Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
‘Stopped.’
‘Open her up.’
Mills tugged the heavy lever. It moved an inch or two, then stuck. ‘Uncommon stiff,’ he commented.
‘You torpedomen never heard of anything called lubricating oil?’ Hansen demanded. ‘Weight, George, weight.’
Mills applied more weight. The lever moved another couple of inches. Mills scowled, shifted his feet to get maximum purchase and heaved just as Hansen shouted: ‘No! Stop! For God’s sake, stop!’
He was too late. He was a lifetime too late. The lever snapped clear, the heavy circular rear door smashed open as violently as if it had been struck by some gigantic battering ram and a roaring torrent of water burst into the for’ard torpedo room. The sheer size, the enormous column of water was staggering. It was like a giant hosepipe, like one of the outlet pipes of the Boulder Dam. It caught up Lieutenant Mills, already badly injured by the flailing sweep of that heavy door and swept him back across the torpedo room to smash heavily against the after bulkhead; for a moment he half-stood there, pinned by the power of that huge jet, then slid down limply to the deck.
‘Blow all main ballast!’ Hansen shouted into the microphone. He was hanging on to a rear torpedo door to keep from being carried away and even above the thunderous roar of the waters his voice carried clearly. ‘Emergency. Blow all main ballast. Number four tube open to the sea. Blow all main ballast!’ He released his grip, staggered across the deck trying to keep his balance in the madly swirling already foot-deep waters. ‘Get out of here, for God’s sake.’
He should have saved his energy and breath. I was already on my way out of there. I had Mills under the arms and was trying to drag him over the high sill of the for’ard collision bulkhead and I was making just no headway at all. The proper trim of a submarine is a delicate thing at the best of times and even after these few seconds the nose of the Dolphin, heavy with the tons of water that had already poured in, was beginning to cant sharply downwards: trying to drag Mills and at the same time keep my balance on that sloping deck with knee-high water boiling around me was more than I could do; but suddenly Hansen had Mills by the feet and I stumbled off-balance, tripped over the high sill and fell backwards into the confined space between the two collision bulkheads, dragging Mills after me.
Hansen was still on the other side of the bulkhead. I could hear him cursing steadily, monotonously and as if he meant it as he struggled to unhook the heavy door from its standing catch. Because of the steep downward pitch of the Dolphin’s deck he had to lean all his weight against the massive steel door to free the catch, and with his insecure footing among the swirling waters on that sloping slippery deck he was obviously having the devil’s own time trying to release it. I let Mills lie, jumped over the sill, flung my shoulder against the door and with the suddenly added pressure the latch clicked free. The heavy door at once swung half-shut, carrying us along with it and knocking us both off our feet into the battering-ram path of that torrent still gushing from number 4 tube. Coughing and spluttering we scrambled upright again, crossed the sill and, hanging on to a clip handle apiece, tried to drag the door shut.
Twice we tried and twice we failed. The water boiled in through the tube and its level was now almost lipping the top of the sill. With every second that passed the downward angle of the Dolphin increased and with every extra degree of steepness the task of pulling that door uphill against the steadily increasing gravity became more and more difficult.
The water began to spill over the sill on to our feet.
Hansen grinned at me. At least, I thought for a moment he was grinning, but the white teeth were clamped tightly together and there was no amusement at all in his eyes. He shouted above the roar of the water: ‘It’s now or never.’
A well-taken point. It was indeed now or never. At a signal from Hansen we flung our combined weights on to those clip-handles each with one hand to a clip while the other braced against the bulkhead to give maximum purchase. We got the door to within four inches. It swung open. We tried again. Still four inches and I knew that all our strength had gone into that one.
‘Can you hold it for a moment?’ I shouted.
He nodded. I shifted both hands to the lower corner clip, dropped to the deck, braced my feet against the sill and straightened both legs in one convulsive jerk. The door crashed shut, Hansen jammed his clip home, I did the same with mine and we were safe. For the moment we were safe.
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 h
‘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.
‘Where?’ Swanson demanded.
‘Starboard bulkhead.’
‘How much?’
‘A pint or two, just trickling down the bulkhead. And it’s getting worse. It’s getting worse all the time. For God’s sake, Captain, what are we going to do?’
‘What are you going to do?’ Swanson echoed. ‘Mop the damn’ stuff up, of course. You don’t want to live in a dirty ship, do you?’ He hung up.
‘She’s stopped. She’s stopped.’ Four words and a prayer. I’d been wrong about every eye being on the loudspeaker, one pair of eyes had never left the depth gauge, the pair belonging to the youngster at the console.
