Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

The demented drumming of the spicules on my mask and ice-sheathed furs suddenly eased, the gale wind fell away and I found myself standing in the grateful shelter of an ice-ridge even higher than the last one we’d used for shelter. I waited for the others to come up, asked Zabrinski to make a position check with the Dolphin and doled out some more of the medicinal alcohol. More of it than on the last occasion. We were in more need of it. Both Hansen and Rawlings were in a very distressed condition, their breath whistling in and out of their lungs in the rapid, rasping, shallow panting of a long-distance runner in the last tortured moments of his final exhaustion. I became gradually aware that the speed of my own breathing matched theirs almost exactly, it required a concentrated effort of will-power to hold my breath even for the few seconds necessary to gulp down my drink. I wondered vaguely if perhaps Hansen hadn’t had the right of it, maybe the alcohol wasn’t good for us. But it certainly tasted as if it were.

Zabrinski was already talking through cupped hands into the microphone. After a minute or so he pulled the earphones out from under his parka and buttoned up the walkie-talkie set. He said: ‘We’re either good or lucky or both. The Dolphin says we’re exactly on the course we ought to be on.’ He drained the glass I handed him and sighed in satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s the good part of the news. Here comes the bad part. The sides of the polynya the Dolphin is lying in are beginning to close together. They’re closing pretty fast. The captain estimates he’ll have to get out of it in two hours. Two at the most.’ He paused, then finished slowly: ‘And the ice-machine is still on the blink.’

‘The ice-machine,’ I said stupidly. Well, anyway, I felt stupid, I don’t know how I sounded. ‘Is the ice–?’

‘It sure is, brother,’ Zabrinski said. He sounded tired. ‘But you didn’t believe the skipper, did you, Dr Carpenter? You were too clever for that.’

‘Well, that’s a help,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘That makes everything just perfectly splendid. The Dolphin drops down, the ice closes up, and there we are, the Dolphin below, us on top and the whole of the polar ice-cap between us. They’ll almost certainly never manage to find us again, even if they do fix the ice-machine. Shall we just lie down and die now or shall we first stagger around in circles for a couple of hours and then lie down and die?’

‘It’s tragic,’ Rawlings said gloomily. ‘Not the personal aspect of it, I mean the loss to the United States Navy. I think I may fairly say, Lieutenant, that we are – or were – three promising young men. Well, you and me, anyway. I think Zabrinski there had reached the limit of his potentialities. He reached them a long time ago.’

Rawlings got all this out between chattering teeth and still painful gasps of air. Rawlings, I reflected, was very much the sort of person I would like to have by my side when things began to get awkward, and it looked as if things were going to become very awkward indeed. He and Zabrinski had, as I’d found out, established themselves as the homespun if slightly heavy-handed humorists on the Dolphin; for reasons known only to themselves both men habitually concealed intelligence of a high order and advanced education under a cloak of genial buffoonery.

‘Two hours yet,’ I said. ‘With this wind at our back we can be back in the sub in well under an hour. We’d be practically blown back there.’

‘And the men on Drift Station Zebra?’ Zabrinski asked.

‘We’d have done our best. Just one of those things.’

‘We are profoundly shocked, Dr Carpenter,’ Rawlings said. The tone of genial buffoonery was less noticeable than usual.

‘Deeply dismayed,’ Zabrinski added, ‘by the very idea.’ The words were light, but the lack of warmth in the voice had nothing to do with the bitter wind.

‘The only dismaying thing around here is the level of intelligence of certain simple-minded sailors,’ Hansen said with some asperity. He went on, and I wondered at the conviction in his voice: ‘Sure, Dr Carpenter thinks we should go back. That doesn’t include him. Dr Carpenter wouldn’t turn back now for all the gold in Fort Knox.’ He pushed himself wearily to his feet. ‘Can’t be much more than half a mile to go now. Let’s get it over with.’

In the backwash of light from my torch I saw Rawlings and Zabrinski glance at each other, saw them shrug their shoulders at the same moment. Then they, too, were on their feet and we were on our way again.

Three minutes later Zabrinski broke his ankle.

It happened in an absurdly simple fashion, but for all its simplicity it was a wonder that nothing of the same sort had happened to any of us in the previous three hours. After starting off again, instead of losing our bearing by working to the south and north until we had rounded the end of the ice ridge blocking our path, we elected to go over it. The ridge was all of ten feet high but by boosting and pulling each other we reached the top without much difficulty. I felt my way forward cautiously, using the ice-probe – the torch was useless in that ice-storm and my goggles completely opaque. After twenty feet crawling across the gently downward sloping surface I reached the far side of the ridge and stretched down with the probe.

‘Five feet,’ I called to the others as they came up. ‘It’s only five feet.’ I swung over the edge, dropped down and waited for the others to follow. Hansen came first, then Rawlings, both sliding down easily beside me. What happened to Zabrinski was impossible to see, he either misjudged his distance from the edge or a sudden easing of the wind made him lose his footing. Whatever the cause, I heard him call out, the words whipped away and lost by the wind, as he jumped down beside us. He seemed to land squarely and lightly enough on his feet, then cried out sharply and fell heavily to the ground.

I turned my back to the ice-storm, raised the useless snow-goggles and pulled out my torch. Zabrinski was half-sitting, half-lying on the ice, propped up on his right elbow and cursing steadily and fluently and, as far as I could tell because of the muffling effect of his snow-mask, without once repeating himself. His right heel was jammed in a four-inch crack in the ice, one of the thousands of such fractures and fissures that crisscrossed the pressure areas of the pack: his right leg was bent over at an angle to the outside, an angle normally impossible for any leg to assume. I didn’t need to have a medical diploma hung around my neck to tell that the ankle was gone: either that or the lowermost part of the tibia, for the ankle was so heavily encased in a stout boot with lace binding that most of the strain must have fallen on the shin bone. I hoped it wasn’t a compound fracture, but it was an unreasonable hope: at that acute angle the snapped bone could hardly have failed to pierce the skin. Compound or not, it made no immediate difference, I’d no intention of examining it: a few minutes’ exposure of the lower part of his leg in those temperatures was as good a way as any of ensuring that Zabrinski went through the rest of his life with one foot missing.

We lifted his massive bulk, eased the useless foot out of the crack in the ice and lowered him gently to a sitting position. I unslung the medical kit from my back, knelt beside him and asked: ‘Does it hurt badly?’

‘No, it’s numb, I hardly feel a thing.’ He swore disgustedly. ‘What a crazy thing to do. A little crack like that. How stupid can a man get?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ Rawlings said acidly. He shook his head. ‘I prophesied this, I prophesied this. I said it would end up with me carrying this gorilla here.’