Ice Station Zebra Read online

  ‘Do you mean what I think you mean?’ Swanson said slowly. ‘Or am I just going round the bend?’

  ‘What’s this about going round the bend?’ Hansen had just come through the doorway leading to the for’ard passageway, and the grin on his face was clear enough indication that though he’d caught Swanson’s last words he’d caught neither the intonation nor the expression on Swanson’s face. ‘Very serious state of affairs, going round the bend. I’ll have to assume command and put you in irons, Captain. Something about it in regulations, I dare say.’

  ‘Dr Carpenter is proposing to sling a bag of provisions on his back and proceed to Drift Station Zebra on foot.’

  ‘You’ve picked them up again?’ Just for the moment Hansen had forgotten me. ‘You really got them? And a cross-bearing?’

  ‘Just this minute. We’ve hit it almost on the nose. Five miles, young Raeburn says.’

  ‘My God! Five miles. Only five miles!’ Then the elation vanished from voice and face as if an internal switch had been touched. ‘In weather like this it might as well be five hundred. Even old Amundsen couldn’t have moved ten yards through this stuff.’

  ‘Dr Carpenter evidently thinks he can improve on Amundsen’s standards,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘He’s talking about walking there.’

  Hansen looked at me for a long and considering moment, then turned back to Swanson. ‘I think maybe it’s Doc Carpenter we should be clapping in the old irons.’

  ‘I think maybe it is,’ Swanson said.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘There are men out there on Drift Station Zebra. Maybe not many, not now, but there are some. One, anyway. Men a long way past being sick. Dying men. To a dying man it takes only the very smallest thing to spell out the difference between life and death. I’m a doctor, I know. The smallest thing. An ounce of alcohol, a few ounces of food, a hot drink, some medicine. Then they’ll live. Without those little things they will surely die. They’re entitled to what smallest aid they can get, and I’m entitled to take whatever risks I care to see they get it. I’m not asking anyone else to go, all I’m asking is that you implement the terms of your orders from Washington to give me all possible assistance without endangering the Dolphin or its crew. Threatening to stop me is not my idea of giving assistance. And I’m not asking you to endanger your submarine or the lives of your men.’

  Swanson gazed at the floor. I wondered what he was thinking of: the best way to stop me, his orders from Washington, or the fact that he was the only man who knew that the commandant on Zebra was my brother. He said nothing.

  ‘You must stop him, Captain,’ Hansen said urgently. ‘Any other man you saw putting a pistol to his head or a razor to his throat, you’d stop that man. This is the same. He’s out of his mind, he’s wanting to commit suicide.’ He tapped the bulkhead beside him. ‘Good God, Doc, why do you think we have the sonar operators in here on duty even when we’re stopped? So that they can tell us when the ice wall on the far side of the polynya starts to close in on us, that’s why. And that’s because it’s impossible for any man to last thirty seconds on the bridge or see an inch against the ice-storm up there. Just take a quick twenty-second trip up there, up on the bridge, and you’ll change your mind fast enough, I guarantee.’

  ‘We’ve just come down from the bridge,’ Swanson said matter-of-factly.

  ‘And he still wants to go? It’s like I say, he’s crazy.’

  ‘We could drop down now,’ Swanson said. ‘We have the position. Perhaps we can find a polynya within a mile, half a mile of Zebra. That would be a different proposition altogether.’

  ‘Perhaps you could find a needle in a haystack,’ I said. ‘It took you six hours to find this one, and even at that we were lucky. And don’t talk about torpedoes, the ice in this area is rafted anything up to a hundred feet in depth. Pretty much all over. You’d be as well trying to blast your way through with a .22. Might be twelve hours, might be days before we could break through again. I can get there in two-three hours.’

