Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean Read Free Book Online Page A

himself. He slaved, he scraped, he sacrificed, he devoted many of the best years of his life to doing everything for his young brother, including putting him through a six-year University course. Not till then did he think of himself, not till then did he get married. He leaves a lovely wife and three marvellous kids. Two nieces and a nephew not yet six months old.’
    ‘Two nieces -’ He broke off and stared at me. ‘Good God, your brother?
Your
brother?’ He didn’t, for the moment, seem to find anything peculiar in the difference of surname.
    I nodded silently. Young Lieutenant Raeburn approached us, an odd expression of anxiety on his face, but Swanson abruptly waved him away without seeming even to glance in his direction. He shook his head slowly and was still shaking it when I said abruptly: ‘He’s tough. He may be one of the survivors. He may live. We must get Drift Station Zebra’s position. We
must
get it.’
    ‘Maybe they haven’t got it themselves,’ Swanson said. You could see he was grateful for something to talk about. ‘It
is
a drifting station, remember. The weather being what it is, it may have been days since they got their last fixes -and for all we know their sextants, chronometersand radio direction finders have been lost in the fire.’
    ‘They must know what their latest fix was, even although it was a week ago. They must have a fairly accurate idea of the speed and direction of their drift. They’ll be able to provide approximate data. The
Morning Star
must be told to keep transmitting non-stop with a continuous request for their position. If you surface now, can you contact the
Morning Star?’
    ‘I doubt it. The trawler must be the best part of a thousand miles north of us. His receiver wouldn’t be big enough to pull us in — which is another way of saying that our transmitter is too small.’
    ‘The B.B.C. have plenty of transmitters that are big enough. So have the Admiralty. Please ask one or other to contact the
Morning Star
and ask it to make a continuous send for Zebra’s position.’
    ‘They could do that themselves direct.’
    ‘Sure they could. But they couldn’t hear the reply. The
Morning Star
can — if there’s any reply. And she’s getting closer to them all the time.’
    ‘We’ll surface now,’ Swanson nodded. He turned away from the chart table we’d been standing beside and headed for the diving stand. As he passed the plotting table he said to the navigator: ‘What was it you wanted, Will?’
    Lieutenant Raeburn turned his back on me and lowered his voice, but my hearing has always been a little abnormal. He whispered: ‘Did you see hisface, Captain? I thought he was going to haul off and clobber you one.’
    ‘I thought the same thing myself,’ Swanson murmured. ‘For a moment. But I think I just happened to be in his line of vision, that’s all.’
    I went forward to my cabin and lay down in the cot.

THREE
    There it is, then,’ said Swanson. ‘That’s the Barrier.’
    The
Dolphin,
heading due north, her great cylindrical bulk at one moment completely submerged, the next showing clear as she rolled heavily through the steep quartering seas, was making less than three knots through the water, the great nuclear-powered engines providing just enough thrust to the big twin eight-foot propellers to provide steerage way and no more: thirty feet below where we stood on the bridge the finest sonar equipment in the world was ceaselessly probing the waters all around us but even so Swanson was taking no chances on the effects of collision with a drifting ice-block. The noonday Arctic sky was so overcast that the light was no better than that of late dusk. The bridge thermometer showed the sea temperature as 28° R, the air temperature as −16° F. The gale-force wind from the north-east was snatching the tops off therolling steel-grey waves and subjecting the steep-walled sides of the great conning-tower — sail, the crew called it — to the