Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
‘“Murdered,” I said. “Murdered,” I meant.’
Swanson stared at me for a long moment, his face empty of expression, but the eyes strained and tired and suddenly somehow old. He wheeled, walked across to the diving officer, spoke a few words to him and returned. ‘Come on,’ he said abruptly. ‘You can fix up the lieutenant’s hand in my cabin.’
SEVEN
‘You realise the seriousness of what you are saying?’ Swanson asked. ‘You are making a grave accusation —’
‘Come off it,’ I said rudely. ‘This is not a court of law and I’m not accusing anyone. All I say is that murder has been done. Whoever left that bow-cap door open is directly responsible for the death of Lieutenant Mills.’
‘What do you mean “left the door open”? Who says anyone left the door open? It could have been due to natural causes. And even if — I can’t see it — that door had been left open, you can’t accuse a man of murder because of carelessness or forgetfulness or because —’
‘Commander Swanson,’ I said. ‘I’ll go on record as saying that you are probably the best naval officer I have ever met. But being best at that doesn’t mean that you’re best at everything. There are noticeable gaps in your education, Commander, especially in the appreciation of the finer points of skulduggery. You require an especially low and devious type of mind for that and I’m afraid that you just haven’t got it. Doors left open by natural causes, you say. What natural causes?’
‘We’ve hit the ice a few hefty smacks,’ Swanson said slowly. ‘That could have jarred it open. Or when we poked through the ice last night a piece of ice, a stalactite, say, could have —’
‘Your tubes are recessed, aren’t they. Mighty oddly-shaped stalactite that would go down then bend in at a right angle to reach the door — and even then it would only shut it more tightly.’
‘The doors are tested every time we’re in harbour,’ Commander Swanson persisted quietly. ‘They’re also opened when we open tubes to carry out surface trimming tests in dock. Any dockyard has pieces of waste, rope and other rubbish floating around that could easily have jammed a door open.’
‘The safety lights showed the doors shut.’
‘They could have been opened just a crack, not enough to disengage the safety contact.’
‘Open a crack! Why do you think Mills is dead? If you’ve ever seen the jet of water that hits the turbine blades in a hydro-electric plant, then you’ll know how that water came in. A crack? My God! How are those doors operated?’
‘Two ways. Remote control, hydraulic, just press a button: then there are manually-operated levers in the torpedo room itself.’
I turned to Hansen. He was sitting on the bunk beside me, his face pale as I splinted his broken fingers. I said: Those hand-operated levers. Were they in the shut position?’
‘You heard me say so in there. Of course they were. First thing we always check.’
‘Somebody doesn’t like you,’ I said to Swanson. ‘Or somebody doesn’t like the Dolphin. Or somebody knew that the Dolphin was going searching for the Zebra survivors and they didn’t like that either. So they sabotaged the ship. You will remember you were rather surprised you didn’t have to correct the Dolphin’s trim? It had been your intention to carry out a slow-time dive to check the underwater trim because you thought that would have been affected by the fact that you had no torpedoes in the for’ard tubes. But surprise, surprise. She didn’t need any correction.’
‘I’m listening,’ Swanson said quietly. He was with me now. He was with me all the way. He cocked an eyebrow as we heard water flooding back into the tanks. The repeater gauge showed 200 feet, Swanson must have ordered his diving officer to level off at that depth. The Dolphin was still canted nose downwards at an angle of about 25°.
‘She didn’t need any correcting because some of her tubes were already full of water. For all I know maybe number three tube, the one we tested and found O.K. is the only one that is not full of water. Our clever little pal left the doors open, disconnected the hand-operated levers so that they appeared to be in the shut position when they were actually open and crossed over a few wires in a junction box so that the open position showed green while the closed showed red. A man who knew what he was about could have done it in a few minutes. Two men who knew what they were about could have done it in no time at all. I’ll lay anything you like that when you’re eventually in a position to check you’ll find the levers disconnected, the wires crossed and the inlets of the test-cocks blocked with sealing-wax, quick-drying paint or even chewinggum so that when the test-cocks were opened nothing would show and you would assume the tubes to be empty.’
‘There was a trickle from the test-cock in number four tube,’ Hansen objected.
‘Low-grade chewing-gum.’
