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

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 his face, Captain? I thought he was going to haul off and sock you."
      "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.

3

      "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 noon-day Arctic sky was so overcast that the light was no better than that of late dusk. The bridge thermometer showed the sea temperature to be 28°F., the air temperature--I 6°F. The gale-force wind from the northeast was snatching the tops off the rolling steel-gray waves and subjecting the steep-walled sides of the great conning tower--"sail," the crew called it--to the ceaseless battering of a bullet-driven spray that turned to solid ice even as it struck. The cold was intense.
      Shivering uncontrollably, wrapped in a heavy duffel coat and oilskins and huddled against the illusory shelter of the canvas wind-dodger, I followed the line of Swanson's pointing ann; even above the high, thin, shrill whine of the wind and the drum-fire of the flying spray against the sail, I could hear the violent chattering of his teeth. Less than two miles away a long, thin, grayish-white line, at that distance apparently smooth and regular, seemed to stretch the entire width of the northern horizon. Fd seen it before and it wasn't much to look at but it was a sight a man never got used to, not because of itself but because of what it represented: the beginning of the polar ice cap that covered the top of the world, at this time of year a solid, compacted mass of ice that stretched clear from where we lay right across to Alaska on the other side of the world. And we had to go under that mass. We had to go under it to find men hundreds of miles away, men who might be already dying, men who might be already dead. Who probably were dead. Men, dying or dead, whom we had to seek out by guess and by God in that great wasteland of ice stretching out endlessly before us, for we did not know where they were.
      The relayed radio message we had received just fortynine hours ago had been the last. Since then, there had been only silence. The trawler _Morning Star_ had been sending almost continuously in the intervening two days, trying to raise Drift Station Zebra, but out of that bleak desert of ice to the north had come nothing but silence. No word, no signal, no faintest whisper of sound had come out of that desolation.
      Eighteen hours before, the Russian atomic-engined _Dvina_ had reached the Barrier and had started on an all-out and desperate attempt to smash its way into the heart of the ice cap. In this early stage of winter the ice was neither so thick nor so compacted as it would be at the time of its maximum density, in March, and the very heavily armored and powerfully engined _Dvina_ was reputed to be able to break through ice up to a thickness of eighteen feet: given fair conditions, the _Dvina_ was widely believed to be capable of battering its way to the North Pole. But the conditions of the rafted ice had proved abnormal to a degree and the attempt a