  ‘If you don’t freeze to death in the first hundred yards,’ Hansen said. ‘If you don’t fall down a ridge and break your leg. If you don’t get blinded in a few minutes. If you don’t fall into a newly-opened polynya that you can’t see, where you’ll either drown or, if you manage to get out, freeze solid in thirty seconds. And even if you do survive all those things, I’d be grateful if you’d explain to me exactly how you propose to find your way blind to a place five miles away. You can’t carry a damn’ great gyro weighing about half a ton on your back, and a magnetic compass is useless in those latitudes. The magnetic north pole is a good bit south of where we are now and a long way to the west. Even if you did get some sort of bearing from it, in the darkness and the ice-storm you could still miss the camp — or what’s left of it — by only a hundred yards and never know it. And even if by one chance in a million you do manage to find your way there, how on earth do you ever expect to find your way back again? Leave a paper-trail? A five-mile ball of twine? Crazy is hardly the word for it.’

  ‘I may break a leg, drown or freeze,’ I conceded. ‘I’ll take my chance on that. Finding my way there and back is no great trick. You have a radio bearing on Zebra and know exactly where it lies. You can take a radio bearing on any transmitter. All I have to do is to tote a receiver-transmitter radio along with me, keep in touch with you and you can keep me on the same bearing as Zebra. It’s easy.’

  ‘It would be,’ Hansen said, ‘except for one little thing. We don’t have any such radio.’

  ‘I have a twenty-mile walkie-talkie in my case,’ I said.

  ‘Coincidence, coincidence,’ Hansen murmured. ‘Just happened to bring it along, no doubt. I’ll bet you have all sorts of funny things in that case of yours, haven’t you, Doc?’

  ‘What Dr Carpenter has in his case is really no business of ours,’ Swanson said in mild reproof. He hadn’t thought so earlier. ‘What does concern us is his intention to do away with himself. You really can’t expect us to consent to this ridiculous proposal, Dr Carpenter.’

  ‘No one’s asking you to consent to anything,’ I said. ‘Your consent is not required. All I’m asking you to do is to stand to one side. And to arrange for that food provision pack for me. If you won’t, I’ll have to manage without.’

  I left and went to my cabin. Hansen’s cabin, rather. But even although it wasn’t my cabin that didn’t stop me from turning the key in the lock as soon as I had passed through the door.

  Working on the likely supposition that if Hansen did come along soon he wasn’t going to be very pleased to find the door of his own cabin locked against him, I wasted no time. I spun the combination lock on the case and opened the lid. At least three-quarters of the available space was taken up by Arctic survival clothing, the very best that money could buy. It hadn’t been my money that had bought it.

  I stripped off the outer clothes I was wearing, pulled on long open-mesh underwear, woollen shirt and cord breeches, then a triple-knit wool parka lined with pure silk. The parka wasn’t quite standard, it had a curiously shaped suède-lined pocket below and slightly to the front of the left armpit, and a differently shaped suède-lined pocket on the right-hand side. I dug swiftly to the bottom of my case and brought up three separate items. The first of these, a nine-millimetre Mannlicher-Schoenauer automatic, fitted into the left-hand pocket as securely and snugly as if the pocket had been specially designed for it, which indeed it had: the other items, spare magazine clips, fitted as neatly into the right-hand pocket.

  The rest of the dressing didn’t take long. Two pairs of heavy-knit woollen socks, felt undershoes and then the furs — caribou for the outer parka and trousers, wolverine for the hood, sealskin for the boots and reindeer for the gloves, which were pulled on over other layers of silk gloves and woollen mittens. Maybe a polar bear would have had a slight edge over me when it came to being equipped to survive an Arctic blizzard, but there wouldn’t have been much in it.

  I hung snow-mask and goggles round my
neck, stuck a rubberised waterproofed torch into the inside pocket of the fur parka, unearthed my walkie-talkie and closed the case. I set the combination again. There was no need to set the combination any more, not now that I had the Mannlicher-Schoenauer under my arm, but it would give Swanson something to do while I was away. I shoved my medicine case and a steel flask of alcohol in a rucksack and unlocked the door.

  Swanson was exactly where I’d left him in the control room. So was Hansen. So were two others who had not been there when I had left, Rawlings and Zabrinski. Hansen, Rawlings, and Zabrinski, the three biggest men in the ship. The last time I’d seen them together was when Swanson had whistled them up from the Dolphin in the Holy Loch to see to it that I didn’t do anything he didn’t want me to do. Maybe Commander Swanson had a one-track mind. Hansen, Rawlings, and Zabrinski. They looked bigger than ever.

  I said to Swanson: ‘Do I get those iron rations or not?’

