Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

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.’