Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
‘Three hours ago,’ I said, ‘before you loaded the torpedo into number three tube you checked the manually controlled levers and the warning lights for the tube bow-caps. In the one case you found that the levers had been disconnected in the open position: in the other you found that the wires had been crossed in a junction-box. Do you think that was the work of a psycho? Another psycho?’
He said nothing. Swanson said: ‘What can I do to help, Dr Carpenter?’
‘What are you willing to do, Commander?’
‘I will not hand over command of the Dolphin.’ He smiled, but he wasn’t feeling like smiling. ‘Short of that, I — and the crew of the Dolphin — are at your complete disposal. You name it, Doctor, that’s all.’
‘This time you believe my story?’
‘This time I believe your story.’
I was pleased about that, I almost believed it myself.
EIGHT
The hut where we’d found all the Zebra survivors huddled together was almost deserted when we got back to it — only Dr Benson and the two very sick men remained. The hut seemed bigger now, somehow, bigger and colder, and very shabby and untidy like the remnants of a church rummage sale where the housewives have trained for a couple of months before moving up to battle stations. Pieces of clothing, bedding, frayed and shredded blankets, gloves, plates, cutlery and dozens of odds and ends of personal possessions lay scattered all over the floor. The sick men had been too sick — and too glad to be on their way — to worry overmuch about taking too many of their various knick-knacks out of there. All they had wanted out of there was themselves. I didn’t blame them.
The two unconscious men had their scarred and frostbitten faces towards us. They were either sleeping or in a coma. But I took no chances. I beckoned Benson and he came and stood with us in the shelter of the west wall.
I told Benson what I’d told the commander and Hansen. He had to know. As the man who would be in the most constant and closest contact with the sick men, he had to know. I suppose he must have been pretty astonished and shaken, but he didn’t show it. Doctors’ faces behave as doctors tell them to, when they come across a patient in a pretty critical state of health they don’t beat their breasts and break into loud lamentations, as this tends to discourage the patient. This now made three men from the Dolphin’s crew who knew what the score was — well, half the score, anyway. Three was enough. I only hoped it wasn’t too much.
Thereafter Swanson did the talking: Benson would take it better from him than he would from me. Swanson said: ‘Where were you thinking of putting the sick men we’ve sent back aboard?’
In the most comfortable places I can find. Officers’ quarters, crew’s quarters, scattered all over so that no one is upset too much. Spread the load, so to speak.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t know of the latest — um — development at the time. Things are rather different now.’
‘They are. Half of them in the wardroom, the other half in the crew’s mess — no, the crew’s quarters. No reason why they shouldn’t be fixed up comfortably. If they wonder at this, you can say it’s for ease of medical treatment and that they can all be under constant medical watch, like heart patients in a ward. Get Dr Jolly behind you in this, he seems a co-operative type. And I’ve no doubt he’ll support you in your next move — that all patients are to be stripped, bathed and provided with clean pyjamas. If they’re too ill to move, bed-bath. Dr Carpenter here tells me that prevention of infection is of paramount importance in cases of severe burn injuries.’
‘And their clothes?’
‘You catch on more quickly than I did,’ Swanson grunted. ‘All their clothes to be taken away and labelled. All contents to be removed and labelled. The clothes, for anyone’s information, are to be disinfected and laundered.’
‘It might help if I am permitted to know just what we are looking for,’ Benson suggested.
Swanson looked at me.
‘God knows,’ I said. ‘Anything and everything. One thing certain — you won’t find a gun. Be especially careful in labelling gloves — when we get back to Britain we’ll have the experts test them for nitrates from the gun used.’
‘If anyone has brought aboard anything bigger than a postage stamp I’ll find it,’ Benson promised.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Even if you brought it aboard yourself?’
‘Eh? Me? What the devil are you suggesting?’
‘I’m suggesting that something may have been shoved inside your medical kit, even your pockets, when you weren’t looking.’
