Joe Poyer

NORTH CAPE

CHAPTER 1

Fifty-eight degrees of frost. Twenty-six below zero F… From two hundred thousand feet, the surface of the earth below was void of all but the largest geological features. The land was a mixture of browns and grays, overlain with the misty white of a thin ice cover at sixty thousand feet. A barely discernible range of mountains stretched to the northeast beyond the narrow scope of vision allowed by the slit window. From this altitude, the lofty sixteen-thousand-foot peaks of the Urals appeared as softly rounded mounds almost lost in the sere browns of the surrounding plains. A thread of a river snaked down through, these plains from the narrow valleys and snowfields of the mountains and disappeared into the mist and cloud on the horizon. The land below spoke of peace and serenity; but the height obscured the hidden missile sites that could fling their deadly cargoes of thermonuclear death across continents and oceans; hid the military camps and bases scattered across the Asian mainland to meet the threat of enemies on two fronts.

The weather screen shifted focus to the northwest. Here the contrast was startling. Stretching far into the north of the continent and out across the Arctic Ocean, the northwestern swell of the Scandinavian Peninsula was covered with a huge storm that built even as Teleman watched. A hundred-mile-long streamer of cloud twisted around the tiny eye of the cyclonic storm sweeping down across the Great Barrier. All but the foremost edges of the storm were lost below the horizon, but in his imagination Teleman could picture the whole storm, covering five hundred thousand square miles on its leading edge, and God only knew how much in total. On the surface, one-hundred-milean-hour winds would be lashing the ocean into sixty-and seventy-foot waves to send them crashing onto the northern edges of the continental shelf. Salt spray blown off the crests of the waves would be turned instantly to ice and would batter to death all but the strongest ships that had the misfortune to be caught in the storm. This was an Arctic storm at its worst, a gale that could laugh at the puny efforts of the largest of its Mid-Atlantic and Caribbean cousins, a storm even more powerful and deadly than the coastal typhoons of the China Sea. For the next hour he would watch it grow through the forward observation slits and on his screen as he approached the Barents Sea. Lazily the pilot read the course plot and made a minor correction. He felt the plane bank over, the gulping ramjets running up with a steady murmur. He checked the instrument panels, all 573 dials, verniers, and digital readouts. Airspeed, course fix, engine temperature, fuel, contact point countdown, ambient temperature, internal temperatures in a hundred different locations throughout the aircraft, star fix coordinates, metal flex, accumulators, liquid oxygen generators, batteries, hydraulics, altitude, trim, generators, cameras, blood pressure, acid-base balance, pee; p°s, renal function, EKG… all checked themselves green on the boards.

Teleman — Major Joseph Teleman, USAF Ret — lay back in the acceleration couch and relaxed, suffused with the languid feeling of tranquilizers as the Physiological Control and Monitoring System (PCMS) accomplished its programed tasks and he was fully in control of his body again.

The airspeed indicated was slightly over Mach 1.5, with contact less than one hour away. The on-board computers had decided that he was fully capable of handling the aircraft at this relative crawl and had withdrawn all booster drugs. He settled back, one hand casually resting on the finger controls, and enjoyed the comfortable murmur of the engines and the passing scene below.

For the next twenty minutes the reconnaissance plane would drone on across the roof of Soviet Russia, skirting the Moscow antiaircraft missile defense ring by 250 miles, as it headed for the Barents Sea and rendezvous with the U. S. Navy battle cruiser that would accept the cargo of precious military information.

Above, traveling in overlapping polar orbits at six hundred nautical miles in carefully calculated paths that would circumscribe the earth every thirty minutes, a complex of Advanced SAMOS 3 satellites relayed information between one another and their ground point in Virginia. Shortly, the encoder on board clicked softly to itself and began displaying, in digital shorthand, information on a particularly suspicious ground location. One of the SAMOS 3 satellites had observed a small area of low-level infrared radiation where none had existed before. The location was in the vicinity of Magnitogorsk, the center of the Soviet electronics research.

Teleman smiled grimly. At last. He had been searching this entire mission for this patch of infrared as had his sister aircraft the week before. Word had been passed from the Defense Intelligence Agency of the sudden move of a very vital part of the new Soviet missile warhead countermeasures research operation. The testing location had been shifted for some unknown reason; perhaps it had something to do with the latest KGB announcement of a blown Western spy ring. Whether genuine or not, there was no way of knowing, but the fact remained that a large research installation had been moved, almost overnight it seemed. Thoughtfully, he programed the coordinates for his next sweep. Maybe the pieces of this little puzzle would finally begin to fall into place. But, for the remainder of this flight, it would be a milk run until he orbited the ship still a thousand miles north. Beneath his aircraft he could see the cloud-and snow-covered landscape of northern Russia turning black with its covering of pine. The forest, the taiga of Asian fame, stretched north for four hundred miles without a break — a last holdout of commercial enterprise in the — Soviet Union, the home of hundreds of fur trappers and family lumbering concerns, and the deathtrap into which whole divisions of the Moscow Army of the Nazi Wermacht had been lured to their destruction in the winters of 1942 and ’43.

Ahead, the terrain of Soviet Russia, slipping by the needle nose of the AR-17, was being covered by a heavy cloud layer. The cover thickened rapidly during the next ten minutes until a solid overcast was spread from horizon to horizon. Teleman reached forward and warmed up the infrared detectors and switched on the radar. The wide-scan radar beam knifed through the clouds to lay the pattern of the land below. Infrared came on-line moments later, laying a composite picture of heat patterns as it hunted through the lower frequencies to build a black and white image on the screen. The white, washed-out picture was quickly highlighted here and there with sharp black dots and patches as the warmer formations jumped out of the blizzard-and storm-covered ground below.

After a further ten minutes, an insistent code pattern containing airspeed and direction corrections appeared on the digital readout screen. Teleman altered course once more to suit the final rendezvous location. As the aircraft settled onto the new course, the cede pattern for rendezvous changed to that for the battle cruiser, his contact point for this portion of the mission. Still fifteen minutes short, he nevertheless began the check-out procedure on the transmission batteries.

CHAPTER 2

Forty degrees of frost. Eight degrees below zero F at sea level. The nuclear-powered Robert F. Kennedy came around sharply, bows swinging into the crushing fury of a Force 11 wind, twin screws churning furiously as she clawed her way-up a towering wave rising nearly twenty feet above her superstructure, then rocketed down into the pounding waters of the trough. The bows smashed deep into green Arctic waters. Tons of water sprayed over her decks, mast-high, turning instantly to ice that rattled-against the bridge like cannon shot. What liquid, not frozen instantly in the frigid air, clung to the bridge, the shrouds, any exposed part of the ship, added yet another microlayer of ice o the tons already weighting her down. Again and again the ship smashed into the waves, each time rising half submerged from an encounter that would have sent lesser vessels to the bottom with all the careless thought of a glacier crushing a hillock beneath its advance.

Fifty-to seventy-foot waves, whipped to a froth by the Arctic gale, marched down from the Great Barrier across two hundred miles of open sea. What was possibly the worst Arctic storm fir more than thirty years hunted through the desert wastes of the Arctic in a cyclonic storm of unbelievable proportions.

Formed from a katabatic storm somewhere on the Greenland Icecap and fed by a smaller low pressure area of relatively warmer, moister air, the two centers had met; the colder, moist, and therefore heavier air had settled down onto the glacier. The Greenland Icecap rises from the coast to nearly two thousand feet in the interior. The settling cold air had merely flowed down the eastern side of the icecap, encountered a low-pressure area off the foggy coast into which it rushed, picked up more moisture and speed, and spewed itself out into the Greenland Sea as a full-scale cyclone. Now, the storm, fully built and overpowering everything in its path, was sweeping in a huge curving arc up into the Norwegian and Barents seas. Lieutenant Commander Peter Folsom swiveled on his high seat as-Captain Henly Larkin, commanding officer of the RFK, came onto the bridge, peered out through the driving wipers, and shuddered. Folsom indicated the coffee pot and grinned as Larkin poured his famous oversized cup and carefully took a sip of the steaming black liquid as he came over to stand by Folsom.

“How’s she look, Pete?”

“A real ball coming up, Captain. The wind is about seventy-five knots and rising. The barometer is 28.52 and still falling — fast. We’ve had a four-tenths drop in the last half hour.”

“Anything coining in over the weather channel?”

“Thule’s forecasting what they call ‘heavy weather’ again. They claim that little breeze two days ago was only a prelude. At least 125-knot winds, possibly higher for this area in the next twenty-four hours.”

Folsom passed over the sheaf of flimsies that had come in since Larkin went off watch four hours before. Larkin took them over to his console and settled into the high stool with a muffled sigh of weariness and began to read. The picture was not good. Arctic cyclones are not to be fooled with. Any shipping without dire need steered well clear of such storms and even submarines moved down to the two-hundred-foot level to avoid the angry currents and crosscurrents churned up by the furious winds above. Larkin read on. The volume of meteorological information that had been gathered, collated, and disseminated in the past four hours was far more complete than that available to commercial shipping. In addition to the reports from the civilian agency weather satellites, the Department of Defense maintained a series of its own, devoted exclusively to gathering weather information strictly for the military. Larkin therefore had available to him more data about the storm and more accurate projections as to its future course than did commercial shipping. But Larkin had one other thing that commercial captains did not have — strict orders to maintain station in the Barents Sea at all costs, short of losing his ship. However, if it should become clear to Larkin that he was about to lose his ship, it would probably be too late to save her.

Larkin rubbed his eyes aid swiveled around to face Folsom at the adjacent panel. “Ah… my aching back. How long till contact?” He peered at his watch and checked it against the chronometer readout above his command console.

“Five minutes to go. Communications tells me everything is set. There shouldn’t be any trouble on this end.” Folsom slid out of the seat and walked over to the forward ports and stared out through the revolving screen into the wind-and wave-filled night. The ship crested another wave, tipped, slid and smashed again into the Arctic seas. Folsom hung onto the coaming, riding easily with the motion of the ship, and winced involuntarily as solid spray rattled like grapeshot against the tempered glass.

“Thule also said that we can expect snow toward the end. It seems to be one of those blasted Greenland storms, and when this one finally spilled over the edge it found a lowpressure area along the coast and kept coming… bringing everything in its path with it.” Larkin merely grunted as he continued to stare thoughtfully into the storm. His mind was churning with dozens of lines of thought, all ending at one consideration… the safety of the ship. Fourteen years of sea duty in every ocean of the world had taught him one certain lesson: the sea can never be trusted. Even the weather satellite system, with its computerized data reduction processes, was not to be trusted completely. There were too many unknowns, too many variables in the billions of cubic miles that comprised the ocean of air and the ocean of water that always obscured the pattern. Larkin had weathered both Mid-Atlantic hurricanes and South Pacific typhoons. He had seen a destroyer almost turned turtle in a South China Sea typhoon off the coast of Taiwan and rode out the Pacific typhoon of ’57 in a light cruiser. If nothing else, Larkin had immense respect for the sea. He was worried about this storm. If the predictions were right, it was going to get an awful lot worse before it got better. And, he remembered, it was here in the Barents Sea in 1942 that two lend-lease British destroyers had been sunk by just this same kind of Arctic cyclone. The RFK was a much more powerful and stouter ship than those two World War I tin cans—“tin cans” built in a day when they were really not much more than that — but still, every ship, every crew had its limit. One small mistake could be extremely fatal.

He turned to survey the bridge quickly, noting each station manned with all of the ship’s electronic and visual eyes and ears tuned outward to register the slightest alteration in the storm or the condition of the sea. Radar units quested ceaselessly to pinpoint the most insignificant object revealed by an instant’s break in wave or cloud that might turn out to be the conning tower of a submarine or rocket-loaded fighter bomber. For all intents and. purposes, the Barents Sea, edging the northern coasts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as well as Norway and Finland, was enemy water. The panel above the ECM — electronic countermeasures — console was lit a bright red, indicating that the highly secret sonar, radar, and infrared jamming devices were in full operation. Any contact with a Soviet vessel — or that of any nationality — would be a matter of pure, blind luck in these seas, but Larkin was not one to trust luck any more than he trusted the sea.

“Helmsman, course and speed,” he called out. Folsom glanced at him for a moment, then went back to staring out the ports.

“026° at sixteen knots sir.”

Larkin considered a moment. “Sixteen knots against these head-winds, not bad. Let’s cut her back to ten. I don’t want to carry any more pressure on that bow patch-up than we absolutely have to have.”

Folsom nodded agreement and called out the changed speed, then ordered communications to make the proper correction in the rendezvous location and time and get it off. As he finished talking, the screen door swung open with a bang and a furshrouded figure stumbled in, followed by the banshee shriek of the wind. A howled chorus of “shut the door” rose from the bridge crew as they swung around as one man from their consoles to glare at the snow-covered apparition. The hatch was jerked from the man’s grip by the wind and thudded back against the stops, then just as perversely swung the other way and slammed shut, abruptly ending the noise. Lieutenant Commander Joel Bridges leaned wearily against the hatch and stripped the Arctic mask from his face with a great deal of care. The mask and his nylon all-weather gear were coated with an inch of solid ice. Bridges worked the zipper on the parka loose and pulled it down. The parka then fell away of its own volition and the ice coating dumped onto the deck plates in thick chunks.

Bridges stood swaying among the ruins of his parka, his face flushed in the sudden ninety-degree temperature change. His expression, as circulation began returning to his legs and anus, was almost comical.

“It’s colder than a bitch kitty out there!”

“Now, now, that’s no way to talk in the presence of your ranking officers, is it, Lieutenant?” Folsom asked innocently.

Bridges delivered a muffled comment, glaring from the corner of his eyes as he stumbled around in a wobbly circle looking for the coffee. Larkin chuckled and poured coffee for him. “I take it that it is cold. Anyone else out there?”

“No, sir, I sent them in about twenty minutes ago.”

“Good, there is no need to stand watch outside tonight. You can’t see anything anyway.”

“Amen. Your eyeballs freeze.” Bridges took the coffee and stumbled over to the second officer’s console and pulled himself up into the high seat and began massaging his legs. Twenty minutes passed slowly, twenty minutes in which the ship fought the angry seas while Larkin calmly continued to study the weather reports and maps displayed by his console. Only the intenseness of his concentration betrayed his worry. Larkin turned sharply at the buzz of the intercom. Folsom picked up the handset.

“Communications is ready. Shall I have them pipe it up here, sir?” Larkin nodded. He lit a cigarette and made himself comfortable at his console, then picked up the handset and pressed the button that cut in the secrecy circuits and slipped the ear-plug wire around his ear. Immediately he heard the operator two decks below begin his “ident” call on the ultratight FM scrambled frequency.

“Got him, sir.”

“Beatle to Target One: …I read your signal… five by five… stand by… for transmission.”

The characteristically drowsy voice of the reconnaissance pilot came through on the FM channel clearly in spite of the storm and havoc raging in the intervening twenty thousand feet between ship and aircraft. Larkin pressed a third tab and glanced around quickly to make sure the banks of tapes were all running, and then took a long drag at his cigarette.

“Clear, go ahead.”

High-frequency chatter sounded briefly over the handset. The tape reels spun madly and the bridge echoed to the tortured squeal of the telemetry. The guard stood looking straight ahead impassively. Folsom sat on his stool at the executive officer’s console and tried to appear disinterested in the little drama being played out at the next console. He did not succeed any more than did the eight other officers and enlisted men on the bridge. Only Larkin knew who was aloft or why. Only the captain of the rendezvous vessel was entrusted with the knowledge of the trite but very true phrase — supersecret mission — so secret that the entire project did not possess a code name. The identification label was changed with every mission flown. Tonight the mysterious pilot and aircraft were known as Target. Two weeks ago in the Indian Ocean the name had been Phoebus. Larkin became aware of a faint hissing noise filling the background as the pilot began to speak. For Cod’s sake, he thought, not again. The last rendezvous had taken three hours while the communications section had struggled to maintain contact. For three hours Larkin had steamed a zigzag pattern around a fixed point while the aircraft had flown long, looping orbits around a rotating imaginary point and the ionosphere had wreaked havoc with the radio transmission. For three hours Larkin had sweated blood, knowing that even the vastness of the southern Indian Ocean was not big enough to hide both an aircraft and a large battle cruiser from hostile submarines or roving ASW patrols. Now he was praying that they would not experience similar trouble only 170 miles off the coast of the Soviet Union.

But after a few moments the hissing began to fade and the pilot’s voice came through again, slow and measured but clear:

“Transmission complete… fuel load… low… proceeding to refueling… point… at minus… thirty-five minutes… everything in clear… working like a charm… no… trouble from… Reds… ECM gear… working… perfectly.” Larkin hunched forward and spoke directly into the handset. “It looks as though you won’ t be completing this sweep… or returning to base for a while,” he said.

“We have new orders for you in supplembntary transmission coming up. I have been instructed to tell you by voice that you are to review them after’’—he stressed the word—

“refueling. We will remain on station here, waiting for you to report in. The mission should he completed by i800 hours tomorrow. You will rendezvous with us tomorrow night, same location.”

Larkin paused and unconsciously lowered his voice. “I have also been instructed to add that this mission is of the highest importance to East-West relations and must be completed at all costs, short — of detection.”

“I… understand…”

Larkin did too, only too well in fact. What he would pass along, locked into the tapes, was an almost impossible task. “Stand by for transmission.” Larkin keyed the tape decks to transmit to the circling aircraft.

Teleman sat thinking while the encoder clicked out the receipt of the transmission from the ship. He too understood only too.well what Larkin’s verbal instructions meant. And he was rather puzzled. This certainly did not sound like a routine patrol, the last of this watch before returning to base. Never before had he flown a mission pattern that in any way brought him in range of enemy rockets or aircraft. Heretofore all missions over hostile territory — which was anywhere in the world, including the United States — had been flown at altitudes above eighty thousand feet. He glanced out the slit beside his head and banked the aircraft a few degrees to see the storm below. Darkness was only an hour away, but the setting sun shed enough light on the cloud cover to highlight the intensity of the storm, even from twenty thousand feet. The storm, seen from above, resembled a devilish badlands: long, twisting canyons and arroyos of saw-edged cloud. The depths of the canyons were filled with hell’s own blackness, contrasting sharply with the evil red of the peaks and ridges. The late afternoon sunlight filtered suddenly as he passed beneath a thick blanket of high-flying ice crystals. The sun dipped below the rim of the storm and immediately its light turned a somber gray, deathly solid in its low intensity. In spite of himself, Teleman shivered involuntarily.

“Looks… awfully rough… down there… you be able to hold… through that stuff?”

“I don’t anticipate any real trouble,” Larkin replied. “So far it’s nothing we can’t handle.” Inwardly though, Larkin was worried. Although the RFK was new and built to more exacting specifications than any other ship m history, she had been damaged’ a week previously. Steaming slowly out of Newport, Rhode Island, Naval Base she had collided with a destroyer in a freak accident. In the heavy fog the destroyer had come off second best, but her sharply raked bow had gashed a hole in the RFK’s port bow, slashing through several structural. members. An emergency patch had been rigged at the almost deserted Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Naval Yards by a skeleton crew and the bow section shored up with temporary braces. This mission was too important to delay and there had been no other ship with the required equipment anywhere-within steaming range.

Now, the weather satellite information and photographs that had come in just prior to contact had shown the entire Arctic region as far east as Novaya Zemlya and west to Iceland in for the worst Arctic gale in years — worse in all appearances than the Great Storm of 1942. And now, the RFK, less than 170 miles from the Soviet coast and forty miles off Norway’s North Cape, was also directly in the storm’s track.

“We’ll be here,” he said: with considerably more confidence than he felt at the moment. The seas were increasing and the stabilizers were just about useless in the heavy waters. He noted that Folsom, bent over the console, had just ordered the RPM’s on the engines stepped up to furnish stabilizing air around the hull.

“We are going to start quartering a fifty-mile circuit in fifteen minutes.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw the white flicker of another wave break mast-high and come crashing down against the forward ports. “So we’ll be here.”

“Good…” The transmission garbled and quickly cleared. “Say again,” Larkin requested.

“Good… take it… easy… down there… see you tomorrow.”

“Right, clear.” Larkin stubbed his cigarette out and got up from the console. He waved to the marine and ordered Folsom to stand down from security. He thought for a moment, leaning against the console, feeling again the crushing weight of responsibility come down over him just as it had the night the destroyer sheared through the bow, or that afternoon off the North Vietnamese coast. He took a deep breath and shook his head reluctantly, then beckoned Folsom to join him at the plotting table, and quickly explained that they would stay on station for another twenty-four hours. For the next ten minutes they discussed the advantages and disadvantages of various courses that would allow them to take the brunt of the storm in the easiest manner possible. Finally, they settled on a straight run to the northeast that would bring them abreast of the North Cape, some one hundred miles north by 1100 hours. Both were convinced that it would be better to ride directly into the teeth of the gale now, before it unleashed its better than one-hundred-mile-an-hour winds, as it was expected to do late tomorrow. They Would then be able to run before the storm, arriving back on station at 1700 hours. This allowed a onehour lead time for any unexpected delays or heavier seas than Folsom picked up the maps and spread them out on the chart amble. He drew a fine line in red between their present position and the expected turn-around point north of the Cape.

He pointed with the pencil at the exposed position. “Actually it might be better to come farther west to bring us under the lee of the Cape.” He waited expectantly for Larkin’s answer.

Larkin shoved his cap back and rubbed his forehead. “Ordinarily, yes. But in this weather, I just don’t trust these waters. They shoal too damned easily and the average depth runs less than ten fathoms. If we pick up any more ice, and it looks like we’re going to, we’d be in big trouble. No, I think I’d prefer to make the turn in the open sea and take my chances with the wind and waves.”

“You’re the boss.” Folsom nodded and bent over the table again, to — begin the intricate task of plotting a course that would take them into the teeth of eighty-to ninety-knot headwinds that had a tendency to quarter unexpectedly. Even with the latest in inertial gyroscopes aboard, he still had a tricky problem in navigation on his hands — to take them a total of 223 nautical miles in twenty-four hours and bring them back to a starting point less than half a mile wide, all with terrible winds and towering waves that would combine to push the battle cruiser in a myriad of directions during the voyage. Larkin nodded to himself and turned away, satisfied that the ship was in capable hands with Folsom at the helm. He went below for breakfast.

CHAPTER 3

Teleman fell off to the north and west at a leisurely pace for the refueling point. Beneath him, the storm-filled Arctic Ocean gave way to the frozen wastes of the Great Ice Barrier, now at its farthest point of advance south in late March, well past the Norwegian outpost of Bear Island. Only the Great North Atlantic Drift, still retaining some of the slightly warmer waters of the Gulf Stream, kept the vast plateau of ice from moving farther south toward the European mainland. Crumpled and tom, the jagged edges of ice near the rim, twisted and warped by the pressure of billions of tons of slowly, insidiously moving ice from its vast interior, threw up blinding sheets of minute ice crystals that filled the frozen air to a height of twenty feet with fiery, needle-sharp spicules that screamed through the pressure ridges and hummocks, which carved them into tortured shapes. A frozen hell from insanity’s worst imaginings.

Teleman climbed slowly to one hundred thousand feet and held. Here the air, what little there was of it, was quiet, knifing past the razor-sharp leading edges of his half-extended wings as he flew westward, overtaking the sun. After another hour of flight, the trailing edge of the storm appeared low on the horizon, and within minutes he could see the gray shape of the ice surface below. The low Arctic sun broke suddenly through the edge of the cloud cover that reached westward to Greenland and flooded a two-dimensional pyramid of burnished ice with blood. The sunlight shining through the small observation slit to his right carried no warmth, only the cold glare of death. He flew on for another twenty minutes, lulled by the muffled sound of the engines working in a throttled-down ramjet mode and by the slow infusion of relaxant drugs seeping into his bloodstream: He was eight hundred miles north of Greenland when the radar contact panel lit suddenly. Instantly the computers responded and the PMC injected a neutralizer followed by a timed release of an Adrenalin derivative that jumped his heart rate to — double the normal rate of 72 beats per minute, with a correspondingly increased respiration ratio. Teleman hunched forward, taking in the full significance of the radar signal and the digital readout that was feeding closing range and speed into the display. At the same time, his body, acting in a blur of motion — a controlled berserk reaction — took over the aircraft and prepared for a series of evasive actions. Teleman knew that the blip on the radar screen could only be the refueling aircraft climbing up to meet him. But this made no difference to his reflex patterns. Friend or foe, he repeated the drill precisely as laid down in his subconscious by intensive training. The digital panel displayed a “friendly contact” signal and one second later flashed the recognition pattern for the refueling tanker.

The computers stepped down the flow of reaction drugs and Teleman relaxed slightly. He was now in full control of the aircraft and approaching the tanker, still two hundred miles distant, at a closing rate of better than three thousand miles an hour. The radar screen indicated that the craft was a KB-58 tanker. His speed was close to Mach a, near his limit, and Teleman’s was Mach 2.1. The tanker did not slack his speed and Teleman barely caught a glimpse of him as he pulled past and below his nose in a tight turn to take up his station ahead and above.

Only then did Teleman cut back his speed to match that of the KB-58. The boom was out of the tanker and he maneuvered carefully, bringing the aircraft up and just off the boom. Teleman watched it waver in the nebulous slipstream and, judging the right moment, increased power slowly to slip the nozzle into the housing aft of the cockpit. The maneuver was all performed by Teleman. The KB-58 pilot merely brought his straining aircraft up to the one-hundred-thousand-foot altitude for which it had been specially modified with TF-30 fanjets and outboard ramjet wing-tip engines and held her steady. The juggling for position, too precise even for the most advanced computer-controlled instrumentation, was performed by Teleman, who depended upon the extended reach that the controlling drugs provided his body.

When he felt the sharp bang of the nozzle slamming home and saw the safety light go on, he signaled the KB-58 and high-pressure pumps forced the two-hundred-thousand-pound cargo of liquid hydrogen into the — cryogenic tanks. Eight minutes later the refueling process was complete, and he broke away. Speed was of the essence during these midair refuelings, as both aircraft were totally helpless. Due to the advanced electronic detection and countermeasure equipment carried by Teleman, it was not likely that hostile aircraft would have the capability to track and ambush the two planes, but then in this operation nothing had been left to chance. Once, nearly twelve years before, it had been, and the one in a million gamble had occurred — with disastrous results. The United States Government was determined that it would not happen again. The KB-58, gleaming and sharply defined in the reddish light, dropped down and pulled ahead. Teleman answered the cocky, rocking wings and watched as the KB-58 pulled into a wide turn to the south that would take it back to its base at Thule. Then he settled into an orbiting pattern and keyed in the contents of the taped orders that Larkin had transmitted from the ship. For long minutes, Teleman sat silently, waiting for his next command and absorbing the message encoded on the tape while the aircraft described a vast orbit nearly fifty miles in diameter. When he finished, he sat for a few,moments thinking that his orders amounted to international blackmail on a grand scale.

From all outward appearances, the Soviet Union and the United States had been moving toward a rapprochement ever since the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when both nations, and indeed the world, had teetered on the brink of the nuclear abyss. Teleman knew that, although the outward hostilities bad been submerged fairly well from public view, they bad not disappeared. Now it was a much more subtle thrust and counterthrust. The Cold War had become economic war; carefully conducted war in which both great nations vied for the largest slice of world trade and world influence. Espionage had increased to such an-extent that dose to — one-percent of the national budget of both countries went to support their numerious “spy” establishments. Overt hostilities were engineered and “carried out through third and fourth parties as insurgency-counterinsurgency wars in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa testified. But lately the world had tired of playing patsy for these two giants.”

Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact had all but died in the past two years. The Southeast Asian nations had subtly declared that neither Western nor Eastern influences were welcome any longer, only trade. To reinforce their new demands, they had formed the Southeast Asian Common Market, in effect a revival of the old Southeast Asian Sphere of Greater Co-Prosperity dominated and led by, naturally enough, japan. What could not be achieved by war was finally won by the ancient oriental traits of patience and discipline. Since the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution had elevated Mao Tse-tung to the status of a semidivinity — a new Confucius — the flagging Chinese resolve had been stiffened by the infusion of a new spirituality into a people that had always existed in its soul. This newly revived and expansionist character, foiled by the SACM, had turned on the Soviet Union for the fuel of hatred to replenish the Communist Revolution. The Soviets had been challenged in fact as well as word for the leadership of the Communist world and for the “uncommitted nations.” Fortunately enough for the world, the smaller developing nations had tired of the empty promises of Communism, found the exhortations and money of the United States to be quite unapplicable to their own problems, and discovered that on a planet where the farthest neighbor was no more than eight hours away by supersonic transport and milliseconds by communication satellites, that even nationalism no longer held the key. Suddenly the wave of nationalist sentiment of the 1960s was dead.

By the mid-1970s a new trend — the first tentative edgings toward international cooperation that far surpassed that of the 1930s and completely disregarded the regional blocism of the late 1940s and early 195os-was gaining momentum. And so, rebuffed like the other two giants, Red China turned again, as historically she had done for thousands of years, to fomenting trouble on her frontiers — her Asian frontiers. And not without some small justification.

Between the Soviet Union and Red China stretches nearly two thousand miles of common border. That this borderland includes some of the most worthless land on the face of the earth made absolutely no difference to either party — just as it never had in four hundred years of struggle. In the mid-1800s the troops and diplomats of the Romanov tsars, after their rebuff at the Dardanelles by Britain and France during the Crimean War, turned their attentions toward the still mythical lands of Cathay. By the turn of the century they had managed to annex some fifty million square miles of former Chinese territory in a fashion that not even the wily Ch’ing emperors completely understood. That fifty million square miles of desolate and useless land remained a bone of contention ever since. Most of it consisted of a northeastern extension of the Himalayas called the Tien Shan Range; the Takla Makan, a cold, wind-swept, and totally barren desert ranging from three to six thousand feet in altitude; and the equally desolate and useless western reaches of the Gobi Desert. Since the late 1950s, China and the Soviet Union had continually fought a series of small-scale battles up and down the border and throughout the land on either side; the Chinese side was known as Sinkiang and the Russian, the Kazakh S.S.R. So isolated was this area, so far removed from human civilization was this region, that very little word of conflict ever leaked out to the Western world. Teleman recalled that it was in this same area, along these same borders, that in 1938-39 the Soviets and the Japanese fought a small-scale war — so small in fact that in 1940 over three thousand Soviet officers were decorated for war action — and promptly shipped off as badly needed reinforcements for Soviet troops in Finland. As Soviet and Chinese relations worsened following the de-Stalinization campaign of the Khrushchev regime, the intensity and frequency of Sino-Soviet border clashes increased until finally, less than a year ago, both sides, in a carefully secreted meeting, worked out a compromise that was to have settled the entire affair. It seemed that the Chinese had already broken their side of the bargain.

Teleman’s orders directed him to fly to the Sinkiang-Kazakh border where the Red Chinese were reported to have attacked in strength. It appeared to Western observers, from the sketchy reports available, that the Chinese had pulled a surprise attack and caught the Russians fiat-footed. They were steadily being pushed back all along the border and Chinese troops were reported to be firmly established on Soviet territory. Both sides were extremely quiet about the fighting, as indeed they always had been. The war was being conducted on a non-nuclear basis at the moment, rather a gentlemen’s agreement, although Teleman could not think of two less likely candidates.

