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20
The rest of that night went as planned. They slunk out of Sandefjord Harbor undetected and turned west until coming to a secluded bay that kept them hidden and sheltered. What followed was five backbreaking hours of shoveling coal off the barge and into the Hvalur Batur’s bunkers. Each man took his turn, including Bell and the captain. And even as the fuel was being tossed through special access ports, Ivar and another crewman were working on the automatic feed system to keep the boilers stoked without wasting manpower, as well as balancing the boiler’s need for a fresh supply of water drawn through the sea inlets. Bell had always understood the delicate balance needed to keep a modern boiler properly fed, he’d just never had such an up-close tutorial.
When the sun finally rose and the men were forced to scuttle the two-thirds full barge so it didn’t become a navigation hazard, Bell’s hands were black with ingrained coal but also split open and bloody with torn blisters. His spine felt like someone had rammed a steel spear between two lower vertebrae, and his shoulders and arms had never ached so cruelly in his life.
“Not bad, for a city dweller,” Ivar commented when he saw Bell slumped in the galley over a steaming mug. His face was an anthracite mask, and the dawn light streaming in the little porthole drew attention to the sweat runnels snaking through the grime. “You won’t make it as a bluejacket, but you’re not completely worthless either.”
To Bell, it was about the best compliment he could have been given. “Don’t go soft on me, chief.”
“Not to worry, Mr. Detective. That was the easy part.”
The run across the Skagerrak Strait took less time than expected, but securing enough coal for the round trip to the Imperial Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya took longer than anticipated. The extra time allowed Captain Fyrie to provision the ship. News that an impounded ship had escaped Norwegian waters reached the commercial fishing town of Skagen on Denmark’s northern tip while a dockside crane equipped with a clamshell bucket was dumping coal onto chutes leading into the Hvalur’s holds.
None of the harbor authorities seemed interested in the ship, but the scuttlebutt imbued the captain with a new level of paranoia. Fyrie ordered one of his men over the fantail on a ladder rig with a bucket of marine-grade paint with orders to obscure the vessel’s name as a precaution. Even if no one in Denmark cared about them, they still had to cruise up the entire western coat of Norway. They’d stay well beyond shipping lanes, yet as a northern seaman Fyrie believed in prudence above all else.
They departed the Danish port twenty hours after escaping Sandefjord, and Fyrie turned them on a northwesterly course to get around the Norwegian lobe of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Because of the Gulf Stream’s continuous wash of warm water, their passage was ice-free and the temperature far more moderate than the latitude suggested. They were about level geographically with Canada’s Hudson Bay, and, by way of contrast, those waters would remain under several feet of ice well into May and sometimes June.
A day and a half out, the ship crossed the Arctic Circle, the line ringing the globe above which the sun never rises in winter and in the summer never fully sets. As with other recognized cartographical sites—namely, the equator—the first transect of the Arctic Circle by a sailor was marked with a ceremony. The tradition dated from nearly a century, and while most such commemorations were dedicated to the world’s professional navies, some civilians got in on it as well.
Captain Fyrie, Ivar, and the others not on duty didn’t have the props and costumes to give the ceremony its air of mock seriousness. They simply rousted Bell from his bed in a cabin he enjoyed by himself since so many of the crew were home in Iceland. A burlap sack was pulled over his head and he was frog-marched to the galley. Bell fought his natural instincts to escape and mete out retribution. He recognized the spirit of what was happening. When the burlap was ripped away, he saw Fyrie and his men, all grinning. Magnus, the third officer, was there with a daub of blue paint for the tip of the detective’s nose, and before Bell could protest, Arn, who more resembled an oak tree than a man, hoisted Bell off his bare feet and dunked them into a bucket of ice water.
Just as Bell opened his mouth to protest the shock of his feet and calves going instantly numb, a fair-sized cod was thrust at him so that its lips pressed his for a ceremonial kiss. As soon as this was done, the crew roared its approval.