‘Good lord.’ He dug feverishly into his pockets. ‘The idea never occurred to me.’
‘You haven’t the right type of nasty suspicious mind,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘Off you go. You too, John.’
They left, and Swanson and I went inside. Once I’d checked that the two men really were unconscious, we went to work. It must have been many years since Swanson had policed a deck or parade-ground, far less doubled as scavenger, but he took to it in the manner born. He was assiduous, painstaking, and missed nothing. Neither did I. We cleared a corner of the hut and brought across there every single article that was either lying on the floor or attached to the still ice-covered walls. Nothing was missed. It was either shaken, turned over, opened or emptied according to what it was. Fifteen minutes and we were all through. If there was anything bigger than a matchstick to be found in that room then we would have found it. But we found nothing. Then we scattered everything back over the floor again until the hut looked more or less as it had been before our search. If either of the two unconscious men came to I didn’t want him knowing that we had been looking for anything.
‘We’re no great shakes in the detecting business,’ Swanson said. He looked slightly discouraged.
‘We can’t find what isn’t there to be found. And it doesn’t help that we don’t know what we’re looking for. Let’s try for the gun now. May be anywhere, he may even have thrown it away on the ice-cap, though I think that unlikely. A killer never likes to lose his means of killing — and he couldn’t have been sure that he wouldn’t require it again. There aren’t so very many places to search. He wouldn’t have left it here, for this is the main bunkhouse and in constant use. That leaves only the met. office and the lab. where the dead are lying.’
‘He could have hidden it among the ruins of one of the burnt-out huts,’ Swanson objected.
‘Not a chance. Our friend has been here for some months now, and he must know exactly the effect those ice-storms have. The spicules silt up against any object that lies in their path. The metal frameworks at the bases of the destroyed buildings are still in position, and the floors of the huts — or where the wooden floors used to be — are covered with solid ice to a depth of from four to six inches. He would have been as well to bury his gun in quick-setting concrete.’
We started on the meteorological hut. We looked in every shelf, every box, every cupboard and had just started ripping the backs off the metal cabinets that housed the meteorological equipment when Swanson said abruptly: ‘I have an idea. Back in a couple of minutes.’
He was better than his word. He was back in a minute flat, carrying in his hands four objects that glittered wetly in the lamplight and smelled strongly of petrol. A gun — a Luger automatic — the haft and broken-off blade of a knife and two rubber-wrapped packages which turned out to be spare magazines for the Luger. He said: ‘I guess this was what you were looking for.’
‘Where did you find them?’
‘The tractor. In the petrol tank.’
‘What made you think of looking there?’
‘Just luck. I got to thinking about your remark that the guy who had used this gun might want to use it again. But if he was to hide it anywhere where it was exposed to the weather it might have become jammed up with ice. Even if it didn’t, he might have figured that the metal would contract so that the shells wouldn’t fit or that the firing mechanism and lubricating oil would freeze solid. Only two things don’t freeze
‘It wouldn’t have worked,’ I said. ‘Metal would still contract — the petrol is as cold as the surrounding air.’
‘Maybe he didn’t know that. Or if he did, maybe he just thought it was a good place to hide it, quick and handy.’ He looked consideringly at me as I broke the butt and looked at the empty magazine, then said sharply: ‘You’re smearing that gun a little, aren’t you?’
‘Fingerprints? Not after being in petrol. He was probably wearing gloves anyway.’
‘So why did you want it?’
‘Serial number. May be able to trace it. It’s even possible that the killer had a police permit for it. It’s happened before, believe it or not. And you must remember that the killer believed there would be no suspicion of foul play, far less that a search would be carried out for the gun.
‘Anyway, this knife explains the gun. Firing guns is a noisy business and I’m surprised — I was surprised — that the killer risked it. He might have wakened the whole camp. But he had to take the risk because he’d gone and snapped off the business end of this little sticker here. This is a very slender blade, the kind of blade it’s very easy to snap unless you know exactly what you’re doing, especially when extreme cold makes the metal brittle. He probably struck a rib or broke the blade trying to haul it out — a knife slides in easily enough but it can jam against cartilage or bone when you try to remove it.’
