Sloan Wilson - Ice Brothers

Paul was sick again.

“Now don’t get the wrong idea. Them Eskies ain’t whores. They’re just the most natural people on earth. They’re little bitty women and they do love a big white man.”

“Do their men mind, sir?” the helmsman asked.

“The men don’t mind a bit! There’s no such thing as jealousy in an Eskie. They know that there’s always enough ping-ping to go around. You know what ping-ping is, Yale?”

“I can guess.”

“You guess right. You just ask for ping-ping and nobody’s going to be mad at you, unless you’re near some big settlement where the damn Christers have ruined everything.”

“Boy!” the helmsman said.

“Why, I can take you to places where the women will knock you down trying to get to you first. They’re always afraid of inbreeding up there. That’s why they love a stranger so.”

“When will we get to that part of Greenland?” the helmsman asked.

“That depends on our assignment, boy, but you can be sure of one thing: we’re going north and that’s the right direction. We’re going to God’s country, man’s country, ping-ping land! We’re going where the summer is just one three-month day. We’ll run out of night before long. Do you realize that, Yale?”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“I’ll show you polar bears that weigh a full ton and men who can kill them without a gun.”

“How?” the helmsman asked.

“You’ll see. They got more than one way. I’ll show you sheep that eat fish. I’ll take you on a dog-sled race that will make any horse race look tame.”

“It sounds fascinating,” Paul said, swallowing in an attempt to contain his nausea.

“And you’ll eat like you never ate before. Reindeer steak! Bear paw! Ptarmigan, Arctic shrimp and seal liver! You ever ate salmon and cod raw? The Eskies think the best part of a fish is the eyes and they’re right!”

This time Paul and the helmsman both retched so hard that they couldn’t hear what their captain was saying. Mowrey took the chewed butt of his cigar from his mouth and licked the tobacco leaves into place.

“Curl your toes up when you get sick that bad,” he said. “That way you won’t spit your guts up.”

“Thank you,” Paul said.

“Yale, you may not think it now,” Mowrey continued with a chuckle, “but if you’re any kind of a man at all, you’ll love Greenland. After you’ve had an Eskie girl, all the others seem half dead. Once I get you up to Greenland, you’ll never want to go home again.”

The first three days that the Arluk was at sea, Paul was so seasick that his mind worked hardly at all. He had plenty of company. Nathan Green was soon so weak that he barely had the strength to cling to a rail during his watches and stagger to his bunk below, where he lay clutching his bucket as a drowning man might hug a life preserver. The only enlisted men who were not seasick as the unballasted trawler with her heavy top load of guns rolled in a steady easterly gale, was the collection of old Coast Guard reprobates who had been sent from the Boston brigs to the Greenland Patrol as an example to other incorrigibles. The spectacle of all the nice people proving to be helpless while the foul-mouthed bums boisterously took charge suddenly seemed to Paul to be the essence of war. The only capable sailor who also appeared to Paul to be a halfway decent human being was the old fisherman, Seth Farmer, whose strongest expletive was, “Oh, my! ” but who remained as cheerfully healthy aboard the violently rolling trawler as though he were standing on the rockbound coast of Maine.

At eleven o’clock in the morning when they were four days out of Boston, Sparks received a coded message from “Commander, GreenPat” to the Arluk . He typed it on yellow paper, clipped it with a carbon copy to a board and carried it to Nathan, who was still lying in his bunk hugging his shiny galvanized bucket. With a groan Green untangled his lank frame from his blankets, extricated himself from the bunk, and staggered to the table, where a sudden lurch of the ship almost threw him before he grabbed one of the chairs that had been bolted down, and eased himself on to it. Dully he stared at the message which the radioman handed to him. It began, “XWLV YQOP NVEO RPOQ” and went on like that for five lines. Feeling that it appeared about as sensible as everything else that was happening to him, Nathan initialed the carbon, gave it back to the radioman, and staggered to the door of a safe which had been built into the bulkhead. Before he could get the combination out of his wallet while holding the clipboard under his right arm, the rolling of the ship threw him against his bunk, where he bruised his knee but hardly noticed it as he grabbed for the bucket he had left in his blankets and used it.

“Can I help?” Farmer asked from his bunk, putting down a well-thumbed copy of The Saturday Evening Post .

At that moment Nathan was willing to accept almost any help, but he had been severely warned by Mowrey that only a commissioned officer, not a warrant officer, was entitled to handle codes.

“The only fucking thing your commission makes you good for is paperwork,” Mowrey had said, “so don’t load it off on nobody else.”

“I can get it,” Nathan gasped, propped his bucket into a corner of his bunk with a pillow and returned to the safe. An hour-long lecture in communications which had been his sole training as an officer had taught him to use a strip board with numbers and letters which looked like a child’s game. Clinging to a chair with his long legs, he hunched over this board, pushing the paper strips back and forth with the eraser of a pencil. No matter what he did, nothing made any sense, but when he finally realized that he was using the wrong cypher, he found himself spelling out the following message on his board:

Your orders to proceed directly to Narsarssuak Fjord hereby canceled. Proceed immediately by most direct course to Argentia, Newfoundland, there to await orders to join convoy for Greenland.

Commander GreenPat.

Proud of decoding his first message, Green started toward the bridge without bothering to have it typed. As he staggered up the steps to the pilothouse, he saw Paul white-faced and clinging in an apparently fond embrace with one of the 20-millimeter antiaircraft guns on the gun deck. The two men exchanged grins of desperation as Nathan grabbed the rail of the bridge and retched over the side before opening the door to the pilothouse. He found Mowrey sitting on a stool near the wheel smoking an extremely foul briar pipe, which made gurgling noises.

“Greenberg, what the fuck do you want up here?” Mowrey demanded.

“I have just decoded a radio message for you, sir,” Nathan said and handed the clipboard to the captain before grabbing the engine room telegraph to prevent himself from being thrown to the deck by the lurching vessel. Guns, the burly telephone-booth lover, grinned, took a piece of chewing tobacco from his pocket, and bit a piece off with brown teeth.

“Now what the fuck is this?” Mowrey said as he accepted the board. After glancing at it, he crumpled the paper in his fist, hurled it to the deck and exploded.

“I bet that bastard Hansen did this! I knew he wouldn’t let me get up there first! He’s been up there sucking ass at Headquarters, and now he’s going to have me sitting with my thumb up my ass at Argentia until it’s time for all the real shit jobs to be handed out. Well, I won’t stand for it. Did Sparks acknowledge receipt of this fucking thing?”

“I believe so, sir. I mean, that would be normal radio procedure—”

“You’re supposed to be communications officer aboard here, and you tell that son of a bitch not to acknowledge receipt of any message until you decode it and I see what it is. Just keep them repeating it until you figure it out. Now, goddamn it, you’ve got me trapped. God knows how long we’ll sit in Argentia while that bastard Hansen waltzes up there ahead of us and grabs off all the supply runs. I should have punched that bastard’s head in while I had the chance. Christ, I’ve known that slippery queer for years and I should have known he’d figure out a way to shaft me up the ass one way or another!”