Ice Station Zebra Read online

  ‘“For the past thirty hours long-range supersonic bombers of the American, British and Russian air forces have been scouring the polar ice-pack searching for Station Zebra. Because of the uncertainty about the Drift Station’s actual position, the complete absence of daylight in the Arctic at this time of year and the extremely bad weather conditions they were unable to locate the station and forced to return.”’

  ‘They didn’t have to locate it,’ Rawlings objected. ‘Not visually. With the instruments those bombers have nowadays they could home in on a humming-bird a hundred miles away. The radio operator at the Drift Station had only to keep on sending and they could have used that as a beacon.’

  ‘Maybe the radio operator is dead,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘Maybe his radio has packed up on him. Maybe the fuel that was destroyed was essential for running the radio. All depends what source of power he used.’

  ‘Diesel-electric generator,’ I said. ‘He had a standby battery of Nife cells. Maybe he’s conserving the batteries using them only for emergencies. There’s also a hand-cranked generator, but its range is pretty limited.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Hansen asked quietly. ‘About the type of power used?’

  ‘I must have read it somewhere.’

  ‘You must have read it somewhere.’ He looked at me without expression, then turned back to his paper. “‘A report from Moscow,”’ he read on, ‘“states that the atomic-engined Dvina, the world’s most powerful ice-breaker, sailed from Murmansk some twenty hours ago and is proceeding at high speed towards the Arctic pack. Experts are not hopeful about the outcome for at this late period of the year the ice-pack has already thickened and compacted into a solid mass which will almost certainly defy the efforts of any vessel, even those of the Dvina, to smash its way through.

  “The use of the submarine Dolphin appears to offer the only slender hope of life for the apparently doomed survivors of Station Zebra. The odds against success must be regarded as heavy in the extreme. Not only will the Dolphin have to travel several hundred miles continuously submerged under the polar ice-cap, but the possibilities of its being able to break through the ice-cap at any given place or to locate the survivors are very remote. But undoubtedly if any ship in the world can do it it is the Dolphin, the pride of the United States Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet.”’

  Hansen broke off and read on silently for a minute. Then he said: ‘That’s about all. A story giving all the known details of the Dolphin. That, and a lot of ridiculous rubbish about the enlisted men in the Dolphin’s crew being the élite of the cream of the U.S. Navy.’

  Rawlings looked wounded. Zabrinski, the polar bear with the red face, grinned, fished out a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. Then he became serious again and said: ‘What are those crazy guys doing up there at the top of the world anyway?’

  ‘Meteorological, lunkhead,’ Rawlings informed him. ‘Didn’t you hear the lieutenant say so? A big word, mind you,’ he conceded generously, ‘but he made a pretty fair stab at it. Weather station to you, Zabrinski.’

  ‘I still say they’re crazy guys,’ Zabrinski rumbled. ‘Why do they do it, Lieutenant?’

  ‘I suggest you ask Dr Carpenter about it,’ Hansen said dryly. He stared through the plate-glass windows at the snow whirling greyly through the gathering darkness, his eyes bleak and remote, as if he were already visualising the doomed men drifting to their death in the frozen immensity of the polar ice-cap. ‘I think he knows a great deal more about it than I do.’

  ‘I know a little,’ I admitted. ‘There’s nothing mysterious or sinister about what I know. Meteorologists now regard the Arctic and the Antarctic as the two great weather factories of the world, the areas primarily responsible for the weather that affects the rest of the hemisphere. We already know a fair amount about Antarctic conditions, but practically nothing about the Arctic. So we pick a suitable ice-floe, fill it with huts crammed with technicians and all sorts of instruments and let them drift around the top of the world for six months or so. Your own people have already set up two or three of those stations. The Russians have set up at least ten, to the best of my knowledge, most of them in the East Siberian Sea.’

  ‘How do they establish those camps, Doc?’ Rawlings asked.

  ‘Different ways. Your people prefer to establish them in wintertime, when the pack freezes up enough for plane landings to be made. Someone flies out from, usually, Point Barrow in Alaska and searches around the polar pack till they find a suitable ice-floe — even when the ice is compacted and frozen together into one solid mass an expert can tell which pieces are going to remain as good-sized floes when the thaw comes and the break-in begins. Then they fly out all huts, equipment, stores and men by ski-plane and gradually build the place up.

