Free Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean Page A

travelling in steadily decreasing circles under the polar ice-cap?’
    I didn’t want to spend what little was left of my life travelling in steadily decreasing circles under the ice-cap so I kept quiet. I watched Swanson as he walked across to the diving stand and studied the banked dials in silence for someseconds. I was beginning to become a little apprehensive about what Swanson would do next: I was beginning to realise, and not slowly either, that he was a lad who didn’t give up very easily.
    ‘That’s enough of that lot,’ he said to the diving officer. ‘If we go through now with all this pressure behind us we’ll be airborne. This ice is even thicker than we thought. We’ve tried the long steady shove and it hasn’t worked. A sharp tap is obviously what is needed. Flood her down, but gently, to eighty feet or so, a good sharp whiff of air into the ballast tanks and we’ll give our well-known imitation of a bull at a gate.’
    Whoever had installed the 240-ton air-conditioning unit in the
Dolphin
should have been prosecuted, it just wasn’t working any more. The air was very hot and stuffy — what little there was of it, that was. I looked around cautiously and saw that everyone else appeared to be suffering from this same shortage of air, all except Swanson, who seemed to carry his own built-in oxygen cylinder around with him. I hoped Swanson was keeping in mind the fact that the
Dolphin
had cost 120 million dollars to build. Hansen’s narrowed eyes held a definite core of worry and even the usually imperturbable Rawlings was rubbing a bristly blue chin with a hand the size and shape of a shovel. In the deep silence after Swanson had finished speaking the scraping noise sounded unusually loud, then was lost in the noise of water flooding into the tanks.
    We stared at the screen. Water continued to pour into the tanks until we could see a gap appear between the top of the sail and the ice. The pumps started up, slowly, to control the speed of descent. On the screen, the cone of light thrown on to the underside of the ice by the flood-lamp grew fainter and larger as we dropped, then remained stationary, neither moving nor growing in size. We had stopped.
    ‘Now,’ said Swanson. ‘Before that current gets us again.’
    There came the hissing roar of compressed air under high pressure entering the ballast tanks. The
Dolphin
started to move sluggishly upwards while we watched the cone of light on the ice slowly narrow and brighten.
    ‘More air,’ Swanson said.
    We were rising faster now, closing the gap to the ice all too quickly for my liking. Fifteen feet, twelve feet, ten feet.
    ‘More air,’ Swanson said.
    I braced myself, one hand on the plot, the other on an overhead grab bar. On the screen, the ice was rushing down to meet us. Suddenly the picture quivered and danced, the
Dolphin
shuddered, jarred and echoed hollowly along its length, more lights went out, the picture came back on the screen, the sail was still lodged below the ice, then the
Dolphin
trembled and lurched and the deck pressed against our feet like an ascending elevator. The sail on the TV vanished, nothing butopaque white taking its place. The diving officer, his voice high with strain that had not yet found relief, called out. ‘Forty feet, forty feet.’ We had broken through.
    ‘There you are now,’ Swanson said mildly. ‘All it needed was a little perseverance.’ I looked at the short plump figure, the round good-humoured face, and wondered for the hundredth time why the nerveless iron men of this world so very seldom look the part.
    I let my pride have a holiday. I took my handkerchief from my pocket, wiped my face and said to Swanson: ‘Does this sort of thing go on all the time?’
    ‘Fortunately, perhaps, no.’ He smiled. He turned to the diving officer. ‘We’ve got our foothold on this rock. Let’s make sure we have a good belay.’
    For a few seconds more compressed air was bled into the tanks, then the diving