Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

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.