Polar Bear Blues

by Stephen Wishnevsky

  “This all makes some sick sort of sense. If you were nuts, I mean.”

  “There is a document, that this Admiral slipped me, that I passed on up the line. It said that this Don Javier Bermejillo, a Spanish diplomat and old friend of the Prince of Wales—he had known him since the 1920s—reported a conversation he had had with the Prince to his superiors. Bermejillo reported that the Prince of Wales blamed ‘the Jews, the Reds and the Foreign Office for the war.’ The Prince added that he would like to put Anthony Eden and other British politicians ‘up against a wall.’ Bermejillo stated that Windsor had already made similar remarks about the Reds and the Jews to him long before. In another conversation Bermejillo reported that Prince of Wales stressed that if one defeated the Americans effectively this could bring peace. Bermejillo concluded that the Prince of Wales seemed very much to hope that this would occur: He wants peace at any price’.”

  “And now he has it.”

  “Not quite yet. But soon.”

  “So what happens to the AEF? They all came though England to get to France. They all have British commanders. I haven’t forgotten.”

  “What do you suppose will happen?” He asked me, pointedly.

  “I think they are fucked. If Patton does not make peace, they will have to swim home.”

  “Pretty much.” He shrugged. “I think Patton, the vainglorious bastard, will take any war he can get. And the only war there is…”

  “Is this one. On the Line. We have Vladivostok. I suppose having the whole shore of the North Pacific would be worthwhile. Fishing and all that. Is it worth it? Siberia is a big place, but how is it better than Canada? Than Alaska?”

  “Who knows? Our problem is not strategy. Our problem is tactics.” Eppi said, as seriously as words can be said.

  “And?”

  “Tactically we are screwed. We can’t put enough men and materiel through Vladivostok to hold the Line, much less the whole of Eastern Siberia.”

  “Therefore…”

  “We get this port open as ordered. And if worst comes to worst…”

  “We might need this port to evacuate our troops. If Patton lets them come back to clutter up his nice neat country.”

  “Miles, I do hope that is not the spirit of prophecy speaking through your lips.”

  “Fuck me. I open my mouth and bullshit comes out. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. You could be wrong, but once you said it that way, a chill came over me.”

  “Yeah. I do shit like that.” I sipped on my flask. “It’s a fucking gift.”

  >>>>>>

  We got back to the Machine Shop, there was a Signal Corps type hooking up my telephone, Hoskins and some other guy were testing circuits with a disassembled flashlight. The generator was chugging away, and the shop was cleaned and shipshape. Eppi left with the words, “Carry on, you know what to do.” I did? News to me.

  I found the sheaf of paperwork Eppi had given us and flipped through it, sorting into piles on my desk as being lathe, milling machine, blacksmith, or combination jobs. Outside, Hoskins threw the big main

  switch, the lights came on, then sparks erupted from the far end of the shop. Somebody yelled, and he threw the switch back. I stuck my head out, called a question with “what the fuck?” in it.

  “Loose wire. We will be chasing ground faults all day. No big deal.”

  “Carry on.” I went back to sorting. That done, I went out and investigated the forge. I knew a little about that, there had been an old fashioned smithy down the street in New Haven when I was a kid. I used to hang around, bother the smith. It looked like there were enough hammers and tongs and chisels to make a start, so I started a fire in the forge, fanned it to life with the hand-cranked blower and added coal until it was going good.

  I had noticed that the first thing on the forge list was a dozen two foot wide grappling hooks, made from one inch minimum stock. There was some in the rack. I drew a sketch in charcoal on the wall, figured the length of metal I would need, marked out three pieces on a twenty foot length of square stock, and attacked with a convenient hack saw. Work up a sweat doing that. I had the pieces heated red and was bending the first one when the lights came on and stayed on. I finished bending the other two, set them aside to cool, added more coal to the fire and went back to supervise.

  Hoskins had five or six guys there shuffling through the paper work and scratching their heads. He introduced them; Kowalski, Jeems, Toole, Akins, Grant, and Pomeroy. Pomeroy was a blacksmith and looked it. Black, I mean. I led him back to the forge and showed him the work order, “Can do?”

