Ice Station Zebra (19 page)

      Back in the collision compartment we gave the prearranged taps on the door. Almost at once we heard the subdued hum of a motor as the high-speed extraction pumps in the torpedo room got to work, forcing the water out through the hull. Slowly the water level dropped, and as it dropped, the air pressure as slowly decreased. Degree by degree the _Dolphin_ began to come back on even keel. When the water was finally below the level of the for'ard sill, we gave another signal and the remaining over-pressure air was slowly bled out through the hose.
      A few minutes later, as I was stripping off the rubber suit, Swanson asked, "Any trouble?"
      "None. You picked a good man in Murphy."
      "The best. Many thanks, Doctor." He lowered his voice. "You wouldn't by any chance--"
      "You know damned well I would," I said. "I did. Not sealing wax, not chewing gum, not paint. Glue, Commander Swanson. That's how they blocked the test-cock inlet. The oldfashioned animal-hide stuff that comes out of a tube. Ideal for the job."
      "I see," he said, and walked away.
      The _Dolphin_ shuddered along its entire length as the torpedo hissed out of its tube--number 3 tube, the only one in the submarine Swanson could safely rely upon.
      "Count it down," Swanson said to Hansen. "Tell me when we should hit, when we should hear it hit."
      Hansen looked at the stop watch in his bandaged hand and nodded. The seconds passed slowly. I could see Hansen's lips move silently. Then he said, "We should be hitting-- now," and two or three seconds later, "We should be hearing--now."
      Whoever had been responsible for the settings and time calculations on that torpedo had known what he was about. Just at Hansen's second "now" we felt as much as heard the clanging vibration along the _Dolphin's_ hull as the shock waves from the exploding warhead reached us. The deck shook briefly beneath our feet, but the impact was nowhere nearly as powerful as I had expected. I was relieved. I didn't have to be a clairvoyant to know that everyone was relieved. No submarine bad ever before been in the vicinity of a torpedo detonating under the ice pack; no one had known to what extent the tamping effect of overhead ice might have increased the pressure and destructive effect of the lateral shock waves.
      "Nicely," Swanson murmured. "Very nicely done indeed. Both ahead one third. I hope that bang had considerably more effect on the ice than it had on our ship." He said to Benson at the ice machine, "Let us know as soon as we reach that lead, will you?"
      He moved to the plotting table. Raeburn looked up and said: "Five hundred yards gone, five hundred to go."
      "All stop," Swanson said. The slight vibration of the engines died away. "We'll just mosey along very carefully. That explosion may have sent blocks of ice weighing a few tons apiece pretty far down into the sea. I don't want to be doing any speed at all if we meet any of them on the way up."
      "Three hundred yards to go," Raeburn said.
      "All clear. All clear all around," the sonar room reported.
      "Still thick ice," Benson intoned. "Ah! That's it. We're under the lead. Thin ice. Well, five or six feet."
      "Two hundred yards," Raeburn said. "It checks."
      We drifted slowly onward. At Swanson's orders the propellers kicked over once or twice, then stopped again.
       "Fifty yards," Raeburn said. "Close enough."
      "Ice reading?"
      "No change. Five feet, about."
      "Speed?"
      "One knot."
      "Position?"
      "One thousand yards exactly. Passing directly under target area." -
      "And nothing on the ice machine? Nothing at all?"
      "Not a thing." Benson shrugged and looked at Swanson. The captain walked across and watched the inked stylus draw its swiftly etched vertical lines on the paper.
      "Peculiar, to say the least," Swanson murmured. "Seven hundred pounds of very high-grade amatol in that torpedo. Must be unusually tough ice in those parts. Again, to say the least. We'll go up to ninety feet and make a few passes under the area. Floodlights on, TV on."
      So we went up to ninety feet and made a few passes and nothing came of it. The water was completely opaque, the floods and camera useless. The ice machine stubbornly registered four to six feet--it was impossible to be more accurate--all the time.
      "Well, that seems to be it," Hansen said. "We back off and try again?"
      "Well, I don't know," Swanson said pensively. "What do you say we just try to shoulder our way up?"
      "'Shoulder our way up?'" Hansen wasn't with him; neither was I. "What kind of shoulder is going to heave five feet of ice to one side?"
