Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean


  ‘He miscalculated,’ I said mildly. ‘Come along.’

  They were waiting for us in the wardroom as I’d arranged, eleven of them in all — Rawlings, Zabrinski, Captain Folsom, Dr Jolly, the two Harrington twins, who were now just barely well enough to be out of bed, Naseby, Hewson, Hassard, Kinnaird and Jeremy. Most of them were seated round the wardroom table except for Rawlings, who opened the door for us, and Zabrinski, his foot still in the cast, who was sitting in a chair in one corner of the room, studying an issue of the Dolphin Daze, the submarine’s own mimeographed newspaper. Some of them made to get to their feet as we came in but Swanson waved them down. They sat, silently, all except Dr Jolly who boomed out a cheerful: ‘Good morning, Captain. Well, well, this is an intriguing summons. Most intriguing. What is it you want to see us about, Captain?’

  I cleared my throat. ‘You must forgive a small deception. It is I who wants to see you, not the captain.’

  ‘You?’ Jolly pursed his lips and looked at me speculatively. ‘I don’t get it, old boy. Why you?’

  ‘I have been guilty of another small deception. I am not, as I gave you to understand, attached to the Ministry of Supply. I am an agent of the British Government. An officer of M.I.6, counterespionage.’

  Well, I got my reaction, all right. They just sat there, mouths wide open like newly-landed fish, staring at me. It was Jolly, always a fast adjuster, who recovered first.

  ‘Counter-espionage, by jove! Counter-espionage! Spies and cloaks and daggers and beautiful blondes tucked away in the wardrobes — or wardroom, should I say. But why — but why are you here? What do you — well, what can you want to see us about, Dr Carpenter?’

  ‘A small matter of murder,’ I said.

  ‘Murder!’ Captain Folsom spoke for the first time since coming aboard ship, the voice issuing from that savagely burnt face no more than a strangled croak. ‘Murder?’


  ‘Two of the men lying up there now in the Drift Station lab. were dead before the fire. They had been shot through the head. A third had been knifed. I would call that murder, wouldn’t you?’

  Jolly groped for the table and lowered himself shakily into his seat. The rest of them looked as if they were very glad that they were already sitting down.

  ‘It seems so superfluous to add,’ I said, adding it all the same, ‘that the murderer is in this room now.’

  You wouldn’t have thought it, not to look at them. You could see at a glance that none of those high-minded citizens could possibly be a killer. They were as innocent as life’s young morning, the whole lot of them, pure and white as the driven snow.

  TWELVE

  It would be an understatement to say that I had the attention of the company. Maybe had I been a two-headed visitor from outer space, or had been about to announce the result of a multi-million pound sweepstake in which they held the only tickets, or was holding straws for them to pick to decide who should go before the firing squad — maybe then they might have given me an even more exclusive degree of concentration. But I doubt it. It wouldn’t have been possible.

  ‘If you’ll bear with me,’ I began, ‘first of all I’d like to give you a little lecture in camera optics — and don’t ask me what the hell that has to do with murder, it’s got everything to do with it, as you’ll find out soon enough.

  ‘Film emulsion and lens quality being equal, the clarity of detail in any photograph depends upon the focal length of the lens — that is, the distance between the lens and the film. As recently as fifteen years ago the maximum focal length of any camera outside an observatory was about fifty inches. Those were used in reconnaissance planes in the later stages of the Second World War. A small suitcase lying on the ground would show up on a photograph taken from a height of ten miles, which was pretty good for those days.

