Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
‘I’ll be very much surprised if they aren’t, Commander. The other attempt to delay us, of course, was by making a direct attack on the Dolphin itself. When it became known that the Dolphin was to make an attempt to reach Zebra, orders went through to Scotland to cripple the ship. Red Clydeside is no more red than any other maritime centre in Britain, but you’ll find Communists in practically every shipyard in the country — and, more often than not, their mates don’t know who they are. There was no intention, of course, of causing any fatal accident — and, as far as whoever was responsible for leaving the tube doors open was concerned, there was no reason why there should be. International espionage in peacetime shuns violence — which is why our friend here is going to be very unpopular with his masters. Like Britain or America, they’ll adopt any legitimate or illegitimate tactic to gain their espionage end — but they stop short of murder, just as we do. Murder was no part of the Soviet plan.’
‘Who is it, Dr Carpenter?’ Jeremy said very quietly. ‘For God’s sake, who is it? There’s nine of us here and — do you know who it is?’
‘I know. And only six, not nine, can be under suspicion. The ones who kept radio watches after the disaster. Captain Folsom and the two Harringtons here were completely immobilised. We have the word of all of you for that. So that, Jeremy, just leaves yourself, Kinnaird, Dr Jolly, Hassard, Naseby and Hewson. Murder for gain, and high treason. There’s only one answer for that. The trial will be over the day it begins: three weeks later it will all be over. You’re a very clever man, my friend. You’re more than that, you’re brilliant. But I’m afraid it’s the end of the road for you, Dr Jolly.’
They didn’t get it. For long seconds they didn’t get it. They were too shocked, too stunned. They’d heard my words all right, but the meaning hadn’t registered immediately. But it was beginning to register now for like marionettes under the guidance of a master puppeteer they all slowly turned their heads and stared at Jolly. Jolly himself rose slowly to his feet and took two paces towards me, his eyes wide, his face shocked, his mouth working.
‘Me?’ His voice was low and hoarse and unbelieving. ’Me? Are you — are you mad, Dr Carpenter? In the name of God, man —’
I hit him. I don’t know why I hit him, a crimson haze seemed to blur my vision, and Jolly was staggering back to crash on the deck, holding both hands to smashed lips and nose, before I could realise what I had done. I think if I had had a knife or a gun in my hand then, I would have killed him. I would have killed him the way I would have killed a fer-de-lance, a black widow spider or any other such dark and evil and deadly thing, without thought or compunction or mercy. Gradually the haze cleared from my eyes. No one had stirred. No one had stirred an inch. Jolly pushed himself painfully to his knees and then his feet and collapsed heavily in his seat by the table. He was holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to his face. There was utter silence in the room.
‘My brother, Jolly,’ I said. ‘My brother and all the dead men on Zebra. Do you know what I hope?’ I said. I hope that something goes wrong with the hangman’s rope and that you take a long, long time to die.’
He took the handkerchief from his mouth.
‘You’re crazy, man,’ he whispered between smashed and already puffing lips. ‘You don’t know what you are saying.’
‘The jury at the Old Bailey will be the best judge of that. I’ve been on to you now, Jolly, for almost exactly sixty hours.’
‘What did you say?’ Swanson demanded. ‘You’ve known for sixty hours!’
‘I knew I’d have to face your wrath some time or other, Commander,’ I said. Unaccountably, I was beginning to feel very tired, weary and heartsick of the whole business. ‘But if you had known who he was you’d have locked him up straightaway. You said so in so many words. I wanted to see where the trail led to in Britain, who his associates and contacts would be. I had splendid visions of smashing a whole spy ring. But I’m afraid the trail is cold. It ends right here. Please hear me out.
‘Tell me, did no one think it strange that when Jolly came staggering out of his hut when it caught fire that he should have collapsed and remained that way? Jolly claimed that he had been asphyxiated. Well, he wasn’t asphyxiated inside the hut because he managed to come out under his own steam. Then he collapsed. Curious. Fresh air invariably revives people. But not Jolly. He’s a special breed. He wanted to make it clear to everyone that he had nothing to do with the fire. Just to drive home the point, he has repeatedly emphasised that he is not a man of action. If he isn’t, then I’ve never met one.’
