The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

March 1912

It was clear early on in Bell’s search for a skipper with the right kind of Arctic experience that he’d end up either in the northern reaches of Canada or back in Europe. And the Canadian angle seemed unlikely because most of those experts amid the frozen seas were native hunters in open longboats searching the black waters for small whales and walrus.

That he needed a whaler was never in doubt. They are the only men who are willing to risk both ship and crew on the hunt for the giant cetaceans that migrate around the ice fields at the top of the world. No merchantman need traverse these frozen reaches, save small coastal freighters plying the waters from village to village along the coasts of Norway and Iceland and the Faroe Islands. None had any need to know how to circumvent the mighty floes that drifted down from the Arctic or how to spot and exploit open leads in the ice that were large enough for a ship and navigable.

The fishermen certainly had the bravery for what Bell had in mind, but they were mariners of the open waters where they could trawl their vast nets without fear of them being shredded by an accidental brush against an iceberg’s jagged underside. They stayed well clear of bergs and pack ice. And when winter’s darkened grip held fast and the ice grew truly thick, they beached the boats and tended to winter chores until the sun returned again in the spring.

The men who chased the whales. That’s who Bell was told he needed by sailors he’d befriended during past cases. He talked to the few he knew and they, in turn, led him to seafarers with specialized knowledge of the mariners of the far north. It was at this point a name emerged, whispered as rumor at first but who others claimed to have first- or at least secondhand knowledge of a legendary skipper, a man whose skills and experience and bravery were the stuff of tavern tales. When cannon-mounted harpoons had made whaling so deadly efficient that they’d decimated the populations of minke, blue, and bowhead, he’d been one of the first skippers to turn southward and hunt the vast ice fields surrounding the continent of Antarctica.

The skipper was Ragnar Fyrie, a native of Iceland, and Isaac Bell had tracked him to the city of Sandefjord, which served as the whaling capital of Norway. In reality, the coastal town of six thousand was also the world’s whaling capital, as so much of the industry was based here or at least crewed by sailors local to the area.

Situated near the mouth of the mighty Oslofjord, Sandefjord boasted a natural harbor that was well protected from the ravages of the Skagerrak Strait, the section of the North Sea between Norway and Denmark. Unlike the towering fjords in the north of the country, the town was backed by low hills. It consisted mostly of wooden cottages owned by the whalers, but there were some brick structures for the wealthy and a central street dominated by the newly rebuilt Sandefjord church, with its soaring brick tower roofed in dark slate and a suite of bells that sounded every hour.

Bell arrived by train from Oslo. He’d read that in the summer the nearby beaches were popular with the capital city’s residents and that there were spas nestled around town. However, when he stepped off the train and onto the platform, a heavy smell hit him like a gut punch and he wondered how anyone could spend even a few seconds in Sandefjord let alone an entire summer season.

The smell was of the whaling fleet at anchor in the inner harbor. The ships were modern, ocean-capable vessels and were regularly serviced by their crews, but, like the slave ships of old, there was no amount of cleansing that could rid them of the noxious odor they carried like the stain of sin for what they were built to do. The particular smell permeated everything within the city and probably carried for many miles. It was the fishy stink of blubber rendered into whale oil, but also the hot copper scent of blood so copious that it would wash the whalers’ decks like the slosh of waves during heavy seas.

He imagined it was a stench the locals had grown so accustomed to, they never noticed it, but that outsiders would never find themselves immune from.

It was now mid-March, and his window to reach Brewster and his fellow miners was closing rapidly. It had taken far too long to find the right person for the job, and longer still to develop a plan to secure his assistance. The problem was, Ragnar Fyrie stood accused of illegally poaching whales in an area claimed as the exclusive territory of a concession holder from there in Sandefjord.

