Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
‘Pressure won’t kill them.’ I was dimly aware through my cold and misery and burning chest and eyes that my voice sounded just as strange as did those of Swanson and Patterson. ‘Carbon monoxide will kill them. Carbon monoxide is what is killing them now. It’s the relative proportion of CO2 to oxygen that matters. It’s too high, it’s far too high. That’s what’s going to finish us all off.’
‘More oxygen,’ Swanson ordered. Even the unnecessary acknowledgment of my words would have cost too much. ‘More oxygen.’
Valves were turned and oxygen hissed into the control room and, I know, into the crew spaces. I could feel my ears pop as the pressure swiftly built up, but that was all I could feel. I certainly couldn’t feel any improvement in my breathing, a feeling that was borne out when Patterson, noticeably weaker this time, crawled back and croaked out the bad news that he now had a dozen unconscious men on his hands.
I went for’ard with Patterson and a closed-circuit oxygen apparatus — one of the few unexhausted sets left — and clamped it for a minute or so on to the face of each unconscious man in turn, but I knew it was but a temporary palliative, the oxygen revived them but within a few minutes of the mask being removed most of them slipped back into unconsciousness again. I made my way back to the control room, a dark dungeon of huddled men nearly all lying down, most of them barely conscious. I was barely conscious myself. I wondered vaguely if they felt as I did, if the fire from the lungs had now spread to the remainder of the body, if they could see the first slight changes in colour in their hands and faces, the deadly blush of purple, the first unmistakable signs of a man beginning to die from carbon monoxide poisoning. Jolly, I noticed, still hadn’t returned from the engine-room: he was keeping himself permanently on hand, it seemed, to help those men who were in ever increasingly greater danger of hurting themselves and their comrades, as their weakness increased, as their level of care and attention and concentration slid down towards zero.
Swanson was where I’d left him, propped on the deck against the plotting table. He smiled faintly as I sank down beside himself and Hansen.
‘How are they, Doctor?’ he whispered. A whisper, but a rock-steady whisper. The man’s monolithic calm had never cracked and I realised dimly that here was a man who could never crack; you do find people like that, once in a million or once in a lifetime. Swanson was such a man.
‘Far gone,’ I said. As a medical report it maybe lacked a thought in detail but it contained the gist of what I wanted to say and it saved me energy. ‘You will have your first deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning within the hour.’
‘So soon?’ The surprise was in his red, swollen streaming eyes as well as in his voice. ‘Not so soon, Doctor. It’s hardly — well, it’s hardly started to take effect.’
‘So soon,’ I said. ‘Carbon monoxide poisoning is very rapidly progressive. Five dead within the hour. Within two hours fifty. At least fifty.’
‘You take the choice out of my hands,’ he murmured. ‘For which I am grateful. John, where is our main propulsion officer? His hour has come.’
‘I’ll get him.’ Hansen hauled himself wearily to his feet, an old man making his last struggle to rise from his deathbed, and at that moment the engine-room door opened and blackened exhausted men staggered into the control room. Waiting men filed out to take their place. Swanson said to one of the men who had just entered: ‘Is that you, Will?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Lieutenant Raeburn, the navigating officer, pulled off his mask and began to cough, rackingly, painfully. Swanson waited until he had quieted a little.
‘How are things down there, Will?’
‘We’ve stopped making smoke, Skipper.’ Raeburn wiped his streaming face, swayed dizzily and lowered himself groggily to the floor. ‘I think we’ve drowned out the lagging completely.’
‘How long to get the rest of it off?’
‘God knows. Normally, ten minutes. The way we are — an hour. Maybe longer.’
‘Thank you. Ah!’ He smiled faintly as Hansen and Cartwright appeared out of the smoke-filled gloom. ‘Our main propulsion officer. Mr Cartwright, I would be glad if you would put the kettle on to boil. What’s the record for activating the plant, getting steam up and spinning the turbo-generators?’
