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“. . . 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.
