Ice Station Zebra Read online

  Swanson nodded wordlessly and left the room. I followed. We picked up coats and binoculars and clambered up to the bridge. After the warmth and comfort of the control room, the cold seemed glacial, the flying ice-spicules more lancet-like than ever. Swanson uncapped the gyro-repeater compass, gave us the line of o-forty-five, told the two men who had been keeping watch what to look for and where.

  A minute passed, two minutes, five. My eyes began to ache from staring into the ice-filled dark, the exposed part of my face had gone completely numb and I knew that when I removed those binoculars I was going to take a fair bit of skin with them.

  A phone bell rang. Swanson lowered his glasses, leaving two peeled and bloody rings round his eyes — he seemed unaware of it, the pain wouldn’t come until later — and picked up the receiver. He listened briefly, hung up.

  ‘Radio room,’ he said. ‘Let’s get below. All of us. The rockets were fired three minutes ago.’

  We went below. Swanson caught sight of his face reflected in a glass gauge and shook his head. ‘They must have shelter,’ he said quietly. ‘They must. Some hut left. Or they would have been gone long ago.’ He went into the radio room. ‘Still in contact?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Zabrinski spoke. ‘Off and on. It’s a funny thing. When a dicey contact like this starts to fade it usually gets lost and stays lost. But this guy keeps coming back. Funny.’

  ‘Maybe he hasn’t even got batteries left,’ I said. ‘Maybe all they have is a hand-cranked generator. Maybe there’s no one left with the strength to crank it for more than a few moments at a time.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Zabrinski agreed. ‘Tell the captain that last message, Curly.’

  ‘“Can’t late many tours,”’ Brown said. ‘That’s how the message came through. “Can’t late many tours.” I think it should have read “Can’t last many hours.” Don’t see what else it can have been.’

  Swanson looked at me briefly, glanced away again. I hadn’t told anyone else that the commandant of the base was my brother and I knew he hadn’t told anyone either. He said to Brown: ‘Give them a time-check. Ask them to send their call-signs five minutes every hour on the hour. Tell them we’ll contact them again within six hours at most, maybe only four. Zabrinski, how accurate was that bearing?’

  ‘Dead accurate, Captain. I’ve had plenty of re-checks. O-forty-five exactly.’

  Swanson moved out into the control centre. ‘Drift Station Zebra can’t see the moon. If we take Dr Carpenter’s word for it that weather conditions are pretty much the same all over, that’s because the moon is below their horizon. With the elevation we have of the moon, and knowing their bearing, what’s Zebra’s minimum distance from us?’

  ‘A hundred miles, as Dr Carpenter said,’ Raeburn confirmed after a short calculation. ‘At least that.’

  ‘So. We leave here and take a course o-forty. Not enough to take us very far from their general direction but it will give us enough offset to take a good cross-bearing eventually. We will go exactly a hundred miles and try for another polynya. Call the executive officer, secure for diving.’ He smiled at me. ‘With two cross-bearings and an accurately measured base-line, we can pin them down to a hundred yards.’

  ‘How do you intend to measure a hundred miles under the ice? Accurately, I mean?’

  ‘Our inertial navigation computer does it for me. It’s very accurate, you wouldn’t believe just how accurate. I can dive the Dolphin off the eastern coast of the United States and surface again in the Eastern Mediterranean within five hundred yards of where I expect to be. Over a hundred miles I don’t expect to be twenty yards out.’

  Radio aerials were lowered, hatches screwed down and within five minutes the Dolphin had dropped down from her hole in the ice and was on her way. The two helmsmen at the diving stand sat idly smoking, doing nothing: the steering controls were in automatic interlock with the inertial navigation system which steered the ship with a degree of accuracy and sensitivity impossible to human hands. For the first time I could feel a heavy jarring vibration rumbling throughout the length of the ship: ‘Can’t last many hours’ the message had said: the Dolphin was under full power.

  I didn’t leave the control room that morning. I spent most of the time peering over the shoulder of Dr Benson who had passed his usual five minutes in the sick-bay waiting for the patients who never turned up and then had hurried to his seat by the ice-machine. The readings on that machine meant living or dying to the Zebra survivors. We had to find another polynya to surface in to get a cross-bearing: no cross-bearing, no hope. I wondered for the hundredth time how many of the survivors of the fire were still alive. From the quiet desperation of the few garbled messages that Brown and Zabrinski had managed to pick up I couldn’t see that there would be many.

