Ice Station Zebra Read online

  We drifted slowly onwards. At Swanson’s orders the propellers kicked over once or twice then stopped again.

  ‘Fifty yards,’ Raeburn said. ‘Near enough.’

  ‘Ice reading?’

  ‘No change. Five feet, about.’

  ‘Speed?’

  ‘One knot.’

  ‘Position?’

  ‘One thousand yards exactly. Passing directly under target area.’

  ‘And nothing on the ice-machine. Nothing at all?’

  ‘Not a thing.’ Benson shrugged and looked at Swanson. The captain walked across and watched the inked stylus draw its swiftly etched vertical lines on the paper.

  ‘Peculiar, to say the least of it,’ Swanson murmured. ‘Seven hundred pounds of very high-grade amatol in that lot. Must be uncommonly tough ice in those parts. Again to say the least of it. We’ll go up to ninety feet and make a few passes under the area. Floodlights on, TV on.’

  So we went up to ninety feet and made a few passes and nothing came of it. The water was completely opaque, the floods and camera useless. The ice-machine stubbornly registered four to six feet — it was impossible to be more accurate — all the time.

  ‘Well, that seems to be it,’ Hansen said. ‘We back off and have another go?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Swanson said pensively. ‘What say we just try to shoulder our way up?’

  ‘Shoulder our way up?’ Hansen wasn’t with him: neither was I. ‘What kind of shoulder is going to heave five feet of ice to one side?’

  ‘I’m not sure. The thing is, we’ve been working from unproved assumptions and that’s always a dangerous basis. We’ve been assuming that if the torpedo didn’t blow the ice to smithereens it would at least blow a hole in it. Maybe it doesn’t happen that way at all. Maybe there’s just a big upward pressure of water distributed over a fair area that heaves the ice up and breaks it into pretty big chunks that just settle back into the water again in their original position in the pattern of a dried-up mud hole with tiny cracks all round the isolated sections. But with cracks all round. Narrow cracks, but there. Cracks so narrow that the ice-machine couldn’t begin to register them even at the slow speed we were doing.’ He turned to Raeburn. ‘What’s our position?’

  ‘Still in the centre of the target area, sir.’

  ‘Take her up till we touch the ice,’ Swanson said.

  He didn’t have to add any cautions about gentleness. The diving officer took her up like floating thistledown until we felt a gentle bump.

  ‘Hold her there,’ Swanson said. He peered at the TV screen but the water was so opaque that all definition vanished half-way up the sail. He nodded to the diving officer. ‘Kick her up — hard.’

  Compressed air roared into the ballast tanks. Seconds passed without anything happening then all at once the Dolphin shuddered as something very heavy and very solid seemed to strike the hull. A moment’s pause, another solid shock then we could see the edge of a giant segment of ice sliding down the face of the TV screen.

  ‘Well, now, I believe I might have had a point there,’ Swanson remarked. ‘We seem to have hit a crack between two chunks of ice almost exactly in the middle. Depth?’

  ‘Forty-five.’

  ‘Fifteen feet showing. And I don’t think we can expect to lift the hundreds of tons of ice lying over the rest of the hull. Plenty of positive buoyancy?’

  ‘All we’ll ever want.’

  ‘Then we’ll call it a day at that. Right, Quartermaster, away you go up top and tell us what the weather is like.’

  I didn’t wait to hear what the weather was like. I was interested enough in it, but I was even more interested in ensuring that Hansen didn’t come along to his cabin in time to find me putting on the Mannlicher-Schoenauer along with my furs. But this time I stuck it not in its special holster but in the outside pocket of my caribou trousers. I thought it might come in handier there.

  It was exactly noon when I clambered over the edge of the bridge and used a dangling rope to slide down a great rafted chunk of ice that slanted up almost to the top of the sail. The sky had about as much light in it as a late twilight in winter when the sky is heavy with grey cloud. The air was as bitter as ever, but the weather had improved for all that. The wind was down now, backed round to the north-east, seldom gusting at more than twenty m.p.h., the ice-spicules rising no more than two or three feet above the ice-cap. Nothing to tear your eyes out. To be able to see where you were going on that damned ice-cap made a very pleasant change.

  There were eleven of us altogether — Commander Swanson himself, Dr Benson, eight enlisted men and myself. Four of the men were carrying stretchers with them.

