Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

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.

‘The point of no return, I think,’ Hansen said. His breathing, like Rawlings’s, was very quick, very shallow, almost gasping. ‘We can’t take much more of this, Doc.’

‘You ought to listen to Dr Benson’s lectures a bit more,’ I said reprovingly. ‘All this ice-cream and apple pie and lolling around in your bunks is no training for this sort of thing.’

‘Yeah?’ He peered at me. ‘How do you feel?’

‘A mite tired,’ I admitted. ‘Nothing much to speak of.’ Nothing much to speak of, my legs felt as if they were falling off, that was all, but the goad of pride was always a useful one to have to hand. I slipped off my rucksack and brought out the medicinal alcohol. ‘I suggest fifteen minutes’ break. Any more and we’ll just start stiffening up completely. Meantime, a little drop of what we fancy will help keep the old blood corpuscles trudging around.’

‘I thought medical opinion was against alcohol in low temperatures,’ Hansen said doubtfully. ‘Something about opening the pores.’

‘Name me any form of human activity,’ I said, ‘and I’ll find you a group of doctors against it. Spoilsports. Besides, this isn’t alcohol, it’s very fine Scotch whisky.’

‘You should have said so in the first place. Pass it over. Not too much for Rawlings and Zabrinski, they’re not used to the stuff. Any word, Zabrinski?’

Zabrinski, with the walkie-talkie’s aerial up and one earphone tucked in below the hood of his parka, was talking into the microphone through cupped hands. As the radio expert, Zabrinski had been the obvious man to handle the walkie-talkie and I’d given it to him before leaving the submarine. This was also the reason why Zabrinski wasn’t at any time given the position of lead man in our trudge across the pack ice. A heavy fall or immersion in water would have finished the radio he was carrying slung on his back: and if the radio were finished then so would we be, for without the radio not only had we no hope of finding Drift Station Zebra, we wouldn’t have a chance in a thousand of ever finding our way back to the Dolphin again. Zabrinski was built on the size and scale of a medium-sized gorilla and was about as durable; but we couldn’t have treated him more tenderly had he been made of Dresden china.

‘It’s difficult,’ Zabrinski said. ‘Radio’s O.K., but this ice-storm causes such damn’ distortion and squeaking – no, wait a minute, though, wait a minute.’

He bent his head over the microphone, shielding it from the sound of the storm, and spoke again through cupped hands. ‘Zabrinski here . . . Zabrinski. Yeah, we’re all kinda tuckered out, but Doc here seems to think we’ll make it . . . Hang on, I’ll ask him.’

He turned to me. ‘How far do you reckon we’ve come, they want to know.’

‘Four miles.’ I shrugged. ‘Three and a half, four and a half. You guess it.’

Zabrinski spoke again, looked interrogatively at Hansen and myself, saw our headshakes and signed off. He said: ‘Navigating officer says we’re four-five degrees north of where we should be and that we’ll have to cut south if we don’t want to miss Zebra by a few hundred yards.’

It could have been worse. Over an hour had passed since we’d received the last bearing position from the Dolphin and, between radio calls, our only means of navigating had been by judging the strength and direction of the wind in our faces. When a man’s face is completely covered and largely numb it’s not a very sensitive instrument for gauging wind direction – and for all we knew the wind might be either backing or veering. It could have been a lot worse and I said so to Hansen.

‘It could be worse,’ he agreed heavily. ‘We could be travelling in circles or we could be dead. Barring that, I don’t see how it could be worse.’ He gulped down the whisky, coughed, handed the flask top back to me. ‘Things look brighter now. You honestly think we can make it?’

‘A little luck, that’s all. You think maybe our packs are too heavy? That we should abandon some of it here?’ The last thing I wanted to do was to abandon any of the supplies we had along with us: eighty pounds of food, a stove, thirty pounds of compressed fuel tablets, 100 ounces of alcohol, a tent, and a very comprehensive medical kit; but if it was to be abandoned I wanted the suggestion to be left to them, and I was sure they wouldn’t make it.

‘We’re abandoning nothing,’ Hansen said. Either the rest or the whisky had done him good, his voice was stronger, his teeth hardly chattering at all.

‘Let the thought die stillborn,’ Zabrinski said. When first I’d seen him in Scotland he had reminded me of a polar bear and now out here on the ice-cap, huge and crouched in his ice-whitened furs, the resemblance was redoubled. He had the physique of a bear, too, and seemed completely tireless; he was in far better shape than any of us. ‘This weight on my bowed shoulders is like a bad leg: an old friend that gives me pain, but I wouldn’t be without it.’

‘You?’ I asked Rawlings.

‘I am conserving my energy,’ Rawlings announced. ‘I expect to have to carry Zabrinski later on.’

We pulled the starred, abraded and now thoroughly useless snow-goggles over our eyes again, hoisted ourselves stiffly to our feet and moved off to the south to find the end of and round the high ridge that here blocked our path. It was by far the longest and most continuous ridge we’d encountered yet, but we didn’t mind, we required to make a good offing to get us back on course and not only were we doing just that but we were doing it in comparative shelter and saving our strength by so doing. After perhaps four hundred yards the ice wall ended so abruptly, leading to so sudden and unexpected an exposure to the whistling fury of the ice-storm that I was bowled completely off my feet. An express train couldn’t have done it any better. I hung on to the rope with one hand, clawed and scrambled my way back on to my feet with the help of the other, shouted a warning to the others, and then we were fairly into the wind again, holding it directly in our faces and leaning far forward to keep our balance.

We covered the next mile in less than half an hour. The going was easier now, much easier than it had been, although we still had to make small detours round rafted, compacted and broken ice: on the debit side, we were all of us, Zabrinski excepted, pretty far gone in exhaustion, stumbling and falling far more often than was warranted by the terrain and the strength of the ice-gale: for myself, my leaden dragging legs felt as if they were on fire, each step now sent a shooting pain stabbing from ankle clear to the top of the thigh. For all that, I think I could have kept going longer than any of them, even Zabrinski, for I had the motivation, the driving force that would have kept me going hours after my legs would have told me that it was impossible to carry on a step farther. Major John Halliwell. My elder, my only brother. Alive or dead. Was he alive or was he dead, this one man in the world to whom I owed everything I had or had become? Was he dying, at that very moment when I was thinking of him, was he dying? His wife, Mary, and his three children who spoilt and ruined their bachelor uncle as I spoilt and ruined them: whatever way it lay they would have to know and only I could tell them. Alive or dead? My legs weren’t mine, the stabbing fire that tortured them belonged to some other man, not to me. I had to know, I had to know, and if I had to find out by covering whatever miles lay between me and Drift Ice Station Zebra on my hands and knees, then I would do just that. I would find out. And over and above the tearing anxiety as to what had happened to my brother there was yet another powerful motivation, a motivation that the world would regard as of infinitely more importance than the life or death of the commandant of the station. As infinitely more important than the living or dying of the score of men who manned that desolate polar outpost. Or so the world would say.