‘You can hardly call that proof of guilt,’ Swanson interrupted.
‘I’m not adducing evidence,’ I said wearily. ‘I’m merely introducing pointers. Pointer number two. You, Naseby, felt pretty bad about your failure to wake up your two friends, Flanders and Bryce. You could have shaken them for an hour and not woken them up. Jolly, here, used either ether or chloroform to lay them out. This was after he had killed Major Halliwell and the three others; but before he started getting busy with matches. He realised that if he burnt the place down there might be a long, long wait before rescue came and he was going to make damned certain that he wasn’t going to go hungry. If the rest of you had died from starvation — well, that was just your bad luck. But Flanders and Bryce lay between him and the food. Didn’t it strike you as very strange, Naseby, that your shouting and shaking had no effect? The only reason could be that they had been drugged — and only one man had access to drugs. Also, you said that both Hewson and yourself felt pretty groggy. No wonder. It was a pretty small hut and the chloroform or ether fumes had reached and affected Hewson and yourself — normally you’d have smelt it on waking up, but the stink of burning diesel obliterates every other smell. Again, I know this is not proof of any kind.
‘Third pointer. I asked Captain Folsom this morning who had given the orders for the dead men to be put in the lab. He said he had. But, he remembered, it was Jolly’s suggestion to him. Something learnedly medical about helping the morale of the survivors by putting the charred corpses out of sight.
‘Fourth pointer. Jolly said that how the fire started was unimportant. A crude attempt to sidetrack me. Jolly knew as well as I did that it was all-important. I suppose, by the way. Jolly, that you deliberately jammed all the fire-extinguishers you could before you started the fire. About that fire, Commander. Remember you were a bit suspicious of Hewson, here, because he said the fuel drums hadn’t started exploding until he was on his way to the main bunkhouse. He was telling the truth. There were no fewer than four drums in the fuel stores that didn’t explode — the ones Jolly, here, used to pour against the huts to start the fire. How am I doing, Dr Jolly?’
‘It’s all a nightmare,’ he said very quietly. ‘It’s a nightmare. Before God, I know nothing of any of this.’
‘Pointer number five. For some reason that is unclear to me Jolly wanted to delay the Dolphin on its return trip. He could best do this, he reckoned, if Bolton and Brownell, the two very sick men still left out on the station, could be judged to be too sick to be transferred to the Dolphin. The snag was, there were two other doctors around who might say that they were fit to be transferred. So he tried, with a fair measure of success, to eliminate us.
‘First Benson. Didn’t it strike you as strange, Commander, that the request for the survivors to be allowed to attend the funeral of Grant and Lieutenant Mills should have come from Naseby in the first place, then Kinnaird? Jolly, as the senior man of the party with Captain Folsom, here, temporarily unfit, was the obvious man to make the approach — but he didn’t want to go calling too much attention to himself. Doubtless by dropping hints, he engineered it so that someone else should do it for him. Now Jolly had noticed how glass-smooth and slippery the ice-banked sides of the sail were and he made a point of seeing that Benson went up the rope immediately ahead of him. You must remember it was almost pitch dark — just light enough for Jolly to make out the vague outline of Benson’s head from the wash of lig
‘You’re mad,’ he said mechanically. ‘This is utter nonsense. Even if it wasn’t nonsense, you couldn’t prove a word of it.’
‘We’ll see. Jolly claimed that Benson fell on top of him. He even flung himself on the ice and cracked his head to give some verisimilitude to his story — our pal never misses any of the angles. I felt the slight bump on his head. But he wasn’t laid out. He was faking. He recovered just that little bit too quickly and easily when he got back to the sick-bay. And it was then that he made his first mistake, the mistake that put me on to him — and should have put me on guard for an attack against myself. You were there, Commander.’
‘I’ve missed everything else,’ Swanson said bitterly. ‘Do you want me to spoil a hundred per cent record?’
