The Titanic Secret Page 22

  It was easier for Arn to crawl into the boat, dragging his bum leg, than to step across the gunwale of the little craft.

  “This is no way for a sailor to put to sea,” he said stoically.

  Ivar retorted, “I’ve seen you drunk-crawl up a ratline on a bet, Arn Bjørnson, so what’s your complaint?”

  Bell took to the oars, finding battling a Beaufort scale wind a little more difficult than rowing Marion around the lake in Central Park on a lazy summer afternoon. Very quickly, he felt his body temperature rising at the same time his face was freezing. His lungs were near struggling by the time he positioned the dinghy under the hanging ropes of the Batur’s davits. Ivar secured the lines to the lift points while, above them, crewmen waited to haul them up to the deck. With the weather deteriorating further, the men worked swiftly and professionally.

  Ivar helped Arn out of the boat once they were safely aboard. One of the Petrs was there to help him to a cabin while Bell made his way up to the bridge, where Captain Fyrie stood at the helm, one eye on the weather off to starboard, the other on the ice floe directly ahead. Despite its drafty nature, the bridge felt blessedly warm. Bell helped himself to some coffee from a glass-lined metal thermos.

  “How did it go?” Fyrie asked.

  Bell sipped at the steaming mug, and said, “I can scratch facing down a charging polar bear from the list of things I’ve never done.”

  The captain didn’t so much as glance in Bell’s direction when he said, “That’s just another rite of passage in the Arctic.”

  A big gust of wind hit the ship just then, followed almost immediately by a particularly strong swell. The whaler rose up and then dropped into the trough. For a second, they lost their view of the ice floe, but they distinctly heard what happened when the wave passed below it. The crack was as loud as thunder would be from directly overhead, a single deafening sound that hit like a physical assault. When the ship rose up again, the floe ahead of them had been cleaved in two exactly where the thermite had weakened the ridge.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Bell, on a job well done.” This time, Fyrie cracked a smile.

  An hour later, the wind had shuffled the ice enough for the captain to thread his ship between the shattered floes and find an area of open water beyond. After nearly half a day drifting with the pack, Fyrie was again able to turn the Hvalur Batur eastward and pour on the steam for the scheduled rendezvous with the Coloradan miners.

  22

  Fyrie didn’t leave the bridge again over the next two days, pushing the ship and crew—and mostly himself—to make up lost time. Bell had impressed upon Fyrie how important it was to reach Brewster and the others by the first of April. He didn’t think the miners would mutiny if the ship wasn’t there on time, and he certainly didn’t fear a physical retribution from Brewster should they be late reaching Novaya Zemlya. The consequences were more personal. What he’d done was give Brewster his word that if he could meet an impossible deadline, Bell would too. And for a man like Isaac Bell, not keeping his word was as dishonorable an act as he could think of.

  The weather never improved, which was a blessing because it meant the pack ice continued to break up and they’d have to detour less and less.

  On the morning of April first, the ship ran into icy cold fog. Somewhere ahead, there was an area where the sea’s surface was warmer than the air, and the only way that was possible this far north was if they were approaching land. Fyrie slowed the ship and set a watchman up on the mast with a signal bell. By noon, the fog had thinned, and out of the mist rose the massif of Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago consisting mainly of two islands stretching almost six hundred miles in length and separated by a mile-wide channel. By chance they had reached their target abreast of the strait.

  The islands were an extension of the Urals chain, so a mountainous spine ran long the centerline. To the north, a thick permanent snowpack hid all but the tallest of the mile-high peaks, while to the south the hilly tundra was emerging from under its winter mantle of snow. It was a bleak, ugly place not fit for human habitation. Bell could well understand how its mineral riches had gone unnoticed for so long. Had Brewster not been stranded here in the first place, who knows how long it would have been before the archipelago was properly surveyed.

  “You said a hundred miles due north of the Matochkin Strait?” Fyrie asked. His eyes were bleary and his once-broad shoulders were stooped with exhaustion.

