Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
‘Be as quick as you can,’ Swanson said. ‘Remember, Jolly, you’re not trained for this sort of thing. I’ll expect you back inside ten minutes.’
They were back in exactly four minutes. They didn’t have an unconscious Ringman with them either. The only unconscious figure was that of Dr Jolly, whom Brown half-carried, half-dragged over the sill into the control room.
‘Can’t say for sure what happened,’ Brown gasped. He was trembling from the effort he had just made, Jolly must have out-weighed him by at least thirty pounds. ‘We’d just got into the engine-room and shut the door. I was leading and suddenly Dr Jolly fell against me — I reckon he must have tripped over something. He knocked me down. When I got to my feet he was lying there behind me. I put the torch on him. Out cold, he was. His mask had been torn loose. I put it on as best I could and pulled him out.’
‘My word,’ Hansen said reflectively. ‘The medical profession on the Dolphin is having a rough time.’ He gloomily surveyed the prone figure of Dr Jolly as it was carried away towards the after door and relatively fresh air. ‘All three sawbones out of commission now. That’s very handy, isn’t it, Skipper?’
Swanson didn’t answer. I said to him: ‘The injection for Ringman. Would you know what to give, how to give it and where?’
‘No.’
‘Would any of your crew?’
‘I’m in no position to argue, Dr Carpenter.’
I opened Jolly’s medical kit, hunted among the bottles on the lid rack until I found what I wanted, dipped a hypodermic and injected it in my left forearm, just where the bandage ended. ‘Painkiller,’ I said. ‘I’m just a softy. But I want to be able to use the forefinger and thumb of that hand.’ I glanced across at Rawlings, as recovered as anyone could get in that foul atmosphere, and said: ‘How are you feeling now?’
‘Just resting lightly.’ He rose from his chair and picked up his breathing equipment. ‘Have no fears, Doc. With Torpedoman First-class Rawlings by your side -’
‘We have plenty of fresh men still available aft, Dr Carpenter,’ Swanson said.
‘No. Rawlings. It’s for his own sake. Maybe he’ll get two medals now for this night’s work.’
Rawlings grinned and pulled the mask over his head. Two minutes later we were inside the engine-room.
It was stiflingly hot in there, and visibility, even with powerful torches shining, didn’t exceed eighteen inches, but for the rest it wasn’t too bad. The breathing apparatus functioned well enough and I was conscious of no discomfort. At first, that was.
Rawlings took my arm and guided me to the head of a ladder that reached down to the deck of the machinery space. I heard the penetrating hiss of a fire-extinguisher and peered around to locate its source.
A pity they had no submarines in the Middle Ages, I thought, the sight of that little lot down there would have given Dante an extra fillip when he’d started in on his Inferno. Over on the starboard side two very powerful floodlamps had been slung above the huge turbine: the visibility they gave varied from three to six feet, according to the changing amount of smoke given off by the charred and smouldering insulation. At the moment, one patch of the insulation was deeply covered in a layer of white foam — carbon dioxide released under pressure immediately freezes anything with which it comes in contact. As the man with the extinguisher stepped back, three others moved forward in the swirling gloom and started hacking and tearing away at the insulation. As soon as a sizeable strip was dragged loose the exposed lagging below immediately burst into flames reaching the height of a man’s head, throwing into sharp relief weird masked figures leaping backwards to avoid being scorched by the flames. And then the man with the CO2 would approach again, press his trigger, the blaze would shrink down, flicker and die, and a coat of creamy-white foam would bloom where the fire had been. Then the entire process would be repeated all over again. The whole scene with the repetitively stylised movements of the participants highlit against a smoky oil-veined background of flickering crimson was somehow weirdly suggestive of the priests of a long-dead and alien culture offering up some burnt sacrifice on their bloodstained pagan altar.
It also made me see Swanson’s point: at the painfully but necessarily slow rate at which those men were making progress, four hours would be excellent par for the course. I tried not to think what the air inside the Dolphin would be like in four hours’ time.
The man with the extinguisher — it was Raeburn — caught sight of us, came across and led me through a tangled maze of steam pipes and condensers to where Ringman was lying. He was on his back, very still, but conscious: I could see the movement of the whites of his eyes behind his goggles. I bent down till my mask was touching his.
‘Your leg?’ I shouted.
He nodded.
‘Left?’
He nodded again, reached out gingerly and touched a spot halfway down the shin-bone. I opened the medical case, pulled out scissors, pinched the clothes on his upper arm between finger and thumb and cut a piece of the material away. The hypodermic came next and within two minutes he was asleep. With Rawlings’s help I laid splints against his leg and bandaged them roughly in place. Two of the fire-fighters stopped work long enough to help us drag him up the ladder and then Rawlings and I took him through the passage above the reactor room. I became aware that my breathing was now distressed, my legs shaking and my whole body bathed in sweat.