‘When Jolly came to he saw Benson lying there. All he could see of him was a blanket and a big gauze pack covering the back of his head. As far as Jolly was concerned, it could have been anybody — it had been pitch dark when the accident occurred. But what did he say? I remember his exact words. He said: ‘Of course, of course. Yes, that’s it. He fell on top of me, didn’t he?’ He never thought to ask who it was — the natural, the inevitable question in the circumstances. But Jolly didn’t have to ask. He knew.’
‘He knew.’ Swanson stared at Jolly with cold bleak eyes and there was no doubt in his mind now about Jolly. ‘You have it to rights, Dr Carpenter. He knew.’
‘And then he had a go at me. Can’t prove a thing, of course. But he was there when I asked you where the medical store was, and he no doubt nipped down smartly behind Henry and myself and loosened the latch on the hatch-cover. But he didn’t achieve quite the same high degree of success this time. Even so, when we went out to the station next morning he still tried to stop Brownell and Bolton from being transferred back to the ship by saying Bolton was too ill. But you overruled him.’
‘I was right about Bolton,’ Jolly said. He seemed strangely quiet now. ‘Bolton died.’
‘He died,’ I agreed. ‘He died because you murdered him and for Bolton alone I can make certain you hang. For a reason I still don’t know. Jolly was still determined to stop this ship. Delay it, anyway. I think he wanted only an hour or two’s delay. So he proposed to start a small fire, nothing much, just enough to cause a small scare and have the reactor shut down temporarily. As the site of his fire he chose the machinery space — the one place in the ship where he could casually let something drop and where it would lie hidden, for hours if need be, among the maze of pipes down there. In the sick-bay he concocted some type of delayed action chemical fuse which would give off plenty of smoke but very little flame — there are a dozen combinations of acids and chemicals that can bring this about and our friend will be a highly-trained expert well versed in all of them. Now all Jolly wanted was an excuse to pass through the engine-room when it would be nice and quiet and virtually deserted. In the middle of the night. He fixed this too. He can fix anything. He is a very, very clever man indeed is our pal here; he’s also an utterly ruthless fiend.
‘Late on the evening of the night before the fire the good healer here made a round of his patients. I went with him. One of the men he treated was Bolton in the nucleonics lab. — and, of course, to get to the nucleonics lab. you have to pass through the engine-room. There was an enlisted man watching over the patients and Jolly left special word that he was to be called at any hour if Bolton became any worse. He was called. I checked with the engine-room staff after the fire. The engineer officer was on watch and two others were in the manoeuvring-room but an engine-man carrying out a routine lubrication job saw him passing through the engine-room about 1.30 a.m. in answer to a call from the man watching over the patients. He took the opportunity to drop his little chemical fuse as he was passing by the machinery space. What he didn’t know was that his little toy lodged on or near the oil-saturated lagging on the housing of the starboard turbo-generator and that when it went off it would generate sufficient heat to set the lagging on fire.’
Swanson looked at Jolly, bleakly and for a long time, then turned to me and shook his head. ‘I can’t wear that, Dr Carpenter. This phone call because a patient just happens to turn sick. Jolly is not the man to leave anything to chance.’
‘He isn’t,’ I agreed. ‘He didn’t. Up in the refrigerator in the sickbay I have an exhibit for the Old Bailey. A sheet of aluminium foil liberally covered with Jolly’s fingerprints. Smeared on this foil is the remains of a salve. That foil was what Jolly had bandaged on to Bolton’s burnt forearm that night, just after he had given him painkilling shots — Bolton was suffering very badly. But before Jolly put the salve on the foil he spread on something else first — a layer of sodium chloride -common or garden household salt. Jolly knew that the drugs he had given Bolton would keep him under for three or four hours; he also knew that by the time Bolton had regained consciousness body heat would have thinned the salve and brought the salt into contact with the raw flesh on the forearm. Bolton, he knew, when he came out from the effects of the drugs, would come out screaming in agony. Can you imagine what it must have been like: the whole forearm a mass of raw flesh — and covered with salt? When he died soon after, he died from shock. Our good healer here — a lovable little lad, isn’t he?