For Bell, the legalities seemed a little vague. The concession holder maintained that the Norwegian government gave him the authority to hunt whales over a wide swath of the Arctic Ocean and he, in turn, employed captains and crews to do the actual harvesting. Fyrie maintained that he wa

s a native of Iceland, which made him a Danish citizen, and was therefore not bound by a concession granted by a foreign power. His argument held little sway with the Norwegians. As soon as he’d put into port with nearly ten thousand gallons of whale oil, as well as some more valuable spermaceti oil his crew had harvested from the mammoth heads of several sperm whales, his ship had been impounded and its cargo confiscated.

That had occurred at the end of the 1911 hunting season, and the wrangling between the governments of Norway and Denmark had lasted throughout the sunless Arctic winter and there seemed to be no end in sight as spring fast approached and the great cetaceans’ migrations were about to begin anew. Fyrie and his crew were free to leave the ship and enjoy Sandefjord as they awaited their fate so long as their vessel remained tied to the dock with her main engines cold.

Bell knew all of this before he had arrived in the coastal town and had crafted a plan with the help of a marine engineer employed by a wealthy shipping magnate who’d used the Van Dorn Agency on a few occasions when discretion was a must. It was only a matter of convincing Captain Fyrie to go along with it.

It took two porters to wrestle each of the large trunks Bell had stowed in the luggage car for the sixty-mile trip from Oslo. The contents had been purchased at some expense from specialists in New York, Newark, and Philadelphia. Bell’s acquisitions had all but emptied the supplies in all three cities. Customs forms declared powdered silica. That was far from the truth.

He shuddered to think what would have happened if one of the waterproofed trunks had failed and its contents come into contact with water. The trunks, as well as two personal bags, went onto a waiting Leyland truck he’d rented that took Bell across town to a small inn that was crowded during the summer season but was empty now except for him on this cold, dark March evening. He paid extra to have the truck parked in a clapboard barn behind the inn.

Bell changed out of his suit and put on dark woolen pants, a cable-knit wool sweater, and a Navy coat with a high collar.

The docks were easy enough to find. He simply followed his nose and knew he was on the right path when the smell grew progressively stronger. Twenty-odd whaling ships tied up in loose rows. Each sported a raised platform on the bow, usually accessible by a suspended catwalk over the forward part of the ship from the wheelhouse. On the platform was mounted a vicious-looking harpoon cannon capable of hurling an explosives-tipped lance far and with enough force to pierce a whale’s thick blubber hide.

He found Fyrie’s ship easily enough. Bell knew he had the right ship, the Hvalur Batur, or Whale Boat, because a small guardhouse had been erected at the foot of its gangplank and a trickle of smoke coiled from the chimney of what he imagined was a potbellied stove.

He strode past the guard shack without a moment’s pause or the slightest regard for its occupant and mounted the inclined ramp up from the quay to the deck of the Icelandic whaler. He’d noted she flew a Danish flag on her jack staff as a cheeky reminder that she wasn’t bound by Norway’s laws.

The guard didn’t emerge from his little metal lodge, and no one challenged him upon reaching the ship’s deck. He climbed a steep flight of stairs welded to the superstructure and emerged on a balcony that wrapped around the bridge and extended out to the harpoon some fifty feet forward. The bridge was dark, and when he tugged at a pitted brass doorknob, he found it locked. Back down on deck, he located a watertight door aft of the gangplank, but it too was locked.

He retreated from the ship, and when he came abreast of the guard shack, the door opened. The man wore a blue serge police uniform with bright buttons, but his face was in bad need of a shave, and the bags under his eyes were large enough to be considered ladies’ purses. It was obvious he’d been on duty for quite some time and that this wasn’t considered a plum assignment.

He spoke a few words in Norwegian to Bell.

“I’m sorry,” the detective replied, “do you speak English?”

The guard scratched himself absently. “The crew. Ja?”

“Captain Fyrie?”

“Ja. They drink at the Lundehund. A tavern. Lundehund—is a dog. You see on, ah, sign. Little dog. Lundehund.”

“Captain Fyrie and his men are at a tavern called the Lundehund, which is named for a dog painted on a sign outside.”

The man flashed nicotine-yellowed teeth and pointed in the direction of the big church that dominated the downtown district. “Ja.”