Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
‘The point of no return, I think,’ Hansen said. His breathing, like Rawlings’s, was very quick, very shallow, almost gasping. ‘We can’t take much more of this, Doc.’
‘You ought to listen to Dr Benson’s lectures a bit more,’ I said reprovingly. ‘All this ice-cream and apple pie and lolling around in your bunks is no training for this sort of thing.’
‘Yeah?’ He peered at me. ‘How do you feel?’
‘A mite tired,’ I admitted. ‘Nothing much to speak of.’ Nothing much to speak of, my legs felt as if they were falling off, that was all, but the goad of pride was always a useful one to have to hand. I slipped off my rucksack and brought out the medicinal alcohol. ‘I suggest fifteen minutes’ break. Any more and we’ll just start stiffening up completely. Meantime, a little drop of what we fancy will help keep the old blood corpuscles trudging around.’
‘I thought medical opinion was against alcohol in low temperatures,’ Hansen said doubtfully. ‘Something about opening the pores.’
‘Name me any form of human activity,’ I said, ‘and I’ll find you a group of doctors against it. Spoilsports. Besides, this isn’t alcohol, it’s very fine Scotch whisky.’
‘You should have said so in the first place. Pass it over. Not too much for Rawlings and Zabrinski, they’re not used to the stuff. Any word, Zabrinski?’
Zabrinski, with the walkie-talkie’s aerial up and one earphone tucked in below the hood of his parka, was talking into the microphone through cupped hands. As the radio expert, Zabrinski had been the obvious man to handle the walkie-talkie and I’d given it to him before leaving the submarine. This was also the reason why Zabrinski wasn’t at any time given the position of lead man in our trudge across the pack ice. A heavy fall or immersion in water would have finished the radio he was carrying slung on his back: and if the radio were finished then so would we be, for without the radio not only had we no hope of finding Drift Station Zebra, we wouldn’t have a chance in a thousand of ever finding our way back to the Dolphin again. Zabrinski was built on the size and scale of a medium-sized gorilla and was about as durable; but we couldn’t have treated him more tenderly had he been made of Dresden china.
‘It’s difficult,’ Zabrinski said. ‘Radio’s O.K., but this ice-storm causes such damn’ distortion and squeaking — no, wait a minute, though, wait a minute.’
He bent his head over the microphone, shielding it from the sound of the storm, and spoke again through cupped hands. ‘Zabrinski here . . . Zabrinski. Yeah, we’re all kinda tuckered out, but Doc here seems to think we’ll make it . . . Hang on, I’ll ask him.’
He turned to me. ‘How far do you reckon we’ve come, they want to know.’
‘Four miles.’ I shrugged. ‘Three and a half, four and a half. You guess it.’
Zabrinski spoke again, looked interrogatively at Hansen and myself, saw our headshakes and signed off. He said: ‘Navigating officer says we’re four-five degrees north of where we should be and that we’ll have to cut south if we don’t want to miss Zebra by a few hundred yards.’
It could have been worse. Over an hour had passed since we’d received the last bearing position from the Dolphin and, between radio calls, our only means of navigating had been by judging the strength and direction of the wind in our faces. When a man’s face is completely covered and largely numb it’s not a very sensitive instrument for gauging wind direction — and for all we knew the wind might be either backing or veering. It could have been a lot worse and I said so to Hansen.
‘It could be worse,’ he agreed heavily. ‘We could be travelling in circles or we could be dead. Barring that, I don’t see how it could be worse.’ He gulped down the whisky, coughed, handed the flask top back to me. ‘Things look brighter now. You honestly think we can make it?’
‘A little luck, that’s all. You think maybe our packs are too heavy? That we should abandon some of it here?’ The last thing I wanted to do was to abandon any of the supplies we had along with us: eighty pounds of food, a stove, thirty pounds of compressed fuel tablets, 100 ounces of alcohol, a tent, and a very comprehensive medical kit; but if it was to be abandoned I wanted the suggestion to be left to them, and I was sure they wouldn’t make it.
‘We’re abandoning nothing,’ Hansen said. Either the rest or the whisky had done him good, his voice was stronger, his teeth hardly chattering at all.
‘Let the thought die stillborn,’ Zabrinski said. When first I’d seen him in Scotland he had reminded me of a polar bear and now out here on the ice-cap, huge and crouched in his ice-whitened furs, the resemblance was redoubled. He had the physique of a bear, too, and seemed completely tireless; he was in far better shape than any of us. ‘This weight on my bowed shoulders is like a bad leg: an old friend that gives me pain, but I wouldn’t be without it.’
‘You?’ I asked Rawlings.
‘I am conserving my energy,’ Rawlings announced. ‘I expect to have to carry Zabrinski later on.’