  The pattern traced out by the hissing stylus on the chart was hardly an encouraging sight. Most of the time it showed the ice overhead to be of a thickness of ten feet or more. Several times the stylus dipped to show thicknesses of thirty to forty feet, and once it dipped down almost clear of the paper, showing a tremendous inverted ridge of at least 150 feet in depth. I tried to imagine what kind of fantastic pressures created by piled-up logjams of rafted ice on the surface must have been necessary to force ice down to such a depth: but I just didn’t have the imagination to cope with that sort of thing.

  Only twice in the first eighty miles did the stylus trace out the thin black line that meant thin ice overhead. The first of those polynyas might have accommodated a small rowing boat, but it would certainly never have looked at the Dolphin: the other had hardly been any bigger.

  Shortly before noon the hull vibration died away as Swanson gave the order for a cutback to a slow cruising speed. He said to Benson: ‘How does it look?’

  ‘Terrible. Heavy ice all the way.’

  ‘Well, we can’t expect a polynya to fall into our laps straight away,’ Swanson said reasonably, ‘We’re almost there. We’ll make a grid search. Five miles east, five miles west, a quarter-mile farther to the north each time.’

  The search began. An hour passed, two, then three. Raeburn and his assistant hardly ever raised their heads from the plotting table where they were meticulously tracing every movement the Dolphin was making in its criss-cross search under the sea. Four o’clock in the afternoon. The normal background buzz of conversation, the occasional small talk from various groups in the control centre, died away completely. Benson’s occasional ‘Heavy ice, still heavy ice,’ growing steadily quieter and more dispirited, served only to emphasise and deepen the heavy brooding silence that had fallen. Only a case-hardened undertaker could have felt perfectly at home in that atmosphere. At the moment, undertakers were the last people I wanted to think about.

  Five o’clock in the afternoon. People weren’t looking at each other any more, far less talking. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Defeat, despair, hung heavy in the air. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Even Swanson had stopped smiling, I wondered if he had in his mind’s eye what I now constantly had in mine, the picture of a haggard, emaciated, bearded man with his face all but destroyed with frostbite, a frozen, starving, dying man draining away the last few ounces of his exhausted strength as he cranked the handle of his generator and tapped out his call-sign with lifeless fingers, his head bowed as he strained to listen above the howl of the ice-storm for the promise of aid that never came. Or maybe there was no one tapping out a call-sign any more. They were no ordinary men who had been sent to man Drift Ice Station Zebra but there comes a time when even the toughest, the bravest, the most enduring will abandon all hope and lie down to die. Perhaps he had already lain down to die. Heavy ice, still heavy ice.

  At half past five Commander Swanson walked across to the ice-machine and peered over Benson’s shoulder. He said: ‘What’s the average thickness of that stuff above?’

  ‘Twelve to fifteen feet,’ Benson said. His voice was low and tired. ‘Nearer fifteen, I would say.’

  Swanson picked up a phone. ‘Lieutenant Mills? Captain here.
What is the state of readiness of those torpedoes you’re working on? . . . Four? . . . Ready to go? . . . Good. Stand by to load. I’m giving this search another thirty minutes, then it’s up to you. Yes, that is correct. We shall attempt to blow a hole through the ice.’ He replaced the phone.

  Hansen said thoughtfully: ‘Fifteen feet of ice is a helluva lot of ice. And that ice will have a tamping effect and will direct 90 per cent of the explosive force down the way. You think we can blow a hole through fifteen feet of ice, Captain?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Swanson admitted. ‘How can anyone know until we try it?’

  ‘Nobody ever tried to do this before?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Not in the U.S. Navy, anyway. The Russians may have tried it, I wouldn’t know. They don’t,’ he added dryly, ‘keep us very well informed on those matters.’

  ‘Aren’t the underwater shock waves liable to damage the Dolphin?’ I asked. I didn’t care for the idea at all, and that was a fact.

