It was obvious that many had experienced vomiting or diarrhea before death, but none had ventured back to their bunks only a few feet away.
Their skin was locked in a grayish pallor marbled with the angry pink and ominous black of frostbite. Among those whose eyes remained open, the eyeballs were sunken and showed signs of residual bleeding. Many of the faces were recognizable from the publicity photos of the expedition on CNN, ESPN, and the Explorer Channel, but none resembled Neddermeyer.
The positions of the bodies in the room seemed odd. Zubov explained that he and Byrnes had actually had to push their way through the door, only to find the men seated around the perimeter.
“It looks like they took precautions to keep anyone from getting in here,” Byrnes said. “But I don’t get it. If they were sick, why did they all retreat in here, not to the galley or their bunks?”
“And why didn’t they call for help?” Carol asked. She was becoming enraged, though whether from the demonstrated foolishness of these men’s ridiculous machismo or the terrifying reminder of Dex’s and Ramsey’s deaths she did not know.
Garner stepped around the bodies closest to the door and looked at them from another angle. In a morning of ghosts, the sight of the men now lying dead before him was chillingly reminiscent of past accounts of early polar expeditions, successful or not. Amundsen. Peary. Scott. Franklin. Shackleton. Neddermeyer had stubbornly added himself to this list a century too late. The men, some of Scandinavia’s best — or at least wealthiest — yachtsmen, had died weak, cold, and hungry, but they had died with resolve.
Examining the scene, Garner tried to make sense of it all.
“They weren’t retreating. They were advancing. They set up a blockade to keep anyone from getting out of here, even while they slept or after they were too weak to move. With their food only a few feet away.”
“Getting out from where?” Byrnes asked. Nearly in unison, the five of them turned to look aft, at a second door leading into the room.
“Whatever they wanted stopped was in there,” Garner said. “And I think I know what — or who — it is.”
The small enclosure, built into the hull nearly as an afterthought, was the most heavily fortified cabin on the ship. The timbers in the walls and door were part of a bulkhead and easily too thick for any of the knives or hatchets the landing party could see on board. Garner and Zubov retreated to the afterdeck, where Zubov lowered his friend off the Explorer’s crowded transom.
“Hurry up,” Zubov grunted. “The meals on the Phoenix haven’t made you any lighter, buddy.”
Garner moved across the ornate transom of the vessel only a few feet above the icy water, in search of a chink in the Explorer’s wooden armor. Moments later, he found what he was looking for: a small porthole that looked into the curious room. The opening was far too small for a man to climb through, but large enough to allow a good view of the horizon and, if necessary, the firing of a flare pistol from inside, had there been one. Garner found the recklessness of Neddermeyer’s historical dream more chilling each time he reconsidered it.
Garner’s light flicked over something shiny. Through the gloom he could see it was the ship’s transmitter. Beyond it, next to the heavily barricaded door leading to the fortress, lay the frozen body of the twelfth and final member of the Explorer’s crew.
“What do you see?” Zubov called down.
“The two things between these men and survival,” Garner called back. “The radio and the captain.”
Garner and Zubov eventually got into the radio room with the assistance of a chainsaw borrowed from the Phoenix’s tool stores.
Examining the clues left before them, it became apparent that Neddermeyer had fended off a possible mutiny by barricading himself in the small cabin along with the ship’s logs, charts, and radio. The rest of the crew, like Neddermeyer, probably already sick and weakened by radiation poisoning, had battened-down the ship and staged a mutiny outside the radio room. Neddermeyer’s log mentioned their “urging” him to call off the expedition for health reasons, but he continued to ignore them “for the greater good.”
True to his delusions, Neddermeyer kept records with an antique quill pen, taking bearings from the stars and marking these on his charts.
Entry after entry in his log spoke of the coming of spring and the breakup of the ice that would, mercifully, mark the successful end of their odyssey. Facing the prospect not only of abandoning the expedition but of losing several men, Neddermeyer had tried simply to outlive the unknown, invisible killer.
Garner found that the Explorer’s emergency beacon was the same make and model as the one he carried aboard his own Albatross. The device could be set so that it had to be manually reset every twelve or twenty-four hours and would begin beeping if this reset failed to occur. Figuring back to the time when the Coast Guard first noted the beacon, Neddermeyer had been dead less than two days.
The final entry in the log concluded with: All but three of us dead. With the end of this quill, weakness begs me to surrender. Passage through Fury and Hecla was hellishly slow, exhausting what little hope I have left. God have mercy on me for what I have done. To their families, my shame. To those who succeeded where I have so obviously failed, my admiration. Notwithstanding the stoic melodrama and the antiquated use of words, it was indeed tragic that Neddermeyer believed his vessel to be so far from safety. He had chosen death for twelve sailors rather than face defeat by Sverdrup’s Arctic.
Even if the facilities had been available, there was no need for an autopsy on any of the men. The dosimeter indicated absorbed doses of seven grays in the fortress, and even higher on the blankets the men had used to stay warm in their last hours. Other than the whales, these were the highest environmental levels they had yet recorded; Junko speculated that the boat’s wood construction had amplified the level of saturation.
“Killed by starvation, cold, and radiation,” Junko mused. “In that order, if they were lucky.”
“It was arrogance and stupidity that killed these men, in that order,” Carol said bitterly. “The best we can do is try not to join them.”
Carol returned to the Phoenix within the hour to radio her findings back to Parsons. The stunned silence on the other end of the line in response to her description left little to the imagination; Parsons was only beginning to appreciate the horror they all now faced.
“I’ll notify the Norwegian authorities so that they can tell the next of kin,” he said. “Right after I get a nuclear emergency response team up to your location. The NORAD radar post at Hall Beach and the Canadian Forces at Iqaluit and Resolute have already been placed on alert.”
“Alert? To do what?” Carol said, her anger finally boiling over. “To expose more people to this radiation? To soak more vessels in this stuff and send them back to God-knows-how-many ports around the Arctic?”
“Then what would you like?” Parsons asked evenly.
Carol hesitated what would she like? The question posed was the sudden answer to the demands she had been making for nearly two weeks. Now that she was in a position to have someone listen to her and respond, she found herself hesitating. It was too late. What she had just witnessed aboard the Explorer went beyond a mere call for help. The Phoenix was alone at ground zero of some invisible, slow motion nuclear detonation. For as far as they needed to go along this toxic trail, to invite assistance at this point could mean countless more deaths.