The slender reed that supported the couple's hope of escape looked to Greta's weary mind like a cradle in the snow, a refuge into which she wanted to curl and sleep until they were far, far away. It wouldn't be that easy, of course. The lifeboat's very presence was a grim reminder of how difficult it might prove to get away from the Antarctic island. The two surviving Norwegians from the Bergen had tried and failed.
When Hart first crawled out of the cave six years ago it was utter exhaustion that had allowed him to spot the craft. He'd collapsed on the lava ledge too tired to even lift his head and as his eyes adjusted to the stark polar light he found them idly tracing the fractal geometry of the shoreline far below. It was the leaf-shaped regularity of the abandoned boat's gunwale that caught his eye. He'd risked the time for inspection and found that the artifact was the Norwegian lifeboat, perfectly preserved by the Antarctic dry freeze. The memory had stuck in his mind ever since.
The overturned craft now remained impervious to time. Its wood was bleached gray but it seemed as sound as when it had first left the Bergen. The craft's fittings were only lightly rusted. A few cans of food, a blanket, and a seaman's wool watch cap were frozen onto its bottom floorboards in defiance of gravity. Even the lines were still there, stiff with cold but little decayed. The mast had been unstepped and hastily lashed to the thwarts and its fringe of tattered canvas told what must have happened. The Norwegians' sail had blown out in a storm and they'd been driven back to the island. Either a wave had tossed the boat high on shore or the whalers themselves had dragged the boat away from the reach of the sea. Then the men had disappeared. The pilot supposed they were somewhere nearby, entombed in snow.
"It's not the best of boats to change our luck in," he admitted to Greta.
"I think it's beautiful because it's ours," she replied. "The first part of our new life."
They used ice axes to chop the boat free from its frozen fusion and then rolled it onto its keel. Hart stepped the mast, fastened the boom, and tied on the sail he'd liberated from the motor launch, using as rigging both the lines in the boat and additional ones Greta had stuffed in their packs. The fit was inexact but would serve. Then they put their shoulders to the stern and pushed.
"Heave!" Hart shouted. "Heave with all your might!"
She leaned and let out a Valkyrie cry. The lifeboat broke free and tobogganed into the water, Owen snaring the stern line to keep it from drifting away.
She glanced back up the volcanic slope above the cove. No sign of Jurgen. "They haven't found us yet. We might just make it."
"If we hurry. We're a long ways from the open sea and we'll have to row quite a distance to weave out of this pack ice."
"Do you still have strength for rowing?"
"I'll row to New York to get away from here."
The floating pack ice was a problem for the German launch as well. After motoring out of the caldera entrance Drexler and his SS detachment of five surviving men had to swing wide around the flank of the island to avoid its encircling rind. Being outside the protective crater and on the open sea made Drexler nervous. He really didn't like Antarctica's expansive emptiness, he admitted to himself. The excitement he'd felt about the continent when the Schwabenland had first cast off from Germany had long since disappeared. What made it such a dreadful place, he thought, was that it was beyond human control. Not a house nor a light nor a refuge nor a path. To his mind, there was nothing liberating about such wilderness: he felt like he had to squeeze himself to prevent being pulled apart by Antarctica's vacuum, pieces of him sailing off in all directions like an explosion in space. Accordingly, he'd been looking forward to the cubbyhole embrace of the steel submarine on the long voyage home, his victory ensured in ranks of neatly labeled bottles of a revolutionary biology. Now he was driving through water so cold it was like dark syrup, a sea so chill that the snow which fell on it didn't melt but instead undulated on its top like gray skin. A monstrous place!
He was struggling to fight off gloom. The antibiotic was gone, the cave destroyed, and the U-boat contaminated. The other volcano was smoking more than ever and a full-scale eruption might make a return impossible. Which meant his dreams had been utterly imperiled by the woman he'd loved. Almost destroyed! Lord, how he hated her.
There was a rattle and he looked down to see bits of ice rasp along the side of the launch. He shivered. He still couldn't swim and he wondered how deep the ocean was here. It seemed bottomless.
"Seals." One of the storm troopers pointed.
There was a group of them on an ice floe, as indolent as ever. Drexler remembered that Greta had claimed some of them were fierce predators, huge and swift. The thought was absurd! The sluggish beasts barely moved except to yawn and defecate. They stank and whelped and did nothing more. Worst of all, they were indifferent to the Germans, caring nothing for what they were up against. It was a kind of arrogance that annoyed him. It was like the indifference of God.
"Give me your gun."
"My gun?"
"Give it to me!"
The lazy animals had no fear of man. That must change. He pulled back the lever on the submachine gun to arm it and fired a burst, the rattle surprisingly clamorous in the hushed whiteness. One of the seals recoiled, barking in surprise and pain, and suddenly the snow was bright with blood. In a flash the animals slithered off the ice and into the water.
"Damned slugs." Drexler threw the gun back at the soldier.
The storm troopers looked at one another uneasily. Bad luck.
"What was that?" Greta's head had come up.
Hart looked around uneasily. "Maybe just a glacier calving. Or a breakup of ice." He frowned. It had sounded like a burst of gunshots.