We pulled the starred, abraded and now thoroughly useless snow-goggles over our eyes again, hoisted ourselves stiffly to our feet and moved off to the south to find the end of and round the high ridge that here blocked our path. It was by far the longest and most continuous ridge we’d encountered yet, but we didn’t mind, we required to make a good offing to get us back on course and not only were we doing just that but we were doing it in comparative shelter and saving our strength by so doing. After perhaps four hundred yards the ice wall ended so abruptly, leading to so sudden and unexpected an exposure to the whistling fury of the ice-storm that I was bowled completely off my feet. An express train couldn’t have done it any better. I hung on to the rope with one hand, clawed and scrambled my way back on to my feet with the help of the other, shouted a warning to the others, and then we were fairly into the wind again, holding it directly in our faces and leaning far forward to keep our balance.
We covered the next mile in less than half an hour. The going was easier now, much easier than it had been, although we still had to make small detours round rafted, compacted and broken ice: on the debit side, we were all of us, Zabrinski excepted, pretty far gone in exhaustion, stumbling and falling far more often than was warranted by the terrain and the strength of the ice-gale: for myself, my leaden dragging legs felt as if they were on fire, each step now sent a shooting pain stabbing from ankle clear to the top of the thigh. For all that, I think I could have kept going longer than any of them, even Zabrinski, for I had the motivation, the driving force that would have kept me going hours after my legs would have told me that it was impossible to carry on a step farther. Major John Halliwell. My elder, my only brother. Alive or dead. Was he alive or was he dead, this one man in the world to whom I owed everything I had or had become? Was he dying, at that very moment when I was thinking of him, was he dying? His wife, Mary, and his three children who spoilt and ruined their bachelor uncle as I spoilt and ruined them: whatever way it lay they would have to know and only I could tell them. Alive or dead? My legs weren’t mine, the stabbing fire that tortured them belonged to some other man, not to me. I had to know, I had to know, and if I had to find out by covering whatever miles lay between me and Drift Ice Station Zebra on my hands and knees, then I would do just that. I would find out. And over and above the tearing anxiety as to what had happened to my brother there was yet another powerful motivation, a motivation that the world would regard as of infinitely more importance than the life or death of the commandant of the station. As infinitely more important than the living or dying of the score of men who manned that desolate polar outpost. Or so the world would say.
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 mor
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.’
I laid splints to the injured leg and taped them as tightly as possible over the boot and the furs, trying not to think of the depth of trouble we were in now. Two major blows in one. Not only had we lost the indispensable services of the strongest man in our party, we now had an extra 220 lbs. — at least — of weight, of dead-weight, to carry along with us. Not to mention his 40-lb. pack. Zabrinski might almost have read my thoughts.
‘You’ll have to leave me here, Lieutenant,’ he said to Hansen. His teeth were rattling, with shock and cold. ‘We must be almost there now. You can pick me up on the way back.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Hansen said shortly. ‘You know damn’ well we’d never find you again.’
‘Exactly,’ Rawlings said. His teeth were like Zabrinski’s, stuttering away irregularly like an asthmatic machine-gun. He knelt on the ice to support the injured man’s bulk. ‘No medals for morons. It says so in the ship’s articles.’
‘But you’ll never get to Zebra,’ Zabrinski protested. ‘If you have to carry me —’
<
‘The lieutenant is perfectly correct,’ Rawlings agreed. ‘You aren’t the hero type, Zabrinski. You haven’t the face for it, for one thing. Now clam up while I get some of this gear off your back.’
I finished tightening the splints and pulled mittens and fur gloves back on my silk-clad but already frozen hands. We shared out Zabrinski’s load among the three of us, pulled goggles and snow-masks back into position, hoisted Zabrinski to his one sound leg, turned into the wind and went on our way again. It would be truer to say that we staggered on our way again.
But now, at last and when we most needed it, luck was with us. The ice-cap stretched away beneath our feet level and smooth as the surface of a frozen river. No ridges, no hummocks, no crevasses, not even the tiny cracks one of which had crippled Zabrinski. Just billiard-flat unbroken ice and not even slippery, for its surface had been scoured and abraded by the flying ice-storm.
Each of us took turns at being lead man, the other two supporting a Zabrinski who hopped along in uncomplaining silence on one foot. After maybe three hundred yards of this smooth ice, Hansen, who was in the lead at the moment, stopped so suddenly and unexpectedly that we bumped into him.
‘We’re there!’ he yelled above the wind. ‘We’ve made it. We’re there! Can’t you smell it?’
‘Smell what?’
‘Burnt fuel oil. Burnt rubber. Don’t you get it?’
I pulled down my snow-mask, cupped my hands to my face and sniffed cautiously. One sniff was enough. I hitched up my mask again, pulled Zabrinski’s arm more tightly across my shoulder and followed on after Hansen.