Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
The smooth ice ended in another few feet. The ice sloped up sharply to a level plateau and it took the three of us all of what pitifully little strength remained to drag Zabrinski up after us. The acrid smell of burning seemed to grow more powerful with every step we took. I moved forward, away from the others, my back to the storm, goggles down and sweeping the ice with semicircular movements of my torch. The smell was strong enough now to make my nostrils wrinkle under the mask. It seemed to be coming from directly ahead. I turned round into the wind, protectively cupped hand over my eyes, and as I did my torch struck something hard and solid and metallic. I lifted my torch and vaguely through the driving ice I could just make out the ghostly hooped steel skeleton, ice-coated on the windward side, fire-charred on the leeward side, of what had once been a Nissen-shaped hut.
We had found Drift Ice Station Zebra.
I waited for the others to come up, guided them past the gaunt and burnt-out structure, then told them to turn backs to wind and lift their goggles. For maybe ten seconds we surveyed the ruin in the light of my torch. No one said anything. Then we turned round into the wind again.
Drift Station Zebra had consisted of eight separate huts, four in each of two parallel rows, thirty feet between the two rows, twenty feet between each two huts in the rows — this to minimise the hazard of fire spreading from hut to hut. But the hazard hadn’t been minimised enough. No one could be blamed for that. No one, except in the wildest flights of nightmarish imagination, could have envisaged what must indeed have happened — exploding tanks and thousands of gallons of blazing oil being driven through the night by a gale-force wind. And, by a doubley inescapable irony, fire, without which human life on the polar ice-cap cannot survive, is there the most dreaded enemy of all: for although the entire ice-cap consists of water, frozen water, there is nothing that can melt that water and so put out the fire. Except fire itself. I wondered vaguely what had happened to the giant chemical fire-extinguishers housed in every hut.
Eight huts, four in each row. The first two on either side were completely gutted. No trace remained of the walls, which had been of two layers of weather-proofed bonded ply that had enclosed the insulation of shredded glass-fibre and kapok: on all of them even the aluminium-sheeted roofs had disappeared. In one of the huts we could see charred and blackened generator machinery, ice-coated on the windward side, bent and twisted and melted almost out of recognition: one could only wonder at the furnace ferocity of the heat responsible.
The fifth hut — the third on the right-hand side — was a gutted replica of the other four, the framing even more savagely twisted by the heat. We were just turning away from this, supporting Zabrinski and too sick at heart even to speak to each other, when Rawlings called out something unintelligible. I leaned closer to him and pulled back my parka hood.
‘A light!’ he shouted. ‘A light. Look, Doc — across there!’
And a light there was, a long narrow strangely white vertical strip of light from the hut opposite the charred wreck by which we stood. Leaning sideways into the storm we dragged Zabrinski across the intervening gap. For the first time my torch showed something that was more than a bare framework of steel. This was a hut. A blackened, scorched and twisted hut with a roughly nailed-on sheet of plywood where its solitary window had been, but nevertheless a hut. The light was coming from a door standing just ajar at the sheltered end. I laid my hand on the door, the one unscorched thing I’d seen so far in Drift Station Zebra. The hinges creaked like a rusty gate in a cemetery at midnight and the door gave beneath my hand. We passed inside.
Suspended from a hook in the centre of the ceiling a hissing Coleman lamp threw its garish light, amplified by the glittering aluminium ceiling, over every corner and detail of that eighteen by ten hut. A thick but transparent layer of ice sheathed the aluminium roof except for a three-foot circle directly above the lamp, and the ice spread from the ceiling down the plywood walls all the way to the door. The wooden floor, too, was covered with ice, except where the bodies of the men lay. There may have been ice under them as well. I couldn’t tell.