  ‘If they do, the Electric Boat Company can expect a pretty strong letter of complaint. We shall explode the warhead electronically about 1,000 yards after it leaves the ship — it has to travel eight hundred yards anyway before a safety device unlocks and permits the warhead to be armed. We shall be bows-on to the detonation and with a hull designed to withstand the pressures this one is, the shock effects should be negligible.’

  ‘Very heavy ice,’ Benson intoned. ‘Thirty feet, forty feet, fifty feet. Very, very heavy ice.’

  ‘Just too bad if your torpedo ended up under a pile like the stuff above us just now,’ I said. ‘I doubt if it would even chip off the bottom layer.’

  ‘We’ll take care that doesn’t happen. We’ll just find a suitably large layer of ice of normal thickness, kind of back off a thousand yards and then let go.’

  ‘Thin ice!’ Benson’s voice wasn’t a shout, it was a bellow. ‘Thin ice. No, by God, clear water! Clear water! Lovely clear, clear water!’

  My immediate reaction was that either the ice-machine or Benson’s brain had blown a fuse. But the officer at the diving panel had no such doubts for I had to grab and hang on hard as the Dolphin heeled over violently to port and came curving round, engines slowing, in a tight circle to bring her back to the spot where Benson had called out. Swanson watched the plot, spoke quietly and the big bronze propellers reversed and bit into the water to bring the Dolphin to a stop.

  ‘How’s it looking now, Doc?’ Swanson called out.

  ‘Clear, clear water,’ Benson said reverently. ‘I got a good picture of it. It’s pretty narrow, but wide enough to hold us. It’s long, with a sharp left-hand dog-leg, for it followed us round through the first forty-five degrees of our curve.’

  ‘One fifty feet,’ Swanson said.

  The pumps hummed. The Dolphin drifted gently upwards like an airship rising from the ground. Briefly, water flooded back into the tanks. The Dolphin hung motionless.

  ‘Up periscope,’ Swanson said.

  The periscope hissed up slowly into the raised position. Swanson glanced briefly through the eyepiece, then beckoned me. ‘Take a look,’ he beamed. ‘As lovely a sight as you’ll ever see.’

  I took a look. If you’d made a picture of what could be seen above and framed it you couldn’t have sold the result even if you added Picasso’s name to it: but I could see what he meant. Solid black masses on either side with a scarcely lighter strip of dark jungle green running between them on a line with the fore-and-aft direction of the ship. An open lead in the polar pack.

  Three minutes later we were lying on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, just under two hundred and fifty miles from the Pole.

  The rafted, twisted ice-pack reared up into contorted ridges almost fifty feet in height, towering twenty feet above the top of the sail, so close you could almost reach out and touch the nearest ridge. Three or four of those broken and fantastically hummocked icehills we could see stretching off to the west and then the light of the floodlamp failed and we could see no more. Beyond that there was only blackness.

  To the east we could see nothing at all. To have stared out to the east with opened eyes would have been to be blinded for life in a very few seconds: even goggles became clouded and scarred after the briefest exposure. Close in to the Dolphin’s side you could, with bent head and hooded eyes, catch, for a fleeting part of a second, a glimpse of black water, already freezing over: but it was more imagined than seen.

  The wind, shrieking and wailing across the bridge and through raised antennae, showed at consistently over 60 m.p.h. on the bridge anemometer. The ice-storm was no longer the gusting, swirling fog of that morning but a driving wall of stiletto-tipped spears, near-lethal in its ferocity, high speed ice-spicule lances that would have skewered their way through the thickest cardboard or shattered in a second a glass held in your hand. Over and above the ululating threnody of the wind we could hear an almost constant grinding, crashing and deep-throated booming as millions of tons of racked and tortured ice, under the influence of the gale and some mighty pressure centre, heaven knew how many hundreds of miles away, reared and twisted and tore and cracked, one moment forming another rafted ridge as a layer of ice, perhaps ten feet thick, screeched and roared and clambered on to the shoulders of another and then another, the next rending apart in indescribably violent cacophony to open up a new lead, black wind-torn water that started to skim over with ice almost as soon as it was formed.

  ‘Are we both mad? Let’s get below.’ Swanson cupped his hands to my ear and had to shout, but even so I could hardly hear him above that hellish bedlam of sound.

  We clambered down into the comparatively sudden stillness of the control room. Swanson untied his parka hood and pulled off scarf and goggles that had completely masked his face. He looked at me and shook his head wonderingly.

