Arctic Drift dp-20 Read online

  “We could retake the Erebus,” Fitzjames suggested, peering at the masts of his former ship rising above the jagged crests of white.

  “The men are too spent to fight each other and the elements,” Crozier replied. “She’ll either find her way to the bottom like the Terror or spend another wretched summer icebound, I have no doubt.”

  “God have mercy on their souls,” Fitzjames muttered under his breath as he took a final gaze at the distant vessel.

  With teams of eight men harnessed to the heavy lifeboats like mules to a plow, they trudged over the uneven ice floe toward land. Mercifully, the winds settled, while the temperature climbed to near zero. But the exertions required of the starved and frozen crewmen began to break the body and the spirit of every man.

  Tugging and shoving the burdensome loads, they reached the pebble-strewn island after five torturous days. King William Land, known today as King William Island, could hardly have been a less hospitable place. A low, windswept landmass the size of Connecticut, its ecosystem supported a bare minimum of plant and animal life. Even the indigenous Inuit avoided the island, recognizing it as a poor hunting ground for the food staples of caribou and seal.

  None of this was known by Crozier and his men. Only their own exploratory sledge parties would have told them that the land was even an island, disputing the common geographic belief of 1845 that it was a finger of the North American continent. Crozier likely knew that, and one other thing. From where he stood on the northwest tip of King William Land, he recognized that he was nearly a thousand miles from the nearest civilization. A meager Hudson’s Bay Company trading settlement located far to the south on the banks of the Great Fish River offered the best hope of rescue. But open water between the southern tip of King William Land and the mouth of that river, some one hundred and fifty miles away, meant that they had to keep dragging the cursed boats with them across the ice.

  Crozier rested the crew a few days at the stockpile, allowing a temporary reward of full rations to boost their strength for the arduous journey ahead. Then he could wait no longer. Every day would count in the race to the Hudson Bay settlement before the autumn snows began to fall. The seasoned captain had no illusions that the full crew could make it that far or anywhere close. But with luck, a few of the heartiest men might make it in time to send a relief party to the others. It was their only chance.

  Once again hauling the boats foot by foot, they found the shoreline ice less imposing. But the bitter reality quickly set in that they were on a death march. The physical rigors of unending exertion in the biting cold were too much for the malnurished body to bear. The worst agony, perhaps more than frostbite, was the sense of unquenchable thirst. Since their portable gas stoves mostly depleted of fuel, there was no efficient way to produce fresh water from the ice. Men desperately stuffed snow in their mouths to melt a few drops, then shivered with cold. Like a caravan crossing the Sahara, they fought the vestiges of dehydration along with the other ailments. Day by day and one by one, men began to wither and die as the contingent marched south. Shallow graves were dug at first, but then the dead were left on the ice as all energy was conserved for the migration.

  Cresting a small snow-covered ridge, Fitzjames held up his hand and stopped in his tracks. Two sledge crews of eight men apiece staggered to a halt behind him, letting loose the harness ropes attached to a wood-planked pinnace. The heavy wooden boat, packed with food and gear, weighed over two thousand pounds. Transporting it was like dragging a rhinoceros across the ice. All of the men fell to their knees to rest, sucking deep breaths of icy air into their starved lungs.

  The sky was clear, showering the landscape with bright sunlight that reflected off the snow in a blinding dazzle. Fitzjames slipped off a pair of wire-mesh snow goggles and walked from man to man, offering words of encouragement while checking their extremities for frostbite. He was nearly through the second crew when one of the men shouted.

  “Sir, it’s the Erebus! She’s free of the ice pack.”

  Fitzjames turned to see one of the seamen pointing toward the horizon. The man, a yeoman’s mate, slipped out of his harness and began scampering toward the shoreline and onto the ice pack.

  “Strickland! Stand where you are!” Fitzjames ordered.

  But the command fell on deaf ears. The seaman slowed not a step, stumbling and careening over the uneven ice floe toward a dark smudge on the horizon. Fitzjames adjusted his gaze in the same direction and felt his jaw drop. Three leagues distant, the black hull and upright masts of a large sailing ship were clearly visible. It could be no vessel but the Erebus.