‘She’s stopped,’ the diving officer confirmed. His voice had a shake in it.
No one spoke. The blood continued to drip unheeded from Hansen’s crushed fingers. I thought that I detected, for the first time, a faint sheen of sweat on Swanson’s brow, but I couldn’t be sure. The deck still shuddered beneath our feet as the giant engines strove to lift the Dolphin out of those deadly depths, the compressed air still hissed into the diesel and fresh-water tanks. I could no longer see the depth gauge, the diving officer had drawn himself up so close to it that he obscured most of it from me.
Ninety seconds passed, ninety seconds that didn’t seem any longer than a leap year, ninety interminable seconds while we waited for the sea to burst into our hull and take us for its own, then the diving officer said: ‘Ten feet. Up.’
‘Are you sure?’ Swanson asked.
‘A year’s pay.’
‘We’re not out of the wood yet,’ Swanson said mildly. ‘The hull can still go — it should have gone a damn’ long time ago. Another hundred feet — that means a couple of tons less pressure to the square foot — and I think we’ll have a chance. At least a fifty-fifty chance. And after that the chances will improve with every foot we ascend; and as we ascend the highly compressed air in the torpedo room will expand, driving out water and so lightening ship.’
‘Still rising,’ the diving officer said. ‘Still rising. Speed of ascent changed.’
Swanson walked across to the diving stand and studied the slow movement of the depth gauge dial. ‘How much fresh water left?’
‘Thirty per cent.’
‘Secure blowing fresh-water ballast. Engines all back two-thirds.’
The roar of compressed air fell away and the deck vibration eased almost to nothing as the engine revolutions fell from emergency power to two-thirds full speed.
‘Speed of ascent unchanged,’ the diving officer reported. ‘One hundred feet up.’
‘Secure blowing diesel.’ The roar of compressed air stopped completely. ‘All back one-third.’
‘Still rising. Still rising.’
Swanson took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and neck. ‘I was a little worried there,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘and I don’t much care who knows it.’ He reached for a microphone and I could hear his voice booming faintly throughout the ship.
‘Captain here. All right, you can all start breathing again. Everything is under control, we’re on our way up. As a point of interest we’re still over three hundred feet deeper than the lowest previous submarine dive ever recorded.’
I felt as if I had just been through the rollers of a giant mangle. We all looked as if we’d just been through the rollers of a giant mangle. A voice said: ‘I’ve never smoked in my life, but I’m starting now. Someone give me a cigarette.’ Hansen said: ‘When we get back to the States do you know what I’m going to do?’
‘Yes,’ Swanson said. ‘You’re going to scrape together your last cent, go up to Groton and throw the biggest, the most expensive party ever for the men who built this boat. You’re too late, Lieutenant, I thought of it first.’ He checked abruptly and said sharply: ‘What’s happened to your hand?’
Hansen lifted his left hand a
‘You did a damn’ fine job there, John,’ Swanson said warmly. ‘Getting that door closed, I mean. Couldn’t have been easy.’
‘It wasn’t. All pats on the back to our friend here,’ Hansen said. ‘He got it closed, not me. And if we hadn’t got it closed —’
‘Or if I’d let you load the torpedoes when you came back last night,’ Swanson said grimly. ‘When we were sitting on the surface and the hatches wide open. We’d have been eight thousand feet down now and very, very dead.’
Hansen suddenly snatched his hand away. ‘My God!’ he said remorsefully. ‘I’d forgotten. Never mind this damned hand of mine. George Mills, the torpedo officer. He caught a pretty bad smack. You’d better see him first. Or Doc Benson.’
I took his hand back. ‘No hurry for either of us. Your fingers first. Mills isn’t feeling a thing.’
‘Good lord!’ Astonishment showed in Hansen’s face, maybe shock at my callousness. ‘When he recovers consciousness —’
‘He’ll never recover consciousness again,’ I said. ‘Lieutenant Mills is dead.’
‘What!’ Swanson’s fingers bit deeply, painfully into my arm. ‘“Dead,” did you say?’
‘That column of water from number four tube came in like an express train,’ I said tiredly. ‘Flung him right back against the after bulkhead and smashed in the occiput — the back of his head — like an eggshell. Death must have been instantaneous.’
‘Young George Mills,’ Swanson whispered. His face had gone very pale. ‘Poor young beggar. His first trip on the Dolphin. And now -just like that. Killed.’
‘Murdered,’ I said.
‘What!’ If Commander Swanson didn’t watch out with his fingers he’d have my upper arm all black and blue. ‘What was that you said?’