The radio operator’s page was becoming all too familiar to Carol.
“Stuart, you’re becoming one of my least favorite people around here, you know?”
“Sorry,” came Frisch’s reply.
It’s Szilard, she thought. Or that little creep Seaborg. Or the lawyers. They’re shutting us down as the world’s most ineffective emergency response team.
“Unless it’s Publishers Clearing House with a big, fat check, tell them I’ll call them back.”
“You better take it, Carol,” Frisch said. “It’s the Canadian Coast Guard.”
“What do they want?” she asked.
“Our help,” Frisch said. “They want us to respond to a possible emergency.”
I thought we were in an emergency already, Carol said to herself.
“What the hell does the Coast Guard want?”
“It’s a distress beacon,” Frisch explained as Carol arrived at the radio room. “They want us to check it out.”
Carol took the microphone and waited as the call was patched through.
The caller identified himself as Captain Neil Parsons of the Canadian Coast Guard, somewhere out of Iqaluit.
“After nearly two months of enforced radio silence, we’ve picked up an emergency beacon from the Sverdrup Explorer coming out of Fury and Hecla Strait,” Parsons explained.
“The ship is frozen into some ice, but there isn’t enough of a platform for a helo to set down, even if we had the range to reach her. So far we’ve only been able to do an aircraft flyby of the vessel under low overcast, and that hasn’t told us much. No one’s answered our hailing and no one is visible on deck, but the ship appears to be seaworthy.”
“What do you think it is then?” Carol asked.
“I suspect it’s something trivial — either their radio’s out or their batteries are run down in the cold and the captain is too proud to admit it. As you probably know, the Explorer made an explicit request for privacy. If it wasn’t for the beacon, we wouldn’t even be bothering you.”
“What about your ships?” Carol asked Parsons tersely. The Coast Guard had flatly rejected her request for a routine flyby to check out the possible radiation source; now they wanted the Phoenix’s assistance.
“What exactly do you guys get paid for?”
“Obviously we are short on other options or I wouldn’t be deputizing you,” Parsons said.
“The Bernier is the closest Coast Guard vessel to the Explorer’s location and she broke a propeller shaft about an hour after we registered the beacon. There’s a fishing vessel in the Hudson Strait that might assist too, but she says she’s blocked by the ice.”
“How convenient for them,” Carol said. “I don’t suppose the ice is blocking their nets.”
“Maritime law requires that you provide search-and-rescue support if necessary. I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t at least temporarily necessary. Common sense and common courtesy dictate it.”
“There’s no need to lecture me. Captain Parsons,” Carol said. “Send us the latest coordinates and I’ll have my captain respond to that location ASAP.”
“Thank you. Dr. Harmon,” Parsons said. “If it turns out there’s some type of emergency up there you’ll have all the assistance you need. Just let me know.”
The connection was broken and Carol stuck out her tongue at the dead microphone.
“Where was that intrepid spirit and generosity a week ago?” Carol asked Frisch.
She muttered a profane remark under her breath, handed the radio back to her crewman, and marched out of the room, nearly colliding with Garner in the corridor.
“As if we don’t have enough to keep us busy, now we’ve got to go play Lassie for a group of yachtsmen,” Carol said. She said yachtsmen as though there were some sort of obstruction in her throat.
Garner was impressed when he heard the name of the vessel in distress.
“You mean the Sverdrup Explorer?”
“One and the same,” Carol said. “Norway’s backward little time machine.”
Garner couldn’t help but notice Carol’s resistance to providing a mandatory check of a vessel in distress.
“I know I’m being terrible, but really,” Carol said. “It’s like stopping to check out a car alarm — when’s the last time anyone did that?” She looked at Garner then and the stability in his eyes brought her down to earth. It felt good.
“I know, I know. I guess it could just as easily be us someday.”
“Someday? Like tomorrow?”
“Yeah, like tomorrow.”
8
The Sverdrup Explorer had been built as part of a meticulous, modern-day re-creation of the Fram expedition. The Fram — Norwegian for “forward” and symbolic of the days when explorers steadfastly believed they had free license to choose their own direction — set out to sail the waters of the high Arctic.
Fridtjof Nansen, the expedition’s leader, wanted to use the drift of the ship to prove the existence of a cross-polar current that ran northwest from Siberia to the North Pole, then south past Greenland in the Davis Strait. A durable, four-hundred-ton wooden vessel was designed specifically to be frozen into the ice. Once there, the vessel and its crew followed the drift of the ice for nearly two years, learning more about polar oceanography than any expedition in history.
The three-masted ship was hewn from solid wood more than two feet thick, its triple hull reinforced with sheet metal and given well-rounded sides to allow the vessel to pop up onto converging ice rather than being crushed by it. A retractable propeller and rudder also reduced potential ice damage, while a 220-horsepower steam engine and a windmill provided virtually all of the vessel’s power.
Under the command of Captain Otto Sverdrup, the ship had sailed from Larvik, Norway, in 1893 with twelve men and a five-year supply of provisions. It was frozen into the ice near the Siberian Islands and drifted for nearly two years before breaking free of the ice at Svalbard. The expedition and its successor (from 1898 to 1902, also under Sverdrup’s command) were considered triumphs. In all, Sverdrup managed to log more than seven hundred days in the Arctic, crossing nearly twelve thousand miles, surveying more than ten thousand square miles of shoreline and contributing unprecedented knowledge about the general circulation of the Arctic Ocean. To the present day, oceanographers routinely used “Nansen” bottles to sample parcels of water or spoke of the “Sverdrup” ― a unit of volume transport equal to one million cubic meters per second when discussing ocean currents. The original Fram was eventually memorialized in 1935 and put ashore at Bygdeynes, Norway, where it was heralded as a national treasure.
The idea to re-create the Fram expedition was that of a man named Malcolm Neddermeyer. Neddermeyer was a burly, unabashedly chauvinistic Norwegian mountaineer, explorer, and businessman who had accrued his modest millions selling water purification filters. The Sverdrup Explorer, an exact reproduction of the Fram, became his passion and unbridled promotion. Over the next decade, Neddermeyer’s infectious enthusiasm convinced private-sector sponsors in both Norway and Canada to subscribe to the vision. Neddermeyer used his effusive charisma and considerable wealth to generate widespread public awareness of the event, particularly how exactly the Fram had been re-created and how Neddermeyer’s crew would forgo “any and all modern conveniences” to duplicate more precisely the original expedition.