  Fitzjames stared for several seconds, barely breathing. Strickland was right. The ship was moving, appearing to drift clear of the ice pack.

  The startled commander stepped to the pinnace and rummaged under a bench seat until locating a folding telescope. Training the glass on the vessel, he readily identified his former command. She looked like a ghost ship, though, with sails furled and her decks empty. He idly wondered if the crazed men below even knew they were adrift. His excitement at seeing the vessel was tempered when he studied the surface area around the ship. It was unbroken ice.

  “She’s still locked in the pack ice,” he muttered, noting that the ship was moving stern first. The Erebus was in fact encased in a ten-mile-long sheet of ice that had splintered from the frozen sea and was drifting south. Her survival prospects had improved slightly, but she still faced the risk of pulverization from rupturing ice.

  Fitzjames let out a sigh, then turned to two of his fittest crewmen.

  “Reed, Sullivan, go retrieve Seaman Strickland at once,” he barked.

  The two men rose and charged after Strickland, who had now reached the ice pack and was disappearing over a large hummock. Fitzjames peered again at the ship, searching for damage to the hull or signs of life above deck. But the distance was too great to observe any detail. His thoughts turned to the expedition’s commander, Franklin, whose body lay packed in ice in the depths of the hold. Maybe the old bird will yet get buried in England, Fitzjames mused, knowing that his own prospects of making it home, dead or alive, were looking quite thin.

  A half hour passed before Reed and Sullivan returned to the boat. Fitzjames noticed that both men stared at the ground, while one of them clutched a scarf that Strickland had been wearing around his face and neck.

  “Where is he?” the commander asked.

  “He broke through a snow-covered lead in the pack ice,” replied Sullivan, a ship’s rigger with plaintive blue eyes. “We tried to pull him out, but he went under before we could get a good grip on him.” He held up the frozen-stiff scarf, showing all they had been able to grasp.

  It was no matter, Fitzjames thought. Had they pulled him out, he would have likely died before they could have got him into dry clothes anyway. Strickland was actually lucky. At least he got to die quickly.

  Shaking the image from his mind, Fitzjames shouted harshly to the somber crew, “Back in the harnesses. Let’s get the sledge moving,” dismissing the loss without another word.

  * * *

  The days passed with growing strain as the men trudged south. Gradually, the crewmen broke into separate parties, divided by their physical stamina. Crozier and a small party from the Terror blazed a path down the coastline ten miles ahead of everyone else. Fitzjames followed next but was tailed several miles behind by three or four groups of stragglers, the weakest and sickest who could not keep pace and for all practical purposes were already dead. Fitzjames had lost three men of his own, forging ahead with only thirteen to haul the heavy load.

  Light winds and moderate temperatures had given the men hope for escape. But a late-spring blizzard turned their fortunes. Like an approaching veil of death, a black line of clouds appeared to the west and rolled in with a fury. Blistering winds blasted across the ice pack, pounding the low island without mercy. Buffeted by the winds and unable to see, Fitzjames had no choice but to turn the boat turtle and seek refuge beneath its wo
od-planked hull. For four days, the winds pounded them like a mallet. Imprisoned in their shell with scant food and no source of heat but their bodies, the emaciated men slowly began to succumb.

  Like the rest of his men, Fitzjames drifted in and out of consciousness as his bodily functions slowly shut down. When the end was near, an odd burst of energy surged through him, driven perhaps by a dying curiosity. Climbing over the bodies of his comrades, he slipped under the gunwale and pulled himself upright against the exterior hull. A brief respite in the gale winds let him stand unmolested in the elements as the fading light of dusk approached. Peering over the ice, he forced himself to look one more time.

  She was still there. A dark projectile scratching the horizon, the Erebus loomed, creeping with the ice like a black wraith.

  “What mystery hath thou?” he cried, though the final words left his parched lips in barely a whisper. With its glistening eyes locked on the horizon, Fitzjames’s dead body wilted against the pinnace.