  ‘The Russians prefer to use a ship in summertime. They generally use the Lenin, a nuclear-engined ice-breaker. It just batters its way into the summer pack, dumps everything and everybody on the ice and takes off before the big freeze-up starts. We used the same technique for Drift Ice Station Zebra — our one and only ice station. The Russians lent us the Lenin — all countries are only too willing to cooperate on meteorological research as everyone benefits by it — and took us pretty deep into the ice-pack north of Franz Josef Land. Zebra has already moved a good bit from its original position — the polar ice-cap, just sitting on top of the Arctic Ocean, can’t quite manage to keep up with the west-east spin of the earth so that it has a slow westward movement in relation to the earth’s crust. At the present moment it’s about four hundred miles due north of Spitzbergen.’

  ‘They’re still crazy,’ Zabrinski said. He was silent for a moment then looked speculatively at me. ‘You in the Limey navy, Doc?’

  ‘You must forgive Zabrinski’s manners, Dr Carpenter,’ Rawlings said coldly. ‘But he’s denied the advantages that the rest of us take for granted. I understand he was born in the Bronx.’

  ‘No offence,’ Zabrinski said equably. ‘Royal Navy, I meant. Are you, Doc?’

  ‘Attached to it, you might say.’

  ‘Loosely, no doubt,’ Rawlings nodded. ‘Why so keen on an Arctic holiday, Doc? Mighty cool up there, I can tell you.’

  ‘Because the men on Drift Station Zebra are going to be badly in need of medical aid. If there are any survivors, that is.’

  ‘We got our own medico on board and he’s no slouch with a stethoscope, or so I’ve heard from several who have survived his treatment. A well-spoken-of quack.’

  ‘Doctor, you ill-mannered lout,’ Zabrinski said severely.

  ‘That’s what I meant,’ Rawlings apologised. ‘It’s not often that I get the chance to talk to an educated man like myself, and it just kinda slipped out. The point is, the Dolphin’s already all buttoned up on the medical side.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’ I smiled. ‘But any survivors we might find are going to be suffering from advanced exposure, frostbite and probably gangrene. The treatment of those is rather a speciality of mine.’

  ‘Is it now?’ Rawlings surveyed the depths of his coffee cup. ‘I wonder how a man gets to be a specialist in those things?’

  Hansen stirred and withdrew his gaze from the darkly-white world beyond the canteen windows.

  ‘Dr Carpenter is not on trial for his life,’ he said mildly. ‘The counsel for the prosecution will kindly pack it in.’

  They packed it in. This air of easy familiarity between officer and men, the easy camaraderie, the mutually tolerant disparagement with the deceptively misleading overtones of knock-about comedy, was something very rare in my experience but not unique. I’d seen it before, in first-line R.A.F. bomber crews, a relationship found only among a close-knit, close-living group of superbly trained experts each of whom is keenly aware of their complete interdependence. The casually informal and familiar attitude was a token not of the lack of discipline but of the complete reverse: it was the token of a very high degree of self-discipline, of the regard one man held for another not only as a highly-skill
ed technician in his own field but also as a human being. It was clear, too, that a list of unwritten rules governed their conduct. Offhand and frequently completely lacking in outward respect though Rawlings and Zabrinski were in their attitude towards Lieutenant Hansen, there was an invisible line of propriety over which it was inconceivable that they would ever step: for Hansen’s part, he scrupulously avoided any use of his authority when making disparaging remarks at the expense of the two enlisted men. It was also clear, as now, who was boss.

  Rawlings and Zabrinski stopped questioning me and had just embarked upon an enthusiastic discussion of the demerits of the Holy Loch in particular and Scotland in general as a submarine base when a jeep swept past the canteen windows, the snow whirling whitely, thickly, through the swathe of the headlights. Rawlings jumped to his feet in mid-sentence, then subsided slowly and thoughtfully into his chair.

  ‘The plot,’ he announced, ‘thickens.’

  ‘You saw who it was?’ Hansen asked.

  ‘I did indeed. Andy Bandy, no less.’