  Even seven hundred pounds of the highest grade conventional explosive on the market hadn’t managed to do very much damage to the ice in that lead. Over an area of seventy yards square or thereabouts the ice had fractured into large fragments curiously uniform in size and roughly hexagonal in shape but fallen back so neatly into position that you couldn’t have put a hand down most of the cracks between the adjacent fragments of ice: many of the cracks, indeed, were already beginning to bind together. A poor enough performance for a torpedo war-head — until you remembered that though most of its disruptive power must have been directed downwards it had still managed to lift and fracture a chunk of ice-cap weighing maybe 5,000 tons. Looked at in that way, it didn’t seem such a puny effort after all. Maybe we’d been pretty lucky to achieve what we had.

  We walked across to the eastern edge of the lead, scrambled up on to the ice-pack proper and turned round to get our bearings, to line up on the unwavering white finger of the searchlight that reached straight up into the gloom of the sky. No chance of getting lost this time. While the wind stayed quiet and the spicules stayed down you could see that lamp in the window ten miles away.

  We didn’t even need to take any bearings. A few steps away and up from the edge of the lead and we could see it at once. Drift Station Zebra. Three huts, one of them badly charred, five blackened skeletons of what had once been huts. Desolation.

  ‘So that’s it,’ Swanson said in my ear. ‘Or what’s left of it. ‘I’ve come a long way to see this.’

  ‘You nearly went a damned sight longer and never saw it,’ I said. ‘To the floor of the Arctic, I mean. Pretty, isn’t it?’

  Swanson shook his head slowly, moved on. There were only a hundred yards to go. I led the way to the nearest intact hut, opened the door and passed inside.

  The hut was about thirty degrees warmer than the last time I had been there, but still bitterly cold. Only Zabrinski and Rawlings were awake. The hut smelt of burnt fuel, disinfectant, iodine, morphine and a peculiar aroma arising from a particularly repulsive looking hash that Rawlings was industriously churning around in a dixie over the low stove.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ Rawlings said conversationally. He might have been hailing a neighbour who’d phoned a minute previously to see if he could come across to borrow the lawnmower rather than greeting men he’d been fairly certain he’d never see again. ‘The time is perfect — just about to ring the dinner bell, Captain. Care for some Maryland chicken — I think.’

  ‘Not just at the moment, thank you,’ Swanson said politely. ‘Sorry about the ankle, Zabrinski. How is it?’

  ‘Just fine, Captain, just fine. In a plaster cast.’ He thrust out a foot, stiffly. ‘The Doc here — Dr Jolly — fixed me up real nice. Had much trouble last night?’ This was for me.

  ‘Dr Carpenter had a great deal of trouble last night,’ Swanson said. ‘And we’ve had a considerable amount since. But later. Bring that stretcher in here. You first, Zabrinski. As for you, Rawlings, you can stop making like Escoffier. The Dolphin’s less than a couple of hundred yards from here. We’ll have you all aboard in half an hour.’

  I heard a shuffling noise behind me. Dr Jolly was on his feet, helping Captain Folsom to his. Folsom looked even weaker than he had done yesterday: his face, bandaged though it was, certainly looked worse.

/>   ‘Captain Folsom,’ I introduced him. ‘Dr Jolly. This is Commander Swanson, captain of the Dolphin. Dr Benson.’

  ‘Doctor Benson, you said, old boy?’ Jolly lifted an eyebrow. ‘My word, the pill-rolling competition’s getting a little fierce in these parts. And Commander. By jove, but we’re glad to see you fellows.’ The combination of the rich Irish brogue and the English slang of the twenties fell more oddly than ever on my ear, he reminded me of educated Singhalese I’d met with their precise, lilting, standard southern English interlarded with the catch-phrases of forty years ago. Topping, old bean, simply too ripping for words.

  ‘I can understand that,’ Swanson smiled. He looked around the huddled unmoving men on the floor, men who might have been living or dead but for the immediate and smoky condensation from their shallow breathing, and his smile faded. He said to Captain Folsom: ‘I cannot tell you how sorry I am. This has been a dreadful thing.’