Once in the control centre I took off my mask and immediately began to cough and sneeze uncontrollably, tears streaming down my cheeks. Even in the few minutes we had been gone the air in the control room had deteriorated to a frightening extent.
Swanson said: ‘Thank you, Doctor. What’s it like in there?’
‘Quite bad. Not intolerable, but not nice. Ten minutes is long enough for your fire-fighters at one time.’
‘Fire-fighters I have in plenty. Ten minutes it shall be.’
A couple of burly enlisted men carried Ringman through to the sick-bay. Rawlings had been ordered for’ard for rest and recuperation in the comparatively fresh air of the messroom, but elected to stop off at the sick-bay with me. He’d glanced at my bandaged left hand and said: ‘Three hands are better than one, even although two of them do happen to belong to Rawlings.’
Benson was restless and occasionally murmuring, but still below the level of consciousness. Captain Folsom was asleep, deeply so, which I found surprising until Rawlings told me that there were no alarm boxes in the sick-bay and that the door was completely soundproofed.
We laid Ringman down on the examination table and Rawlings slit up his left trouser leg with a pair of heavy surgical scissors. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared it would be, a clean fracture of the tibia, not compound: with Rawlings doing most of the work we soon had his leg fixed up. I didn’t try to put his leg in traction, when Jolly, with his two good hands, had completely recovered he’d be able to make a better job of it than I could.
We’d just finished when a telephone rang. Rawlings lifted it quickly before Folsom could wake, spoke briefly and hung up.
‘Control room,’ he said. I knew from the wooden expression on his face that whatever news he had for me, it wasn’t good. ‘It was for you. Bolton, the sick man in the nucleonics lab., the one you brought back from Zebra yesterday afternoon. He’s gone. About two minutes ago.’ He shook his head despairingly. ‘My God, another death.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Another murder.’
ELEVEN
The Dolphin was an ice-cold tomb. At half past six that morning, four and a half hours after the outbreak of the fire, there was still only one dead man inside the ship, Bolton. But as I looked with bloodshot and inflamed eyes at the men sitting or lying about the control room — no one was standing any more — I knew that within an hour, two at the most, Bolton would be having company. By ten o’clock, at the latest, under those conditions, the Dolphin would be no more than a steel coffin with no life left inside her.
As a ship, the Dolphin was already dead. All the
Fighting for air. That was the irony of it. Fighting for air while there were still many days’ supply of oxygen in the giant tanks. There were some breathing sets aboard, similar to the British Built-in Breathing System which takes a direct oxy-nitrogen mixture from tanks, but only a few, and all members of the crew had had a turn at those, but only for two minutes at a time. For the rest, for the more than ninety per cent without those systems, there was only the panting straining agony that leads eventually to death. Some portable closed-circuit sets were still left, but those were reserved exclusively for the firefighters.
Oxygen was occasionally bled from the tanks directly into the living spaces and it just didn’t do any good at all; the only effect it seemed to have was to make breathing even more cruelly difficult by heightening the atmospheric pressure. All the oxygen in the world was going to be of little avail as long as the level of carbon dioxide given off by our anguished breathing mounted steadily with the passing of each minute. Normally, the air in the Dolphin was cleaned and circulated throughout the ship every two minutes, but the giant 200-ton air-conditioner responsible for this was a glutton for the electric power that drove it; and the electricians’ estimate was that the reserve of power in the stand-by battery, which alone could reactivate the nuclear power-plant, was already dangerously low. So the concentration of carbon dioxide increased steadily towards lethal levels and there was nothing we could do about it.
Increasing, too, in what passed now for air, were the Freon fumes from the refrigerating machinery and the hydrogen fumes from the batteries. Worse still, the smoke was now so thick that visibility, even in the for’ard parts of the ship, was down to a few feet, but that smoke had to remain also, there was no power to operate the electrostatic precipitators and even when those had been briefly tried they had proved totally inadequate to cope with the concentration of billions of carbon particles held in suspension in the air. Each time the door to the engine-room was opened — and that was progressively oftener as the strength of the fire-fighters ebbed — fresh clouds of that evil acrid smoke rolled through the submarine. The fire in the engine-room had stopped burning over two hours previously; but now what remained of the redly-smouldering insulation round the starboard high-pressure turbine gave off far more smoke and fumes than flames could ever have done.
But the greatest enemy of all lay in the mounting count of carbon monoxide, that deadly, insidious, colourless, tasteless, odourless gas with its murderous affinity for the red blood cells — five hundred times that of oxygen. On board the Dolphin the normal permissible tolerance of carbon monoxide in the air was thirty parts in a million. Now the reading was somewhere between four and five hundred parts in a million. When it reached a thousand parts, none of us would have more than minutes to live.
