Kilo Class

assertion that the ship was under attack and that the Japanese were responsible. The Pentagon repeatedly pointed out that the Cuttyhunk had been the subject of an extensive sea search conducted by the US Navy over a period of three months, and that the President himself had ordered a frigate from the Seventh Fleet into the area within hours of the last message from the research ship.

Other government officials had written Freddie back in the self-interested, lethargic tones of the bureaucrat, explaining that “exhaustive inquiries from the State Department to the Japanese minister and indeed to their military High Command, had left everyone in a state of bewilderment.”

“The Japanese,” wrote one official, “are denying any involvement in the incident.”

Freddie had replied by telephone after a couple of good-size glasses of winter bourbon. “Well, what about the goddamned Chinese, or the Vietnamese or any of those other guys out there who look a bit the same to the American eye?”

No one had been able to help, and Freddie now stood beneath these dark, menacing cliffs, staring at the gray, icy waters of Choiseul Bay, shivering despite his heavy foul-weather gear, pondering the tragic loss of Kate Goodwin and the crew of the Cuttyhunk.

Throughout the long ordeal of the past year, his editor, Frank Markham, had been completely supportive. Frank had suggested that it might be a good idea for Freddie to get down to Kerguelen, at the newspaper’s expense, and write a series of features about the island at the end of the world, using the loss of the Cuttyhunk as its centerpiece.

“You find a way to get there, we’ll pay and help you get organized, and then you can have a darned good snoop around and see if anything shakes loose.”

Frank had put his arm around Freddie and told him that if he found one thing, it would be a huge story, and that the experience would be cathartic. “Maybe help you lay your Kate to rest, at least in your own mind.”

And now the star feature writer from the Cape Cod Times stood alone on this blasted shoreline, trying to wipe the freezing tears from his face, and he stared out forlornly at another research ship, waiting with engines running a hundred yards out, the one that had carried him from Miami to Kerguelen.

His final destination was the McMurdo Station, from where he would be airlifted out by helicopter and eventually flown back to Boston. Frank Markham had paid the ship’s owners the sum of $4,000 to hang around for two or three days while the reporter gathered his material.

As it happened they would probably have done it for nothing. Everyone liked the writer from Cape Cod, and he had regaled the crew throughout the long southern voyage with stories about Cuttyhunk and those who sailed in her. By the time they arrived off Christmas Harbor, no one aboard that research ship believed that the whole truth about the ship’s disappearance had yet emerged. Freddie had convinced them all that his cousin might still be alive.

Today, with the sea calm for once, he had been permitted to go ashore alone in a rubber Zodiac, which he had driven into the beach, raised the outboard, and dragged ashore — it was an exercise he had been carrying out in somewhat warmer waters since he was old enough to walk.

Alone with his thoughts and memories, he stared in turn at the landscape and at his chart of the island. A lifelong devotee of Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, Freddie kept telling himself that the answers lay in the “little gray cells.” He had jotted down the known final positions of Cuttyhunk, and looking at his charts he could see they must have run down to Kerguelen’s northwestern headland, right past Bligh’s Cap.

He knew the bow of the ship had been damaged, and he knew the Cuttyhunk had been in heavy weather and was running for cover. The question was, where? Christmas Harbor? Not a chance. In a big wind, they’d have gone farther down. Even in the light November breeze that surrounded him, Freddie could feel the wind backing round in the cliffs. “I bet this place is a goddamned disaster area in a big westerly,” he thought. “It’d come howling round that point out there. What’s it called? Yeah…here we are…D’Estaing. There’s no way Tug would have put into here. He’d have gone farther down the bay, looking for something a bit more sheltered. No doubt in my mind.”

High overhead he could identify the majestic flight of a big wandering albatross. Toward the east in the more exposed area of the harbor, he could see a flight of storm petrels fluttering low over the water. As far as he could tell, nothing else stirred. Christmas Harbor was the most silent place Freddie Goodwin had ever been. Large ice floes, swollen and split by the searing cold, littered the long, rocky beach. Aside from the seabirds, it was a world of total lifelessness.

