Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
Swanson half-raised a hand in acknowledgment of defeat, crossed to the wall-phone, gave the necessary orders, hung up and came back to stand beside me. He looked at me without either respect or admiration. I looked round all the other people in the room. Jolly, Hansen and Rawlings standing, Zabrinski sitting on a chair by himself with the now disregarded copy of the Dolphin Daze on his knees, all the others sitting round the table, Kinnaird well clear of them, the gun very steady in his hand. So very steady. No one seemed to be contemplating any heroics. For the most part everyone was too shocked, too dazed, to think of anything.
‘Hi-jacking a nuclear submarine is an intriguing prospect — and no doubt would be a highly profitable one, Commander Swanson,’ Jolly said. ‘But I know my limitations. No, old top, we shall simply be leaving you. Not very many miles from here is a naval vessel with a helicopter on its after deck. In a little while, Commander, you will send a wireless message on a certain frequency giving our position: the helicopter will pick us up. And even if your crippled engine would stand the strain I wouldn’t advise you to come chasing after that ship with ideas about torpedoing it or anything of that dramatic ilk. Apart from the fact that you wouldn’t like to be responsible for triggering off a nuclear war, you couldn’t catch it, anyway. You won’t even be able to see the ship, Commander — and if you did it wouldn’t matter, anyway. It has no nationality markings.’
‘Where are the films?’ I asked.
‘They’re already aboard that naval vessel.’
‘They’re what?’ Swanson demanded. ‘How in hell’s name can they be?’
‘Sorry and all that, old boy. I repeat that unlike Carpenter, here, I don’t go around shooting off my mouth. A professional, my dear captain, never gives information about his methods.’
‘So you get off with it,’ I said bitterly. My mouth felt thick and swollen.
‘Don’t see what’s to stop us. Crimes don’t always come home to roost, you know.’
‘Eight men murdered,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Eight men. You can stand there and cheerfully admit that you are responsible for the deaths of eight men.’
‘Cheerfully?’ he said consideringly. ‘No, not cheerfully. I’m a professional, and a professional never kills unnecessarily. But this time it was necessary. That’s all.’
‘That’s the second time you’ve used the word “professional”,’ I said slowly. I was wrong on one theory. You weren’t just suborned after the Zebra team had been picked. You’ve been at this game a long time — you’re too good not to have been.’
‘Fifteen years, old lad,’ Jolly said calmly. ‘Kinnaird and I — we were the best team in Britain. Our usefulness in that country, unfortunately, is over. I should imagine that our — um — exceptional talents can be employed elsewhere.’
‘You admit to all those murders?’ I asked.
He looked at me in sudden cold speculation. ‘A damned funny question, Carpenter. Of course. I’ve told you. Why?’
‘And do you, Kinnaird?’
He looked at me in bleak suspicion. ‘Why ask?’
‘You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.’ At the corner of my range of vision I could see Jolly looking at me with narrowed eyes. He was very sensitive to atmosphere, he knew there was something off-key.
‘You know damn’ well what I did, mate,’ Kinnaird said coldly.
‘So there we have it. In the presence of no less than twelve witnesses, you both confess to murder. You shouldn’t have done that, you know. I’ll answer your question, Kinnaird. I wanted to have an oral confession from you because, apart from the sheet of aluminium foil and something I’ll mention in a minute, we have no actual proof at all against either of you. But now we have your confessions. Your great talents are not going to be used in any other sphere, I’m afraid. You’ll never see that helicopter or that naval vessel. You’ll both die jerking on the end of a rope.’
‘What rubbish is this?’ Jolly asked contemptuously. But there was worry under the contempt. ‘What last-minute despairing bluff are you trying to pull, Carpenter?’
I ignored his question. I said: ‘I’ve been on to Kinnaird, here, for some sixty hours also, Jolly. But I had to play it this way. Without letting you gain what appeared to be the upper hand you would never have admitted to the crimes. But now you have.’
‘Don’t fall for it, old boy,’ Jolly said to Kinnaird. ‘It’s just some desperate bluff. He never had any idea that you were in on this.’
‘When I knew you were one of the killers,’ I said to Jolly, ‘I was almost certain Kinnaird had to be another. You shared the same cabin and unless Kinnaird had been sapped or drugged he had to be in on it. He was neither. He was in on it. That door wasn’t jammed when Naseby ran round to the radio room to warn you — the two of you were leaning all your weight against it to give the impression that it had been closed for hours and that ice had formed.
