73
The Narwhal’s tender was perilously overloaded. Designed to hold twelve men, the boat easily accommodated the fourteen crewmen who had evacuated the ship. But the extra weight was just enough to alter her sailing characteristics in a rough sea. With choppy waves slapping at her sides, it was only a short time before a layer of icy water began sloshing around the footwells.
Stenseth had taken hold of the tiller after a laborious effort to start the frozen motor. With a pair of ten-gallon cans of gasoline, they had just enough fuel to reach King William Island. But Stenseth already had an uneasy feeling, realizing that they would have to march in the footsteps of Franklin’s doomed crew if they were to reach safety at Gjoa Haven.
Leery of swamping the boat, the captain motored slowly through the whitecapped seas. Fog still hung heavy over the water, but he could detect a faint lightening of the billows as the brief Arctic night showed signs of passing. He refrained from turning directly east toward King William Island, holding to his word to make a brief search for Pitt and Giordino. With next to no visibility, he knew the odds of locating the submersible were long. To make matters worse, there was no GPS unit in the tender. Relying on a compass distorted by their nearness to the magnetic north pole, Stenseth dead reckoned their way back to the site of the shipwreck.
The helmsman estimated that they had collided with the icebreaker some six miles northwest of the wreck site. Guessing at the current and their own speed, Stenseth piloted the boat southeast for twenty minutes, then cut the motor. Dahlgren and the others shouted out Pitt’s name through the fog, but the only sound they heard in reply was the slap of the waves against the tender’s hull.
Stenseth restarted the motor and cruised to the southeast for ten minutes, then cut the motor again. Repeated shouts through the fog went unanswered. Stenseth motored on, repeating the process once more. When the last round of shouts fell empty, he addressed the crew.
“We can’t afford to run out of fuel. Our best bet is to run east to King William Island and try and locate some help. Once the weather clears, the submersible can be found easily. And I can tell you that Pitt and Giordino are probably a lot more comfortable in that sub than we are.”
The crew nodded in agreement. Respect ran high for Pitt and Giordino, but their own situation was far from harmless. Getting under way once more, they ran due east until the outboard motor sputtered to a halt, having sucked dry the first can of gas. Stenseth switched fuel lines to the second can and was about to restart the motor when the helmsman suddenly cried out.
“Wait! ”
Stenseth turned to the man seated nearby. “I think I heard something,” he said to the captain, this time in a whisper.
The entire boat fell deathly quiet, each man afraid to breathe, as all ears were trained to the night air. Several seconds passed before they heard it as one. A faint tinging sound in the distance, almost like the chime of a bell.
“That’s Pitt and Giordino,” Dahlgren shouted. “Has to be. They’re tapping out an SOS on the Bloodhound’s hull.”
Stenseth looked at him with skepticism. Dahlgren had to be wrong. They had moved too far from the submersible’s last-known position. But what else could be signaling through the bleak Arctic night?
Stenseth engaged the outboard motor and sailed the tender in an ever-widening series of circles, cutting the throttle at periodic intervals to try to detect which direction the sound was coming from. He finally noted a rising pitch emanating from the east and turned in that direction. The captain motored slowly but anxiously, fearful that the tapping might cease before he had determined a true bearing. The fog blew in thick wisps while the morning dawn still struggled to appear. As close as they might be, he knew it would be all too easy to lose the submersible if it fell silent.
Fortunately, the clanging went on. The rapping only grew louder, audible even over the rumble of the outboard. Changing course with slight shifts to the tiller, Stenseth zeroed in on the sound until it echoed in his ears. Cruising blindly through a dark bank of fog, he suddenly cut the throttle as a huge black shape rose up in front of them.
The barge seemed to have lost its mammoth scale since Stenseth had last seen it, being towed by the icebreaker. Then he saw why. The barge was sinking by the stern, with nearly half of its length already submerged. The bow rose at a rakish angle, reminiscent of the last minutes of the Narwhal. Having just witnessed his own ship’s demise, he knew the barge was down to its last minutes, if not seconds.
Stenseth and the crew reacted with disappointment at their discovery. Their hopes had been pinned on finding Pitt and Giordino. But their disillusionment quickly turned to horror when they realized that the barge was about to go under.
And that the tapping sound came from someone locked aboard.
74
Dahlgren played a flashlight beam across the exposed deck of the barge, searching for an entry point, but found only fixed bulkheads ahead of the forward hold.
“Take us around to the starboard side, Captain,” he requested.
Stenseth motored the tender around the towering bow of the barge, slowing as he approached the forward hold. The rhythmic metallic rapping suddenly became noticeably louder.
“There,” Dahlgren exclaimed, finding the side-compartment hatch with his light. A chain was visible, wrapped around the hatch door lever and secured to a rail stanchion.
Without a word, Stenseth ran the tender alongside the barge until it bumped into a metal railing that angled out of the water. Dahlgren was already on his feet and leaped onto the barge’s deck, landing aside the partially flooded number 3 hold hatch cover.
“Be quick, Jack,” Stenseth yelled. “She’s not long above water.”
He immediately backed the tender away from the barge, not wanting to get caught in its suction should it suddenly plunge to the bottom.
Dahlgren had already sprinted across the angled deck and up a short flight of steps to the locked storage compartment. Banging a gloved hand on the hatch, he shouted, “Anybody home?”
The startled voice of Sergeant Bojorquez replied instantly.
“Yes. Can you let us out?”
“Will do,” Dahlgren replied.
He quickly studied the securing length of chain, which had been crudely knotted around both the hatch lever and the deck stanchion. There had been little slack to begin with, but the twisting girders of the sinking ship had pulled the chain drum tight. Checking each end under the beam of his flashlight, he quickly realized that the stanchion knot was more accessible, and he focused his efforts there.
Yanking his gloves off, he grabbed hold of the knot’s outer links and pulled with all his might. The frozen steel links dug into his flesh but refused to budge. Gathering his breath, he tugged again, putting the full power of his legs into the effort while nearly ripping his fingers from their sockets. But the chain wouldn’t move.
The deck beneath his feet took a sudden lurch, and he felt the ship twist slightly from the uneven pull of the rapidly flooding holds. Releasing his mangled and frozen fingers from the links, he looked at the chain and tried another tack. Leaning over the landing in order to attack from a right angle, he began kicking at the knot with his boots. Inside the storage compartment, he could hear panicked shouts from several voices urging him to hurry. From the water nearby, a few of the Narwhal’s crew yelled over, echoing the sentiment. As if to add its own pressure, the barge let out a deep metallic groan from somewhere far beneath the surface.
With his heart pounding, Dahlgren kicked at the chain with his toe. Then he stomped with his heel. He kicked harder and harder, with a growing sense of anger. Furiously he kicked, as if his own life depended on it. He kept on kicking until a single link of chain finally slipped over the tightly wound coil.