Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

‘Both.’

‘How do the captive ones work?’

‘A free-running winch, nylon cord marked off in hundreds and thousands of feet.’

‘We’ll ask them to send a captive balloon up to 5,000 feet,’ Swanson decided. ‘With flares. If they’re within thirty or forty miles we ought to see it, and if we get its elevation and make an allowance for the effect of wind on it, we should get a fair estimate of distance . . . What is it, Brown?’ This to the man Zabrinski called ‘Curly’.

‘They’re sending again,’ Curly said. ‘Very broken, fades a lot. “God’s sake, hurry.” Just like that, twice over. “God’s sake hurry.” ’

‘Send this,’ Swanson said. He dictated a brief message about the balloons. ‘And send it real slow.’

Curly nodded and began to transmit. Raeburn came running back into the radio room.

‘The moon’s not down yet,’ he said quickly to Swanson. ‘Still a degree or two above the horizon. I’m taking a sextant up top and taking a moon-sight. Ask them to do the same. That’ll give us the latitude difference and if we know they’re o-forty-five of us we can pin them down to a mile.’

‘It’s worth trying,’ Swanson said. He dictated another message to Brown. Brown transmitted the second message immediately after the first. We waited for the answer. For all of ten minutes we waited. I looked at the men in the radio room, they all had the same remote withdrawn look of men who are there only physically, men whose minds are many miles away. They were all at the same place and I was too, wherever Drift Ice Station Zebra was.

Brown started writing again, not for long. His voice this time was still matter-of-fact, but with overtones of emptiness. He said: ‘ “All balloons burnt. No moon.” ’

‘No moon.’ Raeburn couldn’t hide the bitterness, the sharpness of his disappointment. ‘Damn! Must be pretty heavy overcast up there. Or a bad storm.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t get local weather variations like that on the ice-cap. The conditions will be the same over 50,000 square miles. The moon is down. For them, the moon is down. Their latest estimated position must have been pure guesswork, and bad guesswork at that. They must be at least a hundred miles farther north and east than we had thought.’

‘Ask them if they have any rockets,’ Swanson said to Brown.

‘You can try,’ I said. ‘It’ll be a waste of time. If they are as far off as I think, their rockets would never get above our horizon. Even if they did, we wouldn’t see them.’

‘It’s always a chance, isn’t it?’ Swanson asked.

‘Beginning to lose contact, sir,’ Brown reported. ‘Something there about food but it faded right out.’

‘Tell them if they have any rockets to fire them at once,’ Swanson said. ‘Quickly, now, before you lose contact.’

Four times in all Brown sent the message before he managed to pick up a reply. Then he said: ‘Message reads: “Two minutes.” Either this guy is pretty far through or his transmitter batteries are. That’s all. “Two minutes,” he said.’

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.