Ice Station Zebra. Alistair MacLean

I tried again. I said: ‘I know Drift Station Zebra. I helped select the site. I helped establish the camp. The commandant, a Major Halliwell, has been my closest friend for many years.’ The last was only half the truth but I felt that this was neither the time nor the place for over-elaboration.

      ‘Well, well,’ Garvie said thoughtfully. ‘And you still claim you’re just an ordinary doctor?’

      ‘My duties are flexible, sir.’

      ‘I’ll say they are. Well, then, Carpenter, if you’re just a common-or-garden sawbones, how do you explain this?’ He picked a signal form from the table and handed it to me. ‘This has just arrived in reply to Commander Swanson’s radioed query to Washington about you.’

      I looked at the signal. It read: ‘Dr Neil Carpenter’s bonafides beyond question. He may be taken into your fullest, repeat fullest confidence. He is to be extended every facility and all aid short of actually endangering the safety of your submarine and the lives of your crew.’ It was signed by the Director of Naval Operations.

      ‘Very civil of the Director of Naval Operations, I must say.’ I handed back the signal. ‘With a character reference like this, what are you worrying about? That ought to satisfy anyone.’

      ‘It doesn’t satisfy me,’ Garvie said heavily. ‘The ultimate responsibility for the safety of the Dolphin is mine. This signal more or less gives you carte blanche to behave as you like, to ask Commander Swanson to act in ways that might be contrary to his better judgment. I can’t have that.’

      ‘Does it matter what you can or can’t have? You have your orders. Why don’t you obey them?’

      He didn’t hit me. He didn’t even bat an eyelid. He wasn’t activated by pique about the fact that he wasn’t privy to the reason for the seeming mystery of my presence there, he was genuinely concerned about the safety of the submarine. He said: ‘If I think it more important that the Dolphin should remain on an active war footing rather than to go haring off on a wild-goose chase to the Arctic, or if I think you constitute a danger to the submarine, I can countermand the D.N.O.’s orders. I’m the C.-in-C. on the spot. And I’m not satisfied.’

      This was damnably awkward. He meant every word he said and he didn’t look the type who would give a hoot for the consequences if he believed himself to be in the right. I looked at both men, looked at them slowly and speculatively, the unmistakable gaze, I hoped, of a man who was weighing others in the balance: what I was really doing was thinking up a suitable story that would satisfy both. After I had given enough time to my weighing-up – and my thinking – I dropped my voice a few decibels and said: ‘Is that door soundproof?’

      ‘More or less,’ Swanson said. He’d lowered his own voice to match mine.

      ‘I won’t insult either of you by swearing you to secrecy or any such rubbish,’ I said quietly. ‘I want to put on record the fact that what I am about to tell you I am telling you under duress, under Admiral Garvie’s threat to refuse me transport if I don’t comply with his wishes.’

      ‘There will be no repercussions,’ Garvie said.

      ‘How do you know? Not that it matters now. Well, gentlemen, the facts are these. Drift Ice Station Zebra is officially classed as an Air Ministry meteorological station. Well, it belongs to the Air Ministry all right, but there’s not more than a couple of qualified meteorologists among its entire personnel.’

      Admiral Garvie refilled the tooth-glass and passed it to me without a word, without a flicker of change in his expression. The old boy certainly knew how to play it cool.

      ‘What you will find there,’ I went on, ‘are some of the most highly skilled men in the world in the fields of radar, radio, infra-red and electronic computers, operating the most advanced instruments ever used in those fields. We know now, never mind how, the count-down succession of signals the Russians use in the last minute before launching a missile. There’s a huge dish aerial in Zebra that can pick up and amplify any such signals within seconds of it beginning. Then long-range radar and infra-red home in on that bearing and within three minutes of the rocket’s lift-off they have its height, speed and course pin-pointed to an infinitesimal degree of error. The computers do this, of course. One minute later the information is in the hands of all the anti-missile stations between Alaska and Greenland. One minute more and solid fuel infra-red homing anti-missile rockets are on their way; then the enemy missiles will be intercepted and harmlessly destroyed while still high over the Arctic regions. If you look at a map you will see that in its present position Drift Ice Station Zebra is sitting practically on Russia’s missile doorstep. It’s hundreds of miles in advance of the present DEW line – the distant early warning system. Anyway, it renders the DEW line obsolete.’

      ‘I’m only the office boy around those parts,’ Garvie said quietly. ‘I’ve never heard of any of this before.’

      I wasn’t surprised. I’d never heard any of it myself either, not until I’d just thought it up a moment ago. Commander Swanson’s reactions, if and when we ever got to Drift Station Zebra, were going to be very interesting. But I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. At present, my only concern was to get there.

      ‘Outside the Drift Station itself,’ I said, ‘I doubt if a dozen people in the world know what goes on there. But now you know. And you can appreciate how vitally important it is to the free world that this base be maintained in being. If anything has happened to it we want to find out just as quick as possible what has happened so that we can get it operating again.’

      ‘I still maintain that you’re not an ordinary doctor,’ Garvie smiled. ‘Commander Swanson, how soon can you get under way?’

      ‘Finish loading the torpedoes, move alongside the Hunley, load some final food stores, pick up extra Arctic clothing and that’s it, sir.’

      ‘Just like that? You said you wanted to make a slow-time dive out in the loch to check the planes and adjust the underwater trim – those missing torpedoes up front are going to make a difference you know.’

      ‘That’s before I heard Dr Carpenter. Now I want to get up there just as fast as he does, sir. I’ll see if immediate trim checks are necessary: if not, we can carry them out at sea.’

      ‘It’s your boat,’ Garvie acknowledged. ‘Where are you going to accommodate Dr Carpenter, by the way?’

      ‘There’s space for a cot in the Exec’s and Engineer’s cabin.’ He smiled at me. ‘I’ve already had your suitcase put in there.’

      ‘Did you have much trouble with the lock?’ I inquired.

      He had the grace to colour slightly. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a combination lock on a suitcase,’ he admitted. ‘It was that, more than anything else – and the fact that we couldn’t open it – that made the admiral and myself so suspicious. I’ve still one or two things to discuss with the admiral, so I’ll take you to your quarters now. Dinner will be at eight to-night.’

      ‘I’d rather skip dinner, thanks.’

      ‘No one ever gets seasick on the Dolphin, I can assure you,’ Swanson smiled.

      ‘I’d appreciate the chance to sleep instead. I’ve had no sleep for almost three days and I’ve been travelling non-stop for the past fifty hours. I’m just tired, that’s all.’

      ‘That’s a fair amount of travelling.’ Swanson smiled. He seemed almost always to be smiling, and I supposed vaguely that there would be some people foolish enough to take that smile always at its face value. ‘Where were you fifty hours ago, Doctor?’

      ‘In the Antarctic.’

      Admiral Garvie gave me a very old-fashioned look indeed, but he let it go at that.

       TWO

      When