Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
I had another look at the two unconscious men. They were warm enough and comfortable enough but that was about all you could say for them. I couldn’t see them as fit enough to be moved inside the next twenty-four hours. I lifted the phone and asked for someone to relieve me and when two seamen arrived, I made my way back to the Dolphin.
There was an unusual atmosphere aboard ship that afternoon, quiet and dull and almost funereal. It was hardly to be wondered at. As far as the crew of the Dolphin had been concerned, the men manning Drift Ice Station Zebra had been just so many ciphers, not even names, just unknowns. But now the burnt, frostbitten, emaciated survivors had come aboard ship, sick and suffering men each with a life and individuality of his own, and the sight of those wasted men still mourning the deaths of their eight comrades had suddenly brought home to every man on the submarine the full horror of what had happened on Zebra. And, of course less than seven hours had elapsed since their own torpedo officer, Lieutenant Mills, had been killed. Now, even although the mission had been successful, there seemed little enough reason for celebration. Down in the crew’s mess the hi-fi and the juke-box were stilled. The ship was like a tomb.
I found Hansen in his cabin. He was sitting on the edge of his Pullman bunk, still wearing his fur trousers, his face bleak and hard and cold. He watched me in silence as I stripped off my parka, undid the empty holster tied round my chest, hung it up and stuck inside it the automatic I’d pulled from my caribou pants. Then he said suddenly: ‘I wouldn’t take them off, Doc. Not if you want to come with us, that is.’ He looked at his own furs and his mouth was bitter. ‘Hardly the rig of the day for a funeral, is it?’
‘You mean —’
‘Skipper’s in his cabin. Boning up on the burial service. George Mills and that assistant radio operator — Grant, wasn’t it — who died out there today. A double funeral. Out on the ice. There’s some men there already, chipping a place with crowbars and sledges at the base of a hummock.’
‘I saw no one.’
‘Port side. To the west.’
‘I thought Swanson would have taken young Hills back to the States. Or Scotland.’
‘Too far. And there’s the psychological angle. You could hardly dent the morale of this bunch we have aboard here far less shoot it to pieces, but carrying a dead man as a shipmate is an unhappy thing. He’s had permission from Washington . . . ’ He broke off uncertainly, looked quietly up at me and then away again. I didn’t have any need of telepathy to know what was in his mind.
‘The seven men on Zebra?’ I shook my head. ‘No, no funeral service for them. How could you? I’ll pay my respects some other way.’
His eyes flickered up at the Mannlicher-Schoenauer hanging in its holster, then away again. He said in a quiet savage voice: ‘Goddam his black murderous soul. That devil’s aboard here, Carpenter. Here. On our ship.’ He smacked a bunched fist hard against the palm of his other hand. ‘Have you no idea what’s behind this, Doc? No idea who’s responsible?’
‘If I had, I wouldn’t be standing here. Any idea how Benson is getting along with the sick and injured?’
‘He’s all through. I’ve just left him.’
I nodded, reached up for the automatic and stuck it in the pocket of my caribou pants. Hansen said quietly: ‘Even aboard here?’
‘Especially aboard here.’ I left him and went along to the surgery. Benson was sitting at his table, his back to his art gallery of Technicolor cartoons, making entries in a book. He looked up as I closed the door behind me.
‘Find anything?’ I asked.
‘Nothing that I would regard as interesting. Hansen did most of the sorting. You may find something.’ He pointed to neatly folded piles of clothing on the deck, several small attache-cases and a few polythene bags, each labelled. ‘Look for yourself. How about the two men left out on Zebra?’
‘Holding their own. I think they’ll be O.K., but it’s too early to say yet.’ I squatted on the floor, went carefully through all the pockets in the clothes and found, as I had expected, nothing. Hansen wasn’t the man to miss anything. I felt every square inch of the lining areas and came up with the same results. I went through the small cases and the polythene bags, small items of clothing and personal gear, shaving kits, letters, photographs, two or three cameras. I broke open the cameras and they were all empty. I said to Benson: ‘Dr Jolly brought his medical case aboard with him?’
‘Wouldn’t even trust one of your own colleagues, would you?’
‘No.’
‘Neither would I.’ He smiled with his mouth only. ‘You’re an evil influence. I went through every item in it. Not a thing. I even measured the thickness of the bottom of the case. Nothing there.’
‘Good enough for me. How are the patients?’
