Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean

Author:Alistair MacLean
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9780007892235
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1963-01-07T23:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t all that pleasant, not by quite a way, but it wasn’t all that terribly bad either. It went off exactly as it could have been predicted it would go off. Swanson cautiously eased the Dolphin up until her stern was just a few feet beneath the ice: this reduced the pressure in the torpedo room to a minimum, but even at that the bows were still about a hundred feet down.

A hole was drilled in the after collision bulkhead door and an armoured high-pressure hose screwed into position. Dressed in porous rubber suits and equipped with an aqualung apiece, a young torpedoman by the name of Murphy and I went inside and stood in the gap between the two collision bulkheads. High-powered air hissed into the confined space. Slowly the pressure rose: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty pounds to the square inch. I could feel the pressure on lungs and ears, the pain behind the eyes, the slight wooziness that comes from the poisonous effect of breathing pure oxygen under such pressure. But I was used to it, I knew it wasn’t going to kill me: I wondered if young Murphy knew that. This was the stage where the combined physical and mental effects became too much for most people, but if Murphy was scared or panicky or suffering from bodily distress he hid it well. Swanson would have picked his best man and to be the best man in a company like that Murphy had to be something very special.

We eased off the clips on the for’ard bulkhead door, knocked them off cautiously as the pressures equalised. The water in the torpedo room was about two feet above the level of the sill and as the door came ajar the water boiled whitely through into the collision space while compressed air hissed out from behind us to equalise the lowering pressure of the air in the torpedo room. For about ten seconds we had to hang on grimly to hold the door and maintain our balance while water and air fought and jostled in a seething maelstrom to find their own natural levels. The door opened wide. The water level now extended from about thirty inches up on the collision bulkhead to the for’ard deckhead of the torpedo room. We crossed the sill, switched on our waterproof torches and ducked under.

The temperature of that water was about 28° F. — four below freezing. Those porous rubber suits were specially designed to cope with icy waters but even so I gasped with the shock of it — as well as one can gasp when breathing pure oxygen under heavy pressure. But we didn’t linger, for the longer we remained there the longer we would have to spend decompressing afterwards. We half-walked, half-swam towards the fore end of the compartment, located the rear door on number 4 tube and closed it, but not before I had a quick look at the inside of the pressure cock. The door itself seemed

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