  ‘And some people talk about the white silence of the Arctic. My God, a boilermaker’s shop is like a library reading-room compared to that lot.’ He shook his head again. ‘We stuck our noses out a few times above the ice-pack last year, but we never saw anything like this. Or heard it. Wintertime, too. Cold, sure, damned cold, and windy, but never so bad that we couldn’t take a brief stroll on the ice, and I used to wonder about those stories of explorers being stuck in their tents for days on end, unable to move. But I know now why Captain Scott died.’

  ‘It is pretty nasty,’ I admitted. ‘How safe are we here, Commander?’

  ‘That’s anybody’s guess,’ Swanson shrugged. ‘The wind’s got us jammed hard against the west wall of this polynya and there’s maybe fifty yards of open water to starboard. For the moment we’re safe. But you can hear and see that pack is on the move, and not slowly either. The lead we’re in was torn open less than an hour ago. How long? Depends on the configuration of the ice, but those polynyas can close up damned quickly at times, and while the hull of the Dolphin can take a fair old pressure, it can’t take a million tons of ice leaning against it. Maybe we can stay here for hours, maybe only for minutes. Whichever it is, as soon as that east wall comes within ten feet of the starboard side we’re dropping down out of it. You know what happens when a ship gets caught in the ice.’

  ‘I know. They get squeezed flat, are carried round the top of the world for a few years then one day are released and drop to the bottom, two miles straight down. The United States Government wouldn’t like it, Commander.’

  ‘The prospects of further promotion for Commander Swanson would be poor,’ Swanson admitted. ‘I think —’

  ‘Hey!’ The shout came from the radio room. ‘Hey, c’m here.’

  ‘I rather think Zabrinski must be wanting me,’ Swanson murmured. He moved off with his usual deceptive speed and I followed him into the radio room. Zabrinski was sitting half-turned in his chair, an ear-to-ear beam on his face, the earphones extended in his left hand. Swanson took them, listened briefly, then nodded.

  ‘DSY,’ he said softly, ‘DSY, Dr Carpenter. We have them. Got the bearing? Good.’ He turned to the doorway, saw t
he quartermaster. ‘Ellis, ask the navigating officer to come along as soon as possible.’

  ‘We’ll pick ‘em all up yet, Captain,’ Zabrinski said jovially. The smile on the big man’s face, I could see now, didn’t extend as far as his eyes. ‘They must be a pretty tough bunch of boys out there.’

  ‘Very tough, Zabrinski,’ Swanson said absently. His eyes were remote and I knew he was listening to the metallic cannonading of the ice-spicules, a billion tiny pneumatic chisels drumming away continuously against the outer hull of the submarine, a sound loud enough to make low speech impossible. ‘Very tough. Are you in two-way contact?’

  Zabrinski shook his head and turned away. He’d stopped smiling. Raeburn came in, was handed a sheet of paper and left for his plotting table. We went with him. After a minute or two he looked up, and said: ‘If anyone fancies a Sunday afternoon’s walk, this is it.’

  ‘So close?’ Swanson asked.

  ‘So very close. Five miles due east, give or take half a mile. Pretty fair old bloodhounds, aren’t we?’

  ‘We’re just lucky,’ Swanson said shortly. He walked back to the radio room. ‘Talking to them yet?’

  ‘We’ve lost them altogether.’

  ‘Completely?’

  ‘We only had ‘em a minute, Captain. Just that. Then they faded. Got weaker and weaker. I think Doc Carpenter here is right, they’re using a hand-cranked generator.’ He paused, then said idly: ‘I’ve a six-year-old daughter who could crank one of those machines for five minutes without turning a hair.’

  Swanson looked at me, then turned away without a word. I followed him to the unoccupied diving stand. From the bridge access hatch we could hear the howl of the storm, the grinding ice with its boom and scream that spanned the entire register of hearing. Swanson said: ‘Zabrinski put it very well . . . I wonder how long this damnable storm is going to last?’

  ‘Too long. I have a medical kit in my cabin, a fifty-ounce flask of medicinal alcohol and cold-weather clothes. Could you supply me with a thirty-pound pack of emergency rations, high protein high-calorie concentrates, Benson will know what I mean.’