  “Yes, sir, no problem. And I can find you more boys that know this business. We are all railroad hands, but we don’t want to be up on that damn Line.”

  I pointedly did not ask if they were deserters. All the rules were off now. I just said, “Get these grappling hooks made, then find your boys. Men, I mean. We are in deep shit. I will explain tonight at dark. Go to it.”

  “Yes, sir.” People calling me sir. Wonders never cease.

  Hoskins had his guys at work, a lot of tools had to be sharpened, belts tightened, correct wrenches found, all that sort of setup work, but metal was being cut, sparks were flying. I asked around, found somebody, Billy Ardmore, who said he knew how to keep books, and do filing. I had him write a few sentences, I could read them, so he got promoted to office staff. I left him cleaning up and answering the telephone, while I went out and interviewed some of the hopefuls that were hanging around looking for work. Anybody with any iron working, riveting, or shipbuilding experience I directed down to Eppi. A lot of the rest I put cleaning up the grounds, salvaging bricks and sheet tin, and generally civilizing the surrounding area. I found a motorboat, a thirty footer, awash at the end of one of the nearby docks, I set a crew to bulling that up and out of the water, it looked like it might prove useful. Once they had it out, I told the leader of that crew, Stearns, to tear the engine down and see if he could get it to turn freely. “I got it. Fill it up full of oil, and see if it wants to crank over.”

  “Right. Can do?”

  “Takes a lot to kill one of these old two bangers, we will see. If I can find some ether or naphtha to dry the magneto out, I can get her running today. If not, then tomorrow. I hope. ”

  “Good man.” No sooner had I got back to the Shop when Lupo showed up from HQ with another draft of possible workers. I sorted them out, sent the heavy duty guys down to Eppi, then organized another crew to see what we could do with the next building down the docks. It turned out to be a warehouse full of huge heavy crates labeled in Chinese or Japanese. My education is not good enough to tell the difference. The place had been looted, some of the crates, they were of a size to hold automobiles, had been busted open in a hit or miss fashion. Lo and behold, they were full of automobiles. Or at least small trucks, sort of like the flivver pickup, smaller, and they were marked DAT Lila on the radiator caps. Fine. At least they were not liable to explode.

  Most of this roof was intact, there was a little office in one corner as usual, and what looked like a small auto shop next to it. A few tools, a couple of work benches, a small compressor, a rack of tires. A forklift truck. Got it. Warehouse for an automobile dealership. I told the leader of this mob to turn this place into a barracks. “You can use the crates for bunk beds, or partitions, I guess, push all the trucks into one end. If you want, see if you can get a few of them fired up, we can always use runabouts.”

  “Better than sleeping rough. Thanks, Lieutenant.”

  “Carry on, errr…”

  “Bolton, sir, Jimmy Bolton.”

  “Okay, Bolton, you are in charge of the motor pool. I’ll get you some gas and oil.”

  “Motor Pool?”

  “And workers barracks. If you hustle up a few women to cook for you, I won’t complain. But I don’t want a whorehouse here. We have a god-awful amount of work to do, and I have a suspicion that Commander Epstein is not a man to cross.”

  “I understand. I was a car salesm
an back in Wichita, so I know something about cars. I can do this.”

  “Hired.”

  >>>>>

  That was close to a decent day’s work, at least by my lowly standards, so I decided to go down to see what Commander Eppi was up to, officially to update the Diary, and unofficially to get a bottle or two, for medicinal purposes, you understand. The Eiben was completely painted now. Several bulky machines were solidly bolted to the deck and there was a small crane mounted at one end of the double-ended craft. Eppi had moved her out into the harbor and seemed to be working on a medium-sized freighter whose decks were barely awash, her bottom on the harbor floor. The compressor was running, streams of air bubbling up, and crews of men with hammers and chisels trying to stop the leaks by peening the metal together. It did not seem to be working real well. I looked around, there was some sort of native rowboat at the dock, a couple of Chinese guys improving the shining hour with few pipes. I got their attention with a piece of silver, and they paddled me out to see Eppi.

