The Titanic Secret Page 21

  Somehow, Ragnar Fyrie kept them moving in the right direction. They might need to detour north or south, or even backtrack west on occasion, but he always managed to find fresh areas of black ocean amid the twirling tableland of ice and kept them sailing ever eastward toward the distant Russian archipelago.

  The sun never rose more than a few degrees above the horizon, so oftentimes the great dome of the sky overhead remained dark. On this night, Bell was treated to a sight of which he’d heard but never experienced. The aurora borealis shone like the most phantasmagorical fireworks display ever. Dancing curtains of green light wavered amid streamers of reds and blues. It was as though the entire sky was pulsing to some cosmic beat emanating from out among the stars. For Bell, it was both awe-inspiring and a little frightening.

  “Heavy show tonight,” Captain Fyrie commented. “Good for us. I can still see well enough to keep going.”

  “See?” Bell asked. “What exactly do you see?”

  Fyrie shrugged inside his peacoat. Though the engines were running fine, the bridge never felt fully warm because so many gaps under doors and around windows allowed the frigid Arctic air to establish a toehold in the room. “It’s a trick my father taught me and one I will one day teach my son.

  “I can read the reflection of light off the ice. It’s easier during the day and with some cloud cover, but I can do it even using the glow of the aurora. I can see where light bounces back into the sky off the ice floes and I will steer for areas where there is no reflection. That is where we will find open ocean. My father says it is how native hunters and fishermen have survived in these waters for so many hundreds of generations.”

  Bell scanned the sky, trying to see any difference in the light’s properties, but with the aurora thumping and shimmering like a celestial heliograph, it was impossible for his eyes to detect any hint of a reflection.

  Fyrie must have noticed Bell’s scowl. “Not to worry if you can’t see it. None of my crew can either, and some have been with me since we were boys. It’s a talent and a gift. It’s why I rarely leave the bridge when we’re this close to the ice.”

  Bell said, “I am grateful for the trail that led me to your doorstep, Captain Fyrie. You certainly are the right man for this job.”

  Fyrie nodded at the compliment and tossed back an assurance of his own. “Not to worry, Mr. Bell. We’ll have your miners in Aberdeen before the French ship you told me about has even left the North Sea.”

  Two hours later, clouds had rolled in that obscured the aurora, and the Hvalur Batur was trapped in a black water lagoon surrounded by ice at least three feet thick. She also faced a growing westerly wind that was pushing them away from their destination while simultaneously shrinking the amount of space the ship had before her hull plates were staved in by the floes.

  Bell had been asleep in his cabin but had come awake when the engine’s lullaby of mechanical rhythms ceased and silence settled over the whaling ship. He’d slept clothed. It took him just seconds to put on his boots and climb up to the bridge. It took just seconds more for him to assess the situation.

  “What do we do?” he finally asked.

  “Drift,” Captain Fyrie replied, “and hope this lead doesn’t close entirely.”

  “If it does?”

  “We transfer as much gear as we can onto the ice and pray we get rescued by someone as crazy as we were for coming this far north this early in the season.”

  21

  The area of open water around the whaler stabilized as the mass of ice drifted ahead of the wind. Because the ship presented a larger target to the breeze than the flat ice, she drifted faster than the floe. A crew member had to remain at the wheel in order to keep the vessel away from the lagoon’s dangerously sharp edges. It was an endless dance of throttle and wheel because the ice wasn’t moving in a uniform direction. It constantly spun and twisted around the Hvalur in a jumble without pattern, and even a moment’s lapse on the helmsman’s part would see the ship founder in the icy sea.

  Once Fyrie was satisfied that the ship was safe for a moment he donned thick overpants and a sealskin parka with wolf pelt hemming around the hood. When drawn tight, the hood practically swallowed the captain’s face so that only his eyes shone out from the insulating fur. His mittens were also made of insulated seal and were awkwardly big, but he could still grip a pair of binoculars.

