Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

I left Hansen to secure the remaining clips and started knocking the clips off the after collision bulkhead door. I’d only got as far as the first one when the others started falling off by themselves. Petty Officer Bowen and his men, on the other side of that door, needed no telling that we wanted out of there just as fast as possible. The door was pulled open and my eardrums popped with the abrupt fall in air pressure. I could hear the steady echoing roar of air blasting into the ballast tanks under high pressure. I hoisted Mills by the shoulders, strong competent hands lifted him out and over the sill and a couple of seconds later Hansen and I were beside him.

‘In God’s name!’ Petty Officer Bowen said to Hansen. ‘What’s gone wrong?’

‘Number four tube open to the sea.’

‘Jesus!’

‘Clip up that door,’ Hansen ordered. ‘But good.’ He left at a dead run, clawing his way up the sharply sloping deck of the torpedo storage room. I took a look at Lieutenant Mills – one short look was all I needed – and followed after Hansen. Only I didn’t run. Running wasn’t going to help anybody now.

The roar of compressed air filled the ship, the ballast tanks were rapidly emptying, but still the Dolphin continued on its deadly dive, arrowing down for the dark depths of the Arctic: not even the massive compressed-air tanks of the submarine could hope to cope so soon with the effects of the scores of tons of sea-water that had already flooded into the for’ard torpedo room: I wondered bleakly if they would ever be able to cope at all. As I walked along the wardroom passage, using the hand-rail to haul myself up that crazily canted deck, I could feel the entire submarine shudder beneath my feet. No doubt about what that was, Swanson had the great turbines turning over at maximum revolutions, the big bronze propellers threshing madly in reverse, trying to bite deep into the water to slow up the diving submarine.

You can smell fear. You can smell it and you can see it and I could do both as I hauled my way into the control centre of the Dolphin that morning. Not one man as much as flickered an eye in my direction as I passed by the sonar room. They had no eyes for me. They had no eyes for anybody: tense, strained, immobile, with hunted faces, they had eyes for one thing only – the plummetting needle on the depth gauge.

The needle was passing the six-hundred-feet mark. Six hundred feet. No conventional submarine I’d ever been on could have operated at this depth. Could have survived at this depth. Six hundred and fifty. I thought of the fantastic outside pressure that represented and I felt far from happy. Someone else was feeling far from happy also, the young seaman manning the inboard diving seat. His fists were clenched till the knuckles showed white, a muscle was jumping in his cheek, a nerve twitching in his neck and he had the look on his face of a man who sees the bony finger of death beckoning.

Seven hundred feet. Seven hundred and fifty. Eight hundred. I’d never heard of a submarine that had reached that depth and lived. Neither, apparently, had Commander Swanson.

‘We have just set up a new mark, men,’ he said. His voice was calm and relaxed and although he was far too intelligent a man not to be afraid, no trace of it showed in tone or manner. ‘Lowest recorded dive ever, as far as I am aware. Speed of descent?’

‘No change.’

‘It will change soon. The torpedo room must be about full now – apart from the pocket of air compressed under high pressure.’ He gazed at the dial and tapped his teeth thoughtfully with a thumb-nail – this, for Swanson, was probably the equivalent of going into hysterics. ‘Blow the diesel tanks: blow the fresh-water tanks.’ Imperturbable though he sounded, Swanson was close to desperation for this was the counsel of despair: thousands of miles from home and supplies, yet jettisoning all the diesel and drinking water, the lack of either of which could make all the difference between life and death. But, at that moment, it didn’t matter: all that mattered was lightening ship.

‘Main ballast tanks empty’ the diving officer reported. His voice was hoarse and strained.

Swanson nodded, said nothing. The volume of the sound of the compressed air had dropped at least seventy-five per cent and the suddenly comparative silence was sinister, terrifying, as if it meant that the Dolphin was giving up the fight. Now we had only the slender reserves of the fresh water and diesel to save us: at the rate at which the Dolphin was still diving I didn’t see how it could.

Hansen was standing beside me. I noticed blood dripping from his left hand to the deck and when I looked more closely I could see that two of his fingers were broken. It must have happened in the torpedo room. At the moment, it didn’t seem important. It certainly didn’t seem important to Hansen. He was entirely oblivious of it.

The pressure gauge fell farther and still farther. I knew now that nothing could save the Dolphin. A bell rang. Swanson swung down a microphone and pressed a button.

‘Engine-room here,’ a metallic voice came through. ‘We must slow down. Main bearings beginning to smoke, she’ll seize up any moment.’

‘Maintain revolutions.’ Swanson swung back the microphone. The youngster at the diving console, the one with the jumping cheek muscles and the nervous twitch, started to mumble, ‘Oh, dear God, oh, dear God,’ over and over again, softly at first, then the voice climbing up the scale to hysteria. Swanson moved two paces, touched him on the shoulder. ‘Do you mind, laddie? I can hardly hear myself think.’ The mumblings stopped and the boy sat quite still, his face carved from grey granite, the nerve in his neck going like a trip-hammer.

‘How much more of this will she take?’ I asked casually. At least, I meant it to sound casual but it came out like the croak of an asthmatic bullfrog.

‘I’m afraid we’re moving into the realms of the unknown,’ Swanson admitted calmly. ‘One thousand feet plus. If that dial is right, we passed the theoretical implosion point – where the hull should have collapsed – fifty feet ago. At the present moment she’s being subjected to well over a million tons of pressure.’ Swanson’s repose, his glacial calm, was staggering, they must have scoured the whole of America to find a man like that. If ever there was the right man in the right place at the right time it was Commander Swanson in the control room of a runaway submarine diving to depths hundreds of feet below what any submarine had ever experienced before.

‘She’s slowing,’ Hansen whispered.

‘She’s slowing,’ Swanson nodded.

She wasn’t slowing half fast enough for me. It was impossible that the pressure hull could hold out any longer. I wondered vaguely what the end would be like, then put the thought from my mind, I would never know anything about it, anyway. At that depth the pressure must have been about twenty tons to the square foot, we’d be squashed as flat as flounders before our senses could even begin to record what was happening to us.

The engine-room call-up bell rang again. The voice this time was imploring, desperate. ‘We must ease up, Captain. Switch gear is turning red hot. We can see it glowing.’

‘Wait till it’s white hot, then you can complain about it,’ Swanson said curtly. If the engines were going to break down they were going to break down; but until they did he’d tear the life out of them in an attempt to save the Dolphin. Another bell rang.

‘Control room?’ The voice was harsh, high-pitched. ‘Crew’s mess deck here. Water is beginning to come in.’ For the first time, every eye in the control room turned away from the depth gauge and fixed itself on that loudspeaker. The hull was giving at last under the fantastic pressure, the crushing weight. One little hole, one tiny threadlike crack as a starting point and the pressure hull would rip and tear and flatten like a toy under a steamhammer. A quick glance at the strained, shocked faces showed this same thought in every mind.