‘By the same token, young Grant, the assistant radio operator, was in cahoots with you — or he wasn’t. If he wasn’t, he would have to be silenced. He wasn’t. So you silenced him. After I’d caught on to the two of you I had a good look at Grant. I went out and dug him up from where we’d buried him. Rawlings and I. I found a great big bruise at the base of his neck. He surprised you in something, or he woke when you knifed or shot one of Major Halliwell’s men, and you laid him out. You didn’t bother killing him, you were about to set the hut on fire and incinerate him, so killing would have been pointless. But you didn’t reckon on Captain Folsom, here, going in and bringing him out — alive.
‘That was most damnably awkward for you, wasn’t it, Jolly? He was unconscious but when and if he recovered consciousness he could blow the whole works on you. But you couldn’t get at him to finish him off, could you? The bunkhouse was full of people, most of them suffering so severely that sleep was impossible for them. When we arrived on the scene you got desperate. Grant was showing signs of regaining consciousness. You took a chance, but not all that much of a chance. Remember how surprised I was to find that you had used up all my morphine? Well, I was surprised then. But not now. I know now where it went. You gave him an injection of morphine — and you made damn’ sure the hypodermic had a lethal dose. Am I correct?’
‘You’re cleverer than I thought you were,’ he said calmly. ‘Maybe I have misjudged you a little. But it still makes no difference, old boy.’
‘I wonder. If I’d known about Kinnaird so long why do you think I allowed a situation to develop where you could apparently turn the tables?’
‘Apparently is not the word you want. And the answer to your question is easy. You didn’t know Kinnaird had a gun.’
‘No?’ I looked at Kinnaird. ‘Are you sure that thing works?’
‘Don’t come that old stuff with me, mate,’ Kinnaird said in contempt.
‘I just wondered,’ I said mildly. ‘I thought perhaps the petrol in the tractor’s tank might have removed all the lubricating oil.’
Jolly came close to me, his face tight and cold. ‘You knew about this? What goes on, Carpenter?’
‘It was actually Commander Swanson, here, who found the gun in the tank,’ I said. ‘You had to leave it there because you knew you’d all be getting a good clean-up and medical examination when we got you on board and it would have been bound to be discovered. But a murderer — a professional, Jolly — will never part with his gun unless he is compelled to. I knew if you got the slightest chance you would go back for it. So I put it back in the tank.’
‘The hell you did!’ Swanson was as nearly angry as I’d ever seen him. ‘Forget to tell me, didn’t you?’
‘I must have done. That was after I’d cottoned on to you, Jolly. I wasn’t absolutely sure you had a partner, but I knew if you had it must be Kinnaird. So I put the gun back there in the middle of the night and I made good and certain that you, Jolly, didn’t get the chance to go anywhere near the tractor shed at any time. But the gun vanished that following morning when everyone was out sampling the f
‘I’m afraid your bluff’s run out, mate.’ The gun was pointing directly at my face.
‘Your last chance, Kinnaird. Please pay attention to what I am saying. Put up that gun or you will be requiring the services of a doctor within twenty seconds.’
He said something, short and unprintable. I said: ‘It’s on your own head. Rawlings, you know what to do.’
Every head turned towards Rawlings who was standing leaning negligently against a bulkhead, his hands crossed lightly in front of him. Kinnaird looked too, the Luger following the direction of his eyes. A gun barked, the sharp flat crack of a Mannlicher-Schoenauer, Kinnaird screamed and his gun spun from his smashed hand. Zabrinski, holding my automatic in one hand and his copy of the Dolphin Daze — now with a neat charred hole through the middle — in the other, regarded his handiwork admiringly then turned to me. ‘Was that how you wanted it done, Doc?’
‘That was exactly how I wanted it done, Zabrinski. Thank you very much. A first-class job.’
‘A first-class job,’ Rawlings sniffed. He retrieved the fallen Luger and pointed it in Jolly’s general direction. ‘At four feet even Zabrinski couldn’t miss.’ He dug into a pocket, pulled out a roll of bandage and tossed it to Jolly. ‘We kinda thought we might be having to use this so we came prepared. Dr Carpenter said your pal here would be requiring the services of a doctor. He is. You’re a doctor. Get busy.’
‘Do it yourself,’ Jolly snarled. No ‘old boy,’ no ‘old top’. The bonhomie was gone and gone for ever.
Rawlings looked at Swanson and said woodenly: ‘Permission to hit Dr Jolly over the head with this little old gun, sir?’
‘Permission granted,’ Swanson said grimly. But no further persuasion was necessary. Jolly cursed and started ripping the cover off the bandage.