  He was hard at work, as filthy and battered as any of his men, having a wonderful time. They were indeed trying to hammer seams together, which seemed a futile pursuit, but I guess he knew his business. “Ah, Miles,” he greeted me. “You don’t know where we can get a few hundred pounds of lead, do you?”

  “Bullets are made out of lead, but I don’t have any that are not in cartridges.”

  He snapped his finger, pointed at me, “You just earned your keep. Why didn’t I see that?”

  “Nobody can think of everything all the time. I suppose silver would work too, but that’s a bit expensive.”

  “Not compared to the price of a ship it isn’t. You are an oblique thinker, Kapusta, I like that. Any progress?”

  “We found a warehouse full of light Japanese trucks, and a guy that says he’s a blacksmith. Working on your grappling irons. Hooks, I mean.”

  “Good work.”

  “We found a launch, maybe a thirty footer, you look like you can use that. If we can get the engine working, I will bring it over tomorrow.”

  “That would be a big help. But be very careful of mines. They are everywhere.” He pointed around. “You see those little yellow buoys?” There were more than a dozen in plain sight.

  “Mines?”

  “And plenty more we haven’t marked yet. The fuses are all corroded, they will go off with a sideways glance.”

  “So what are you going to do with them?”

  “Clear a space, start setting them off. We could use some of the explosives, but it’s a tricky business. Have to tow them with an all wood boat, some have magnetic fuses, some have detonators on their anchor chains, will go off when you cut their moorings.”

  “No mine sweepers?”

  “You know how many mines on average a minesweeper disposes of before being sunk?”

  “Twenty?”

  “One.” He nodded seriously. “Just one, Miles, just one. Not very economic.”

  “I had no idea. That’s horrible.”

  “And expensive. We need to figure out a way to dispose of them. It’s a mess out here.”

  “Shoot them and let them sink?”

  “Very dangerous. They are full of nitroglycerine, they will go off if hit, but they are far enough underwater to be invulnerable to bullets unless you are close. Too close.”

  “Send out a bunch of people you don’t like with hammers?”

  “Don’t tempt me.” He sighed. “They have been dropping mines in these harbors for more than twenty years. They still drop some from zeppelins, just for harassment. The Naval port, Port Arthur proper, at the west end of the peninsula, is unusable because of all the generations of rotting old mines over there.”

  “I will think on it, but I really don’t have much hope. I am not an engineer. I fired up the forge and bent a couple of hooks for the grapnels, that’s about the limits of my engineering ability.”

  “I value your unconventional insights. So to what do we owe the honor of your visit?”

  “You want me to keep a diary. I just came to see what you are doing.”

  “We are trying to raise this ship. The something or other Maru. They opened the sea cocks and let her sink, so if we can get her up, we can dry her out without a dry dock. We need one very badly, but of the three that were here, two are in Port Arthur, sunk, and the one here is all the way underwater. “ He waved an arm at a few dispirited masts and antennae poking up out of the water, a quarter mile away.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “If I can get two ships this size up, I can equip them with pumps and make my own dry dock. A workable facsimile, anyway. I will also convert some petrol tanks and water tanks I found to pontoons, and lift some serious tonnage. We need to get a path cleared to these docks PDQ.”

  I looked out over the harbor full of tilted masts and odd bits of ships poking up out of the oil-slicked water. “You think you can do this?”

  “Or die trying.” I had no reply to that. I knew he spoke the truth, and I knew my fate was linked to his, win or lose. Time to head back, tomorrow was going to be a bitch.

  >>>>>>

  The next day started with a pre-dawn bang. A big, expensive one. Even though it was across town at the old Ferry Dock, the sound blasted me out of the first nice dream I had had for months. The phone rang while I was still blinking sleep from my eyes. A mine had been dropped in the wrong place, or an old one had drifted in from somewhere, and been the path of one of the Deportee ships from the states. Killed eighty or so poor souls, but the captain had the presence of mind to beach the ship away from the Ferry Dock, keep it from sinking and therefore saving many lives. It was suspected that the Germans had dropped the mine, but no one could be sure. What did it matter?

