Eddie and I followed Captain DeBlieu through a maze of steel stairways and decks. He’d left his usual bridge staff in charge of guiding the ship in so-far ice-free waters. He wanted to stay close to us to find out more about what we planned to do. As we headed for the engine room, I mentally reviewed my situation.
Two Marine squads who don’t trust me. One State Department Assistant Deputy Secretary who should not be here. One ice expert who grew up in a communist country. And a crew that has not been vetted for high-security situations. All it takes is one person who’s pissed off because they lost a promotion, or a friend died, or they need money for a car, vacation, trip to Vegas… Or they’ve decided, in the twisted compartments of their brain, that Al-Qaeda is right.
The ship was a marvel of complexity, a floating city of steel; but clearly it had been designed for research. Rescue missions, yes. Warfare, no.
“The Wilmington was built as a compromise,” DeBlieu told Eddie and me as we made our way aft from the mess, where Eddie had insisted I fortify myself with some caloric intake. The bacon-on-wheat sandwich, generously proportioned, smelled mouthwatering, and the caffeine rush from the mug of heavily sugared Maxwell House sharpened my thinking.
“Our rounder prow,” DeBlieu said, “optimizes ramming. We sacrificed maneuverability. There’s no miracle formula to getting through ice, gentlemen. You slug through or back up and ram it. You try again. If the ice gets too thick, you stop.”
Eddie said, “Sounds like the Marines, except for the stopping part.”
DeBlieu explained, “Congress only allocated enough money to keep one icebreaker running at the moment. The other two are under repair. NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — assigns our missions, except during the annual summer cruise when State takes over. By the way, I hear you met Secretary Sachs.”
“We had a friendly chat,” I said.
DeBlieu allowed himself a smile, clearly familiar with Sachs’s friendliness.
I need to plan. Within hours, these peaceful-looking decks might be transformed into a field hospital, a launch point for combat, platform for Arctic war.
From outside, the ship had looked impressive, but in a boxy, cruise ship way; its prow more rounded than sharp, as it would have been the case with a Naval ship built for speed, fighting, and evasion.
The superstructure was an enormous white box, top-heavy, crowned by the bridge, the icebreaker a maze of twelve levels. Inside four upper levels, humans slept, ate, or relaxed, and layouts were similar; with two long passageways running along port and starboard sides, lined with bunk rooms, individual ones for senior officers, group cabins for other crew below, then supply rooms, lounges for crew and scientists, and various mechanical shops.
Passageways held regular caches of fire-fighting equipment, and to go fore to aft, we had to continually pass through watertight steel hatches, unlatching steel levers and locking them behind us once we passed.
“Main control on the bridge. Propulsion’s diesel electric. Horsepower’s 30,000 max. We can carry 1.2 million gallons of fuel. Length, 420 feet. Aft area is mostly for science. We’ve got labs there as good as those at Harvard, freezers for sediment samples, whale samples.”
Well, that’s one good point, I thought. If we’ve got to analyze a disease or toxin, we’ll have labs.
“I thought it’s not legal to kill whales,” Eddie said, out of curiosity.
DeBlieu nodded. “We only take samples if we find a dead animal and need to figure how it died. Believe me, if we ever hurt a whale, Clinton Toovik would have our heads. The Iñupiats took oil companies to court and stopped them from drilling offshore until they agreed to stay away during hunting weeks. The whole culture up here depends on whales. The locals have millions of dollars from taxing oil on their land, and they use it well in Washington.”
“Having Clinton looking over your shoulder must be a pain in the ass,” Eddie said.
“No. Marine mammals are protected, and even if Clinton weren’t here, we’d have observers on the bridge — private company provides them. Usually college kids. If we’re on a collision course with whales, they can order us to divert.”
Eddie was always irritated at civilian meddling. “You’re telling me a college kid can order you around?”
DeBlieu shrugged. “Part of our job is to protect the environment.”
“But the only thing up here besides animals is you.”
“No, every year there are more ships: seismic ones, oil company ships, tourists exiting the Northwest Passage… we don’t even know they’re coming until they show up.”
Eddie flared, hands on his hips, “So if we get into a firefight, we need some kid’s permission before we shoot, in case we hit a walrus?”
DeBlieu laughed.
“Somehow I know you’ll do the right thing,” he said.
I liked this captain, the way he didn’t engage when it was pointless, the way he stood up for things when he was right. I interrupted him as we dropped through a hatch, donned noise-suppressing headphones, and eyed the ship’s two immense shafts turning, operating screws out back.
“I’m posting a guard here. Also in the engine room,” I said.
By now the captain clearly regarded my security concerns as excessive, and his answer came immediately.
“They don’t touch anything. I don’t need an overzealous Marine doing damage. Unless they see someone actually starting a fire, they’ll leave my crew alone.”
“Fair enough.”
My tiredness was creeping back, and my coffee mug was empty. Boots appeared in the hatch above, and Major Pettit climbed down to report that his men had found no listening devices in any of the spaces they had checked.
“All clean.”
DeBlieu smiled. “What a surprise.”
The bridge stretched port to starboard and was a large, comfortably lit space, its windows providing views in all directions. A twenty-foot-long waist-high console dominated the area, manned by the three-person bridge crew, constantly monitoring a plethora of screens: wind speed, temperature, latitude and longitude, and frozen, the last satellite image received of sea ice ahead, a white mass, but I was too far away to see how many miles separated us.
Clad in fire retardant Kevlar suits, an emergency drill crew of four stood around in back, doing nothing. Their job was to extinguish fires here, and since there weren’t any, they waited for the drill to end.
Another half dozen men and women clustered around a large chart table, peering at a map. One officer was plotting a route.
The crew, most in their late teens or twenties, wore standard-issue dark blue uniforms, black lace-up boots, some in hooded sweatshirts with WILMINGTON in white letters, some in peaked caps, or blue stocking hats, or woven red hats with gold lettering.
“Red for ‘polar bears’ — Arctic veterans,” DeBlieu said.
My eyes went to the vista outside the slanted windows. It was astounding and I caught my breath.
I looked down on an expanse of black ocean and a few bits of bobbing ice — small from seventy feet up — amid whitecaps, like scouts probing for weakness in the hull.
Despite the urgency, I was awed. So this was the southern Arctic Ocean, which had smashed ships to pieces for centuries, and those ice dots were growlers, remnants of the once mighty ice sheet. They seemed to tumble in slow motion, white on top, bottoms the turquoise of a Caribbean bay, or the green of a dollar bill. I saw a spout of water erupt from the surface about a hundred yards to starboard, then two more, beside it, all three heading away from the ship.