  He stepped out onto the bridge wing and then climbed some steel rungs up to the roof of the wheelhouse. From there, he climbed another thirty feet up onto a tiny observation platform at the high point of the ship’s rigging tower. This was the whale-watching post, a spot manned during the long hunts where a sharp-eyed crewman would scan for the telltale plume from a whale exhaling the warm air from its lungs into the cold air and direct the boat to give chase.

  To Bell, the sky was too dark to see more than a few hundred yards. Fyrie, however, spent two hours standing in the crow’s nest monitoring the ice, the weather, and the reflections that apparently only he could interpret. When he returned to the bridge, his breath had frozen into a crust in the wolf insulation. He shucked his outer gear. His face was mottled red and white and his hands shook, as surely his core temperature had dropped despite the extra clothing.

  The other changes since his ascent up the mast were the wind had increased its speed and great waves sluiced under the ice, causing the floe to undulate amid a crackle and pop of breaking ice and an occasional blast like a cannon shot when a thick section snapped.

  “There’s open water about a mile south of us,” Fyrie said, his teeth chattering. “Problem is, there’s a significant ridge in that direction. This floe will break up with the wind gaining strength, but not where that ridge is holding it together.”

  “Can we do anything?” Bell asked.

  “Not really,” one of the two Petrs said from behind the wheel.

  “I’ve got thermite left over,” Bell informed them.

  “How much?”

  Bell grinned. “Enough to bore a couple dozen holes through just about any thickness of ice we encounter. We break up the ridge . . .”

  “. . . and Mother Nature breaks up the rest,” Fyrie finished.

  Thirty minutes later, with the thermite prebundled and secure, Bell, Arn Bjørnson, and the chief engineer, Ivar Ivarsson, were lowered down into the water in a small wooden dinghy. Arn’s considerable size and strength made short work of rowing to the edge of the floe. Bell wore borrowed cold-weather gear. It was bulky and difficult to move in, but at least everything fit, and the boots were so well insulated that he couldn’t feel the ice when they transferred to shore. Arn torqued a screw into the floe to tie off the dinghy, and the three men set off for the large ridge silhouetted by the sun as it made its slow circuit across the horizon.

  Arn carried a Model 1898 Mauser bolt action rifle chambered for the new Otto Bock–designed 9.3-by-62-millimeter round. With winter ending, the Arctic’s most feared predator, the polar bears, were getting in a last meal before the lean summer season kicked in. A male bear, standing ten feet tall when upright, could weigh nearly three-quarters of a ton and consume a hundred-pound seal all at once. Without a weapon—usually a powerful one like the Mauser—humans rarely survived an encounter with Ursus maritimus. Standard procedure when working on the pack ice was for at least one man to be on guard at all times. The polar bear has an incredible sense of smell, and because their fur is actually clear rather than white, they blend into the ice so well they can sneak up on even the most wary prey.

  The ridge looked to be less than a half mile distant, its range and size distorted by how the light from the sun reached the surface at such an extreme angle. As they trudged across the ice toward their target, Bell looked behind them. In the uncertain gloom, his shadow appeared translucent, like that of a chimera rather than a man. And when he looked ahead, the solid spine of ice created where two bergs smashed together appeared to be floati
ng several feet in the air. He blinked, behind his dark polar glasses, and the hummock returned to its rightful place.

  The other thing throwing off his perception and making him doubt his own senses were the waves passing under the ice and causing its surface to bow and subside. It all looked solid enough, but in fact it was as fragile as a sheet of crystallized sugar that a large enough wave could shatter just as easily. The feeling reminded him of the day six years previous when he was riding out the Great San Francisco Earthquake, when the ground beneath his feet became jelly and the whole city seemed to collapse into fire and dust.

  The wind was at their backs, fortunately, and the ice had been scoured of any snow long before, so visibility was good. It took fifteen minutes to reach the fifteen-foot-high wall of fractured and fused blocks of ice. Like scar tissue left after a wound, the ridge was thicker and stronger than the surrounding ice and would keep a huge slab from breaking up when the incoming storm intensified.