‘Nine of them,’ Benson said. ‘The psychological effect of knowing that they’re safe has done them more good than any medication ever could.’ He consulted cards on his desk. ‘Captain Folsom is the worst. No danger, of course, but his facial burns are pretty savage. We’ve arranged to have a plastic surgeon standing by in Glasgow when we return. The Harrington twins, both met. officers, are rather less badly burnt, but very weak, from both cold and hunger. Food, warmth and rest will have them on their feet in a couple of days again. Hassard, another met officer, and Jeremy, a lab. technician, moderate burns, moderate frostbite, fittest of the lot otherwise — it’s queer how different people react so differently to hunger and cold. The other four — Kinnaird, the senior radio operator, Dr Jolly, Naseby, the cook, and Hewson, the tractor-driver and man who was in charge of the generator — are much of a muchness: they’re suffering most severely of all from frostbite, especially Kinnaird, all with moderate burns, weak, of course, but recovering fast. Only Folsom and the Harrington twins have consented to become bed-patients. The rest we’ve provided with rigouts of one sort or another. They’re all lying down, of course, but they won’t be lying down long. All of them are young, tough, and basically very fit — they don’t pick children or old men to man places like Drift Station Zebra.’
A knock came to the door and Swanson’s head appeared. He said, ‘Hallo, back again,’ to me then turned to Benson. ‘A small problem of medical discipline here, Doctor.’ He stood aside to let us see Naseby, the Zebra cook, standing close behind him, dressed in a U.S. Navy petty officer’s uniform. ‘It seems that your patients have heard about the funeral service. They want to go along — those who are able, that is — to pay their last respects to their colleagues. I understand and sympathise, of course, but their state of health —’
‘I would advise against it, sir,’ Benson said. ‘Strongly.’
‘You can advise what you like, mate,’ a voice came from behind Naseby. It was Kinnaird, the cockney radio operator, also clad in blue. ‘No offence. Don’t want to be rude or ungrateful. But I’m going. Jimmy Grant was my mate.’
‘I know how you feel,’ Benson said. ‘I also know how I feel about it — your condition, I mean. You’re in no fit state to do anything except lie down. You’re making things very difficult for me.’
‘I’m the captain of this ship,’ Swanson put in mildly. ‘I can forbid it, you know. I can say “No,” and make it stick.’
‘And you are making things difficult for us, sir,’ Kinnaird said. ‘I don’t reckon it would advance the cause of Anglo-American unity very much if we started hauling off at our rescuers an hour or two after they’d saved us from certain death.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Besides, look at what it might do to our wounds and burns.’
Swanson cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘Well, they’re your countrymen.’
‘Dr Benson is perfectly correct,’ I said. ‘But it’s not worth a civil war. If they could survive five or six days on that damned ice-cap, I don’t suppose a few minutes more is going to finish them off.’
‘Well, if it does,’ Swanson said heavily, ‘we’ll blame you.’
If I ever had any doubt about it I didn’t have then, not after ten minutes out in the open.
Heads bent against the snow and ice, we hurried back to the shelter of the Dolphin. From the icecap to the top of the sail it was a climb of over twenty feet up the almost vertically inclined huge slabs of ice that the submarine had pushed upwards and sideways as she had forced her way through. Hand-lines had been rigged from the top of the sail but even then it was a fairly tricky climb. It was a set-up where with the icy slope, the frozen slippery ropes, the darkness and the blinding effect of the snow and ice, an accident could all too easily happen. And happen it did.
I was about six feet up, giving a hand to Jeremy, the lab. technician from Zebra whose burnt hands made it almost impossible for him to climb alone, when I heard a muffled cry above me. I glanced up and had a darkly-blurred impression of someone teetering on top of the sail, fighting for his balance, then jerked Jeremy violently towards me to save him from being swept away as that same someone lost his footing, toppled over backwards and hurtled down past us on to the ice below. I winced at the sound of the impact, two sounds, rather, a heavy muffled thud followed immediately by a sharper, crisper crack. First the body, then the head. I half imagined that I heard another sound afterwards, but couldn’t be sure. I handed Jeremy over to the care of someone else and slithered down an ice-coated rope, not looking forward very much to what I must see. The fall had been the equivalent of a twenty-foot drop on to a concrete floor.
Hansen had got there before me and was shining his torch down not on to one prostrate figure as I had expected, but two. Benson and Jolly, both of them out cold.
I said to Hansen: ‘Did you see what happened?’
‘No. Happened too quickly. All I know is that it was Benson that did the falling and Jolly that did the cushioning. Jolly was beside me only a few seconds before the fall.’
‘If that’s the case then Jolly probably saved your doctor’s life. We’ll need to strap them in stretchers and haul them up and inside. We can’t leave them out here.’
‘Stretchers? Well, yes, if you say so. But they might come round any minute.’
‘One of them might. But one of them is not going to come round for a long time. You heard that crack when a head hit the ice, it was like someone being clouted over the head with a fence-post. And I don’t know which it is yet.’
Hansen left. I stooped over Benson and eased back the hood of the duffel-coat he was wearing. A fence-post was just about right. The side of his head, an inch above the right ear, was a blood-smeared mess, a three-inch long gash in the purpling flesh with the blood already coagulating in the bitter cold. Two inches farther forward and he’d have been a dead man, the thin bone behind the temple would have shattered under such an impact. For Benson’s sake, I hoped the rest of his skull was pretty thick. No question but that this had been the sharp crack I’d heard.
