Ice Station Zebra

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A little personal reconnaissance before the appointed hour was acceptable, but woe betide the Kinch minor that tried to snaffle one before his time. I enjoyed how the narrator/POV character didn’t reveal his own secrets with the reader either, not until later, only giving hints, and how many of his actions are esoteric and mysterious, making you wonder if you’re following a reliable narrator at all. For submerging and surfacing scenes, the diesel-electric Guppy IA USS Blackfin (SS-322) was used, near Pearl Harbor.

Dolphin [blackout]sets off under the ice back to Britain, but during the night the saboteurs set the engine room on fire and the submarine fills with smoke.

When Soviet and British agents arrived to recover the film capsule, the scientists were caught in the crossfire.

Jones finds another tracking device but is knocked out by Vaslov, a Soviet double-agent and the saboteur. In January 1967 MGM announced the film would be one of 13 movies it would make during the next year. Maclean says he got much of the technical information of the novel from the book Nautilus 90 North by William Anderson. He also discovers several unburned supplies hidden in the bottom of a hut, while Swanson finds a gun hidden in a petrol tank.

Their motive is spy-related, but Maclean only reveals it in the second to last chapter and it’s a MacGuffin (e. The fictional nuclear-powered submarine Tigerfish (SSN-509) was portrayed in the movie by the diesel-electric Guppy IIA class sub USS Ronquil (SS-396) when seen on the surface.

A USN Nuclear Submarine dashes to the Arctic to rescue a British meteorological team trapped on the polar ice cap. When the inner torpedo hatch is opened, seawater rushes in flooding the compartment causing the submarine to nose dive. A British doctor, Carpenter, arrives at the dock in Scotland where a nuclear submarine, the USS Dolphin, is preparing to sail. Finally, MacLean even mentions the newly-operational Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin by involving the ship in an aborted attempt to reach the survivors at Drift Ice Station Zebra.As with several of MacLean’s other books (like Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone), Ice Station Zebra was also remade into a hit major motion picture (probably in the 1970s and one I’ve admittedly never seen). Jones reveals to Ferraday that he's looking for an advanced experimental British camera which used an enhanced film developed by the Americans.

During filming, Patrick McGoohan had to be rescued from a flooded chamber by a diver who freed his trapped foot, saving his life. Carpenter[blackout] gets the scientists together and reveals he is an MI6 agent and knows who the murderer is. The novel was later very loosely adapted into the 1968 John Sturges film of the same name starring Rock Hudson.Which reminds me: "Ice Station Zebra" is also at least as much a wilderness survival story as a spy novel, and I didn't mind that. Also, MacLean may have been influenced by press reports about the nuclear-powered submarine USS Skate visiting Ice Station Alpha, located on Ice Island T-3 in the Arctic, on 14 August 1958, as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) . IMO, this story would be more entertaining as a movie - and because there is a movie based on the book I plan to see it, even though I've heard that the book is far better. The half a dozen interchangeable American sailors are all equally tough and unflappable but a bit jollier.