Kilo Class

loathsome place in which he now found himself had grounded him in the present. He took another long mouthful of bourbon and announced to the deserted cabin, “If you’re alive, I’m gonna make sure someone finds you, even if it’s not me.”

Putting his drink down he picked up his notebook and wrote in block capitals as he had done so many times: WHY WOULD THE CUTTYHUNK RADIO OPERATOR SAY HE WAS UNDER ATTACK IF HE WASN’T? AND IF THE SHIP WAS SUNK IN A FJORD WHY HAS NOTHING EVER FLOATED TO THE SURFACE?

“Beats the shit out of me,” he added poetically. “But I think Cuttyhunk is still floating. And I think someone knows where her crew and passengers are.”

That night, at dinner, Freddie planned his morning attack, persuading the Captain to take him for a run down Baie Blanche. “Not all the way — just three or four miles, or maybe down to where the fjord splits. I don’t think Captain Mottram would have gone farther than that point. If there’s anything to be found, we’ll find it. And if there’s nothing I’ll go take a shot at that sheltered anchorage on the Ile Foch directly east. You move us on down Choiseul a bit in the afternoon, I’ll just run the Zodiac through those narrows between the islands, if the weather’s okay.”

No one had any objection to the plan, and they all settled into a dinner of coq au vin, prepared especially for the ship’s officers by one of the French scientists on board, who had poured the entire contents of a bottle of Margaux Premier Reserve ’86 into the pot. There was no objection from anyone when the chef came up with three more bottles of the Margaux, and Freddie proposed a solemn toast to Kate Goodwin, in which they all joined, with much sadness.

“The thing about it is,” said Freddie, with the careful deliberation that invariably pervades that no-man’s-land before serious drunkenness sets in, “you can’t sink ships without a lot of stuff coming to the surface. You take a big steel vessel like Cuttyhunk, you wanna put her on the floor of the ocean, you gotta blow a fucking hole in her below the waterline. You need either a torpedo, in which case you need a submarine. Or you need a fucking great hunk of TNT, which is noisy, messy, and dangerous.

“Things break up when you scuttle a ship, the whole upper deck is full of stuff that can break away — rubber life rafts, winch covers, life buoys, stuff that floats. All through the interior of the ship there’s clothes, wooden fittings and furniture, plastic bathroom fittings, suitcases. Not to mention about a billion gallons of oil and gasoline. SOMETHING MUST HAVE COME UP IF SHE WAS SUNK,” he said emphatically.

He twirled his wine around in his glass. Then he looked up and added much more slowly, “But nothing did. Not a trace was found. And we had the US Navy down here searching the waters with every possible modern device for locating stuff in the ocean. What did they find? FUCK ALL, that’s what they found. Gentlemen, I’m going to bed now, thanks for indulging me…” And he wandered somewhat unsteadily back to his cabin, to sleep the deeply troubled, dreamless sleep of the unfulfilled detective.

He awoke early the following morning, profoundly regretting the last couple of glasses of Margaux. He understood that the skill of Kentucky’s bourbon distillers very possibly equaled that of the Bordeaux wine makers, but he was unsure that those separate talents were meant to share the same evening. At least not in abundance.

The ship was still anchored in shallow water behind Pointe Lucky, south of Feron. The Captain had taken the standard precaution of leaving two men on watch throughout the night in the event another capricious Antarctic front arrived and sent the barometric pressure crashing.

Freddie took a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets, declined breakfast, and prepared himself for Baie Blanche. They were under way before 0700, rounding the jutting ice-encrusted headland and turning hard right into the long waters of the fjord. The Captain killed the speed to four knots and placed two lookouts on the starboard side, with one other seaman joining Freddie on the port-side lower deck facing the coast of Gramont Island. All four men were carrying binoculars, which they used to scour every inch of the shoreline, hoping for the telltale piece of wreckage that would betray the former presence here of the Cuttyhunk.

They ran slowly, south-southwest for six miles, and saw nothing but rock and ice. The sun cast light but no heat, and the temperature was just below freezing. The Baie Blanche yielded no secrets.