  ‘I didn’t hear that, Rawlings,’ Hansen said coldly.

  ‘Vice-Admiral John Garvie, United States Navy, sir.’

  ‘Andy Bandy, eh?’ Hansen said pensively. He grinned at me. ‘Admiral Garvie, Officer Commanding U.S. Naval Forces in Nato. Now this is very interesting, I submit. I wonder what he’s doing here.’

  ‘World War III has just broken out,’ Rawlings announced. ‘It’s just about time for the Admiral’s first martini of the day and no lesser crisis -’

  ‘He didn’t by any chance fly down with you in that chopper from Renfrew this afternoon?’ Hansen interrupted shrewdly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Know him, by any chance?’

  ‘Never even heard of him until now.’

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Hansen murmured.

  A few minutes passed in desultory talk — the minds of Hansen and his two men were obviously very much on the reason for the arrival of Admiral Garvie — and then a snow-filled gust of chilled air swept into the canteen as the door opened and a blue-coated sailor came in and crossed to our table.

  ‘The captain’s compliments, Lieutenant. Would you bring Dr Carpenter to his cabin, please?’

  Hansen nodded, rose to his feet and led the way outside. The snow was beginning to lie now, the darkness was coming down fast and the wind from the north was bitingly chill. Hansen made for the nearest gangway, halted at its head as he saw seamen and dockyard workers, insubstantial and spectral figures in the swirling flood-lit snow, carefully easing a slung torpedo down the for’ard hatch, turned and headed towards the after gangway. We clambered down and at the foot Hansen said: ‘Watch your step, Doc. It’s a mite slippery hereabouts.’

  It was all that, but with the thought of the ice-cold waters of the Holy Loch waiting for me if I put a foot wrong I made no mistake. We passed through the hooped canvas shelter covering the after hatch and dropped down a steep metal ladder into a warm, scrupulously clean and gleaming engine-room packed with a baffling complexity of grey-painted machinery and instrument panels, its every corner brightly illuminated with shadowless fluorescent lighting.

  ‘Not going to blindfold me, Lieutenant?’ I asked.

  ‘No need.’ He grinned. ‘If you’re on the up and up, it’s not necessary. If you’re not on the up and up it’s still not necessary, for you can’t talk about what you’ve seen — not to anyone that matters — if you’re going to spend the next few years staring out from behind a set of prison bars.’

  I saw his point. I followed him for’ard, our feet soundless on the black rubber decking past the tops of a couple of huge machines readily identifiable as turbo-generator sets for producing electricity. More heavy banks of instruments, a door, then a thirty-foot-long very narrow passageway. As we passed along its length I was conscious of a heavy vibrating hum from beneath my feet. The Dolphin’s nuclear reactor had to be somewhere. This would be it, here. Directly beneath us. There were circular hatches on the passageway deck and those could only be covers for the heavily-leaded glass windows, inspection ports which would provide the nearest and only approach to the nuclear furnace far below.

  The end of the passage, another heavily-clipped door, and then we were into what was obviously the control centre of the Dolphin. To the left was a partitioned-off radio room, to the right a battery of machines and dialled panels of incomprehensible purpose, straight ahead a big chart table. Beyond that again, in the centre were massive mast housings and, still farther on, the periscope stand with its twin periscopes. The whole control room was twice the size of any I’d ever seen in a conventional submarine but, even so, every square inch of bulkhead space seemed to be taken up by one type or another of highly-complicated looking machines or instrument banks: even the deckhead was almost invisible, lost to sight above thickly twisted festoons of wires, cables and pipes of a score of different kinds.

  The for’ard port side of the control room was for all the world like a replica of the flight-deck of a modern multi-engined jet airliner. There were two separate yoke aircraft-type control columns, facing on to banks of hooded calibrated dials. Behind the yokes were two padded leather chairs, each chair, I could see, fitted with safety-belts to hold the helmsman in place. I wondered vaguely what type of violent manoeuvres the Dolphin might be capable of when such safety-belts were obviously considered essential to strap the helmsman down.

