Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean

looked up from the plot. ‘It’s difficult to be sure.’

      ‘Sanders?’ This to the man at the ice-machine.

      ‘Thin ice, sir. Still thin ice.’

      ‘Keep calling. Down periscope.’ He folded the handles up and turned to the diving officer. ‘Take her up like we were carrying a crate of eggs atop the sail and didn’t want to crack even one of them.’

      The pumps started again. I looked around the control room. Swanson excepted, everyone was quiet and still and keyed-up. Raeburn’s face was beaded with sweat and Sanders’s voice was too calm and impersonal by half as he kept repeating: ‘Thin ice, thin ice,’ in a low monotone. You could reach out and touch the tension in the air. I said quietly to Hansen:

      ‘Nobody seems very happy. There’s still a hundred feet to go.’

      ‘There’s forty feet,’ Hansen said shortly. ‘Readings are taken from keel level and there’s sixty feet between the keel and the top of the sail. Forty feet minus the thickness of the ice – and maybe a razor-sharp or needle-pointed stalactite sticking down ready to skewer the Dolphin through the middle. You know what that means?’

      ‘That it’s time I started getting worried too?’

      Hansen smiled, but he wasn’t feeling like smiling. Neither was I, not any more.

      ‘Ninety feet,’ the diving officer said.

      ‘Thin ice, thin ice,’ Sanders intoned.

      ‘Switch off the deck flood, leave the sail flood on,’ Swanson said. ‘And keep that camera moving. Sonar?’

      ‘All clear,’ the sonar operator reported. ‘All clear all round.’ A pause, then: ‘No, hold it, hold it! Contact dead astern!’

      ‘How close?’ Swanson asked quickly.

      ‘Too close to say. Very close.’

      ‘She’s jumping!’ the diving officer called out sharply. ‘80, 75.’ The Dolphin had hit a layer of colder water or extra salinity.

      ‘Heavy ice, heavy ice!’ Sanders called out urgently.

      ‘Flood emergency!’ Swanson ordered – and this time it was an order.

      I felt the sudden build-up of air pressure as the diving officer vented the negative tank and tons of sea-water poured into the emergency diving tank, but it was too late. With a shuddering jarring smash that sent us staggering the Dolphin crashed violently into the ice above, glass tinkled, lights went out and the submarine started falling like a stone.

      ‘Blow negative to the mark!’ the diving officer called. High pressure air came boiling into the negative tank – at our rate of falling we would have been flattened by the sea-pressure before the pumps could even have begun to cope with the huge extra ballast load we had taken aboard in seconds. Two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty and we were still falling. Nobody spoke, everybody just stood or sat in a frozen position staring at the diving stand. It required no gift for telepathy to know the thought in every mind. It was obvious that the Dolphin had been struck aft by some underwater pressure ridge at the same instant as the sail had hit the heavy ice above: if the Dolphin had been holed aft this descent wasn’t going to stop until the pressure of a million tons of water had crushed and flattened the hull and in a flicker of time snuffed out the life of every man inside it.

      ‘Three hundred feet,’ the diving officer called out. ‘Three fifty – and she’s slowing! She’s slowing.’

      The Dolphin was still falling, sluggishly passing the four-hundred-foot mark, when Rawlings appeared in the control room, tool-kit in one hand, a crate of assorted lamps in the other.

      ‘It’s unnatural,’ he said. He appeared to be addressing the shattered lamp above the plot which he had immediately begun to repair. ‘Contrary to the laws of nature, I’ve always maintained. Mankind was never meant to probe beneath the depths of the ocean. Mark my words, those new-fangled inventions will come to a bad end.’

      ‘So will you, if you don’t keep quiet,’ Commander Swanson said acidly. But there was no reprimand in his face, he appreciated as well as any of us the therapeutic breath of fresh air that Rawlings had brought into that tension-laden atmosphere. ‘Holding?’ he went on to the diving officer.

      The diving officer raised a finger and grinned. Swanson nodded, swung the coiled-spring microphone in front of him. ‘Captain here,’ he said calmly. ‘Sorry about that bump. Report damage at once.’

      A green light flashed in the panel of a box beside him. Swanson touched a switch and a loudspeaker in the deck-head crackled.

      ‘Manoeuvring room here.’ The manoeuvring room was in the after end of the upper level engine-room, towards the stern. ‘Hit was directly above us here. We could do with a box of candles and some of the dials and gauges are out of kilter. But we still got a roof over our heads.’

      ‘Thank you, Lieutenant. You can cope?’

      ‘Sure we can.’

      Swanson pressed another switch. ‘Stern room?’

      ‘We still attached to the ship?’ a cautious voice inquired.

      ‘You’re still attached to the ship,’ Swanson assured him. ‘Anything to report?’

      ‘Only that there’s going to be an awful lot of dirty laundry by the time we get back to Scotland. The washing-machine’s had a kind of fit.’

      Swanson smiled and switched off. His face was untroubled, he must have had a special sweat-absorbing mechanism on his face, I felt I could have done with a bath towel. He said to Hansen: ‘That was bad luck. A combination of a current where a current had no right to be, a temperature inversion where a temperature inversion had no right to be, and a pressure ridge where we least expected it. Not to mention the damned opacity of the water. What’s required is a few circuits until we know this polynya like the backs of our hands, a small offset to allow for drift and a little precautionary flooding as we approach the ninety-foot mark.’

      ‘Yes, sir. That’s what’s required. Point is, what are we going to do?’

      ‘Just that. Take her up and try again.’

      I had my pride so I refrained from mopping my brow. They took her up and tried again. At 200 feet and for fifteen minutes Swanson juggled propellers and rudder till he had the outline of the frozen polynya above as accurately limned on the plot as he could ever expect to have it. Then he positioned the Dolphin just outside one of the boundary lines and gave an order for a slow ascent.

      ‘One twenty feet,’ the diving officer said. ‘One hundred ten.’

      ‘Heavy ice,’ Sanders intoned. ‘Still heavy ice.’

      Sluggishly the Dolphin continued to rise. Next time in the control room, I promised myself, I wouldn’t forget that bath towel. Swanson said: ‘If we’ve overestimated the speed of the drift, there’s going to be another bump I’m afraid.’ He turned to Rawlings who was still busily repairing lights. ‘If I were you, I’d suspend operations for the present. You may have to start all over again in a moment and we don’t carry all that number of spares aboard.’

      ‘One hundred feet,’ the diving officer said. He didn’t sound as unhappy as his face looked.

      ‘The water’s clearing,’ Hansen said suddenly. ‘Look.’

      The water had cleared, not dramatically so, but enough. We could see the top corner of the sail clearly outlined on the TV screen. And then, suddenly, we could see something else again, heavy ugly ridged ice not a dozen feet above the sail.

      Water flooding into the tanks. The diving officer didn’t have to be told what to do, we’d gone up like an express lift the first time we’d hit a different water layer and once like that was enough in the life of any submarine.

      ‘Ninety