They'd been rowing slowly and carefully, picking their way through the ice toward the open sea. Now the pilot clambered forward to where the mast was stepped, pulling himself up its short length and clinging with his legs.
"Careful!" Greta warned. The boat rocked dangerously.
Hart squinted across the ice. He didn't see the German boat so much as spy movement: motion in a place that otherwise was calm and still. He slid down, heartsick.
"It's them. In the motor launch. Somehow they saw us, or realized what we're doing. They're trying to cut us off by sea. How did they figure it out?"
She looked pained, then determined. "Jurgen always figures it out. But I'm not going back with them."
"We're not to that point yet. I'm going to raise the sail. Maybe we can outrun them in this ice."
There was just breeze enough to fill the canvas. He hoisted the sail and it caught, the lifeboat heeling slightly. They'd lashed the rudder amidships and now he untied it and began to steer, meanwhile grasping the boom line. "Stay on the upward side of the boat to help balance."
She nodded. "I've sailed. I can help tack when you give the word."
They began coasting, dark water gurgling up from the stern. How many thousands of miles to go? Hart looked in the direction of the Germans.
"And Greta? You'd better unlash the submachine gun."
She nodded. "They may be surprised that we have it."
"Colonel! A sail!"
The SS men were pointing and Drexler lifted his binoculars. It was them, trying to ghost away as if they were making a pleasure sail on the Havel outside Berlin. He could imagine them laughing together, thinking they'd infected all the tiresome Germans and joking about the fool they'd made of the cuckold Jurgen Drexler. Except that Jurgen Drexler wasn't ill, not yet. And even if he already was- even if he felt perhaps the murmur of fever in his brain- it was still just a whisper. He had plenty of time to catch them and punish them and swallow the cure.
"Full power! Full speed!" The engine roared as the helmsman gunned it. "Watch for ice! But go, go, go!"
The added breeze from their acceleration was colder. While the helmsman steered, the other SS men checked their weapons and then crouched low behind the gunwales for shelter, a peeking pride of lions.
"Speed, dammit!" A small floe banged against the hull and Drexler was forcibly reminded of the Schwabenland's mishap. "But be careful!"
He spotted a wide patch of open water to port and pointed. "Go there!" They were faster than the sailboat and could afford to loop around the unpowered craft, blocking the fugitives from the ocean. With that pathetic mast sticking upward like a pointing flag the adulterous lovers couldn't hope to hide. He had them! Oh, he had them.
The Germans charged across the open water, spray arcing off their prow, a tendril of greasy engine smoke drifting behind. Each swell that lifted gave a better view of the fleeing sail, tacking first this way and then that. Predator and prey, strong and weak. The way of the world! Now the storm troopers were between the lifeboat and the open sea. Owen and Greta were caught against the island.
"Now, that way! Into that lead there! We'll pin them!"
The motor launch wake churned the flat water of the ice lead, its wake heaving the floes up and down. The sail was getting tantalizingly close, flapping aimlessly now as the couple hunted for fickle wind. He could imagine their panic. He could feel their dread. It was sweet revenge, imagining what they must feel like as the soldiers inexorably gained on them. Would she weep at the end? If she did, it would no longer move him. He was sure of it.
They churned through a tiny connecting channel and then they were in the same polynya of open water as the sailboat. Where had they gotten the craft? Drexler suddenly looked around as if the American might have allies ready to attempt a rescue. But no, the horizons were empty. Still, it was as if Hart was some kind of magician, able to conjure improbable escapes and sudden resources at the last moment. It baffled him: the pilot had been a plague since that first night at Karinhall. Well, the showdown had finally come. No more tricks.
The sail abruptly dropped and the pair unshipped their oars; they were going to try to reach the edge of the ice and escape on foot. Drexler calculated. The Nazis would catch them a few feet short of their goal. "Faster!"
Suddenly there was a burp of gunfire in Drexler's ear. Spouts of seawater flew up near the fleeing lifeboat. One of the SS men had opened fire.
Drexler cuffed him. "Not yet, you fool! Not until we've recovered the drug!" Morons. Was he the only person on this voyage capable of thought?
Then Hart bent, sat up, and there was a flicker of muzzle flash in return. "He's got a gun!" the helmsman cried as water and wood splinters filled the air and one of the SS men cried out. The motor launch veered abruptly away, lurching toward the ice on the opposite side of the watery channel. They hit with a glancing blow and Drexler and the other men landed in a tangle on the bottom.
"Get off me, dammit!" He struggled upward. The pair were rowing again, taking advantage of the Nazi confusion. The couple hit the other side of the ice and scrambled out, dragging their packs behind them.
"Damn! Make for them!" But Hart had already staked their boat to a line and the two were jogging away like a pair of taunting foxes.
"Fuck! Now we'll have to catch them on foot." There was a groan, and Drexler looked down in irritation. It was Walther, one of his SS men. He was hit in the stomach and spewing blood all over the damn boat. Well, he'd be envied if they didn't recover the drug. And if they did it would be too late to save him anyway. The groaning would stop soon enough.
"We're leaking!" one of the men cried, watching water stream into the motor launch from a bullet hole.
"No matter," Drexler said. "We'll have their boat."