  “Yes,” Bell replied. “They’re on the other side of the islands. We need to transit the strait to the Kara Sea and then head north. Brewster said there’s a sheltered bay in the shadow of Bednaya Mountain where he’ll meet us.”

  “Good thing the channel’s already ice-free,” Arn said. He had just come up from the galley with sandwiches of canned meat on freshly baked bread still warm from the oven and another thermos of sweet coffee. He still walked with a limp, but the bear attack had done no lasting damage. He saw the fatigue in every line and crease etched on his captain’s face. “Why don’t you let me steer for a bit, Captain. The way’s clear, and you look like you can use some sleep.”

  Fyrie didn’t protest. He wolfed down a sandwich and, like before, settled on the floor at the rear of the bridge under a couple of blankets next to a coal-burning stove. He promptly fell into a death-like sleep. Bell ate his lunch a little more leisurely as Arn steered the ship into the narrow strait. At one point, they passed a colony of disinterested walruses sunning themselves on a pebbly beach. Some of the big males had tusks at least three feet long and easily tipped the scales at four thousand pounds.

  Dinner that night was a thick and creamy fish stew, and several extra pots of it were left to warm on the stove. They were nearing the rendezvous. Once again, Fyrie was on the bridge, though a crewman named Gunnar manned the helm. Bell stood a little behind the captain’s elevated chair. The sun was hidden by the mountains and glaciers of the northern island of the archipelago. The shadows were long and fixed. The skies were clouding up, and a constant wind rattled the bridge windows and buffeted the ship.

  The little vessel was just a speck compared to the ominous mountains and icy glaciers rolling by on her port side. Bell felt a vulnerability in the face of such raw Nature. For the first time, he came to appreciate the task Joshua Hayes Brewster had set for himself.

  As if reading his mind, Captain Fyrie said, “Your friend is either fearless or crazy to come here.”

  “A little of both, I think,” Bell replied. “I had no idea how barren and desolate a place could be. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  “The most forlorn coast of Iceland looks like paradise compared to this heap,” Fyrie remarked. “I can’t imagine spending the winter here. It had to have been hell.”

  A half hour later, the ship chugged into a bay just as Brewster had described. Looming out of an ice field was the naked flank of Bednaya Mountain, a black craggy tor that rose like a shark’s fin. The bay was ringed by a rocky beach, but beyond it stretching to the foothills was a bog humped with moss hillocks and riven with frozen ponds and streams. During the summer, it would melt into a soggy morass that would be as impenetrable as any tract on earth.

  As they drew deeper into the bay, Bell noted smoke coming from where a river would discharge into the sea once winter relinquished its grip on the landscape. He pointed out the spot to Fyrie, who nodded and adjusted course accordingly.

  In the lee of the mountains, the wind became less intense but still tore at the ocean’s surface, rendering it into a churning dark mass capped with occasional splashes of white foam. A lone bird glided for a moment just beyond the whaler’s windscreen before peeling off, lost in the scudding clouds.

  Not knowing the depth of the bay, Fyrie ordered a crewman to the rail with a sounding weight attached to a line marked out in meters. The door to the bridge wing had to remain open for his calls to be heard. When they were two hundred yards from the coast, the bott
om started shelving rapidly, and the captain called for the anchor to be dropped. He then ordered the ship’s lifeboat to be lowered rather than the smaller dinghy Bell had used earlier with the ice floe. The craft was large enough to fit all the miners and required four crewmen to row it.

  Over at the mouth of the frozen river stood the cluster of miners, their backs to their smoky signal fire. Bell expected them to be shouting and waving, eager to be off the cursed rock that had been like a prison these past months. Instead, they stood mutely. The distance was too great to read expressions, but he got an impression of men who’d been so beaten by experience that nothing left on earth could give them joy. They were in a sullen mass like veterans of the Civil War he’d seen at special homes for those who’d been shattered by what they’d seen and done.

  Bell made sure he was one of the rowers heading to shore. He needed to be there as a familiar face for Brewster. Seeing Novaya Zemlya, Bell better understood the task the miner had set for himself and his men. Their efforts, no matter if they’d been successful or not, were nothing short of herculean. Bell also wanted to step onto the island as a tangible link to what the Coloradans had accomplished.