  ‘But the American Army and Air Force wanted bigger and better aerial cameras, and the only way this could be done was by increasing the focal length of the lens. There was obviously a superficial limit to this length because the Americans wanted this camera to fit into a plane — or an orbiting satellite — and if you wanted a camera with a focal length of, say, 250 inches, it was obviously going to be quite impossible to install a twenty-foot camera pointing vertically downwards in a plane or small statellite. But scientists came up with a new type of camera using the folded lens principle, where the light, instead of coming down a long straight barrel, is bounced round a series of angled mirrored corners, which permits the focal length to be increased greatly without having to enlarge the camera itself. By 1950 they’d developed a hundred-inch focal length lens. It was quite an improvement on the World War II cameras which could barely pick up a suitcase at ten miles — this one could pick up a cigarette packet at ten miles. Then, ten years later, came what they called the Perkin-Elmer Roti satellite missile tracker, with a focal length of five hundred inches — equivalent to a barrel type camera forty feet long: this one could pick up a cube of sugar at ten miles.’

  I looked inquiringly around the audience for signs of inattention. There were no signs of inattention. No lecturer ever had a keener audience than I had there.

  ‘Three years later,’ I went on, ‘another American firm had developed this missile tracker into a fantastic camera that could be mounted in even a small-size satellite. Three years’ non-stop work to create this camera — but they reckoned it worth it. We don’t know the focal length, it’s never been revealed: we do know that, given the right atmospheric conditions, a white saucer on a dark surface will show up clearly from 300 miles up in space. This on a relatively tiny negative capable of almost infinite enlargement — for the scientists have also come up with a completely new film emulsion, still super-secret and a hundred times as sensitive as the finest films available on the commercial market today.

  ‘This was to be fitted to the two-ton satellite the Americans called Samos III — Samos for Satellite and Missile Observation System. It never was. This, the only camera of its kind in the world, vanished, hi-jacked in broad daylight and, as we later learned, dismantled, flown from New York to Havana by a Polish jet-liner which had cleared for Miami and so avoided customs inspection.

  ‘Four months ago this camera was launched in a Soviet satellite on a polar orbit, crossing the American Middle West seven times a day. Those satellites can stay up indefinitely, but in just three days, with perfect weather conditions, the Soviets had all the pictures they ever wanted — pictures of every American missile launching base west of the Mississippi. Every time this camera took a picture of a small section of the United States another smaller camera in the satellite, pointing vertically upwards, took a fix on the stars. Then it was only a matter of checking map co-ordinates and they could have a Soviet inter-continental ballistic missile ranged in on every launching-pad in America. But first they had to have the pictures. ‘Radio transmission is no good, there’s far too much quality and detail lost in the process — and you must remember this was a relatively tiny negative in the first place. So they had to have the actual films. There are two ways of doing this — bring the satellite back to earth or have it eject a capsule with the films. The Americans, with their Discoverer tests, have perfected the art of using planes to snatch falling capsules from the sky. The Russians haven’t, although we do know they have a technique for ejecting capsules should a satellite run amok. So they had to bring the satellite down. They planned to bring it down some two hundred miles east of the Caspian. But something went wrong. Precisely what we don’t know, but our experts say that it could only have been due to the fact that the retro-rockets on one side of the capsule failed to fire when given the radio signal to do so. You are beginning to understand, gentlemen?’

  ‘We are beginning to understand indeed.’ It was Jeremy who spoke, his voice very soft. ‘The satellite took up a different orbit.’

  ‘That’s what happened. The rockets firing on one side didn’t slow her up any that mattered, they just knocked her far off course. A new and wobbly orbit that passed through Al
aska, south over the Pacific, across Grahamland in Antarctica and directly south of South America, up over Africa and Western Europe, then round the North Pole in a shallow curve, maybe two hundred miles distant from it at the nearest point.

  ‘Now, the only way the Russians could get the films was by ejecting the capsule, for with retro-rockets firing on one side only they knew that even if they did manage to slow up the satellite sufficiently for it to leave orbit, they had no idea where it would go. But the damnably awkward part of it from the Russians’ viewpoint was that nowhere in its orbit of the earth did the satellite pass over the Soviet Union or any sphere of Communist influence whatsoever. Worse, ninety per cent of its travel was over open sea and if they brought it down there they would never see their films again as the capsule is so heavily coated with aluminium and Pyroceram to withstand the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere that it was much heavier than water. And as I said, they had never developed the American know-how of snatching falling capsules out of the air — and you will appreciate that they couldn’t very well ask the Americans to do the job for them.

