Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  At three-thirty I went ashore and hurried up the jetty to the huts. They were deserted except for the equipment hut where Eddie was blasphemously trying to start up the diesel. He looked up as he saw me.

  ‘Nobody could ever call me one for complaining, Dr Marlowe, but this bloody—’

  ‘Have you seen Mr Smith? The mate?’

  ‘Not ten minutes ago. Looked in to see how we were getting on. Why? Is there something—’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘About where he was going? What he was doing?’

  ‘No.’ Eddie looked at the shivering Three Apostles, whose blank expressions were of no help to anyone. ‘Just stood there for a couple of minutes with his hands in his pockets, looking at what we were doing and asking a few questions, then he strolls off.’

  ‘See where he went?’

  ‘No.’ He looked at the Three Apostles, who shook their heads as one. ‘Anything up, then?’

  ‘Nothing urgent. Ship’s about to sail and the skipper’s looking for him.’ If that wasn’t quite an accurate assessment of how matters stood at that moment, I’d no doubt it would be in a very few minutes. I didn’t waste time looking for Smithy. If he had been hanging around with apparent aimlessness at the camp instead of closely supervising the urgent clearing of the foredeck, which one would have expected of him and would normally have been completely in character, then Smithy had a very good reason for doing so: he just wanted, however temporarily, to become lost.

  At three-thirty-five I returned to the Morning Rose. This time Captain Imrie was very much in evidence. I had thought him incapable of becoming frantic about anything, but as I looked at him as he stood in the wash of light at the door of the saloon I could see that I could have been wrong about that. Perhaps ‘frantic’ was the wrong term, but there was no doubt that he was in a highly excitable condition and was mad clear through. His fists were balled, what could be seen of his face was mottled red and white, and his bright blue eyes were snapping. With commendable if lurid brevity he repeated to me what he’d clearly told a number of people in the past few minutes. Worried about the deteriorating weather—that wasn’t quite the way he’d put it—he’d had Allison try to contact Tunheim for a forecast. This Allison had been unable to do. Then he and Allison had made the discovery that the transceiver was smashed beyond repair. And just over an hour or so previously the receiver had been in order—or Smith had said it was, for he had then written down the latest weather forecast. Or what he said was the latest weather forecast. And now there was no sign of Smith. Where the hell was Smith?

  ‘He’s gone ashore,’ I said.

  ‘Ashore? Ashore? How the hell do you know he’s gone ashore?’ Captain Imrie didn’t sound very friendly, but then, he was hardly in a friendly mood.

  ‘Because I’ve just been up in the camp talking to Mr Harbottle, the electrician. Mr Smith had just been up there.’

  ‘Up there? He should have been unloading cargo. What the hell was he doing up there?’

  ‘I didn’t see Mr Smith,’ I explained patiently. ‘So I couldn’t ask him.’

  ‘What the hell were you doing up there?’

  ‘You’re forgetting yourself, Captain Imrie. I am not responsible to you. I merely wished to have a word with him before he left. We’ve become quite friendly, you know.’

  ‘Yes you have, haven’t you?’ Imrie said significantly. It didn’t mean anything, he was just in a mood for talking significantly. ‘Allison!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘The bo’sun. Search-party ashore. Quickly now, I’ll lead you myself.’ If there had ever been any doubt as to the depth of Captain Imrie’s concern there was none now. He turned back to me but as Otto Gerran and Goin were now standing beside me I wasn’t sure whether he was addressing me or not. ‘And we’re leaving within the half-hour, with Smith or without him.’

  ‘Is that fair, Captain?’ Otto asked. ‘He may just have gone for a walk or got a little lost—you see how dark it is—’

  ‘Don’t you think it bloody funny that Mr Smith should vanish just as I discover that a radio over which he’s been claiming to receive messages is smashed beyond repair?’

  Otto fell silent but Goin, ever the diplomat, stepped in smoothly.

