"Alistair Maclean - Ice Station Zebra" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Alistair)

"I flew down here. Helicopter."
"A whirly-bird, eh? I heard one arriving a few minutes ago. But that was one of ours."
"It had 'U. S. Navy' written all over it in four-foot letters," I conceded, "and the pilot spent all his time chewing gum and praying out loud for a quick return to California."
"Did you tell the skipper this?" Hansen demanded.
"He didn't give me the chance to tell him anything."
"He's got a lot on his mind and far too much to see to," Hansen said. He unfolded the paper and looked at the front page. He didn't have far to look to find what he wanted: the two-inch-banner headlines were spread over seven columns.
"Well, would you look at this." Lieutenant Hansen made no attempt to conceal his irritation and chagrin. "Here we are, pussy-footing around in this God-forsaken dump, tape all over our mouths, sworn to eternal secrecy about mission and destination--and then what? I pick up this damned limey newspaper and here are all the top-secret details plastered right across the front page."
"You are kidding, Lieutenant," said the man with the red face and the general aspect of a polar bear. His voice seemed to come from his boots.
"I am not kidding, Zabrinski," Hansen said coldly, "as you would appreciate if you had ever learned to read. 'Nuclear submarine to the rescue,' it says. 'Dramatic dash to the North Pole.' God help us, the North Pole. And a picture of the _Dolphin_. And of the skipper. Good God, there's even a picture of me."
Rawhings reached out a hairy paw and twisted the paper to have a better look at the blurred and smudged representation of the man before him. "So there is. Not very flattering, is it, Lieutenant? But a speaking likeness, mind you, a speaking likeness. The photographer has caught the essentials perfectly."
"You are utterly ignorant of the first principles of photography," Hansen said witheringly. "Listen to this piece. 'The following joint statement was issued simultaneously a few minutes before noon (G.M.T.) today in both London and Washington: "In view of the critical condition of the survivors of Drift Ice Station Zebra and the failure either to rescue or contact them by conventional means, the U. S. Navy has willingly agreed that the U. S. nuclear submarine _Dolphin_ be dispatched with all speed to try to effect contact with the survivors.
"'"The _Dolphin_ returned to its base in the Holy Loch, Scotland, at dawn this morning after carrying out extensive exercises with the Nato naval forces in the eastern Atlantic. It is hoped that the _Dolphin_ (Commander James D. Swanson, U.S.N., commanding) will sail at approximately seven p.m. (G.M.T.) this evening."
"'The laconic understatement of this communique heralds the beginning of a desperate and dangerous rescue attempt which must be without parallel in the history of the sea or the Arctic, It is now sixty hours--'"
"Desperate,' you said, Lieutenant?" Rawlings frowned heavily. "'Dangerous,' you said? The captain will be asking for volunteers?"
"No need. I told the captain that I'd already checked with all eighty-eight enlisted men and that they'd volunteered to a man."
"You never checked with me."
"I must have missed you. Now, kindly shut up, your executive officer is talking. 'It is now sixty hours since the world was electrified to learn of the disaster that had struck Drift Ice Station Zebra, the only British meteorological station in the Arctic, when an English-speaking ham-radio operator in Bodц, Norway, picked up the faint S.O.S. from the top of the world.
"A further message, picked up less than twenty-four hours ago by the British trawler _Morning Star_ in the Barents Sea, makes it clear that the position of the survivors of the fuel-oil fire that destroyed most of Drift Ice Station Zebra in the early hours of Tuesday morning is desperate in the extreme. With their oil-fuel reserves completely destroyed and their food stores all but wiped out, it is feared that those still living cannot long be expected to survive in the twenty-below temperatures--fifty degrees of frost--at present being experienced in that area.
"'It is not known whether all the prefabricated huts, in which the expedition members lived, have been destroyed.
"'Drift Ice Station Zebra, which was established only in the late summer of this year, is at present in an estimated position of 85° 40'N., 21 °30'E., which is only about three hundred miles from the North Pole. Its position cannot be known with certainty, because of the clockwise drift of the polar ice pack.
"'For the past thirty hours long-range supersonic bombers of the American, British and Russian air forces have been scouring the polar ice pack searching for Station Zebra. Because of the uncertainty about the drift station's actual position, the complete absence of daylight in the Arctic at this time of year and the extremely bad weather conditions, they were unable to locate the station and forced to return.'"
"They didn't have to locate it," Rawhings objected. "Not visually. With the instruments those bombers have nowadays, they could home-in on a hummingbird a hundred miles away. The radio operator at the drift station had only to keep on sending and they could have used that as a beacon."
"Maybe the radio operator is dead," Hansen said heavily, "Maybe his radio has broken down on him. Maybe the fuel that was destroyed was essential f or running the radio. All depends what source of power he used."
"Diesel-electric generator," I said. "He had a standby battery of Nife cells. Maybe he's conserving the batteries, using them only for emergencies. There's also a hand-cranked generator, but its range is pretty limited."
"How do you know that?" Hansen asked quietly. "About the type of power used?"
"I must have read it somewhere."