  Once they got coordinated, Bell and the three crewmen rowed across from the Batur to shore quick enough. As they neared, they could hear the slow gurgle of water under the veneer of ice covering the river. The miners broke ranks only when the longboat ran aground on the pebbly beach. Judging by the surf line, high tide was another foot above where the keel gouged into the water-rounded stones. Even with the weight of the extra men, and the crates Bell could see they’d fashioned, they’d be able to float free in a couple of hours if they couldn’t maneuver the boat off the shore.

  It was only when the men spread out a bit that Bell counted them and came up with eight. Nine men had faked their deaths in Colorado. When he looked closer, he could also see that these were the shadows of men, the bare minimum of flesh remaining to cover the bones. Their beards weren’t what he expected. Some had none, but they didn’t look freshly shaved, just so gaunt that maybe the skin had no way of producing whiskers. Others’ beards were patchy and rough, like half-plucked chickens. The men all wore various types of hats, but only a few had lengths of greasy hair poking out from under them. All had red-rimmed eyes, so distant and dim that they were like walking corpses. All of them were pale too, with waxy skin, again not unlike the dead.

  Whatever estimation Bell had concocted in his head of the horrors these men endured was one hundredth of the true depth of deprivation they’d actually suffered. They had all volunteered for the job long before Bell became involved, but somehow he felt responsible, that he’d made these men endure such sickening brutality in the mountainous wastes of Novaya Zemlya.

  When he finally gave Brewster his full attention, the man stared at him with the vacancy of the mentally deranged and yet the unbroken hatred of a bitter enemy. The spark of madness he’d seen months earlier had caught fire and was spreading in a growing inferno. It was the most unsettling look Bell had ever experienced and yet he would not turn away. This was Brewster’s way of expressing how much this had affected him, and Bell felt obliged to acknowledge it. After ten or fifteen more seconds, Brewster’s expression didn’t exactly soften, but it became less focused.

  “You made good on your word, Mr. Bell,” Brewster said while Isaac Bell jumped over the lifeboat’s gunwale in borrowed rubber boots and splashed into a receding wave.

  Bell pointed to the ten wooden crates. “And you yours, Mr. Brewster.”

  “Thousand pounds of high-grade ore. The cost was one man killed, but I don’t think the rest of us are too far behind, to be honest. We’re all walking dead men. Only, none of us has the sense to settle into the grave just yet.”

  None of the men reacted to their leader pronouncing such a grim fate.

  “What happened to your man?”

  “Jake Hobart? He got lost in a storm in early February and froze to death. As for the rest, we think it’s the food that’s killing us.”

  Magnus interrupted. “Mr. Bell, maybe we should go to ship now and talk later. Ja?”

  “You’re right. Yes.”

  Brewster and his men were so thoroughly exhausted they needed help just to crawl over the lifeboat’s gunwale and left the work of loading the crates to Bell and the three sailors. Once loaded, the boat was heavy but the tide was swift. Bell and the two biggest seamen pushed with everything they had and soon slid it off the beach. The wooden craft floated free, though sluggishly. They scrambled aboard and got to the oars, having crawled around the sprawled forms of the ghastly looking miners. Bell noticed a couple were missing most of their teeth. This in and of itself wasn’t uncommon, but these men’s mouths were bleeding, making him believe their tooth loss was something recent.

  Because of the tide, the Hvalur Batur had swung around on her anchor chain so that she was a bit closer, but the oarsmen had to fight the rising waters and a ponderously loaded boat. It took twice as long to reach the whaling ship, and Bell was grateful when Magnus clipped the ropes to the davits and the lifeboat was cranked aboard.

  No sooner had the keel settled onto the chocks welded to the deck and the anchor chain started rattling up the hawsehole than a heavy gout of smoke shot out the ship’s stack. Captain Fyrie was wasting no time getting them headed for home.