  It was about three miles away, a bunch of us trooped down there to see if we could help, the roads were bad, cluttered with rubble. We tossed crap out of the way as we went, more roofing tin and scrap wood. This whole town had aspirations of getting all the way up to being a fucking mess. But we made it. Hodges was there in person, Eppi arrived as I was checking in, he took one look, said, “That captain did well. He did not block the dock. You could send him to me, I could use a captain that can think on his feet.”

  “And the ship?”

  “I’ll add it to the list.” He pointed. “I’ll fill that hole with concrete, and once we get a tug, I will just drag it off and he will be back in business. I think it was an old mine, it didn’t have full force.”

  “Very well. I will send Captain Hawken to you as soon as we get the paperwork done.”

  “Excellent. Thank you, General.”

  “Thank you. I do hope you can determine a procedure to limit the mine damage, clear our harbors.”

  “Actually,” I butted in, “I have an idea. Half an idea.”

  “Go on, Kapusta.” Having Hodges’ full attention focused on you was not a comfortable sensation.

  “I remember reading in an old National Geographic, that somewhere out here, they have clans of women divers. The men fish from boats, and while they are gone, the women dive for pearls, edible seaweed, and other goodies from the bottom. They go pretty deep, as I remember.”

  “Free divers?” Eppi asked.

  “Very free. Naked, in fact. If they could attach a detonator to a mine, with stickum or rope or something, then you could blow it safely from a distance. They would not have any metal to trigger a magnetic fuse, would not hit one of those horns by accident. Very deft people. I clipped the article, I thought I might use it in a novel.”

  “Indeed. Who should we talk to about this?” Hodges on point as usual.

  “I don’t know. The oldest native we can find, I guess.” I hazarded.

  “That Master Wu.” Eppi decided. “Worth a try. You will talk to him, Miles?”

  “Consider it done.” Make a note.

  “Lieutenant, I would appreciate it if you would take the unwounded deportees back with you, add them to your work force.” Hodges decided. “The
Army will take care of the wounded, and Commander Epstein, you get all the sailors and the Captain, as soon as possible.”

  “Sir.” Eppi agreed. “I could use the lifeboats too, by the way. Anything that floats.”

  Meanwhile the sailors on the

  H.R. Hayes, the ship, had lowered cargo nets and the first Section Fives were peering over the edge, with some trepidation. On the other side of the bow, another detail of sailors were rigging a stretcher from a small crane to lower the casualties to waiting ambulances. Looked as under control as anything gets these days.

  My job. I walked closer, called up. I have a big voice, sometimes it comes in handy. “All you Section Five men. Get your bedding, all your possessions, make bindles, blanket rolls, bring any tools you have. Three mile walk. We have jobs for you. Starting now. Shape up, there is no ship out. Welcome to the End of the Line.”

  One man, a redhead giant, called back, “They got women too.”

  “Bring them too. No difference.”

  “These bitches are plenty different. They are locked up below.”

  “Did I stutter? Did I stammer? You got beans in your ears? Bring them.”

  “Fuck me. Okay, you’re the boss. On your head, so be it.” He talked to the nearest crewman, a mate, maybe. The sailor shrugged, nodded, and turned away.

  “What’s your name, Red?”

  “Right in one. Red. Red Sovine.”

  “Fine. Here are the rules, Red. Do what I tell you, or you get shipped out to The Line. That’s the Trans-Siberian Railway. It’s in Siberia. It’s getting toward summer. Mosquito season. The Germans are coming down that line with all they got. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Abundantly, Lieutenant. Abund-the-fuck-antly clear.”

  “Carry on, Sovine.”

  >>>>>

  We got a few brave souls down the net, I had Jeems with me, he was one of the straw-bosses, supposed to be a milling machine operator. I left him to shape up the mob while I hauled my fat ass up the net to the deck to supervise. I hate supervising, I would rather just work, but that was my job these days.