Alistair MacLean: Ice Station Zebra

"'The use of the submarine «Dolphin» appears to offer the only slender hope of life for the apparently doomed survivors of Station Zebra. The odds against success must be regarded as heavy in the extreme. Not only will the «Dolphin» have to travel several hundred miles continuously submerged under the polar ice cap, but the possibilities of its being able to break through the ice cap at any given place or to locate the survivors are very remote. But undoubtedly if any ship in the world can do it, it is the «Dolphin», the pride of the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine fleet.'"

Hansen broke off and read on silently for a minute. Then he said: "That's about all. A story giving all the known details of the «Dolphin». That, and a lot of ridiculous rubbish about the enlisted men in the «Dolphin's» crew being the elite of the cream of the U. S. Navy."

Rawlings looked wounded. Zabrinski, the polar bear with the red face, grinned, fished out a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. Then he became serious again and said: "What are those crazy guys doing up there at the top of the world, anyway?"

"Meteorological, lunkhead," Rawlings informed him. "Didn't you hear the lieutenant say so? A big word, mind you," he conceded generously, "but he made a pretty fair stab at it. 'Weather station' to you, Zabrinski."

"I still say they're crazy guys," Zabrinski rumbled. "Why do they do it, Lieutenant?"

"I suggest you ask Dr. Carpenter about it," Hansen said dryly. He stared through the plate-glass windows at the snow whirling grayly through the gathering darkness, his eyes bleak and remote, as if he were already visualizing the doomed men drifting to their death in the frozen immensity of the polar ice cap. "I think he knows a great deal more about it than I do."

"I know a little," I admitted. "There's nothing mysterious or sinister about what I know. Meteorologists now regard the Arctic and the Antarctic as the two great weather factories of the world, the areas primarily responsible for the weather that affects the rest of the hemispheres. We already know a fair amount about Antarctic conditions, but practically nothing about the Arctic. So we pick a suitable ice floe, fill it with huts crammed with technicians and all sorts of instruments, and let them drift around the top of the world for six months or so. Your own people have already set up two or three of those stations. The Russians have set up at least ten, to the best of my knowledge, most of them in the East Siberian Sea."

"How do they establish those camps, Doc?" Rawlings asked.

"Different ways. Your people prefer to establish them in wintertime, when the pack freezes up enough for plane landings to be made. Someone flies out from, usually, Point Barrow in Alaska and searches around the polar pack till they find a suitable ice floe — even when the ice is compacted and frozen together into one solid mass an expert can tell which pieces are going to remain as good-sized floes when the thaw comes and the break-up begins. Then they fly out all huts, equipment, stores and men by ski plane and gradually build the place up.

"The Russians prefer to use a ship in summertime. They generally use the «Lenin», a nuclear-engined ice-breaker. It just batters its way deep into the summer pack, dumps everything and everybody on the ice, and takes off before the big freeze-up starts. We used the same technique for Drift Ice Station Zebra — our one and only ice station. The Russians lent us the «Lenin» — all countries are only too willing to concentrate on meteorological research, since everyone benefits by it — and took us pretty deep into the ice pack north of Franz Josef Land. Zebra has already moved a good bit from its original position — the polar ice cap, just sitting on top of the Arctic Ocean, can't quite manage to keep up with the west-east spin of the earth, so that it has a slow westward movement in relation to the earth's crust. At the present moment It's about four hundred miles due north of Spitsbergen."

"They're still crazy," Zabrinski said. He was silent for a moment, then looked speculatively at me. "You in the limey Navy, Doc?"

"You must forgive Zabrinski's manners, Dr. Carpenter," Rawlings said coldly. "But he's been denied the advantages that the rest of us take for granted. I understand he was born in the Bronx."

"No offense," Zabrinski said equably. "Royal Navy, I meant. Are you, Doc?"

"Attached to it, you might say."

"Loosely, no doubt." Rawlings nodded. "Why so keen on an Arctic holiday, Doc? Mighty cool up there, I can tell you."

"Because the men on Drift Station Zebra are going to be badly in need of medical aid. If there are any survivors, that is."

"We got our own medic on board and he's no slouch with a stethoscope, or so I've heard from several who have survived his treatment. A well-spoken-of quack."

"'Doctor,' you ill-mannered lout," Zabrinski said severely.

"That's what I meant," Rawlings apologized. "It's not often that I get the chance to talk to an educated man like myself, and it just kinda slipped out. The point is, the Dolphin's already all buttoned up on the medical side."

"I'm sure it is," I smiled, "but any survivors we might find are going to be suffering from advanced exposure, frostbite, and probably gangrene. The treatment of those is rather a specialty of mine."

"Is it now?" Rawlings surveyed the depths of his coffee cup. "I wonder how a man gets to be a specialist in those things?"

Hansen stirred and withdrew his gaze from the darkly white world beyond the canteen windows.

"Dr. Carpenter is not on trial for his life," he said mildly. "The counsel for the prosecution will kindly shut up."

This air of easy familiarity between officer and men, the easy camaraderie, the mutually tolerant disparagement with the deceptively misleading overtones of music-hall comedy, was something very rare in my experience but not unique. I'd seen it before, in first-line R.A.F. bomber crews, a relationship found only among a close-knit, close-living group of superbly trained experts, each of whom is keenly aware of his complete interdependence on the others. The casually informal and familiar attitude was a token not of the lack of discipline but the complete reverse, it was the badge of a very high degree of self-discipline, of the regard one man held for another not only as a highly skilled technician in his own field but also as a human being. It was clear, too, that a list of unwritten rules governed their conduct. Offhand and frequently completely lacking in outward respect though Rawlings and Zabrinski were in their attitude toward Lieutenant Hansen, there was an invisible line of propriety over which it was inconceivable that they would ever step: for Hansen's part, he scrupulously avoided any use of his authority when making disparaging remarks at the expense of the two enlisted men. It was also clear, as now, who was boss.

Rawlings and Zabrinski had stopped questioning me and had just embarked upon an enthusiastic discussion of the demerits of the Holy Loch in particular and Scotland in general as a submarine base, when a jeep swept past the canteen windows, the snow whirling whitely, thickly, through the swathe of the headlights. Rawlings jumped to his feet in mid-sentence, then subsided slowly and thoughtfully into his chair.

"The plot," he announced, "thickens."

"You saw who it was?" Hansen asked.

"I did indeed. Andy Bandy, no less."

"I didn't hear that, Rawlings," Hansen said coldly.

"Vice-Admiral John Garvie, U. S. Navy, sir."

"Andy Bandy, eh?" Hansen said pensively. He grinned at me. "Admiral Garvie. Officer Commanding U. S. Naval Forces in Nato. Now, this is very interesting, I submit. I wonder what he's doing here."

"World War III has just broken out," Rawlings announced. "It's just about time for the admiral's first Martini of the day, and no lesser crisis — "