‘The murderous swine,’ Swanson said calmly. His restraint was far more effective than the most thunderous denunciations could ever have been. ‘He could have murdered us all. But for the grace of God and the Groton boatyard shipwrights he would have murdered us all.’
‘He didn’t mean to,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mean to kill anyone. You had intended to carry out a slow-time dive to check trim in the Holy Loch before you left that evening. You told me so yourself. Did you announce it to the crew, post it up in daily orders or something like that?’
‘Both.’
‘So. Our pal knew. He also knew that you carried out those checks when the boat is still awash or just under the surface. When you checked the tubes to see if they were O.K., water would come in, too much water to permit the rear doors to be shut again, but not under such high pressure that you wouldn’t have time and to spare to close the for’ard collision bulkhead door and make a leisurely retreat in good order. What would have happened? Not much. At the worst you would have settled down slowly to the bottom and stayed there. Not deep enough to worry the Dolphin. In a submarine of even ten years ago it might have been fatal for all, because of the limited air supply. Not to-day when your air purifying machines can let you stay down for months at a time. You just float up your emergency indicator buoy and telephone, tell your story, sit around and drink coffee till a naval diver comes down and replaces the bow cap, pump out the torpedo room and surface again. Our unknown pal — or pals — didn’t mean to kill anyone. But they did mean to delay you. And they would have delayed you. We know now that you could have got to the surface under your own steam, but even so your top brass would have insisted that you go into dock for a day or two to check that everything was O.K.’
‘Why should anyone want to delay us?’ Swanson asked. I thought he had an unnecessarily speculative look in his eyes, but it was hard to be sure, Commander Swanson’s face showed exactly what Commander Swanson wanted it to show and no more.
‘My God, do you think I know the answer to that one?’ I said irritably.
‘No. No, I don’t think so.’ He could have been more emphatic about it. ‘Tell me, Dr Carpenter, do you suspect some member of the Dolphin’s crew to be responsible?’
‘Do you really need an answer to that one?’
‘I suppose not,’ he sighed. ‘Going to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is not a very attractive way of committing suicide, and if any member of the crew had jinxed things he’d damn’ soon have unjinxed them as soon as he realised that we weren’t going to carry out trim checks in shallow water. Which leaves only the civilian dockyard workers in Scotland — and every one of them has been checked and rechecked and given a top-grade security clearance.’
‘Which means nothing. There are plushy Moscow hotels and British and American prisons full of people who had top-grade security clearances . . . What are you going to do now, Commander. About the Dolphin, I mean?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it. In the normal course of events the thing to do would be to close the bow-cap of number four and pump out the torpedo room, then go in and close the rear door of number four. But the bow-cap door won’t close. Within a second of John’s telling us that
‘You bet your life it’s jammed,’ I said grimly. ‘A sledge-hammer might do some good but pressing buttons won’t.’
‘I could go back to that lead we’ve just left, surface again and send a diver under the ice to investigate and see what he can do, but I’m not going to ask any man to risk his life doing that. I could retreat to the open sea, surface and fix it there, but not only would it be a damned slow and uncomfortable trip with the Dolphin canted at this angle, it might take us days before we got back here again. And some of the Drift Station Zebra men are pretty far through. It might be too late.’
‘Well, then,’ I said. ‘You have the man to hand, Commander. I told you when I first met you that environmental health studies were my speciality, especially in the field of pressure extremes when escaping from submarines. I’ve done an awful lot of simulated sub escapes, Commander. I do know a fair amount about pressures, how to cope with them and how I react to them myself.’
‘How do you react to them, Dr Carpenter?’
‘A high tolerance. They don’t worry me much.’
‘What do you have in mind?’
‘You know damn’ well what I have in mind,’ I said impatiently. ‘Drill a hole in the door of the after collision bulkhead, screw in a high-pressure hose, open the door, shove someone in the narrow space between the two collision bulkheads and turn up the hose until the pressure between the collision bulkheads equals that in the torpedo room. You have the clips eased off the for’ard collision door. When the pressures are equalised it opens at a touch, you walk inside, close number four rear door and walk away again. That’s what you had in mind wasn’t it?’
‘More or less,’ he admitted. ‘Except that you are no part of it. Every man on this ship has made simulated escapes. They all know the effects of pressure. And most of them are a great deal younger than you.’