  Opposite the control platform, on the other side of the passageway leading forward from the control room, was a second partitioned-off room. There was no indication what this might be and I wasn’t given time to wonder. Hansen hurried down the passage, stopped at the first door on his left, and knocked. The door opened and Commander Swanson appeared.

  ‘Ah, there you are. Sorry you’ve been kept waiting, Dr Carpenter. We’re sailing at six-thirty, John’ — this to Hansen. ‘You can have everything buttoned up by then?’

  ‘Depends how quickly the loading of the torpedoes goes, Captain.’

  ‘We’re taking only six aboard.’

  Hansen lifted an eyebrow, made no comment. He said: ‘Loading them into the tubes?’

  ‘In the racks. They have to be worked on.’

  ‘No spares?’

  ‘No spares.’

  Hansen nodded and left. Swanson led me into his cabin and closed the door behind him.

  Commander Swanson’s cabin was bigger than a telephone booth, I’ll say that for it, but not all that much bigger to shout about. A built-in bunk, a folding washbasin, a small writing-bureau and chair, a folding camp-stool, a locker, some calibrated repeater instrument dials above the bunk and that was it. If you’d tried to perform the twist in there you’d have fractured yourself in a dozen places without ever moving your feet from the centre of the floor.

  ‘Dr Carpenter,’ Swanson said, ‘I’d like you to meet Admiral Garvie, Commander U.S. Nato Naval Forces.’

  Admiral Garvie put down the glass he was holding in his hand, rose from the only chair and stretched out his hand. As he stood with his feet together, the far from negligible clearance between his knees made it easy to understand the latter part of his ‘Andy Bandy’ nickname: like Hansen, he’d have been at home on the range. He was a tall florid-faced man with white hair, white eyebrows and a twinkle in the blue eyes below: he had that certain indefinable something about him common to all senior naval officers the world over, irrespective of race or nationality.

  ‘Glad to meet you, Dr Carpenter. Sorry for the — um — lukewarm reception you received, but Commander Swanson was perfectly within his rights in acting as he did. His men have looked after you?’

  ‘They permitted me to buy them a cup of coffee in the canteen.’

  He smiled. ‘Opportunists all, those nuclear men. I feel that the good name of American hospitality is in danger. Whisky, Dr Carpenter?’

  ‘I thought American naval ships were dry, sir.’

  ‘So they are, my boy, so they are. Except for a little medicinal alcohol, of co
urse. My personal supply.’ He produced a hip-flask about the size of a canteen, reached for a convenient tooth-glass. ‘Before venturing into the remoter fastnesses of the Highlands of Scotland the prudent man takes the necessary precautions. I have to make an apology to you, Dr Carpenter. I saw your Admiral Hewson in London last night and had intended to be here this morning to persuade Commander Swanson here to take you aboard. But I was delayed.’

  ‘Persuade, sir?’

  ‘Persuade.’ He sighed. ‘Our nuclear submarine captains, Dr Carpenter, are a touchy and difficult bunch. From the proprietary attitude they adopt towards their submarines you’d think that each one of them was a majority shareholder in the Electric Boat Company of Groton, where most of those boats are built.’ He raised his glass. ‘Success to the commander and yourself. I hope you manage to find those poor devils. But I don’t give you one chance in a thousand.’

  ‘I think we’ll find them, sir. Or Commander Swanson will.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ He added slowly, ‘Hunch?’

  ‘You could call it that.’

  He laid down his glass and his eyes were no longer twinkling. ‘Admiral Hewson was most evasive about you, I must say. Who are you. Carpenter? What are you?’

  ‘Surely he told you, Admiral? Just a doctor attached to the navy to carry out —’

  ‘A naval doctor?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. I —’

  ‘A civilian, is it?’

  I nodded, and the admiral and Swanson exchanged looks which they were at no pains at all to conceal from me. If they were happy at the prospect of having aboard America’s latest and most secret submarine a man who was not only a foreigner but a civilian to boot, they were hiding it well. Admiral Garvie said: ‘Well, go on.’

  ‘That’s all. I carry out environmental health studies for the services. How men react to extremes of environmental conditions, such as in the Arctic or the tropics, how they react to conditions of weightlessness in simulated space flights or to extremes of pressure when having to escape from submarines. Mainly -’