“Congratulations, Mr. Bell,” Captain Fyrie said when Arn lifted Bell from the bucket and set him in a waiting chair. A crewman handed over a towel that had been prewarmed on the stove. “You have been welcomed into the Royal Order of the Blue Nose by crossing into the realm of Boreas, King of the North.”
Another crewman thrust a bottle of akvavit into Bell’s hands and Bell swished a mouthful to rinse away the taste of fish slime while others slapped him on the back.
Isaac Bell had made a successful career of being able to read people without judging them, but for the moment he allowed himself the indulgence of forming an opinion about his companions and found he couldn’t imagine a better group.
Eighteen hours later, they came upon the first ice. It was late afternoon and already the sun was almost to the horizon, its light weak and cold. To an untrained eye like Isaac Bell’s, the odd angles of the sun’s rays elongated distances and made determining position next to impossible. He thought the first bits of pancake ice were well away from the ship when in fact the Hvalur Batur passed them in moments. When he looked astern from his spot on the bridge, the ice had been swallowed by the gathering gloom as though it had never existed at all.
“What do you know about ice?” Fyrie asked quietly. He stood at the helm, both hands on the wheel, and the last of the sun shining through his blond hair.
Bell could imagine the captain a thousand years earlier commanding a Viking longboat. “I know too much ruins a good glass of whiskey.”
Fyrie cracked a smile but kept his tone serious. “By the time the jet stream reaches these waters, it’s lost most of the heat it has carried north and east from the tropics, so come winter the surface can freeze from here all the way over the crown of the planet to Siberia and your Alaska territory. At its edges the ice pack is thin because it melts again each spring. Closer to the center, near the geographic pole, the ice persists for many years and can be several meters thick. At times, though, multiyear ice will migrate outward, and we have masses of floes that stretch seemingly forever, some with ridges, called hummocks, that tower as high as fifteen meters.”
Bell quickly converted that in his head and whistled. It was nearly fifty feet.
“The point is, we never know what we’re going to find each spring until the thaw comes and we start probing around the edges of the pack. And, truth be told, whalers are doing it less and less. The big ones have all been taken. That’s why some of us tried our hand in the Antarctic below southern Africa.”
“How’d that work out?”
“The whales are there, for sure, but it’s expensive to reach the best grounds and hard to find a crew willing to sign on for that length of time. This way of life is dying, Mr. Bell. You mark my word, and, honestly, I don’t mind a bit.”
“Odd statement from someone who makes a living at it.”
“It’s a living that comes with a price,” the captain said in a voice just discernible over the throb of the engines below deck. “A soulless person may feel nothing at the death of one of these magnificent animals, but I remember every single one I’ve hunted and rendered into oil to light homes for men who think up better and faster ways to perpetuate the slaughter.
“So, Mr. Bell,” Fyrie boomed with his normal good cheer, dispelling the pall that had suddenly gripped the bridge, “your fortuitous arrival may well turn out to be the watershed event that sets me on a new path. I have a wife and young son back in Iceland. I will never give up th
e sea, yet I think it’s time I find a better way to balance the priorities in my life.”
“I’m married myself,” Bell said. “No children yet, but I imagine that when they come along, I won’t be too keen to jaunt all over the world looking for criminals and other ne’er-do-wells.”
As the night progressed, their pace eastward across the north coast of Norway slowed. They weren’t yet in pack ice, but they encountered an ever-increasing amount of drifting sheets, some as small as carpets, others many acres in size. This was the year-old ice Fyrie had mentioned.
While the ship’s bow was reinforced to cleave through the thinner ice, she could not do so at anywhere near her top speed, and each time she hit the ice, she slowed and shuddered until the floe split apart and she could proceed, oftentimes with ice bumping along her hull as she passed. Captain Fyrie let Magnus spell him at the wheel just after the watery dawn broke. He lay down on the floor of the bridge under a woolen blanket and didn’t stir for four hours, but when he woke he was not only refreshed but clear-eyed as well. Fresh coffee from the galley and a breakfast of soft eggs over shredded beef and potatoes with onion brought him to full wakefulness. He stayed at the helm the rest of the day.