  ‘I think Mr Gerran is right, Captain. You could be acting a little bit unfairly. I agree that the destruction of your radio is a serious and worrisome affair and one that is more than possibly, in light of all the mysterious things that have happened recently, a very sinister affair. But I think you are wrong immediately to assume that Mr Smith has any connection with it. For one thing, he strikes me as much too intelligent a man to incriminate himself in so extremely obvious a fashion. In the second place, as your senior officer who knows how vitally important a piece of equipment your radio is, why should he do such a wanton thing? In the third place, if he were trying to escape the consequences of his actions, where on earth could he escape to on Bear Island? I do not suggest anything as simple as an accident or amnesia: I’m merely suggesting that he may have got lost. You could at least wait until the morning.’

  I could see Captain Imrie’s fists unballing, not much, just a slight relaxation, and I knew that if he weren’t wavering he was at least on the point of considering, a state of approaching uncertainty that lasted just as long as it took Otto to undo whatever Goin might have been on the point of achieving.

  ‘That’s it, of course,’ he said. ‘He just went to have a look around.’

  ‘What? In the pitch bloody dark?’ It was an exaggeration but a pardonable one. ‘Allison! Oakley! All of you. Come on!’ He lowered his voice a few decibels and said to us: ‘I’m leaving within the half-hour, Smith or no Smith. Hammerfest, gentlemen, Hammerfest and the law.’

  He hurried down the gangway, half a dozen men close behind. Goin sighed. ‘I suppose we’d better lend a hand.’ He left and Otto, after hesitating for a moment, followed.

  I didn’t, I’d no intention of lending a hand, if Smithy didn’t want to be found then he wouldn’t be. Instead I went down to my cabin, wrote a brief note, took the small duffel bag with me and went in search of Haggerty. I had to trust somebody, Smithy’s most damned inconvenient disappearing trick had left me with no option, and I thought Haggerty was my best bet. He was stiff-necked and suspicious and, since Imrie’s questioning of him that morning, he must have become even more suspicious of me: but he was no fool, he struck me as being incorruptible, he was, I thought, amenable to an authoritative display of discipline and, above all, he’d spent twenty-seven years of his life in taking orders.

  It was fifteen minutes’ touch and go, but at last he grudgingly agreed to do what I asked him to.

  ‘You wouldn’t be making a fool out of me, Dr Marlowe?’ he asked.

  ‘You’d be a fool if you even thought that. What would I have to gain?’

  ‘There’s that, there’s that.’ He took the small duffel bag reluctantly. ‘As soon as we’re safely clear of the island—’

  ‘Yes. That, and the letter. To the captain. Not before.’

  ‘Those are deep waters, Dr Marlowe.’ He didn’t know how deep, I was close to drowning in them. ‘Can’t you tell me what it is all about?’

  ‘If I knew that, Haggerty, do you think I’d be remaining behind on this godforsaken island?’

  For the first time he smiled. ‘No, sir, I don’t really think you would.’

  Captain Imrie and his search-party returned only a minute or two after I’d gone back up to the upper deck. They returned without Smithy. I was surprised neither by their failure to find him nor the brevity of their search—an elapsed time of only twenty minutes. Bear Island, on the map, may be only the veriest speck in the high Arctic, but it does cover an area of 73 square miles and it must have occurred to Captain Imrie very early on indeed that to attempt to search even a fraction of one per cent of that icily mountainous terrain in darkness was to embark upon a monumental folly. His fervour for the searc
h had diminished to vanishing point: but his failure to find Smithy had, if anything, increased his determination to depart immediately. Having ensured that the last of the foredeck cargo had been unloaded and that all of the film company’s equipment and personal effects were ashore, he and Mr Stokes courteously but swiftly shook hands with us all as we were ushered ashore. The derricks were already stayed in position and the mooring ropes singled up: Captain Imrie was not about to stand upon the order of his going.

  Otto, properly enough, was the last to leave. At the head of the gangway, he said: ‘Twenty-two days it is, then, Captain Imrie? You’ll be back in twenty-two days?’

  ‘I won’t leave you here the winter, Mr Gerran, never fear.’ With both the mystery and his much-unloved Bear Island about to be left behind. Captain Imrie apparently felt that he could permit himself a slight relaxation of attitude. ‘Twenty-two days? At the very outset. Why, man, I can be in Hammerfest and back in seventy-two hours. I wish you all well.’

