Ice Station Zebra

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Is involved in a final confrontation with the Antagonist and stops (or fails to stop) them carrying out their plan.

Carpenter realizes that not all is what it seems, and there may very well be murderers and espionage afoot! After mainy failed attempts by the Britain, the US and surprisingly even Russia, to locate the station, finally a special crew aboard a very special vessel, submarine USS Dolphin, is commissioned. There is precious little time for reflection or character development, not when there are Reds to outwit and icy tundras to cross. He explains to the Captain that Soviet agents had infiltrated the base because it had clandestine missile warning equipment.The few members of the crew having Carpenter's confidence are on alert for foul play, following the alert, and they arrive at the station and pick up the survivors. While the voyage is underway, we are introduced to the nuclear submarine's layout and features by the submarine's doctor, Benson.

The sabotage aboard the submarine that nearly resulted in its sinking is based on the loss of the Royal Navy's HMS Thetis in Liverpool Bay in 1939. In 2006, the US National Reconnaissance Office declassified information stating that "an individual formerly possessing Corona access was the technical adviser to the movie" and admitted "the resemblance of the loss of the Discoverer II capsule, and its probable recovery by the Soviets" on Spitsbergen Island. Dolphin travels to the Arctic and breaks through the ice, first a hundred miles from the base, and second only five miles away. I wondered whether I would read the same book very differently a few years later, from the time I read it first, and to test this theory, picked it up again.

yawn* I get it - this was the style of the period, but I would rather read about the derring-do happening instead of a cold, remote analysis of the problem. After a second avalanche during the night while everyone was sleeping, Larry wakes up in the morning in discomfort. Carpenter does some more investigating, and finds that the fire was no accident; it was a cover to hide that three of the dead men, one of whom was his brother, were murdered.

A British Meteorological drift station set up in the Arctic- Ice Station Zebra, has gone completely off the grids. To quote a contemporary Maclean's writing style was "hit 'em with everything but the kitchen sink, then give 'em the sink, and when they raise their heads, drop the plumber on 'em" . The nearly fatal flooding of the forward torpedo room, before the intermission, is the only time in the film where the submarine is shown to be in jeopardy, unlike the novel where a fire in the engine room nearly kills the entire crew. For submerging and surfacing scenes, the diesel-electric Guppy IA USS Blackfin (SS-322) was used, near Pearl Harbor.The West’s recon planes are getting nothing and even the surprising assistant from the Russians who sent an “Ice Breaker” class ship, came up with nothing.