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“Captain,” Bell said urgently, “turn us toward them.”
“What? Why?”
“Just do it!”
Fyrie swung the wheel, and the whaling ship drove her shoulder into the sea and she came about far sharper than she ever had in her career. She heeled over hard, forcing the men on the bridge to clutch handholds. The sound of something crashing to the deck below came up the stairway.
An instant later, the French fired a third time. The shell crashed into the nearby berg exactly where the wheelhouse would have been had Bell not shouted a warning. More ice cascaded down into the sea.
“Their turret doesn’t swivel,” Bell said. “They have to aim the cannon by turning the entire ship.”
“How do we take advantage of that?” Fyrie asked, turning his ship once again so he could duck around the back of the berg and take refuge amid the enormous field of floating ice islands.
“For one thing, don’t let him get directly behind us. We need to keep moving unpredictably. Zig when he zags.”
Arn bellowed up the stairwell, “Captain, we need to vent the mechanical room.”
“One moment.” Fyrie turned his attention to Bell. “You go out and open the fairlead plug. It twists a quarter turn into position, and it’s secured to the ship with a chain. Take gloves because it’s going to be hot. Same with the deck. Out and back as fast as you can.”
“On it,” Bell replied. He found gloves on a shelf above some hangi
ng parkas. He pulled on the thickest pair, and a hooded anorak, before sliding open the bridge wing door.
The temperature was tolerable, maybe a dozen degrees below freezing, but it was the wind rushing across the deck that numbed Bell’s face and made his eyes stream. Down below, below his waist, he could feel warmth radiating from the deck above the place the fire had raged. He raced along the raised catwalk connecting the bridge to the pulpit, where the harpoon cannon stood empty. Even at a fast jog, he could feel the hot metal through the soles of his boots. He saw the round plug used to cover the hole that the wire the harpoon was attached to, on its deadly arc, rise from within the ship.
The plug had expanded due to the extreme heat, forcing him to use both hands to twist with all his strength. It finally loosened, and the pressure of overheated air down below blew the plug upward like a champagne cork. Bell fell to the deck, but then the heat meeting the seat of his pants forced him back to his feet in a comical bit of acrobatics.
From the hole spewed a solid column of black smoke, followed by dense white steam, as the fire team belowdecks began to cool the metal machinery with the two-inch hose. In the pristine Arctic air, the smoke was a dark stain.
Bell needed time. He needed time for the hull to cool, the smoke to dissipate, and for the captain of the Lorient to make a number of tactical mistakes. Otherwise, they were going to tear the Hvalur Batur apart, steal its cargo, and murder its crew. Luck, skill, and sheer audacity had worked so often for Bell in the past that sometimes he forgot fortune may favor the bold, but oftentimes it punished the unaware.
He admitted, as he dashed back to the bridge, that he knew little of the ship’s capabilities, less of naval tactics, and nothing at all of the chances of pulling off his plan.
Over the next hour, the two ships played a game of cat and mouse amid the towering ramparts of ice. When the French found the whaling ship in its sights, it fired off several shots, but the hastily aimed shells never came close. And then Captain Fyrie would hook them around another berg and make a quick retreat. The trick was to keep moving so the Lorient couldn’t come at them directly and bring her deck gun to bear. And for much of the day, that’s exactly what kept happening. Even if the French caught a glimpse of the whaling ship, it was at such an angle or distance that they couldn’t engage with the big cannon.
Luck seemed to be on their side until it abandoned them without warning.
The Hvalur was racing west, hoping to hook around the back of a berg, when suddenly the Lorient burst out behind them from around another drifting mass of ice. Her cannon fired, but before its thunder rolled across the Icelandic vessel its solid steel shell slammed into the rear of the pilothouse. It tore through the radio room, before screaming across the bridge and finally exploding out one of the windows overlooking the foredeck. The round landed unseen out past the bow.
Inside the bridge, the kinetic energy shed by the five-inch shell as it transited the space had been transformed into heat and shock waves that assaulted the men’s senses like they’d been thrust inside a whirling kaleidoscope of light and sound and motion. A fire started growing in the radio room, and the temperature dropped fifty or more degrees as the cold Arctic air gusted through the broken window.
Bell’s ears rang like church bells and his vision was blurry for many long seconds. His head felt as though it had been worked over with a pneumatic rock hammer. A little blood dripped from his forehead where a piece of shrapnel had embedded itself. He winced as he pulled the shard free of his flesh and tossed it aside in order to unclip a fire extinguisher from the wall and douse the burning books atop the shack’s desk. The radio set was a sparking ruin, which he soaked for good measure.
Fyrie was trying to talk to him, but Bell couldn’t hear the words, only see his mouth moving soundlessly. He held up a hand to forestall any conversation and worked his jaw to equalize the pressure between his ears and sinuses. When things cleared up with what to him was an audible squeak, his head felt instantly better and his vision normalized. Fyrie’s voice was nothing more than a monotonous buzz for now, but it was an improvement.
A second shot followed the first, but it went wide and streaked past the bridge wing like a meteor. A moment later, the French lost sight of their target as the Hvalur Batur motored around the trailing edge of another iceberg.
After another few moments, Bell was finally able to hear Captain Fyrie lighting off a string of curses in English, Icelandic, a little French, and quite possibly Swahili. No sooner had he caught his breath than Chief Engineer Ivarsson climbed up the stairs from the main deck, his expression grim. He looked around at the destruction and nodded, accepting the mess as just one more thing gone wrong that day.
“I’ll get some plywood from stores to cover the window, Captain,” he said when he had Fyrie’s attention. “But we’ve got a real problem. It’s cool enough to check the bilge below the mechanical room. Some plates are buckled and we’re taking on water.”
He held up a quick hand to prevent the inevitable barrage of follow-up questions. “We’ve jammed the holes with oakum mats and caulked them in place as best we could. The pumps can stay ahead of the water, but we must reduce our speed by one quarter at least.”
“The crew’s okay?” Fyrie asked.
“Some smoke inhalation. Arn got the worst of it, but you know him. Indestructible.”
“Send him up here,” Fyrie ordered. “Now that we know we can’t outrun the French, it’s time we put an end to this. Bell, are you sure about your plan?”
