“Then we’ll go back for fresh batteries,” Garner said. “These notes are the best source of information we’ve got so far and I don’t want to leave them behind just yet.” The charts from the Explorer would also be invaluable to them, but those would have to be left behind for investigators of the tragic expedition.
Additionally, the weathered paper showed radiation levels far too high to risk bringing it aboard the Phoenix.
Byrnes indicated the Explorer’s charts.
“How are we doing with those?”
By comparing Neddermeyer’s notes with his celestial observations and the crude notations on the charts. Garner and Zubov were able to reconstruct the track of the ship’s drift over the last several weeks of the expedition.
“If Neddermeyer was intending to duplicate Sverdrup’s original course,” said Zubov, “he failed miserably.”
“The Explorer came too far north before it froze into the ice,” Garner estimated. “Once it did, the floating ice was so large it moved not only with the currents, but was turned and held back by the pack ice on all sides of it.
By December, Neddermeyer surmised the same thing in his diary, but it was too late to change his mind. The deviation from his hoped-for route into Davis Strait continued to increase until only the means and accommodations were similar to the original Fram expedition.”
“Sounds like grounds for a mutiny to me,” Byrnes said.
“Could be,” Garner agreed. “There was no reason to continue the voyage, especially when the crew started getting sick.”
“No reason except ego,” Carol said.
“A hundred years ago it was known as bravery,” Byrnes parried.
Carol started to retort, but her words stalled. For a moment, the ghosts returned to the galley of the Explorer, sitting down at the table next to the landing party from the Phoenix.
“They were drinking contaminated meltwater,” Junko said. “Catching contaminated seals and fish to supplement their provisions. Everything was reused or recycled.”
“If anyone out on this ice was going to feel the effects of the radiation, it would be these men,” Garner said.
“And the Inuit,” Junko said. “Victor and his family and many others. I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but the rest are probably better off getting canned goods at the government store.”
“I doubt any of them could even imagine what was happening until it was too late,” Byrnes said. He meant the men aboard the Explorer, but the encounter with the Inuk and his lewkeemeeah certainly applied as well.
“If it wasn’t for the Balaenoptera, the same thing might have happened to us.”
“The same thing did happen to us two of us,” Carol reminded them. “And we don’t know if the rest of us will get out of the woods.” She looked at Garner. “That’s up to you.”
For a moment there was no one in the room but Garner and his ex-wife.
It could not be more obvious how much faith she was placing in his ability to get the Phoenix to the source of this nightmare. Whatever past differences there had been, Carol needed Garner’s experience, she needed his confidence and objectivity. More than that, she needed him.
I know, came the reply in his eyes, I need you too.
“The Explorer was designed to drift, like a drogue on top of the ice, and she seems to have done that extremely well,” Garner said. “Her track not only lets us know how the floes have been moving, but where she’s been. That’s the direction we should head next back up the surface currents to wherever the Explorer first encountered the radiation.”
Garner showed the others a series of bearings marked in pencil on Neddermeyer’s chart. The points began nearly one hundred miles northwest of their present position.
“If the Explorer had followed its intended route,” Garner continued, “she probably would have drifted too far north to be exposed to the radiation at all. Instead they came around the end of Baffin Island, through the Gulf of Boothia and Fury and Hecla Strait. The bottleneck in the strait slowed them down enough to exhaust their supplies and their energy. I hate to say it, but their bad luck might be just what we need to narrow our search area.”
Nearly nineteen thousand square miles of ocean and broken coastlines were represented on the charts before them. Even a glance at the sheer scale and desolation surrounding them was enough to cause doubt about the massive problem that they now faced.
“We’ll move north to the end of Foxe Basin, at least and keep sniffing the currents with Medusa until we find a possible source,” Garner said. “Given the levels we’re seeing here, I can’t imagine we’re too far from it.”
Carol studied Garner’s face as he continued to study the map. His expression was nearly ashen, hardly convinced by his own spoken confidence.
“See anything?” she asked him.
Garner thought a moment longer, then said, “What Sverdrup and Nansen found in the 1890s, Neddermeyer was in the process of repeating when he drifted through the radiation: there is a strong surface current in the eastern Arctic, coursing up the coast of Greenland.” He indicated the region on the chart.
“Along the way to Baffin Island, it curls off to the west, then flows back to the south as the Baffin Land Current.”
“Then where does it go?” Junko asked.
“Eventually it becomes the Labrador Current and divides, either dovetailing into the Grand Banks or flowing clockwise, east across the North Atlantic. A cold, dense, highly nutrified front is formed there by the convergence of these two or three water masses.”
That jibed with what Carol knew about baleen whales.
“Whales end up there, because that’s where the plankton accumulates.”
“Yep,” Garner agreed. “Fishermen too, because that’s where the whales and the fish are.” He indicated the position where the Explorer and the Phoenix were currently reconnoitered.
“Where we’re sitting now is really the beginning of a cold-water wellspring that eventually flows into most of the Northwest Atlantic. From there, it will eventually hit what’s left of the fishing grounds off the Grand Banks and the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic. Less likely, but possibly, it could also contaminate the subsurface currents and bottom water.”
“And where does that go?” Junko asked again, intrigued by the interconnectedness of it all.
“The bottom currents go into the general circulation of the Atlantic, flowing south and west before being up welled onto the shores of the northeastern United States,” Garner replied.
“In other words, unless we can stem the source,” he finished, “the debris passing us right now could become radioactive surf on a shoreline of thirty million people.”
The following morning, those aboard the Phoenix held a brief memorial service for the crew of the Sverdrup Explorer. After anchoring the vessel against the current and retrieving the last of the landing equipment, Carol gathered everyone in the Phoenix’s main clean room.
She included a few words about Dexter and Ramsey, and reiterated her previous offer: anyone who wanted to be airlifted from the vessel could still do so, but this would be their last chance until the source of the radiation was discovered.
Twenty-five pairs of eyes looked back at her, then at one another. It had become second nature when passing or regarding a fellow passenger on the Phoenix to drop one’s gaze to the radiation film badges each of them wore around their neck or clipped to their collar. It was a silent means of checking the health of one’s colleagues, of looking in on them, as if the individuals didn’t themselves consult the colored film on their own badges a dozen times an hour. It was also a sign of camaraderie, a necessary nuisance they each shared.