My first thought, conviction rather, and one that struck at me with a heart-sapping sense of defeat, with a chill that even the polar storm outside had been unable to achieve, was that we had arrived too late. I had seen many dead men in my life, I knew what dead men looked like, and now I was looking at just that many more. Shapeless, huddled, lifeless forms lying under a shapeless mass of blankets, mackinaws, duffels and furs, I wouldn’t have bet a cent on my chances of finding one heart-beat among the lot of them. Lying packed closely together in a rough semicircle at the end of the room remote from the door, they were utterly still, as unmoving as men would be if they had been lying that way for a frozen eternity. Apart from the hissing of the pressure-lamp there was no sound inside the hut other than the metallic drumfire of the ice-spicules against the ice-sheathed eastern wall of the hut.
Zabrinski was eased down into a sitting position against a wall. Rawlings unslung the heavy load he was carrying on his back, unwrapped the stove, pulled off his mittens and started fumbling around for the fuel tablets. Hansen pulled the door to behind him, slipped the buckles of his rucksack and wearily let his load of tinned food drop to the floor of the shack.
For some reason, the voice of the storm outside and the hissing of the Coleman inside served only to heighten the deathly stillness in the hut, and the unexpected metallic clatter of the falling cans made me jump. It made one of the dead men jump, too. The man nearest to me by the left-hand wall suddenly moved, rolled over and sat up, bloodshot faded eyes staring out unbelievingly from a frostbitten, haggard and cruelly burnt face, the burns patchily covered by a long dark stubble of beard. For long seconds he looked at us unblinkingly, then, some obscure feeling of pride making him ignore the offer of my outstretched arm, he pushed himself shakily and with obvious pain to his feet. Then the cracked and peeling lips broke into a grin.
‘You’ve been a bleedin’ long time getting here.’ The voice was hoarse and weak and cockney as the Bow Bells themselves. ‘My name’s Kinnaird. Radio operator.’
‘Whisky?’ I asked.
He grinned again, tried to lick his cracked lips, and nodded. The stiff tot of whisky went down his throat like a man in a barrel going over the Niagara Falls, one moment there, the next gone for ever. He bent over, coughing harshly until the tears came to his eyes, but when he straightened life was coming back into those same lacklustre eyes and colour touching the pale emaciated cheeks.
‘If you go through life saying “Hallo” in this fashion, mate,’ he observed, ‘then you’ll never lack for friends.’ He bent and shook the shoulder of the man beside whom he had been lying. ‘C’mon, Jolly, old boy, where’s your bleedin’ manners? We got company.’
It took quite a few shakes to get Jolly, old boy, awake, but when he did come to he was completely conscious and on his feet with remarkable speed in the one case and with remarkable nimbleness in the other. He was a short, chubby character with china-blue eyes, and although he was as much in need of a shave as Kinnaird, there was still colour in his face and the round good-humoured face was far from emaciated: but frostbite had made a bad mess of both mouth and nose. The china-blue eyes, flecked with red and momentarily wide in surprise, crinkled into a grin of welcome. Jolly, old boy, I guess, would always adjust fast to circumstances.
‘Visitors, eh?’ His deep voice held a rich Irish brogue. ‘And damned glad we are to see you, too. Do the honours, Jeff.’
‘We haven’t introduced ourselves,’ I said. I’m Dr Carpenter and this —’
‘Regular meeting of the B.M.A., old boy,’ Jolly said. I was to find out later that he used the phrase ‘old boy’ in every second or third sentence, a mannerism which went strangely with his Irish accent.
‘Dr Jolly?’
‘The same. Resident medical officer, old boy.’
‘I see. This is Lieutenant Hansen of the United States Navy submarine Dolphin —’
&n
‘Explanations can wait. Torpedoman Rawlings. Radioman Zabrinski.’ I glanced down at the huddled men on the floor, some of them already stirring at the sound of voices, one or two propping themselves up on their elbows. ‘How are they?’
‘Two or three pretty bad burn cases,’ Jolly said. ‘Two or three far gone with cold and exhaustion, but not so far gone that food and warmth wouldn’t have them right as rain in a few days. I made them all huddle together like this for mutual warmth.’
I counted them. Including Jolly and Kinnaird, there were twelve all told. I said: ‘Where are the others?’
‘The others?’ Kinnaird looked at me in momentary surprise, then his face went bleak and cold. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘In the next hut, mate.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ He rubbed a weary forearm across bloodshot eyes. ‘Because we don’t fancy sleeping with a roomful of corpses, that’s why.’