Teleman thoughtfully considered the implications of such an attack as he continued to enjoy a rare moment of relaxation. If the war was being fought without the use of nuclear weapons, the Chinese would be at a distinct advantage. They could mobilize one field army at a strength equal to the entire Soviet forces. The Soviets now must be feeling the same way about the Chinese that the United States had felt about the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, and, before them, the magnificent French Army about the Viet Mirth. The Chinese troops were equipped and trained for this type of “conventional” guerrilla war, a conventional war that involved the proper use and maneuvering of small battle units in guerrilla tradition, small but in vast numbers of independently acting units. Units able to hit and run, always edging and prodding the Soviet forces into territory where the Chinese troops could overwhelm the less mobile Soviet troops by sheer weight of numbers. The Soviet generals and political leaders would be in Moscow fingering their arsenal of nuclear missiles and bombs, just as the United States generals had done in Southeast Asia, knowing that they could never use them unless the Chinese did so first, or unless a disastrous defeat endangering the entire nation appeared imminent. They would learn, thought Teleman, just the way the United States had, how best to fight such a war — by practical experience. All the reading and observing could never furnish what one year’s defeats and questionable victories would provide.

The Soviets could ill afford to risk the loss of prestige that would follow if the world knew that the stepson was challenging the stepfather, a very untutored and ill-equipped stepson at that. The State Department and the Pentagon apparently felt that, if the Soviet Union should wind up on the losing side, it would not take long for them to run screaming to the United States for help.

And why not? he thought sarcastically. Everyone else did as soon as their backs were to the wall. Why should they be different? For the moment the Soviets did not want it known that the much poorer Red Chinese had had the effrontery to attack one of the strongest nations on earth and the leader of World Communism to boot, at least spiritually. Seven to five, he thought, the State Department wants to know how deeply both are involved so that they can start cooking up one of their own brews to ease the pressure somewhere else in the world. Perhaps an announcement in the United Nations General Assembly, or better yet a call to two (tongue in cheek) distinguished nations to settle their differences before nuclear bombardments began would steal a march on both as well as promote general world condemnation. The other nations, particularly the non-nuclear nations, had become very leery of the big three of late whenever they had differences to settle in a nondiplomatic manner. After Cuba and the Tel Aviv incident, Teleman did not blame them the least bit.

Another thought occurred to him. The — Red Chinese, who had taken some pretty embarrassing reverses in Africa and Southeast Asia in the past five years and who were presently, torn apart internally, would not want their preoccupation with the Soviets widely known. Although they could put a much larger army into the field than could the Soviets, a correspondingly greater portion of their total national effort would have to be devoted to supporting that army. And the Chinese Central Government would not logically want to risk their very shaky position in China at the moment. The neo-warlords would certainly be ready and able to take advantage of the situation. If the war got too far out of hand; the Chinese — could be damn sure that the United States and the Soviet Union would in due course make plenty of trouble for _them elsewhere. The more Teleman thought about it, the more he was ready to lay odds that the Soviets had initiated this particular fight by baiting the Chinese somehow. They must be realizing full well that they could not much longer tolerate the supercilious attitude of the present Peking leadership. That the Russians might have bitten off more than they could chew was also quite possible. Teleman shook his head at the childishness and complexity of international politics and began to set up his flight plan. The orders directed him to proceed to the war area — the desolate and rugged hills of the northern Sinkiang plateau and border region — some of the worst territory for fighting a war in the world, territory that made the Dakota badlands look like a children’s playground, he thought.

Teleman made the necessary final corrections and keyed the program into the computer. Seconds later the aircraft broke out of its orbiting mode and headed westward on a course that would intercept the go° meridian. He would pick up the meridian over Uedineniya Island in the Arctic Sea, less than seventy-five miles from the Soviet Mainland of the Taimyr Peninsula. He would then cross the Soviet Union from north to south at 150,000 feet with negative 4 radar disruption to avoid Soviet observation.

For the next hour Teleman sat staring out the observation slit at the frozen wastes of the Arctic slipping past below. He sat and stared and thought about the coming mission. He had no qualms about performing it, had no questions about its importance. But he was puzzled about the motives involved on either side. It was not spelled out in the orders, but years of intensive. training, covering a good bit more than flying this aircraft, had taught him that he must seek the reason behind anything the opposition did. He knew that he could not rely on the busy clerks and service officers in the State Department to read the correct interpretations into the intelligence that he gathered, It was, by its very nature, often nothing more than a broad overview. And then again, sometimes, the most minute details were found that brought the entire picture into focus. The trouble with the State Department. was its size. Its thousands of employees were all too often engaged simply in running a bureau where forty thousand people worked. His own agency had fallen into the same pattern of late.

There were just too many people involved, too many in decision-making positions, too many incapable of making the correct decisions or, for that matter, any decisions at all. Too many that spent all of their time pushing their own ideas, interpretations, and motives no matter how they conflicted with the evidence at hand. Nor were the problems of bureaucracy the problems of the United States alone. The interrupted mission to locate the new Soviet electronics research center after its recent move was a prime example. The present theory popular in his agency was that A. Sovulov Semechastky had been responsible. Semechastky was Second Party Secretary and he had come up the hard way in the new generation of Soviet leaders. He also had a son who was general manager of the Electronics Assembly Plant No. 2 in Magnitogorsk. The cocktail talk around Moscow was that Semechastity had been pressured by his son to shift the location of the research center closer to the assembly plant, ostensibly for reasons of efficiency. Covertly, for reasons of increasing family power. Several million rubles would be spent in making such a change, but it was reportedly common knowledge that Semechastky, Jr., was about to be named the new director of the research center.

Teleman could confirm the rumor by photographs from 120,000 feet that would identify the make, model, and, if lucky, the license plate number of the automobile in the factory manager’s parking space.

Teleman sighed. Such was the stuff of modern spying. License plates from 120,000 feet. He knew that he must look for similar signs along the Kazakh-Sinkiang border. In the meantime, he had nearly six thousand miles to go and it looked like a long day. He keyed the computer and PCMS into action and slept.

CHAPTER 4

In 1964, as the A-11 project — later to become the SR-71, fighter Interceptor in an attempt to cover up its reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering role — came to conclusion, it had become extremely clear that the United States was badly in need of a stopgap method of acquiring intelligence information beyond the limited capabilities of the original SAMOS project. SAMOS was a classified Air Force satellite system, launched from 1958 to 1972 from both Cape Kennedy and Vandenberg AFB near Santa Barbara, California. Always shrouded under heavy secrecy, SAMOS — and later the expanded ADVANCED SAMOS — had one and only one objective: to keep an eye on Soviet and Red Chinese territory.

The state of the art in photographic techniques, lenses, and films in the early part of the project’s life was such that only fairly gross data could be obtained. The SAMOS satellites were at first limited to one-hundred-nautical-mile orbits in an equatorial path that covered, at best, only limited portions of USSR territory. But as more powerful launch vehicles became available and as the Vandenberg launch site was completed, the SAMOS satellites were launched with increasing frequency into polar orbits of altitudes from six to ten thousand miles, which provided coverage of Communist territory every two hours. By increasing the number of satellites in orbit and launching them into carefully prepared, overlapping orbits, complete coverage every three minutes was obtained.

Sensor technology increased quickly as industry was funded for billions of dollars. From the first crude infrared and black and white lenses, which were limited to coverage of open, daylight, cloudless territory, faster films, computerized programing, sensitive day-night television cameras, tape storage, and widely dispersed, secretly located mobile and fixed ground stations continually received microsecond-duration transmissions that were impossible to locate and fix, and relayed them to a central, monitoring station deep in the Virginia hills. From there, especially prepared abstracts were transmitted to Washington. But, even with sensors able to photograph a Russian guard sneaking a smoke on duty at the Number 3 gate at Kasputin Yar, or record the identification numbers on the locomotive and each of the freight cars moving along the Trans-Siberian Railroad with supplies for the naval base at Vladivostok, there were often, all too often, sites and areas spotted that needed further investigation, In the 1950s, before the SAMOS satellites were available, this Portion of the job had been performed in large part by a series of aircraft, the three most important of which were the U-2 and the reconnaissance versions of the B-47 and B-66. But in 1960, just prior to the ill-fated Paris Summit Conference, a U-2 had been shot down over the Soviet Union with a new type of missile. Nikita Khrushchev had used the incident to stop reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory. For some years after, the U-2 had continued to be operated over Red Chinese territory by the Nationalist Chinese, in spite of the ever-increasing number of the outmoded aircraft shot down and destroyed. By the late 1960s, both the United States and the USSR realized.that the continual surveillance of each other’s territory by their respective “spy-in-the-sky” satellites was doing a great deal of harm to their defense efforts. Such a great deal of harm that both nations on differing occasions were able to report such incidents as the explosion of a nuclear test rocket and the resulting destruction of a complete test complex — and several key officials — in the Soviet Union, and the similar explosion of the highly secret nuclear rocket-engine project at jackass Flats, Nevada, before the capitols were aware that the disaster had occurred, As sensor technology improved, steps were taken to move highly classified work into underground or camouflaged locations not visible to the spying satellites. It was this problem that brought several key officials, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Chief of Staff, the secretaries of State, and Defense, and the president of a large aircraft corporation together in the President’s office in late 1967. From this meeting had come the decision to build an aircraft that would carry many of the same sensors that were incorporated in the Advanced SAMOS. The aircraft to be designed would have long loiter time — on the matter of days rather than hours — coupled with high speed and an extremely high altitude ceiling, well beyond the range of high-altitude antiaircraft rockets.

For two years the lights had burned twenty-four hours a day on the back lot of the aircraft plant, the same lights that had burned for the U-2 and the A-11. Only the two hundred men virtually hand-building the aircraft ever knew what was being built, and of these, only five knew the reason why. A specially constructed and programed computer was used to design and refine the basic structure of the aircraft taking shape in the “skunk works,” as the back lot was known. Shotgun-carrying security guards were in evidence at all times, hard bitten men from the AP’s. They brooked no attempts to cross the gate and were as likely to level a shotgun at a general as a wandering employee. It was contrary to normal American industrial security procedures, usually unobtrusively present, but it was thought better to be safe than sorry.

On the day the aircraft was rolled out, shrouded in nylon and airlifted to Edwards Air Force Base, there was no celebration, no rejoicing over a job well done, only relief that it was at last out of the plant and gone. A Lockheed C-141 flew the parts of the aircraft to the desert flight-testing base at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas, and it was quickly rolled Into a hangar and disassembled, then trucked deeper into the Mohave to Gillon Advanced Test Site on the northern rim of the desert. Here, in a specially constructed and closely guarded base annex; the aircraft was reassembled and the testing begun. Teleman’s first look at the aircraft came on a day three years after he had signed his contract with the CIA and entered training. Previously, he had served as a reconnaissance pilot with the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnamese war, with some eighty-three missions to his credit before the armistice. He was a bachelor, with no more than the usual family ties and a fierce devotion to his country that had been tested and found fully complete in a North Vietnamese prison camp. His three years of training, covering a range of subjects from aeronautical engineering to geopolitics, and including education equivalent to a masters degree in the psychology of political power and government structures, had taught him more than he had ever suspected there was to learn. Teleman stood in the hangar that August day, feeling the fierce heat of the Mohave sun burning down on his back. It was nothing compared to the white heat of excitement generated by the sleek black needle of an airplane that reached back into the gloom of the hangar.

He shook his head wonderingly as he walked back along its DC-9 length. The body was 120 feet long, yet nowhere was it more than eight feet in diameter. The fuselage carried the distinctive contours of a supersonic aircraft: a pinched waist, Coke bottle shape halfway along its length. The wing began less than ten feet from the tip of the nose. Starting at a width of half an inch, it grew to two feet at mid-length, where it then flared out into a severely flattened and cambered parallelogram. Twin vertical stabilizers rode the wing, reaching four stories toward the ceiling of the cantilevered hangar. Each was demurely painted with the symbol of the United States, a six-by-nine-foot representation of the American flag. Other than that red, white, and blue flag, the aircraft was a gleaming black, a deadly killer whale of an aircraft for all that she was completely unarmed.

Teleman climbed the ladder affixed to the fragile side, half expecting the fuselage to collapse under his weight. He wriggled down into the cockpit and stretched out in the same acceleration couch he had sat in so many times in the mock-up at Eglin AFB. Every instrument, every control was exactly where it should be. With eyes closed he ran through the complete check-out of the instrument and computer panels. The only difference that he could detect was the complete satisfaction of sitting in the actual aircraft rather than the fiberglass and plywood mock-up.

Teleman was the first to fly the A-17. She was rolled out the next day and he climbed into the cockpit again and wriggled down into the couch, feeling the soft push of the oil-filled cushions against his back as the couch adjusted itself to his body. He made the first flight without the PCMS — the Physiological Control Monitoring System — in operation and the aircraft was all his to control. Teleman taxied to the far end of the runway and set the brakes. Then he ran the engines up slowly to full-military-rated thrust. The two great Pratt & Whitney TRR-58 turbo-ram-rocket engines took two minutes to build thrust to the maximum allowable for takeoff, nearly 53,000 pounds apiece. Teleman lay in the acceleration couch wondering at the tremendous vibration that shook every rivet, every seam in the entire aircraft until his teeth ached. Then he released the brakes. And in spite of its two-hundred-thousand-pound dead weight, the A-17 bounded forward. He was off the runway before he realized it. Automatically his body went through all the motions: gear up and locked, engines throttled back to low cruising speed of 470 knots, ground control tuned to 126.6 Mc, eyes sweeping the instrument panels. All instruments were reading into the green, and for a moment he ignored the check list and concentrated on getting the feel of the aircraft.

While the chase planes took up their stations around him, he tentatively tried the control system and whistled excitedly as the A-17 responded with all the firmness of an F-4

Phantom. Then test control was on the radio demanding to know if he had started through the check list yet. Regretfully he dropped back into the proper pattern while his two chase pilots, one on either side, grinned at each other from their stations well back and below his tail assembly.

For the next year, Teleman got to know the A-17 better than he had ever known any other aircraft. Under the supervision of the design engineers, he took apart and reassembled the aircraft. Then he took the A-17 up for hours on end, always flying the same tight pattern at one hundred thousand feet, well above the allowable levels for commercial planes. Gradually, as he came to know exactly what the airplane would do, flight altitudes and speeds were increased until he was flying routinely at Mach 5 and two hundred thousand feet.

Now he was nearly on his own. He spent so many hours in the aircraft that without the log he would have lost all count. Of the hours spent cramped in the cockpit, sitting in the closely guarded hangar flying computer-devised emergency conditions, he did lose track. At the end of the year he came to feel that the A-17 was an extension of himself. And then the medical people moved in to make it so.

It had been recognized when the A-11 cum SR-71 was completed that man had just about reached his limits in controlling his own aircraft. The A-11 was capable of Mach 3 and nearly Mach 4 by the time the Pratt & Whitney J-58 engines had been up-rated to their fullest extent. The A-11 was only marginally effective as an interceptor aircraft. At Mach 3, fifty miles was needed to complete a 180° turn. Almost go percent of the aircraft was composed of fuel tanks and her cruising range was severely limited at speeds above Mach 1.5, allowing little or no loiter time to contact a target. Because of the immense fuel load needed to keep her in the air, her reconnaissance payload, and therefore her cameras and other sensors, were severely limited also. In effect, and compared to the A-17, she was little help to the satellite surveillance system. Some stopgap measure was needed so that aircraft could spend time over enemy territory without being detected and could gather the smallest details necessary until large, manned satellites could be placed in orbit — still four years in the future.

For nearly ten years the X-15 series of rocket craft had been providing behavior and engineering data on hypersonic aircraft. The X-15 was used as the basic design for the A-17. The X-15 was rocket-powered, and this provided the tremendous speeds necessary — but powered flight time was limited to a few minutes duration. The A-17 needed days of flight time.

The turbojet engine is the most efficient of all propulsion systems’ for speeds between Mach .9 and Mach 2.5, where fuel load, speed, range, and weight are the critical factors. Beyond Mach 2.5 and one hundred thousand feet, the ramjet becomes the most efficient Beyond 120,000 feet, where the air is too thin to support even the ramjet, the rocket engine, with its self-contained oxidizer, becomes the most efficient. To avoid Soviet antiaircraft missiles, the A-17 needed an altitude greater than 125,000 feet. Since the late 1950s, a combination of the three types of propulsive systems had been the research goal of aeronautical research laboratories all across the world. The approach finally adapted to the A-17 was the U. S. Air Force concept called the TURBO-RAM-ROCKET. Below eighty thousand feet and Mach 2.5, the twin power plants in the A-17 functioned as turbojets — air sucked in through the inlet and forced into a combustion chamber, where it mixed with fuel, burned fiercely and the hot gas was forced past a turbine and expelled from the nozzle. The turbine was in turn coupled to the compressor behind the air inlet to compress air and force it into the combustion chamber. An improvement was made on the basic system by adding another stage in front of the compressor assembly called a fan. The fan was just that. Huge blades, coupled to and spun by the turbine, pulled in far more air than the combustion process needed. The excess air was ducted out the side of the engine casing to add as much as 30 percent more thrust.

The turbofan, as it was properly called, was capable of pushing the A-17 to speeds above Mach 2.5. Depending upon the altitude and various atmospheric conditions that necessitated the change — somewhere above Mach 2.5 to 3 — the engine switched from the turbojet mode to ramjet. It was in this versatility that the twin engines differed radically from earlier jet aircraft engines. These assemblies are composed of a thick disk of high-strength steel alloy upon which are mounted cambered blades. The blades are twisted to assume an airfoil shape. In the usual turbojet engine, these blades are mounted rigidly. The turbine assembly is constructed the same way and the blades are made of various materials, selected to withstand temperatures in excess of 1600°F as the hot gases exit from the burner chamber. As a rule of thumb, Teleman had been taught, the hotter the temperature of the gases leaving the burner — the Turbine Inlet Temperature (TIT) — the greater the thrust developed by the engine. The A-17’s TIT was in excess of 3200 degrees.

To allow the power plant to enter the ramjet mode, the blades were mounted upon variable stator disks and could be turned edge-on to the airstream. In addition, the air inlet plug, a large rounded cone of metal mounted in front of the air inlet, could be moved forward to increase the air compression.

A ramjet engine works by ramming air into its combustion chamber at high speeds, where it is mixed with fuel and ignited by a glow plug. Because the ramjet must have a certain flow velocity of air before it will begin to operate, it usually must be carried aloft by another engine to the proper speed and altitude. But once in the thin reaches above eighty thousand feet, the two engines, now operating as ramjets, far surpass the potential and efficiency of the turbojet or turbofan.

A ramjet of this efficiency has a rather narrow operating “envelope.” When the air inlet plug is rammed forward to compress the air while the compressor blades are turned edge-on to — the airstream, a carefully designed tolerance between plug and inlet must be maintained to provide the maximum flow of air to the combustion chamber for the altitude and speed. This tolerance mechanically limits the altitudes and speed beyond which the ramjet may be operated in direct proportion to the growing lack of atmosphere. Beyond 170,000 feet, Teleman could elect, if the extra speed and altitude were needed, to go to the rocket mode.

Now, clamshell doors closed down the area ahead of the combustion chamber — or burner ring in the case of the A-17 engines — and liquid oxygen was fed directly into the burner ring to mix with the fuel — liquid hydrogen — thereby providing a rocket engine that was capable of taking the A-17 to Mach 5.9, only two thousand miles per hour less than would be needed to achieve sub-orbit. Teleman had never had occasion to use the rocket mode except on practice missions. It’ was a last-ditch stand when all else failed: The rocket mode could use six hours worth of carefully metered fuel in two minutes of burning time.

Most experienced military pilots who had received their training during the Vietnamese War were now edging toward the age where their efficiency was slowly being whittled away by the heavy demands placed upon them by their aircraft. Many had gone into the Vietnam War well past the age that a World War II flight surgeon would have considered them capable of controlling even the relatively slower and much less technically complicated fighter aircraft of that period. The younger pilots who had received their baptism of combat flying in the mid-1960s had left the service in droves at the end of the war to answer the lure of high salaries and lifetime sinecure in commercial airlines, which were expanding tremendously in the wake of the giant airliners, supersonic transports, and rapidly growing travel markets.

The human organism is still the most reliable of all mechanisms in spite of the strides that had been made in automation. Rather than load the aircraft down with servomechanisms and complicated gear to perform many of the tasks that the pilot could do, the designers had opted for the human factor.

The A-17 had been on the threshold of man’s ability to control under the difficult and microsecond decision points that had to be reached and gated properly when the aircraft was closing on its target at nearly four thousand miles an hour. The elapsed time from the moment a ground target — often less than a hundred feet across — came into sight until the A-17 had left it behind was often no more than four seconds. During this time, the information displayed on the screens had to be accepted, interpreted, a decision for action made, and the decision implemented; all with enough time remaining to allow the cameras and other recording devices to do their job.

Even in those instances where circumstances dictated that Teleman could loiter the aircraft over the target and select his objectives, someone had to decide what should be recorded, what must be searched for to make the picture complete, and handle the volumes of data that poured in, constantly interpreting, re-deciding and shifting objectives — and often targets. No computer could handle this job. Teleman was trained in the use of certain psychic energizer drugs of the amphetamine and lysergic acid families that could boost his body system output to fantastic heights in relation to normal physiological response. The LSD derivatives extended his powers of concentration and, through their hallucinogenic effect, made him feel that he was actually part of the aircraft. They also increased his comprehension and ability to deal with a multitude of facts in a very short time.

The amphetamines provided the same effect for his bodily responses, increasing his reaction time and slowing his time sense to compensate for the demands of the aircraft’s speed.

Teleman’s physiological and biochemical status was monitored constantly during the mission through a specially tailored system of instruments blended together to form the Physiological Control and Monitoring System. At the start of the mission, an intravenous catheter was inserted into the superior vena cava vein through a plug implanted surgically in his shoulder. A glass electrode was brought into intimate contact with his bloodstream at this nearest acceptable point to the heart. Through the electrode a series of minute pulses, set up by an electrochemical reaction with his blood, informed the computer continually of his body status. The computer was programed to receive inputs directly from various parts of the aircraft’s controlling instrumentation that, coupled with The in vivo status reports, determined the time and dosage of the drugs he received. If the instrumentation, directed by the flight plan or by instructions from Teleman, called for a state of physiologically alert and expanded consciousness, proper drugs were fed into his bloodstream through the catheter and his body responded accordingly. Because of the duration of the flights, often lasting six to seven days, when Teleman was not needed to respond to specific tasks, the computer instructed the PCMS to feed in barbiturate derivatives and he slept. Teleman had once calculated that at least 65 percent of all of his missions were spent sleeping. Although great pains had been taken to develop a high tolerance in Teleman to the drugs he was constantly being infused with, he was thoroughly poisoned by the end of a mission.

In short, Teleman was carefully tailored to the aircraft and its missions. The reach the drugs allowed was marginal, yet enough to provide the control needed to handle his craft as no other airplane had ever been flown. Drugs kept him awake, or put him to sleep, instantly. Others kept him at the peak of alertness for as long as required and his mind focused on his Mission, his instruments, and his aircraft

CHAPTER 5

The great bend in the Oh River, one hundred miles east of the Siberian city of Tomsk, lay 180,000 feet below when the PCMS nudged Teleman out of sleep. Within three seconds he was awake and scanning the information displayed on the screen. The Electronics Countermeasures (ECM) bank had detected a series of searching radar beams within the past few minutes. Teleman got busy with the source detectors, concentrating closely on the sweep of the searching finger on the ECM screen. So far the radar beams were searching below eighty thousand feet, well below his present altitude. After a few minutes of concentrated work, he tracked the radar signals to their location — about where he had suspected. Four hundred miles farther down the Ob was the ancient city of Novosibirsk, one of the oldest of the tsarist Siberian exile camps. Now it was a booming industrial and mining center, containing one of the largest Soviet air bases. Novosibirsk was located at 800 miles north of the Soviet-Chinese border, and he suspected that the local commander of this tempting target was feeling just a bit jumpy this close to a hot war.

At the moment it appeared to be nothing more than routine searching by omni-radar. But the closer he approached to Novosibirsk, the more intense the weaving net of radar became and the greater the search altitude. For a minute his feeling of apprehension tightened, and Teleman wondered if they were on to him.

Fifteen minutes later he was approaching the northern rim of the Altai Mountain chain that ringed the western rim of the Mongolian Plateau. Beneath, the ground was still shrouded in darkness, sparsely broken by patches of light signifying inhabited communities. As he flew farther across the mountain range the lights became more and more scattered, until finally they ceased altogether. Now, far on the eastern horizon, he could make out the darker band of horizon that in less than an hour would be touched by the first tinges of dawn. The night-light television cameras displayed a scene of hellish grandeur in the uninhabited recesses of this most desolate of mountain ranges. The Altai range sprawled to three hundred miles wide on, its north-south axis, with peaks of thirteen thousand feet and higher thrusting jaggedly into the black sky. On either side of the range, deep, forbidding stretches of badland had been strewn about as if by a giant’s hand. The southern reach of badland and foothill was Teleman’s immediate destination, the stretch of land between the Altai and the smaller, but no less lofty, Tarbagatai range. More out of curiosity than anything else, he cranked the image up, increasing the magnification and resolution on the electronic telescopes until he was watching a strip of land less than three hundred yards wide slipping past. He was still on the northern face of the range, the gentler side, if that term could be applied to this waste of rock and ice. A few stunted trees, in miniature, appeared here and there. But nowhere could he find a trace of human habitation. This range of mountains was so barren that it was shunned even by the nomadic tribes of Mongolian sheepherders who drew a living from the wastes of the Gobi.

For the next half hour the A-17 passed over the mountains thirty-six miles below, until, on the eastern horizon, Teleman could make out the first indications of the approaching dawn. It would still be another hour and a half before the sun would reach into the valleys and canyons of the Tien Shan ahead, but the aircraft, reacting to the carefully prepared flight plan, began to throttle back and lose altitude. For long minutes Teleman watched the far-off ground sliding past; he was too slept out to sleep any longer and loath to request a barbiturate from the PCMS. As he sat debating with himself, the radar panel blipped for attention and projected a stream of swiftly flowing data that told Teleman that a flight of Soviet fighters was patrolling at thirty thousand feet. Teleman flipped a number of switches and got the radar tracking to trace their flight patterns. They were ahead and below nearly 130 miles south when first spotted. He was less than two hundred from the confluence of the Soviet, Mongolian, and Chinese borders and, as he guessed, the planes were merely another border patrol on a dawn sweep. Shortly, he was over the border into Red China, still at 140,000 feet and watching the Tarbagatai Mountains rounding on the horizon.

His target was now three hundred miles distant and Teleman assumed control of the aircraft. He throttled back and began losing altitude swiftly. The flight plan called for two long passes, one at a hundred thousand feet to survey the terrain and the other at forty thousand feet for close-ups. He was feeling extremely uneasy about the low-altitude pass, and the closer he approached to the target area the more uncomfortable he became. When the altimeters indicated one hundred thousand feet, he leveled off and cut his speed back still more to Mach 1.2, until he was barely crawling up on the Sinkiang highlands.

Twenty minutes to contact. The twisted, narrow Tarbagatai Mountain range slid behind and he was over the rugged highlands that edged the Gobi Desert. The rugged land of the Sinkiang plateau sped by as he slanted in. He started a long, seventy-five mile turn that would bring him onto a heading of 212° and into position to begin his search pattern along the border. As a safety precaution, Teleman began to crank the radar outward to its full — range of sixteen hundred miles and instructed the computer to keep watch and report anything that rose above eighty thousand feet. Then he turned his attention to the ECM console and began to narrow down the counterdetection radar cover to an area less than five miles across. All down the go° meridian Teleman had maintained a fifty-mile diameter ring, not enough to attract attention at the altitude he had been holding, but enough to prevent accidental detection.

Ten minutes to contact. All detection systems were silent. The low light-level television cameras were showing him apparent one-mile altitude shots along his flight path for ten miles on a side. He could make out no sign of life, no roads or tracks or signs of” human habitation. A few minutes before, he had left the desert and scrublands behind as the terrain climbed to eight thousand feet and became grasslands, depending for their meager water supply on the swift rivers flowing down out of the Tien Shan and its foothills. The winter was fierce, but the scouring winds had kept the sloping hillsides relatively free of snow below seven thousand feet. The plateau would rise another two to three thousand feet before cresting and beginning to flow downward toward the Kazakh border seventy miles west.

Fifty miles due east of his present position lay the Chinese city of Urmachi, probably the staging point for Chinese troops fighting in the hinterlands below. Off to the southeast glinted the frozen surface of the Kara Nor that would mark a rough position from which he would make a sharp turn to the northwest and fly up to the first checkpoint to pick up the star-fix coordinates for the border sweep.

As he made the turn the night-light TV cameras blanked for a moment, shifting resolution and iris assemblies as the sun began to brighten the snow-splotched landscape. He could still discern no sign of troop movements, or of life, period. But he knew he would, soon enough.

Now he was less than ten miles inside the Kazakh border, roughly paralleling the line the Soviets were reported to be holding. A swollen river rushing out of the hills, snow covered now, but green in the spring and early summer, slipped tantalizingly past on the ground surveillance screen. The countryside was deserted because of the winter and the war, but in more peaceful and warmer times, Mongolian and Tartar sheepherders shared the valleys, fresh steppe grass, and frequent small rivers from the mountains. In normal times they drove their flocks into the region for the long summer pasturage, peacefully net interfering with one another. Now, he knew, the valleys below were full of) radar sites, long-range missile and artillery positions, and troop concentrations of both sides. A range of pockmarked hills marched across the land that was beginning to fall away into a long valley stretching westward to the border. Abruptly the scene swam as the aircraft navigational sensors locked onto the proper stars and altered the course of the fleeting shadow until it was solidly on the wire. For the next hour the A-17 tacked back and forth across the irregular border, defined only by the series of star-fix coordinates held in magnetic tape. Teleman had completed the first pass at one hundred thousand. feet over the border city of Tahcheng and negotiated the turn-around point some sixty miles north. In manual control again, he was very carefully edging the aircraft down to forty thousand feet, the lowest he had ever flown over enemy territory. He knew that he could be sighted visually by either side and hoped that the lack of radar fixes would be, thought due to opposition countermeasures. Just in case, he warmed up the decoy rigs and slapped them onto standby. If radar beams came questing after him, their distinctive pulse patterns could be analyzed. The ECM would then broadcast high-frequency radio signals up and down several bandwidths. This would have the effect of presenting to the radar operator a broken, rapidly flickering signal that hopefully would be blamed on freak atmospheric conditions.

As the A-17 came over the Irtysh River where it flowed down through a deep gorge cut through the foothills of the Altai Mountains, Teleman suddenly glimpsed a small patch of heat on the infrared screen some thirty miles west of the Kazakh border into Sinkiang. A feeling of elation coursed through him. The whole operation might turn out to be easier than he thought. Ending the coded message that Larkin had transmitted from the ship containing his countering orders was the message “Imperative you procure visual data of war situation.” He had to come back with actual photographs of the fighting for the mission to be successful. Without photos, the impact of the conflict between Red China and the Soviet Union would be lost on the world. The public would tend to interpret it as another smoke screen or propaganda play. The patch of heat detected by the infrared sensors could very well lead to those photographs. Teleman examined the IR screen carefully. There, in the.center of the blacked-out snowcovered rock and scrub-covered walls of the gorge that led toward the border was a barely discernible shade of gray, only slightly lighter than the surrounding valley. Teleman pulled around in a tight circle, concentrating visual sensors and cameras on the spot. He had earlier cut his speed from Mach 1.2 to sub-sonic when he had dropped below one hundred thousand feet to avoid sonic boom. Now he throttled back even more, running out the variable geometrical wings until they were extended to the fullest to hold his speed at two hundred knots.

The television cameras were displaying’ the deep valley and he carefully began cranking up the image until he could make out a two-wheel track twisting through the rock and paralleling a tiny stream. Shortly a military vehicle came into sight around and from under a shoulder-like overhanging rock. It moved slowly into the open and began to pick up speed along the track. A minute passed and a second vehicle appeared, and then a third.

