Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

Hansen didn’t argue. I couldn’t imagine anyone arguing with Commander Swanson. He made for the door. ‘Coming, Doc?’

‘In a moment. Sleep well.’

‘Yeah. Thanks.’ He touched me lightly on the shoulder and smiled through bloodshot and exhausted eyes. ‘Thanks for everything. Goodnight, all.’

When he was gone Swanson said: ‘It was pretty wicked out there to-night?’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it for an old ladies’ home Sunday afternoon outing.’

‘Lieutenant Hansen seems to imagine he’s under some kind of debt to you,’ he went on inconsequentially.

‘Imagination, as you say. They don’t come any better than Hansen. You’re damned lucky to have him as an exec.’

‘I know that.’ He hesitated, then said quietly: ‘I promise you, I won’t mention this again – but, well, I’m most damnably sorry, Doctor.’

I looked at him and nodded slowly. I knew he meant it, I knew he had to say it, but there’s not much you can say in turn to anything like that. I said: ‘Six others died with him, Commander.’

He hesitated again. ‘Do we – do we take the dead back to Britain with us?’

‘Could I have another drop of that excellent bourbon, Commander? Been a very heavy run on your medicinal alcohol in the past few hours, I’m afraid.’ I waited till he had filled my glass then went on: ‘We don’t take them back with us. They’re not dead men, they’re just unrecognisable and unidentifiable lumps of charred matter. Let them stay here.’

His relief was unmistakable and he was aware of it for he went on hurriedly, for something to say: ‘All this equipment for locating and tracking the Russian missiles. Destroyed?’

‘I didn’t check.’ He’d find out for himself soon enough that there had been no such equipment. How he’d react to that discovery in light of the cock-and-bull story I’d spun to himself and Admiral Garvie in the Holy Loch I couldn’t even begin to guess. At the moment I didn’t even care. It didn’t seem important, nothing seemed important, not any more. All at once I felt tired, not sleepy, just deathly tired, so I pushed myself stiffly to my feet, said good-night and left.

Hansen was in his bunk when I got back to his cabin, his furs lying where he had dropped them. I checked that he was no longer awake, slipped off my own furs, hung them up and replaced the Mannlicher-Schoenauer in my case. I lay down in my cot to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Exhausted though I was, I had never felt less like sleep in my life.

I was too restless and unsettled for sleep, too many problems coming all at once were causing a first-class log-jam in my mind. I got up, pulled on shirt and denim pants, and made my way to the control room. I spent the better part of what remained of the night there, pacing up and down, watching two technicians repairing the vastly complicated innards of the ice-machine, reading the messages of congratulation which were still coming in, talking desultorily to the officer on deck and drinking endless cups of coffee. It passed the night for me and although I hadn’t closed an eye I felt fresh and almost relaxed by the time morning came.

At the wardroom breakfast table that morning everyone seemed quietly cheerful. They knew they had done a good job, the whole world was telling them they had done a magnificent job, and you could see that they all regarded that job as being as good as over. No one appeared to doubt Swanson’s ability to blow a hole through the ice. If it hadn’t been for the presence of the ghost at the feast, myself, they would have been positively jovial.

‘We’ll pass up the extra cups of coffee this morning, gentlemen,’ Swanson said. ‘Drift Station Zebra is still waiting for us and even although I’m assured everyone there will survive, they must be feeling damned cold and miserable for all that. The ice-machine has been in operation for almost an hour now, at least we hope it has. We’ll drop down right away and test it and after we’ve loaded the torpedoes – two should do it, I fancy – we’ll blow our way up into this lead at Zebra.’

Twenty minutes later the Dolphin was back where she belonged, 150 feet below the surface of the sea – or the ice-cap. After ten minutes’ manoeuvring, with a close check being kept on the plotting table to maintain our position relative to Drift Station Zebra, it was clear that the ice-machine was behaving perfectly normally again, tracing out the inverted ridges and valleys in the ice with its usual magical accuracy. Commander Swanson nodded his satisfaction.

‘That’s it, then.’ He nodded to Hansen and Mills, the torpedo officer. ‘You can go ahead now. Maybe you’d like to accompany them, Dr Carpenter. Or is loading torpedoes old hat to you?’

‘Never seen it,’ I said truthfully. ‘Thanks, I’d like to go along.’ Swanson was as considerate towards men as he was towards his beloved Dolphin which was why every man in the ship swore by him. He knew, or suspected that, apart from the shock I felt at my brother’s death, I was worried stiff about other things: he would have heard, although he hadn’t mentioned it to me and hadn’t even asked me how I had slept, that I’d spent the night prowling aimlessly and restlessly about the control room: he knew I would be grateful for any distraction, for anything that would relieve my mind, however temporarily, of whatever it was that was troubling it. I wondered just how much that extraordinarily keen brain knew or guessed. But that was an unprofitable line of thought so I put it out of my mind and went along with Hansen and Mills. Mills was another like Raeburn, the navigation officer, he looked to me more like a college undergraduate than the highly competent officer he was, but I supposed it was just another sign that I was growing old.

Hansen crossed to a panel by the diving console and studied a group of lights. The night’s sleep had done Hansen a great deal of good and, apart from the abraded skin on his forehead and round the cheekbones where the ice-spicules of last night had done their work, he was again his normal cheerfully-cynical relaxed self, fresh and rested and fit. He waved his hand at the panel.

‘The torpedo safety light, Dr Carpenter. Each green light represents a closed torpedo tube door. Six doors that open to the sea – bow caps, we call them – six rear doors for loading the torpedoes. Only twelve lights but we study them very, very carefully – just to make sure that all the lights are green. For if any of them were red – any of the top six, that is, which represent the sea doors – well, that wouldn’t be so good, would it?’ He looked at Mills. ‘All green?’

‘All green,’ Mills echoed.

We moved for’ard along the wardroom passage, and dropped down the wide companionway into the crew’s mess. From there we moved into the for’ard torpedo storage room. Last time I’d been there, on the morning after our departure from the Clyde, nine or ten men had been sleeping in their bunks; now all the bunks were empty. Five men were waiting for us: four ratings and a Petty Officer Bowen whom Hansen, no stickler for protocol, addressed as Charlie.

‘You will see now,’ Hansen observed to me, ‘why officers are more highly paid than enlisted men, and deservedly so. While Charlie and his gallant men skulk here behind two sets of collision bulkheads, we must go and test the safety of the tubes. Regulations. Still, a cool head, and an iron nerve: we do it gladly for our men.’

Bowen grinned and unclipped the first collision bulkhead door. We stepped over the eighteen-inch sill, leaving the five men behind, and waited until the door had been clipped up again before opening the for’ard collision bulkhead door and stepping over the second sill into the cramped torpedo room. This time the door was swung wide open and hooked back on a heavy standing catch.