  With vast knowledge of the Arctic, Captain Fyrie and Ivar Ivarsson figured out the best places to plant Bell’s remaining thermite charges. They wanted the chemicals to bore a series of adjacent holes, like perforations in a sheet of paper, in a straight line over the top of the ridge. When the wind accelerated, the weakened rift would crack exactly in front of the Hvalur Batur and the whaling ship would be able to steam for open water amid the swirl of collapsing floes.

  Ivar found what looked to be a low spot in the hummock. The ice was piled up only ten feet in one section, and the ridge itself was only thirty feet deep. It stretched for at least a mile in both directions. Bell shucked the canvas pack off his back and retrieved one of the glass mason jars filled with thermite and wrapped in cotton scraps for protection during transport. A length of string was tied around the neck of the jar.

  He placed the jar on the ground at the base of the ridge near its low point, unscrewed its cap, and backed away, paying out string as he moved. When he got to the end of the line, he gave it enough of a tug that he knocked the glass jar on its side, which allowed some of its contents to hit the frozen surface. Enough residual warmth remained in the thermite powder to melt a small amount of ice. That little bit of moisture, in turn, was enough to spark the chemical reaction with a hissing roar, and, like some runaway display of fireworks, the reaction became self-sustaining. The intensity of the glow forced Bell and the others to look away, while noxious purple smoke billowed from the hole the chemical had bored into the ice. In seconds, the pile of thermite had melted its way down nearly to the bottom of the floe. Bell saw the problem at once. The cavern the thermite produced was tight in circumference, as he’d predicted.

  And in just the blink of an eye, the mass of chemicals burned their way through the bottom of the berg, and all the water pooled in the bell jar–sized hole vanished into the sea. Nearby, Ivar laughed aloud. And even Arn, who’d been distracted by the thermal excavation, nodded taciturn approval.

  And then Arn was airborne, and his rifle went flying from his grip, twirling like a baton as it pinwheeled aloft. The big man crashed to the ice without trying to cushion the impact. Bell lost a second staring at the prostrate man before he saw the white terror bearing down on him.

  The polar bear’s mouth was crimson with the blood of a seal it had recently eaten and had been half asleep digesting amid the crags and folds of the ice ridge. Because its belly was full, it had merely bowled Arn Bjørnson aside rather than bitten off his leg at the groin. The noise and smoke and the familiar smell of the only creature capable of challenging its dominance on the ice had it confused and angry. It had incapacitated Arn and now it was coming for Bell and Ivarsson, its jaws open and its two-inch canines gleaming like ivory. It made a sound deep in its throat, a cross between a lion’s roar and a locomotive picking up speed. Loping at them, its shoulders flexed and rolled, it kept its wedge-like head down and only a hint of its black eyes was visible.

  Bell shucked his gloves. His hands began to go numb the instant they were exposed to the freezing air. Even before the thick mittens hit the ice, he’d pulled his .45 from the outer pocket of his sealskin anorak. He wasn’t a hunter himself, but he’d spent enough time with such men in exclusive clubs, railroad dining cars, and private residences to know the bullets his gun fired would do little beyond annoy the charging beast. Bell couldn’t hope for a lucky shot, hitting an eye or entering the bear’s mouth. The only target it presented was the top of its skull, which for his Colt was as impenetrable as armor.

  He’d been working with the .45 for months now and had come to understand that it rose after each discharge and twitched slightly left because the ejection port spit out the spent brass cartridge on the right of the slide. Shooting one-handed required a fraction of a second to recenter the sights in order to accurately fire another round, so he took a two-handed stance.

  The bear was thirty feet away, coming hard, its confusion giving way to primal aggression. It had no need to eat the men, but it still wanted them dead.

  Bell began firing and cycled through the clip so fast that each shot became an instantaneous echo of the one before it. He didn’t aim at the bear at all but at the ice a foot or so in front of its snuffling snout. Each impact gouged a plume of flinty particles that lashed the animal’s eyes and sensitive nose.