  With this Captain Imrie ordered the gangway to be raised and went up to the bridge without explaining his cryptic remark about the seventy- two hours. It was more likely than not that what he had in mind at that very moment was, indeed, to be back inside seventy-two hours with, his manner seemed to convey, a small regiment of heavily-armed Norwegian police. I wasn’t concerned: I was as certain as I could be that, if that were indeed what he had in mind, he would change his mind before the night was out.

  The navigation lights came on and the Morning Rose moved off slowly northward from the jetty, slewed round in a half-circle and headed down the Sor-hamna, her engine note deepening as she picked up speed. Opposite the jetty again Captain Imrie sounded his hooter—only the captain could have called it a siren—twice, a high and lonely sound almost immediately swallowed up in the muffling blanket of snow: within seconds, it seemed, both the throb of the engine and the pale glow of the navigation lights were lost in the snow and the darkness.

  For what seemed quite some time we all stood there, huddled against the bitter cold and peering into the driving snow, as if by willing it we could bring the lights back into view again, the engine throb back into earshot. The atmosphere was not one of voyagers happily arrived at their hoped-for destination but of castaways marooned on an Arctic desert island.

  The atmosphere inside the big living cabin was not much of an improvement. The oil heaters were functioning well enough and Eddie had the diesel generator running so that the black heaters on the walls were just beginning to warm up, but the effects of a decade of deep-freeze were not to be overcome in the space of an hour: the inside temperature was still below freezing. Nobody went to their allocated cubicles for the excellent reason that they were considerably colder than the central living space. Nobody appeared to want to talk to anybody else. Heissman embarked upon a pedantic and what promised to be lengthy lecture about Arctic survival, a subject concerning which his long and intimate acquaintance with Siberia presumably made him uniquely qualified to speak, but there were no takers, it was questionable whether he was even listening to himself. Then he, Otto and Neal Divine began a rather desultory discussion of their plans for—weather permitting—the following day’s shooting, but obviously they hadn’t their hearts even in that. It was, eventually, Conrad who put his finger on the cause of the general malaise, or, more accurately, expressed the thought that was in the mind of everybody with the possible exception of myself.

  He said to Heissman: ‘In the Arctic, in winter, you require torches. Right?’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘We have them?’

  ‘Plenty, of course. Why?’

  ‘Because I want one. I want to go out. We’ve been in here now, all of us, how long, I don’t know, twenty minutes at least, and for all we know there may be a man out there sick or hurt or frostbitten or maybe fallen and broken a leg.’

  ‘Oh, come now, come now, that’s pitching it a bit strongly, Charles,’ Otto said. ‘Mr Smith has always struck me as a man eminently able to take care of himself.’ Otto would probably have said the same thing if he’d been watching Smithy being mangled by a polar bear: because of both nature and build Otto was not a man to become unnecessarily involved in anything even remotely physical.

  ‘If you don’t really care, why don’t you come out and say so?’ This was a new side of Conrad to me and he continued to develop his theme at my expense. ‘I’d have thought you’d have been the first to suggest this, Dr Marlowe.’ I might have been, too, had I not known considerably more about Smithy than he did.

  ‘I don’t mind being the second,’ I said agreeably.

  In the event, we all went, with the exception of Otto, who complained of feeling unwell, and Judith Haynes who roundly maintained that it was all nonsense and that Mr Smith would come back when he felt like it, an opinion which I held myself but for reasons entirely different from hers. We were all provided with torches and agreed to keep as closely together as possible or, if separated, to be back inside thirty minutes at the latest.

  The party set off in a wide sweep up the escarpment fronting the Sor-hamna to the north. At least, the others did. I headed straight for the equipment hut where the diesel generator was thudding away reassuringly, for it was unlikely that any one of us would be missed—no one would probably be aware of the presence of any other than his immediate neighbours—and the best place to sit out a wild goose chase was the warmest and most sheltered spot I could find. With my torch switched off so as not to betray my presence I opened the door of the hut; passed inside, closed the door, took a step forward and swore out loud as I stumbled over something comparatively yielding and almost measured my length on the planked floor. I recovered, turned and switched on my torch.

