The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

om started shelving rapidly, and the captain called for the anchor to be dropped. He then ordered the ship’s lifeboat to be lowered rather than the smaller dinghy Bell had used earlier with the ice floe. The craft was large enough to fit all the miners and required four crewmen to row it.

Over at the mouth of the frozen river stood the cluster of miners, their backs to their smoky signal fire. Bell expected them to be shouting and waving, eager to be off the cursed rock that had been like a prison these past months. Instead, they stood mutely. The distance was too great to read expressions, but he got an impression of men who’d been so beaten by experience that nothing left on earth could give them joy. They were in a sullen mass like veterans of the Civil War he’d seen at special homes for those who’d been shattered by what they’d seen and done.

Bell made sure he was one of the rowers heading to shore. He needed to be there as a familiar face for Brewster. Seeing Novaya Zemlya, Bell better understood the task the miner had set for himself and his men. Their efforts, no matter if they’d been successful or not, were nothing short of herculean. Bell also wanted to step onto the island as a tangible link to what the Coloradans had accomplished.

Once they got coordinated, Bell and the three crewmen rowed across from the Batur to shore quick enough. As they neared, they could hear the slow gurgle of water under the veneer of ice covering the river. The miners broke ranks only when the longboat ran aground on the pebbly beach. Judging by the surf line, high tide was another foot above where the keel gouged into the water-rounded stones. Even with the weight of the extra men, and the crates Bell could see they’d fashioned, they’d be able to float free in a couple of hours if they couldn’t maneuver the boat off the shore.

It was only when the men spread out a bit that Bell counted them and came up with eight. Nine men had faked their deaths in Colorado. When he looked closer, he could also see that these were the shadows of men, the bare minimum of flesh remaining to cover the bones. Their beards weren’t what he expected. Some had none, but they didn’t look freshly shaved, just so gaunt that maybe the skin had no way of producing whiskers. Others’ beards were patchy and rough, like half-plucked chickens. The men all wore various types of hats, but only a few had lengths of greasy hair poking out from under them. All had red-rimmed eyes, so distant and dim that they were like walking corpses. All of them were pale too, with waxy skin, again not unlike the dead.

Whatever estimation Bell had concocted in his head of the horrors these men endured was one hundredth of the true depth of deprivation they’d actually suffered. They had all volunteered for the job long before Bell became involved, but somehow he felt responsible, that he’d made these men endure such sickening brutality in the mountainous wastes of Novaya Zemlya.

When he finally gave Brewster his full attention, the man stared at him with the vacancy of the mentally deranged and yet the unbroken hatred of a bitter enemy. The spark of madness he’d seen months earlier had caught fire and was spreading in a growing inferno. It was the most unsettling look Bell had ever experienced and yet he would not turn away. This was Brewster’s way of expressing how much this had affected him, and Bell felt obliged to acknowledge it. After ten or fifteen more seconds, Brewster’s expression didn’t exactly soften, but it became less focused.

“You made good on your word, Mr. Bell,” Brewster said while Isaac Bell jumped over the lifeboat’s gunwale in borrowed rubber boots and splashed into a receding wave.

Bell pointed to the ten wooden crates. “And you yours, Mr. Brewster.”

“Thousand pounds of high-grade ore. The cost was one man killed, but I don’t think the rest of us are too far behind, to be honest. We’re all walking dead men. Only, none of us has the sense to settle into the grave just yet.”

None of the men reacted to their leader pronouncing such a grim fate.

“What happened to your man?”

“Jake Hobart? He got lost in a storm in early February and froze to death. As for the rest, we think it’s the food that’s killing us.”

Magnus interrupted. “Mr. Bell, maybe we should go to ship now and talk later. Ja?”

“You’re right. Yes.”

Brewster and his men were so thoroughly exhausted they needed help just to crawl over the lifeboat’s gunwale and left the work of loading the crates to Bell and the three sailors. Once loaded, the boat was heavy but the tide was swift. Bell and the two biggest seamen pushed with everything they had and soon slid it off the beach. The wooden craft floated free, though sluggishly. They scrambled aboard and got to the oars, having crawled around the sprawled forms of the ghastly looking miners. Bell noticed a couple were missing most of their teeth. This in and of itself wasn’t uncommon, but these men’s mouths were bleeding, making him believe their tooth loss was something recent.

Because of the tide, the Hvalur Batur had swung around on her anchor chain so that she was a bit closer, but the oarsmen had to fight the rising waters and a ponderously loaded boat. It took twice as long to reach the whaling ship, and Bell was grateful when Magnus clipped the ropes to the davits and the lifeboat was cranked aboard.

No sooner had the keel settled onto the chocks welded to the deck and the anchor chain started rattling up the hawsehole than a heavy gout of smoke shot out the ship’s stack. Captain Fyrie was wasting no time getting them headed for home.

Magnus oversaw several other crew members off-loading the wooden chests to store in an unused cabin while Bell shepherded the exhausted miners down to the warm mess hall, where the aroma of fish stew filled the air. The odor was too rich for one of the men and he rushed for a corner trash can to dry-heave his pitifully empty stomach.

As the miners shed hats, heavy gloves, and thick parkas, another odor permeated the cozy room, the smell of eight men who’d spent months holed up in a poorly ventilated mine shaft lit by sooty fires without any way of bathing. They reeked of stale smoke and old sweat. Their skin was veined by dark lines, and dirt-encrusted joints and wrinkles. Hair lay flat and lifeless, and Bell noted most of the miners had lost significant patches of it so only odd tufts remained.

But it was their eyes that he noticed the most. More than the smell or the filth, it was the haunted and haggard look of the eyes, the look of men who’d been driven to the edge of insanity and had not yet stepped back from the precipice.

A few of the miners slurped the rich stew while the others seemed to enjoy cups of steaming coffee laced with Scotch whiskey Bell had purchased during the layover in Denmark. Like Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the men’s silence seemed accusatory.

Bell sat opposite Joshua Hayes Brewster and waited patiently until he’d partially finished a bowl of stew, washed it down with coffee, and gingerly set a plug of tobacco from a pouch of Mile-Hi.

“Ain’t much more to tell ya, Mr. Bell,” Brewster said at last. “After the Frenchies dropped us off, we hauled our gear up the mountain a ways and set to blasting our way in. Lived in tents until we’d tunneled deep enough to wall ourselves in and only go outside for the facilities or when we set off a charge of dynamite. We stripped the earth of every trace of byzanium. Then we set about to erase all evidence we were there and camouflage the tunnel entrance and tailings dump.”

“But . . .” Bell wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of the men’s appearance.

“How we all look,” Brewster said for him. “Started just about when the worst of the winter hit us. We were already holed up in the mine but still bitter cold. No night in the Rockies could compare to the wind shrieking off that ice.

“We were doing all right for a piece. Then we all started feeling sickly. Stomach issues. Hair and teeth started going bad. We worked through it, mind you, but it was bad.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t some type of gas leaching out of the rock?” Bell asked.

“Nothing like I’ve heard of, and it wasn’t our fire causing it neither. We kept proper ventilation th

e whole time. It had to be the food. The cans were contaminated. Charlie Widney said he’d heard about something like it taking place on a ship. And the food had all been tainted when they sealed the cans with lead or some such thing.”