Frozen in Time Read online

  Later that night, I find Lou resting his sore knees and still holding the gold flagpole ball.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” I say.

  “Don’t worry,” Lou says. “I’m not giving up.”

  With help from the safety team, he screws the ball into place.

  AT A PLANNING session that night, Lou and Jim agree that there are no more reasons to search Essex One, Essex Two, Essex Three, or Points A, B, and K. Once the six highest-priority sites, now they’re the glacial equivalent of dry wells. Tomorrow, Terri will carry the magnetometer to the lower-priority Point O, located on a slope roughly between Essex Two and Essex Three. Jaana’s radar readings there were confounded by underground crevasses, so the magnetometer visit feels more like crossing an item off a to-do list than investigating a real prospect.

  Despite the loss of time from the GPS mishaps, the 2012 Duck Hunt expedition will soon have cleared seven sites, one more than required by the Coast Guard’s contract with North South Polar. It’s getting colder on the glacier, and reports from Kulusuk Airport say a storm is coming our way. We have at most two or three days before we’ll have to leave. With nothing better to do, Jim suggests that the radar team head to the farthest point yet, CRREL Point N, a mile beyond Essex Three.

  Standing over a map in the command tent, Lou has an idea. He sees that the newly discovered Point N anomaly is near two other sets of coordinates, one given to him by JPAC, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, and the other from the final crash report written about the PN9E in 1943. If Jaana is headed to Point N, Lou says, she should also survey the JPAC location and the 1943 point. He calls the historical point BW-1, because the crash report was written at the Army’s Bluie West One base.

  Lou admits that it’s another long shot, probably the longest yet. Neither the JPAC point nor BW-1 registered as a hit on any previous aerial radar survey, which is why they weren’t named among the priority sites. Also, long-standing doubts about the historic sightings of the Duck undermine confidence in the BW-1 coordinates. Still, there’s nothing to lose but time.

  MY DREAMS OF finding the Duck pretty well dashed, I head to the sleeping tents. On my way, John grabs my arm and invites me on a safety team adventure: a nighttime glacier hike. Joining us are Frank, Michelle, and Jaana, who despite all her radar work is up for more hiking.

  Equipped with ice axes and roped together, we set off by moonlight toward Essex One, to find a crevasse that John noticed earlier and now wants to explore. We talk and laugh on the way, a momentary relief from what we all suspect is the expedition’s looming failure. When we reach the crevasse, we lower each other one at a time into its crooked mouth. The opening leads to a cave filled with countless enormous icicles in translucent shades of blue, a secret underground spectacle that Michelle names “the chandelier room.”

  On our way back, undulating green curtains of northern lights stretch across the sky. Frank tells us to look away and then quickly look back. Each time, the shapes change, like wisps of luminescent smoke against a blue-black night. The sight gives me new appreciation for the misery of PN9E navigator Bill O’Hara. Anyone who wants to shoot the aurora borealis from the sky must know suffering beyond measure.

  WITH SEARCH LOCATIONS dwindling, Jaana feels pressure to find something. Every day, upon returning to camp from a radar run, she hears a half-dozen versions of the same question: “Did you find anything?” Each time, she experiences the sadness that comes from her reply.

  Before Jaana leaves with John and Frank to search the final three locations, Point N, JPAC, and BW-1, Steve aggravates her by asking if she’d be willing to run the radar not only around the three points of interest, but everywhere in between and on her way to and from the sites. Restraining her desire to tell him off, Jaana refuses, but the implied message plays on her nerves: we’re desperate, so come back with something. Trying to stay cool, she tells herself, “I can’t do more than cover as much as possible, and if I do not see anything, I do not.”

  Fortified by Michelle’s breakfast egg burritos, Jaana, Frank, and John leave camp in their usual order: John out front to keep the lines straight when the radar work begins; Jaana in the middle with the gear; and Frank in the rear, watching the dragon tail—and Jaana—to keep both out of crevasses. They go first to BW-1 because it’s the closest of the three sites to camp, just under 1.4 miles away. Using John’s GPS, they find the coordinates and place a flag at the spot.