  The first few shots didn’t seem to have any effect. The bear came on as implacable as a berserker warrior from the storied Icelandic sagas. But by the fifth blast from the pistol, the bear’s eyes were reduced to painful slits, its nose was bleeding from dozens of nicks, and the rolling force of the shots had eroded its courage. Bell’s final two saw the bear veer sharply away when it was only a couple of feet from him. He kept the last round in the pistol in case the animal reached him and he’d at least have the opportunity to fire through the thick blubber and muscle protecting its internal organs in the instant before the bear killed him outright.

  He shifted to a one-handed stance as he watched the bear’s ponderous backside lope across the floe in the direction of a narrow open lead from where it had hunted the seal hours earlier. Without taking his eyes off the enormous carnivore—the largest land predator on earth, in fact—Bell fished a fresh magazine from his pocket and had it ready so that when he dropped the clip out of the Colt’s grip he would be ready to ram home the full one.

  Only when the polar bear plunged into the water and began swimming away did Isaac Bell slip the .45 back into his pocket, bend and retrieve the spent magazine, and finally replace the thick mittens on his hands. They shook and were cramping but there was no lasting damage. Nearby, Arn Bjørnson began moaning and pushing himself up from where the bear had so unceremoniously tossed him. Ivar cut short his rant and ran for his crewmate and friend. Bell took a second to recover the fallen Mauser rifle and gave it a once-over to ensure it remained functional.

  “Arn, you all right?” Ivar asked, dropping to the ice.

  “I think so,” the big man said. When he tried getting to his feet, his hip buckled where the bear had plowed into him.

  Ivar helped him up and stood with the larger man’s arm draped across his shoulders for a moment. Arn took a staggering step. His face became a mask of pain when his leg supported his weight. He ignored it and took a second step, then a third, with Ivar keeping pace at his side.

  “I think I will be okay,” he said.

  “That joint is going to stiffen up,” Bell told him over an increasingly loud wind. “We need to work as fast as we can.”

  Ivar eased Arn back down to the ice and then joined Bell. Together, they marked a straight line over the top of the hummock, placing bits of coal from the ship’s bunker as markers for where they wanted to bore through the frozen ridge. At several spots, they had to chip into the ice to create a flat spot big enough for one of the thermite charges. Arn watched them work but also kept an eye out in case the polar bear decided to return. The rifle rested across his knees.

  Once everything was
set, Bell replaced the first piece of coal with a jar of thermite and, like before, paid out string to give himself a margin of safety from the chemical reaction. Ivar was on the far side of the ridge doing the same thing. Bell tipped the jar and watched for a moment as the chemicals flashed in a blinding jewel of fire and violet-colored smoke coiled away on the wind. In the time it took to place his second jar, the first had penetrated to the sea and the meltwater had drained away.

  It took thirty minutes in all to place and set off the thermite charges. During that time, the wind had picked up considerably, scouring the floe and forcing Bell and Ivarsson to work hunched over and with their backs to it. Arn too had to crawl into the lee of the ridge in order to protect himself from the icy gusts but still watch for the bear. The rolling of the waves underneath the floe had also increased and so too had the snap and bang of cracking ice.

  The hike back to the boat became a living nightmare as soon as they started out. They had to march straight into the wind, which had somehow found fresh supplies of snow to whip at any exposed skin with the scouring force of a commercial sandblaster. To make matters worse, Arn’s injured hip joint had frozen, as Bell had predicted. He and Ivar had to walk on either side of the big man and support him through each painful step. Arn didn’t complain at what had to be utter agony.

  The fifteen-minute walk they’d enjoyed from the dinghy to the ridge morphed into a three-quarters-of-an-hour hike back. Until they reached the open water and saw the four-man boat as they’d left it, he’d imagined the ice had already split and their ride had drifted away, leaving them stranded. It was an unfounded fear. The ice still held and the Hvalur Batur was only a quarter mile distant. Any stranding would have been short-lived.