  Across the ice, the Erebus silently sailed on, an ice-encrusted tomb. Like her crew, she would eventually fall victim to the harsh Arctic environment, a last vestige of Franklin’s quest to navigate the Northwest Passage. With her disappearance, the saga of Fitzjames’s mad crew would be obscured from history. But unbeknownst to her commander, the ship held a greater mystery, one that over a century later would impact man’s very survival on the planet.

  PART I

  DEVIL’S BREATH

  1

  APRIL 2011 THE INSIDE PASSAGE BRITISH COLUMBIA

  The sixty-foot steel-hulled trawler was what all commercial fishing boats ought to look like but seldom did. Her nets were stowed neatly on their rollers, the deck was free of clutter. The boat’s hull and topside were absent of rust and grime, while a fresh coat of paint covered the most weathered areas. Even the boat’s worn dock fenders had been regularly scrubbed of grit. While not the most profitable fishing boat plying the northern waters of British Columbia, the Ventura was easily the best maintained.

  Her shipshape appearance reflected the character of her owner, a meticulous and hardworking man named Steve Miller. Like his boat, Miller didn’t fit the bill of the average independent fisherman. A trauma doctor who’d grown tired of patching up mangled auto accident victims in Indianapolis, he’d returned to the small Pacific Northwest town of his youth to try something different. Possessing a secure bank account and a love of the water, commercial fishing had seemed the perfect fit. Steering the boat through an early morning drizzle now, he wore his happiness in the form of a wide grin.

  A young man with shaggy black hair poked his head into the wheelhouse and called to Miller.

  “Where they biting today, skipper?” he asked.

  Miller gazed out the forward window, then poked his nose up and sniffed the air.

  “Well, Bucky, I’d say the west coast of Gil Island, without a doubt,” he grinned, taking the bait. “Better grab some shut-eye now, as we’ll be reeling them in soon enough.”

  “Sure, boss. Like, a whole twenty minutes?”

  “I’d say closer to eighteen.” He smiled, gazing at a nearby nautical chart. He cinched the wheel a few degrees, aiming the bow toward a narrow slot dividing two green landmasses ahead of them. They were cutting across the Inside Passage, a ribbon of protected sea that stretched from Vancouver to Juneau. Sheltered by dozens of pine-covered islands, the winding waterway inspired comparisons to the scenic fjords of Norway.

  Only the occasional commercial or tourist fishing boat, casting its lines for salmon or halibut, was found dodging the Alaska-bound cruise ship traffic. Like most independent fishermen, Miller chased after the more valuable sockeye salmon, utilizing purse seine nets to capture the fish near inlets and in ocean waters. He was content to break even with his catches, knowing few got rich fishing in these parts. Yet despite his limited experience, he still managed a small profit due to his planning and enthusiasm. Sipping a mug of coffee, he glanced at a flush-mounted radar screen. Spotting two vessels several miles to the north, he let go of the wheel and walked outside the pilothouse to inspect his nets for the third time that day. Satisfied there were no holes in the mesh, he climbed back to the bridge.

  Bucky was standing by the rail, forgoing his bunk for a cigarette instead. Puffing on a Marlboro, he nodded at Miller, then looked up at the sky. An ever-present blanket of gray clouds floated in an airy mass yet appeared too light to dispense more than a light drizzle. Bucky peered across Hecate Strait at the green islands that bound it to the west. Ahead off the port bow, he noticed an unusually thick cloud rolling along the water’s surface. Fog was a common companion in these waters, but there was something peculiar about this formation. The color was a brighter white than that of a normal fogbank, its billows heavier. Taking a long drag on his cigarette, Bucky exhaled deeply, then walked to the wheelhouse.

  Miller had already taken note of the white cloud and had a pair of binoculars trained on the mist.

  “You seen it too, boss? Kind of a funky-looking cloud, ain’t it?” Bucky drawled.

  “It is. I don’t see any other vessels around that could have discharged it,” Miller replied, scanning the horizon. “Might be some sort of smoke or exhaust that drifted over from Gil.”