      "I'm not sure. The thing is, we've been working from unproved assumptions and that's always a dangerous basis. We've been assuming that if the torpedo didn't blow the ice to smithereens, it would at least blow a hole in it. Maybe it doesn't happen that way at all. Maybe there's just a big upward pressure of water distributed over a sizable area that heaves the ice up and breaks it into pretty big chunks that just settle back into the water again in their original position in the pattern of a dried-up mud hole with tiny cracks all around the isolated sections. But with cracks all around. Narrow cracks, but there. Cracks so narrow that the ice machine couldn't begin to register them even at the slow speed we were doing." He turned to Raeburn. "What's our position?"
      "Still in the center of the target area, sir."
      "Take her up till we touch the ice," Swanson said.
      He didn't have to add any cautions about gentleness. The diving officer took her up like floating thistledown until we felt a gentle bump.
      "Hold her there," Swanson said. He peered at the TV screen, but the water was so opaque that all definition vanished halfway up the sail. He nodded to the diving officer. "Kick her up--hard."
      Compressed air roared into the ballast tanks. Seconds passed without anything happening; then all at once the _Dolphin_ shuddered as something very heavy and very solid seemed to strike the hull. A moment's pause, another solid shock, and then we could see the edge of a giant segment of ice sliding down the face of the TV screen.
      "Well, now, I believe I might have had a point there," Swanson remarked. "We seem to have hit a crack between two chunks of ice almost exactly in the middle. Depth?"
      "Forty-five."
      "Fifteen feet showing. And I don't think we can expect to lift the hundreds of tons of ice lying over the rest of the hull. Plenty of positive buoyancy?"
      "All we'll ever want."
      "Then we'll call it a day. Okay, quartermaster, away you go up top and tell us what the weather is like."
      I didn't wait to hear what the weather was like. I was interested enough in it, but I was even more interested in making sure that Hansen didn't come along to his cabin in time to find me putting on the Mannlicher-Schoenauer along with my furs. But this time I stuck it not in its special holster but in the outside pocket of my caribou trousers. I thought it might come in handier there.
      It was exactly noon when I clambered over the edge of the bridge and used a dangling rope to slide down a great rafted chunk of ice that slanted up almost to the top of the sail. The sky had about as much light in it as a late twilight in winter when the sky is heavy with gray cloud. The air was as bitter as ever, but, for all that, the weather had improved. The wind was down now, backed around to the northeast, seldom gusting at more than twenty mph, the ice spicules rising no more than two or three feet above the ice cap. Nothing to tear your eyes out. To be able to see where you were going on that damned ice cap made a very pleasant change.
      There were eleven of us altogether: Commander Swanson himself, Dr. Benson, eight enlisted men and myself. Four of the men were carrying stretchers with them.
      Even 700 pounds of the highest grade conventional explosive on the market hadn't managed to do very much damage to the ice in that lead. Over an area of seventy yards square or thereabouts the ice had fractured into large fragments curiously uniform in size and roughly hexagonal in shape but fallen back so neatly into position that you couldn't have put a hand down most of the cracks between the adjacent fragments of ice: many of the cracks, indeed, were already beginning to come together. A poor enough performance for a torpedo warhead--until you remembered that though most of its disruptive power must have been directed downward, it had still managed to lift and fracture a chunk of the ice cap weighing maybe 5,000 tons. Looked at that way, it didn't seem such a puny effort after all. Maybe we'd been pretty lucky to achieve what we had.
      We walked across to the eastern edge of the lead, scrambled up onto the ice pack proper, and turned around to get our bearings, to line up on the unwavering white finger of the searchlight that reached straight up into the gloom of the sky. No chance of getting lost this time. While the wind stayed quiet and the spicules stayed down, you could see that lamp in the window ten miles away.
      We didn't even need to take any bearings. A few steps away and up from the edge of the lead and we could see it at once. Drift Station Zebra. Three huts, one of them badly charred, five blackened skeletons of what had once been huts. Desolation.
      "So that's it," Swanson said in my ear. "Or what's left of it. I've come a long way to see this."
      "You nearly went a damned sight longer and never saw it," I said. "To the floor of the Arctic, I mean. Pretty, isn't it?"
      Swanson shook his head slowly and moved on. There were only a hundred yards to go. I led the way to the nearest intact hut, opened the door, and walked inside.
      The hut was about thirty degrees warmer than the last time I had been there, but still bitterly cold. Only Zabrinski and Rawlings were awake. The hut smelled of burnt fuel, disinfectant, iodine, morphine and a peculiar aroma arising from a particularly repulsive-looking hash that Rawlings was industriously churning around in a large iron pot on the low stove.