‘Well, that’s Jolly. Incidentally, you can discount most of the gallant doctor’s heroism during the fire — although he was understandably as anxious as any of us that we survive. The first time he went into the engine-room it was too damned hot and uncomfortable for his liking so he just lay down on the floor and let someone carry him for’ard to where the fresh air was. Later —’
‘He’d his mask off,’ Hansen objected.
‘He took it off. You can hold your breath for ten or fifteen seconds — don’t you think Jolly can too? Later on, when he was performing his heroics in the engine-room it was because conditions there were better, conditions outside were worse — and because by going into the engine-room he was entitled to a closed-circuit breathing set. Jolly got more clean air last night than any of us. He doesn’t mind if he causes someone to die screaming his head off in agony — but he himself isn’t going to suffer the slightest degree of hardship. Not if he can help it. Isn’t that so, Jolly?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Where are the films, Jolly?’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ he said in a quiet toneless voice. ‘Before God, my hands are clean.’
‘How about your fingerprints on that foil with the salt on it?’
‘Any doctor can make a mistake.’
‘My God! Mistake! Where are they, Jolly — the films?’
‘For God’s sake leave me alone,’ he said tiredly.
‘Have it your own way.’ I looked at Swanson. ‘Got some nice secure place where you can lock this character up?’
‘I certainly have,’ Swanson said grimly. ‘I’ll conduct him there in person.’
‘No one’s conducting anyone anywhere,’ Kinnaird said. He was looking at me and I didn’t care very much for the way he was looking at me. I didn’t care very much either for what he held in his hand, a very nasty-looking Luger. It was cradled in his fist as if it had grown there and it was pointing straight between my eyes.
THIRTEEN
‘Clever, clever counter-espionage, Carpenter,’ Dr Jolly murmured. ‘How swiftly the fortunes of war change, old boy. But you shouldn’t be surprised really. You haven’t found out anything that actually matters, but surely you should have found out enough to realise that you are operating out of your class. Please don’t try anything foolish. Kinnaird is one of the finest pistol shots I have ever known ??
He delicately patted his still-bleeding mouth with a handkerchief, rose, went behind me and ran his hands quickly down my clothes.
‘My word,’ he said. ‘Not even carrying a gun. You really are unprepared, Carpenter. Turn round, will you, so that your back is to Kinnaird’s gun?’
I turned round. He smiled pleasantly then hit me twice across the face with all his strength, first with the back of his right hand and then with the back of the left. I staggered, but didn’t fall down. I could taste the salt of blood.
‘Can’t even call it regrettable loss of temper,’ Jolly said with satisfaction. ‘Did it deliberately and with malice aforethought. Enjoyed it, too.’
‘So Kinnaird was the killer,’ I said slowly, thickly. ‘He was the man with the gun?’
‘Wouldn’t want to take all the credit, mate,’ Kinnaird said modestly. ‘Let’s say we sorted them out fifty-fifty.’
‘You were the one who went out with the monitor to find the capsule,’ I nodded. ‘That’s why you got your face so badly frostbitten.’
‘Got lost,’ Kinnaird admitted. ‘Thought I’d never find the damned station again.’
‘Jolly and Kinnaird,’ Jeremy said wonderingly. ‘Jolly and Kinnaird. Your own mates. You two filthy murderous —’
‘Be quiet,’ Jolly ordered. ‘Kinnaird, don’t bother answering questions. Unlike Carpenter here, I take no pleasure in outlining my modus operandi and explaining at length how clever I’ve been. As you observed, Carpenter, I’m a man of action. Commander Swanson, get on that phone there, call up your control room, order your ship to surface and steam north.’
‘You’re becoming too ambitious, Jolly,’ Swanson said calmly. ‘You can’t hi-jack a submarine.’
‘Kinnaird,’ Jolly said. ‘Point your gun at Hansen’s stomach. When I reach the count of five, pull the trigger. One, two, three —’