Freddie Goodwin could not bring himself to believe the entire ship’s company of the Cuttyhunk was dead. For months he had used the columns of the Cape Cod Times to rail against the government investigation of the ship’s disappearance. He was emotionally and intellectually unable to accept the official report:
There is no evidence to suggest that Cuttyhunk is still floating. It must be presumed that she has gone to the bottom of the Southern Ocean with all hands. The chances of finding any survivors in these inhospitable waters is plainly zero.
At various times Freddie had demanded to know in both his newspaper and in letters to various Washington government departments how anyone could explain away Cuttyhunk’s last message: the 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, 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 Île 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 g
one 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.
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