for such a job, and Paul wondered if the old man was right …

  A commanding officer isn’t much if he starts a long voyage looking and acting as though he was sure he was heading toward certain doom, Paul thought, and forced himself to smile a lot, his lips feeling tight and unnatural. Restlessly going to the flying bridge, he saw that Nathan had found someone to print a picture of a rattlesnake on the stack with the words DON’T TREAD ON ME. The trouble was that the amateur artist had made the snake look rather like a worm, and the motto seemed like a plea. Probably the Krauts could step on this worm without even leaving much of a smear, Paul reflected. All that had been left of the Nanmak had been a few scorched timbers and a bullet-ridden boat full of corpses. The idea that Hansen could still be hiding out in the ice with a few survivors was almost certainly sheer fantasy.

  Paul was still unable to get his mind off these grim thoughts several hours later when they came within sight of the wreck of the destroyer. As Mowrey had predicted, the wind had driven ice into the mouth of the fjord, and several bergs bigger than the destroyer had pressed the abandoned ship higher onto the rocks, tilting her bow up so that she seemed to be climbing a high sea, with her lethal but now useless guns pointing at the low scudding clouds overhead. Nathan climbed to the flying bridge and stood beside Paul, examining the wreck through binoculars.

  “I wonder if they stripped her before abandoning her,” Nathan said. “Or do you suppose they left a few men aboard?”

  “They’d probably signal us. Flash a light at them and see if anyone answers.”

  For five minutes Nathan clacked the shutter of the signal light, but there was no flash on the bridge of the broken destroyer. Picking up his binoculars he continued to study the derelict as Paul altered course to come closer.

  “Maybe they’re all asleep,” Paul said. “When we get closer we’ll blow the whistle and wake them up.”

  “They didn’t strip her radar gear,” Nathan said. “Not the stuff on the mast, anyway. Do you suppose the whole radar room is intact?”

  “They might have abandoned ship in a hurry when those bergs closed in. There isn’t a chance in the world of putting big stuff like that on this ship, is there?”

  Nathan’s face suddenly lit up. “Their big air-search radar for aircraft probably would be more than we could handle, but they’re carrying a smaller antenna for navigation. If it’s all still there, I bet I could make it work here.”

  “Hell, let’s try!”

  “And they’re sure to have something for radar detection. But this is all secret stuff. They wouldn’t just go off and leave it.”

  “Who the hell would steal it here, the Eskies? Probably they intend to send a salvage ship in as soon as the ice moves out. No ship could get alongside her now.”

  “But the whaleboat could, and it could handle anything we need,” Nathan said. “Put me aboard there, skipper, there’s sure to be all kinds of stuff we can use—”

  “First we better make sure there isn’t a guard aboard.”

  After coming closer he blew the whistle—one prolonged blast. It echoed through the fjord, and there was no sign of life aboard the ship.

  “Maybe they’re all drunk,” Nathan said.

  “We’ll soon find out. Get ready to
go aboard. I’ll anchor as close as I can. Take Guns with you. There’s a nice 40-millimeter there on his fantail. Do you suppose we could find a way to put that on our well deck?”

  “We might be able to hide radar when we were in port, but how would you explain an unauthorized forty?”

  “The Krauts won’t ask for explanations and that’s all I’m thinking about right now. Do you think we could bolt that thing to a wooden deck?”

  “We could probably fix it so we could get off a few rounds, anyway. Hell, if you don’t mind getting court-martialed, we could steal enough here to make the old Arluk a regular pocket battleship!”

  “Are you really an engineer?”

  “I got a diploma that says so.”

  “So engineer me a plan to put as many guns as we can on here without turning this bucket over in the first gale. We could fill the hold with ballast to make up for some of the top weight.”

  “Just let me go in and see what’s there,” Nathan said. “I hope we don’t find somebody asleep below. They couldn’t just go off and leave all this stuff!”

  “One thing I believe is that the navy can screw up,” Paul said. “If they can let the Japs sink their whole damn fleet in Pearl Harbor the first day of the war, they can run off and leave a beached tin can. Probably the only thing they took with them is their ice cream freezer.”

  Paul reduced speed and took the Arluk close to shore, where a row of big icebergs was grounded in a hundred feet of water. He anchored behind the biggest of them. If he was going to engage in illegal salvage, he better learn to hide like a pirate.

  CHAPTER 29

  Paul ached to go aboard the destroyer, but the weather did not look settled and he decided that he better stay aboard his ship. Flags had overheard some of his conversation with Nathan, and word of their plans quickly spread through the ship. The mood of the men was exuberant as they lowered the whaleboat. Guns carried a sledgehammer, a crowbar and a huge monkey wrench tied up in a bundle as he climbed into the boat. Everyone wanted to go on the raid, and the men Paul told to stay aboard the Arluk smiled only when he added that they could go later.