‘Because you don’t —’ I broke off and stared down at the men at my feet. Seven of them were awake now, three of them propped on elbows, four still lying down, all seven registering various degrees of dazed bewilderment: the three who were still asleep — or unconscious — had their faces covered by blankets. I said slowly. ‘There were nineteen of you.’
‘Nineteen of us,’ Kinnaird echoed emptily. ‘The others — well, they never had a chance.’
I said nothing. I looked carefully at the faces of the conscious men, hoping to find among them the one face I wanted to see, hoping perhaps that I had not immediately recognised it because frostbite or hunger or burns had made it temporarily unrecognisable. I looked very carefully indeed and I knew that I had never seen any of those faces before.
I moved over to the first of the three still sleeping figures and lifted the blanket covering the face. The face of a stranger. I let the blanket drop. Jolly said in puzzlement: ‘What’s wrong? What do you want?’
I didn’t answer him. I picked my way round recumbent men, all staring uncomprehendingly at me, and lifted the blanket from the face of the second sleeping man. Again I let the blanket drop and I could feel my mouth go dry, the slow heavy pounding of my heart. I crossed to the third man, then stood there hesitating, knowing I must find out, dreading what I must find. Then I stooped quickly and lifted the blanket. A man with a heavily bandaged face. A man with a broken nose and a thick blond beard. A man I had never seen in my life before. Gently I spread the blanket back over his face and straightened up. Rawlings, I saw, already had the solid-fuel stove going.
‘That should bring the temperature up to close to freezing,’ I said to Dr Jolly. ‘We’ve plenty of fuel. We’ve also brought food, alcohol, a complete medical kit. If you and Kinnaird want to start in on those things now I’ll give you a hand in a minute. Lieutenant, that was a polynya, that smooth stretch we crossed just before we got here? A frozen lead?’
‘Couldn’t be anything else.’ Hansen was looking at me peculiarly, a wondering expression on his face. ‘These people are obviously in no fit state to travel a couple of hundred yards, far less four or five miles. Besides, the skipper said he was going to be squeezed down pretty soon. So we whistle up the Dolphin and have them surface at the back door?’
‘Can he find that polynya — without the ice-machine, I mean?’
‘Nothing simpler. I’ll take Zabrinski’s radio, move a measured two hundred yards to the north, send a bearing signal, move two hundred yards to the south and do the same. They’ll have our range to a yard. Take a couple of hundred yards off that and the Dolphin will find itself smack in the middle of the polynya.’
‘But still under it. I wonder how thick that ice is. You had an open lead to the west of the camp some time ago, Dr Jolly. How long ago?’
‘A month. Maybe five weeks. I can’t be sure.’
‘How thick?’ I asked Hansen.
‘Five feet, maybe six. Couldn’t possibly break through it. But the captain’s always had a hankering to have a go with his torpedoes.’ He turned to Zabrinski. ‘Still fit to operate that radio of yours?’
I left them to it. I’d hardly been aware of what I’d been saying, anyway. I felt sick and old and empty and sad, and deathly tired. I had my answer now. I’d come 12,000 miles to find it, I’d have gone a million to avoid it. But the inescapable fact was there and now nothing could ever change it. Mary, my sister-in-law and her three wonderful children — she would never see her husband again, they would never see their father again. My brother was dead and no one was ever going to see him again. Except me. I was going to see him now.
I went out, closing the door behind me, moved round the corner of the hut and lowered my head against the storm. Ten seconds later I reached the door of the last hut in the line. I used the torch to locate the handle, twisted it, pushed and passed inside.
Once it had been a laboratory: now it was a charnel house, a house of the dead. The laboratory equipment had all been pushed roughly to one side and the cleared floor space covered with the bodies of dead men. I knew they were dead men, but only because Kinnaird had told me so: hideously charred and blackened and grotesquely misshapen as they were, those carbonised and contorted lumps of matter could have been any form of life or indeed no form of life at all. The stench of incinerated flesh and burnt diesel fuel was dreadful. I wondered which of the men in the other hut had had the courage, the iron resolution, to bring those grisly burdens, the shockingly disfigured remains of their former comrades into this hut. They must have had strong stomachs.