Teleman brought the aircraft around on the opposite heading and slowed ” still further until the fan assemblies engaged and wound up to thirty thousand RPM to provide extra airflow over the wing surfaces to support the aircraft. He was now down to 105 knots. A check of the radar detectors showed nothing more than a routine search patrol nearly eighty miles south, probably Chinese. No scrambled Chinese fighters were recorded. He turned his full attention back to the vehicles again.

The trucks were now moving along the roadway at about forty-five miles an hour, pretty fast for military vehicles on an almost nonexistent road. He cranked the images up to their highest degree of magnification and identified them as Kirov five-ton troop lorries. Ahead of the trucks Teleman could see that the narrow gorge opened up and climbed steeply to a flattish plain that butted sharply against a series of rocky foothills. The foothills appeared to be their destination. -Now he could also see artillery pieces on limbers bouncing along behind each truck. As the trucks reached the spot where the valley began to widen, they had to pass through a narrow defile several hundred yards long. There was no place to turn off the road and, because it snaked through the gap, it would be all but impossible to back out with the artillery pieces. The Chinese must have been waiting for just that moment.

Artillery opened up from somewhere deep in the foothills. The first truck was lucky and ran the ranging gauntlet. Cannon shells, four of them, burst high on either side of the first truck. As it cleared the pass, it sped for the safety of the foothills less than half a mile away. The second truck was not so lucky. It was caught by a fifth artillery shell that arrowed down into the defile and exploded. The truck disintegrated in the explosion, the gas tank and ammunition going up in a fierce welter of flame. The third truck skidded to a halt only a short distance behind and was hit almost immediately. For three more minutes a heavy barrage of fire pursued the first truck, but it managed to reach the foothills below, to which the enemy artillery men obviously could not depress their guns. Teleman’s cameras faithfully recorded the action on tape. The entire sequence had taken less than two minutes, but two minutes was too long for Teleman to maintain such a low speed. Someone would be bound to notice. He increased power to bring the aircraft up to five hundred knots and forty thousand feet again as he broke out of the tight orbit and resumed his search along the border. The flight plan called for a shallow zigzag pattern along the border that would carry him fifty-odd miles into enemy territory on the first, high-altitude pass. The second pass would be modified by data from the nonvisual sensors and would concentrate on areas of heavy troop concentrations. One area particularly was read out by the flight-control complex. It indicated modifying data being received from one of the SAMOS series designated Advanced Reconnaissance 7. The satellite system had spotted an unusual degree of infrared activity twenty miles behind Chinese lines in the vicinity of Kuldja on the Ili River. The river flowed through a wide pass and crossed the border fifty miles east of the scrub town, important only as a staging point for whomever could hold it. At the moment it was in the hands of the Chinese.

Its principal danger lay in the fact that it commanded the shallow heights that led gradually to the border and the start of the Kazakh steppe, then out across the flat grasslands. The pass down which the Ili River flowed from the Tien Shan to Lake Balkhash was an arrow aimed directly at the huge Soviet military complex around the Kazakh city of Alma Alta.

The infrared patch that AR-4, satellite AR-7’s predecessor, had detected immediately caused its IR and visual light lenses to shift focus. At the optimum moment, recorders were activated and they picked up two images. In its brainless way AR-4 was excited by what it saw. The visual light cameras showed a cluster of trucks and, more important, a special variable called a 210-mm cannon mounted on a massive tracked crawler. As AR4 had watched, the cannon had spat a shell. The IR cameras saw the flash of fierce gases erupting from the muzzle and immediately the computer tripped a relay that caused the tape to spurt through the reel. The visual light cameras tracked the shell in free flight as the lenses shifted focus quickly to follow the trajectory.

In twelve seconds of flight the shell flew unerringly to detonation. There was no explosion worth mentioning, merely a spreading cloud, recorded by the IR cameras until it cooled and was lost in background scatter. Program 14 — designed to watch for nuclear weaponry — noted the disappointing blast and gave way to Program 1, GENERAL SURVEILLANCE.

Program a took its time digesting the data — all of three nanoseconds — then scanned rapidly across its disk memory to match this variable against any of eight billion bits of data. It found none. Program 1 reached the end of its rack and automatically tripped Program 99, code named OVERVIEW. Program 99 evaluated the data, found the flight pattern it needed, then instructed Program 1 to include the new datum in its general report. Five minutes later a coded message left AR-4 and was received by a picket ship south of Ceylon. By the time the message came to the attention of the project director on the night shift in Virginia, AR-4 was already eleven minutes away from the site deep in the Tien Shan and over East Pakistan. The task of relaying the instructions from Virginia plus the new information fell to AR-7, traveling a parallel track to AR-4, but 250 miles east and half an orbit behind.

Teleman studied the new data for several seconds, then punched the program tab that recorded the new flight plan segment, modifying the original, and fed it to Flight Control. Immediately, the, A-17 lifted for altitude, climbing swiftly on its turbofans to eight thousand feet. If warranted, he would return to complete the original low-level flight after checking out the threatening artillery piece. The 210-mm gun was one of the largest artillery pieces in the world. It was capable of throwing a three-thousand-pound shell a distance of forty-two miles. Originally, a similar artillery piece had been designed by the United States Army in 1953, as a nuclear cannon for tactical uses in the event of a war in Europe. The Soviets had immediately retaliated with their own version. But as short and intermediate-range ballistic missiles improved in size, accuracy, and transportability, the cumbersome gun had been discarded. Obviously the Soviets had discarded at least one of theirs to the Red Chinese, probably in the late 195os when everything, at least outwardly, was still sweetness and light between Russia and China. Now the Chinese appeared to be using the cannon against their one-time benefactors. But, as the instructions pointed out, they had not used a nuclear shell — or if they did, it had failed to explode. Teleman’s job was to verify the possibility that a nuclear shell might have failed or else find out what they were shooting that required such an effort and such a large caliber weapon. “Great,” he muttered aloud. Ten minutes later Teleman passed over the muddy city of Kuldja and the frozen Ili River. He turned inland for a brief moment to bring the aircraft to the head of the pass, and then swung into a tight sub-sonic orbit again. A ground control map flew across the scope matching his ground speed. At the proper moment Teleman began the long, twenty-five-mile swing onto a — heading of 353° N and bent to check the surveillance radar. The screen was blank except for scattered blips above him, indicating the presence of high ice-cloud formations. Interested, he shifted to Weather Surveillance and asked for a readout on the ice cover. The panel indicated that it was building quickly to a solid cover above 175,000 feet and gradually extending eastward to cover all of Central Asia. At the moment, it was solid — solid that is to radar, but invisible to the eye — between the Kirghiz SSR — Tadzhik SSR border to the south and the Urals to the east. He instructed Weather Surveillance to continue monitoring the cover and flipped back to the surveillance radar. Teleman then cranked the image outward, extending it to its full 1600-mile diameter. There on the western quadrant, four blips were rising, probably from the base at Alma Alta. The interceptors were well inside the Soviet border and did not appear too interested in anything other than patrolling for Chinese aircraft. They were down on the deck at less than ten thousand feet. East, there was little activity except for what appeared to be cargo aircraft on the Chinese side. He spotted a long line of heavy-cargo planes, escorted by fighters, coming in from China proper. Teleman checked once more on the four Soviet interceptors, watching for a long moment as they completed the formation and turned north and east. They appeared to be flying sub-sonic-as a border patrol would. But if they turned east still further and crossed the border, they would bear watching. To be on the safe side he fed data to the computer and ordered it to keep tracking. Then he turned his attention back to the ground control map.

He was now almost directly over the location of the cannon emplacement. The new flight plan called for two passes, one at forty thousand feet to survey the countryside and, if he could manage it safely, a second lower pass over the impact area for closeups. The altitude was left up to him. Teleman looked pained — that was their polite way of telling him to get right down on the deck if he could. To make the fastest possible approach with the least amount of time over the target area, he resumed manual control and fell off fifty miles to the east. He would make a quick pass straight down the valley and pull up hard to eighty, thousand feet. The pass should carry him over both the cannon site and the impact site with less than one full minute spent below sixty thousand feet. The second pass he would worry about later.

Teleman made the first run across the target in a straight pass while all of his surveillance equipment — infrared, ultraviolet, topographical laser, and telephoto visual light — ground away. There was little activity on the ground, with the exception of two Red Chinese Mig-21 patrol crafts rising from the vicinity of Ala-Kul to the north. He had nothing to fear from the Chinese interceptors even if he came within visual sighting distance. His speed was more than a match for any armament they carried. The ground control map flew across the screen, a green streak acting as the pointer to the first of the locations.

The sensors picked out the exact location of the 210-mm gun from the satellite coordinates and displayed the area beneath on the scope. The gun emplacement was covered with camouflage netting and he shifted to the IR panel. On the scope he thought he could pick out several trenches and some activity close to the gun itself. Then he was away and past, hoping that all of the sensors combined had been able to pick out a coherent picture. The laser panel was signaling for attention and he switched it up. The laser had spotted a diffuse cloud on the order, of two hundred parts per million some thirty miles east. Quickly he reran the instructions from AR-7 until they matched the location.

When the shell from the gun had exploded it had released a cloud. Of what, AR-4 was not equipped to tell. But it was still there after twenty minutes, and spreading slowly, apparently on the prevailing wind. The laser indicated particulate matter as the main composition of the cloud — thin droplets of liquid. That pretty well ruled out an atomic shell, he thought, even if it had failed to explode properly. Teleman paused for a moment, then deciding, he boosted power to the turbofans and swung the wings forward a few degrees and headed quickly for the deck. At a little less than Mach 1 he bore westward toward the cloud, flying up the valley and losing altitude as fast as he could shed it. “Gas?” he wondered aloud. If the Chinese were using gas, the Soviets might not be so reluctant to initiate a nuclear conflict. In this godforsaken area it could be done fairly safely, that is if they could limit the exchange to the war area and not extend it to each other’s cities. The Soviets might be trusted to do that, but not the Chinese. They would have to escalate if they were to remain effective. The valley seemed outwardly calm in the early morning sunlight that was beginning to touch the snow-covered slopes. But he knew that the snow and convolutions of the land hid masses of troops and weaponry. He knew that the radar operators on both sides of the border must be wondering about the peculiar blank spots in their radar that kept recurring over the war area and along the lengthy border. He was sure that conferences were being held by phone between the radar sites and headquarters areas to decide whether to scramble investigating fighter aircraft. Teleman was reckoning that he would have less than ten minutes more before the first aircraft appeared. It would be dangerous to the project, but probably not fatal to him if he was spotted visually. The A-17 could outclimb and outrun anything either side could throw against him.

As Teleman neared the open plain where the shell had impacted and scattered its mysterious cloud, the lasers indicated that it had spread to cover an area at least twenty miles square. The single shell fired had exploded over the western crest of the last ridge separating the valley from the plains, and the prevailing westerly winds had swept it down and across the plain. Teleman warmed up the Terrain Avoidance Radar for the second pass and settled into the northern end of the wide, bowl-shaped plain for samples. The wing scoop covers slid open and he throttled back until the wings were fully extended and he was flying at less than five hundred miles an hour. He completed a first pass at five hundred feet and saw nothing visually although the flickering display from the monitoring consoles assured him that the sensors were faithfully recording every blade of grass and tree leaf for later analysis.

He swung up in a tight turn over the southern end, dipped the port wing, and lost altitude until he was down on the deck at little over two hundred feet and lumbering along at 140 knots. He turned into a lazy zigzag pattern and put all of the sensors to work and the aircraft on automatic pilot. Teleman rubbed his face and sighed, then picked up the binoculars to search the snow-covered meadows and hillsides beneath while the aircraft went into the rolling jolting pattern calculated by the TAR to maintain an even two-hundred-foot altitude over the undulating land below.

There was plenty of evidence of past battles on the ground: numerous shell holes, trenches, shattered tanks and personnel carriers, and long stretches of churned mud left by maneuvering vehicles. A fierce battle must have swept through the area only yesterday, as several of the destroyed vehicles were still sending up thin columns of smoke from fire-blackened hulks. The snowfall of the preceding night had spread a thin layer of white over the battle area, but it had not been heavy enough to cover all traces. The overcast sky and the banked, heavy blue clouds to the east suggested another snowfall and fierce winds in a matter of hours, and he thanked the weather control satellite system that had provided the data that had brought him to the battle area before the new snowfall began.

Then, off to the right, at the base of a gentle slope, well hidden by a thicket of aspen, he caught a flicker of movement. Cutting out the autopilot, Teleman continued the zag around until he could make a straight pass. The ungainly 120-foot A-17 pivoted delicately and!loped across the plain.

Watching the scope now rather than looking through the glasses, he could see a vehicle resembling a jeep jerk out of a stand of aspen and head erratically into the meadow. As he watched, the jeep struck a patch of thick, churned — mud and bounced to a stop, thoroughly mired. The driver struggled to get out, then collapsed backward across the seat. From the padded uniform and hat, he was obviously Chinese. Teleman cut in the autopilot again and checked the valley floor to the west with the binoculars while the aircraft resumed its interrupted search pattern. He had now been down in the valley at two hundred feet for a minute and a half. Safe-time was getting mighty short. Whatever that shell carried, he thought, they did not seem to care whether or not they hit their own troops as well Then he saw what he had missed on his first and higher pass: a Soviet tank sat astraddle a point where several muddy tracks converged. Its turret gun was pointed in the direction of the hills off Teleman’s starboard wing and he could plainly see two mortar emplacements concealed by its bulk. The powerful glasses showed figures clad in green Soviet uniforms, some with white snow coverings, scattered like dropped firewood. The turret hatch on the tank was open and he could see a body, half in, half out. Other troopers lying on the ground were twisted into grotesque postures, some still jerking spasmodically.

Teleman’s first thought was of nerve gas. He keyed the telephoto lenses on the visual cameras to the scene and boosted the image up on the scope, closing on the mortar emplacement. While he put the aircraft into a tight orbit at three hundred feet. He swore as he checked the chronometer readout. One more minute and he would have to get out whether he had everything or not. Now he could see the bodies of other soldiers, some in foxholes, some scattered around the meadow as if they had tried to stagger toward the river. The faint footprints in the fresh snow were silhouetted in the dawn sun, indicating unsteady trails. A single trooper lay on his back, arched over the lip of a foxhole, one arm thrown across a pile of mortar shells. His helmet had tumbled back off his head, leaving his face exposed to the dead light of the early sun. Teleman could even see the man’s long blond hair stirring in the vagrant breeze that reinforced the prediction of the impending storm. The image of the hair registered subconsciously. Teleman peered at the face, framed in the scope: it was covered with blood and vomit and the eyes of the man were open, staring directly, it seemed, into the cameras. For a long moment Teleman could not tear his eyes away from the face as the cameras recorded the scene in minute detail. Then he broke the aircraft out of its orbit and dismissed the rest of the flight plan. He had all of the information he needed. judging from the evidence he had seen so far, the Chinese were using either gas or germ warfare. For some reason, with the image of the dead Russian soldier’s face before him, he was betting on bacteriological agents.

CHAPTER 6

Teleman wondered how many shells had been fired’ before the satellite surveillance system had spotted the 210-mm cannon. This one appeared to have been timed for just after dawn; probably so, that the Chinese could gain a quick estimate of its effectiveness as well as initial Soviet reaction.

So far, there did not appear to be any. He checked the atmosphere sampling tanks and the lights glowed green, showing that the covers were sealed. Now it would be up to Washington to extract what they could from the samples.

A quick scan of the radar panels indicated that there had been no unusual air activity recorded in the nine minutes he had been below forty thousand feet. But deep in the valley as he had been, his radar was shadowed by the hills to the east. He considered a moment, then pulled the nose up sharply and cut in afterburners. He came out of the shallow valley, clearing the hills like a rocket. In less than thirty seconds he had passed sixty thousand feet and switched the engines to ramjet. The sudden explosion of thrust kicked him back into the acceleration couch. The pressure suit accommodated itself to the change caused by the sudden acceleration while the PCMS adjusted stimulant flows. Off to the east, the surveillance radar had two Chinese Migs spotted, heading for the broad valley. As he climbed, the Chinese pilots, now far below, pulled up sharply, caught by his surprise exit. They chased him upward for a short while, but by the time they reached_ sixty thousand feet he was leveling off at 120,000. Teleman caught the flicker of air-to-air missiles reaching for him as the Chinese aircraft tried a last frantic measure to bring him down. But there was never a chance. There would be, he knew, some soul-searching at their intelligence headquarters later on — if the pilots were believed. There would certainly be no radar sightings to confirm their story and the Thoughts of Mao would provide no sensible answers. Teleman grinned to himself as the A-17 pulled out of the climb and settled into a search-and-photograph flight mode, then turned to the monitoring console to run through the information the sensors had so far picked up. As the data, reduced to language forms and equations, streamed across the screen, he found more information than he had hoped for. The laser topographical radar had managed to build a thorough map of the war area. Also spotted were several Soviet and Red Chinese missile installations that he suspected were previously unknown to U. S. Intelligence. Near the town of Lepsinsk on the Kazakh SSR side, a cleared site with camouflaged bunkers betrayed a VTOL fighter airdrome. That meant that the Soviets had moved their air operations closer to the border than had been suspected. The vertical takeoff and landing fighters were limited in operating range, but they were Mach 2.1 fighters and could react and be over the selected target or engagement in a lot less time than conventional jet aircraft. By moving them into the area around Lepsinsk, the Soviets could meet the threat of the heavy Chinese airbase at Nordach, located well into the jut of the Sinkiang border, from which they could bring fighter bombers within striking distance of Alma Alta.

The IR sensors had located vehicle weapon parks on both sides of the border, including a number of heavy artillery sites, well dug in and virtually invulnerable to counterartillery attacks. Both sides had prepared well, Teleman thought, and obviously for a number of years. Much of the fighting on the plateau would have to be done by infantry troops supported by aircraft. It, was still short of 0800, local time, only forty minutes after local sunrise. Except for probing patrol actions, the bulk of the day’s fighting was probably still to come.

The action earlier in which the two Soviet troop carriers had been knocked out would furnish ample evidence that a shooting war was actually going on. That revelation would make quite a stir in the United Nations, particularly to certain neighboring and nervous countries. The more sophisticated nonvisual sensor data would be pored over eagerly by the attaches of many nations. But the dangerous information, the data that really counted, lay safely in the atmosphere-sampling tanks. Either gas or bacteriological agents, it would make no difference. Either would be enough to bring world condemnation of the Red Chinese, even by nations friendly to her. It was doubtful if their usual pattern of denial would avail them in this instance. The doubt would be there, and there would be calls for an international monitoring team. And the evidence could not be hidden. Teleman was well pleased with the morning’s work. And so would Washington be.

Teleman was completing the final leg of the search pattern preparatory to shaping a course northeast for rendezvous. He was flying at eight thousand feet in the vicinity of Lach Rom on the Chu River. The aircraft was on automatic, following the irregular border by star-fix coordinates when Telemen caught a tiny flicker on the trailing edge of the surveillance radar screen. The blip showed at sixty thousand feet near Pezhevalsk, on the Soviet side of the border. As he watched, the blip was read out as an Ilyushin Falcon, closing the four-hundred-mile gap at Mach 2.5. For long seconds he continued to watch, wondering where the Soviet aircraft was going in such a hurry. The Falcon was the latest Soviet interceptor, capable of Mach 3.2 and carrying an armament consisting of four Mach 4.8 air-to-air missiles that could be armed with small nuclear warheads. The aircraft was only recently being distributed to the Soviet Tactical Air Command as a high-speed, high-altitude interceptor with a ceiling of a little less than 180,000 feet. Its major task was to act as defense against the new, high/low-level Mach 3 penetration bombers of the USAF Strategic Air Command. Teleman had spotted flights several times before over the Soviet Union, but always either on training jaunts or border patrols. None had heretofore been aware of his presence.

This one, though, seemed to be-another matter. The Falcon was holding its course on a direct line that would cross his less than a minute after he passed over the border into Soviet territory. Experimentally, he made a small course correction that lengthened his’ stay in Red Chinese territory. The Falcon changed to match. For the first time Teleman felt the cold chill of fear that not even the PCMS could cope with. That damned aircraft was waiting for him, he thought. How in the name of all the gods… frantically, Teleman lifted the A-17, ramjets flaming, and scrambled to two hundred thousand feet. The Russian pilot pulled his aircraft up sharply and cut in his afterburners. The long, thousand-foot cone of hot gases showed as a thin ghost image on the radar screen. Teleman began to increase his speed, shoving the throttle control up past Mach 2.5. The intruder was still closing. He checked the ECM unit. It put him at the center of a three-hundred-mile-diameter circle, but still the flickering image came on to meet him at the interception point, now less than two hundred miles ahead. And the Falcon had the advantage of being down-course. That damned ECM unit was working, but still the Soviet aircraft came on. Somehow, the Russian had him visually, Teleman knew. That left Teleman with only one other move. He switched the surveillance radar to scan to the east — nothing more than scattered Mig patrols on both sides of the border and occasional cargo craft on the Chinese side, all well below forty thousand feet. He quickly checked the Falcon. It was still there and in another few seconds would be in range to fire a salvo of twin missiles. He did not want to chance those. The PCMS, anticipating his decision from the combined inputs of his body setting itself for action and the information coming to it from the surveillance radar, began to increase the flow of amphetamine stimulants. Teleman’s actions became a blur as he pulled the A-17 around in a narrow curve to the northeast. The gap between the two aircraft opened as though a knife had slashed through an invisible cord, and the Falcon fell rapidly behind as Teleman streaked for the deserted reaches of Sinkiang. Watching the surveillance radar, he felt a small measure of relief as the Soviet aircraft disappeared from the scope. At least they were not going to take a chance on trying to shoot him down over Chinese territory. They wanted the A-17, or what would be left of it, badly. As he streaked deeper into Sinkiang, Teleman watched the Falcon. The Soviet aircraft pulled around to the west in a tight turn that was almost a match for his, then straightened out and ran, presumably for its base at Alma Alta. Teleman found himself very interested in that final maneuver. A number of questions were suddenly occurring to him. Number one: Why did they send only one aircraft? And number two: Why did it return to base so quickly instead of loitering in the vicinity to see if Teleman would try and cross the border again? There was only one way to find out, he decided. Swinging back again toward the border, he increased his speed to Mach 4. Seconds later, as he approached the spot where he had first sighted the Falcon, a second Russian aircraft showed up from the southwest quadrant, the same quadrant from which the first had come barreling in. Somehow, they were tracking him, Teleman thought. They must have aircraft stacked up low down on the deck where his surveillance radar could not pick them out of the background scatter. He did not wait this time to see how close he could push on to the border, but swung to the east again in the same tight turn. Again the Falcon turned and headed after the first one to base. A third time he tried it, streaking for the border at less than a thousand feet and Mach 2. The sonic boom below would be enough to cause concussion-and alert everyone within fifty miles. But in this deserted desert country he was not concerned about being sighted.

And again the Falcon showed up, cutting his flight path on a diagonal that would have the Falcon meet him as he crossed into Soviet territory. Frustrated, Teleman went into a climbing turn east and at Mach 1.8 headed into Sinkiang.

He was holding an altitude of eighty thousand feet — a comfortable level for the A-17 that made the best use of its fuel capacity. It was now obvious to him that the Soviets had developed some type of sophisticated, visual tracking system that could not only pick him out at great altitudes and distances, but hold him at supersonic speeds as a Falcon closed. A visual tracking system would require a second man in the aircraft; this probably explained the limited stay-time. The increased payload taken up by the observer and the visual tracking equipment would cut well into the cruising range of the Falcon. Although it was designed for long supersonic flight, it could sustain its Mach 4.8 speed only for short durations, for the approach and attack. During the cruise to and from the target, the speed would be well down into the more conventional ranges. But the problem confronting Teleman now was: At what range could they track him? Did they have to have flying patrols in the air, or did they have ground observing stations with much more sensitive equipment than an aircraft could possibly carry?

The Soviets could have had plenty of opportunity to observe him while he was orbiting the fire fight involving the trucks, as well as during his pass across the valley where the shell had impacted.

That in turn led him to the next series of questions. Did they know about the A-17?

Obviously they did. A visual tracking system sophisticated enough to pick up what amounted to a flyspeck moving at speeds up to Mach 4.5 over even several hundred miles distance would require a substantial outlay of both men and money. And to have set-up in the vicinity of the Soviet-Chinese war zone, they would have had to know that the conflict would bring him on the run. There was nothing the Chinese could put into the sky that would require a visual tracking system. Teleman shook his head. It was all such a preposterous chain of events, but then so was the U-2 flight that was shot down over Russia in late 1959, by a missile whose existence was not even suspected by Western intelligence. And so vicious was the pace of missile development that in 1965, up-rated, second-generation versions of those same missiles were provided to the North Vietnamese for use against U.S. fighter-bombers as obsolete Soviet weaponry. The Soviets could very well have rushed the development of a visual tracking system in much the same way that they and the United States always had when a clear requirement arose. A-17 flights had been going on over Soviet territory for more than a year now, and the increasing appearance of dead spots in radar warning and detection systems would be enough to indicate that something or someone was intruding over Soviet territory with alarming frequency. Even if they had not been particularly worried about intelligence-gathering missions, they would be seared to death that the same ECM systems could be placed in manned bombers or even intercontinental missiles. So the knowledge that the Soviets were onto the A-17 overflights, and onto them with a visual tracking system, was suddenly more important than the information he had gathered from the war zone. The problem was how to get the information back to Washington.

By now he was six hundred miles into the northern reaches of Sinkiang and less than ten minutes from the Mongolian border. Mongolia was still firmly in the Soviet camp, perhaps not firmly enough to have the new Falcons, but it was not worth the risk of finding out. Coming up dead ahead was the faint thread of the Irtysh River. The floor of the desert was as deserted as only the

Gobi could be. In this particular area not even Mongolian herdsman could live. The river, here near its headwaters in the low hills that lay two hundred miles off his starboard wing, was still little more than a muddy stream, not yet purified and strengthened as it would be later on during its 2500-mile rush to the Arctic Ocean. South, the Gobi cut into the province of Sinkiang, cut a swatch of utter desolation for another five hundred miles before the land began the long climb back to the fertile steppes leading to the Tien Shan, whose eastern flank’s began on the far side of the Turfan Depression. Teleman punched the tabs to key in the ground control maps of the Tien Shan. When the image centered, he stopped the flow and asked for the altitude overlay, then settled back to study the lofty summits. The Tien Shan was actually the northern extension of the Himalaya chain, reaching north and east for nearly fifteen hundred miles. Next to the Himalayas, the Tien Shan was the longest mountain chain on the Asian continent. The southern slopes on the west rose out of the Pamir Plateau and covered more than four hundred thousand square miles. It was a cinch that the Soviets would not be able to cover the entire range with visual tracking equipment. But he still did not know the altitude range of that equipment. And the Soviets would be expecting him to try and break through somewhere. They must know, or at least suspect, that he had to recross Soviet territory. And he did, he thought ruefully. Normally he would fly out of the fix by crossing China and refueling over either the Bay of Bengal or the China Sea. But not this time. They must have been watching the progress of the blind spots on the radar screens as he crossed Soviet territory, making educated guesses with their computers until they hit upon a familiarity with his flight schedules. He had no support waiting anywhere except in the Barents Sea. The mission was too complex and the secrecy too great to try and stretch it to alternate points. Each flight was carefully made up and very little margin of error allowed. He had no alternate landing bases outside the continental United States. No landings in foreign territory could be allowed. If he had to abort a mission, he was to head for the nearest ocean and bail out.

So this mission, it was back to the Barents Sea or not at all. Teleman decided that the risk of crossing Soviet territory with the information he had so far collected justified the attempt

As he continued to study the map of the Tien Shan, a plan began to take shape. The range averaged 250 miles wide and the peaks ranged up,to 23,620 feet in the Tengri Khan, in the center, to 17,946 in the Bogodo Ula in the east. A good chunk of the range was glaciated or thickly forested. For the most part, the average elevation ran close to twenty thousand feet, and, located as it was on the edge of both the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas, the interior slopes on the southern face would be sparsely inhabited. Teleman leaned forward and began setting up a flight plan that would carry him directly south of his present position to the vicinity of the Turfan Depression. There he would drop to fifteen thousand feet and wriggle in between the northern flanks of the Altyn Tagh Mountains in the Kun Lun range on the northern reaches of the Himalayas and the Tien Shan. At fifteen thousand feet he would be able carefully to pick his way through the valleys and canyons of the Tien Shan and come out far south of the war zone, thus crossing the border at 49° latitude into Kirghiz SSR. By staying down on the deck through the mountains, it would be impossible for the Soviets to track his progress. Teleman hoped only that by now, six hundred miles into Sinkiang, he was well off their scopes. Seconds later, after checking fuel levels, the computer agreed with the revised flight plan. It would be cutting it fine, he decided, but it could be done without having to touch the fuel reserves. And, as a bonus, it would put him less than ten minutes off the rendezvous schedule he had set up with Larkin.

Thoughtfully, Major Joseph Teleman turned to the never-beforeused direct line communication channel to his headquarters, nestled deep in the soft Virginia hills, and began composing the message that would shake one of the most vital, least known, and smallest portions of the United States military establishment.

CHAPTER 7

The dead, coppery sun dragged itself out of the heaving ocean and hung sullenly against the slate sky. Folsom had never seen a — sunrise that boded so ill for the day to come. The sun was merely a not overly bright ball, shrouded in layers of ice. Its light was as dull and washed out as the running seas around and gave no warmth at all, real or imagined, to the scene over which it presided. Folsom stamped his feet on the caked ice of the bridge deck and swore under his breath. The RFK was shrouded in a more substantial ice than was the sun. So much more substantial that she was riding noticeably lower in the water. The deck heaters had been running at full power all night and the interior of the hull was unbelievably hot. But even heaters that piped waste heat directly from the nuclear reactor heat exchangers had not been sufficient to cope with an Arctic storm of such magnitude.

The dry-bulb temperature showed only eight degrees below zero, not enough to freeze sea water. But the anemometer, clacking on the masthead like something possessed, gave the answer. Wind speed was averaging close to fifty-seven knots, a Force 11 wind on the Beaufort scale. And below zero, for every mile of wind speed, you add another degree below freezing to the apparent temperature to obtain the true temperature. The true temperature was -33°F. Even swathed from head to foot in his heated Arctic gear and wearing double-insulated and heated boots, Folsom was half frozen. The wind was strong enough to tear the crests off the long swells and fling them back as ice that froze solidly into place the moment it touched the ship.

Ahead of the ship, the wind-whipped swells, with their lashing crests of white water, built in slow succession to inundate the decks as the RFK crested wave after wave. Folsom periodically ducked behind the windscreen to escape the cascades of wafer that poured over the bridge deck — in spite of its being forty feet above the water line — and left the deck plates slippery with sea water and ice.

