The young navigator pressed his dividers onto the chart against a steel ruler. “There’s a damn great flat-topped mountain on the headland,” he called to Bob. “It’s marked right here as the Bird Table. It’s probably the first thing we’ll see. We’ll change course a few degrees southerly right there. That way we’ll see straight up into Christmas Harbor. I don’t think it’ll give us enough shelter from the wind, though. We’ll have to run on a bit farther.”
“What the hell’s Christmas Harbor? I thought the whole place was French. Why isn’t it called Noël Pointe or something?”
“My notes say it was named by Captain Cook. He pulled in there on Christmas Day, 1776. The French named it Baie de l’Oiseau around that same time. Shouldn’t be surprised if no one’s been there since. I’m telling you, this place is des-o-late.”
At 0337 Bob Lander steered Cuttyhunk around Cap D’Estaing. They were in daylight now, but the wind was still hooting out of the Antarctic, and it swept around the great northwestern headland of Kerguelen. Fifteen minutes later Kit Berens was gazing up at the turmoil of white-capped ocean swirling through Christmas Harbor.
“Forget that,” he said. “I’d say the wind was blowing right around D’Estaing but somehow it’s also sweeping round that damn great mountain and into the harbor from the other direction. It’s like a wind tunnel in there. The katabatics are gonna give us a problem. We’re gonna have to run right up into one of the fjords.”
“Fjords?” said Bob. “I thought they were more or less a northern thing.”
“According to this chart, Kerguelen’s got more fjords than Norway,” said Kit. “I’ve been studying it for hours now. The whole place must have been a succession of glaciers once. The fjords here cut so deep back into the land I can’t find one spot on the whole island more than about eleven miles from saltwater. I bet if you measured every inch of the contiguous coastline it’d be about as long as Africa’s!”
Lander laughed. He liked the adventurous young Texan. And he liked the way he always knew a lot about where they were, not just the position, course, speed, and distances. It was typical of Kit to know that Captains James Cook and William Bligh had sailed through these waters a couple of hundred years ago.
Just then Tug Mottram returned to the bridge, bang on time, as he always was. “Morning men,” he said. “Is this goddamned wind ever gonna ease up?”
“Not yet, anyway,” said Lander. “The cold front is still right here. I guess we should be thankful the darned blizzard’s gone through. Wind’s still sou’westerly, and it’s freezing out there.”
“Kit, you picked a spot for us?” asked the Captain.
The Texan stared at his chart. “Kind of,” he said slowly, without looking up. “About another eight miles southwest there’s a deep inlet called Baie Blanche — a fjord really, ten miles long. A mile wide and deep, up to four hundred feet. At the end it forks left into Baie de Français, which I think will be sheltered. But it also turns right into another fjord, Baie du Repos. This one’s about eight miles long, narrow but very deep. The mountain range on the western side should give some shelter. The swells shouldn’t come in too bad, not that far up, and I don’t see any kelp marked. I’m recommending we get in there.”
“Sounds good to me. Oh, Bob, on your way to your bunk tell the engineers to be ready to start work on the hull at around 0800, will you?”
“Okay, sir. I’m just gonna catch an hour’s sleep. Then I’ll be right back for a bit of sightseeing.”
Kit Berens finally looked up and informed the Captain he was about to put a message on the satellite, stating their position and describing the minor repairs that would delay them for less than a day.
In the communications room, positioned on the port side of the wide bridge, Dick Elkins, a former television repairman from Boston, was talking to a weather station when Kit Berens dropped his message on the desk. “Intercontinental. Direct to Woods Hole,” Kit said.
And now, at last, they were getting a lee. The water was flatter, and Cuttyhunk steadied, sheltered by the rising foothills on the starboard side as they ran down to the Baie Blanche.
Kit Berens was back hunched over his charts, his steel ruler sweeping across the white, blue, and yellow sheets. He finally spoke. “Sir, I wanna give you three facts.”
“Shoot,” said the Captain.
“Right. If you left this island and headed due north, you would not hit land for eight thousand five hundred miles and it would be the south coast of Pakistan. If you went due west you’d go another eight thousand five hundred miles to the southern coastline of Argentina. And if you went east, you’d go six thousand miles, passing to the south of New Zealand and then six thousand five hundred more to the coast of Chile. My assessment is therefore that right now we’re at the ass-end of the goddamned earth.”
Tug Mottram laughed loudly. “How about south?”
“That, sir, is a total fucking nightmare. Five hundred miles into the West Ice Shelf, which guards the Astrid Coast. That’s the true Antarctic coastline. Colder and more windswept even than here. But they do have something else in common, Kerguelen and the Antarctic.”
“They do? What’s that?”
“No human being has ever been born in either place.”
“Jesus.”
At 0600 they swung into the first wide fjord, Baie Blanche, and immediately became aware that the wind had stopped and that the water was calm and tideless. There were four hundred feet below the keel. Tug Mottram cut the speed back because in these very cold, deep Antarctic bays, you could blunder into the most dangerous kind of small iceberg — the ones formed of transparent meltwater ice, which float heavily below the surface, absorbing the somber, morose shades of the surrounding seas. To the eye they look bluish black, and unlike white glacier ice, they are almost impossible to see.
After four miles, Bob Lander took the wheel while the skipper went outside into the freezing but clear air and gazed up at the rugged sides of the waterway. Ahead he could see the lowish headland of Point Bras where the fjord split. Beyond that, rising to a height of a thousand feet, was the snow-covered peak of Mount Richards. Through his binoculars Tug could see gales of snow being whipped from the heights by the still blasting wind.
This lee would be fine for a while, but should a gale swing suddenly out of the north, it would blast straight down Baie Blanche. That was why Kit Berens had advised running right down into the deeply sheltered Baie du Repos before they brought out the welding kit.
They turned into the long continuing fjord of Repos at 0655 and made their way over almost seventy fathoms of water around the long left-handed bend, which led to the protected dead-end waters below Mount Richards.
Bob Lander slowed to below four knots while they searched for an anchorage. Tug Mottram caught sight of two old, rusting, gray buoys spaced about four hundred feet apart, some fifty yards off the rocky western lee shore. “That’ll do just fine,” he muttered, at once wondering if it had been Captain Cook who had left them there in the first place. But then, still looking through his glasses, he spotted something beyond both his imagination and comprehension.
Speeding toward them, at about fourteen knots, was the unmistakable shape of a US-made Naval assault craft, one of the old 130 LCVP’s, complete with two regulation 7.62mm machine guns mounted on the bow. What was really disconcerting to Tug was the line of big red and white dragon’s teeth painted about two feet high across the shallow bow. Worse yet, there were ten men standing on the deck, each wearing white military-style helmets. Tug could see the sun glinting off the ones worn by the for’ard gunners.