Benson’s breathing was very shallow, the movement of his chest barely discernible. Jolly’s, on the other hand, was fairly deep and regular. I pulled back his anorak hood, probed carefully over his head and encountered a slight puffiness far back, near the top on the left-hand side. The inference seemed obvious. I hadn’t been imagining things when I thought I had heard a second sound after the sharp crack caused by Benson’s head striking against the ice. Jolly must have been in the way of the falling Benson, not directly enough beneath him to break his fall in any way but directly enough to be knocked backwards on to the ice and clout the back of his head as he fell.
It took ten minutes to have them strapped in stretchers, taken inside and placed in a couple of temporary cots in the sick-bay. With Swanson waiting anxiously I attended to Benson first, though there was little enough I could do, and had just started on Jolly when his eyes flickered and he slowly came back to consciousness, groaning a bit and trying to hold the back of his head. He made to sit up in his cot but I restrained him.
‘Oh, lord, my head.’ Several times he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, opened them wide, focused with difficulty on the bulkhead riotous with the colour of Benson’s cartoon characters, then looked away as if he didn’t believe it. ‘Oh, my word, that must have been a dilly. Who did it, old boy?’
‘Did what?’ Swanson asked.
‘Walloped me on the old bean. Who? Eh?’
‘You mean to say you don’t remember?’
‘Remember?’ Jolly said irritably. ‘How the devil should I . . .’ He broke off as his eye caught sight of Benson in the adjacent cot, a huddled figure under the blankets with only the back of his head and a big gauze pack covering his wound showing. ‘Of course, of course. Yes, that’s it. He fell on top of me, didn’t he?’
‘He certainly did,’ I said. ‘Did you try to catch him?’
‘Catch him? No, I didn’t try to catch him. I didn’t try to get out of the way either. It was all over in half a second. I just don’t remember a thing about it.’ He groaned a bit more then looked across at Benson. ‘Came a pretty nasty cropper, eh? Must have done.’
‘Looks like it. He’s very severely concussed. There’s X-ray equipment here and I’ll have a look at his head shortly. Damned hard luck on you too, Jolly.’
‘I’ll get over it,’ he grunted. He pushed off my hand and sat up. ‘Can I help you?’
‘You may not,’ Swanson said quietly. ‘Early supper then twelve hours solid for you and the eight others, Doctor, and those are my doctor’s orders. You’ll find supper waiting in the wardroom now.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Jolly gave a ghost of a smile and pushed himself groggily to his feet. ‘That bit about the twelve hours sounds good to me.’
After a minute or two, when he was steady enough on his feet, he left. Swanson said: ‘What now?’
‘You might inquire around to see who was nearest or near to Benson when he slipped climbing over the edge of the bridge. But discreetly. It might do no harm if at the same time you hinted around that maybe Benson had just taken a turn.’
‘What are you hinting at?’ Swanson asked slowly.
‘Did he fall or was he pushed? That’s what I’m hinting at.’
‘Did he fall or . . . ’ He broke off then went on warily: ‘Why should anyone want to push Dr Benson?’
‘Why should anyone want to kill seven — eight, now — men in Drift Ice Station Zebra?’
‘You have a point,’ Swanson acknowledged quietly. He left.
Making X-ray pictures wasn’t very much in my line but apparently it hadn’t been very much in Dr Benson’s line either for he’d written down, for his own benefit and guidance, a detailed list of instructions for the taking and development of X-ray pictures. I wondered how he would have felt if he had known that the first beneficiary of his meticulous thoroughness was to
By and by Commander Swanson returned, closing the door behind him. I said: ‘Ten gets one that you got nothing.’
‘You won’t die a poor man,’ he nodded. ‘Nothing is what it is. So Chief Torpedoman Patterson tells me, and you know what he’s like.’
I knew what he was like. Patterson was the man responsible for all discipline and organisation among the enlisted men and Swanson had said to me that he regarded Patterson, and not himself, as the most indispensable man on the ship.
‘Patterson was the man who reached the bridge immediately before Benson,’ Swanson said. ‘He said he heard Benson cry out, swung round and saw him already beginning to topple backwards. He didn’t recognise who it was at the time, it was too dark and snowy for that. He said he had the impression that Benson had already had one hand and one knee on the bridge coaming when he fell backwards.’
‘A funny position in which to start falling backwards,’ I said. ‘Most of his body weight must already have been inboard. And even if he did topple outwards he would surely still have had plenty of time to grab the coaming with both hands.’
‘Maybe he did take a turn,’ Swanson suggested. ‘And don’t forget that the coaming is glass-slippery with its smooth coating of ice.’
‘As soon as Benson disappeared Patterson ran to the side to see what had happened to him?’
‘He did,’ Swanson said wearily. ‘And he said there wasn’t a person within ten feet of the top of the bridge when Benson fell.’