  Folsom stirred and said something but we couldn’t make out what it was. Although his shockingly burnt face had been bandaged since I’d seen him last it didn’t seem to have done him any good: he was talking inside his mouth all right but the ravaged cheek and mouth had become so paralysed that his speech didn’t emerge as any recognisable language. The good side of his face, the left, was twisted and furrowed and the eye above almost completely shut. This had nothing to do with any sympathetic neuromuscular reaction caused by the wickedly charred right cheek. The man was in agony. I said to Jolly: ‘No morphine left?’ I’d left him, I’d thought, with more than enough of it.

  ‘Nothing left,’ he said tiredly. ‘I used the lot. The lot.’

  ‘Dr Jolly worked all through the night,’ Zabrinski said quietly. ‘Eight hours. Rawlings and himself and Kinnaird. They never stopped once.’

  Benson had his medical kit open. Jolly saw it and smiled, a smile of relief, a smile of exhaustion. He was in far worse case than he’d been the previous evening. He hadn’t had all that much in him when he’d started. But he’d worked. He’d worked a solid eight hours. He’d even fixed up Zabrinski’s ankle. A good doctor. Conscientious, Hippocratic, anyway. He was entitled to relax. Now that there were other doctors here, he’d relax. But not before.

  He began to ease Folsom into a sitting position and I helped him. He slid down himself, his back to the wall. ‘Sorry, and all that, you know,’ he said. His bearded frostbitten face twisted into the semblance of a grin. ‘A poor host.’

  ‘You can leave everything to us now, Dr Jolly,’ Swanson said quietly. ‘You’ve got all the help that’s going. One thing. All those men fit to be moved?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jolly rubbed an arm across bloodshot, smudged eyes. ‘I don’t know. One or two of them slipped pretty far back last night. It’s the cold. Those two. Pneumonia, I think. Something an injured man could fight off in a few days back home can be fatal here. It’s the cold,’ he repeated. ‘Uses up ninety per cent of his energy not in fighting illness and infection but just generating enough heat to stay alive.’

  ‘Take it easy,’ Swanson said. ‘Maybe we’d better change our minds about that half-hour to get you all aboard. Who’s first for the ambulance, Dr Benson?’ Not Dr Carpenter. Dr Benson. Well, Benson was his own ship’s doctor. But pointed, all the same. A regrettable coolness, as sudden in its onset as it was marked in degree, had appeared in his attitude towards me, and I didn’t have to be beaten over the head with a heavy club to guess at the reason for the abrupt change.

  ‘Zabrinski, Dr Jolly, Captain Folsom and this man here,’ Benson said promptly.

  ‘Kinnaird, radio operator,’ Kinnaird identified himself. ‘We never thought you’d make it, mate.’ This to me. He dragged himself somehow to his feet and stood there swaying. ‘I can walk.’

  ‘Don’t argue,’ Swanson said curtly. ‘Rawlings, stop stirring that filthy mush and get to your feet. Go with them. How long would it take you to run a cable from the boat, fix up a couple of big electric heaters in here, some lights?’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘All the help you want, man.’

  ‘Fifteen minutes. I could rig a phone, sir.’

  ‘That would be useful. When the stretcher bearers come back bring blankets, sheets, hot water. Wrap the water containers in the blankets. Anything else, Dr Benson?’

  ‘Not now, sir.’

  ‘That’s it then. Away you go.’

  Rawlings lifted the spoon from the pot, tasted it, smacked his lips in appreciation and shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a crying shame,’ he said mournfully. ‘It really is.’ He went out in the wake of the stretcher bearers.

  Of the eight men left lying on the floor, four were conscious. Hewson the tractor-driver, Naseby the cook, and two others who introduced themselves as Harrington. Twins. They’d even been burnt and frostbitten in the same places. The other four were either sleeping or in coma. Benson and I started looking them over, Benson much more carefully than myself, very busy with thermometer and stethoscope. Looking for signs of pneumonia. I didn’t think he’d have to look very far. Commander Swanson looked speculatively around the cabin, occasionally throwing a very odd look in my direction, occasionally flailing his arms across his chest to keep the circulation going. He had to. He didn’t have the fancy furs I had and in spite of the solid-fuel stove the place was like an ice-box.

  The first man I looked at was lying on his side in the far right-hand corner of the room. He had half-open eyes, just showing the lower arcs of his pupils, sunken temples, marble-white forehead and the only part of his face that wasn’t bandaged was as cold as the marble in a winter graveyard. I said: ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Grant. John Grant.’ Hewson, the dark quiet tractor-driver answered me. ‘Radio operator. Kinnaird’s side-kick. How’s it with him?’