Death must have been swift, swift for all of them. Theirs had not been the death of men trapped by fire, it had been the death of men who had themselves been on fire. Caught, drenched, saturated by a gale-borne sea of burning oil, they must have spent the last few seconds of life as incandescently blazing human torches before dying in insane screaming agony. They must have died as terribly as men can ever die.
Something about one of the bodies close to me caught my attention. I stooped and focused the torch beam on what had once been a right hand, now no more than a blackened claw with the bone showing through. So powerful had been that heat that it had warped, but not melted, the curiously shaped gold ring on the third finger. I recognised that ring, I had been with my sister-in-law when she had bought it.
I was conscious of no grief, no pain, no revulsion. Perhaps, I thought dully, those would come later when the initial shock had worn off. But I didn’t think so. This wasn’t the man I remembered so well, the brother to whom I owed everything, a debt that could never now be repaid. This charred mass of matter before me was a stranger, so utterly different from the man who lived on in my memory, so changed beyond all possibility of recognition that my numbed mind in my exhausted body just could not begin to bridge the gap.
As I stood there, staring down, something ever so slightly offbeat about the way the body lay caught my professional attention. I stooped low, very low, and remained bent over for what seemed a long time. I straightened, slowly, and as I did I heard the door behind me open. I whirled round and saw that it was Lieutenant Hansen. He pulled down his snow-mask, lifted up his goggles, looked at me and then at the man at my feet. I could see shock draining expression and colour from his face. Then he looked up at me.
‘So you lost out, Doc?’ I could hardly hear the husky whisper above the voice of the storm. ‘God, I’m sorry.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your brother?’ He nodded at the man at my feet.
‘Commander Swanson told you?’
‘Yeah. Just before we left. That’s why we came.’ His gaze moved in horrified fascination over the floor of the hut, and his face was grey, like old parchment. ‘A minute, Doc, just a minute.’ He turned and hurried through the doorway.
When he came back he looked better, but not much. He said: ‘Commander Swanson said that that was why he had to let you go.’
‘Who else knows?
‘Skipper and myself. No one else.’
‘Keep it that way, will you? As a favour to me.’
‘If you say so, Doc.’ There was curiosity in his face now, and puzzlement, but horror was still the dominant expression. ‘My God, have you ever seen anything like it?’
‘Let’s get back to the others,’ I said. ‘We’re doing nobody any good by staying here.’
He nodded without speaking. Together we made our way back to the other hut. Apart from Dr Jolly and Kinnaird, three other men were on their feet now, Captain Folsom, an extraordinarily tall thin man with savagely burnt face and hands who was second in command of the base, Hewson, a dark-eyed taciturn character, a tractor driver and engineer who had been responsible for the diesel generators, and a cheerful Yorkshireman, Naseby, the camp cook. Jolly, who had opened my medical kit and was applying fresh bandages to the arms of the men still lying down, introduced them, then turned back to his job. He didn’t seem to need my help, not for the moment, anyway. I heard Hansen say to Zabrinski: ‘In contact with the Dolphin!’
‘Well, no.’ Zabrinski stopped sending his call-sign and shifted slightly to ease his broken ankle. ‘I don’t quite know how to put this, Lieutenant, but the fact is that this little ol’ set here seems to have blown a fuse.’
‘Well, now,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘That is clever of you, Zabrinski. You mean you can’t raise them?’
‘I can hear them, they can’t hear me.’ He shrugged, apologetically. ‘Me and my clumsy feet, I guess. It wasn’t just only my ankle that went when I took that tumble out there.’
‘Well, can’t you repair the damn’ thing?’
‘I don’t think so, Lieutenant.’
‘Damn it, you’re supposed to be a radioman.’
‘That’s so,’ Zabrinski acknowledged reasonably. ‘But I’m not a magician. And with a couple of numbed and frozen hands, no tools, an old-type set without a printed circuit and the code signs in Japanese — well, even Marconi would have called it a day.’