After fifteen minutes on deck, Folsom was finally driven back inside, where he stood gasping for air in the sudden 105° temperature change. He shed his foul-weather gear and climbed into his high seat. The height of the storm was still to be met in approximately four hours. By then the short Arctic day would be long over and the impenetrable blackness would have closed in. The previous night there had been a sky glow through the scudding clouds, but tonight there would be only the black of the deepest pits of hell. The ice layer had thickened above forty thousand feet and the first tinges of storm clouds bearing the blizzard that always followed a katabatic storm were beginning to appear. Folsom did not like this storm or the way it was progressing. Already it was well on the way to becoming one of the worst ever recorded. With a whole ship he would not have been concerned, but the bow section shore-up job was beginning to show signs of strain. He did not know how many more hours of pounding it would take before seams started to open. And open seams in these seas would be disastrous. With a long sigh, Folsom heaved himself out of the high seat and left the bridge. As he passed out of the hatch he picked up the flashlight racked beside the coating and stuck it into his pocket. The bow areas of the ship were deserted. The captain had ordered all but the forward missile rooms and the communication station to shift operations aft. It took Folsom several minutes to reach the forward compartments. Each hatch had to be unsealed, then resealed again. The closer he moved to the outer hull, the louder became the tympanic roar of metal flexing under great strain. The seas were running so heavily that even below the water line, as he was, the outer plates near the bow were flexing in the wind and swells each time the forefoot lifted above the waves. Folsom unsealed the last hatch into the ballast spaces between the ship’s interior and exterior hulls. The ballast water had all been pumped out forward to raise the bow under its coating of ice and force the stern down farther, where the great engines could maintain a continual purchase on the water. In these winds, even a moment with the four screws out of water could find the battle cruiser being spun wildly by the winds, broadside to the waves. Once allowed to start, even a 16,500-ton battle cruiser could be tumbled over beams end, turned turtle, and sunk.

The ballast tank was ice cold. Traces of water remaining after the pumping had frozen to a smooth glaze on bulkheads and deck. Folsom had to hang onto the metal rungs spaced in even rows along the side and bottom to cross the eight-foot space that separated the two hulls.

The outside of the ballast tanks acted as an integral part of the hull. The tank itself was crisscrossed with steel bracing bars. Folsom stood up gingerly, riding with the slow rise and fall of the ship, and flicked on the flashlight. The strong beam sprang out boldly in the wet air, striking the ice-and water-coated sides of the tank to flash back as sparkles from millions of diamonds. He played the beam along the tank wall until he found the eight-foot-long gash, high up above the water line. Carefully he examined the steel plates that had been welded over the gash, checking for signs of water seepage. He could find no major breaks, and with the ice and dampness it was impossible to spot small leaks.

Folsom stood uncertainly below the welded plates, playing the light around the sides of the tank. He would have felt much better if he dared order the tank flooded to capacity with sea water. Filling the tank would have eased the strain on the welded joints. But it might also put them far enough down into the waves so that they would never recover. Finally, after a long minute of helplessness coupled with frustration, he shrugged and turned back to the hatch, clicking off the light. Folsom carefully dogged the hatch shut and then made his way aft to the engine room, amidships.

Although the Robert F. Kennedy displaced 16,500 tons and was nearly seven hundred feet long, she carried a crew of only eighty men. With the ship standing to general quarters in the storm, most of this minimum crew was on duty or else snatching a few hours of restless sleep in the duty bunks scattered around the ship. A powered elevator took Folsom down to G deck and he walked aft another hundred feet, pushed open the engine-room hatch, and stepped into the softly lit, instrument-paneled room. The duty chief nodded to him and came over as he approached the master control panel.

“What’s she look like outside, Commander?” Lieutenant Charles Barrows grinned as Folsom slumped down into the extra command seat.

“Rough. The seas are running better than fifty feet right now. How are your engines doing?”

“Better question would be how’s the hull doing.”

Folsom grinned. “I guess-it would be at that. I was just up there. So far no sign of any separation and no seepage… but, I don’t know.”

Barrows nodded slowly. “How about if I send a couple of boys up to put in some strain gauges, wired to the control room. Shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.” Folsom nodded. “Good. That’s really what I came down here to see about. By the way, how is the overhaul on number three free turbine coming along?” Barrows turned and reached across the console for a check list and leafed quickly through the pages. “They are reassembling the bearings now. Should have it all back together and checked out in twelve hours.”

“Twelve hours…” Folsom made an elaborate face. “Way too long. Try and cut that in half.” Barrows turned a startled face. “In half! For God’s sake, what do you think we are, miracle men?” Nevertheless, he reached for a microphone and roared, “All right, you half-witted slackers. The Exec wants that number three engine operating in four hours. So — get off your tails and move.”

“Six hours…” he mumbled.

“It is rather important We are going to come about at 0400, and if the seas or the winds get any worse, we are going to need all the power we can get. I sure would hate to see this bucket swing into a turn and keep right on going — straight down. Which brings me to the next point. Isn’t there anything you can do about the ice on the deck? We are carrying nearly four hundred tons right now and the ship is so damn low she looks like a submarine.”

Barrows scratched his head. “I sure as hell don’t know what it would be. I am squeezing every last calorie of heat out of the reactor now. The cooling system is shut down for the lower decks and I’m saving the reactor cooling system until we do come about. If I switch it off now, the reactor is going to overheat.”

“Okay, I’ll leave the details up to you. But the computer shows that if the ice-build-up rate continues steady, we are going to have about a hundred and fourteen more tons of the stuff on the deck by 0300. And that is going to make coming about very, very touchy.”

Barrows tapped his fingers nervously on the console. “All right, let me see if we can come up with something else that will help the deck heaters out. Forty years ago — they tell me — they never worried much about ice build-up. If the deck heaters couldn’t keep up, they just gave a hundred or so sailors safety lines and buckets of ashes and told them to go to it. But what the hell can you do with eighty men, sixty of whom are on duty during general quarters at any one time, and no ashes.” He shook his head. “Progress. Sometimes it does more to work against you than for you.” Folsom grinned and left, after extracting a promise to get the number three engine back on line as soon as possible. He went directly up to the bridge and to the computing table. As he climbed into his high seat again, he switched on the navigation course plot and studied the fine red line that had marked their progress since 1900 the previous evening. The red progress line was superimposed onto the projected course and showed every little deviation from the plot. But it was running fourteen miles behind; it was clearly indicated by an angry red circle encompassing the end point of both lines. He sat at the console, unconsciously tapping a pencil while he tried to figure a way out. Increased speed would apply more pressure to the bow. If they camelate to the turnaround; point, they would be late to the rendezvous. If they stayed behind — and the computer showed that, given the same conditions, at turnaround time they would be thirty-two miles short — they would not be in the lee of the North Cape. And with the ice building up at an ever-increasing rate, it would be far too risky to attempt the turn in the open seas.

Folsom swiveled to stare out the forward ports. The heavy gray sky formed a low-hanging ceiling barely clearing the mountainous seas. It was now nearly 1100, one hour past sunrise. But the sun, filtering down through thousands of feet of ice and storm cloud, shed very little light to relieve the funeral pall. The wind, throbbing around the ship and even through thick insulation, could be heard clearly above the low-key noises of the bridge. The barometer had dropped to the lowest point that Folsom had ever seen, 28.49 inches of mercury. He knew that the worst of the storm and winds were yet to come. And they were heading directly into the teeth of it — in fact, rushing headlong to meet it. The anemometer, clacking loudly on the masthead, was still registering a fairly steady wind speed of fifty-seven knots, a Force 11 wind, strong enough to blow the crests off the waves. As waves approach shore, an entirely different set of hydrodynamic principles come into play, and the waves become the more familiar breakers, with crests of roiling white water as they break on the beach. In mid-ocean, waves are usually long swells several hundred feet long, with a rounded bosom rolling to the far-distant shore. When the wind is strong, then the water forming the swell is pushed faster toward the crest so that it overshoots and falls free in a mass of white water. Out there, Folsom could see, the wind was blowing so hard that the water that was pushed over the crest was blown free into long streamers for fifty and sixty feet downwind. He shivered involuntarily before the frozen wastes of the Arctic Ocean.

But daydreaming would not solve his navigational problem, and for the hundredth time he damned the destroyer that had ripped their bow, thereby causing all these problems. With an undamaged bow, neither he nor Larkin would have worried about the effects of the angry seas on the bow. They would have put the ship onto a long, rectangular course until rendezvous time and the hell with the pounding on the bow. His thinking was interrupted by the appearance on the bridge of Barrows’ electronics crew. They politely elbowed him aside to get at the electrical conduits over his console to run temporary lines from the strain gauges in the bow. With nothing else to do for the moment, Folsom wandered around the bridge and the various consoles as unobtrusively as possible, stymied by the mathematics of the situation.

A half hour later he thought he was beginning to see a way out of the problem. The wind speed had increased another three knots and the seas were running to swells nearly sixty feet high. The wind was blowing steadily from the north-northwest quarter, deviating little from 10° north, which was what he had been half hoping for. For the past twenty minutes he had’ observed little or no deviation either in direction or speed. When he fed the new information into the course computers, it worked out perfectly. By falling off two points from the wind direction, he could bring the RFK farther to the west in a shallow arc that would increase the distance toward the Cape lee. Feeling very much like a skipper of a sailing ship, he ordered the course change to take advantage of the wind. The RFK rolled far to starboard as the two rudders inched over in response to the instructions from the bridge. The roll went on through thirty, then forty, then fifty, to fifty-seven degrees. Folsom watched the inclinometer with apprehension, and when the needle’ began to move back toward vertical, he let out a pent-up breath. Good lord, he thought, if she would go over that far with just a minor change with the wind, how would she handle when it came time to reverse course. He glanced around the bridge and saw that the others on watch were also looking at the inclinometer and were just as apprehensive as he.

At 1200, Larkin came onto the bridge. He nodded to the officer of the watch, signed the log, and came over to Folsom’s console. He turned, before saying anything to Folsom, and said, “Mr. Peterson, please stay on the bridge for a few minutes. I would like you to relieve me while Mr. Folsom and I go below.”

The second officer nodded and sank back into his high seat and began flipping through ship’s status report forms. Folsom unbuckled his seat belt and followed Larkin off the bridge, wondering what the captain had on his mind. Neither said a word until they entered Larkin’s quarters.

“Sit down, Pete.” He indicated a comfortable chair against the bulkhead. Folsom took the seat and glanced around at the comfortably appointed room. Larkin had thrown out the regulation Navy furniture as one of his first official acts on assuming command of the RFK, in the belief that a new skipper should assume all prerogatives in setting new traditions on a new ship. Certainly, the comfortable living-room-style furniture was much more relaxing than the hard-backed steel and plastic furniture that had been furnished by the shipyard.

He accepted the coffee that Larkin ordered and sat back in the chair to watch his commanding officer pouring his own coffee. Folsom really knew little about Larkin, and he doubted that many men did. Larkin was old Navy, relaxed but steeped in tradition; he probably would have been more at home in the more easygoing Australian or Canadian navies if he were to be judged by his command style. In two years he had yet to hear the captain raise his voice to give an order. And he could not ever remember Larkin having to give an order twice.

But the man kept his own counsel. Never had there been an exchange of personal information between them. What little he knew about Larkin had been gleaned from his service record, to which Folsom, as executive officer, had access, and from talk around the various officers’ clubs. The service record had been exceedingly dry, as always, but at the same time was an intriguing document, more from what it had implied rather than described. Folsom knew, for instance, that Larkin had commanded a destroyer during the Vietnam conflict and had been decorated with the Navy Cross for bravery under fire. But it had remained a noncommittal note in a record until he ran into a chance acquaintance in San Francisco who had been communications officer on the cruise for which Larkin earned the decoration.

The story was that Larkin had taken his destroyer to within a hundred yards of fringing reefs off the South Vietnamese coast just below the Demilitarized Zone. He was to lay down pointblank covering fire for a Korean patrol driven back and pinned down on the beach by a superior and well-dug-in North Vietnamese Army unit. Larkin had moved in so close that he had come under intensive mortar fire. The destroyer took three mortar rounds, one directly through the fan tail, which had exploded against the rudder controls, blasting them out of action. In spite of the damage, Larkin had remained on the scene, in fact moving in even closer to bring antiaircraft guns into broadside position to lay down a sweeping barrage for twenty minutes while army helicopters moved in to pull the Koreans out. The service record for some reason missed noting the award of the Republic of South Korea Distinguished Service Medal.

Folsom’s friend had many other tales of Larldn’s skill and bravery, which he was more than happy to relate to Folsom during a long two-fifths-of-gin afternoon and evening. All were in a similar vein. But what stuck most deeply in Folsom’s memory was his friend’s description of Larkin as an aloof, although quite personable, and lonely man. Exactly Folsom’s own conclusion.

Even Larkin’s face bore out his manner. It was a face that was at once alive but closed to outsiders. The gray eyes stared out at you from under straight, medium thin brows with a direct stare that forbade anything except the exact truth. Larkin was a tall man, but spare, almost to the point of gauntness in some respects. His face was thin, with the skin stretched tightly across the brow and nose. But the shoulders were broader than would have been expected for a man so tall and lean. There was something about the man, something in the posture, that Folsom could not isolate, that belied the personal aesthetism that really existed. The furniture in the cabin may have been comfortable and pleasantly arranged, but it was certainly not opulent. The color scheme matched the paneled and steel walls, but that was all. The desk, set under the air vent, was clean and neat. A choice selection of books could be seen in the barred rack over the desk and the titles were intriguing, indicating a disciplined mind.

Larkin settled into a chair facing him and balanced his coffee cup on the arm. He glanced at Folsom, who sipped at his coffee and waited. It was characteristic of Larkin, he thought, to unknowingly make you wait uncomfortably until he started to speak. The gray eyes peering out from the calm face gave the impression that Larkin was measuring your character and strength, It was not intentional, he knew. It was only that Larkin was marshaling his own thoughts.

Larkin cleared his throat “I noticed that you made a course correction. Good thinking. These seas are going to get rougher.”

Folsom nodded. “I had engineering rig up strain gauges on the bow patch. If it starts to weaken, we’ll want to know about it in plenty of time.” Larkin smiled briefly. “Yes we will at that.” He sat for a moment sipping his coffee. “I just got word from Virginia that our Russian friends are onto the system.” Folsom sat up. He really knew very little about the supersecret games they had been playing lately. Between themselves they always used the name Virginia to refer to the agency that directed their actions. Although he did not know really who “Virginia” was, he could pretty well guess that it meant the forty-two-acre complex in the hills just outside Washington that was Central Intelligence

Agency Headquarters. But what was the game the Russians were onto?

Larkin pulled a sealed envelope off the desk top and handed it to Folsom. “Open it.” Folsom tore the end off and extracted the folded papers. He spread them on his lap and picked up the top sheet. DOD 630-29K. That was one he had not seen before. He looked up questioningly at Larkin, but Larkin was gazing in deep absorption at the design on his coffee cup.

The top sheet was an instruction page for the five that followed. It held one small paragraph that immediately caught Folsom’s eye. If he accepted the terms of the attached contract and signed, he would be “liable to twenty years in a federal prison or $20,000 fine or both if he revealed to any unauthorized person or persons any material or information given to him in connection with that relayed to him by Captain Henly Larkin, USN, Commanding Officer of the battle cruiser U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy, or in any way violated the provisions of the National Defense Act.” The rest of the forms were standard Department of Defense Top Secret Clearance sheets, already filled out and dated the day he had received his Top Secret clearance. Puzzled, Folsom turned the pages until he came to the last. It was a simple, green-colored sheet with a short list of questions and space for his signature and the date. It was headed “Q” Prime Clearance. He whistled softly. He had heard of the QPC, but never had expected to receive it. Usually, it was a clearance reserved for the President, cabinet officers, and the joint Chiefs of Staff, to whom there were no secrets. Not even the highest-ranking members of Congress got that one. He looked up.

“Rather surprising, isn’t it? But that’s how important this project is. Will you sign the form?”

Folsom nodded, and Larkin handed him a pen.

“Then do so,” he said quietly. Folsom scribbled his name and added the date.

“You are now cleared to receive ‘Q’ Prime information,” Larkin said. “The clearance search was run the day you came aboard, and if something had happened to me while we were on duty you would have found all of the instructions in my safe. The decision as to when to bring you into the project was left up to me. Because I believe that the fewer people who know about this project the safer it will be, I have not done so until now.” He paused to drink slowly.

“Why did you decide now that I should know about it?” Folsom asked much more calmly than he felt.

Larkin waved his hand in a manner to take in the ship and the storm raging outside. “To date there has been no emergency that has warranted it. But now there is what you might call a proper combination of circumstances. As I said, the Russians are onto our most closely guarded secret since the Manhattan Project. Additionally, the sea is running into one of the worst storms on record and our ship could be in very serious danger. In the next few hours you are going to have to have a full understanding as to why we are not going to be able to do anything more than complete our assigned mission at all costs. And, if we survive the storm, we may have trouble of a kind we have never encountered before except in practice” — Larkin hesitated, letting the tension build—“Soviet submarines may be out to sink us.” Folsom stared at him, wondering if the old man had not finally succumbed to the pressures of commanding a ship. As if aware of what he was thinking, Larkin grinned and shook his head. “No, I haven’t gone out of my mind.” He got up and pulled a map from the desk drawer and spread it on the table. It was a map of the northern Eastern hemisphere showing the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Arctic. On it was penciled in red a line paralleling the go° meridian to the Sinkiang border, then swinging north in a long, curving arc across the Soviet Union to their rendezvous position off the Ryabchi Peninsula of Scandinavia.

“This map shows the flight path of one of our three specially equipped reconnaissance aircraft. The aircraft is capable of speeds in excess of Mach 5 and flight times of…” For a long time Folsom listened to the dry matter-of-fact voice explaining one of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. After the first few minutes he recovered quickly from the astonishment accompanying the discovery of the exact depth and extent of the surveillance missions that the United States had conducted over the past two years and the role he, or the RFK to be exact, had played. The deeper Larkin went into the explanation/briefing, the more he understood the almost fanatical secrecy that surrounded the project. Not counting the employees at Lockheed and the Air Force crew at GilIon Advanced Test Site, who never were allowed to know the full story, Larkin told him that there were less than fifty people in the United States who knew about the A-17. Fifty people and possibly the entire Soviet military establishment, Folsom thought ironically. Larkin was the only U.S. military official outside the United States territorial boundaries who knew about the A-17, with the exception of a submarine commander in charge of all relay operations for the entire southern hemisphere.

“And that, Pete, is the whole story, or at least as much as I think it is necessary to tell you at this point.” The old man looked piercingly at him. Folsom met his eyes unwaveringly.

“What are your orders then, sir?”

Larkin rubbed the back of his head and walked over to stand and stare out the porthole. His voice, when he spoke, was low, barely carrying across the ten feet that separated them, hinting all the actual loneliness of command that only the captain of a ship, or perhaps the commander of a Strategic Air Command bomber, could feel. The loneliness in knowing that you had no one to *horn you could turn to for advice. “I wish I knew…”

He let his voice trail off.

But with the next breath he swung quickly around from the porthole and said firmly, “For now, we have no choice but to continue to the turn-around point and rendezvous tonight on-station.” He walked briskly back to the desk and handed Folsom another flimsy.

“This is the last message we received after I made the status report an hour ago. It says, quite simply, “Imperative maintain station — Soviets on.”

“Why couldn’t we continue to the lee side of the Cape and wait for him there. One hundred and fifty miles shouldn’t make that much difference to the pilot,” Folsom continued.

“But it does. We have no way Of contacting the aircraft. The pilot must initiate all such contacts with us. Secondly, the radio transmitter that he uses is a VHF-FM set with a range of less than twenty miles, to reduce the chance that hostile ships or aircraft might pick up the transmission. If we aren’t where we said we will be, then he is done. He can’t contact us and we can’t give him his next set of orders. And that set of orders has his next fueling coordinates. Everything possible has been done to lessen the chance of his being discovered by electronic snooping.”

Folsom nodded. “So if we aren’t there, he’s as good as dead.” He paused and massaged his weary eyes. They felt as if large boulders of jagged rock were slowly working their way up under the lids. He had been on duty, without sleep, „for nearly twenty-four hours, and his mental faculties were beginning to match the syrupy slowness of his body. “That is one job that I certainly do not want under any circumstances.”

“How would you like the job of having to be in the right place at the right time, everytime,” Larkin asked bleakly. “You’ve got it, Pete.”

CHAPTER 8

The well-defined southern edge of the Turfan Depression cut a sable horizon line through the pale gold of the Gobi and the dust-laden sky. To his right, the blue expanse of Bagrach Kol gleamed in the late morning sunlight. The Bagrach Kol had the singular distinction of being the largest and one of two free bodies of water in all the Gobi, and it is salty beyond belief. The other was the almost dry and equally salt-laden Lop Nor Basin. For some minutes now the eastern reaches of the Tien Shan had been in view, and from fifteen thousand feet Teleman could easily make out the dark smudge farther down on the southern horizon that was the Kun Lun range.

He flew steadily due south, leaving the alkaline lake and the pebble desert of the Depression behind. When the Tien Shan were well past his starboard wing, Teleman began the long turn east that would take him down the valleys between the two ranges to cross the Soviet border well south, or so he hoped, of the visual tracking net the Soviets had so hastily thrown up.

Beneath, the land began to rise as the flanks of either mountain chain spread out to form a comfortable supporting base. The ground flowing beneath resembled nothing as much as a flat plate, broken here and there with upthrust rock formations, the edges folding up on themselves and sprinkled with a black pepper of stunted scrub bushes reminiscent of mesquite. As always, he was amazed that deserts look so much alike. Looking at the scene sliding past, he would not have been able to distinguish between the Gobi and stretches of Nevada and New Mexico desert.

The Lop Nor was beginning to appear off his starboard wing as he looped back up from the far end of the turn. This last was a maneuver designed to shake any possible last vestiges of Soviet observation. He hoped that the long swing south would be interpreted as an attempt to fly out over the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean beyond. It was too bad he could not, he thought regretfully. It would certainly be one hell of a lot easier than the long way around that was still to come: As Teleman drew abreast of the second salt lake, the Tarim River, flowing down out of the peaks of Karakorum in. the western Himalayas to Lop Nor, appeared, a thin crooked line of a river swollen now with the first evidence of the spring thaw. As he crossed the Lop Nor he passed into Chinese Eastern Turkestan.

The countryside below appeared considerably colder between the ranges. The snow line reached almost to the floor of the new desert that was beginning to appear ahead, the Taklamakan. Pobeda Peak, rising in an almost sheer vertical from the banks of the Tarim on its southern face, reared up, higher by nearly ten thousand feet than the fourteen thousand feet at which he Was now flying. It occurred to him that this was the first time he had ever flown below a land feature and for some reason it made him uneasy. Possibly, Teleman considered, it was brought on because it put both himself and the A17 into perspective — a perspective that he lost at the two hundred thousand feet that lent him a minor godhead in which he was unconcerned with human fumblings toward power and gain, and made him content with observation and obscured the need for involvement. For long minutes he flew past the shining expanse of the 24,400-foot peak, gleaming along its crest as the sun inched light over its ridges.

For the next forty minutes he followed the Tarim southwest across the Taklamakan until it struggled up through a wicked series of foothills into the Karakormn. From here, relatively safe and comfortable in the heated/air-conditioned cabin of the silent aircraft, gazing at the twisted rills and cols of the mountains, he could feel the excitement that he knew men like Sir Edmund Hillary and Barry Bishop must have experienced when they stood at the foot of a peak such as Kanchenjunga, or Godwin Austen, or Mount Everest, preparatory to beginning the ascent to the “roof of the world,” a term the Sherpas had given the Himalayas, stretching a thousand miles from the Hindu Kush in the west to the Nan Shan in the east. But at the same time, he could only shake his head and wonder why a man would risk his life in the loneliest arena of the world to climb peaks that had been shrouded in snow and wind since man was little more than a gene spark in some species of reptile.

The Tarim had been left behind now and the Pamir Plateau, thirteen to fifteen thousand feet high, was beginning. Teleman lifted the airplane accordingly, another thousand feet. The two Tibetan cities of Yarkand and Kashgar would be slipping past in a few minutes and he ran a check on all of his antidetection gear. He would pass between the two cities, in reality little more than villages, but villages with large Chinese garrisons. He would be out of sight of both towns, Yarkand to the south and Kashgar well to the north. The only tricky spot would be the narrow dirt highway that ran between the two, and he was counting on the heavy snowfall of the previous night to make it impassable; he would be out of Chinese territory before fighters could be scrambled to intercept, even if they could break through his radar fouling.

As he drew abreast of the city of Kashgar, out of sight to the north, he cleared a ridge and the vista of the Pamir Plateau opened up before him. Ahead, less than five minutes flying time, was the Tadzhik SSR border. The radar net was indicating no hostile aircraft anywhere within the 1600-mile diameter of its extent, but Teleman was not banking on that. Although the Tien Shan range, rising yet another nine thousand feet above his flight level, formed a perfect barrier to questing radio impulses, the entire Soviet and Chinese air forces combined could have hidden behind the wall of rock and he would never know it. It was times like these, he thought resignedly, that made him regret the excessive caution that would not allow him to interrogate the satellite system at will for fear of detection. Especially now, when the Soviets appeared to know about the project anyway. Because of the surrounding mountains, his radar could show him only dependable information on a very narrow cone leading directly up the valley to the border. In very short order, he knew, he would find out just how smart he had been. Teleman came out of the sheltering arms of the two mountain chains fighting for altitude. At 150,000 feet he leveled off and took a good look around. He had narrowed his counterdetection radar to a circle two miles in diameter — no sense in. advertising his presence. Teleman took a look at the weather gear and found the friendly ice cloud bank still stretched above him. Below, the plains of Turkestan were beginning to open up and he could just make out the hairline of the mighty Amu Dar Ya that tumbled and roared from the Hindu Kush to the Aral Sea a thousand miles northwest. The area over which he had just passed had been the fabled lands of the Kyber Pass and British soldiery of Kipling’s tales. But for Teleman there would be no glorious charge of British lancers to rescue him at the last possible moment. All he had was himself and the A-17 to depend on.

A sudden flurry of the computer tapes and there on the screen, closing in from the north, was a Falcon. This time the Soviet pilot had been caught napping. Teleman was ahead of rather than behind him. It was going to be a stern chase, he thought without humor as he flicked the series of switches that fired the ramjets and scrambled to 200,000 feet. The intruder dropped behind momentarily, then increased power and began to close up. As the A-17’s speed increased, the PCMS reacted accordingly, infusing Teleman with a calculated mix of hallucinogenic and barbiturate drugs. Within seconds Teleman was no longer thinking of the aircraft as a collection of metal and plastic components, but as an extension of himself. Actually, he did not feel on a conscious level that he had become the aircraft; it simply did not occur to him that there was any distinction. He was a part of the aircraft.

That bastard is gonna catch me, he thought in surprise. The contact readout chattered noisily to itself and showed less than forty minutes needed for missile range to be achieved. Teleman paused, finger on the throttle lever. It occurred to him that the Falcon could not maintain that speed and altitude for more than a few more minutes. Even as he was thinking, his body was reacting and lifting the A-17 to 225,000 feet and Mach 4.5. Simultaneously, the trailing Falcon slewed off and fell below, angling down and north to the nearest air base, while a second came streaking up from just ahead of the Last Soviet aircraft’s position. The chase was now shaping up into a gigantic chess match. They were going to run him down and if they failed at that, they would chase him into an area where fate, resembling a Falcon with a loaded and ready missile, would knock him out of the sky.

Teleman’s mind was working furiously, weighing various possibilities, while he tried to sort out the various loopholes in each that would allow him to beat the odds stacking up against him. He could continue to climb to maximum altitude and speed, cutting into his remaining fuel load (already shaved to the danger point by the long flight into Tibet), to and maybe below the poundage needed to achieve rendezvous; or he could try and outfox his energetic pursuers. He checked the computers to see how much longer he dared defer the decision: ten minutes.

He was now flying at 225,000 feet at Mach 4.5 and heading due west across the southernmost part of the Soviet Union. Teleman made a small correction for the rendezvous patterns he had set up. Immediately the Falcon followed suit. He flew on, keeping a wary eye on the plane below. After five minutes, the second Falcon began to drop down in a long glide to its base, and then made an extended turn to the north, dropping lower all the time. At once, a third Falcon came roaring up to take position, still well behind, but having gained nearly twelve miles on his predecessor. The contact readout did a quick readjustment and flipped up the “comforting” news that it would now require only eight minutes before missile range could be achieved, and two minutes left to make his decision. After that, he would be committed to a stern chase across Russia. This third intruder seemed a little more impatient than the first two, Teleman thought, watching him close in faster. Probably wanted to hog the glory of bringing down the Americanski spion. Samolot. Teleman grinned. Only four hundred miles separated the two craft now, and Teleman considered it time to take some positive action.

“Enough of this fooling around,” he muttered aloud, his voice sounding depressingly empty in the silence of the cockpit. Teleman went to work with the decoy missile setups, programing a new flight pattern into the computer. The computer would have to take care of the cubs, he thought. He was going to be too busy shortly to draw a decent breath. Teleman was about to give the Soviet detection systems a thorough workout. He knew that the observer would be busy with the optical tracking gear, but the pilot would have time to operate the semiautomated radar gear they would still carry. He doubted that they would remove all of that, as it would at least provide the approximate area in which to search. Obviously, the optical gear had a range of at least four hundred miles since that was the distance at which they had picked him up as he came out of the mountains. At five hundred miles, with his own ECM now narrowed to a mile in diameter, he would be only a hole in the sky to the Falcon radar. But he could really give them a red herring to play with. Teleman chuckled. A red herring for Reds. Quite appropriate. He began to flick the ECM switch controlling the antiradar gear on and off in a haphazard pattern, hopefully making the Soviet pilot think that his own radar gear was breaking through the electromagnetic interference the American gear was causing. At the same time he put the A-17 into a steep downward curve south and continued around into a tighter and tighter spiral, all the while keeping a close watch on the digital counter clicking off the closure rate to missile range. On the radar scope, the Russian pilot smoothly followed suit, never hesitating once. The flickering image of the A-17 must have been clearly visible on the radar scope. Teleman followed the course of the Falcon, waiting patiently. He was counting on the natural impatience, coupled with anxiety over losing the target, that he knew the Russian pilot must now be feeling. He had just begun the third spiral when it happened. He saw the Falcon clearly increase speed and go into a tighter and faster curving descent than the A-17. It was so impetuous that he did hot even need the readout to tell him that the Russian had moved, moved to catch him within missile range by turning faster and steeper. Teleman waited a moment longer to be sure the Russian was committed.

He straightened the turn abruptly and pulled the nose up quickly. The ECM was in full operation again and, as he started into the climb, the A-17 released a ghost-image missile that, traveling at his speed, began to pull away from the aircraft into the same spiral course that he had been flying. The violent turn that the Falcon had made in an effort to catch him inside should have lost the A-17 to the visual observer. The ghost image, a small, ramjet-powered affair, was further complicating matters by producing the same signal that simulated the mother A-17. Teleman could see the pattern plainly on his own radar screen as it pulled farther and farther away. After the two were separated by several mile; the computer, following Teleman’s instructions, began to turn the ghost away from the spiraling descent into a straight run south, as if running from the Soviet aircraft.

Teleman hoped, hoped so hard it was almost a prayer, that there was a terrific argument going on between the pilot and observer on board the Falcon. If this bird was going to hold true to pattern, he had about another five minutes or so to go before he would have to drop out and turn the chase over to the next in line. Teleman wondered at the organization they must have to be able to figure out what he was up to: return the Falcons from their rotating picket duty nearly fifteen hundred miles northeast, land and refuel them, and put them back into the air less than two hours later, strung out in a perfect line to intercept him as he came sneaking across the border. Then he stopped cold. Or else they had one hell of a lot more of-these specially rebuilt Falcons than he had counted on. So far, he had faced four, and that meant they must be supported by at least twelve more if the pickets were to be effective. Since they would not know for sure where he would try to cross, the Soviets would have to keep at least thirty-six modified Falcons on the ready line. One set of twelve on station, twelve on their way from the base to the line, and twelve on the ground being serviced and fueled. “Ye gods,” he muttered.