  Expecting a repeat of the previous days’ fruitless work, the trio begins walking one radar line after another to the southwest of the flag. Each line extends up to five hundred feet, to be certain the area is thoroughly covered. No luck. Next they move to the northeast side of the flag to run more radar lines. Partway through the second line, Jaana calls out, “Hey, John, can you stop?”

  During four days of radar work together, the radar team has scanned nearly fifteen miles of glacier, not including the miles they’ve walked together back and forth from base camp and between the points of interest. Not once in that time has Jaana stopped in the middle of a line. But staring back at her from the little screen at her waist is something unusual. The glacier at BW-1 is almost free of crevasses, a near-solid block of ice some one hundred feet deep atop bedrock. A perfect ice cube of monstrous proportions. But now, Jaana sees a flaw in the cube.

  Between thirty and forty feet below where they stand, the radar shows what Jaana calls “a large, clear anomaly.” She settles herself and continues to work.

  They start walking again, but when they reach the end of the radar line, Jaana surprises John and Frank again. Usually, they separate their lines by forty-five to fifty feet. This time, she asks John to lead her along a line close to the previous one. Neither John nor Frank asks why, but they know something’s up. On the second pass, the anomaly announces itself again on the screen, a boomerang-shaped message from beneath the ice. Jaana asks her partners to place a second flag between the two lines, directly over the spot where she thinks the anomaly is located.

  At 10:25 on Monday morning, August 27, the expedition’s fifth day at Koge Bay, walkie-talkies set to the same frequency come alive: “Radar team to base camp,” Frank says.

  “Come in, radar team,” Lou answers.

  “We have a ten-meter anomaly at BW-1 position.”

  “Do you like it?”

  A long pause ensues.

  “She likes it. Over.”

  Everyone within earshot catches the significance of Frank’s last comment. It’s the first time that Jaana has been impressed enough by the sight and size of a hyperbola on her radar screen to alert base camp from the field.

  Lou calls them back after warning me, “If I cry, don’t take my picture.”

  He asks for Jaana, then says, “Is there anything different about this anomaly.”

  Jaana: “Yes.”

  Lou: “Can you please tell us what?”

  Jaana knows what Lou wants to hear: it’s the Duck. But she’s a scientist, and she won’t jump to conclusions. She says calmly, “This is in clear ice, with fewer crevasses.” Jaana explains that the anomaly is large, and it’s more than thirty feet deep in what otherwise appears to be solid ice. Also, it creates a radar response that goes all the way down to the bedrock, which makes it unlikely to be a crevasse. Yet until WeeGee melts some holes and drops the camera, there’s no telling for certain what it might be.

  Jaana’s restraint notwithstanding, word of the BW-1 anomaly races through base camp. Terri and the magnetometer team are told to move from Point O to BW-1 as soon as possible. Jim calls Air Greenland to request a Hotsy airlift from Point A to BW-1, a 1.3-mile distance over crevassed terrain, made worse by a large area where there’s a steep four-hundred-foot rise. The idea of the Hotsy team pushing it over the ice seems ludicrous and potentially dangerous. Lou goes as far as to say it would be impossible. Jim asks Air Greenland for fast service, but the first available helicopter won’t arrive before late afternoon tomorrow. We’ll take it, Jim says.

  Lou
swallows painkillers for his knees and scrambles to BW-1 to watch the magnetometer sweep. When Terri crosses the spot over the anomaly, her screen registers a reading “ten times higher than the ambient magnetic field.” In other words, something metal appears to be buried in the ice. For the first time in days of walking atop the glacier, Terri has a hit. The magnetometer shows the same reading on several passes, but not all, leaving some doubt whether the machine is working properly. Still, Lou considers it confirmation of the radar finding.

  A SECTION OF THE RADAR COMPUTER SCREEN SHOWING THE TEN-METER ANOMALY AT BW-1. THE SMALL HYPERBOLAS NEAR THE SURFACE ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY A CREVASSE, WHILE THE LARGER ONES DEEP IN THE ICE RAISE HOPES AMONG THE DUCK HUNT TEAM. (MITCHELL ZUCKOFF PHOTOGRAPH.)

  “I said, ‘John, Ben, Loren, give us a sign,’ ” he says. “And Terri started and stopped, started and stopped, and oh my God, it’s there.”

