Olaf worked the patina on the watch with his fingers, his jaw quivering in a now familiar way. The look of concentration on his face had given way to drowsiness.
“How did you pick the guys to cross the deck with you?”
“I picked Red because he was the single strongest guy I ever knew,” Olaf said. “Short bastard, built like a brick shithouse, with a red beard that hung to his chest and eyebrows the same color, bushy as a hedge. He had a cannonball of a gut, rock solid and sticking out there like a pregnant woman’s. Huge shoulders”—he hunched his shoulders up for effect—“but the smallest goddamn feet you ever saw. Like a bird.
“And a goofball, too. Always laughing and joking and playing pranks, good guy to have on your boat any time of year but especially in the fall, when everyone’s good and goddamn tired of each other. He wore the damnedest red boots.
“During a lifesaving drill earlier that year, he hauled one of the lifeboats twenty yards up a Lake Ontario beach. Might not sound like much, but I could have picked any team of three other guys on that boat and together we wouldn’t have been able to do the same thing. Amazing. I’m sure I had that in mind when I told him to bundle up.”
“Why Luke?”
“Luke was the guy I trusted most on that boat. He was the only guy — aside from Jan — who I believed would do anything to save another guy’s life. You said something about heroes, well, Luke was as close as we got.
“He was in his cabin, and I poked my head in and said, ‘Luke, we’re going aft. We’ve got trouble,’ and he was up and in his gear in thirty seconds. Keep in mind he was asleep in his drawers at the time. Always willing to help, always had the best interest of the crew in mind.” Olaf yawned, twitched his nose, and tried to cross his legs but couldn’t.
“And why Bjorn?”
“Bjorn was sitting closest to the door.”
Again the photograph in the maritime museum of the three men huddled on the beach came to mind. The distance between Bjorn’s place at the card table and that otherworldly beach suddenly seemed like an impossible span. Noah wondered how much the picking of that particular group of men mattered. He wondered if Red had been a weakling, or if Luke had been less willing, or if Bjorn had been asleep in his bunk, whether things would have turned out differently.
Olaf interrupted Noah’s thought. “We were out on the deck within minutes. I instructed the boys to keep together and latched myself onto the lifeline. I went first, then Red, then Bjorn, and Luke was last. The lifeline was a taut, half-inch steel cable that ran from the bow decking to the stern decking right down the middle of the boat. We had lines attached to our waists that we clipped onto it.
“We each had a flashlight or headlamp. Red had a walkie-talkie. There were half-a-dozen lamps running down the edge of either side of the deck. On a clear night they lit the Rag up like a boulevard, but they barely cracked the darkness that night. And the spotlight Jan had shining down on us from the roof of the pilothouse was just a little glimmer in the dark. Might as well have been a star on a cloudy night for all the good it was doing.
“The darkness wasn’t the terrible part, though. It was everything else. Even though we’d gotten the ship turned around, we were still taking some pretty heavy seas, and our big problem was the ice. The deck was covered with it, the lifeline was heavy with it, and in no time at all we were covered in it ourselves. And the wind — Jesus Christ, the wind — so strong at times it’d just whip up behind us and send one of us sprawling face-first onto the deck.
“And the snow,” he said finally and whistled.
“And cold?”
“So goddamn cold I felt like I was on fire,” Olaf said.
One of the few points of difference in the chronicles of that night was the moment at which the fire became the central fact of the catastrophe. Although Bjorn had told a reporter during an interview a few weeks after the wreck that they could smell the fire while they were crossing the deck — a detail that should have put the speculation to rest — some refused to believe this could have been true. They argued that it would have been impossible to smell the fire, seeing how the smoke would have been contained in the engine room, how by then the wind would have been coming from behind them. These same people argued that any fire would certainly have resulted in an immediate explosion that the men on the deck would have heard and felt despite the rough crossing. Noah doubted these speculations. Although it seemed fair enough to assume that they might have felt or heard the explosion, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that they might not have, either. As for smelling the fire, Noah had little doubt that the stench could have escaped from any of a hundred crannies in the decking.
“How soon did you know she was burning?” Noah said.
“Hard to say. We were probably better than halfway across the deck when it dawned on me that something smelled wrong. It was like burning hair is what it was, but there was so much other goddamn commotion that it must have been another minute or two before it hit me. We’d crossed under the hatch crane and were probably only thirty or forty feet from reaching the decking when the stink took over.
“All at once I knew what was happening, and no sooner had I put it all together than Red grabs me by the shoulder. I thought he was falling and using me for balance, so I didn’t turn around right away. But when he shook me again I turned, and he was shining his flashlight on the walkie-talkie.
“‘Boss,’ he said, hollering at the top of his goddamn lungs, ‘the captain’s calling.’
“There was so much static and interference from the noise in the background that I could barely hear what Jan was saying, but the long and short of it was that we were pretty well sunk.” He looked off into the corner for a few seconds.
“He told me we had no steerage, that the engine room was incommunicado again. That’s what I gathered from the static anyway. But then his voice came clear: ‘The Rag is burning,’ he said. It seemed absolutely impossible.” He looked down and quit talking.
“Jan must have already made the mayday, huh?”
Olaf lifted his eyes slowly. In the dim light Noah might have mistaken their glassiness for tears.
“Hand me the book,” Olaf said. “And grab my glasses off the counter.”
Noah did.
“I don’t know exactly what time it was when Jan radioed us on the deck, but it had to have been some time around quarter of eleven. Everything was happening so fast.” He had the open book under his nose in the lamplight and was scanning the page with his long, thick finger. “He made the mayday at ten thirty-three. And I’m sure he made the mayday before he signaled us.”
“You said something about all the answers being in the mayday transcript,” Noah said.
“I said as much as we’ll ever know is in here.” Olaf looked back down at the page for a second. “In the mayday,” he said, closing the book but keeping it marked with his finger, “he gives them our position — which had hardly changed from the time of the pan-pan — and tells them there’s a fire in the engine room, that he’s lost contact with the stern, that he’s got four men en route to investigate, and that he’s lost his rudder.
“We know the fuel line was leaking. We know that everyone on the stern was busy trying to contain the leak. We know that sometime between, say, ten twenty and ten thirty, the whole thing went up, and that within minutes the steerage was shot and Jan made the mayday. It’s safe to assume that there was some sort of explosion because a fire alone wouldn’t have put the rudder out of commission so fast. It’s also safe to assume there was an explosion because we never saw any of those boys alive.