Now it was beginning to look as if his long shot was going to pay off. The following Falcon began to come around on a course halfway between Teleman and’ the ghost so that he could keep an eye on both until he decided which was the real intruder. He was being a little more cautious than Teleman had planned on. The gap between him and the ghost had widened to 160 miles and he instructed the computer to pour it on. Instantly, the ghost leaped ahead at close to Mach 5 and the range began to open. By now, the crew of the Falcon must be desperate. He checked his altitude and leveled off at 180,000 feet to watch for further developments.

As he waited, a fourth Falcon appeared on the scope, screaming for altitude. The third began to drop back and finally, after a few seconds, turned sharply into a bank and began spiraling down. Overshot his fuel, Teleman thought grimly. He hoped their escape capsule was in good operating condition. The fourth Falcon moved up fast, but still was far below the altitude at which the third had fallen out. This was exactly the situation Teleman had been hoping for. He ran for the ice layer. The crystalline structure of the high altitude cloud was so tenuous as to be almost nonexistent, in fact it was detectable only by instruments, but still thick enough to reflect radar waves. He did not have to worry about radar sighting, but the thin haze the cloud.cast would also make optical tracking that much more difficult in the strong, late morning sunlight. Seconds later he began the second phase of his plan by falling off slowly southward.

It was rare to see an ice cloud layer of this extent much above ninety thousand feet; although scattered and shredded bits of ice could always be found at this altitude. The effects of the Arctic storm, Teleman thought, even 3600 miles south. Anyway, it was here and he was going to make darned good use of it. Safely into the nebulous ice layer, he, settled back to the long chase that would lead him north and west across the Asian landmass.

His radar screens indicated that the Falcon was still tracking the ghost by radar. The readout indicated that they would close.up enough within four minutes to spot it as a phony on the visual apparatus. And when that happened, all hell was going to break loose. And sure enough, after four long minutes, in which Teleman widened the gap between the A-17 and the pursuing Falcon by nearly five hundred miles, he spotted the Soviet craft coming around in a tight half turn. Obviously they had discovered the ghost for what it was and were now running back to the projected path of the last visual sighting. When they got there, they would find him nowhere in sight — he hoped. Sure enough, here came the reinforcements. Four more Falcons were rising fast along the path where they had last sighted him. As unobtrusively as possible, he fell off.even farther south. Now that the Reds were lost in the dust, he was free for the moment to cope with other problems. Right now he was safely out of range of the visual gear. In fact, by dropping off south, he was now falling behind the fourth and rearmost Falcon. He was pretty sure the Soviets would figure that he would pull a trick like this and would right now be using all of the radar at their disposal to try and spot the blind area, now less than a mile wide, that his ECM gear was causing. That would explain the systematic spacing of the four Falcons, each two hundred miles apart. In addition, they might shortly be using their mid-continental radar line, jacked around south to search for him. It was time to increase the ECM before they did pick him up.

As Teleman reached for the ECM gear panel, he caught a flicker of light on the radar screen as one of the Falcons changed course.

The digital readout chattered quickly. Too late, he groaned inwardly. Either one of the aircraft or the ground stations had picked him up. The Falcon was heading directly for him. Working quickly, he extended the counterdetection range to its full sixteen-hundred-mile range. It seemed to have no effect on the approaching Falcon. He could not spot a single indication of wavering or uncertainty. Swearing softly, Teleman checked the fuel-load readouts. Mach +5 was the limit unless he wanted to crash somewhere in Poland or France, out of fuel. The contact-point readout.now gave him six minutes before the Falcon reached missile range. He checked his location quickly and found that he was south of the ancient capital of the Mongolian Khan Timur-i-leng, the city of Samarkand, less than three hundred miles from the Afghan border. Would the Soviets hesitate to cross the border, as they had north over Sinkiang? There was only one way to find out, he thought grimly, and dropped into a steep turn south, sliding down in a long glide that would bring him across the border at 140,000 feet. It was a desperate gamble, but one that had to be taken.

The next six minutes passed slowly. Teleman fled south for the border pursued by the Falcons, slowly gaining ground by their relay tactics. As the chase lengthened, Teleman began to observe the flight characteristics of the other pursuing aircraft. His radar showed two other bandits wheeling into the flight line from the north. He could imagine them strung out in a long line, in both directions, all the way to the air base at Alma Alta. Of the two on his radar beside the immediate pursuer, one was heading back. The sudden flurry of activity involving the four Falcons when they thought they had lost him obviously had not exhausted them. Then on the horizon Teleman spotted the Amu Dar Ya, the river that formed the northeastern border, separating the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

The radar screen showed the second following Falcon almost within range, and indicated that Teleman would cross the border with seconds to spare. As if realizing that he was losing his prey, the Soviet pilot fired a salvo of missiles. Teleman watched the two rockets spurt ahead of the aircraft and begin to close in on him with deadly silence. As soon as the missiles were away, the Falcon throttled back and dropped swiftly down in a sharp turn, trying desperately to conserve fuel for the impossible run back to the Alma Alta base eight hundred miles north.

The missiles fell far short, not a serious hazard after all. Teleman bent wearily forward and programed the ECM to respread the sixteen-hundred-mile safety net around the A17. The remaining three Soviet Falcons had pulled around to the north as he crossed the border, and climbing swiftly up to his altitude was a single replacement with which the Soviets would probably try and keep him in sight. But it would be a hopeless task, Teleman knew. He now had a pretty good idea of the effective range of their visual tracking gear. Five hundred miles seemed to be the ultimate, limit and accurate tracking could be performed properly only at less than four hundred miles. Accordingly, Teleman pulled into a long arc to the southwest that would bring him out of range in less than twelve minutes, and throttled back to Mach 1.9.

Two problems, both serious, still faced him. One was how to repenetrate the Soviet Union in order to make the rendezvous point on time; the second was his dwindling fuel load. Both problems were interdependent.

After fifteen minutes of intense work with the computer, Teleman sat back and studied the results. Keeping him company the entire while was the lone Falcon, six hundred miles north and safely inside his own border. Teleman was sure he was out of sight of the Soviet aircraft. He had to be in order for this new course to work. The computers, taking all the variables into account, including the fact that it was very possible for the Soviets to again pick him up deeper into the Soviet Union, had drawn a flight path that would keep him outside the boundaries of the Soviet Union until he reached the vicinity of the Caspian Sea. He would re-enter the Soviet Union from northern Iran, skirting the southern edge of the Caspian at two hundred thousand feet. He would use a full ECM range of sixteen hundred miles, as the Soviet border radar net would he on alert and it would be impossible to escape their notice anyway. It was very likely that, if they could have visual tracking systems for aircraft, then they could also have ground stations to perform the same job over a wider range and with greater accuracy. But radar disruption of sixteen-hundred-mile diameter should make it impossible for the radar net to provide enough of a course approximation to the visual tracking stations to aid in spotting him in the three minutes or so that he would be within range. Telcman fell off slowly, deeper into Afghan territory, always paralleling his original line of flight, keeping the Russian plane on the edges of his radar screen while slowly leaving him behind. The one-sided chase continued due west now, until he had left the torn earth of the Hindu Kush far behind and below lay the rugged Plateau of Iran. Every ten minutes, regular as clockwork, he watched another Falcon spiral up to take his station on the other side of the border. The A-17 was on full automatic now and Teleman was merely a passenger. At a certain point the aircraft banked steeply to the south, then steadied in response to a small correction in the flight plan. After half an hour of this blind run and chase, his, companion, now six hundred miles behind him, overstayed his ten-minute pattern. Teleman bent to the radar screen, watching to see what would happen. A minute passed, then a second and a third. In the fourth minute the Falcon slid off one wing and dropped quickly into a long glide northwest. Teleman checked his maps. The air base at Ashkhabad on the Soviet side of the Turkman SSR-Afghanistan border was now within range. Operations had probably been shifted accordingly, Teleman thought.

He turned his attention to the ground control map rolling out on the screen. His flight path was marked by a triangular bar reaching to the black horizon line. The flight path was superimposed on an actual view of the terrain below. Off his starboard wing was the Iranian city of Meshed and he knew that the Iranians had a large radar complex north of the city, watching the Russian border. His crossing point would be almost directly over the city of Babol, two hundred miles northeast of Tehran.

After this little bit of unscheduled horseplay, his’ fuel load was going to be cut mighty fine to get him to rendezvous. He would have to reduce speed severely and yet he still had to get there on time. He was certain that Larkin, from what little he knew of his contact man, could be depended on, gale or no gale. He had not received any weather reports on conditions between Greenland and Novaya Zemlya since he started his run south from the Arctic. To avoid the least possibility of detection, all but two monitoring channels were shut down automatically during the mission portion of any flight over Communist territory. The Soviets were known to monitor the Advanced SAMOS satellite system by ground and shipboard stations in an effort to break the codes used. The only weather information he could receive, then, was from the military weather satellites directly overhead, and they reported on local conditions only. Satellite-to-satellite transmissions were too easily monitored and traced to allow him to interrogate at will. Teleman could therefore only guess at weather conditions in the Arctic, and if the ice clouds that overlay most of Asia were any indication, he had to conclude that they were extremely bad.

Once more he had the computer review the flight plan for him. In twelve minutes he would be crossing the border into Soviet territory. Teleman was well aware that, if he had missed anything while setting up the course, the flight plan would end with him and the A-17 scattered across miles of steppe, rather than orbiting the Robert F. Kennedy prior to refueling for home.

After crossing the border, the flight path would take him over the southern end of the Caspian Sea to the Caucasus Mountains and across the Sea of Azov, then over the bend in the Dnieper River to bypass Kiev, and out across the Ukraine to Poland. Over the Ukraine, he had a choice to make. Depending on local weather conditions and any indications of Soviet fighter activity, he could, if he had to, drop farther south into the Czechoslovakia-Hungary region and run for West Germany and the North Sea. That alternative was his last-ditch escape attempt if they tried to intercept him over continental Russia. If not, he would make for Poland and the Baltic Sea and up across the Scandinavian Peninsula. That route would put him at the rendezvous point with ten minutes of fuel left, much more preferable than ditching in the Barents Sea. He could do the last in seven hours by holding his speed to Mach 1.5, his most economical cruising speed.

Ahead now was the Soviet border, and it was time to crank out the radar counterdetection gear. A circle of interference sixteen hundred miles across would keep them busy for a long time, hunting for him with that damned visual gear.

CHAPTER 9

Larkin was on watch, strapped securely into Ms high seat, when Folsom stumbled through the Hatchway onto the bridge. Larkin nodded a greeting without taking his eyes from the violent seas visible through the revolving screen. Truly mountainous waves were building, even here in the lee of the cliffs forming the sea edge of the North Cape. Folsom, peering out through the spinning circle of glass that kept the ice and sleet from completely shrouding the bridge windows, was shocked to see just how high and rough they had become in the two hours he had been off bridge duty. In the engine room, where he had been assisting with the overhaul for the last hour, the motion of the ship had been rough, rougher than he had ever experienced that far down in the hull of any ship. But the spread of tortured wave and glooming sky through the glass was beyond belief. Folsom estimated the waves to be rising nearly eighty feet. The anemometer showed wind speed gusting to 105 knots. The sweep of horizon, broken only by the faintly visible headlands of the Cape to the extreme west, was filled with masses of cyclonic cloud that intermittently obscured frost-sharp stars, glistening momentarily overhead whenever the ship, cresting a wave, rose out of the dense spray fog. The wind-riven clouds, still low on the horizon; were bearing down savagely. In less than two hours the U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy would reel under the impact of the storm’s major onslaught. Since early morning Folsom had been aware of a mild tension building in the pit of his stomach. Now staring through the spinning disk of glass, it threatened to choke him. He swallowed and reswallowed as inconspicuously as possible. He had been through bad gales before, but never one of such fury or with a damaged ship. For the hundredth time since the strain gauges had been installed, he leaned over to study the dials. All four gauges, their leads attached to the insides of the patch and to the hull plates, showed periodic flex that he knew would be loosening the welding beads. Earlier he had sent a crew into the hull tank to reweld the plates flush against the tank, but they had been. unable to finish more than three strengthening bars before the mounting vibration of the hull plates against the hammering of wind and wave made further work impossible.

Folsom turned away from the dials and noticed Larkin’s face as he stared into the wind-and wave-filled night. The narrow face was strangely lit by the soft bridge lights, causing the angles and planes of the skull to set in rigid patterns. The face betrayed not the first sign of emotion. In spite of the intensity of the angry sea, Larkin sat comfortably in the high seat, arms folded across his chest, studying the small cone of night visible through the madly whirling screen.

Folsom’s musings were interrupted by the radioman. Startled, he turned to find the rating standing at his shoulder. Folsom glanced at the sailor’s face and was not surprised to see the small light of controlled fear deep in the man’s eyes. He knew the same flicker of light must also be in his. Hurriedly he took the message and turned away.

“Ye gods,” he said softly. “Here it comes.” Larkin turned his head to look at him, then accepted the message Folsom handed to him. He read it through without comment, then passed it back to Folsom.

“It does look like we are in for it. Gale force winds of 125 to 130 knots expected in the next three hours, decreasing to go to 110 knots for the following eight hours. Ouch.” Larkin bent forward to read the strain gauges. “How much time before we reach the turnaround point?” Folsom glanced at his watch. “About ninety minutes, sir.” Larkin rubbed his face absently, and then stared at hid hand as if expecting to find the answer there. When he did not, he grunted and looked up at Folsom.

“Stress is building far too rapidly on the bow section to suit me. I think it’s time we came about. We can loiter somewhat on the way back to make it come out right, can’t we?”

“Yes, sir?’

“In that case, prepare to come about, Mr. Folsom.” Folsom nodded and made for the plotting table, the ball of fear in his stomach growing larger and tighter at the same time.

He had to force himself to keep his voice steady as he ordered the general quarters alarm sounded through the ship, then made the announcement. He had just finished and was putting the microphone back into its clip when the ship’s intercom buzzer sounded. He flicked the switch on. “Bridge here.”

“Mr. Folsom, Rigsby here. We got real trouble in the hull tank. Those damned welders… the whole patch is weakening fast.”

Folsom spun around. One of the needles on the strain-gauge dial was jerking madly. Almost at the same time, the other gauge started to follow.

“Captain,” he spat out, and flipped the volume up a bit so that Larkin could hear.

“Go on, Rigsby.”

“The main forward structural member is cracked-right alongside the weld. I’m getting a trickle of water right now near the top of the patch.”

“Is there anything that can be done?” Larkin asked.

“Yes, sir. Flood the tank.” The tinny reproduction of the intercom barely concealed the nervousness of the man’s voice. Folsom could imagine him all alone in the immensity of the tank, knowing that the interior hatch was secured and that it would take forty seconds to get it open. If the patch should go, he would be crushed to death by tons of freezing water pouring into the tank. That same water would also pull the RFK down farther by the how until the first wave that broke would send her straight to the bottom. Folsom could feel the knot of fear rising into his throat, threatening to erupt into endless screams. The figures on the scratch pad, which he had scribbled from the strain-gauge dials, dissolved into a meaningless jumble, and the console reeled for a moment before he clenched the side of the plotting table and gripped until his knuckles went dead white. He fought with his body to control the panic as he watched the wind indicator flicker wildly with the first of the gusts that would quickly grow to a full 125-knot gale. Flashes of thought broke through his guard… the sudden wrenching snap as the bow broke loose under the pounding and the bulkheads… never designed to withstand the pressures of the naked, angry sea… giving way one by one… the RFK settling deeper into the waves… the Arctic seas pounding and smashing through the bulkheads… the ship buckling against the impact… plunging bow downward….

“We’re shoring up the patch and the structural member with braces, but they won’t hold up long.”

“All right then, do what you can and keep me informed.” Larkin’s voice was calm in the midst of Folsom’s own mental storm. “But as soon as you get the braces installed, I want you and the crew out of there. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir, but if we stay, or one of us anyway, we’ll shave time to warn you and get out.”

“No,” Larkin said sharply. “You could not give me any more than a minute or so warning. The strain gauges will provide that. As soon as you are finished with the bracing, get out and report aft to the repair station. Is that understood?” Larkin’s matter-of-fact analysis of the situation and Rigsby’s almost suicidal offer to remain behind in the hull tank to provide the ship with a few seconds extra warning began to calm Folsom. He had never experienced this kind of paralyzing fear before, but he knew, as did every man who faces danger in situations over which he has little control, that eventually he would meet this shattering fear at least once before he died. He had seen men suddenly grow rigid before going into battle, or divers just before making a deep dive, veterans who had been through many engagements. It happened, and there was nothing you could do about it except hope that you could handle the situation when it did happen. He reached down and picked up the pencil that had dropped from his nerveless fingers and pressed it slowly onto the pad, willing his muscles to move again, to continue to draw the numbers indicating the course change required and the time they would have to lose at reduced speed to bring them to the rendezvous point on time.

Larkin flicked off the intercom and turned to Folsom. His voice was strong and full of command. “Mr. Folsom, get me an exact position fix, as close as you can. Then run the new course through the computer and alert the crew that we are coming about. Keep them at general quarters until We have straightened out on the new course… and make sure that Rigsby and the rest are out of that hull tank. Give them five minutes more. I’m going below for my foul-weather gear. You will take the conn while I am outside, but follow my directions.”

“Outside!” Folsom exploded. “Captain, you can’t go out there!” Larkin grinned. “Watch me. How else do you think we are going to get her around? You can’t see worth a damn through that screen. This ship is going to have to be steered around those waves like a tin can. That means we come about as we crest a wave — and only the right wave at that — and complete the turn before we hit the bottom of the trough or else we will roll over and go right to the bottom.” Folsom took a deep breath. “Captain, you. will freeze to death before we can come about.”

“Not if you hurry about it.”

Larkin turned away and hurried down to his cabin for his foul-weather gear. When he returned to the bridge a few minutes later, Folsom was just finishing his instructions to the helmsman. He looked up as Larkin came onto the bridge, zipping up his jacket. A marine came hurrying up with a nylon safety line and clipped one end to the harness already around Larkin’s chest.

“Listen for my count. As we come up the wave I’ll start counting backward from ten. When I get to one, be ready to put the helm over hard… and better keep the turbine engines idling up to speed as well. We’ll have plenty of need of an extra kick” Folsom nodded and Larkin turned away, jamming the helmet down over his head. He snapped the throat mike into place, tested it quickly, then pulled down the faceplate and left through the emergency hatch. Once outside, still in the lee of the bridge, he checked the microphone again, then buckled his safety straps to the railing. With the safety line trailing behind, he was now about as safe as he could possibly be… until the first good wave decided to wash him overboard. Against the power of those tons, of water the line would snap; or, if it held, would probably cut him in half. The plates of the catway leading around the top of the bridge structure were caked solid with ice. That ice, washed constantly by spray, was slippery underfoot, and he moved carefully to keep his footing. As he came out of the lee of the deckhouse, Larkin grunted in surprise as the wind cut through the nylon and electrically heated layers of foam padding as if they did not exist. Almost immediately his fingers and toes went numb. The temperature close to -20°, when combined with the 110-knot wind, gave a chill index of -98°. Unprotected, he would not last more than a minute before his heart stopped beating. As Larkin moved out onto the forward position of the weather deck, the wind pulled and plucked at him to send his feet sweeping away. He crashed against the steel wall of the deckhouse with stunning force, and for several minutes was unable to clear his head enough to get to his feet. The — forty-foot journey from the deck hatch, up the narrow ladder, and around the curve of the bridge was made, an inch at a time, on hands and knees. The wind was a solid wall of force through which he had to tunnel, and finally he was reduced to using his hands to pull himself from stanchion to stanchion along the railing. The stanchions were set every six feet, just beyond the grasp of his extended arm. He had to wait between each stanchion, arms stretched wide to hold the stanchion and the edge of the catway, resting, readying himself for the lunge to the next. Then, when he grasped it, he had to pull himself painfully up to the frozen metal and reach for the next. His task was made even harder by the fact that each stanchion supported a wedge of ice nearly two feet long to windward. His gloves froze to the ice and he had to pull them loose each time. If he lost a glove, he would also lose a hand. An uncovered hand would freeze into uselessness in less than two minutes. And Larkin needed the use of both hands to make any progress at all. Larkin stretched out full length on the ice-coated deck to reduce the amount of his body exposed to the wind. The wind was like a solid hammer of steel pounding away in rhythmic gusts, thumping him into the ice, and then, as it got under his body and lifted him clear of the deck, flinging him back against the safety line. The struggle soon became concentrated into forcing his Land out to grasp the next stanchion and pull himself along the deck. He had thirty-five more feet to go to reach the center of the catway.

The strain on Larkin’s shoulders was causing the muscles to scream, in-protest each time he reached for the next stanchion. Then it happened.

Between the fourth and fifth stanchion, his hand slipped off the ice-coated tube. The wind reached, slamming him back against the harness, and the line fouled. Another gust of wind caught him and almost pulled him through the railing before he got the straps cleared. Then the petulant wind smashed him back, cracking his leg viciously against the bridge plating as if it were alive and frustrated by the puny efforts of this unbearable, unnoticeable insect. For a minute Larkin lay crumpled against the bulkhead while the pain in his leg slowly subsided. Then by sheer strength of will he pulled himself to the next stanchion.

After twenty minutes he had managed to get as close to the center of the bridge as he could.

So much ice, he thought. He would never have believed it. Every square inch of the ship above the water line was coated with several feet of ice that glistened here and there in the bridge lights. The forward part of the deck was covered with mounds of ice that obscured bollards and lines and winches. No wonder the RFK was riding so low. If he had filled that hull tank the extra tonnage of water in the bow would have brought her so low in the water that they would have been swamped in short order. Although the RFK was no submarine, she could ride low for a long while, But eventually the weight of the steadily accumulating ice would send her to the bottom as surely as if the patch had opened.

Larkin rested against the railing with his arms wrapped around the icy stanchion. After a minute or so he regained enough strength to ask for the searchlights. Two powerful beams of light lanced out, swirling around to light the forepeak before disappearing into the twilight gray. Highlights of green and white foam were snatched from the waves and flung back at him by the wind.

Larkin pulled himself to his knees and wedged his body be-tween two close-set stanchions. Standing on his knees, he tried to peer ahead into the deep twilight gloom of the Arctic storm as water and ice smashed back at him from the knife-edged prow. He found that he could keep the faceplate of his electrically heated helmet and suit free of ice with his gloves, but the sea and sky were so close to the same shades of greenish gray that it was almost impossible to tell which was which. After a while he began to make sense of the scene. The waves, he found, were silhouetted in the searchlight as the ship climbed toward their crests. He timed several, counting the seconds — one thousand… two thousand… three thousand — until he had gained a rough average of the time it took the RFK to climb, pause at the crest, then rocket down the far side into the deep trough. The motion of the ship was far too irregular to judge the size and height of the waves because of the tremendous forces being applied laterally to the ship by the wind blowing from only two points off the port bow.

He crouched, waiting, his arms wrapped around the railing. The water streamed back, soaking him thoroughly in spite of the waterproof clothing. The wind drove into his trouser legs between the sealed boot tops and cuffs, down his neck and beneath the helmet, disregarding the faceplate as if it did not exist. He waited, already half frozen, trying desperately to stay awake in the intense cold.

A towering roller built up in front of the ship. The bow followed, lifting toward the crest at an impossible angle, and Larkin started his count. He reached one, just as the ship crested, teetered for a moment. Now, he thought, just… “howl” he screamed into the microphone and felt the ship vibrate through its shroud of ice as full power was fed from its nuclear engines to the spinning propeller shafts. The ship tilted and started its headlong rush for the trough.

CHAPTER 10

For a curious moment Larkin was aware only of the beams of the twin searchlights probing into the depths of the trough, immeasurably distant. The stark, white light caught and held the peculiar green-blue color of the frigid Arctic waters. With an effort he wrenched his eyes away and strained through the gloom to the next wave, not quite a quarter of a mile away. Light flashes from the searchlights danced in front of his eyes, obscuring the express train speed of approach. In spite of the pounding, the cold, the spray, and the near panic, he found he was still counting smoothly.

“Now, hard to port, all engines emergency full.” Again his voice was a near scream. In spite of the violence of the wind on the crest, the ship shuddered along its stem as the nuclear engines were supplemented by the six gas turbine engines spewing thirty thousand shp apiece in less than eight seconds from idle. The cruiser, which had begun to swing from the wind, stopped as suddenly as though it had hit a brick wall. The engines drove her deep down below the crest, and momentarily out of the full force of the wind. The RFK slewed to port, its stern snapping around as the rudders came hard over. As she reached the, trough she was broadside to the next mountainous wave. Larkin groaned in agony. That damned ice, he cursed. The vast tonnage of ice had slowed her, pressed her too deep into the water for the engines to cope. And the next wave was already towering above her and would roll her like a stick. The ship heeled, farther and farther over, until Larkin gave up hope. A deluge of’ water washed him under, burying him completely. Then the great battle cruiser broke free; shaking her head like an angry terrier, she righted herself and shed water in torrents. She came up with a bone in her teeth as she surged around to point in the opposite direction. The following wave rolled under and lifted her high into the wind. The ship skidded down into another trough, her bow smashing deeply into the water. For a heart-sickening moment, Larkin thought again she would never surface, but once. more the bow knifed up, and she shed water. The next wave was easier, as the engines were cut back to one third. And finally she ran before the wind, moving with an easy rolling motion through the towering waves.

Larkin hung exhausted and freezing as the: ship straightened and lifted more easily into the next wave, now chasing water to the crest. Water was no longer breaking over her bow in a steady stream, but came instead in fitful spurts. Larkin felt two hands go under his arms and he was lifted to his feet. The forward portion of.the bridge on which he stood was now in the lee of the wind as the storm pounded in from directly astern. Half supported, he stumbled across the deck and into the heat and glare of the bridge. After the intense cold, the 72° temperature of the interior was almost intolerable. He slumped into the seat and Folsom pulled off his helmet and boots. It was Bridges who had come out onto the deck for him, and now he stripped off his mask and gloves and fetched a cup of hot coffee. Larkin gulped it down as fast as the scalding liquid would allow.

Folsom walked easily across the bridge to where Larkin was seated clutching his coffee. He stopped and grinned down at the captain. “Aren’t you the iron sailor,” he chuckled in a low voice. Larkin smiled back.

“I thought I was before I went out there. Now I’m not so sure.”

Folsom bent to read the dials on the strain gauges. “Well, at least that’s one worry gone. At this rate we could keep on for the next ten years.”

“Good. In that case, I’m going below for some sleep. Call me in two hours.”

“I’ll call you when we hit the rendezvous point, not before.” Larkin glanced up, startled.

“Not before I said.”

The captain stood up, trying valiantly to square his shoulders. “That is mutiny, I think, Mr. Folsom,” he said in mock anger.

“Yeah, I know. Now get below, before I call a marine to escort you.” Folsom watched fondly as Larkin went below to his quarters, then he turned and went back to the plotting table. He studied the map and the course he had laid out to the rendezvous point for a long while, then he went to stand before the screen. He reached down and flicked on the searchlights and swiveled them around to scan the sea on both sides of the bow. Clean circles of light were cut into the mountainous waves by the two million candlepower lights, which picked green out of the freezing Arctic waters and gleamed off white crests now blowing in the same direction as the RFK. He concentrated on the motion of the ship under his feet and found that she was moving in a rhythmic dance in time to the roll of the waves under her keel. Darkness had fallen in all of its intensity. The frozen air glistened with a million scattered stars, the very crispness of their light indicating the depth of the cold. Low on the southern horizon was the storm bank, spun out from the leading edge of the storm. Folsom knew that the seas would be at their worst in that area. But they could run on into the sheltering lee of the Soviet coast, safe in the knowledge that no Russian ship or aircraft could put out to look for them, nor would submarines be cruising near enough to the storm-wracked surface to spot them electronically. By the time the storm abated enough for the Russian Navy to resume regular patrols, they should be putting into the Glyde, their intermediate base before sailing for Newport Naval Base, Rhode Island.

Folsom turned away from the screen and started his regular watch tour of the various consoles, checking on the condition of the ship. He was still worried about the deck heaters. Even with the extra heat being piped up from the reactor cooling system, they still were not coping with the ice. Perhaps, now that they were running before the waves, they would not be taking aboard as much spray, not unless the wind veered, anyway. And to judge by the satellite photos of the storm center, if they maintained present speed and heading they would sail into a radial arm of wind within two hours. Then they would be taking the wind and spray across the bow quarter as well as one hell of a cross chop from the waves as the wind tried to push incalculable gallons of sea water from their already set path. It was going to be one hell of an afternoon. Two hours later Folsom was ready to modify his judgment as to what kind of afternoon it would be, but modify it downward. He turned away from the ship’s intercom. Barrows, the engineering officer, had every right to be extremely unhappy with Folsom, but his voice had been steady enough, with no hint that he did indeed blame the executive officer. Barrows had just finished reporting that the main condenser system had frozen solid. It had been Folsom’s order to use the major part of the reactor heat to feed the deck heaters. This meant that the heat normally used to maintain the condenser system at an even 36°F had to be channeled into the deck heaters and the reactor crew had to vary the power output to control the condenser system by hand. When Larkin had called for full emergency power from all engines, an overload had been thrown onto the condensers. The temperature had dropped quickly while the reactor worked at full power, until, when the engines had been cut back to one third, the temperature in the condensers stood at 33°F. The reactor crew had gone furiously to work to try and bring the temperatures back up to a safe 36°F, but in the succeeding two hours the system had oscillated widely, and, finally, the first seed crystal of ice had formed in the outside banks. Even rechanneling all heat being fed to the decks had not been enough to stave off the rapid icing. Five minutes later the webbing of pipe was full of half-frozen slush. Barrows had closed down the main system and shifted to the auxiliary condensers. If needed, he could go directly to sea water, but the resulting corrosion would mean a major overhaul for the system and two months in drydock to complete the job. Damn it all, Folsom swore to himself. Why now of all times? This whole blasted cruise seemed to be jinxed. First the collision, then the storm, and now the condenser system. What in the name of the God was next? Barrows estimated that he would need at least three to four hours to thaw and flush out the condensers. In the meantime the auxiliary banks could handle slightly less than eight knots speed. That in itself would put them nearly forty minutes behind on the rendezvous.

He snapped on the intercom and punched the code for engineering viciously. “Chuck, use the auxiliaries. If you can’t get the main condensers thawed in three hours, we’ll have to use the boost engines to make up forty minutes.”

“Right, sir. I’ve got a crew checking them over right now. How does the deck ice look?”

“Just a minute.”

Folsom turned and pressed against the glass. The decks showed up clearly in the searchlights. The glare from the ice was strong, but not so strong that he could not make out the forward winch boom lying horizontal on the deck where it had been lashed. It was covered by ice that barely showed a mound. The’ boom, when horizontal, lay three feet above the deck.

“Still too damn thick for me,” he said into the intercom. “But that’ll have to wait. Use all the reactor heat you need to get those condensers thawed!” Teleman lay relaxed in the acceleration couch, Jotting the liquid pulsing of the aircraft flow placidly through his body. The PCMS was bringing him slowly out of a two-hour nap, a much-needed nap that, while it would not completely restore him, would bring his body systems to the point where the proper dosages of amphetamines could keep him awake and completely aware. He eased the couch forward into a semisitting position and lazily scanned the ground control monitor currently displaying the Pomeranian coastline of Poland 180,000 feet below. Even at this distance he could see specks of white dancing on the surface of the Baltic Sea as it rolled and thrashed to the commands of the storm front beginning to reach across northern Europe.