"You must have read it somewhere." He looked at me without expression, then turned back to his paper. "A report from Moscow states that the atomic-engined _Dvina_, the world's most powerful ice-breaker, sailed from Murmansk some twenty hours ago and is proceeding at high speed toward the Arctic pack. Experts are not hopeful about the outcome, for at this late period of the year the ice pack has already thickened and compacted into a solid mass which will almost certainly defy the efforts of any vessel, even those of the _Dvina_, to smash its way through.
"'The use of the submarine _Dolphin_ appears to offer the only slender hope of life for the apparently doomed survivors of Station Zebra. The odds- against success must be regarded as heavy in the extreme. Not only will the _Dolphin_ have to travel several hundred miles continuously submerged under the polar ice cap, but the possibilities of its being able to break through the ice cap at any given place or to locate the survivors are very remote. But undoubtedly if any ship in the world can do it, it is the _Dolphin_, the pride of the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine fleet.'"
Hansen broke off and read on silently for a minute. Then he said: "That's about all. A story giving all the known details of the _Dolphin_. That, and a lot of ridiculous rubbish about the enlisted men in the _Dolphin's_ crew being the elite of the cream of the U. S. Navy."
Rawlings looked wounded. Zabrinski, the polar bear with the red face, grinned, fished out a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. Then he became serious again and said: "What are those crazy guys doing up there at the top of the world, anyway?"
"Meteorological, lunkhead," Rawlings informed him. "Didn't you hear the lieutenant say so? A big word, mind you," he conceded generously, "but he made a pretty fair stab at it. 'Weather station' to you, Zabrinski."
"I still say they're crazy guys," Zabrinski rumbled. "Why do they do it, Lieutenant?"
"I suggest you ask Dr. Carpenter about it," Hansen said dryly. He stared through the plate-glass windows at the snow whirling grayly through the gathering darkness, his eyes bleak and remote, as if he were already visualizing the doomed men drifting to their death in the frozen immensity of the polar ice cap. "I think he knows a great deal more about it than I do."
"I know a little," I admitted. "There's nothing mysterious or sinister about what I know. Meteorologists now regard the Arctic and the Antarctic as the two great weather factories of the world, the areas primarily responsible for the weather that affects the rest of the hemispheres. We already know a fair amount about Antarctic conditions, but practically nothing about the Arctic. So we pick a suitable ice floe, fill it with huts crammed with technicians and all sorts of instruments, and let them drift around the top of the world for six months or so. Your own people have already set up two or three of those stations. The Russians have set up at least ten, to the best of my knowledge, most of them in the East Siberian Sea."
"How do they establish those camps, Doc?" Rawlings asked.
"Different ways. Your people prefer to establish them in wintertime, when the pack freezes up enough for plane landings to be made. Someone flies out from, usually, Point Barrow in Alaska and searches around the polar pack till they find a suitable ice floe--even when the ice is compacted and frozen together into one solid mass an expert can tell which pieces are going to remain as good-sized floes when the thaw comes and the break-up begins. Then they fly out all huts, equipment, stores and men by ski plane and gradually build the place up.
"The Russians prefer to use a ship in summertime. They generally use the _Lenin_, a nuclear-engined ice-breaker. It just batters its way deep into the summer pack, dumps everything and everybody on the ice, and takes off before the big freeze-up starts. We used the same technique for Drift Ice Station Zebra--our one and only ice station. The Russians lent us the _Lenin_--all countries are only too willing to concentrate on meteorological research, since everyone benefits by it--and took us pretty deep into the ice pack north of Franz Josef Land. Zebra has already moved a good bit from its original position--the polar ice cap, just sitting on top of the Arctic Ocean, can't quite manage to keep up with the west-east spin of the earth, so that it has a slow westward movement in relation to the earth's crust. At the present moment It's about four- hundred miles due north of Spitsbergen."
"They're still crazy," Zabrinski said. He was silent for a moment, then looked speculatively at me. "You in the limey Navy, Doc?"
"You must forgive Zabrinski's manners, Dr. Carpenter," Rawlings said coldly. "But he's been denied the advantages that the rest of us take for granted. I understand he was born in the Bronx."
"No offense," Zabrinski said equably. "Royal Navy, I meant. Are you, Doc?"
"Attached to it, you- might say."
"Loosely, no doubt." Rawlings nodded. "Why so keen on an Arctic holiday, Doc? Mighty cool up there, I can tell you."
"Because the men on Drift Station Zebra are going to be badly in need of medical aid. If there are any survivors, that is."
"We got our own medic on board and he's no slouch with a stethoscope, or so I've heard from several who have survived his treatment. A well-spoken-of quack."
"'Doctor,' you ill-mannered lout," Zabrinski said severely.
"That's what I meant," Rawlings apologized. "It's not often that I get the chance to talk to an educated man like myself, and it just kinda slipped out. The point is, the Dolphin's already all buttoned up on the medical side."
"I'm sure it is," I smiled, "but any survivors we might find are going to be suffering from advanced exposure, frostbite, and probably gangrene. The treatment of those is rather a specialty of mine."
"Is it now?" Rawlings surveyed the depths of his coffee cup. "I wonder how a man gets to be a specialist in those things?"
Hansen stirred and withdrew his gaze from the darkly white world beyond the canteen windows.
"Dr. Carpenter is not on trial for his life," he said mildly. "The counsel for the prosecution will kindly shut up."