For almost a minute there was silence in the room while we watched Jolly carry out a rough, ready and far from gentle repair job on Kinnaird’s hand. Then Swanson said slowly: ‘I still don’t understand how in the devil Jolly got rid of the film.’
‘It was easy. Ten minutes thinking and you’d get it. They waited until we had cleared the icecap then they took the films, shoved them in a waterproof bag, attached a yellow dye marker to the bag then pumped it out through the garbage disposal unit in the galley. Remember, they’d been on a tour of the ship and seen it — although the suggestion was probably radioed them by a naval expert. I had Rawlings posted on watch in the early hours of this morning and he saw Kinnaird go into the galley about half past four. Maybe he just wanted a ham sandwich, I don’t know. But Rawlings says he had the bag and marker with him when he sneaked in and empty hands when he came out. The bag would float to the surface and the marker stain thousands of square yards of water. The naval ship up top would have worked out our shortest route from Zebra to Scotland and would be within a few miles of our point of exit from the ice-pack. It could probably have located it without the helicopter: but the chopper made it dead certain.
‘Incidentally, I was being rather less than accurate when I said I didn’t know the reason for Jolly’s attempts to delay us. I knew all along. He’d been told that the ship couldn’t reach our exit point until such and such a time and that it was vital to delay us until then. Jolly, here, even had the effrontery to check with me what time we would be emerging from the ice-pack.’
Jolly looked up from Kinnaird’s hand and his face was twisted in a mask of malevolence.
‘You win, Carpenter. So you win. All along the line. But you lost out in the only thing that really mattered. They got the films — the films showing the location, as you said, of nearly every missile base in America. And that was all that mattered. Ten million pounds couldn’t buy that information. But we got it.’ He bared his teeth in a savage smile. ‘We may have lost out, Carpenter, but we’re professionals. We did our job.’
‘They got the films, all right,’ I acknowledged. ‘And I’d give a year’s salary to see the faces of the men who develop them. Listen carefully, Jolly. Your main reason in trying to cripple Benson and myself was not so much that you could have the say-so on Bolton’s health and so delay us: your main reason, your over-riding reason, was that you wanted to be the only doctor on the ship so that it could only be you who would carry out the X-ray on Zabrinski’s ankle here and remove the plaster cast. Literally everything hinged on that: basically, nothing else mattered. That was why you took such a desperate chance in crippling me when you heard me say I intended to X-ray Zabrinski’s ankle the following morning. That was the one move you made that lacked the hallmark of class — of a professional — but then I think you were close to panic. You were lucky.
‘Anyway, you removed the plaster cast two mornings ago and also the films which you had hidden there in oilskin paper when you’d fixed the plaster on to Zabrinski’s leg the first night we arrived in Zebra. A perfect hiding-place. You could always, of course, have wrapped them in bandages covering survivors’ burns, but that would be too dicey. The cast was brilliant.
‘Unfortunately for you and your friends I had removed the original plaster during the previous night, extracted the films from the oiled paper and replaced them with others. That, incidentally, is the second piece of evidence I have on you. There are two perfect sets of prints on the leaders of the satellite films — yours and Kinnaird’s. Along with the salt-covered aluminium foil and the confession freely made in front of witnesses that guarantees you both the eight o’clock walk to the gallows. The gallows and failure, Jolly. You weren’t even a professional. Your friends will never see those films.’
Mouthing soundless words through smashed lips, his face masked in madness and completely oblivious to the two guns, Jolly flung himself at me. He had taken two steps and two only when Rawlings’s gun caught him, not lightly, on the side of the head. He crashed to the floor as if the Brooklyn bridge had fallen in on top of him. Rawlings surveyed him dispassionately.
‘Never did a day’s work that gave me profounder satisfaction,’ he said conversationally. ‘Except, perhaps, those pictures I took with Dr Benson’s camera to give Dr Carpenter, here, some negatives to shove inside that oiled paper.’
‘Pictures of what?’ Swanson asked curiously.
Rawlings grinned happily. ‘All those pin-ups in Doc Benson’s sick-bay. Yogi Bear, Donald Duck, Pluto, Popeye, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — you name it, I got it. The lot. Each a guaranteed work of art — and in glorious Technicolor.’ He smiled a beatific smile. ‘Like Doc Carpenter, here, I’d give a year’s pay to see their faces when they get around to developing those negatives.’
MacLean Goes Everywhere You Do
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Alistair MacLean, Ice Station Zebra