When they rounded the point at Saint Lanne they could clearly see the headland of Pointe Bras; the Captain thought that was about as far as they needed to go, since he could not believe Tug Mottram would have required more shelter for a simple welding job. Freddie looked at his chart and noticed that there was a small bay inset into the Loranchet Peninsular, about two miles into Baie du Repos on the right, bang on the forty-ninth parallel. “That’s as far as Tug Mottram would ever have needed to go,” he said. “I’d like to scoot down there in the Zodiac, just to take a quick look. Would you mind hanging around for an hour?”

The Captain agreed, and Freddie set off alone, gazing around the still, silent waterway and wondering inevitably if Kate too had looked at the frozen cliffs. He opened the throttle and flew up into the bay, then slowed and carefully searched the shoreline at the slowest possible speed. Only the soft beat of the engine, and the light, gurgling bow wave broke the devastating silence. Freddie gazed up at the peak of Mount Richards four miles distant and irrationally wished that it could talk. But there was absolutely nothing.

Back at the ship, he suggested they might exit the fjords through Baie de Londres on the far side of Gramont. They continued to travel at four knots, still searching. Still nothing. At the northeast tip of the island they were forced to swing wide to avoid a murderous kelp bed two miles wide. Standing on the bow as they went past the bed in clear water, the island to port and the jutting, eerie Cox’s Rock fifty yards to starboard, Freddie Goodwin spotted it. They were almost by. He was late. But he saw it clearly. Something faded but red, modern Day-Glo red, jammed into the stones at the base of the Rock.

“What’s that?” he yelled, pointing out over the gunwales and racing aft.

“Where? Where? Freddie? Whereabouts?” Everyone was anxious to help, and suddenly everyone could see the red in the rocks. The first mate put the ship into reverse, and they lowered the Zodiac. Freddie Goodwin sped across the short distance to Cox’s accompanied by three crewmates. The water was deep, dangerous, and freezing cold, and they could each see the red crescent shape was a part of one of those hard styrene modern life buoys. It was jammed into the rocks and would have crumbled had they gone at it with a boat hook. Instead they decided to pry the rocks apart. Forty yards farther the helmsman maneuvered them in close to a flat dry ledge, shoving the reinforced rubberized bow into a corner and holding it there on the engine. Freddie clambered out with the two other crewmen and made his way back over the rocks to the red life buoy. It took ten minutes to wrest the buoy free. When he turned it over, the three big black letters were like a knife to Freddie Goodwin’s already broken heart…C-U-T.

Worse yet, his seaman’s instinct was telling him the prevailing west wind was no longer on his face. The broken life buoy had been swept onto the windward side of the Rock, which meant it had not come in from the open sea. It had been swept out from one of the fifty-odd miles of fjords that surge around this small part of Kerguelen. In a flash, Freddie now realized that Cuttyhunk had almost certainly gone to the bottom in one of the deep, sinister waterways. He had been saying for so long that no wreckage meant the Cuttyhunk was still floating. But here was wreckage from the ship’s upper deck. He was holding it in his hand for Christ’s sake. Suddenly, he had no more tears to shed. Kate was gone. He was now certain.

It would take him three days to change his mind. The red life buoy was proof that the Cuttyhunk had sunk unless some really fast-thinking member of the ship’s crew had secretly heaved the life buoy over the side during the attack, as a last signal to the outside world. The notion was so remote it took another week to fully germinate and for Freddie to accept it as a potential truth. And it did so, just before Freddie sat down in Hyannis to write the first of an outstanding series of syndicated articles centered around the menacing, frozen island at the end of the world.

2

Vice admiral Arnold Morgan, at age fifty-eight, was wryly amused by the opulence of his new office at the White House. For a man whose background was nuclear submarines, and the functional operations rooms of the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, the carpeted hush of his well-appointed quarters in the home of the President was a culture shock. Also, people were apt to look a bit startled when he yelled at ’em.