  While Terri is at BW-1, the radar team moves to Point N and the JPAC point. They find nothing at either site. Like BW-1, Point N is almost solid ice, but with no anomalies worth noting. The JPAC site is so heavily crevassed that Jaana’s screen fills with hyperbolas, making it almost impossible to pick out an anomaly if one’s there.

  After Terri’s magnetometer hit at BW-1, Lou wants the radar team to return to repeat the survey. Jaana, John, and Frank run several lines in a new direction from the BW-1 flag, with the same positive results. Point N and JPAC are forgotten; all our bets are on BW-1.

  BACK AT BASE camp, geophysics experts Jaana, Terri, and Bil are upbeat but restrained, knowing that the hyperbolas might be a crevasse, and the magnetometer’s accuracy has been suspect. Still, Terri says that when she first heard about Frank’s walkie-talkie call with Jaana’s message from BW-1, she thought, If she called it out, it has to be something significant. Jaana wears a poker face, but privately admits feeling “full of energy, really happy and excited.”

  In the command tent, Jim is optimistic but cautious. For one thing, if BW-1 is the crash site, he has to abandon his hard-earned theory about Balchen’s X, which is about a mile largely downhill from BW-1. Glaciers don’t move uphill, so even with glacial movement, there’s no chance that the Duck migrated from Balchen’s X to BW-1. In other words, if BW-1 is the Duck’s resting place, Balchen’s X was in the right general vicinity, but misplaced.

  AS NIGHT FALLS, Lou and I agree that we might never have a better opportunity to break out Shackleton’s Scotch. If we wait and the BW-1 anomaly is a bust, we’d be drinking fine whiskey to wash away the bitter taste. If, on the other hand, the news is good, opening the historic blend will mark the start of our celebrations.

  I pull the bottle’s wooden case from my duffel bag as everyone gathers in the dome. Our plastic cups held high, Lou offers a toast: “To Lieutenant John Pritchard, Radioman First Class Benjamin Bottoms, and Corporal Loren Howarth. Your families want you home. We’re here to bring you home, and may we be successful.” His cheeks flushed, his silver hair flowing from under a North South Polar baseball hat, Lou thanks us one by one for our contributions to the mission.

  I’ve never seen him in finer form or the team in better spirits.

  The question now is whether, as on Shackleton’s failed mission to the South Pole, the best part of our expedition will be the Scotch.

  23

  “SOME PLAN IN THIS WORLD”

  MARCH–APRIL 1943

  CAUTIOUSLY AVOIDING CREVASSES during the first mile to the Motorsled Camp, Monteverde, Best, and Spina each walked under his own power, as did the three-man trail team. The nine dogs pulled a main sled, behind which was a tow sled loaded with everything the men and beasts would need until Barney Dunlop’s Dumbo returned to fetch them or Pappy Turner’s B-17 resupplied them.

  The team’s lead dog was Rinsky, a fierce husky born in Antarctica and brought to Greenland by Healey, its owner. Two other dogs on the team were called Pat and Mopey. Raised in barren lands with no trees or hydrants, male sled dogs had no targets upon which to relieve themselves, so they usually squatted rather than raising their legs. Sometimes, though, a man’s pant leg might get watered in a display of disdain or dominance. Greenland dogs tended to be aggressive, often fighting among themselves for scraps and power. Straddling the line between wild and tame, most had little use for affection or human company. Some were whip-smart and some were dumb as sleds. Some were handsome and some were not. All were tough and seemingly immune to pain and cold. Most seldom barked, but they’d howl like their ancestors at night and at meals. When tired, they’d curl into tight balls of fur, their faces against their flanks, to sleep through Arctic winds.

  As the men and dogs marched across the snow-covered ice, Spina was the first to falter. During more than four months since the crash, the farthest he’d walked was fifty feet in pursuit of the milk can. He tried to keep up but soon he fell to his knees every twenty or thirty feet. He’d rise and stumble forward with his eyes shut, then fall again into the snow. After one fall Spina made no effort to rise. He felt resigned to die in place. Strong had other ideas; he bundled Spina aboard the tow sled. Best fell next. Monteverde teetered, tempted to pitch forward into a snowbank and sleep forever. Strong called a halt.

