Chapter 40
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Ford’s Terror—Endicott Arm, AK
Marco couldn’t stop himself from yawning. “Hey, Bill, those books will still be here tomorrow. We’ll have some time before we pull up anchor to make our date with the exit.”
Bill had the two books and a legal pad spread out on the table. “I’ve found something interesting here, Marc.”
Marco leaned over to see what Bill was doing.
“See how these incoming messages are all written out in longhand cursive?” Bill asked.
“Nobody takes down Morse code that way on CW. Code guys always take a kind of shorthand, so they can keep up with these transmissions banging out twenty words or more per minute. There is no time to write things out in beautiful cursive like this.”
“Why is that significant?” Marco asked.
“It means our guy wasn’t writing in this journal as he translated the code,” Bill explained. “He was writing it somewhere else, then recopying the messages into the journal in longhand cursive.”
“Maybe he was just trying to be neat?” The only other reason Marco could think of for doing that was if you were going to alter the messages before writing them in the official log.
“Could have been, yeah, but why would he care what it looks like?” Bill said.
“Also, the writing in this other book is clearly in his CW shorthand, but in some kind of code. Notice how he writes the little E like a backward 3 so it doesn’t look like a small L?
Or the zero with a slash through it so it’s not like an O?
Guys did that to avoid errors, so the letters didn’t look like each other. ”
Marco was having trouble focusing. A headache was coming on and he couldn’t concentrate on much besides getting in bed.
“I’m convinced this stuff in the coded book is some kind of a simple cipher, but I’m not getting any of the usual clues.” Bill continued. “Normally you can pretty quickly figure out which letters are E, A, and I—and work from there. A and I are one-letter words, and E is at the end of a lot of—”
Marco failed to suppress a yawn. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out. I’m gonna sleep on it.”
Bill seemed undeterred. “Yeah, okay. See—there are way too many one-letter words, and all the sections seem to start with a single E or T, which makes no sense. Maybe some kind of rolling cipher?”
Marco locked the back door. He wasn’t sure why he locked the door in a remote anchorage with nobody around. One of those habits he had brought with him from the city.
“That makes the gold hidden in Joe’s radio all the more curious,” Marco said.
Bill doodled on his legal pad. “Think maybe they paid him in gold or something? Maybe he hid it there in case someone broke in while he was gone?”
Marco knew the Gold Reserve Act had made it illegal for U.S. citizens to own gold from the early thirties until the mid-seventies. Perhaps Baxter was up to something shady?
“Yeah, dunno.” Marco tried to fight back another yawn and failed again. He turned off all the salon lights except the one over Bill’s table.
Bill wasn’t taking the hint and didn’t budge from his seat. “Hah! Yeah. I really appreciate you asking me along on this trip, Marco. This is an adventure of a lifetime—antique radios, code breaking, hidden gold, glaciers, bears, rapids—what else have you got in store for me?”
“Ideally, sleep.” Marco went up to the pilothouse to make sure everything was in order for the night. Anchor holding well. Winds calm.
He turned off the chartplotter screens and checked that the anchor light was on.
He fast-forwarded through the last hours of recording from the SSB radio. Nothing but static. It was useless anyway. They were over a hundred miles from where the woman had gone missing.
Outside was pitch black. Overcast skies with no stars or moonlight.
No hint of other humans anywhere near. “Tomorrow morning early we start back toward Juneau. I figure we’ll overnight in Tracy Arm Cove or Taku Harbor again on the way back—or maybe both, depending on weather.
All that assumes we can get out tomorrow.
One time I tried to leave here and the entrance was completely blocked with ice. ”
Bill shouted from below. “Well, good to know we’re keeping with our theme of Imminent Peril.”
Marco walked back down to the salon. “It’s not that bad, Bill. You’re probably in more danger in the bunco parlor back home, it’s just harder to see it coming.”
Bill raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
Marco chuckled at himself. “Just kidding. But we won’t make it back to Juneau alive if I don’t get some sleep.”
Bill looked back down at the books. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
Marco went to the galley and dried the last few dinner dishes, stacking them back into the cupboards.
“Good luck there, Mr. Turing. I’m sure the safety of the modern world hinges on you cracking Joe Baxter’s code.
” He turned off the galley lights. “That radio station log is pretty cool, though. It hadn’t really dawned on me that all this was during the height of the Great Depression.
Some of those messages between the miners and families are heartbreaking. ”