And then there was the cold. As Commander Swanson had grimly prophesied, the Dolphin, with the steam pipes cooled down and all heaters switched off, had chilled down to the sub-freezing temperature of the sea outside, and was ice-cold. In terms of absolute cold, it was nothing — a mere two degrees below zero on the centigrade scale. But in terms of cold as it reacted on the human body it was very cold indeed. Most of the crew were without warm clothing of any kind — in normal operating conditions the temperature inside the Dolphin was maintained at a steady 22° C. regardless of the temperature outside — they were both forbidden to move around and lacked the energy to move around to counteract the effects of the cold, and what little energy was left in their rapidly weakening bodies was so wholly occupied in forcing their labouring chest muscles to gulp in more and ever more of that foul and steadily worsening air that they had none at all left to generate sufficient animal heat to ward off that dank and bitter cold. You could actually hear men shivering, could listen to their violently shaking limbs knocking and rat-tat-tatting helplessly against bulkheads and deck, could hear the chattering of their teeth, the sound of some of them, far gone in weakness, whimpering softly with the cold: but always the dominant sound was that harsh strangled moaning, a rasping and frightening sound, as men sought to suck air down into starving lungs.
With the exception of Hansen and myself — both of whom were virtually one-handed — and the sick patients, every man in the Dolphin had taken his turn that night in descending into the machinery space and fighting that red demon that threatened to slap us all. The number in each fire-fighting group had been increased from four to eight and the time spent down there shortened to three or four minutes, so that efforts could be concentrated and more energy expended in a given length of time; but because of the increasingly Stygian darkness in the machinery space, the ever-thickening coils of oily black smoke, and the wickedly cramped and confined space in which the men had to work, progress had been frustratingly, maddeningly slow; and entered into it now, of course, was the factor of that dreadful weakness that now assailed us all, so that men with the strength only of little children were tugging and tearing at the smouldering insulation in desperate near-futility and seemingly making no progress at all.
I’d been down again in the machinery space, just once, at 5.30 a.m. to attend to Jolly who had himself slipped, fallen and laid himself out while helping an injured crewman up the ladder, and I knew I would never forget what I had seen there, dark and spectral figures in a dark and spectral and swirling world, lurching and staggering around like zombies in some half-forgotten nightmare, swaying and stumbling and falling to the deck or down into the bilges now deep-covered in great snowdrifts of carbon dioxide foam and huge smoking blackened chunks of torn-off lagging. Men on the rack, men in the last stages of exhaustion. One little spark of fire, one little spark of an element as old as time itself and all the brilliant technological progress of the twentieth century was set at nothing, the frontiers of man’s striving translated in a moment from the nuclear age to the dark unknown of prehistory.
Every dark hour brings forth its man and there was no doubt in the minds of the crew of the Dolphin that that dark night had produced its own here. Dr Jolly. He had made a swift recovery from the effects of his first disastrous entry into the engine-room that night, appearing back in the control centre only seconds after I had finished setting Ringman’s broken leg. He had taken the news of Bolton’s death pretty badly, but never either by word or direct look did he indicate to either Swanson or myself that the fault lay with us for insisting against his better judgment on bringing on board the ship a man whose life had been hanging in the balance even under the best of conditions. I think Swanson was pretty grateful for that and might even have got around to apologising to Jolly had not a fire-fighter come through from the engine-room and told us that one of his team had slipped and either twisted or broken an ankle — the second of many minor accidents and injuries that were to happen down in the machinery space that night. Jolly had reached for the nearest closed-circuit breathing apparatus before we could try to stop him and was gone in a minute.
We eventually lost count of the number of trips he made down there that night. Fifteen at least, perhaps many more, by the time six o’clock had come my mind was beginning to get pretty fuzzy round the edges. He’d certainly no lack of customers for his medical skill. Paradoxically enough, the two main types of injury that night were diametrically opposite in nature: burning and freezing, burning from the red-hot lagging — and, earlier, the steam pipes — and freezing from
About 6.45 a.m. Chief Torpedoman Patterson came into the control centre. I suppose he walked through the doorway, but that was only assumption, from where I sat on the deck between Swanson and Hansen you couldn’t see half-way to the door; but when he came up to Swanson he was crawling on his hands and knees, head swaying from side to side, whooping painfully, his respiration rate at least fifty to the minute. He was wearing no mask of any kind and was shivering constantly.
‘We must do something, Captain,’ he said hoarsely. He spoke as much when inhaling as when exhaling, when your breathing is sufficiently distressed one is as easy as the other. ‘We’ve got seven men passed out now between the for’ard torpedo room and the crew’s mess. They’re pretty sick men, Captain.’
‘Thank you, Chief.’ Swanson, also without a mask, was in as bad a way as Patterson, his chest heaving, his breath hoarsely rasping, tears and sweat rolling down the greyness of his face. ‘We will be as quick as possible.’
‘More oxygen,’ I said. ‘Bleed more oxygen into the ship.’
‘Oxygen? More oxygen?’ He shook his head. ‘The pressure is too high as it is.’