  ‘One last formal statement,’ Swanson said. His first thoughts, as I came waddling into the control centre, must have been that a grizzly bear was loose inside his submarine, but he hadn’t batted an eyelid. ‘For the record. Your intentions are suicidal, your chances are non-existent. I cannot give my consent.’

  ‘All right, your statement is on record, witnesses and all. The iron rations.’

  ‘I cannot give my consent because of a fresh and dangerous development. One of our electronic technicians was carrying out a routine calibration test on the ice-machine just now and an overload coil didn’t function. Electric motor burnt out. No spares, it will have to be rewired. You realise what that means. If we’re forced to drop down I can’t find my way to the top again. Then it’s curtains for everybody — everybody left above the ice, that is.’

  I didn’t blame him for trying, but I was vaguely disappointed in him: he’d had time to think up a better one than that. I said: ‘The iron rations, Commander. Do I get them?’

  ‘You mean to go through with this? After what I’ve said?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. I’ll do without the food.’

  ‘My executive officer, Torpedoman Rawlings and Radioman Zabrinski,’ Swanson said formally, ‘don’t like this.’

  ‘I can’t help what they like or don’t like.’

  ‘They feel they can’t let you go through with it,’ he persisted.

  They were more than big. They were huge. I could get past them the way a lamb gets past a starving lion. I had a gun all right but with that one-piece parka I was wearing I’d practically have to undress myself to get at it and Hansen, in that Holy Loch canteen, had shown just how quickly he could react when he saw anyone making a suspicious move. And even if I did get my gun out, what then? Men like Hansen, like Rawlings and Zabrinski, didn’t scare. I couldn’t bluff them with a gun. And I couldn’t use the gun. Not against men who were just doing their duty.

  ‘They won’t let you go through with it,’ Swanson went on, ‘unless, that is, you will permit them to accompany you, which they have volunteered to do.’

  ‘Volunteered,’ Rawlings sniffed. ‘You, you, and you.’

  ‘I don’t want them,’ I said.

  ‘Gracious, ain’t he?’ Rawlings asked of no one in particular. ‘You might at least have said thanks, Doc.’

  ‘You are putting the lives of your men in danger, Commander Swanson. You know what your orders said.’

  ‘Yes. I also know that in Arctic travels, as in mountaineering and exploring, a party has always double the chances of the individual. I also know that if it became known that we had permitted a civilian doctor to set off on his own for Drift Station Zebra while we were all too scared to stir from our nice warm sub, the name of the United States Navy would become pretty muddy’

  ‘What do your men think of your making them risk their lives to save the good name of the submarine service?’

  ‘You heard the captain,’ Rawlings said. ‘We’re volunteers. Look at Zabrinski there, anyone can see that he is a man cast in a heroic mould.’

  ‘Have you thought of what happens,’ I said, ‘if the ice closes in when we’re away and the captain has to take the ship down?’

  ‘Don’t even talk of it,’ Zabrinski urged. ‘I’m not all that heroic.’

  I gave up. I’d no option but to give up. Besides, like Zabrinski, I wasn’t all that heroic and I suddenly realised that I would be very glad indeed to have those three men along with me.

  FIVE

  Lieutenant Hansen was the first man to give up. Or perhaps ‘give up’ is wrong, the meaning of the words was quite unknown and the thought totally alien to Hansen, it would be more accurate to say that he was the first of us to show any glimmerings of common sense. He caught my arm, brought his head close to mine, pulled down his snow mask and shouted: ‘No farther, Doc. We must stop.’