‘You mean — you mean the killer murdered a third man?’ Swanson asked carefully. ‘With this knife?’
‘The third man but the first victim,’ I nodded. ‘The missing half of the blade will be stuck inside someone’s chest. But I’m not going to look for it — it would be pointless and take far too long.’
‘I’m not sure that I don’t agree with Hansen,’ Swanson said slowly. ‘I know it’s impossible to explain away the sabotage on the boat — but, my God, this looks like the work of a maniac. All this — all this senseless killing.’
‘All this killing,’ I agreed. ‘But not senseless — not from the point of view of the killer. No, don’t ask me, I don’t know what his point of view was — or is. I know — you know — why he started the fire: what we don’t know is why he killed those men in the first place.’
Swanson shook his head, then said: ‘Let’s get back to the other hut. I’ll phone for someone to keep a watch over those sick men. I don’t know about you, but I’m frozen stiff. And you had no sleep last night.’
‘I’ll watch them meantime,’ I said. ‘For an hour or so. And I’ve some thinking to do, some very hard thinking.’
‘You haven’t much to go on, have you?’
‘That’s what makes it so hard.’
I’d said to Swanson that I didn’t have much to go on, a less than accurate statement, for I didn’t have anything to go on at all. So I didn’t waste any time thinking. Instead I took a lantern and went once again to the lab. where the dead men lay. I was cold and tired and alone, and the darkness was falling and I didn’t very much fancy going there. Nobody would have fancied going there, a place of dreadful death which any sane person would have avoided like the plague. And that was why I was going there, not because I wasn’t sane, but because it was a place that no man would ever voluntarily visit — unless he had an extremely powerful motivation, such as the intention of picking up some essential thing he had hidden there in the near certainty that no one else would ever go near the place. It sounded complicated, even to me. I was very tired. I made a fuzzy mental note to ask around, when I got back to the Dolphin, to find out who had suggested shifting the dead men in there.
The walls of the lab. were lined with shelves and cupboards containing jars and bottles and retorts and test-tubes and such-like chemical junk, but I didn’t give them more than a glance. I went to the corner of the hut where the dead men lay most closely together, shone my torch along the side of the room and found what I was looking for in a matter of seconds — a floorboard standing slightly proud of its neighbours. Two of the blackened contorted lumps that had once been men lay across that board. I moved them just far enough, not liking the job at all, then lifted one end of the loose floorboard.
It looked as if someone had had it in mind to start up a supermarket. In the six-inch space between the floor and the base of the hut were stacked dozens of neatly arranged cans — soup, beef, fruit, vegetables, a fine varied diet with all the proteins and vitamins a man could want. Someone had had no intention of going hungry. There was even a small pressure-stove and a couple of gallons of kerosene to thaw out the cans. And to one side, lying flat, two rows of gleaming Nife cells — there must have been about forty in all.
I replaced the board, left the lab. and went across to the meteorological hut again. I spent over an hour there, unbuttoning the backs of metal cabinets and peering into their innards, but I found nothing. Not what I had hoped to find, that was. But I did come across one very peculiar item, a small green metal box six inches by four by two, with a circular control that was both switch and tuner, and two glassed-in dials with neither figures nor marking on them. At the side of the box was a brass-rimmed hole.
I turned the switch and one of the dials glowed green, a magic-eye tuning device with the fans spread well apart. The other dial stayed dead. I twiddled the tuner control but nothing happened. Both the magic eye and the second dial required something to activate them — something like a preset radio signal. The hole in the side would accommodate the plug of any standard telephone receiver. Not many people would have known what this was, but I’d seen one before — a transistorised homing device for locating the direction of a radio signal, such as emitted by the ‘Sarah’ device on American space capsules which enables searchers to locate it once it has landed in the sea.