‘I couldn’t say, Skipper.’ Red-eyed, coughing, smoke-blackened and obviously in considerable pain, Cartwright nevertheless straightened his shoulders and smiled slowly. ‘But you may consider it broken.’
He left. Swanson heaved himself to his feet with obvious weakness — except for two brief inspection trips to the engine-room he had not once worn any breathing apparatus during those interminable and pain-filled hours. He called for power on the broadcast circuit, unhooked a microphone and spoke in a calm clear strong voice: it was an amazing exhibition in self-control, the triumph of a mind over agonised lungs still starving for air.
‘This is your captain speaking,’ he said. ‘The fire in the engine-room is out. We are already reactivating our power plant. Open all watertight doors throughout the ship. They are to remain open until further orders. You may regard the worst of our troubles as lying behind us. Thank you for all you have done.’ He hooked up the microphone, and turned to Hansen. ‘The worst is behind, John — if we have enough power left to reactivate the plant.’
‘Surely the worst is still to come,’ I said. ‘It’ll take you how long, three-quarters of an hour, maybe an hour to get your turbine generators going and your air-purifying equipment working again. How long do you think it will take your air cleaners to make any noticeable effect on this poisonous air?’
‘Half an hour. At least that. Perhaps more.’
There you are, then.’ My mind was so woolly and doped now that I had difficulty in finding words to frame my thoughts, and I wasn’t even sure that my thoughts were worth thinking. ‘An hour and a half at least — and you said the worst was over. The worst hasn’t even begun.’ I shook my head, trying to remember what it was that I had been been going to say next, then remembered. ‘In an hour and a half one out of every four of your men will be gone.’
Swanson smiled. He actually, incredibly, smiled. He said: ‘As Sherlock used to say to Moriarty, I think not, Doctor. Nobody’s going to die of monoxide poisoning. In fifteen minutes’ time we’ll have fresh breathable air throughout the ship.’
Hansen glanced at me just as I glanced at him. The strain had been too much, the old man had gone off his rocker. Swanson caught our interchange of looks and laughed, the laugh changing abruptly to a bout of convulsive coughing as he inhaled too much of that poisoned smoke-laden atmosphere. He coughed for a long time then gradually quietened down.
‘Serves me right,’ he gasped. ‘Your faces . . . Why do you think I ordered the watertight doors opened, Doctor?’
‘No idea.’
‘John?’
Hansen shook his head. Swanson looked at him quizzically and said: ‘Speak to the engine-room. Tell them to light up the diesel.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Hansen said woodenly. He made no move.
‘Lieutenant Hansen is wondering whether he should fetch a strait-jacket,’ Swanson said. ‘Lieutenant Hansen knows that a diesel engine is never never lit up when a submarine is submerged — unless with a snorkel which is useless under ice — for a diesel not only uses air straight from the engine-room atmosphere, it gulps it down in great draughts and would soon clear away all the air in the ship. Which is what I want. We bleed compressed air under fairly high pressure into the forepart of the ship. Nice clean fresh air. We light up the diesel in the after part — it will run rough at first because of the low concentration of oxygen in this poisonous muck — but it will run. It will suck up much of this filthy air, exhausting its gases over the side, and as it does it will lower the atmospheric pressure aft and the fresh air will make its way through from for’ard. To have done this before now would have been suicidal, the fresh air would only have fed the flames until the fire was out of control. But we can do it now. We can run it for a
Hansen was with him all right, but he didn’t answer. He had already left.
Three minutes passed, then we heard, through the now open passageway above the reactor room, the erratic sound of a diesel starting, fading, coughing, then catching again — we learned later that the engineers had had to bleed off several ether bottles in the vicinity of the air intake to get the engine to catch. For a minute or two it ran roughly and erratically and seemed to be making no impression at all on that poisonous air: then, imperceptibly, almost, at first, then with an increasing degree of definition, we could see the smoke in the control room, illuminated by the single lamp still left burning there, begin to drift and eddy towards the reactor passage. Smoke began to stir and eddy in the corners of the control room as the diesel sucked the fumes aft, and more smoke-laden air, a shade lighter in colour, began to move in from the wardroom passageway, pulled in by the decreasing pressure in the control room, pushed in by the gradual build-up of fresh air in the forepart of the submarine as compressed air was bled into the living spaces.