  ‘He’s dead. He’s been dead quite some time.’

  ‘Dead?’ Swanson said sharply. ‘You sure?’ I gave him my aloof professional look and said nothing. He went on to Benson: ‘Anybody too ill to be moved?’

  ‘Those two here, I think,’ Benson said. He wasn’t noticing the series of peculiar looks Swanson was letting me have, so he handed me his stethoscope. After a minute I straightened and nodded.

  ‘Third-degree burns,’ Benson said to Swanson. ‘What we can see of them, that is. Both high temperatures, both very fast, very weak and erratic pulses, both with lung fluids.’

  ‘They’d have a better chance inside the Dolphin,’ Swanson said.

  ‘You’ll kill them getting there,’ I said. ‘Even if you could wrap them up warmly enough to take them back to the ship, hauling them up to the top of the sail and then lowering them vertically through those hatchways would finish them off.’

  ‘We can’t stay out in that lead indefinitely,’ Swanson said. ‘I’ll take the responsibility for moving them.’

  ‘Sorry, Captain.’ Benson shook his head gravely. ‘I agree with Dr Carpenter.’

  Swanson shrugged and said nothing. Moments later the stretcher bearers were back, followed soon after by Rawlings and three other enlisted men carrying cables, heaters, lamps and a telephone. It took only a few minutes to button the heaters and lamps on to the cable. Rawlings cranked the call-up generator of his field-phone and spoke briefly into the mouthpiece. Bright lights came on and the heaters started to crackle and after a few seconds glow.

  Hewson, Naseby and the Harrington twins left by stretcher. When they’d gone I unhooked the Coleman lamp. ‘You won’t be needing this now,’ I said. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Swanson’s voice was quiet.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ I repeated. ‘Just looking around.’

  He hesitated, then stood to one side. I went out, moved round a corner of the hut and stopped. I heard the whirr of the call-up bell, a voice on the telephone. It was only a murmur to me, I couldn’t make out what was being said. But I’d expected this.

  The Coleman storm lantern flickered and faded in the wind, but didn’t go out. Stray ice-spicules struck against the
glass, but it didn’t crack or break, it must have been one of those specially toughened glasses immune to a couple of hundred degrees’ temperature range between the inside and the outside.

  I made my way diagonally across to the only hut left on the south side. No trace of burning, charring or even smoke-blackening on the outside walls. The fuel store must have been the one next to it, on the same side and to the west, straight downwind: that almost certainly must have been its position to account for the destruction of all the other huts, and the grotesquely buckled shape of its remaining girders made this strong probability a certainty. Here had been the heart of the fire.

  Hard against the side of the undamaged hut was a lean-to shed, solidly built. Six feet high, six wide, eight long. The door opened easily. Wooden floor, gleaming aluminium for the sides and ceiling, big black heaters bolted to the inside and outside walls. Wires led from those and it was no job for an Einstein to guess that they led — or had led — to the now destroyed generator house. This lean-to shed would have been warm night and day. The squat low-slung tractor that took up nearly all the floor space inside would have started any time at the touch of a switch. It wouldn’t start at the turn of a switch now, it would take three or four blowtorches and the same number of strong men even to turn the engine over once. I closed the door and went into the main hut.

  It was packed with metal tables, benches, machinery and every modern device for the automatic recording and interpretation of every conceivable observed detail of the Arctic weather. I didn’t know what the functions of most of the instruments were and I didn’t care. This was the meteorological office and that was enough for me. I examined the hut carefully but quickly and there didn’t seem to be anything odd or out of place that I could see. In one corner, perched on an empty wooden packing-case, was a portable radio transmitter with listening phones — transceivers, they called them nowadays. Near it, in a box of heavy oiled wood, were fifteen Nife cells connected up in series. Hanging from a hook on the wall was a two-volt test lamp. I touched its bare leads to the outside terminals of the battery formed by the cells. Had those cells left in them even a fraction of their original power that test lamp should have burnt out in a white flash. It didn’t even begin to glow. I tore a piece of flex from a nearby lamp and touched its ends to the terminals. Not even the minutest spark. Kinnaird hadn’t been lying when he had said that his battery had been completely dead. But, then, I hadn’t for a moment thought he’d been lying.