  ‘The next ridge,’ I yelled back. I didn’t know whether he’d heard me or not, as soon as he’d spoken he’d pulled his mask back up into position again to protect the momentarily exposed skin against the horizontally driving ice-storm, but he seemed to understand for he eased his grip on the rope round my waist and let me move ahead again. For the past two and a half hours Hansen, Rawlings and I had each taken his turn at being the lead man on the end of the rope, while the other three held on to it some ten yards behind, the idea being not that the lead man should guide the others but that the others should save the life of the lead man, should the need arise. And the need already had arisen, just once. Hansen, slipping and scrambling on all-fours across a fractured and upward sloping raft of ice, had reached gropingly forward with his arms into the blindness of the night and the storm and found nothing there. He had fallen eight vertical feet before the rope had brought him up with a vicious jerk that had been almost as painful for Rawlings and myself, who had taken the brunt of the shock, as it had been for Hansen. For nearly two minutes he’d dangled above the wind-torn black water of a freshly opened lead before we’d managed to drag him back to safety. It had been a close thing, far too close a thing, for in far sub-zero temperatures with a gale-force wind blowing, even a few seconds’ submersion in water makes the certainty of death absolute, the process of dissolution as swift as it is irreversible. In those conditions the clothes of a man pulled from the water become a frozen and impenetrable suit of armour inside seconds, an armour that can neither be removed nor chipped away. Petrified inside this ice-shroud, a man just simply and quickly freezes to death — in the unlikely event, that is, of his heart having withstood the thermal shock of the body surface being exposed to an almost instantaneous hundred degree drop in temperature.

  So now I stepped forward very cautiously, very warily indeed, feeling the ice ahead of me with a probe we’d devised after Hansen’s near accident — a chopped-off five foot length of rope which we’d dipped into the water of the lead then exposed to the air until it had become as rigid as a bar of steel. At times I walked, at times I stumbled, at times, when a brief lull in the gale-force wind, as sudden as it was unexpected, would catch me off balance I’d just fall forward and continue on hands and knees, for it was quite as easy that way. It was during one of those periods when I was shuffling blindly forward on all-fours that I realised that the wind had, for the time being, lost nearly all of its violence and that I was no longer being bombarded by that horizontally driving hail of flying ice-spicules. Moments later my probe made contact with some solid obstacle in my path: the vertical wall of a rafted ice ridge. I crawled thankfully into its shelter, raised my goggles and pulled out and switched on my torch as the others came blindly up to where I lay.

  Blindly. With arms outstretched they pawed at the air before them like sightless men, which for the past two and a half hours was exactly what they had been. For all the service our goggles had given us we might as well have stuck our heads in gunny sacks before leaving the Dolphin. I looked at Hansen, the first of the three to come up. Goggles, snow-mask, hood, clothing — the entire front part of his body from top to toe was deeply and solidly encrusted in a thi
ck and glittering layer of compacted ice, except for some narrow cracks caused by joint movements of legs and arms. As he drew close to me I could hear him splintering and crackling a good five feet away. Long ice-feathers streamed back from his head, shoulders and elbows; as an extra-terrestrial monster from one of the chillier planets, such as Pluto, he’d have been a sensation in any horror movie. I suppose I looked much the same.

  We huddled close together in the shelter of the wall. Only four feet above our heads the ice-storm swept by in a glittering grey-white river. Rawlings, sitting on my left, pushed up his goggles, looked down at his ice-sheathed furs and started to beat himself with his fist across the chest to break up the covering. I reached out a hand and caught his arm.

  ‘Leave it alone,’ I said.

  ‘Leave it alone?’ Rawlings’s voice was muffled by his snow-mask, but not so muffled that I couldn’t hear the chattering of his teeth. ‘This damn’ suit of armour weighs a ton. I’m out of training for this kind of weight-lifting, Doc.’

  ‘Leave it alone. If it weren’t for that ice, you’d have frozen to death by this time: it’s insulating you from that wind and the ice-storm. Let’s see the rest of your face. And your hands.’

  I checked him and the two others for frostbite, while Hansen checked me. We were still lucky. Blue and mottled and shaking with the cold, but no frostbite. The furs of the other three might not have been quite as fancy as mine, but they were very adequate indeed. Nuclear subs always got the best of everything, and Arctic clothing was no exception. But although they weren’t freezing to death I could see from their faces and hear from their breathing that they were pretty far gone in exhaustion. Thrusting into the power of that ice-storm was like wading upstream against the current of a river of molasses: that was energy-sapping enough, but the fact that we had to spend most of our time clambering over, slipping on, sliding and falling across fractured ice or making detours round impassable ridges while being weighed down with forty pound packs on our back and heaven only knew how many additional pounds of ice coating our furs in front had turned our trudge across that contorted treacherous ice into a dark and frozen nightmare.