In Hamburg, less than three hundred miles west, it would be colder than the gates of hell a thousand years before the fires were lit, he thought. It always seemed that the bottom had fallen out of the thermometer when one of these Arctic storms came sweeping out of the Baltic into Germany. He recalled with fondness the two years he had spent with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Europe. He had toured Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and Belgium to Rumania — all but Scandinavia, with the exception of Denmark. He had never crossed the Kattegat. For some reason he had kept putting off Norway and Sweden and Finland, meaning to cross the channel, but never quite making it. He shrugged in a half stretch to ease cramping muscles and shook. himself out of his reverie. One of these days he would go back, and Scandinavia would be first on his list. By now he could make out the southern coast of Sweden lying beyond Bornholm Island. The cloud cover was closing in quickly below and the northern end of the Baltic Sea had turned slate gray. Patches of cloud to the west were beginning to glow red in the waning twilight.

Teleman was heading directly north across the Baltic toward the Gulf of Bothnia. He would fly up the length of the gulf, then over the curve of the Scandinavian Peninsula where Sweden joined Finland. By following the twenty-fifth meridian due north, in less than two hours he would enter Norwegian airspace north of Finland. Then, twenty minutes flying time later, he would rendezvous with the Robert F. Kennedy off the North Cape, completing a twelve-thousand-mile round trip, dump his information, and head home.

“And a damn good thing, too,” Teleman said aloud to hear his own voice. Rendezvous was still some 2500 miles away and the gauge needles for his main tanks were already well into the empty zone. Shortly he would have to switch to the reserve tanks with their two-thousand-mile additional range. By that time, he figured on his knee pad, he should be somewhere in the vicinity of the Finnish coast. He was also going to come onto the rendezvous point nearly thirty minutes late. Teleman wondered how the ship was going to take that. He hoped to hell that they would have a refueler standing by. The flight plans be had been given hours ago called for him to swing west and rendezvous with the tanker over Iceland. At this rate he would be lucky to make the Cape. Directly below, he caught a fading glimpse of Gotland sliding through the clouds. The cloud cover was closing down fast and he wondered idly whether or not he would be able to see the lights of Stockholm as he passed over the city.

The run into and across the Soviet Union had not been disastrous after all. It appeared that he had lost his tail over Iran, since the last Falcon had dropped down at the end of its ten-minute run and none had come up to take its place. Perhaps they were figuring that they had scared him badly enough when he fell off into Afghanistan and had decided to opt for the Indian Ocean. He sincerely hoped so: He had flown the tightrope between Tehran and the radar base at Gurgan, and then out over the Caspian Sea without being spotted. East of Baku he almost had heart failure when a blip showed up suddenly on his screen and the readout put it at 150 miles distant. It had turned out to be nothing more than a fragment of the same ice cloud he had used for cover, but even so it was several minutes before the adrenaline stopped playing hockey in his bloodstream. Teleman was sure that he had nearly blown out the PCMS unit.

Once past Baku, with, its intensive radar net, he had made a long, sweeping turn west to cross the Russian SSR between Makhachkala and Kizlyar on the Caspian coast. The long flight across the Ukraine to Poland had been accomplished while he slept without so much as a radar bogie to disturb his dreamless exhaustion. He was about done in and he knew it, and the PCMS knew it. He had had to program specific orders into the computer or else it would promptly have dropped him back off to sleep once more. With the end of the mission less than two hours away, and that comfortable hospital bed in California only five and a half hours off, he felt he could afford to lose the extra sleep. Teleman could not explain why, but he had rather an uneasy feeling about the next two hours. The escape from the Soviet trap had been just a little too pat; that last Falcon had given up a bit too easily for all the effort it and the others had expended. He had a hunch, and in this business, he had found, you played your hunches. The ground control map showed him the narrows of the Gulf of Bothnia. The infrared gear was displaying sharply detailed pictures of the Finnish towns of Kikkola, jacobstad, and Nykarleby and the Swedish town of Umea opposite. He knew that both the Swedes and Finns had small military garrisons well hidden nearby and the Swedes had a squadron of aging Hawk antiaircraft missiles, but nothing to worry him. Both concentrated the bulk of their military establishments to the north in concert with the Norwegians to meet the threat of the Soviet armies heavily invested in the Kola Peninsula north of Finland and east of Norway.

The ground control map was beginning to describe the northern coast of the gulf when a small blip appeared on the forward edge of his radar screens, coming south from the direction of Finland and on an intercepting flight path. Quickly he checked his systems and carefully increased the ECM range.

The image grew swiftly, closing on him at near his own speed, but still a hundred thousand feet below. At first he thought it might be one of the Concorde polar flights, but the recognition pattern was all wrong and the approaching craft too small. Puzzled, he reached out and upped the ECM range even more; then he realized that he had made a fatal mistake. The approaching aircraft had to be a Soviet Falcon. By increasing the range of the ECM, he had advertised his own presence as thoroughly as if he had radioed Moscow his exact position. Teleman banked suddenly to starboard, then straightened abruptly and ran for 220,000 feet.

The Falcon maintained course for a moment, then suddenly doubled its speed and rocketed upward. Both the IR and radar screens showed the long ionization trail of the afterburner.

Teleman held for a few minutes, watching the other plane. The Soviet pilot was out to get him once and for all, and Teleman knew it. As if to prove it, the interceptor did not waver but bored steadily on, closing the four-hundred-mile range in seconds. Desperately, Teleman slammed the nose down and blasted the ramjets to full thrust. He shot away beneath the Russian and pulled up sharply behind, wishing mightily for at least a 20-mm cannon, and preferably a wing pod full of heat-seeking missiles. As he came up behind, he straightened out, running for the Arctic. His only hope was to stay as far away from the Russian as possible and outlast him.

Teleman had gained a few miles by pulling beneath and behind the Soviet pilot. But even as he was pulling away, the Russian, without a wasted second, had begun to climb into a loop. Now Teleman watched him spiral into a loop so tight that it should either have killed the pilot or torn the wings off the plane or both. At the top of the climb the Russian did a vicious wingover and arrowed down after him.

Now Teleman realized that he had been underestimating the Soviets’ desperation. Not only did they want very much to bring him down, but they were willing to violate any territory’ since he had escaped their trap in Asia. It should all have been amply clear to him in view of the magnitude of effort they had expended in shifting the Falcons around to run him down over Tashkent. His overtaxed mind finally saw what he should have realized earlier, what the Soviets had already figured out. There was no chance of the aerial fight being recorded on radar. Only the Falcon would be seen. The Russians could either ignore any protests that might be forthcoming from the Finns or Swedes or pass it off with an apology and explanation that the Soviet pilot had merely strayed while on a test flight of a new aircraft. His peculiar antics could be explained as part of the test-flight regime. Teleman himself would be invisible from the ground and there were thousands of square miles of forest-covered mountains to hide the wreckage of the A-17 from everyone but Russian search parties.

The radar panels were showing the Falcon rapidly approaching from the rear. Teleman had just enough fuel left to reach the rendezvous point and loiter for perhaps five minutes waiting for the tanker. Unless he could shake this bastard, he thought grimly, he would never make even Norway. It all depended now on who could outlast whom. The Soviet pilot must be running low on fuel as well. He had made his initial approach at Mach 2.5 and followed that up with a series of bursts to Mach 4. Figure twenty minutes flying time from Leningrad or thereabouts — maybe he could lose him yet.

Teleman decided fast. He put the A-17 into a shallow climb and rocketed to 175,000 feet at Mach 3.7. His pursuer dwindled for a moment and then came on again, afterburners flaming a long trail of ionized gas on Teleman’s radar screen. He was watching his fuel readout now as closely as he monitored the radar. He was going to have to cut the fuel load fine, yet leave enough to permit him to at least reach the ship. He had to be within radio range to transmit. If the refueling tanker was there, great; if not, it would be a short swim in those water temperatures. Teleman had had no illusions about coming out of this mission alive from the moment he recognized the Soviet aircraft over the Baltic. But the information had to be gotten back. Not that the mission was so vitally important, in fact it was probably only someone’s bright idea — we have the aircraft in that vicinity, let him go take a look. What was important was the fact that the Soviets had developed an optical tracking system that ignored the ECM efforts. The next A-17 flight was due to go out in a little less than seven hours from now. If it went, the Soviets would be waiting for it.

The Russian interceptor had caught up quickly, apparently throttling back as he came up on target. Teleman sheered violently off his starboard wing, but the Russian flier had anticipated him and came around smoothly, still locked onto Teleman’s tail. They were deep into Finnish territory now and the Russian had cut the distance to less than a mile. Teleman could not understand why he did not fire. Those damned missiles the Falcon carried had appeared to have a range of nearly two hundred miles and were optically controlled from the interceptor. Teleman twisted and turned, trying to lose his remorseless pursuer. But the Russian, with laughable ease, remained locked onto his tail. Teleman suddenly dropped his speed, cutting his engines back to idle, and dropped both landing flaps and gear. They were nearly useless in the almost nonexistent air of 175,000 feet, but every miniscule bit of drag would help. For an uncertain moment the A-17 slowed relative to the Falcon. The pilot, surprised by this unexpected maneuver, streaked past him. This brief relief in the unbearable tension caused Teleman to laugh wildly; then, regaining some measure of control, he slewed violently to the right, again falling off his starboard wing and down. He was once again behind the Russian and he meant to make the best of it. In fatal desperation, he arrowed straight down, running flat out for the cloud cover at twenty thousand feet. Ahead of him the radar showed the Falcon dropping into a full-powered dive as he pulled out of a sharp right turn and followed Teleman down.

Carefully, Teleman eased the power up, keeping the nose pointed down as sharply as he dared. The wings were fully retracted against the fuselage and he was little more than a powered dart, struggling to keep the A-17 from entering a spin mode that would finish him against some mountainside in Finland. The Russian, clawing into a shallower dive, began rapidly catching up again. In agony, Teleman watched the digital readout on the radar panel as the margin narrowed. It was clear that within seconds the Russian would make it to the cloud cover ahead of Teleman, there to use the three-or four-second lead to unleash the two deadly missiles nestling in the fuselage. Teleman ground his teeth in frustration and shoved the throttle forward to its stop. At the same time he slammed the wings forward for maximum lift and lit off the ramjets with a bang. The A-17 shuddered under the giant hand of acceleration, but the magnificent aircraft rose to the challenge. Through the red acceleration haze Teleman saw the altitude indicator strain upward. The PCMS audio and visual alarms clattered and clanked wildly as they fought to keep Teleman from blacking out. The acceleration indicator read out 12 G’s as the A-17 started into a climb.

Teleman ignored everything except the altitude indicator and the throttle. Gradually he was pulling up short in relation to the Soviet. He had caught him by surprise again. At sixty thousand feet Teleman leveled out. The Russian was still well behind, nearly eight miles, and still climbing for altitude. With the A-17 leveled out and the engines in the turbojet mode with afterburners, Teleman streaked for the North Cape at Mach 4.

But the Soviet Falcon was not through. This was the last chance and both pilots knew it. Neither had anything to lose. Teleman judged the Soviet pilot had passed his point-of-no-return when he went into the dive after him. Now he was rapidly closing the gap in one last desperate try. And there was nothing remaining that Teleman could do about it. He now had barely enough fuel to make the rendezvous point. Even if the tanker was waiting, he doubted whether enough flying time remained to complete refueling. The Soviet pilot was pulling out all stops. He closed on Teleman at Mach 4.5, boring straight in, then lifting abruptly to pounce from above. As he neared, his guns opened up. He kept his thumb down on the firing button and walked a stream of tracers across the A-17. Where were the missiles? Teleman screamed silently. Twisting his head to glance back through the rear observation slit, Teleman could see the sheet of tracers marching toward him. The aircraft rocked violently as at least one cannon shell smashed through his starboard wing without exploding. Then the Falcon slipped below to come streaking up from beneath. Teleman sheered away but the Russian remained locked on. He slammed the A-17 from side to side, nursing every last bit of speed he could from the engines. For seconds both aircraft twisted and wrenched through the frozen air with tracers from the. Falcon’s cannon probing around the A-17. Like a wounded snake, they thrashed through the Finnish skies. A second burst chewed into the tail structure. The A-17 fluttered like a wounded bird and went out of control. The Falcon edged up, cannons waiting for the optimum moment, the Russian pilot waiting hungrily, with the patience of death, for the A-17 to line up crosswise in his gun-sights, waiting to place the last burst. Then Teleman knew why there had been no missile. Because of their bulk and weight the missiles had been removed and replaced with electric cannons, to save fuel and add speed. Now both pilots were waiting for the inexorable closing of their flight paths. The milliseconds turned into minutes for both as they approached the invisible spot in the sky that would nebulously mark Teleman’s grave.

The Falcon fluttered, arced up slightly, and fell off, arrowing down until lost in the clouds below. The Soviet pilot had waited perhaps a second too long.

CHAPTER 11

Teleman watched the black dot of the Falcon on his radar screen disappearing into the black night until the Russian aircraft vanished into the carpet of cloud. Beneath were the heavily forested northern reaches of the Kjolen Mountains and the empty taiga surrounding the Ounas River, an area inhabited only by Lapps who still followed the migrations of their reindeer herds. Unless the Finns had picked up the final moments of the Falcon on their own radar, it could be years before the wreckage was found. Teleman stared at the screen, sick with exhaustion,and despair. The Russian crew’s suicide had been for nothing. The gamble, their fuel load, against his, coupled with their ability to knock him out of the sky, had been lost. Now both were dead. Teleman knew that, if they had managed to eject, they could never have survived the buffeting of the gale and its sub-zero fury. He examined the fuel gauge. There were eight hundred pounds of the liquid hydrogen fuel remaining in the reserve tanks, another fifteen minutes flying time. If the commanding officer of the battle cruiser was as intelligent and resourceful as he had shown himself to be in the past, there would be a tanker waiting at the rendezvous point. He might be able to make it after all… unless more trouble showed up.

Teleman extended his radar fully and waited. The silver-green screen was empty — so far. But it was doubtful if the Soviets would depend only upon one aircraft to complete the job. They rarely played gambles or depended on half measures, and the depth of the system they had erected against him in Asia was more than proof of that. All of a sudden the A-17 rolled out of control and pitched,over into a dive. Teleman’s head snapped back hard against the headrest. The A-17 began to spin wildly. A tremendous banging sounded aft in the fuselage and, twisting around, Teleman saw the starboard rudder assembly through the rear observation slit flap madly. Terrified, he slammed the throttle forward and ran out the landing flaps for the second time. The A-17 was still rolling, down through seventy, sixty-five, sixty, fifty-five, fifty thousand feet before she began to slow. Carefully, his body now under full control of the PCMS, he began to increase power, running the wings forward again. Abruptly the pounding ceased and the A-17 began to bring its nose up into a level attitude. For the next ten minutes Teleman fought furiously with the controls to maintain the damaged A-17 in some semblance of level flight. He had cut the speed back to sub-sonic and managed to fight his way to eighty thousand feet where, hopefully, the thinner, air would lessen the drag on the twisted metal of the tail section. The aircraft still had a tendency to twist into an uncontrollable wingover that would drag him down into the roiling clouds of the storm-filled night below. The computer-controlled linkages aft through the fuselage had been damaged beyond the ability of the alternate circuitry to compensate. The rudder controls were next to useless and he was forced to depend on ailerons and landing flaps for lateral control.

In spite of all he could do, Teleman was slowly losing altitude. The altimeter was circling down through seventy thousand feet with a steadiness that was almost terrifying in its deadliness. The encounter with the Falcon had taken place over the Finnish coast of the Baltic Sea and stretched into the wide margin of mountain separating Sweden from the Norwegian Sea. The Russian had crashed somewhere in Finland, and Teleman hoped to God that the Russians would have a mighty hard time explaining what an advanced Soviet interceptor with empty cannons was doing in Finland — if the Finns ever found it. And if he wasn’t careful, he thought humorlessly, the Americans would be doing the same kind of explaining about him, only in spades when the Finns got a look at his equipment.

From the feel of one of the engines, he was beginning to wonder if a stray cannon shell or perhaps a piece of ricocheting metal had not blasted loose a couple of compressor blades. He was beginning to lose power in number two. A moment later his theory was confirmed when a shattering vibration wracked the aircraft. His hand darted to the cutoff switch and abruptly the racket vanished. At the same time the other engine whined up to power to carry the increased load.

Teleman rubbed his aching head and tried to think clearly. The baleful eye of the PCMS warning light glowed at him in exasperation, warning that he was overextending himself. Big news. He could certainly feel it. His head ached abominably from the overdose of drugs he had been absorbing in the past few hours as well as from the lack of any real sleep. He swore at the light and dialed an increased dosage of amphetamines. He hardly felt the new dose.

“If ever I get out of this mess,” he muttered aloud, “I am going to need at least three months in the hospital to get washed out.”

Talking to himself was something he rawly did. This time it made him feel a little better. For the last twenty minutes he had been telling himself that he was not going to make it, at least in one piece. But, obviously, his subconscious had refused to accept that. He considered the computer for a moment, then began to feed in coordinates and switched the monitoring gear to add information on the aircraft’s condition and fuel load. The answer that came out seconds later was worse than he expected. He was still nine hundred miles from the coast of the North Cape and twelve hundred short of the rendezvous point. By throttling back the remaining engine and staying subsonic, he could just about make it to the Cape — which was sure as hell a lot better than going down in the Barents Sea, all things considered.

As he thought about it, a germ of an idea began to take shape. Teleman forced himself to lean back in the couch and relax. He was so tensed up and worn out from the last several hours of flying hide-and-seek that unless he eased off he never would bring the idea into the open.

Trying to think like the Soviet commander responsible for bagging the Americanski spion, he knew that he would have only the reports from the downed aircraft to go on. And he doubted whether the Russian pilot had been close enough to get much of a reading on the damage his cannon fire had done. The entire sequence had taken less than two minutes, and any time the Soviet crewman would have been close enough for a detailed look would have been limited to a few seconds. And the last burst fired had come while the Russian was diving past and beneath.

So, not knowing the extent of any possible damage, they would reckon him to continue on his present course, perhaps varying a few degrees in either direction to throw them off. They would suspect, although they had no way of knowing for sure, that his fuel was running low. How low, they could only guess. And they would know that he was either heading for a rendezvous somewhere north of Norway or else for a sub-polar route to the States. Following that most logical line of reasoning, they knew he could outrun any pursuing Soviet interceptors. The last thing in the world they would expect would be a reduction in speed. Or would they? In any event it was his only chance. Fortunately, their optical tracking gear would be useless until they broke out of the storm. As it stood now, then, he could make the coast—’ that is if nothing else went wrong, if no more Russian aircraft appeared, and if nothing else fell off the aircraft. Surely the Russian pilot had been sending back a play-by-play description of the one-sided dogfight. The Soviets must know that their boy crashed and that the A-17 was still in the air when last seen. And with only one path open, straight north, they ought to be able to field enough aircraft to knock him down. About now, he thought grimly, one of those Russian copies of the old Steerman biplane ought to be good enough for that job. Teleman flipped the warm-up switches on the transmitters. This new development was going to force him to break the strict radio silence always maintained on overflights. To get the information to the RFK he was going to have to transmit over normal and open commercial channels. The whole secrecy bit was blown anyway, and there remained no need to preserve what faint modicum of secrecy remained. The Soviets could and would monitor all they wanted. The codes were supposed to be “breakproof,” and in any event they would certainly be changed after this disastrous mission. Stiffly, he leaned forward to examine the cloud cover below. The UV Doppler gear gave him a reading of twenty-two thousand feet on the cloud tops. If he ducked down and into the upper reaches of the cloud cover, with his ECM gear he just might be able to elude Soviet aircraft long enough to reach the Cape. What he would do then, he would figure out when he got there. One problem at a time for now. Very carefully, Teleman eased the nose down into a shallow glide that would help to stretch the fuel. He eased the engine speed back until he was flying at 450 knots and anxiously scanned the sky with the search radar. So far so good. As he dropped lower the half moon illuminated the soft bosoms of cloud with a pearlish light. In spite of the hundred-mile-an-hour winds that he knew must be raging lower down, the surface of the cover appeared untroubled. The A-17 dropped lower still and the softness began to give way to scudding rags of cloud that did not look so peaceful after all. At thirty thousand feet he caught the first faint whisper of the wind and marveled at the power of this storm that sent the thin molecules of air whispering along at even this altitude. It wasn’t until he was down a thousand feet into the cloud cover that he felt he had eluded, at least for the time being, pursuit by Soviet fighter aircraft eager to finish him off. Now, if the cover would only last until North Cape. The winds within the clouds were not as bad as he had expected them to be. In spite of the jolting, the A-17 seemed to be taking the ill-use without immediate danger of coming apart. The tail section, according to his instrumentation, was pretty badly chewed. The skin covering was torn, but the thin titanium was holding together quite well. He still had no control over the rudder assembly, but was able to compensate with wing surfaces and landing flaps.

For the first time in half an hour he was able to sit back and begin to think carefully about what evasive action he might take if jumped again. He wished desperately that he could take the chance of snatching a few moments sleep before the ordeal of the ejection and landing took place. But he did not dare. After the volume of drugs he had absorbed, he knew that, in spite of everything the PGMS could do, he would not be able to wake quickly enough to deal with split-second emergencies.

The A-17 stumbled on through the wrack of shielding cloud toward the North Cape of Norway. Somewhere ahead, Soviet aircraft searched the Finnish and Norwegian skies with optical and electronic detection gear for any traces of Teleman. Soviet picket aircraft and ships joined ground stations monitoring the entire spread of communications bands Teleman would be likely to use in transmitting his information. In his office at the Lenin Air Base outside Leningrad, the Soviet commander of the search mission fumed at his helplessness. Somewhere in the Barents or Greenland sea a picket ship was waiting for the American aircraft. Submarine or surface ship, it would make no difference to the aircraft and ships he could put onto the task of finding the intruder aircraft at its rendezvous point. But the storm negated his best efforts. No surface ship could put successfully to sea until the seas moderated. Aircraft could not penetrate the storm beneath the cloud layer. Instead he was forced to string fighters out in a long line with no guarantee that the American would fly obligingly up the gauntlet. The American pilot had bested the Soviets once along the Afghan border. It was the sheerest luck that they had spotted the trailing fringe of his ECM net as he turned north over Poland. Luck like that could not happen twice, damn it!

CHAPTER 12

Folsom stared pensively out the starboard port, watching the storm-thrashed waves towering on either side of the ship. Only rarely now did they break over the bow to come dashing down the length of the ice-smooth deck. He became aware that Larkin had come onto the bridge and had moved over to stand behind hint

“The seas seem to be easing somewhat”

“Yes, sir. We aren’t taking such a pounding now. The repair crew has managed to reweld the cover plates in the bow section and rig a couple of beams to help hold it in place. I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble, from that quarter at least”

“Then there are small things to be grateful for.” Larkin smiled. “You have managed quite well, Mr: Folsom. I must say that I am proud of both you and the crew.” Larkin delivered this rare compliment in a matter-of-fact voice, but Folsom was deeply touched by it.

“Thank you, sir. Although you might want to modify that when you hear about the condensers.”

Larkin chuckled. “Expecting a rocket were you? I read the report when I came up. Don’t worry about it. As you know, man does not always triumph over machinery,” he quoted solemnly. “There was nothing else you could have done. And I think the auxiliary condensers can handle the cooling system for now.”

He paused and stared out at the waves. “What have you decided about using the boost engines?”

“Uh, nothing really, at least at the moment. I didn’t…”

“Well, think…”

“Come now, you are the executive officer. You probably know this ship and her engines better than I do. Do you think she could handle seas like this under emergency power?” Folsom hesitated a moment before answering. “Yes, I think maybe she could,” he said thoughtfully. “Ordinarily I would suggest that we go farther under the lee of the Cape. We might find easier waters there. The only thing that worries me is whether or not the hydrofoils could stand the pounding. In and out of the water so much… shorter seas would be a lot easier on the struts.”

Larkin rubbed his mouth and chin. “Go in closer to the coast… I don’t really know. Most of the charts for this area are not accurate. This coast hasn’t really been thoroughly re-charted since the Germans did it in 1941. The coastal shelf is full of reefs…. How close in would you want to go?”

“At least five miles.”

“Five miles!” Larkin exclaimed. “That puts us inside Norwegian waters.” Folsom nodded. “I know, sir, but anything less would do us no good. That’s why I don’t think we should try. The Norwegians probably Wouldn’t raise a fuss if they spotted us. But, if for some reason they did, the investigating board would have to examine our logs and there would be no way of concealing the fact that we did violate Norwegian waters without permission.

“We can gain a few extra knots by coupling the boost engines to the main drive shafts anyway.”

Larkin nodded assent and turned away to cross to his high seat. He sat down and scanned the readout dials that presented the status of every vital portion of the ship. Both Larkin’s and Folsom’s panels — identical in every way — were to the Robert F. Kennedy what Teleman’s PCMS console had been to the A-17.

“All right, Mr. Folsom,” he said finally, “let’s play it that way.” The Robert F. Kennedy came to the rendezvous position hike an icy ghost. Every external fitting that faced the sea and wind was covered to a depth of three feet with gray, rock-hard ice. Long rills ran along the length of the weather deck, covering every shroud and stay and the lower reaches of the single antenna mast protruding from the superstructure. Only the upper, working portion of each antenna was clear due to its own independent electric heater. The RFK was streamlined like no other ship had ever needed to be. Instead of the block-like superstructure characteristic of modem destroyers and cruisers, the RFK’s bridge was built in a V and sloped aft. Her fore and after decks were free of the usual cannon turrets and other protuberances and the weather deck ran smooth from bow to stem in a gentle line except for the superstructure. At the same time, the sides of the deck curved, from a center line formed by a ten-foot walkway, downward to meet the hull. But now the ship resembled nothing as much as a child’s plastic toy boat covered with ice.

Larkin ordered the ship into a station-keeping pattern and re-.. duced speed to eight knots, only enough to maintain steerageway in the heavy seas. The RFK came about to fight the seas around a four-mile rectangle, with the legs into and running from the waves.

On the bridge, Folsom glanced warily at Larkin, standing before his console, his eyes glued to the radio operator’s hunched back as he sat ears straining under the earphones to catch the slightest whisper of sound over the VHF-FM frequency. Folsom knew Larkin was extremely worried. Knowing the full story and the knife-edge schedules the reconnaissance aircraft had to keep to, he was worried as well. Minutes before they had received a transmission from the refueling tanker, maintaining his assigned rendezvous position two hundred miles to the west. Everything was waiting, the stage set for the final scene. But where was the leading actor? Larkin shifted his weight from one foot to another. Imperceptibly at first, the motion of the ship was becoming rougher as she turned into a crosswind run. Larkin noted it with a sharp glance at the gyroscopic-driven indicator and immediately turned back to face the radio operator. Teleman was less than four hundred miles from the North Cape when he decided that perhaps he had pushed his luck as far as it would go. His fuel readouts were showing barely enough left to reach rendezvous, but the single, remaining engine was certainly not acting like there was. Twice, within the space of two minutes, the engine had coughed like, an old man on a cold winter morning and then resumed its steady drone. Teleman had never experienced a fuel shortage in the A-17 and he was at a loss as to how to diagnose the malady.

He was still maintaining a steady twenty-two thousand feet deep in the top layers of the Arctic storm. So far he had not been spotted by the searching Russian aircraft, but the radar screen was showing them strung out like pickets in a fence. They were putting out quite a bit of effort to greet him, he thought, but it was one honor that he would be happy to do without.

Teleman ran a correction bug-hunter program through the computer directed at the fuel readouts. Nothing showed up and he tried to relax; telling himself that if anything had been wrong the computers would have spotted it. He had almost convinced himself when the engine shuddered again. This time the unevenness persisted, the engine’s RPM’s dropping quickly until he thought he was going into a flame-out condition. At twenty-one thousand RPM, they caught again and the compressor came back up to the proper rev level. If he was running low on fuel, he figured, it was probably due to the increased drag from the damaged tail section. He had been checking on it steadily for the past hour, watching larger and larger chunks peel lose. Added to the fuel problem, he was now worrying about how much longer the entire aft fuselage was going to hold together. Of all places he did not want to eject, he could think of few that ran second to the top of Norway in the middle of an Arctic storm. If he was lucky, a wandering Lap might find his body, perfectly preserved in its thick coat of ice, several years hence. Leaning back as comfortably in the acceleration couch as he could after six straight days he stared at the instrument panel and the various displays trying to decide how soon to raise RFK to transmit his information. He was so tired that the various displays and panels full of readout dials and verniers refused to focus into concrete entities. Instead they were all running together into a fuzzy, jumbled mass of softly glowing colors. He was so tired that he knew if he closed his eyes not even the last trumpet would be loud enough to wake him.

When the engine failed a fourth time and the RPM’s fell and, kept on falling, he decided, enough, and threw the radio transmitter switches.

“Target One, Target One, acknowledge.”

The communicator buzzed on Larkin’s console. He snapped it on with an impatient motion and acknowledged sharply.

“Captain, this is the communications room. We are receiving an in-clear radio message from identity Beatle—”

“What the hell?” Larkin roared. “Did you say Beetle?”

“Yes, sir, he’s coming in on no Mo. and his voice is funny… kind of slow and broken.”

“All right…” Larkin was thinking fast. Obviously something had gone wrong. The recon aircraft was already fourteen minutes-late and now he was transmitting over an open channel, in-clear. “All right,” he repeated. “Pipe him up here and acknowledge.” Almost instantly, the bridge speakers burst into life with a rumble of static.

“Target One, Target One, acknowledge.”

Much longer, Teleman thought, and it would not matter. Already he could see several radar blips that he knew to be radio monitoring aircraft beginning to form a triangulation pattern.

“Target One, Target One, come in you blasted idiots. What the hell do… you think is going on up here?”

Teleman followed with a long string of profanity. If nothing else, that should convince them that he was an American.

“Identify yourself.” The message was short and in the clear. “Target One, Target One, stop playing games. This is Beatle!”

The eleven men on the bridge swiveled almost as one to stare in surprise at their captain. In a year and a half of these mysterious missions around the world this was the first time that anyone except Larkin had heard the hushed voice that came in at periodic intervals. The marine guard started forward, hesitated, as if not knowing,what to’ do. Then training took over and he strode over to Larkin’s desk. Larkin ignored him. He was now concentrating on the speaker and his communications officer acknowledging the call. The bridge operator had still not recovered from the unexpected shock and sat staring at his captain with a quizzical look on his face. Folsom moved to stand behind Larkin, he too ignoring the flustered marine.

“Quit horsing around down… there, I’m… I’m…”

“Target One, here, Target One here, status quickly.” Larkin’s voice was tight, the strain evident. He knew as well as did Folsom that this could be a Russian trick to draw them out, to establish radio fix down which a salvo of missiles could streak at any moment. The radar operator came to suddenly and with a half-choked shout swung back to his screens.

“Bandit… jumped over… Finland. Tail… surface badly-shot up… losing altitude… fuel almost gone… bandits waiting… stand by for transmission… this channel.”

“Beatle wait until within usual procedural range. Repeat, wait until within usual procedural range.”

“No good… cannot last that long.”

Teleman stopped, breathing deeply with the effort. The warm, comforting hands of sleep were again closing around him. He had to shake his head several times before he could focus his thoughts enough to even wonder why the PGMS was not compensating. Then he saw why. The single-minded computer feedback systems were convinced that he was jeopardizing the mission. The flashing MISSION ABORT sign was flickering at him. If he had. not over-ridden the controls earlier, the computer would probably have disregarded the threat of the Soviet fighters and decided Whether or not to run for home at top speed or trigger off the destruct bomb carefully packed away in the center of the aircraft.

Now he was becoming aware that his heart was beating like a trip hammer. His vision had closed to a narrow tunnel that encompassed only the instrument panel. How much more of this total body-system abuse he could take before his heart quit or he had a stroke he did not know. He knew only that he must get the message through to the RFK that the Russians had the optical tracking system.