Standing around Christmas Harbor was not going to help anyone, he knew. Freddie would have liked to walk to the end of the southern headland and take a look at the bays that lie beyond. But he was worried about the boat and the fact that the weather here changed with such terrifying swiftness. So he walked down to the shore and shoved the boat out, jumping expertly onto the bow without even getting his seaboots wet.

He lowered the engine, started it the first time, and chugged out to the harbor entrance, where he swung right. He knew it was about two miles in reasonably flat water over to Pointe D’Aniere, and in those two miles he would cross the mouths of two other bays, both of which he guessed would be even more exposed than Christmas Harbor. He was right. There was no possibility Tug Mottram would have gone in there.

The next bay, beyond the point, was a thirteen-mile-long fjord called Baie de Recques. His chart showed it narrow and deep, heading so far into the rock face it came within three thousand yards of the other side of the island. Its sides were steep, sloping granite walls, and Freddie, who fancied himself a bit of an expert on seabirds, could see through his binoculars a group of shearwaters wheeling fifty feet above the water. He did not consider that this place would have been much of an idea for the stricken Cuttyhunk either, because Recques Bay ran dead straight, due southwest, with nothing between its cold waters and the open ocean. “Even with a westerly,” he murmured, “I bet a gale finds a way into this great streak of a place. Probably round that mountain at the far end. What do they call it…yeah…Mount Lacroix right on the west coast, eight hundred feet above the shore.”

He circled the Zodiac at the mouth of the bay then pushed on around the corner, where he was greeted by huge, black, forbidding cliffs set between a headland called Pointe Pringle and Cap Feron, a mile and a half distant.

Most high-ranging cliffs look grimly impressive from below, as does a great ship from a rowing boat. But to Freddie Goodwin’s eye, this rock face looked nothing short of evil. And he thought of the awful consequences of Cuttyhunk running headlong into them and smashing herself to pieces in the dark, in the howling gale of that far-lost night. “Katie…,” he said, shaking his head, and feeling tears yet again well up in his eyes, as they had been doing for as long as he could now remember.

But that scenario didn’t seem likely. And he told himself sternly that if Cuttyhunk had hit the cliffs there would certainly have been wreckage found, and none ever had been. Tug Mottram would have given such a rock face a very wide berth even in these deep waters; and that Texan kid, Berens, was supposed to have been one of the best navigation officers Bob Lander had ever worked with.

The Zodiac was getting a bit low on gas, so Freddie turned away from the black backdrop of Cap Feron and roared back to his floating base at full throttle. He wanted to write up his notes before dinner. Even if he failed to find the Cuttyhunk, he still had a series of feature articles to write. The next fjord, which lay beyond Feron, would have to wait till morning. Freddie stared at his chart. “Here we are,” he thought. “Christ! It runs down there for nearly twenty miles. What’s it called…right here…Baie Blanche.”

The time was 1938 when he finished recording his observations about the seabirds, the seascape, the rising mountains above the fjords, and the unfathomable dark waters in which Cuttyhunk had sailed. He did not believe she was sunk.

He poured himself an heroic-size glass of Kentucky bourbon, splashed in the same amount of tap water, and swigged deeply. He then kicked off his seaboots and sat in the warm cabin in slacks, shirt, and light sweater. He felt the glow of the amber-colored spirit immediately, and, as he did, he saw again in his mind the face of the tall, willowy Kate Goodwin, her soft slow smile, her tawny, long hair, and her unusual, tranquil good looks.

For several months now, he had seen her face when he took his first drink of the day, perhaps in memory of the many evenings they had shared together on the Cape. He seemed unable to cast aside this secretive, utterly unworldly obsession for a girl he could never have, and who may very well not be alive. The perfect daughter of his own father’s long-dead brother.

There were times over the past few months when Freddie thought he might be losing his grip. But the frozen,