  ‘So they decided to bring it down in the only safe place open to them — either the polar ice-cap in the north or the Antarctic in the south. You will remember, Captain, that I told you that I had just returned from the Antarctic. The Russians have a couple of geophysical stations there and, up until a few days ago, we thought that there was a fifty-fifty chance that the capsule might be brought down there. But we were wrong. Their nearest station in the Antarctic was 300 miles from the path of orbit — and no field parties were stirring from home.’

  ‘So they decided to bring it down in the vicinity of Drift Ice Station Zebra?’ Jolly asked quietly. It was a sign of his perturbation that he didn’t even call me ‘old boy‘.

  ‘Drift Ice Station Zebra wasn’t even in existence at the time the satellite went haywire, although all preparations were complete. We had arranged for Canada to lend us a St Lawrence ice-breaker to set up the station but the Russians in a burst of friendly goodwill and international co-operation offered us the atomic-powered Lenin, the finest ice-breaker in the world. They wanted to make good and sure that Zebra was set up and set up in good time. It was. The east-west drift of the ice-cap was unusually slow this year and almost eight weeks elapsed after the setting up of the station until it was directly beneath the flight trajectory of the satellite.

  ‘You knew what the Russians had in mind?’ Hansen asked.

  ‘We knew. But the Russians had no idea whatsoever that we were on to them. They had no idea that one of the pieces of equipment which was landed at Zebra was a satellite monitor which would tell Major Halliwell when the satellite received the radio signal to eject the capsule.’ I looked slowly round the Zebra survivors. ‘I’ll wager none of you knew that. But Major Halliwell did — and the three other men who slept in his hut where this machine was located.

  ‘What we did not know was the identity of the member of Zebra’s company that had been suborned by the Russians. We were certain someone must have been but had no idea who it was. Every one of you had first-class security clearances. But someone was suborned — and that someone, when he arrived back in Britain, would have been a wealthy man for the rest of his days. In addition to leaving what was in effect an enemy agent planted in Zebra, the Soviets also left a portable monitor — an electronic device for tuning in on a particular radio signal which would be activated inside the capsule at the moment of its ejection from the satellite. A capsule can be so accurately ejected 300 miles up that it will land within a mile of its target, but the ice-cap is pretty rough territory and dark most of the time, so this monitor would enable our friend to locate the capsule which would keep on emitting its signal for at least, I suppose, twenty-four hours after landing. Our friend took the monitor and went out looking for the capsule. He found it, released it from its drogue and brought it back to the station. You are still with me, gentlemen? Especially one particular gentleman?’

  ‘I think we are all with you, Dr Carpenter,’ Commander Swanson said softly. ‘Every last one of us.’

  ‘Fine. Well, unfortunately, Major Halliwell and his three companions also knew that the satellite had ejected its capsule — don’t forget that they were monitoring this satellite twenty-four hours a day. They knew that someone was going to go looking for it pretty soon, but who that someone would be they had no idea. Anyway, Major Halliwell posted one of his men to keep watch. It was a wild night, bitterly cold, with a gale blowing an ice-storm before it, but he kept a pretty good watch all the same. He either bumped into our friend returning with the capsule or, more probably, saw a light in a cabin, investigated, found our friend stripping the film from the capsule and, instead of going quietly away and reporting to Major Halliwell, he went in and challenged this man. If that was the way of it, it was a bad mistake, the last he ever made. He got a knife between the ribs.’ I gazed at all the Zebra survivors in turn. ‘I wonder which one of you did it? Whoever it was, he wasn’t very expert. He broke off the blade inside the chest. I found it there.’ I was looking at Swanson and he didn’t bat an eyelid. He knew I hadn’t found the blade there: he had found the haft in the petrol tank. But there was time enough to tell them that.