A few more minutes made the miracle. The diesel thudded away in the engine-room, running more sweetly and strongly as air with a higher concentration of oxygen reached its intake, and the smoke in the control room drained steadily away to be replaced by a thin greyish mist from the forepart of the ship that was hardly deserving of the name of smoke at all. And that mist carried with it air, an air with fresh life-giving oxygen, an air with a proportion of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that was now almost negligible. Or so it seemed to us.
The effect upon the crew was just within the limits of credibility. It was as if a wizard had passed through the length of the ship and touched them with the wand of life. Unconscious men, men for whom death had been less than half an hour away, began to stir, some to open their eyes: sick, exhausted, nauseated and pain-racked men who had been lying or sitting on the decks in attitudes of huddled despair sat up straight or stood, their faces breaking into expressions of almost comical wonderment and disbelief as they drew great draughts down into their aching lungs and found that it was not poisonous gases they were inhaling but fresh breathable air: men who had made up their minds for death began to wonder how they could ever have thought that way. As air went, I suppose, it was pretty sub-standard stuff and the Factory Acts would have had something to say about it; but, for us, no pine-clad mountain air ever tasted half so sweet.
Swanson kept a careful eye on the gauges recording the air pressure in the submarine. Gradually it sunk down to the fifteen pounds at which the atmosphere was normally kept, then below it; he ordered the compressed air to be released under higher pressure and then when the atmospheric pressure was back to normal ordered the diesel stopped and the compressed air shut off.
‘Commander Swanson,’ I said. ‘If you ever want to make admiral you can apply to me for a reference any time.’
‘Thank you.’ He smiled. ‘We have been very lucky.’ Sure we had been lucky, the way men who sailed with Swanson would always be lucky.
We could hear now the sounds of pumps and motors as Cartwright started in on the slow process of bringing the nuclear power plant to life again. Everyone knew that it was touch and go whether there would be enough life left in the batteries for that, but, curiously, no one seemed to doubt that Cartwright would succeed; we had been through too much to entertain even the thought of failure now.
Nor did we fail. At exactly eight o’clock that morning Cartwright phoned to say that he had steam on the turbine blades and that the Dolphin was a going proposition again. I was glad to hear it.
For three hours we cruised along at slow speed while the air-conditioning plant worked under maximum pressure to bring the air inside the Dolphin back to normal. After that Swanson slowly stepped up our speed until we had reached about fifty per cent of normal cruising speed, which was as fast as the propulsion officer deemed it safe to go. For a variety of technical reasons it was impractical for the Dolphin to operate without all turbines in commission, so we were reduced to the speed of the slowest and, without lagging on it, Cartwright didn’t want to push the starboard high-pressure turbine above a fraction of its power. This way, it would take us much longer to clear the ice-pack and reach the open sea but the captain, in a broadcast, said that if the limit of the ice-pack was where it had been when we’d first moved under it — and there was no reason to think it should have shifted more than a few miles — we should be moving out into the open sea about four o’clock the following morning.
By four o’clock of that afternoon, members of the crew, working in relays, had managed to clear away from the machinery space all the debris and foam that had accumulated during the long night. After that, Swanson reduced all watches to the barest skeletons required to run the ship so that as many men as possible might sleep as long as possible. Now that the exultation of victory was over, now that the almost intolerable relief of knowing that they were not after all to find their gasping end in a cold iron tomb under the ice-cap had begun to fade, the inevitable reaction, when it did come, was correspondingly severe. A long and sleepless night behind them; hours of cruelly back-breaking toil in the metal jungle of the machinery space; that lifetime of tearing tension when they had not known whether they were going to live or die but had believed they were going to die: the poisonous fumes that had laid them all on the rack: all of those combined had taken cruel toll of their reserves of physical and mental energy and the crew of the Dolphin were now sleep-ridden and exhausted as they had never been. When they lay down to sleep they slept at once, like dead men.
