Sloan Wilson - Ice Brothers

“Hell, no submarine is going to waste a torpedo on no goddamn little trawler,” Mowrey said. “They’re waiting for troop ships and tankers.”

Still both Nathan and Paul imagined German submarines lying, perhaps only a few thousand yards away, whenever they stared into the veils of fog. Were the men playing chess, reading girlie magazines, writing letters home and listening to music on the radio, the way the crew was in their own forecastle? Despite the name of the Arluk , the submarines were really the hunters in this war and almost everyone else the quarry. It was the captains of the submarines who could decide whether to attack, to hide or to run, and whatever they did, the odds were always in their favor at that stage of the war. If Paul’s distant forefathers had not emigrated to America, might he now be a professional in command of a really lethal weapons system, instead of a novice on a fishboat? His moment of envying the Germans did not last long, for he remembered a history professor at Boston University saying, “When all is said and done, Germany is a nation of only about eighty million people which has chosen to fight England, all the rest of Europe and Russia, a total of something like a half billion people. Their initial successes have been remarkable, but of course they are mad and will eventually die the death of a mad dog.”

Still the question remained, Paul mused as he stared into the fog, of whether the mad dog would kill him before it was killed. The moan of a rising wind in the rigging and the mournful disembodied cries of seagulls hidden by shrouds of fog, all seemed to be whispering premonitions of death, and the breath of the north was getting colder.

Paul and the other men did not have long for morbid musings. As the trawlers entered Davis Strait, they ran into their first real Arctic gale. The fog was ripped off the ocean like a dirty sheet and all around them lay jagged seas, a nightmare of boiling, constantly heaving mountain peaks. Ahead of them the Nanmak disappeared entirely in every trough. The 3-inch gun on the Arluk ’s bow was smothered in white water every time they finished one of their rollercoaster descents before shaking free and shooting up toward the sky like an express elevator. During these ascents there was a dreadful sucking noise under the bow, as though the ship herself were in frantic need of air for one last convulsion.

Although it was May, spray froze on deck and those few men who could walk at all hung frantically to hastily rigged lifelines. Every man aboard, even the old brig hands, was seasick, except Mowrey, who continued to smoke his cigar on the bridge, Boats, the rather sardonic chief boatswain’s mate, one second-class machinist’s mate, Seth Farmer, who volunteered to stand watches in the engineroom because fishermen know engines as well as deck work, and in defiance of all odds, Cookie, who stood cursing amongst his flying pots and pans, but continued to prepare gourmet food for anybody who could face it.

For both Nathan and Paul “seasickness” was not a term anywhere near drastic enough to denote the disease that beset them. The moment the gale hit they were turned into zombies or less than that, for their corpses could not walk but could only crawl up to the bridge, cling to a rail for four hours of semiconsciousness, then collapse in a bunk which offered blessed oblivion most of the rest of the time.

Paul found that he cared about nothing whatsoever, not even about staying alive, never mind clean or dry. It was always daylight now, and when he glanced at his wristwatch, he had no idea whether it was ten in the morning or ten at night. When the general alarm shrieked, he went skidding out on the frozen decks expecting to see a submarine preparing to gun them down and was not really much relieved to see only a small iceberg which Mowrey was considering a fine opportunity for gunnery practice. Paul was also not either surprised or angry to discover that the retching men on the violently rolling and pitching decks could not hit the iceberg until Mowrey steamed almost close enough to touch it, and then the Arluk ’s guns, which had seemed so lethal in silence, succeeded not in demolishing the iceberg, but only in sending up small splashes of chips.

“If you boys can’t learn to shoot, you better start writing condolence letters to your mothers right now,” Mowrey said as he ducked into his cabin to pour whiskey into his coffee mug.

Nathan, if possible, was even more out of it all than Paul was. He could keep neither food nor liquid in his stomach, and his already thin face appeared to age twenty years in a week. His tall gaunt body was bent forward like that of an octogenarian. When he staggered on deck in the regulation garb for general quarters, a.45 pistol at his belt, a life preserver and a tin hat, he looked like a cartoon figure of wretchedness which was made even more ridiculous by the bucket he clutched.

“Don’t worry, boys!” Mowrey said as Nathan painfully crawled up the steps to the bridge, sprawled on the deck as the ship took a particularly vicious lurch and slowly pulled himself up, clutching a rail. “Germany has Hitler and all those Prussian officers, but we’ve got Greenberg on our side. Greenberg, here, is our secret weapon. He may not look like much now, but wait until the going gets really tough!”

It is doubtful whether Nathan even heard him. He was intent on recovering his bucket, which had escaped his grasp and was now rolling noisily back and forth across the pilothouse. Managing to trap it with his foot without falling, he grabbed it, his lips spreading to a thin desperate grin of triumph before he retched into it.

Neither Paul nor Nathan had any idea how many night-less days went by before the general alarm again brought them from their bunks. This time they saw a big horned mine bobbing almost in their wake — the lookouts had failed to see it and they had almost hit it. After wasting a good deal of ammunition, the men on the 20-millimeter guns finally hit it and it exploded, producing the first roar of German violence that the men of the Arluk had ever heard.

“Captain,” Nathan gasped, “just as a matter of technical curiosity, did Hansen’s radar pick up that thing?”

“Hansen’s radar quit about two days ago,” Mowrey replied with apparent satisfaction. “Since we now know it was invented by guys like you, there’s no reason to be surprised.”

Even with an understanding of Mowrey’s growing madness, Paul still found it difficult to accept the fact that the captain’s anti-Semitism now embraced radar, which correctly or incorrectly, he assumed to be the work of Jewish scientists. It wasn’t long before Mowrey was referring to radar as “Jewish magic,” or “The Jew Box.”

Shortly before they reached the coast of Greenland, the gale moderated. Paul immediately felt better, but Nathan had been so weakened that he still could get out of his bunk only long enough to stand his watches.

Paul’s first glimpse of Greenland came at four o’clock one bright morning when he climbed onto the bridge to start his morning watch.

“There she be!” Mowrey said as though he were bestowing a personal gift. “There lies Greenland, sixty miles dead ahead.”

At first the long ridge of mountains was hard to distinguish from the clouds on the horizon, but then one peak stood out against a steel-colored sky, a black silhouette, majestic but full of distant menace. Paul remembered Nathan saying he had read that Greenland had been called both “the Land of Desolation” and “the Land of Comfort.” There certainly did not seem to be much comfort promised by those stark mountain peaks, but he did feel some strange new excitement in them, perhaps an echo of probably phony tales he had heard about “the clarion call of the north.”