What legitimate purpose could be served by such a device in Drift Ice Station Zebra? When I’d told Swanson and Hansen of the existence of a console for monitoring rocket-firing signals from Siberia, that much of my story, anyway, had been true. But that had called for a giant aerial stretching far up into the sky: this comparative toy couldn’t have ranged a twentieth of the distance to Siberia.
I had another look at the portable radio transmitter and the now exhausted Nife batteries that served them. The dialling counter was still tuned into the waveband in which the Dolphin had picked up the distress signals. There was nothing for me there. I looked more closely at the nickel-cadmium cells and saw that they were joined to one another and to the radio set by wire-cored rubber leads with very powerfully spring-loaded saw-tooth clips on the terminals; those last ensured perfect electrical contact as well as being very convenient to use. I undid two of the clips, brought a torch-beam to bear and peered closely at the terminals. The indentations made by the sharpened steel saw-teeth were faint but unmistakable.
I made my way back to the laboratory hut, lifted the loose floorboard again and shone the torch on the Nife cells lying there. At least half of the cells had the same characteristic markings. Cells that looked fresh and unused, yet they had those same markings and if anything was certain it was that those cells had been brand-new and unmarked when Drift Ice Station Zebra had been first set up. A few of the cells were tucked so far away under adjacent floorboards that I had to stretch my hand far in to reach them. I pulled out two and in the space behind I seemed to see something dark and dull and metallic.
It was too dark to distinguish clearly what the object was but after I’d levered up another two floorboards I could see without any trouble at all. It was a cylinder about thirty inches long and six in diameter with brass stopcock and mounted pressure gauge registering ‘full’: close beside it was a package about eighteen inches square and four thick, stencilled with the words ‘RADIO-SONDE BALLOONS’. Hydrogen, batteries, balloons, corned beef and mulligatawny soup. A catholic enough assortment of stores by any standards; but there wouldn’t have been anything haphazard about the choice of that assortment.
When I made it back to the bunkhouse, the two patients were still breathing. That was about all I could say for myself, too, I was shaking with the cold and even clamping my teeth together couldn’t keep them from chattering. I thawed out under the big electric heaters until I was only half-frozen, picked up my torch and moved out again into the wind and the cold and the dark. I was a sucker for punishment, that was for sure.
In the next twenty minutes I made a dozen complete circuits of the camp, moving a few yards farther out with each circuit. I must have walked over a mile altogether and that was all I had for it, just the walk and a slight touch of frostbite high up on the cheekbones, the only part of my face, other than the eyes, exposed to that bitter cold. I knew I had frostbite for the skin had suddenly ceased to feel cold any more and was quite dead to the touch. Enough was enough and I had a hunch that I was wasting my time anyway. I headed back to the camp.
I passed between the meteorological hut and the lab. and was just level with the eastern end of the bunkhouse when I sensed as much as saw something odd out of the corner of my eye. I steadied the torch-beam on the east wall and peered closely at the sheath of ice that had been deposited there over the days by the ice-storm. Most of the encrustation was of a homogeneous greyish-white, very smooth and polished, but it wasn’t all grey-white: it was speckled here and there with dozens of black flecks of odd shapes and sizes, none of them more than an inch square. I tried to touch them but they were deeply imbedded in and showing through the gleaming ice. I went to examine the east wall of the meteorological hut, but it was quite innocent of any such black flecking. So was the east wall of the lab.
A short search inside the meteorological hut turned up a hammer and screwdriver. I chipped away a section of the black-flecked ice, brought it into the bunkhouse and laid it on the floor in front of one of the big electrical heaters. Ten minutes later I had a small pool of water and, lying in it, the sodden remains of what had once been fragments of burnt paper. This was very curious indeed. It meant that there were scores of pieces of burnt paper imbedded in the east wall of the bunkhouse. Just there: nowhere else. The explanation, of course, could be completely innocuous: or not, as the case might be.