  Magnus oversaw several other crew members off-loading the wooden chests to store in an unused cabin while Bell shepherded the exhausted miners down to the warm mess hall, where the aroma of fish stew filled the air. The odor was too rich for one of the men and he rushed for a corner trash can to dry-heave his pitifully empty stomach.

  As the miners shed hats, heavy gloves, and thick parkas, another odor permeated the cozy room, the smell of eight men who’d spent months holed up in a poorly ventilated mine shaft lit by sooty fires without any way of bathing. They reeked of stale smoke and old sweat. Their skin was veined by dark lines, and dirt-encrusted joints and wrinkles. Hair lay flat and lifeless, and Bell noted most of the miners had lost significant patches of it so only odd tufts remained.

  But it was their eyes that he noticed the most. More than the smell or the filth, it was the haunted and haggard look of the eyes, the look of men who’d been driven to the edge of insanity and had not yet stepped back from the precipice.

  A few of the miners slurped the rich stew while the others seemed to enjoy cups of steaming coffee laced with Scotch whiskey Bell had purchased during the layover in Denmark. Like Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the men’s silence seemed accusatory.

  Bell sat opposite Joshua Hayes Brewster and waited patiently until he’d partially finished a bowl of stew, washed it down with coffee, and gingerly set a plug of tobacco from a pouch of Mile-Hi.

  “Ain’t much more to tell ya, Mr. Bell,” Brewster said at last. “After the Frenchies dropped us off, we hauled our gear up the mountain a ways and set to blasting our way in. Lived in tents until we’d tunneled deep enough to wall ourselves in and only go outside for the facilities or when we set off a charge of dynamite. We stripped the earth of every trace of byzanium. Then we set about to erase all evidence we were there and camouflage the tunnel entrance and tailings dump.”

  “But . . .” Bell wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of the men’s appearance.

  “How we all look,” Brewster said for him. “Started just about when the worst of the winter hit us. We were already holed up in the mine but still bitter cold. No night in the Rockies could compare to the wind shrieking off that ice.

  “We were doing all right for a piece. Then we all started feeling sickly. Stomach issues. Hair and teeth started going bad. We worked through it, mind you, but it was bad.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t some type of gas leaching out of the rock?” Bell asked.

  “Nothing like I’ve heard of, and it wasn’t our fire causing it neither. We kept proper ventilation th
e whole time. It had to be the food. The cans were contaminated. Charlie Widney said he’d heard about something like it taking place on a ship. And the food had all been tainted when they sealed the cans with lead or some such thing.”

  Bell had heard similar tales, and while he wasn’t too knowledgeable about the lead poisoning, he had to defer to the man suffering its effects. He tried to sound upbeat for Brewster’s sake when he said, “We’ve got fine stores aboard the ship and a first-rate cook. In a few days it’ll pass out of your system and you will all start feeling better.”

  “Not so sure about that, Mr. Bell. I’m no doctor, but my insides feel so tore up they ain’t never gonna be right.”

  “We’ll reach Aberdeen in a couple of days. I’ll get you and your men to a hospital. And, I’ll see your ore transported to the dock at Southampton.”

  Brewster didn’t seem capable of holding his head straight, and yet at Bell’s words, he lunged across the table and grabbed the detective by the collar, holding on so close their faces were only inches apart. The voice he dredged up came from a place deep and dark. “I will not leave that ore to another living soul! Do you understand me?”

  Brewster’s breath was foul from months of cheap tobacco and neglect, and his eyes were wide and crazed, but Bell was still able to fight the urge to defend himself and lay the much smaller man out on the deck with a well-placed punch. He didn’t even bother wiping away the foamy spittle that had hit his face. He said calmly, as if to a child, “If that’s what you want, Mr. Brewster, that’s fine with me. No need to get yourself upset. Okay?”

  The fiery little man remained tensed, his jaw working wordlessly and his black pupils darting from one of Bell’s eyes to the other, searching for something—betrayal? Reassurance? Bell had no way of knowing. Brewster finally sat back down on the bench opposite. Bell noted that not one of the other miners had shown the slightest reaction.