“Target One, do not interrupt… prepare to receive… transmission. Bandits are onto… ball game… all in transmission…”

“No,” Larkin shouted. °We have a tanker on the way. He can reach you in less than fifteen minutes.”

If he could have, Teleman would have laughed. In fifteen minutes he could very well be dead, from several causes, not the least of which were Soviet interceptors.

“On my mark… five seconds to transmit… five… four… three… two… one… transmit.”

Over the radio Teleman could hear the squeal of tape decks spinning madly as twenty-six hours of constant speed recording on sixty-eight channels was transmitted. Then he leaned back exhausted. His job was done. The strain of the mission and the almost constant skirmishing with Soviet interceptors in the last eight hours, with only a few minutes sleep at a time, and the overload of drugs in his system caused a stultifying lethargy that was interrupted only by his heart rate. His portion of the task was indeed finished. And so was he. It had been twenty hours since he had more than a few snatched hours of drug-induced light sleep, with the rest of the time occupied in intense mental and physical’ concentration, again prompted by drugs. The A-17 began to fall off and he brought it back with difficulty. The tail section was beginning to vibrate badly again as he lost altitude into the storm, threatening to come loose somewhere aft of the cockpit at any moment. The engine coughed once more and resumed its dull steady murmur. The emergency reserve tank levels were pushing well into the danger zone now.

“Can you hold for tanker?” Larkin asked again. The familiar voice, was high pitched over the radio, rumbling faintly with storm-induced static.

Teleman brought himself upright with difficulty. “No… fuel almost gone… not even reach you… sorry about clear message… no difference… bandits onto everything… so don’t worry…”

Teleman stopped abruptly. He was beginning to ramble and every second he continued to talk brought the Russians that much closer. “Approximately ten minutes… flight left… losing altitude… down on… coast… destroy… plane.”

“You can’t,” Larkin almost shouted. “Try and make it…” Then he realized the futility of what he had been going to say. At five hundred miles an hour, that meant almost forty minutes or more to the ship, and with only ten minutes of fuel left — idiotic, he told himself savagely.

Teleman’s voice came again, weaker and weaker as he talked: “I’ll come in low… over coast… eject… plane… destroy.”

Larkin, standing on the warmly lit bridge of the RFK, could picture the lonely man in the cockpit of his damaged aircraft. He would be going slowly through the motions of setting the timer on the self-destruct charge. As soon as he ejected, it would begin to count off three. minutes. If Teleman did not eject within five minutes of setting the timer, it would go off anyway, with enough force to blow tiny pieces of. the aircraft over a five-mile area. Larkin figured quickly on a scratch pad, glancing from the Doppler distance readout to the radar operator, shaking his head.

“Target One, here. We are getting a position fix on you and will track you down. I’ll bring the ship in and pick you up as soon as the storm subsides enough to get a helicopter or boat in.”

Even as Larkin spoke the radio operator handed him a decoded note, which he read through and then handed to Folsom to read.

“The hell… you will…” Teleman muttered. “Get… those tapes back.”

“Sorry, I’ve just been directed to pick you up. Obviously they are going to want to hear about the bandits and fast. All overflights have been suspended until they can talk to you.”

Teleman was now down to ten thousand feet. He glanced at the ground control panel to see the storm-thrashed tundra and forest sliding by below. He laughed bitterly. “If… I get… out… this… be… miracle. Good-bye.” There was a sudden silence as Teleman’s voice disappeared. Only the hollow hissing of static marked the open channeL Feeling strangely empty, Larkin strode to the radar console and, resting a hand to support himself against the violent motion of the ship on the back of the operator’s chair, watched the screen intently. Coordinates were fed directly into the radar equipment from the communications room, but the operator, listening to The flow of words and numbers, made minute final changes in frequency, pitch, and direction.

Abruptly, he swore and sat back. “Hell, that does it. We’ve hit a dead area… it must be almost two hundred miles wide.”

“Easy now,” Larkin said. He leaned over to point to the white patch of light obscuring a large part of the screen. “Narrow your scope down to encompass this patch. That’s the ECM equipment he carries. He will show up in a moment.” The operator could not resist a muffled expletive. Ten minutes passed slowly while the white blur continued to fill the radar screen. Finally the radar operator muttered, “What the devil kind of equipment does he carry for God’s sake… sir,” he added.

“Better that you do not know any more right now,” Larkin chided gently. “Just keep your eye on that…”

As ha spoke, the obscuring patch of light disappeared, and there, toward the center of: the screen, was an intense white dot, flickering in and out of scale with a steady pulsation. It appeared to be nearly two hundred miles southwest of them, which would put it somewhere close to the coast of the North Cape. At least Larkin hoped it would. It would be all too easy in this miserable storm to miss the coast and drop into the ocean. The ejection capsule was designed to stay afloat in water, but he doubted very much that it could withstand for long a storm as intense as this.

“Get a damned accurate fix on that blip,” he snapped. Then Larkin swung around to the plotting table. “Mr. Folsom, set a course for the coast and make as much speed as you can.”

Moments later the great ship came around in a short, half circle that leaned her far to port like a sloop in a high wind. Tons of water flew from under (her heel and piled up behind in a tattered rooster’s tail as the nuclear engines jumped to flank speed and she straightened out abruptly and settled into the waves. She resembled nothing as much as a motor torpedo boat, rather than a 16,500-ton battle cruiser, as she fought her way south toward the Cape, ignoring the waves piling before her bow. Low in the water as she was from the immense tonnage of ice, Folsom managed to crank twenty-three knots from the engines while a worried engineering crew watched the instruments below. Finally, Barrows could stand it no longer. He reached over and flicked on his intercom, dialed the bridge, and demanded the executive officer. When Folsom answered, he wasted no time on preliminaries.

“Mr. Folsom, if we don’t cut back, we won’t have any auxiliary condensers left either. They can’t take the load from flank speed much longer.”

“Then make do,” Folsom said grimly.

Barrows, unaware of the events on the bridge, stared at the intercom in disbelief. Then be shook his head. “In that case, Mr. Folsom,” he said acidly, “I Suggest we shift to the boost engines for one quarter power output.”

Without waiting for an answer from the bridge, he flicked off the intercom and swung around to his waiting crew and began snapping orders. Within four minutes the boost gas turbine engines were coupled to the main drive shafts and the last of the explosive starter cartridges were echoing in the narrow steel cavern of the engine room. Barrows watched as great gas turbines, now on line, whined up to peak RPM, then he began trimming them back until the ship was running steady under the combined thrust of five of the six power plants.

Teleman shut off the radio and sat staring at this last link with safety. Then he turned to the radar panel. From the activity it was showing, he had finally been spotted. At least three blips were closing fast, but not fast enough. They were still at least three hundred miles away and the eight minutes it would take them to get within cannon range would be more than enough for what he had to do now. Even if they carried visually guided air-to-air rockets they would be useless in the depths of the storm clouds. He pulled the plastic-coated check list from the clip on the rim of his seat. Twelve items were listed, a matter of a few seconds. He pressed the destruct button and closed the spring-loaded clip over it to hold it firmly down. Once the ejection sequence began, the spring clip would be released, and three minutes later one hundred pounds of strategically placed deta-sheet explosive would shred the aircraft beyond reassembly. Then he removed his soft, cloth flight helmet and slipped on the hard plastic headgear and plugged the oxygen lines into the ejection module supply. When the list was finished, Teleman hunched forward and studied the ground control map. He was still a little more than hundred miles from the North Cape and the ground unrolling below was all tundra. He did not, under any circumstances, want to go down in that. In his condition even a few minutes without shelter on the open, windswept tundra would be enough to kill him.. According to the computer display describing the North Cape area, he could expect to cross a band of highlands that would end the tundra, about ten miles from the coast. On the far slopes, leading down to the cliff-barred coastline facing the Barents Sea, an open forest of fir should furnish the shelter he would need. Teleman began to take the wounded A-17 down deeper into the storm. According to the RFK he should break out of the cloud cover, after he ejected, around two thousand feet. He did not particularly like the idea of having to bail out blind, but it was certainly preferable to hanging around until the Russians showed up. He hoped that his heading for the deck was causing the Soviet pilots as much consternation as it was him. But, then, they would have orders to get him at any cost. As long as he kept the ECM going, they would not be able to get a fix on him. If he could get down to about three thousand feet before he had to eject, then he would be low enough for the ejection capsule to be shielded against the ground.

The minutes passed slowly while the A-17 wobbled on. The, engine was cutting in and out steadily now and Teleman knew it must be draining the tanks right down to the last dregs. The North Cape was now clearly outlined by the IR panel as a white ragged line against the dark gray of the warmer water off the coast. The ground control map, with its simulation of the terrain below, was too gross to show any helpful details. The IR was all he had to go on. The ejection was going to be mighty tricky, he thought. He would have to time it so that he would land well back of the cliffs rather than in the water, yet not far enough back so that he could not walk to the beach to meet the boat. With these high winds now almost off the Beaufort scale, Larkin was quite optimistic if he expected to get a helicopter in to pick him up. It would take days before the winds abated enough for the helicopter to make it off the deck, let alone land over the strong updrafts that would be blowing off the cliffs.

He watched closely as the aircraft passed slowly over the cliffs, its speed now below 250 knots. Neither the visual nor the IR scopes told him much at all. The temperature was too low, too bone-chilling, for much warm detail to show among the granite surfaces of the coast. From the IR display there appeared to be no beach at all, but whether this was from the action of high waves he could not tell. If there was no beach he was going to have a devil of a time getting off those cliffs. They would not be able to get a boat in and he knew damned well that he could never survive three days. With these happy alternatives facing him, Teleman brought the A-17 around in a long turn that would bring him in a circle back over the cliffs. As he began his second pass over the coast he dropped the A-17 still lower until he was only fifteen hundred feet above the cliffs. Visually, he was totally blind. His instruments told him only that there was a solid surface below. Whether it was thickly forested or a mass of jumbled boulders he had no way of telling, but time was running out too fast to worry about that. Teleman wiggled his feet into the stirrups and shoved the control column into its locked position. His last act as pilot of the aircraft he had flown for the past three years was to arm the bomb that would destroy it completely.

As he-did, so, the computers took over total control of the aircraft. He saw the red, flashing DESTRUCT light come on just as the metal shields slid down between him and the instrument panel. The two halves of the flattened hemisphere joined together with a solid thunk and the blowers switched on with a high-pitched whine. Teleman settled himself securely into the acceleration couch as it adjusted to a semireclining position. He took a secure grip on the handholds and drew a deep breath, just as the bottom of the A-17 exploded away and the ejection capsule was jettisoned downward. As he fell he could see the distorted bottom of the fuselage pass over him. The capsule began to tumble end over end in the high winds, but not before he saw the lightened plane, huge and sleek in the dead light, bound up, corkscrew, and then recover as the autopilot caught hold of the control surfaces.

Teleman did not see the aircraft bore on into the Barents Sea, where five miles off the coast it erupted into a burst of white flame and plummeted into the icy seas. Pieces of wreckage were blown in every direction, much of it burning fiercely as it hissed into the waves.

The ejection capsule smashed upward, jerking Teleman cruelly against the restraining belts. Through the observation slit Teleman could see the orange and white parachute pop open wide. The ejection capsule bounced several more times, then settled down to a steady swaying. Inside, Teleman was powerless to control the descent or landing area, in fact helpless to do little more than lie there while the capsule was swung and jostled at the mercy of the winds. From fifteen hundred feet it should not have taken more than two minutes to make the descent. Instead it took eight — eight minutes of endless swinging, and Teleman had no idea in which direction.

When the capsule did land it hit with such force that it ruptured the inflated air pods beneath. The wind caught at the parachute and began to drag the capsule. The automatic chute release did not go off as it should have. As he grabbed for the manual release Teleman had a confused impression of trees and rocks roiling past the observation slit. Teleman yanked several times on the manual release before it finally gave and the capsule rolled free and came to a rest with a grinding sound that presaged the blast of wet snow and air that barreled in.

Teleman tore the straps loose and wiggled around in the seat to peer at a foot-long gash in the metal beneath his feet. The capsule had stopped against some obstruction, so that it was canted over at a steep angle. The close confines of the interior gave him little room to move about, but he managed to reach the emergency pack strapped beneath the seat and haul out the sleeping bag, cursing fluently under his breath. He got the sleeping bag jammed into the hole and at once the shrieking sound of the wind died away to a thin whistle. Teleman struggled back into the couch, breathing hard. The amp meter showed a full charge in the batteries that should be good for several hours of steady heat output, providing he ran nothing else at the same time. The interior temperature was already down to twenty-two degrees above freezing, and unless he wanted to freeze to death while he slept he had to bring it back up. Forcing his fuzzy mind to work, he did a rough calculation on how long it would take the RFK to reach the coast. As near as he could tell, he could not be farther than five miles from the cliffs, probably three hours hiking in this miserable storm. He felt the best the RFK could make in the seas that he had glimpsed briefly from the air was about twenty knots, this close to the Cape. At two-hundred-odd miles that would be at least ten to eleven hours. Teleman knew that he had to get some sleep, no matter what happened. His heart was thudding painfully again and his eyes refused to focus. Hell, he thought, he would make it six hours of sleep. They would wait for him.

Painfully, he brought his arm up and fumbled with the alarm on his wristwatch, setting it for six hours. The last thing he remembered was trying to peer out of the narrow slit to see what the terrain was like. The roar of the wind in the trees and the delicate shuddering of the capsule knocked him out as effectively as a blackjack.

CHAPTER 13

The storm crested a few hours after Larkin turned the ship to run before the heavy seas crashing down on the battered, ice-shrouded shape with winds of gale force as it ran toward the coast at twenty-three knots. Teleman’s call had come just after she had reached the rendezvous point. As soon as Teleman had bailed out, the radar operator had done his best to track the ejection capsule as it plummeted into the thick forest edging the coastal cliffs. They now had the pilot’s location pinpointed to within a mile and were running for the location as fast as they dared in the heavy seas. Larkin motioned Folsom over to his console and handed him a flimsy that had just come in.

“Another little missive from our bosses. In spite of our health, we must put forth our ultimate effort,” he said dryly.

Folsom grinned and took the flimsy. It was as Larkin had said, minus the sarcasm of course: they were to expend every effort to assure the safety of the pilot. In short, get him before the Russians did.

“They seem to be forgetting that. the Norwegians might have something to say. Allies or no, I should think they wouldn’t take too kindly to such operations off their coasts, or in their coastal waters, for that matter.”

“I agree. And I would also guess that if Washington had informed Oslo, they would have told us so.”

Folsom nodded, then glanced at the chronometer. “About four hours yet and we should be off the point where he came down.”

Already, Folsom noted, both he and Larkin had begun referring to the unknown pilot as a personal acquaintance.

Larkin got up stiffly and walked over to the forward ports. “In effect, those orders say to bring him back at any cost,” he said half aloud. “At least we appear to have the weather on our side. It is doubtful if the Soviets will send surface ships out searching after him, or aircraft either for that matter. But submarines are definitely in this year and the sub pens at Murmansk are only ten, high-speed hours away.”

Folsom joined him at the ports, both staring out into the sky that was beginning to lighten with a gray dawn that only made the seas and the cold that much more oppressive. “Well, it at least is going to give us a chance to test our own ECM gear under what you might call semicombat conditions. To this point, I hope, they do not know that we are out here. Or rather,” he amended, “they don’t know who and where we are. It’s very likely that they picked up part of the transmission and so they will know that somebody must be out here to pick it up.”

Larkin nodded agreement with his analysis. “And it will be very important that we keep it that way.”

“What about those?” Folsom indicated the silent tape console with its full reels of data from the aircraft.

“I am sending those at 0800 —direct — and through double-scrambled circuits. It may be that the whole ball game is over in terms of these missions. What his mission was this time I don’t have the faintest idea. But the Soviets know that the pilot picked up whatever he was after. So we have to get to him before they do.”

“So we go get him,” Folsom said simply.

“That’s right.”

Teleman opened his eyes. A gray, washed-out light stared at him. The sound of the wind roaring through trees was louder than ever and the rocking of the capsule was more pronounced’ than he remembered. An insistent shrilling filled the capsule and it was several moments before he could wake himself enough to realize that it was his wrist alarm. Teleman shut it off with a fretful twist and lay back on the couch. Weariness that was almost pain flowed through his body, flooding down his arms and legs with heaviness. Flashes of light obscured his vision and the control board before him swam unevenly with the residual effects of the lysergic drugs. The batteries were just about dead and the intense cold was beginning to work its way inside. In addition to the tiredness, he was stiff and aching in every joint, both from the cold.and the cramped position in which he had been lying. Finally, his. head ached abominably.

When at last he managed to sit up, the first thing he did was to remove his helmet. With the pressure of the heavy plastic and leather gone, his head felt curiously lighter, but at the same time ached even more. Teleman groaned and rubbed his temples. After five minutes more of half sleep, half wakefulness, he managed to get himself moving. He worked the acceleration couch into a sitting position with a great deal of pulling and swearing only to find that he could not get at the lockers where the survival gear was stored without getting completely out of the ejection capsule. Peering through the view port, he was not sure that he liked that idea at all.

The narrow slit showed thick forest. He must have come down through the trees, which accounted for the terrific pounding he had taken. The snow was more than a foot deep, with deeper drifts piled up around parts of trees and brush. The branches of the trees danced wildly in the wind. Snow blown up from the surface mingled with the snowfall to create an obscuring ground blizzard composed more of ice particles than snow. Nevertheless, unless he wanted to freeze to death here, there was no help for it — he had to leave the capsule to get the gear out of the lockers.

Teleman slipped his helmet back on and fought with the hatch release until it popped open. He half fell, half climbed out into the bitter cold that immediately bent him double and made him gasp for air. The intense cold, close to twenty below zero, snatched the warm air from his lungs and for several minutes he struggled to regain his breath, breathing air warmed by cupped hands.

Once outside, it was easier to pull the seat all the way forward and open the lockers. The bundles he drew out were tightly packed and opened easily. He pulled them around the side of the battered capsule and beneath the overhanging branches of a thick fir. Here, out of the wind, he opened the first’ and checked its contents, carefully piling the equipment he did not need back into the bag.

Teleman found a .22-caliber pistol, which, after a moment’s hesitation, he tucked into the waistband of his trousers. VERY pistol, field glasses, small but complete first-aid kit, rations, extra socks, gloves and boots, all went into the pile that he would take with him. He shed his lightweight flight jacket while shivering uncontrollably and pulled a set of Arctic pants and parka over his flight pants and bare skin. Over his boots went a pair of Arctic vacuum boots. Finally, he pulled the hood of the parka over his head and tied it securely beneath his chin. Teleman managed to get the compass and, after a moment’s indecision, a tube of Benzedrine tablets into the pocket of his parka. He did not want anything to do with them at the moment, but they might come in handy in an emergency. His metabolism was so low after the long flight and the steady diet of drugs that it would be disastrous to use them now. But he might need them later, he thought. If there was a later. With a pack of rations, he crawled back into the comparative shelter of the capsule. While he ate the cardboard-flavored ration he tried to figure out where he was. After choking down half the bar, he re-wrapped the half-eaten pack and shoved it into a pocket. He glanced at his watch: now six hours and twenty minutes since he had radioed the RFK. They ought to be coming onto station shortly, so it was time he got going. Teleman climbed out of the capsule again and walked around to pick up the pack he had made up from the survival kit. The rest of the gear he shoved into the capsule, then closed and latched the hatch.

Set into the middle of the door was a small, spring-closed flap. Teleman opened this and dialed the switch to three minutes. Then he turned and, in an awkward, stumbling gait, ran for the trees.

The thermite bomb exploded. Teleman, watching from a safe distance, saw the flames run in streamers up and down the capsule before fusing into a single sheet. In minutes the capsule was reduced to a shapeless, hissing mass in the steady snowfall. Teleman crouched at the base of a large pine until he was satisfied that the capsule-had been completely destroyed. His last link with the aircraft, in which he had spent what he considered the most important years of his life was severed. Now, cut off from the stabilizing effect of his semi-computer-controlled aircraft and thrown onto his own, he was confused and uncertain, and the drug residues only increased the intensity of his anxieties.

For a moment he felt as if the complexity of the situation was going to overwhelm him. The windblown snow swirling about him narrowed his world to a tiny circle. Into this world, he huddled against the base of the tree and buried his head in his arms, trying to shut out its effects.

The.roar of a jet aircraft, hidden in the clouds, but low enough to be clearly heard over the wind, shocked him into consciousness. He sprang up, head cocked to one side, listening. He could hear the fading scream of tortured air as the sound went toward the coast.

Teleman stooped down to gather up a handful of snow and rub it on his face. The. Soviets had tried three times to kill him. They had succeeded in unhorsing him, so to speak, but he was not down yet, at least in any but the descriptive sense. The pilot, with grim determination, shouldered his pack and, following his compass, set off due north to the cliffs of the North Cape.

Larkin chafing at the delay, paced the bridge, back and forth from meteorological gear to helm, making short sorties onto the deck to judge the condition of the storm. Larkin would never admit it to anyone, but he trusted his own innate weather sense more than all the meteorological gear in the world. That the gale was subsiding, he was now certain. And as swiftly as they begin, katabatic storms, by their very nature, are short-lived, but while living are possibly the most dangerous storms-of their kind. The aftermath would still be thoroughly dangerous, and the blizzard it would bring would be both a help and a hindrance. It would at least keep the Soviet surface craft snug in port since the high seas would continue to run for quite some time yet, subsiding slowly over a matter of days, even after the winds had blown themselves out. Larkin was worrying about the pounding the bow was again taking as they. plunged toward the Gape at high speed. Each time the forefoot smashed, into a wave, the shock could be felt through the entire ship.

The engineers, still at work in the bow cofferdam, were complaining more and more frequently, and finally Larkin ordered the tank evacuated. The bow plates and patches had been restored earlier. Everything that could be done had been. At 0500 the heavy seas began to abate. The temperatures rose above the freezing mark and the heavy snow turned to sleet. It poured down in buckets, ending — Larkin’s tension-induced deck watch for the time being. In two hours the deck heaters were able to clear away most of the accumulation of ice. The wind, still Mowing Force 9, in combination with the heavy seas, peeled and ripped the remainder of the ice away in great chunks, and the ship slowly became more responsive to the helm as she rode higher. The cruiser beat its way southwest, now a gray shape slipping through the snow and rain and running seas, rolling thirty degrees to either side in the mountainous waves as it sought the shorter waters of the coastal shelf and the tiny indentation in the cliffs that was as close to the downed pilot as she could get.

Teleman had been trudging north for an hour when the wind died abruptly. One minute he had been leaning directly into the forty-mile-an-hour winds, struggling against the solid hand that barred his way, and the next he was standing beneath the trees wrapped in the eerie silence that heavy winds leave when they depart. He glanced up at the swollen cloud cover, lowering over the barely seen tops of the trees. With the disappearance of the wind, the snowfall began to thicken, and in a few moments he could barely see trees less than ten feet away.

He strained forward, listening for the boom of waves against the cliffs, but heard only the peculiar whisper of snow falling through the fir trees. A few moments later Teleman resumed his slow pace. The snow beneath the trees was almost mid-calf deep, but dry and powdery, and he had little trouble plowing through it. What bothered him most was the cold. He knew the temperature must be at least thirty below zero. The emergency kit had not included a face mask and Teleman rubbed his cheeks continually with his gloved hands to maintain circulation. The thin scarf tied across his mouth had crusted with ice from his exhaled breath and was practically useless.

The exertion of walking and fighting the wind was pure torture. Muscles and nerve endings screamed at the agony of movement after so many hours of physical inactivity. Teleman knew he was weak beyond belief, and the deep cold biting into his body was taking a dangerous toll on his already overloaded metabolic system. Earlier, he had briefly considered using the radio and trying to contact the ship to give them an exact position fix. Then he could hole up in the lightweight tent in his pack until they got to him. The only trouble was that it-would give the Russians an exact fix at the same time. A couple of bombers and a saturation bombing run on the area would take care of him once and for all. The fact that the Soviets had tried to shoot him down three times had more than convinced him they were playing for keeps. If they could not have him, they did not want the Americans to get him back either. He had seen too much of their optical tracking system. Since no hint of the system had come out of the Soviet Union from Western intelligence operatives, he surmised that it was one of their most closely guarded secrets. The United States was too far ahead of the Soviets in electronics for radar and other sensor countermeasures for the Russians to compete effectively. The important computer, transistor, and circuitry technologies had been developed to a very high degree in the United States while the Russians were not concerned with the miniaturization and microminiaturization techniques that required advanced circuitry and electronic concepts.

All of this passed through Teleman’s exhausted mind in a very abstracted form. Yet he was well aware of every detail, every ramification. For two years his life had depended on his ECM gear. The optical tracking system was obviously the mainstay of Soviet hopes against an invasion force of supersonic and hypersonic aircraft. Teleman knew enough about the system to enable the American intelligence and scientific communities to analyze and develop optical countermeasures. The race would be evened up again. The Soviets wanted him badly, but would kill him if there was no other way to shut him up — all of this coincidentally with their war on the Sino-Soviet border. Teleman rubbed his ears vigorously with both gloved hands, cap tucked under one arm, and sighed. It was going to be rough on his ears, but there was no hope for it. He had to be able to hear aircraft coming enough in advance to duck under the closest tree. If he did not and was spotted, he could expect the aircraft to make *an immediate pass over the area with rockets, napalm, bombs, cannon, or whatever devilish weaponry it carried, and that would be the end. He shifted the pack to a more comfortable position and started slogging forward once more.

Even though the wind had died, the going was not that much easier. The forest thickened quickly with dense stands of frozen pine. The ground, in spite of the intense cold, had become soggy underfoot, almost on the verge of muskeg, and after nearly an hour more of walking he had covered little more than a mile. Teleman had never seen such forest this far north of the Arctic Circle. He decided that it must be due to the last-gasp effects of the Gulf Stream. Current as it finally dissipated off the North Cape. He recalled that in Alaska, in the foothills of the Brooks Range nearly two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, there were similar fir forests. Then, strangely enough, the pines thinned rapidly, almost in a matter of yards, it seemed. The forest gave way to scattered brush and glacial boulders. Even though the ground was rough, full of snow-covered and treacherous rills, Teleman found it easier walking than the thick forest. But on the verge of exhaustion as he was, it hardly made a difference. Even so, he hesitated on the edge of the last stand of trees. He could see almost a hundred yards ahead now through the driving snow. The compass still showed him to be on course, but the open ground ahead would provide no cover from searching Soviet aircraft. Against that expanse of ice-cold white, on an IR screen he would stand out like a neon sign in a desert. Nor could he hope to burrow far enough into the snow to escape detection.

Finally, after several minutes of almost incoherent self-debate, which to his surprise he found he was conducting aloud with himself, in a weary fit of exasperation, he shook his head and started forward. To hell with it, he thought. If they were going to find him, they were going to find him and that was that. If he did not make the coast shortly he was going to die anyway. Almost imperceptibly at first the ground beneath his feet began to climb. The snow, slowly turning to sleet that drummed down onto him, plastering his hair against his head, which he had forgotten to recover with his hood, obscured his vision — vision that now was almost useless as his brain refused to sort and display images properly. The half snow, half sleet was melting and beginning to trickle down his ebony face and seep beneath his collar.

Teleman stumbled in one of the rills; he had stepped onto what appeared to be a solid surface. His foot had gone through the thin crust of. ice and his leg jarred down stiffly, pitching him forward. For minutes he lay half stunned until some inner instinct lifted him up and sent him stumbling forward again. It was several minutes later that he realized he had fallen.

After that his head seemed to clear a little. Teleman felt the wetness of his scalp and raised the hood. Ahead he could see a fairly large stand of bush, which appeared similar to cottonwoods, Almost without thinking he veered, and a moment later threw himself down beneath the outspread branches and rolled in as close to the base of the bush as he could.

He had never seen such godforsaken country. The sleet and snow swept across the almost barren muskeg with an ululating keening. The gray sky pressed down thickly and the galling snow lent additional oppression to the landscape. The entire scene reminded him of Dante’s description of the tenth circle of hell, so unreal and remote from earth it seemed. The predominate color was gray: gray sky, gray snow, gray rocks, gray trees, and he was the doomed soul, doomed to wander forever in this gray hell searching for the stream of Lethe. Teleman shivered at his morbid thoughts. He could feel what little heat remained in his body quickly dissipating. He knew that he had to get up and keep moving or else he would very quickly freeze to death. But soft tendrils of sleep were curling around his eyes, forcing them closed. With a quivering effort, he forced them open again and struggled to his feet. He faced the snow and rising wind and went on. Now, as the sleet stopped and-the snow fell thicker, blotting away every trace of detail in the barren landscape, he was moving on a treadmill in the middle of white nothingness. For hours it seemed to Teleman, he struggled onward as the wind rose higher, until he was again facing a thirty-knot wind. With vicious suddenness, the wind would quarter, driving him far off course. He no longer knew whether he was moving north. He had dropped the compass sometime back and now had nothing against which to check his direction. Far down in the depths of his conscious mind, he knew that, as long as he kept walking in the direction with which the terrain rose, eventually he would come to the coastal cliffs. Whether or not he would last that long never occurred to him now. Only his survival training was driving him forward, forcing him to plod forward rather than drop in his tracks to freeze to death.

The trees were totally gone, as was the brush. Dimly he knew that he was struggling to climb a steep hill. By now Teleman was nearly asleep, only his subconscious operating his body. He neither knew nor cared where he was or what he was doing except on the dimmest conscious level. But still he went on, climbing the bill that stretched away before him, apparently forever.

Suddenly the wind died for a moment and the snow swirled away as if a curtain had been drawn. Teleman was standing on the lower lip of a hill, which in actuality was the back side of the cliffs leading to the coastal waters. Then the wind came again and the snow fell harder around him. Teleman went to his knees and began to crawl forward, blindly until he had worked his way to the top and the forward edge, which was sheltered from the wind and where the snow fell more thinly than it had before. There was no place for the wind to whirl snow from the drifts to add to the blizzard. He could see, far below, the pounding sea — the waves tall and cold green, smashing into the jagged baseline of the cliffs less than thirty feet away. The waves swept in from the sea in tremendous combers that, as they approached the cliffs, curled up, drawing a paler line at the fold and collapsing against the restraining wall of rock with a shattering roar. Teleman saw that there was no beach. If there had ever been, it had surely been washed away under the onslaught of the waves. The snow was now so heavy that he could see no more than a few hundred — feet out to sea.

After-a few minutes more, the wind slicing it from the sea with the keenness of a razor forced him back from — the cliff edge. Teleman carefully backed away and then moved along paralleling the crest until he found a depression surrounded by two large boulders, which offered some protection against the wind.

Teleman huddled into the lee of the rocks and shrugged off the pack. He sat on his heels, leaning back against the rock, and let the weariness that was exhaustion flow through him. If he could only stay awake long enough to contact the ship, he thought. If the Russians did not pick up the transmission, if the ship was there, if they could get a boat in, if they could beat the Soviets to him… if… then he would have made it. In spite of his tiredness, he grinned weakly before pulling the pack over and digging through it for the radio. Those were some pretty large ifs.

The lightweight unit was almost too much for the meager remains of his strength. Teleman pulled the radio to him and leaned it against a rock. His numbed hands refused to curl around the tip to the antenna for an endless time before he managed to pull it out.

“Target One, do you read me? Target One, do you read me?” The dials were softly illuminated and the power light was glowing red. His watch showed nearly thirty minutes past the time the ship should have come into radio range. The radio had both military and VHF-FM side bands. The VHF was for short-range lineof-sight work, not much more than fifteen miles. The military side band gave the transceiver a range of nearly two hundred miles. He used the VHF-FM band, hoping that the Soviets would not be monitoring within that range. Somewhere out there the ship should be standing less than five miles off the coast, waiting for his call.