  A man was lying stretched out on the floor and to my total lack of surprise it proved to be Smithy. He stirred and groaned, half-turned, raised a feeble arm to protect his eyes from the bright glare of the torch, then slumped back again, his arm falling limply by his side, his eyes closed. There was blood smeared over his left cheek. He stirred uneasily, moving from side to side and moaning in that soft fashion a man does when he is close to the borderline of consciousness.

  ‘Does it hurt much, Smithy?’ I asked.

  He moaned some more.

  ‘Where you scratched your cheek with a handful of frozen snow,’ I said.

  He stopped moving and he stopped moaning.

  ‘The comedy act we’ll keep for later in the programme,’ I said coldly. ‘In the meantime, will you kindly get up and explain to me why you’ve behaved like an irresponsible idiot?’

  I placed the torch on the generator casing so that the beam shone upwards. It didn’t give much light, just enough to show Smithy’s carefully expressionless face as he got to his feet.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘PQS 182131, James R. Huntingdon, Golden Green and Beirut, currently and wrongly known as Joseph Rank Smith, is who I mean.’

  ‘I guess I’m the irresponsible idiot you mean,’ Smithy said. ‘It would be nice to have introductions all round.’

  ‘Dr Marlowe,’ I said. He kept the same carefully expressionless face. ‘Four years and four months ago when we took you from your nice cosy job as Chief Officer in that broken-down Lebanese tanker we thought you had a future with us. A bright one. Even four months ago we thought the same thing. But here, now, I’m very far from sure.’

  Smithy smiled but his heart wasn’t in it. ‘You can’t very well fire me on Bear Island.’

  ‘I can fire you in Timbuctoo if I want to,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘Well, come on.’

  ‘You might have made yourself known to me.’ Smithy sounded aggrieved and I supposed I would have been also in his position. ‘I was beginning to guess. I didn’t know there was anyone else aboard apart from me.’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to know. You weren’t supposed to guess. You were supposed to do exactly what you were told. Just that and no more. You remember the last line in your written instructions? The
y were underlined. A quotation from Milton. I underlined it.’

  ‘“They also serve who only stand and wait”,’ Smithy said. ‘Corny, I thought it at the time.’

  ‘I’ve had a limited education,’ I said. ‘Point is, did you stand and wait? Did you hell! Your orders were as simple and explicit as orders could ever be. Remain constantly aboard the Morning Rose until contacted. Do not, under any circumstances, leave the vessel even to step ashore. Do not, repeat not, attempt to conduct any investigations upon your own, do not seek to discover anything, at all times behave like a stereotype merchant navy officer. This you failed to do. I wanted you aboard that ship, Smithy. I needed you aboard—now. And where are you—stuck in a godforsaken hut on Bear Island. Why in God’s name couldn’t you follow out simple instructions?’

  ‘OK. My fault. But I thought I was alone. Circumstances alter cases, don’t they? With four men mysteriously dead and four others pretty close to death—well, damn it all, am I supposed to stand by and do nothing? Am I supposed to have no initiative, nor to think for myself even once?’

  ‘Not till you’re told to. And now look where you’ve left me—one hand behind my back. The Morning Rose was my other hand and now you’ve deprived me of it. I wanted it on call and close to hand every hour of the day and night. I might need it at any time—and now I haven’t got it. Is there anybody aboard that blasted trawler who could maintain position just off-shore in the darkest night or bring her up the Sor-hamna in a full blizzard? You know damn well there’s not. Captain Imrie couldn’t bring her up the Clyde on a midsummer’s afternoon.’

  ‘You have a radio with you then? To communicate with the trawler?’

  ‘Of course. Built into my medical case—no more than a police job, but range enough.’

  ‘Be rather difficult to communicate with the Morning Rose’s transceiver lying in bits and pieces.’

  ‘How very true,’ I said. ‘And why is it in bits and pieces? Because on the bridge you started talking freely and at length about shouting for help over that self-same radio and whistling up the NATO Atlantic forces if need be, while all the time some clever-cuts was taking his ease out on the bridge wing drinking in every word you said. I know, there were fresh tracks in the snow—well, my tracks, but re-used, if you follow me. So, of course, our clever-cuts hies himself off and gets himself a heavy hammer.’