Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean

      ‘I know a little,’ I admitted. ‘There’s nothing mysterious or sinister about what I know. Meteorologists now regard the Arctic and the Antarctic as the two great weather factories of the world, the areas primarily responsible for the weather that affects the rest of the hemisphere. We already know a fair amount about Antarctic conditions, but practically nothing about the Arctic. So we pick a suitable ice-floe, fill it with huts crammed with technicians and all sorts of instruments and let them drift around the top of the world for six months or so. Your own people have already set up two or three of those stations. The Russians have set up at least ten, to the best of my knowledge, most of them in the East Siberian Sea.’

      ‘How do they establish those camps, Doc?’ Rawlings asked.

      ‘Different ways. Your people prefer to establish them in winter-time, when the pack freezes up enough for plane landings to be made. Someone flies out from, usually, Point Barrow in Alaska and searches around the polar pack till they find a suitable ice-floe – even when the ice is compacted and frozen together into one solid mass an expert can tell which pieces are going to remain as good-sized floes when the thaw comes and the break-in begins. Then they fly out all huts, equipment, stores and men by ski-plane and gradually build the place up.

      ‘The Russians prefer to use a ship in summer-time. They generally use the Lenin, a nuclear-engined ice-breaker. It just batters its way into the summer pack, dumps everything and everybody on the ice and takes off before the big freeze-up starts. We used the same technique for Drift Ice Station Zebra – our one and only ice station. The Russians lent us the Lenin – all countries are only too willing to co-operate on meteorological research as everyone benefits by it – and took us pretty deep into the ice-pack north of Franz Josef Land. Zebra has already moved a good bit from its original position – the polar ice-cap, just sitting on top of the Arctic Ocean, can’t quite manage to keep up with the west-east spin of the earth so that it has a slow westward movement in relation to the earth’s crust. At the present moment it’s about four hundred miles due north of Spitzbergen.’

      ‘They’re still crazy,’ Zabrinski said. He was silent for a moment then looked speculatively at me. ‘You in the Limey navy, Doc?’

      ‘You must forgive Zabrinski’s manners, Dr Carpenter,’ Rawlings said coldly. ‘But he’s denied the advantages that the rest of us take for granted. I understand he was born in the Bronx.’

      ‘No offence,’ Zabrinski said equably. ‘Royal Navy, I meant. Are you, Doc?’

      ‘Attached to it, you might say.’

      ‘Loosely, no doubt,’ Rawlings nodded. ‘Why so keen on an Arctic holiday, Doc? Mighty cool up there, I can tell you.’

      ‘Because the men on Drift Station Zebra are going to be badly in need of medical aid. If there are any survivors, that is.’

      ‘We got our own medico on board and he’s no slouch with a stethoscope, or so I’ve heard from several who have survived his treatment. A well-spoken-of quack.’

      ‘Doctor, you ill-mannered lout,’ Zabrinski said severely.

      ‘That’s what I meant,’ Rawlings apologised. ‘It’s not often that I get the chance to talk to an educated man like myself, and it just kinda slipped out. The point is, the Dolphin’s already all buttoned up on the medical side.’

      ‘I’m sure it is.’ I smiled. ‘But any survivors we might find are going to be suffering from advanced exposure, frostbite and probably gangrene. The treatment of those is rather a speciality of mine.’

      ‘Is it now?’ Rawlings surveyed the depths of his coffee cup. ‘I wonder how a man gets to be a specialist in those things?’

      Hansen stirred and withdrew his gaze from the darkly-white world beyond the canteen windows.

      ‘Dr Carpenter is not on trial for his life,’ he said mildly. ‘The counsel for the prosecution will kindly pack it in.’

      They packed it in. This air of easy familiarity between officer and men, the easy camaraderie, the mutually tolerant disparagement with the deceptively misleading overtones of knock-about comedy, was something very rare in my experience but not unique. I’d seen it before, in first-line R.A.F. bomber crews, a relationship found only among a close-knit, close-living group of superbly trained experts each of whom is keenly aware of their complete interdependence. The casually informal and familiar attitude was a token not of the lack of discipline but of the complete reverse: it was the token of a very high degree of self-discipline, of the regard one man held for another not only as a highly-skilled technician in his own field but also as a human being. It was clear, too, that a list of unwritten rules governed their conduct. Off-hand and frequently completely lacking in outward respect though Rawlings and Zabrinski were in their attitude towards Lieutenant Hansen, there was an invisible line of propriety over which it was inconceivable that they would ever step: for Hansen’s part, he scrupulously avoided any use of his authority when making disparaging remarks at the expense of the two enlisted men. It was also clear, as now, who was boss.

      Rawlings and Zabrinski stopped questioning me and had just embarked upon an enthusiastic discussion of the demerits of the Holy Loch in particular and Scotland in general as a submarine base when a jeep swept past the canteen windows, the snow whirling whitely, thickly, through the swathe of the headlights. Rawlings jumped to his feet in mid-sentence, then subsided slowly and thoughtfully into his chair.

      ‘The plot,’ he announced, ‘thickens.’

      ‘You saw who it was?’ Hansen asked.

      ‘I did indeed. Andy Bandy, no less.’

      ‘I didn’t hear that, Rawlings,’ Hansen said coldly.

      ‘Vice-Admiral John Garvie, United States Navy, sir.’

      ‘Andy Bandy, eh?’ Hansen said pensively. He grinned at me. ‘Admiral Garvie, Officer Commanding U.S. Naval Forces in Nato. Now this is very interesting, I submit. I wonder what he’s doing here.’

      ‘World War III has just broken out,’ Rawlings announced. ‘It’s just about time for the Admiral’s first martini of the day and no lesser crisis –’

      ‘He didn’t by any chance fly down with you in that chopper from Renfrew this afternoon?’ Hansen interrupted shrewdly.

      ‘No.’

      ‘Know him, by any chance?’

      ‘Never even heard of him until now.’

      ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Hansen murmured.

      A few minutes passed in desultory talk – the minds of Hansen and his two men were obviously very much on the reason for the arrival of Admiral Garvie – and then a snow-filled gust of chilled air swept into the canteen as the door opened and a blue-coated sailor came in and crossed to our table.

      ‘The captain’s compliments, Lieutenant. Would you bring Dr Carpenter to his cabin, please?’

      Hansen nodded, rose to his feet and led the way outside. The snow was beginning to lie now, the darkness was coming down fast and the wind from the north was bitingly chill. Hansen made for the nearest gangway, halted at its head as he saw seamen and dockyard workers, insubstantial and spectral figures in the swirling flood-lit snow, carefully easing a slung torpedo down the for’ard hatch, turned and headed towards the after gangway. We clambered down and at the foot Hansen said: ‘Watch your step, Doc. It’s a mite slippery hereabouts.’

      It was all that, but with the thought of the ice-cold waters of the Holy Loch waiting for me if I put a foot wrong I made no mistake. We passed through the hooped canvas shelter covering the after hatch and dropped down a steep metal ladder into a warm, scrupulously clean and gleaming engine-room packed with a baffling complexity of grey-painted machinery and instrument panels, its every corner brightly illuminated with shadowless fluorescent lighting.

      ‘Not going to blindfold me, Lieutenant?’ I asked.

      ‘No need.’