The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

Fyrie had warned there were the ghostly ice castles that calved off the glaciers of western Greenland and eventually drifted southward into the Atlantic shipping channels. These were formed as pressure drove floes into and over one another, mounding up ice that compacted and reformed into new solid blocks that were as hard as iron.

The rigid bergs weren’t yet as tall as Fyrie had mentioned, but Bell could tell they were dangerous. A mere brush against such a formation could rip the hull plates straight off the ship’s support ribs and sink it in seconds. He also knew from going out on deck for a bit of fresh air that the chill coming off the ocean meant an exposure to such icy water for only a minute or two made death all but certain.

Somehow, Ragnar Fyrie kept them moving in the right direction. They might need to detour north or south, or even backtrack west on occasion, but he always managed to find fresh areas of black ocean amid the twirling tableland of ice and kept them sailing ever eastward toward the distant Russian archipelago.

The sun never rose more than a few degrees above the horizon, so oftentimes the great dome of the sky overhead remained dark. On this night, Bell was treated to a sight of which he’d heard but never experienced. The aurora borealis shone like the most phantasmagorical fireworks display ever. Dancing curtains of green light wavered amid streamers of reds and blues. It was as though the entire sky was pulsing to some cosmic beat emanating from out among the stars. For Bell, it was both awe-inspiring and a little frightening.

“Heavy show tonight,” Captain Fyrie commented. “Good for us. I can still see well enough to keep going.”

“See?” Bell asked. “What exactly do you see?”

Fyrie shrugged inside his peacoat. Though the engines were running fine, the bridge never felt fully warm because so many gaps under doors and around windows allowed the frigid Arctic air to establish a toehold in the room. “It’s a trick my father taught me and one I will one day teach my son.

“I can read the reflection of light off the ice. It’s easier during the day and with some cloud cover, but I can do it even using the glow of the aurora. I can see where light bounces back into the sky off the ice floes and I will steer for areas where there is no reflection. That is where we will find open ocean. My father says it is how native hunters and fishermen have survived in these waters for so many hundreds of generations.”

Bell scanned the sky, trying to see any difference in the light’s properties, but with the aurora thumping and shimmering like a celestial heliograph, it was impossible for his eyes to detect any hint of a reflection.

Fyrie must have noticed Bell’s scowl. “Not to worry if you can’t see it. None of my crew can either, and some have been with me since we were boys. It’s a talent and a gift. It’s why I rarely leave the bridge when we’re this close to the ice.”

Bell said, “I am grateful for the trail that led me to your doorstep, Captain Fyrie. You certainly are the right man for this job.”

Fyrie nodded at the compliment and tossed back an assurance of his own. “Not to worry, Mr. Bell. We’ll have your miners in Aberdeen before the French ship you told me about has even left the North Sea.”

Two hours later, clouds had rolled in that obscured the aurora, and the Hvalur Batur was trapped in a black water lagoon surrounded by ice at least three feet thick. She also faced a growing westerly wind that was pushing them away from their destination while simultaneously shrinking the amount of space the ship had before her hull plates were staved in by the floes.

Bell had been asleep in his cabin but had come awake when the engine’s lullaby of mechanical rhythms ceased and silence settled over the whaling ship. He’d slept clothed. It took him just seconds to put on his boots and climb up to the bridge. It took just seconds more for him to assess the situation.

“What do we do?” he finally asked.

“Drift,” Captain Fyrie replied, “and hope this lead doesn’t close entirely.”

“If it does?”

“We transfer as much gear as we can onto the ice and pray we get rescued by someone as crazy as we were for coming this far north this early in the season.”

21

The area of open water around the whaler stabilized as the mass of ice drifted ahead of the wind. Because the ship presented a larger target to the breeze than the flat ice, she drifted faster than the floe. A crew member had to remain at the wheel in order to keep the vessel away from the lagoon’s dangerously sharp edges. It was an endless dance of throttle and wheel because the ice wasn’t moving in a uniform direction. It constantly spun and twisted around the Hvalur in a jumble without pattern, and even a moment’s lapse on the helmsman’s part would see the ship founder in the icy sea.

Once Fyrie was satisfied that the ship was safe for a moment he donned thick overpants and a sealskin parka with wolf pelt hemming around the hood. When drawn tight, the hood practically swallowed the captain’s face so that only his eyes shone out from the insulating fur. His mittens were also made of insulated seal and were awkwardly big, but he could still grip a pair of binoculars.

He stepped out onto the bridge wing and then climbed some steel rungs up to the roof of the wheelhouse. From there, he climbed another thirty feet up onto a tiny observation platform at the high point of the ship’s rigging tower. This was the whale-watching post, a spot manned during the long hunts where a sharp-eyed crewman would scan for the telltale plume from a whale exhaling the warm air from its lungs into the cold air and direct the boat to give chase.

To Bell, the sky was too dark to see more than a few hundred yards. Fyrie, however, spent two hours standing in the crow’s nest monitoring the ice, the weather, and the reflections that apparently only he could interpret. When he returned to the bridge, his breath had frozen into a crust in the wolf insulation. He shucked his outer gear. His face was mottled red and white and his hands shook, as surely his core temperature had dropped despite the extra clothing.

The other changes since his ascent up the mast were the wind had increased its speed and great waves sluiced under the ice, causing the floe to undulate amid a crackle and pop of breaking ice and an occasional blast like a cannon shot when a thick section snapped.

“There’s open water about a mile south of us,” Fyrie said, his teeth chattering. “Problem is, there’s a significant ridge in that direction. This floe will break up with the wind gaining strength, but not where that ridge is holding it together.”

“Can we do anything?” Bell asked.

“Not really,” one of the two Petrs said from behind the wheel.

“I’ve got thermite left over,” Bell informed them.

“How much?”

Bell grinned. “Enough to bore a couple dozen holes through just about any thickness of ice we encounter. We break up the ridge . . .”