“Morning,” Ira Lasko called as he entered the wardroom. He went to the coffee urn before joining Mercer.
“Looks like you need to shave.”
Ira ran a hand around the circle of stubble on his otherwise bald head, and chuckled. “I’m thinking about letting it grow in. How’s the show?”
“Icebreaking’s more dramatic on television.”
“If we’d tried this even a month ago, we wouldn’t have made it anywhere near Ammassalik.”
“How do people live up here?”
“Most of the fifty thousand people on Greenland are native Inuits. While they’ve become dependent on Denmark for a lot of their supplies, I think they’d be fine if the Danes left ’em alone too.”
“I was reading a guidebook on the flight from the States that said Greenland’s Inuits can understand the native languages spoken in Alaska. They’re separated by a quarter of the world and fifteen hundred years of isolation and the languages are still recognizable. Remarkable when you consider that we need dictionaries to help us understand the subtleties of Shake-speare and he’s only been dead for five hundred years.”
“Have you listened to a teenager recently? I can barely understand them, and it’s only been a single generation.” They laughed and Lasko added, “Speaking of teenagers, I ran into Marty in the hallway next to the bathroom last night and he reeked of perfume. Looks like he’s going to have some fun even if he doesn’t want to be here.”
The dining room filled slowly as others came awake and went in search of coffee and food. Marty was one of the last to come to breakfast, and all through the meal he kept glancing over at a young German girl who was Geo-Research’s assistant camp cook. When their eyes met, the brunette would blush and look away demurely.
“Get enough sleep, Marty?” Ira teased.
Bishop looked wolfish. “No, and I don’t think I’ll get much tonight either.”
After breakfast, the Society team went back to their cabins for their parkas and then met on the deck. A steady wind blew across the ship, carrying with it the clean smell of ice and sea. The temperature was thirty-five degrees but the sun was warm. As they checked over their gear, layers of clothes were stripped away. While they were working, Werner Koenig approached to talk about the potential dangers they could face on the ice and warn them about not allowing themselves to sweat.
“If you’re away from the camp and your clothes become sweaty, your body heat will leach away so fast you’ll be dead before you know it. That goes especially for your boots. We’ll be wearing moon boots on the ice, and they heat up fast and take forever to dry out. If your boots get wet from your feet sweating, get out of them immediately or you’re going to get frostbite. It takes less time than you think, so just get back to the camp and change.” He moved on to give the same advice to Igor Bulgarin’s team.
Most of the loose equipment had been stored in the four Sno-Cats or their towed trailers. The machines were big boxy vehicles resembling tracked moving vans, painted red with a decal for Geo-Research affixed to their front doors. Their tracks were heavily notched, like a bulldozer’s, and extended beyond the cabins to give them a wide footprint that distributed their weight better over soft snow. Two of the trailers were basically boxes standing ten feet tall and about twenty-five feet long. They were painted a matching shade of red and mounted on spring-cushioned skis. The other two trailers were open and held sections of prefabricated walls for the base-camp buildings. There were also a few preloaded pallets of gear: fuel drums, floors and roofs for the buildings, the Society’s chemical heat, and crates of food that would be carried directly to Camp Decade by the rotor-stat.
“Why the hell don’t they lug all this stuff right to the site with the blimp?” Ira complained as he rooted through a trailer, looking for lengths of hose for their pump.
“Cost and insurance,” Marty said. “The rotor-stat is still experimental and its owners aren’t willing to use it to lift equipment from a ship at sea. Liability issues if something goes wrong, I imagine. That means we have to be tied up to a pier. And I guess it’s only rated to carry one Sno-Cat and trailer at a time. Fully loaded, these rigs weigh about thirty tons. Geo-Research wasn’t willing to pay for that many trips from Ammassalik to the base camp, so they decided to drive the ’Cats overland and have the rotor-stat make only a couple of runs with the fuel and the other heavy stuff. It’s a pain in the ass, but saved about fifty grand.
“And since we’re paying for the right to join their expedition,” he added, “the burden of driving the ’Cats to Camp Decade falls on us.”
“Geo-Research is sending a few of their people with us, aren’t they?” Mercer asked.
“Yeah, in case something goes wrong.”
“Hey, look at that.” Ira had a digital camera to his eye.
“What is it?”
“Land ho!” he shouted, handing the Nikon to Marty.
When it was his turn, Mercer could see a sheer rock peak smeared with snow and ice that rose from above the sea fog like a lonely sentinel. It was one of the thousands of islands that dotted Greenland’s jagged, glacier-carved coast. To the others it was an uninspiring sight, but Mercer couldn’t help but be intrigued. The rock was certainly granite, some of the toughest stone in the world, and yet it had been ground smooth over hundreds of millions of years. The tremendous pressure of Greenland’s ice sheet was a force that even the earth itself could not stop.
“That’s Kulusuk Island,” a crewman called from the bridge wing high over the deck.
“Kulusuk has an airstrip that was left over from the DEW line station on the north part of the island,” Ira Lasko said. “The old Distant Early Warning radar facility was dismantled years ago and the airport was turned over to the locals. It’s only about an hour and a half flight from Reykjavik. I think we’re pretty close to Ammassalik.”
An hour later, the Njoerd was surrounded by towering ramparts of stone as she entered Tasiilaq Bay. Here the mountains were as sharp as glass, black silhouettes that cut into the clear sky. She wasn’t the first ship of the season into the bay because a wide channel had been carved through the pack ice leading toward the town of Ammassalik. As they threaded their way deeper into the bay, they passed more bergs, twisted sculptures of ice that were as beautiful as fairy castles. The newer bergs were blindingly white, while those that had floated in the bay for a few seasons were shaded the pale blue of a natural gas flame.
The town of Ammassalik appeared off the port side. The first thing they saw was a wall of garbage sloping from the town’s dump into the sea. Behind it was a tremendous trash fire.
“Not an encouraging sight,” Erwin Puhl said. Most everyone was at the ship’s rail watching the approach.
“The natives were used to throwing garbage outside their huts,” Igor said. “Mostly bones that dogs ate. After the Danes moved them here and introduce Western packaging, they still do same thing, not knowing metal cans and plastic wrappers don’t disappear after one winter. Town used to look like junkyard. Is better this way.”
Past a clutch of huge fuel tanks, a small inlet cut into the land, and on the other side lay Ammassalik’s concrete pier backed by a large warehouse. The inlet was full of ice chunks and tired fishing boats. At its head, a stream of melt water tumbled under a bridge and poured into the bay. The town itself flanked the inlet, rising above the waters on steep hills that were dappled with snow. The houses were wood framed and colorful, as if to make up for the monochrome blandness of the surroundings. Next to most of the homes stood rickety drying racks covered with fish and chunks of seal. It was a forlorn and isolated place that sixteen hundred Inuit and a handful of Danish administrators called home.