  “Yep, maybe somebody’s fish smoker blew,” the deckhand replied, his crooked teeth in a wide grin.

  Miller set down the binoculars and grabbed the wheel. Their path around Gil Island led directly through the center of the cloud. Miller rapped his knuckles on the worn wooden wheel in uneasiness, but he made no effort to alter course.

  As the boat approached the cloud’s periphery, Miller stared at the water and crinkled his brow. The color of the water changed visibly, from green to brown to copper-red. A number of dead salmon appeared in the crimson broth, their silver bellies pointing skyward. Then the fishing boat chugged into the haze.

  The men in the wheelhouse immediately felt a change in temperature, as if a cold, wet blanket had been thrown over them. Miller felt a dampness in his throat while tasting a strong acidic flavor. A tingling sensation rippled through his head, and he felt a sudden tightening in his chest. When he sucked in a breath of air, his legs buckled, and stars began to appear before his eyes. His pain was diverted when the second deckhand burst into the cabin with a shriek.

  “Captain… I’m suffocating,” gasped the man, a ruddy-faced fellow with long sideburns. The man’s eyes bulged from his head, and his face was tinted a dark shade of blue. Miller took a step toward him, but the man fell to the deck unconscious.

  The cabin started to spin before Miller’s eyes as he made a desperate lunge for the boat’s radio. In a blur, he noticed Bucky sprawled flat on the deck. With his chest constricting tightly, Miller grasped at the radio, scooping up the transmitter while knocking over some charts and pencils. Pulling the transmitter to his mouth, he tried to call a Mayday, but the words refused to leave his lips. Falling to his knees, he felt like his entire body was being crushed on an anvil. The constriction tightened as blackness slowly crept over his vision. He fought to stay conscious but felt himself slipping into the void. Miller struggled desperately, then let out a final deep gasp as the icy hand of death beckoned him to let go.

  2

  “Catch is aboard,” Summer Pitt shouted toward the wheelhouse. “Take us to the next magic spot.”

  The tall, lithe oceanographer stood on the open stern deck of the research boat, dressed in a turquoise rain jacket. In her hands, she reeled in a polypropylene line wrapped around the spool of a mock fishing pole. The line stretched to the end of a guided rod where her prize catch dangled in the breeze. It wasn’t a fish but a gray plastic tube called a Niskin bottle, which allowed seawater samples to be collected at depth. Summer carefully grabbed the bottle and stepped toward the pilothouse as the inboard motors suddenly revved loudly beneath the deck. The abrupt propulsion nearly threw her off her feet as the workboat leaped forward.

  “Easy on the acceleration,” she yelled, finally maki
ng her way into the cabin.

  Seated behind the wheel, her brother turned and chuckled.

  “Just wanted to keep you on your toes,” Dirk Pitt replied. “That was a remarkable imitation of a drunken ballerina, I might add.”

  The comment only infuriated Summer more. Then she saw the humor in it all and just as quickly laughed it off.

  “Don’t be surprised to find a bucket of wet clams in your bunk tonight,” she said.

  “As long as they’re steamed with Cajun sauce first,” he replied. Dirk eased the throttle back to a more stable speed, then eyed a digital navigation chart on a nearby monitor.

  “That was sample 17-F, by the way,” he said.

  Summer poured the water sample into a clear vial and wrote down the designation on a preprinted label. She then placed the vial in a foam-lined case that contained a dozen other samples of seawater. What had started as a simple study of plankton health along the south Alaska coastline had grown in scope when the Canadian Fisheries and Oceans Department had gotten wind of their project and asked if they could continue their assessment down to Vancouver. Besides cruise ships, the Inside Passage also was an important migratory route for humpbacks, grays, and other whales that attracted the attention of marine biologists. The microscopic plankton was a key to the aquatic food chain as it attracted krill, a primary food source for baleen whales. Dirk and Summer realized the importance of obtaining a complete ecological snapshot of the region and had obtained approval to expand the research project from their bosses at the National Underwater and Marine Agency.