  ‘When the man he had posted didn’t turn up, Major Halliwell got worried. It must have been something like that. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. Our friend with the broken knife was on the alert now, he knew someone was on to him — it must have come as a pretty severe shock, he’d thought himself completely unsuspected — and when the second man the Major sent turned up he was ready for him. He had to kill him — for the first man was lying dead in his cabin. Apart from his broken knife he’d also a gun. He used it.

  ‘Both those men had come from Halliwell’s cabin, the killer knew that Halliwell must have sent them and that he and the other man still in the major’s cabin would be around in double quick time if the second watcher didn’t report back immediately. He decided not to wait for thathe’d burnt his boats anyway. He took his gun, went into Major Halliwell’s cabin and shot him and the other man as they lay on their beds. I know that because the bullets in their heads entered low from the front and emerged high at the back — the angle the bullets would naturally take if the killer was standing at the foot of their beds and fired at them as they were lying down. I suppose this is as good a time as any to say that my name is not really Carpenter. It’s Halliwell. Major Halliwell was my elder brother.’

  ‘Good God!’ Dr Jolly whispered. ‘Good God above!’

  ‘One thing the killer knew it was essential to do right away — to conceal the traces of his crime. There was only one way — burn the bodies out of all recognition. So he dragged a couple of drums of oil out of the fuel store, poured them against the walls of Major Halliwell’s huthe’d already pulled in there the first two men he’d killed — and set fire to it. For good measure he also set fire to the fuel store. A thorough type, my friends, a man who never did anything by halves.’

  The men seated around the wardroom table were dazed and shocked, uncomprehending and incredulous. But they were only incredulous because the enormity of the whole thing was beyond them. But not beyond them all.

  ‘I’m a man with a curious turn of mind,’ I went on. ‘I wondered why sick, burnt, exhausted men had wasted their time and their little strength in shifting the dead men into the lab. Because someone had suggested that it might be a good thing to do, the decent thing to do. The real reason, of course, was to discourage anyone from going there. I looked under the floorboards and what did I find? Forty Nife cells in first-class condition, stores of food, a radio-sonde balloon and a hydrogen cylinder for inflating the balloon. I had expected to find the Nife cells — Kinnaird, here, has told us that there were a good many reserves, but Nife cells won’t be destroyed in a fire. Buckled and bent a bit, but not destroyed. I hadn’t expected to find the other items of equipment, but they made everything clear.

  ‘The killer had had bad luck on
two counts -being found out and with the weather. The weather really put the crimp on all his plans. The idea was that when conditions were favourable he’d send the films up into the sky attached to a radio-sonde balloon which could be swept up by a Russian plane: snatching a falling capsule out of the sky it very tricky indeed; snaring a stationary balloon is dead easy. The relatively unused Nife cells our friend used for keeping in radio touch with his pals to let them know when the weather had cleared and when he was going to send the balloon up. There is no privacy on the air-waves, so he used a special code; when he no longer had any need for it he destroyed the code by the only safe method of destruction in the Arctic — fire. I found scores of pieces of charred paper embedded in the walls of one of the huts where the wind had carried them from the met. office after our friend had thrown the ashes away.

  ‘The killer also made sure that only those few worn-out Nife cells were used to send the S O S’s and to contact the Dolphin. By losing contact with us so frequently, and by sending such a blurred transmission, he tried to delay our arrival here so as to give the weather a chance to clear up and let him fly off his balloon. Incidentally you may have heard radio reports — it was in all the British newspapers — that Russian as well as American and British planes scoured this area immediately after the fire. The British and Americans were looking for Zebra: the Russians were looking for a radio-sonde balloon. So was the ice-breaker Dvina when it tried to smash its way through here a few days ago. But there have been no more Russian planes: our friend radioed his friends to say that there was no hope of the weather clearing, that the Dolphin had arrived and that they would have to take the films back with them on the submarine.’

  ‘One moment, Dr Carpenter,’ Swanson interrupted in a careful sort of voice. ‘Are you saying that those films are aboard this ship now?’

 
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