"'"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 Bod?, 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.