‘Suit yourself,’ I said. ‘But age has little to do with the ability to stand stresses. You didn’t pick a teen-ager as the first American to orbit the earth, did you? As for simulated escapes, making a free ascent up a hundred-foot tank is a different matter altogether from going inside an iron box, waiting for the slow build-up of pressure, working under that pressure, then waiting for the slow process of decompression. I’ve seen young men, big, tough, very, very fit young men break up completely under those circumstances and almost go crazy trying to get out. The combination of physiological and psychological factors involved is pretty fierce.’
‘I think,’ Swanson said slowly, ‘that I’d sooner have you — what do the English say, batting on a sticky wicket — than almost any man I know. But there’s a point you’ve overlooked. What would the Admiral Commanding Atlantic Submarines say to me if he knew I’d let a civilian go instead of one of my own men?’
‘If you don’t let me go, I know what he’ll say. He’ll say: “We must reduce Commander Swanson to lieutenant, j-g., because he had on board the Dolphin an acknowledged expert in this speciality and refused, out of stiff-necked pride, to use him, thereby endangering the lives of his crew and the safety of his ship.”’
Swanson smiled a pretty bleak smile, but with the desperately narrow escape we had just had, the predicament we were still in and the fact that his torpedo officer was lying dead not so many feet away, I hardly expected him to break into gales of laughter. He looked at Hansen: ‘What do you say, John?’
‘I’ve seen more incompetent characters than Dr Carpenter,’ Hansen said. ‘Also, he gets about as nervous and panic-stricken as a bag of Portland cement.’
‘He has qualifications you do not look to find in the average medical man,’ Swanson agreed. ‘I shall be glad to accept your offer. One of my men will go with you. That way the dictates of common sense and honour are both satisfied.’
It wasn’t all that pleasant, not by quite a way, but it wasn’t all that terribly bad either. It went off exactly as it could have been predicted it would go off. Swanson cautiously eased the Dolphin up until her stern was just a few feet beneath the ice: this reduced the pressure in the torpedo room to a minimum, but even at that the bows were still about a hundred feet down.
A hole was drilled in the after collision bulkhead door and an armoured high-pressure hose screwed into position. Dressed in porous rubber suits and equipped with an aqualung apiece, a young torpedoman by the name of Murphy and I went inside and stood in the gap between the two collision bulkheads. High-powered air hissed into the confined space. Slowly the pressure rose: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty pounds to the square inch. I could feel the pressure on lungs and ears, the pain behind the eyes, the slight wooziness that comes from the poisonous effect of breathing pure oxygen under such pressure. But I was used to it, I knew it wasn’t going to kill me: I wondered if young Murphy knew that. This was the stage where the combined physical and mental effects became too much for most people, but if Murphy was scared or panicky or suffering from bodily distress he hid it well. Swanson would have picked his best man and to be the best man in a company like that Murphy had to be something very special.
We eased off the clips on the for’ard bulkhead door, knocked them off cautiously as the pressures equalised. The water in the torpedo room was about two feet above the level of the sill and as the door came ajar the water boiled whitely through into the collision space while compressed air hissed out from behind us to equalise the lowering pressure of the air in the torpedo room. For about ten seconds we had to hang on grimly to hold the door and maintain our balance while water and air fought and jostled in a seething maelstrom to find their own natural levels. The door opened wide. The water level now extended from about thirty inches up on the collision bulkhead to the for’ard deckhead of the torpedo room. We crossed the sill, switched on our waterproof torches and ducked under.
The temperature of that water was about 28° F. — four below freezing. Those porous rubber suits were specially designed to cope with icy waters but even so I gasped with the shock of it — as well as one can gasp when breathing pure oxygen under heavy pressure. But we didn’t linger, for the longer we remained there the longer we would have to spend decompressing afterwards. We half-walked, half-swam towards the fore end of the compartment, located the rear door on number 4 tube and closed it, but not before I had a quick look at the inside of the pressure cock. The door itself seemed undamaged: the body of the unfortunate Lieutenant Mills had absorbed its swinging impact and prevented it from being wrenched off its hinges. It didn’t seem distorted in any way, and fitted snugly into place. We forced its retaining lever back into place and left.
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 old-fashioned 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.
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 on 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 war-head 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 had 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 the 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 engine died away. ‘We’ll just mosey along very carefully indeed. 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 round,’ 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.’