I didn’t sleep. Not then, not at four o’clock. I couldn’t sleep. I had to much to think about, like how it had been primarily my fault, through mistake, miscalculation or sheer pig-headedness, that the Dolphin and her crew had been brought to such desperate straits: like what Commander Swanson was going to say when he found out how much I’d kept from him, how little I’d told him. Still, if I had kept him in the dark so long, I couldn’t see that there would be much harm in it if I kept him in the dark just that little time longer. It would be time enough in the morning to tell him all I knew. His reactions would be interesting, to say the least. He might be striking some medals for Rawlings, but I had the feeling that he wouldn’t be striking any for me. Not after I’d told him what I’d have to.
Rawlings. That was the man I wanted now. I went to see him, told him what I had in mind and asked him if he would mind sacrificing a few hours’ sleep during the night. As always, Rawlings was co-operation itself.
Later that evening I had a look at one or two of the patients. Jolly, exhausted by his Herculean efforts of the previous night, was fathoms deep in slumber, so Swanson had asked if I would deputise for him. So I did, but I didn’t try very hard. With only one exception they were sound asleep and none of them was in so urgent need of medical attention that there would have been any justification for waking him up. The sole exception was Dr Benson, who had recovered consciousness late that afternoon. He was obviously on the mend but complained that his head felt like a pumpkin with someone at work on it with a riveting gun so I fed him some pills and that was the extent of the treatment. I asked him if he had any idea as to what had been the cause of his fall from the top of the sail, but he was either too woozy to remember or just didn’t know. Not that it mattered now. I already knew the answer.
I slept for nine hours after that, which was pretty selfish of me considering that I had asked Rawlings to keep awake half the night; but then I hadn’t had much option about that, for Rawlings was in the position to perform for me an essential task that I couldn’t perform for myself.
Some time during the night we passed out from under the icecap into the open Arctic Ocean again.
I awoke shortly after seven, washed, shaved and dressed as carefully as I could with one hand out of commission, for I believe a judge owes it to his public to be decently turned
‘In his cabin.’
‘I’d like to speak to him and yourself. Privately.’
Hansen looked at me speculatively, nodded, handed over the watch to the navigator and led the way to Swanson’s cabin. We knocked, went in and closed the door behind us. I didn’t waste any time in preamble.
‘I know who the killer is,’ I said. ‘I’ve no proof but I’m going to get it now. I would like you to be on hand. If you can spare the time.’
They’d used up all their emotional responses and reactions during the previous thirty hours so they didn’t throw up their hands or do startled double-takes or make any of the other standard signs of incredulousness. Instead Swanson just looked thoughtfully at Hansen, rose from his table, folded the chart he’d been studying and said dryly: ‘I think we might spare the time, Dr Carpenter. I have never met a murderer.’ His tone was impersonal, even light, but the clear grey eyes had gone very cold indeed. ‘It will be quite an experience to meet a man with eight deaths on his conscience.’
‘You can count yourself lucky that it is only eight,’ I said. ‘He almost brought it up to the hundred mark yesterday morning.’
This time I did get them. Swanson stared at me, then said softly: ‘What do you mean?’
‘Our pal with the gun also carries a box of matches around with him,’ I said. ‘He was busy with them in the engine-room in the early hours of yesterday morning.’
‘Somebody deliberately tried to set the ship on fire?’ Hansen looked at me in open disbelief. ‘I don’t buy that, Doc’
‘I buy it,’ Swanson said. ‘I buy anything Dr Carpenter says. We’re dealing with a madman, Doctor. Only a madman would risk losing his life along with the lives of a hundred others.’