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“Skit.” He pulled a pair of breeches off the floor and legged into them before ramming his earlier-stockinged feet into calf-high rubber boots. “Don’t suppose you know which one?”
“I lack the ear of a good acoustician.”
“Huh?” Fyrie shinnied into a bulky roll-neck sweater the color of old whale bones.
“Your doors all squeal the same, so, no, I don’t know which. Only that it’s not Brewster or Vernon Hall, and likely not Alvin Coulter or John Caldwell.”
Thirty seconds after Bell’s initial knock, he was trailing Captain Fyrie up to the wheelhouse. The big harpooner, Arn, still had the con and nodded a taciturn greeting to his captain and guest. The seas were as black as slag heaps and capped with jagged white lines of foam that wriggled and twisted like living creatures or fanned across the surface like pale bolts of electricity. The sun was a distant smear against the horizon behind them, not yet powerful enough to inject any color into the sky except for a blue just one shade lighter than the deepest obsidian. They were traveling south and west toward the north coast of Norway and making sixteen knots, as they had passed below the ice limit.
“Mr. Bjørnson, course correction, please.”
“Captain.”
“Take us north-northwest at three hundred degrees. Reduce speed to ten knots, and I’ll get Other Petr to act as an additional lookout.”
“Yes, sir. Making my course three hundred degrees and reducing speed to ten knots.” Arn first worked the spoked wooden wheel until the Hvalur Batur’s prow was cutting through the waves on the proper course and then ratcheted the engine telegraph to reduce speed until it read ten knots on the retrofitted pitometer log gauge mounted on the wall next to the pendulum inclinometer that showed the ship’s roll. “Captain. Speed, ten knots. Course, three hundred degrees.”
Fyrie regarded Isaac Bell. “There’s ice to the north of us. With some luck, we can hide among the hummocks and keep moving west.”
“Outflanking the French ship?”
“If she’s out here. Our radio doesn’t have a lot of range, but if they have a big enough antenna, they could still have heard a call.”
“But knowing we’ve left Novaya Zemlya isn’t the same as knowing where we’re going to be,” Bell said.
“Right. It’s a big ocean. We just need to keep all our passengers from knowing our direction and speed and then we should slip by their picket without them ever knowing it.”
“Confine them to the cabins, you mean?”
“I’ll get someone to black out the portholes outside the mess and paint over the small ones in each cabin. That way, they can roam a little bit but not try to get a fix on our position.”
“Why not just take the crystal out of the radio?” Bell suggested. “They can’t help their allies if they can’t communicate.”
With a chagrinned look on his face, Fyrie said, “I’m still getting used to even having a radio aboard my old Batur. I should have thought of that in the first place.”
Bell shrugged good-naturedly. “My wife thinks I’m too clever by half. Anything else we can do?”
“In a few minutes, the light will be strong enough to show our smoke trail. I’m going to have Ivar vent steam out an auxiliary exhaust mounted to the stack. It’s a terribly inefficient use of the engines, but the steam will help dissipate the black coal smoke faster and make us less visible against the ice fields. I can talk to Ivar over the voice tube, so please roust the two Petrs and have them come up here.”
Bell left the bridge and strode back down to Brewster’s cabin. He opened the door without knocking. The miner was dressed and sitting on his bed, his elbows resting on his knees and his head hanging low. He’d been coughing, because there were spots of blood on the deck. Next to the splatters were bits of hair and beard that had fallen by themselves from his head and face and drifted down.
“Mr. Brewster. It’s me again. Isaac Bell.”
The man looked up. His face was as pale as a full moon, and the bags under his eyes were bruised the color of eggplants. “I know who you are, Mr. Bell. I’m forgetful, not stupid.”
“Right. Tell me about Jake Hobart. Do you know who killed him?”
“Whoever smuggled a radio onto the island with him,” Brewster replied.
“A radio?”
“Yeah. Smallish thing powered by a hand crank. I found it after Jake’s body was found. When we found him, see, he was out by the mound of tailings we’d already mined. It was after a bad storm, but that wouldn’t have bothered Jake. He was a bull of a man. Nothing could stand in his way, least of all a little bad weather.”
“Who found him?”
“Charlie Widney.”
Bell pictured the man. He was a gentle giant with a prominent Adam’s apple and scars on his face from some childhood pox. He recalled that Widney’s job was master of the draft horses and mules used in the mine. Therefore, his presence at the tailings pile wasn’t an unusual event. “Go on.”