      "Ah, there you are," Rawlings said conversationally. He might have been greeting a neighbor who'd phoned a minute previously to see if he could come across to borrow the lawn mower, rather than greeting men he'd been fairly certain he'd never see again. "The timing is perfect--just about to ring the dinner bell, Captain. Care for some Maryland chicken--I think?"
      "Not just at the moment, thank you," Swanson said politely. "Sorry about the ankle, Zabriaski. How is it?"
      "Just fine, Captain, just fine. In a plaster cast." He thrust out a foot, stiffly. "The doc here--Dr. Jolly--fixed me up real nice. Had much trouble last night?" This was for me.
      "Dr. Carpenter had a great deal of trouble last night," Swanson said. "And we've had a considerable amount since. But later. Bring that stretcher in here. You first, Zabrinski. As for you, Rawlings, you can stop making like Escoffier. The _Dolphin's_ less than a couple of hundred yards from here. We'll have you all aboard in half an hour."
      I heard a shuffling noise behind me. Dr. Jolly was on his feet, helping Captain Folsom to his. Folsom looked even weaker than he had yesterday; his face, bandaged though it was, certainly looked worse.
      "Captain Folsom," I said by way of introduction. "Dr. Jolly. This is Commander Swanson, captain of the _Dolphin_. Dr. Benson."
      "'_Dr_.' Benson, you said, old boy?" Jolly lifted an eyebrow. "My word, the pill-rolling competition's getting a little fierce in these parts. And 'Commander.' By Jove, but we're glad to see you fellows." The combination of the rich Irish brogue and the English slang of the twenties fell more oddly than ever on my ear; he reminded me of educated Singhalese I'd met with their precise, lilting, standard southern English interlarded with the catch phrases of forty years ago. Topping, old bean, simply too ripping for words.
      "I can understand that." Swanson smiled. He looked around at the huddled, unmoving men on the floor, men who might have been living or dead but for the immediate and smoky condensation from their shallow breathing, and his smile faded. He said to Captain Folsom, "I cannot tell you how sorry I am. This has been a dreadful thing."
      Folsom stirred and said something, but we couldn't make out what it was. Although his shockingly burnt face had been bandaged since I'd seen him last, it didn't seem to have done him any good; he was talking inside his mouth, all right, but the ravaged cheek and mouth had become so paralyzed that his speech didn't emerge as any recognizable language. The good side of his face, the left, was twisted and furrowed, and the eye above almost completely shut. This had nothing to do with any sympathetic neuro-muscular reaction caused by the wickedly charred right cheek. The man was in agony. I said to Jolly, "No morphine left?" I'd left him, I'd thought, with more than enough of it.-
      "Nothing left," he said tiredly. "I used it all. All of it."
      "Dr. Jolly worked all through the night," Zabrinski said quietly. "Eight hours. Rawlings and himself and Kinnaird. They never stopped once."
      Benson had his medical kit open. Jolly saw it and smiled, a smile of relief, a smile of exhaustion. He was in far worse shape than he'd been the previous evening. He hadn't had all that much in him when he'd started. But he'd worked. He'd worked a solid eight hours. He'd even fixed up Zabrinski's ankle. A good doctor. Conscientious. Hippocratic, anyway. He was entitled to relax. Now that there were other doctors here, he'd relax. But not before.
      He began to ease Folsom into a sitting position and I helped him. He slid down himself, his back to the wall. "Sorry and all that, you know," he said. His bearded frost-bitten face twisted into the semblance of a grin. "A poor host."
      "You can leave everything to us now, Dr. Jolly," Swanson said quietly. "You've got all the help that's going. One thing. All those men fit to be moved?"
      "I don't know." Jolly rubbed an arm across bloodshot, smudged eyes. "I don't know. One or two of them slipped pretty far back last night. It's the cold. Those two. Pneumonia, I think. Something an injured man could fight off in a few days back home can be fatal here. It's the cold," he repeated. "Uses up ninety per cent of his energy, not in fighting illness and infection, but just generating enough heat to stay alive."
      "Take it easy," Swanson said. "Maybe we'd better change our minds about that half-hour to get you all aboard. Who's first for the ambulance, Dr. Benson?" Not Dr. Carpenter. Dr. Benson. Well, Benson was his own ship's doctor. But pointed, all the same. A regrettable coolness, as sudden in its onset as it was marked in degree, had appeared in his attitude toward me, and I didn't have to be beaten over the head with a heavy club to guess at the reason for the abrupt change.