  Dolleman raised a tent and climbed inside with Best and Monteverde. They’d remain behind to rest while the others raced ahead to the Motorsled Camp. Strong and Healey continued on foot while Spina reclined on the tow sled. As they hustled across the ice, Strong stepped over the edge of a crevasse. But he was no greenhorn in Greenland; he held tight to a rope attached to the dogsled, and the sled’s momentum pulled him up to safety.

  Along the route, they planted red warning flags to mark crevasses and yellow guide flags to mark the safe path. When they reached the empty Motorsled Camp, Strong and Spina climbed into a tent. Healey and the dogs swung around to retrieve Dolleman, Monteverde, and Best.

  Once reunited, the six men spent the next two nights in tents on the ice. During the day, Strong, Dolleman, and Healey enlarged and improved the warren of snow caves left behind by Don Tetley, Harry Spencer, and Bill O’Hara. When they climbed inside, Monteverde, Spina, and Best were astonished: their friends had created an underground ice palace.

  The entrance was a large hole with a fifteen-foot staircase cut from snow. That led to a hallway about six feet wide, twenty feet long, and ten feet high, with an oil stove at the far end to keep the lair warm and to dry their clothes. Along the hallway were openings that led into small sleeping rooms, like berths on a train. Each was about five feet off the ice floor, to keep water from accumulating in them. The hallway also led to a kitchen with shelves cut into the ice and a vent to the surface for cooking and heating fumes. A large room off the kitchen was the pantry. Past the stove at the end of the hallway was a second set of stairs, leading down another ten feet, to a latrine carved from ice and snow. The three remaining PN9E survivors were so impressed that they renamed the Motorsled Camp: now it was the Imperial Hotel.

  The six men enjoyed several days of good weather, during which Turner’s B-17 boosted their supply cache. But several days of storms followed. The wind was so strong and the snow so fierce that Healey brought the dogs down into the human quarters. One husky that refused paid for his disobedience with a case of frostbite, though he recovered. The dogs treated the underground maze like a kennel, fighting and running through the rooms. When the dogs settled down, they became warming blankets for the men, who tucked their sleeping bags against them at night.

  TWO WEEKS PASSED during which Strong, Healey, and Dolleman cared for the needs of their three Imperial Hotel guests. Healey cooked, and with a wide variety of available supplies he took dinner orders from each man. Healey didn’t like coffee, so he resisted making it, but he kept a pot of tea boiling on the stove around the clock. They stayed up late every night, talking by candlelight and telling jokes. Spina, the jokester of the PN9E, credited Dolleman for keeping them all in stitches. Between laughs, the three trail men told the three fliers stories from their Arctic adventures. />
  When it was light they climbed up from the cave, and Healey strapped Spina to the sled for daily exercise runs with the dogs. They made multiple passes over the designated landing area, to tamp down new snow.

  When Strong was still at Bluie East Two, Don Tetley gave him a detailed map of the Motorsled Camp that included the general location of the buried motorsled. When the weather cleared, Strong decided to get some exercise by digging for it. Dolleman and Healey joined in, and in time so did Monteverde and Best. Spina, his arm still recovering, appointed himself foreman. They dug for three solid days before finding the missing motorsled under twenty feet of snow.

  AT BLUIE EAST TWO, rain replaced snow and coated the runway with slush. A bigger worry for Balchen was that melting would make the snow at the Motorsled Camp/Imperial Hotel sticky, preventing the PBY from taking off after it collected the six men and dogs. Adding to Balchen’s concerns were high winds that wreaked havoc on the two PBYs on the tarmac. Both suffered broken ailerons, the hinged sections on the trailing edge of the wings that allow an aircraft to bank left or right. Time was passing, and repairs added to the delays.

  ON APRIL 5, 1943, nineteen days after the trail team arrived on the ice, Harold Strong radioed Bluie East Two with good news. The ground temperature was relatively warm and the wind had taken the day off. Balchen ordered him to break down the sled and get ready to load everything aboard the rescue plane.

  Worried about the Dumbo’s weight on takeoff from the ice, Balchen had crews strip the plane of everything not essential to flight or stability. He filled its fuel tanks with only enough for the round-trip, plus a little extra for safety in case of delays.