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

pumps started again. I looked around the control room. Swanson excepted, everyone was quiet and still and keyed-up. Raeburn's face was beaded with sweat, and Sanders' voice was too calm and impersonal by half as he kept repeating, "Thin ice, thin ice" in a low monotone. You could reach out and touch the tension in the air. I said quietly to Hansen, "Nobody seems very happy. There's still a hundred feet to go."
      "There's forty feet," Hansen said shortly. "Readings are taken from keel level, and there's sixty feet between the keel and the top of the sail. Forty feet minus the thickness of the ice-and maybe a razor-sharp or needle-pointed stalactite sticking down ready to skewer the _Dolphin_ through the middle. You know what that means?"
      "That it's time I started getting worried too?"
      Hansen smiled, but he wasn't feeling like smiling. Neither Was I, not any more.
      "Ninety feet," the diving officer said.
      "Thin ice, thin ice," Sanders intoned.
      "Switch off the deck flood, leave the sail flood on," Swanson said. "And keep that camera moving. Sonar?"
      "All clear," the sonar operator reported. "All clear all around." A pause then: "No, hold it, hold it! Contact dead astern!"
      "How close?" Swanson asked quickly.
      "Too close to say. Very close."
      "She's jumping!" the diving officer called out sharply. "Eighty, seventy-five." The _Dolphin_ had hit a layer of colder water or extra salinity.
      "Heavy ice, heavy ice!" Sanders called out urgently.
      "Flood emergency!" Swanson ordered--and this time it was an order.
      I felt the sudden build-up of air pressure as the diving officer vented the negative tank and tons of seawater poured into the emergency diving tank. But it was too late. With a shuddering, jarring smash that sent us staggenng, the _Dolphin_ crashed violently into the ice above, glass tinkled, lights went out and the submarine started falling like a stone.
      "Blow negative to the mark!" the diving officer called. High-pressure air came boiling into the negative tank; at our rate of falling, we would have been flattened by the sea pressure before the pumps could even have begun to cope with the huge extra ballast load we had taken aboard in seconds. Two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty, and we were still falling. Nobody spoke; everybody just stood or sat in a frozen position staring at the diving stand. It required no gift for telepathy to know the thought in every mind. It was obvious that the _Dolphin_ had been struck aft by some underwater pressure ridge at the same instant as the sail had hit the heavy ice above. If the _Dolphin_ had been holed aft, this descent wasn't going to stop until the pressure of a million tons of water crushed and flattened the hull and in a ificker of time snuffed out the life of every man inside it.
      "Three hundred feet," the diving officer called out. "Three fifty--and she's slowing. She's slowing."
      The _Dolphin_ was still falling, sluggishly passing the four hundred-foot mark, when Rawlings appeared in the control room, tool kit in one hand, a crate of assorted lamps in the other.
      "It's unnatural," he said. He appeared to be addressing the shattered lamp above the plot which he had immediately begun to repair. "Contrary to the laws of nature, I've always maintained. Mankind was never meant to probe beneath the depths of the ocean. Mark my words, these newfangled inventions will come to a bad end."
      "So will you if don't keep quiet," Commander Swanson said acidly. But there was no reprimand in his face; he appreciated as well as any of us the therapeutic breath of fresh air that Rawlings had brought into that tension-laden atmosphere. "Holding?" he said to the diving officer.
      The diving officer raised a finger and grinned. Swanson nodded and swung the coiled-spring microphone in front of him. "Captain