“Target One, Target One, do you read me? Do you read me?” The small radio sputtered with a faint static composed of low rumblings overlain with a high-pitched hissing. Teleman wondered momentarily where the hissing was coming from. The transceiver employed transistors and printed circuitry, not vacuum tubes. Kneeling in the soft, powdery snow, Teleman tried again and again to raise the ship. In the nine hours since he had last had communication with the RFK innumerable things could have happened. Soviet aircraft or submarines could have found her… could have attacked… sent her to bottom… could have… hit seas too much… where hell was… damned ship… could not last… much.

Teleman had lost all feeling in his feet and hands and was forced to use his clenched fist to work the transmit switch. Over and over he repeated his monotonous call, his voice becoming weaker and weaker until he was barely whispering into the microphone. He huddled on his knees, back against a sheltering rock, drifting hypnotically with the falling snow, whispering over and over again his call signal as the snow began to cover him with a soft, warm blanket. The will to stay awake was gone. He no longer even thought about the importance of staying awake. After a while he became aware that he had stopped calling. The radio was there in front of him, half covered with snow. He wanted to move closer, check the settings, but somehow he could not. It was as if he were paralyzed.

Still kneeling, half bent over the radio, his mouth half open, he decided to rest a moment then try again. Almost without volition, his eyes closed and the warm softness of sleep began to infuse his body.

He pulled them open with a jerk, for a moment dear-headed and wide awake. The radio was spitting and crackling at him. He stared, then with an effort that, literally, almost killed him, reached out his frozen hand and pushed the receive switch. The answer drew his conscious mind back from the brink of the killing sleep and summoned his will and strength to go on a few minutes longer, drew it up from some dark recess of his body.

“Beatle, this is Target One, Beatle this is Target One, do you read me? Do you read me?” The voice on the other end of the tight radio beam could not conceal the anxiety beneath the calm exterior of the professional radio operator’s voice.

“Target One?” he managed to croak, not knowing whether his voice was loud enough to be heard.

The radio operator’s voice, almost lost in the storm of strange-sounding static, came over the tiny speaker again:

“Leave your transmitter on, we are getting a position fix.” For a long time Teleman digested the message, trying to force his leaden mind to understand. Then he pushed the transmitter switch to position identification and a second transmitter built into the radio began sending out a tight VHF beam that the ship would ride in.

A voice that Teleman recognized as belonging to Larkin broke in. “We are standing off the coast about a mile from where you appear to be. Can you fire a flare to pinpoint your position?”

Teleman stared vacantly at the radio. Larkin tried again. “Can you fire a flare to pinpoint your position?”

The radio operator pressed his earphones to his head, then turned the gain up another notch.

“Is he still there?” Larkin asked. think so, sir, the transceiver is still on position fix and—” The radio operator was interrupted by Teleman’s faint voice. “Will shoot… flare…” Teleman pulled the pack to him and fumbled through the contents. His hands were so cold they refused to work, and in an agony of frustration he dumped the canvas bag, scattering the contents. Grawling painfully forward, he got to his knees again and scrabbled through the snow for the VERY pistol. After a few moments his fingers encountered the leather holster and he drew it toward him. He sat back against the rock and, using both hands, wedged the grip between his knees. Then he pushed’ the restraining clip forward and pulled the breech open. With his teeth he pulled a cartridge out of the bandolier fastened to the bolster, transferred it to. his hands, then into the pistol. Teleman sat back, exhausted by his efforts. For a minute he sat, gathering strength. Then he hunched himself around until he was pointing in the direction of the sea and tilted the barrel of the pistol up to a steep angle. He forced two fingers through the trigger guard until the pistol went off. The flare arched up and quickly lost itself in the falling snow. Five seconds later Teleman saw the flare explode as a bright flash of light that began slowly to drift down. Even through the snow he could trace its crazy undulations as the tiny parachute was shaken and thrown from side to side by the wind. It landed in the snow not fifty feet away and Teleman stared stupidly at it as it sputtered and hissed to extinction.

As he sat watching the flare he heard Larkin’s voice calling over the far-away transmitter saying that the flare had been seen. He sodded his head in reply and, as the last of the flare died away, slipped into unconsciousness, still staring at the spot where it had landed.

CHAPTER 14

Five minutes later and Teleman would have seen the Robert F. Kennedy moving majestically through the thirty-foot waves less than a mile offshore, rolling and pitching certainly, but less than would have been expected with a conventionally designed ship. Her rounded deck, almost flush with the water, gave the appearance of a half-submerged submarine as she slipped through the waves. Her deep wing-back bridge, canted aft, seemed to flow smoothly into the rear deck and thence into the sea, with no perceptible change in structure.

Above, the leaden sky glowered down on equally leaden seas. Larkin, standing on the narrow catwalk from which hours before he had fought to turn the ship from the rampaging sea, raised his face to feel the thick, wet flakes filtering down and grimaced as they melted on his upturned face. Both he and Folsom had come out onto the catwalk for a few moments of privacy while they discussed various means to reach the downed pilot.

“I have never seen the temperature rise so quickly after an Arctic storm,” he said. “If this keeps up, we’ll have rain in another hour.”

Folsom’s face was clouded with worry as he surveyed the sky, the seas, and the dimly seen cliffs to port.

“I only wish I knew what the hell it meant,” Larkin growled. The battle cruiser was maneuvering off the cliffs at less than six knots. The waves, marching in rank down from the Great Barrier two hundred miles to the north, first were lifted by the narrow continental shelf then flung forward across three miles of shallows until they smashed into the base of the;cliffs on the

Norwegian North Cape — the first obstacle in two hundred miles. The waves pounded into the rock as if attempting to smash it from their path, as though an entire continent did not lie behind. As the waves recoiled from the shock against the stone, they curled under themselves and swarmed back out into the depths, creating a maze of undertows and crosscurrents that could easily be disastrous to a landing party. This close to land the winds had dropped into the mid-forties, but their velocity, coupled with the roll and pitch of the ship, was far too high to permit the launching of the helicopter the RFK carried. Now, less than a mile off the cliffs, this was as close as Larkin dared bring the great ship. Radar examination of the coastline indicated sheer rock sloping steeply to the sea. The point of land opposite was a fierce line of rock wall. The waves piling up in thirty-foot breakers indicated that little or no beach existed. Larkin was now debating whether to try farther down the coast or attempt the certain suicide of the helicopter. The pilot had volunteered, but Larkin, knowing that it was a measure that could only be tried as a last solution, had rejected the offer.

He sighed deeply and pulled’ his hood tighter against the icy wind. “Mr. Folsom, take her down the coast at eight knots until we find a spot to land.” Folsom nodded. “How far do you want to go?”

“Not over two miles. If we find nothing we’ll try the coast to the west.” He shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t know though, the charts show nothing but cliffs for the next ten miles in either direction. If we don’t get to that pilot soon, we may as well not even bother.”

Folsom nodded and picked up the microphone to order the course change and get the lookouts out onto the bridge deck.

The ragged coastline slid by with inexorable slowness. The battle cruiser moved along the line of breakers marking the cliffs while snow fell intermittently but heavily enough to obscure visibility much of the time. The cliffs, sixty to a hundred feet high, were steep columns of rock that seemed to rise directly from the sea, and nowhere along their length could the searching seamen find any trace of beach, however small, that would permit a landing. After fifteen minutes Larkin reluctantly ordered the RFK brought about. The great ship now quickened its pace for the run up to the west. Time was growing short. Larkin knew Teleman would be on his last reserves of strength. Unless they got to him shortly, he would, in his weakened condition, die in a matter of hours.

The landing place, the only one they found, was a tiny beach less than a hundred yards wide and so shallow that the heavy seas washed perilously close to the base of the cliffs. From what Folsom could see between the crash of each wave, the beach, such as it was, was covered with heavy gravel and sloped upward steeply to the cliffs. A shallow cut led up, to disappear around a chimney of rock, but presumably pointed to the top, ninety feet up. It would be a rugged climb, Folsom knew, and a bad one in the winds which would surely be sweeping up the cut turning it into a wind tunnel. But it was the only feasible landing place they had found so far. And unless they moved farther west, down the coast another twenty miles to where the cliffs began to peter out, it was the only one they were going to find.

“Pete, what do you think? Can a boat be gotten in?” Folsom searched the narrow beach again with his glasses before replying. “I think so, Captain. If the waves are timed right, I think it could be done. Getting back out again will be the trick.”

Larkin turned his own glasses on the beach. “If you can get in and find the pilot, you could wait it out in the boat until we can get a helicopter in.”

“Me, Captain?”

Larkin lowered the glasses and turned to Folsom, his face completely serious.

“Yep — surprise. I would like you to lead the landing party. You know how important it is that the pilot be gotten out.”

Folsom nodded silently, turning his eyes away from Larkin to stare at the distant line of cliffs. Larkin’s voice contained all the explanation needed. He was indeed aware of the importance, the vital importance. “In that case, I would like to take an armed party, just to be on the safe side.”

“Of course. Anything you need?” Larkin paused, considering his executive officer for a moment “What do you think, Pete?” he asked softly.

“I guess I can only give it a try,” Folsom said with a grin that he did not feel. The lifeboat that rested on the aft deck was certainly odd in contrast to the sleekness of the RFK. It was a flattened sphere twelve feet in diameter, its bottom resting on a flaring, truncated cone skirt. Made of fiberglass, it was painted international orange. Folsom had always had cause to shake his head every time he saw the lifeboat above decks; strangelooking as it was, he knew it was the safest possible design that had yet evolved. There were no open-areas to fill with water in heavy seas. You entered the boat through one of three hatches near the top and let yourself down into a roomy interior lined with bunks. In the center was a closed-off electrical heating unit, powered either with a wind-driven generator or a fuel cell. The thing was literally unsinkable. The flaring skirt around the base provided stability in seas running to forty-foot waves or better. Folsom gathered, his two-man party around him to receive their last instructions from Larkin, who shook hands briefly with each man, and then they climbed aboard and sealed the hatches. Larkin stood back as the winches eased the boat off the deck and over the side. As it slid slowly down into the waves, through the upper rim of ports, Folsom and his crew could see the hull of the RFK towering over them. The waves caught at the lifeboat before Folsom got the engine started and slammed them into the side of the battle cruiser with bruising force.

Folsom picked himself up from the deck and started the engine, cursing all the while. Once the engine caught and the boat got underway, he was able to concentrate on keeping the spherical lifeboat, amazingly stable in heavy seas, pointed in the direction of the cliffs that appeared every now and then through the waves. As they neared the breakers, Folsom idled the engines and pressed his face against the tempered glass of the port. He wished mightily that he could open one of the top hatches to steer, but he knew that one heavy wave pushing them under momentarily would swamp the lifeboat. Except for quick glimpses he caught whenever the lifeboat rode up a wave far enough for him to see over the mountainous seas piling up ahead, he was surrounded by ever-moving walls of water.

Folsom felt the boat ride up again, and ahead, through the glass, was the line of cliffs, startlingly close. This was it, he thought, and gunned the engines. The boat paused at the crest of the breaker as the propellers fought to exercise their command over the tumbling masses of water. But it was not enough. As the boat began to slide down the forward edge of the wave, a mean crosscurrent caught the skirt and spun it around. The men inside felt the boat slam hard against the shingle. Folsom glanced back in time to see the following wave towering over them before the boat was engulfed by foaming white water that lifted and tossed it high into the air. The three-ton boat, flung as if it were a child’s toy’, smashed down hard on the rocks. A second and a third wave kicked, then rolled the lifeboat farther up onto the beach.

It was several minutes before Folsom could extricate himself from the mass of equipment on the deck where he had been thrown. He slumped down onto one of the padded seats lining the interior and rubbed his temples with both hands, then stirred one of the prone figures at his feet.

“Come on, up, up! Do you want to lie there all day?” The answer was somewhat muffled, but very much in the affirmative. Shortly they were all three moving around with nothing more than bruises to show for the wild ride. Folsom was exceedingly grateful that the RFK carried the new Life Sphere lifeboats. The same ride in the old, open whaler type would certainly have drowned them all. He crawled out of the top hatch and slid down to the beach. The boat was canted over at a drunken angle and the flaring skirt around the base had been twisted and torn loose from its welds by the wild careen across the beach. Several deep gashes had been ripped in the outer fiberglass hull, but none penetrated the interior hull. What caused the sinking feeling in the pit of Folsom’s stomach was the sight of the snapped and bent propeller shafts and the hopelessly mangled rudders.

Folsom examined the damage while the other two clambered out and joined him on the beach. Both grunted at the damage. “I would say that boat is just about finished.” Folsom agreed. “But there’s no help for that. Let’s get the equipment unloaded and get going. We’ll have to wait until later to worry about the boat.” While the others went to work, Folsom made a report by radio to Larkin. He did not minimize the importance of the loss of the lifeboat but neither did he dwell on it. Larkin promised to get a second lifeboat in as soon as they were able to return to the beach with the pilot. His report finished, the, three men began moving out along the coast to the east. A fast but difficult climb brought them to the top of the cliffs. They wasted no time but immediately struck out east. All they had to go on to find the downed pilot was a radio fix that could be off by as much as a quarter of a mile in any direction.

In the long hours daring which the U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy maneuvered off the Norwegian North Cape; the storm passed on to the northeast where it would gradually lose force as it began to curl north toward the polar icecap once more. As the storm center moved deeper into the Barents Sea toward Novaya Zemlya, the high winds in the vicinity of the Cape began to lose strength, until, an hour after Folsom and his party had landed, they were blowing at a steady forty knots. As the winds died, however, the snow fell thicker and thicker and the temperature dropped rapidly, bringing what Larkin had most feared — intense cold. The waves, still roused by the passage of the fierce winds across two hundred miles of ocean from the southern edge of the Arctic ice pack, continued to run high, beating themselves to death in a final rush of breakers and white water, smashing away at the same cliffs that had defied them for millions of years. Folsom, marching along the top of the cliffs, could see the tremendous breakers rushing onto the thread of beach through the swirling snow. The cold had already deepened to twenty below zero and he had ordered the others to don face masks for protection from frostbite. In spite of their Navy-issue Arctic gear, all three were numb to the bone. Fortunately, Folsom thought to himself, the cliffs above the narrow beach were fairly smooth. There were no deep crevices or caves into which the pilot could have crawled that would take them hours to search out.

The landing party stumbled across Teleman almost by accident thirty minutes later. Chief Petty Officer Beauregard McPherson found him still half crouched in a kneeling position facing the frozen radio. Folsom went to his knees beside the still figure, — ripping off one of his gloves to check for pulse. He found one, slow and fluttery, but a pulse. Another half hour, or even less, would have done it, he knew. Folsom stood up and looked around. Half a mile away he could make out the thin first line of trees through which Teleman had struggled to reach the cliffs. With the pilot half carried, half dragged between them they trotted toward the dubious shelter of the trees. They pushed their way deep into the snow-laden firs until the wind was hardly more than a fitful breeze eddying the falling snow into swirls of white. Even above the soft, steady roar of the, wind through the pine tops, they could hear the crash of the breakers against the cliffs. In less than five minutes they had the nylon mountain tent rigged and the heater going. Folsom quickly stripped the sodden flying clothes from Teleman and got him zipped into a chemically heated sleeping bag. Over this, be pulled still another sleeping bag. As the tent warmed quickly from the primus stove, Folsom anxiously watched the face of the unconscious pilot. The features had the pinched, waxy look that comes from the first stages of frostbite — or from death by freezing. Even though he had been sheltered by the rocks from the wind and if Larkin had been correct in his interpretation of the pilot’s physical condition after a six-day mission, then the man was close to exhaustion. Hiking through these trees would only have worsened that condition, badly. Larkin had cautioned him about using any drugs on the pilot. There was no way for — them to know how his system would react to further drugs if he was deep into exhaustion. Folsom was helpless, then. There was nothing he could do except keep him warm and wait until he regained consciousness, and then get as much solid food into him as the pilot could take. His own body would. have to do all the work. Folsom was amazed that the human body could take such abuse and still manage to function.

After the self-supported tent was securely rigged and their gear squared away, Folsom dug the radio out of his pack and extended the aerial. When he threw the transmit switch, he heard a weird rumble of static and hissing that overpowered any transmissions for a moment. Then, suddenly it cleared.

Larkin was on the other end moments later and Folsom made his report, forgetting quickly about the unusual static.

He described the desperate state that Teleman was in and his fears that he might not regain consciousness even in the warmth of the tent. “Besides,” he finished, “right now, I think that if we tried to move our man the trek back to the beach would, probably kill him. The temperature is dropping very fast up here.”

Larkin’s voice contained undertones of worry. “I agree that you ought to stay put until you see how he is. I should have known that the false rise in temperature would lead to an even deeper drop. Katabatic storms often end this way. You can probably expect the temperature to drop at, least another twenty degrees in the next twenty-four hours.”

“Ye gods, another twenty degrees!” Folsom exclaimed.

“That’s right… but at least it will bring an end to the winds.”

“Yeah, thanks for small favors,” Folsom murmured.

“I’m afraid we are going to have to stand farther out to sea until these waves let up.”

“I was afraid that the seas were going to force you out farther,” Folsom replied: For a moment there was silence as the two men tried to think of what to say next. Larkin continued to stare through the forward ports at the heavy snow thrashing past as the battle cruiser moved through the waves at eight knots. Folsom, hunching over the radio, listened to the wind’s keening beyond the tent walls and felt the loneliness of being cut off from help in the face of the enemy. The other two caught the mood and silence’ enveloped the tent until Folsom said, “Well, it looks like we are stuck here awhile. I’ll set two-hour radio watches for routine checks.”

“Fine. We’ll keep you informed. Out.”

Several minutes later the tent flaps parted and Folsom crawled out and stood up. The wind moaned through the treetops with force enough to whip the powdery snow into twirling gusts. Vaguely he had in mind a short hike for a good look at the area, but the snow, falling heavily, and the wind, backing and filling through the trees, had created a ground blizzard. He changed his mind. It would be too easy to become confused and lost in the closely pressing trees. Instead, he rounded the tent and headed for the line of cliffs half a mile distant.

The snow overlay provided treacherous footing among the frozen grass hummocks of the tundra. The powdery snow had not settled and frozen enough to provide firm footing as yet. He wondered just how far the muskeg extended. If for some reason they had to run for it, it would be bad enough with three healthy, rested men, but damned near impossible with the exhausted pilot. Less than a hundred feet from the tent he stopped and decided not to go any farther. The wind had freshened slightly and in a few minutes time the snowfall had almost. doubled. He had seen this happen before and knew that for the neat few hours they were in for a heavy blizzard. As he turned back, retracing his dimly seen footsteps quickly before they were covered by the falling and drifting snow, he thought of the heavy blizzard with gratitude. The Russians, should a capture party be landed, would not be able to move either. Once back in the tent, he organized the watches, checked on the sleeping Teleman, then settled into his own sleeping bag and was asleep in seconds.

The snow continued to fall heavily during the long night. Folsom, had taken the second radio watch but the RFK reported nothing new. The ship’s detector systems had so far uncovered no trace of movement in the vicinity of the North Gape: land, sea, or air. They had been, however, monitoring radio traffic and Larkin gave him an abstracted report. The Russians were seriously considering attempting the rescue or capture, depending on how you looked at it, of the downed pilot. Other than that, most of the transmissions had been in a new code which the ship’s computers had as yet been unable to break. The transmissions had been recorded and relayed to Virginia, but so far they had had no word on what they contained. Folsom signed off with an uneasy feeling that something big was brewing. He only hoped that they would have some warning before it happened. The close-woven mesh of the nylon tent fabric was covered with snow. Even without the snow, the mesh did not allow much in the way of air circulation. The outside temperature had dropped to 35°F as the wind had all but disappeared, but inside the tent it had become stifling. When they had opened a tent flap, the warm air had immediately rushed out into the night, leaving the inside of the tent as cold as the outside. The three men had tried to keep the tent free of snow, but the blizzard was so heavy that it was almost useless to climb into parkas and boots and work for twenty minutes to brush away the snow. Folsom, lying in his sleeping bag after his second watch, was restless and wide awake. He groaned and rolled over, trying to ignore the closeness of the air, thinking longingly for the very first time of the mind-deadening desk job he had left in the Navy Department to serve aboard the RFK.

CHAPTER 15

Larkin, too, was lying awake in his bunk, but for different reasons. His mind was churning with the possibilities for action. Larkin was trying to examine the situation from the standpoint of the Soviet war room, which must, from somewhere, be directing the ” rescue” operations. He had, as had many other military commanders before him, found it of great value to put himself in the enemy commander’s place and as dispassionately as possible work out the tactic needed to destroy the enemy. This particular situation was a little bit different from others he had encountered in the past. This time he was sure that the enemy commander did not know the RFK existed. They might suspect that somehow, some American forces had gotten to the downed pilot, but they would not know the nature of these forces — which was a damned good thing, he thought grimly. Three men, armed with rifles, cut off from further support in the middle of the North Cape, was, not much of an’ opposing force to worry about.

They had made radar contacts with several, presumably Russian, aircraft throughout most of the afternoon and evening. All seemed to be orbiting the North Cape area where the pilot had gone down. None had ventured out to sea, a sign that Larkin interpreted as meaning the ship was undetected. Larkin was not worried about the ship. She was more than a match for anything the Soviets could throw in against her. But the Soviets would move twice as fast if they knew the RFK was nearby.

As long as the blizzard lasted, he was safe from visual detection. His own electromagnetic counterdetection gear would protect him from electronic snooping; so Larkin held the position of the reserve queen on the chessboard, the deciding factor of the game.

The buzzer on the intercom over his bunk interrupted his musings. He reached a hand and flipped the switch. “Larkin here.”

“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” came the unruffled voice, “but sonar shows a blip, unidentified and approaching subsurface from the northeast.”

“Be right up,” Larkin snapped and sat up, rubbing his face with his hands. He had not had any decent sleep for more than twenty-four hours now and it was beginning to tell on him. He stumbled across to the lavatory and washed his face with hot water and soap, then rinsed with cold. With the cold water still running, he held his wrists under the stream until they were all but numb, then toweled his face and arms vigorously. This helped to refresh him for the moment. Wishing that he had time for a shower, he pulled on trousers and shirt, knotted a tie quickly, tugged on his turtleneck sweater, and, picking up his cap, left for the bridge.

Three minutes later he was peering at the heavy seas through the ports, bracing himself against the railing. “All right, kill the lights.” The tortured scene of thrashing white water and intense snow disappeared abruptly as the powerful searchlights winked out. Larkin turned from the screen and made his way to his console, where he strapped himself in. The marine guard, doubling as steward, brought him coffee.

“Let’s have a status report,” he said into the microphone. “First, the radar.”

“We have identified the sub as Russian, possibly Anatov class, presumably nuclear powered. She is a hunter-killer-type from her hull and, if Anatov class, used for longrange coastal patrolling. Her present position is 32.76 degrees by 74.34 degrees, moving at fourteen knots, east by northeast. We are projecting a landing point now at eighteen miles southeast of where Mr. Folsom landed. ETA at four hours and fifty-six minutes at present course and speed.”

“Very well, put it on the board.”

Above the consoles against the after bulkhead a large screen lit up with a holographic map projection of the North Cape and its interlocking chain of islands and fjords, modified by sonar and radar information. The shallow coast and underwater shelf were clearly outlined for three miles out to sea. As Larkin watched, a star-shaped locator blazed up over the landing-party camp and a smaller pointer marked the location of the wrecked lifeboat.

Farther east Larkin could see the long red trail culminating in a boat-shaped target point that was the Russian submarine heading into Porsangerfjord. A yellow dotted line extended ahead and was now resting on a shallow beach where the cliffs began to straggle down into a steep shelf. Twelve miles west and five south was the Norwegian town of Kjelvik, scarcely more than a fishing village of some two hundred inhabitants and a small Norwegian Coast Guard Base. The fjord waters were frozen solid just north of the town and the Russians would have little trouble crossing. Larkin shifted his gaze to the western coast showing on the map and found the extensive naval air base north of Rolfsö, first constructed by the Nazis in World War II as their northernmost air base for use against the Allied convoys making the dangerous run to Murmansk. From this same base the German Condor bombers had been able to bring the convoys under attack almost from the time they left Iceland. The Norwegians had taken the base over following the war and it now was their main defense post against a northern attack by the Russians. Even though tensions had eased considerably in recent years the base was still manned and in ready condition as a NATO installation. He knew that the twelve-inch radar-controlled guns first installed by the Nazis could cover anything within a radius of seventeen miles. They were backed up by intermediate-range surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles. Larkin knew that he had better not involve the Norwegians unless absolutely necessary. His orders were strict: to pick up the pilot at any cost; avoid alerting the Norwegians; avoid a pitched battle or any contact at all with the Soviets.

Larkin sighed heavily and sat back in the chair. The heavy red line marking the path of the submarine had moved another half inch and he sighed again. “Another complication.”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Nothing, just talking to myself…. What do you make of it, Mister?” The radar man hesitated only a moment. “From the radar, she’s running half submerged with only her conning tower out. She’s hugging the coast and heading for a point fifteen miles from where

Mr. Folsom landed. There is only one place she could have come from, sir — the sub pens at Murmansk.”

“Why not from out at sea, riding out the storm below the surface?”

“Wouldn’t make sense, sir. In order to be safe from the coastal ridges and rocks outside of the Murmansk channel, she would have had to stand at least forty miles off the coast. A surface ship would be safe enough anywhere along the Russian coast, but a submarine would need at least sixty feet over her sail in these seas and that means at least a hundred and twenty feet of water-for maneuvering room. The coast around Murmansk, in fact in any of these fjord areas, does not run much over eighty feet. So she had to come from the sub pens. It would take her at least eight hours at her present cruising speed of — fourteen knots to get here.”

“That Makes a good bit of sense,” Larkin agreed. “I think you may be right. If so, then we should not have to worry about any other Russian subs sneaking up on us from the northern waters for a while. If they are going to come, they will come in from Murmansk.” Larkin sat back a moment and stared at the map. The rugged coast of the North Cape stretched away to the southeast before it turned sharply south into both Porsangerfjord and Laksefjord, wide deep chasms that would furnish protection for the submarine when it surfaced. It would also put them eighteen miles down the coast from where Folsom had landed. The submarine’s apparent track indicated they were heading for the northern end of Porsangerfjord, where they would have the additional protection of the point. The map showed the ground in this area of the North Cape rising quickly from sea level to eight hundred feet, but gradually enough so that there would be a decent beach, partially sheltered from both the sea and the winds, with more than enough protection to land a small boat.

Larkin made his decision. “Mr. Bridges, lay a course for a point where we can keep an eye on both the submarine when she goes under the lee and Mr. Folsom’s party. Then have the crew stand to general quarters.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Bridges replied. He motioned to the communications officer and strode quickly to the plotting table. As he went over the lighted board, the GQ klaxon began its strident rasping throughout the ship. Almost immediately the control board began to wink from red to green as each station reported in.

The U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy came around on a course that would bring them to bear directly on the submarine and settled into the waves. Larkin himself took the conn and rapidly closed the gap between the two vessels. So far it appeared that the submarine had not seen the RFK, and Larkin doubted that, with her more limited equipment, they would be able to break through the ECM shield around the battle cruiser. They would be having troubles enough to spare much time for surveillance in any event. Larkin stood in as close as he dared until only fifty miles separated the two ships. His own detection equipment was excellent and there was no sense pushing his luck. For twenty minutes they watched the submarine as it changed course to run in under the lee of the Porsangerfjord, much as Larkin had expected. He was sure from the way the submarine was being handled that the Russian commander knew these waters well. Fjords are tricky places to take a submarine into. The complex currents between the narrow walls and the convolutions of the rock sides and bottom create a maze of conflicting sonar reports so that the underwater gear becomes almost useless for anything other than short-range work. The Russian commander was clearly over-running his sonar and Larkin wondered how many times the Russian had done this before. It made sense when he thought about it. This section of the Cape was practically deserted, with the exception of a few fishing villages. The only military installation on this end of the Cape was the coast guard base, placed there to protect the fishing fleet, not to conduct coastal surveillance. Other than that, there was only the Norwegian-manned NATO base on the far side of the Cape.

To neutralize the NATO base if war should occur, a head-on attack would be suicidal. But a sufficiently large force in regiment strength, complete with vehicles, could be landed in Porsangerfjord and strike overland to take the base from the rear. With the NATO base in their hands the Soviet sub fleet would have free access to the Barents and Norwegian seas, and from there could move into the North Atlantic with little or no opposition.

Approximately twenty minutes went by before the radar operator called Larkin’s attention to the radar scope again and interpreted the puzzle of dots in the growing pattern on the screen.

It looks like they are surfacing, sir. More of the sail is out — of the water and the decks are coming into view.” A few moments later he said, “Now she’s heaving to… about two miles off the beach, I make it, sir.”

“Probably doesn’t dare go in any closer. In those seas I don’t know as I blame him,” Larkin commented.

“Even inside the fjord, she must be rolling through forty degrees. I pity her crew,” Bridges murmured over Larkin’s shoulder as he _watched the screen. Larkin nodded. “They will have a devil of a time getting a boat off the deck and manned. That’s one operation I would like to see. It would do you good as well, Mr. Bridges. Those new-fangled life spheres don’t call for much of a knack in launching. Swing her over the side and cut her loose. Couldn’t sink one if you tried.”

Bridges made a skeptical noise and Larkin grinned.

“According to the charts, there is a small cove directly in from where the sub is lying,” Bridges pointed out. “But there sure isn’t any shelter there. It faces north, into the winds.”

“Even so, they might get the boat in… but, I sure wouldn’t want to be in it.” On the screen a small shape detached itself from the bulk of the submarine and headed toward the shore. As soon as the boat was away the sub began to submerge. have engine noises, very faintly, sir,” said the sonar operator. “At fifty miles?” Larkin asked incredulously.

“Yes, sir. It might be due to the temperature of the water. I’ve had it happen before, although never this far away from the source.”

“I’ll be damned. What do they seem to *be doing now?” The sonar operator pressed the phones tightly to his head. “As… as near as I can tell… they have just submerged, probably to periscope depth to watch the lifeboat. They don’t seem to be going anywhere.”

“Keep a sharp sonar watch. All engines to stop. Switch to silent running.” Larkin shifted restlessly in his high seat. “If we can hear them, they just may be able to pick us up as well.” The quiet murmuring died throughout the ship as the mechanical gear shut down.

“They might have picked us up already over the noise of their own engines, even though it isn’t likely,” Bridges said as he. moved to. Folsom’s console and strapped himself in, His hands played quickly over the keys and the various panels came alive. Then he ran a quick status check of the ship and its gear before changing over to monitoring the radar and sonar consoles. Deep in the hull, the main sonar and radar rooms, located at opposite ends of the ship for safety, were also keeping a sharp watch, under the direction of the chief petty officer. Certain isolated points might have escaped the human operators, but nothing that appeared to be out of bounds passed the attention of the giant process computer that overmonitored the entire system.

“Just at periscope depth, sir. They don’t seem to be aware of us. I would guess that the changes in the water layers carrying their engine noise is just a fluke. I doubt if it works both ways. And we may lose it anytime,” he pointed out. Larkin nodded. “That may be so, but there is no harm in being careful. I would guess that they haven’t picked us up either. We at least are in international waters. Even so, if they had picked us up they would be getting ready for a fight. In fact, their missiles would probably already be.on the way.”

It took the Russian lifeboat over an hour to negotiate the two miles of angry sea to the cove, and once under the lee of the cliffs it disappeared from their radar, lost in the mass of signal noise reflecting from the rock. From the radar it was impossible.to tell whether the boat had made it in, and the propeller noises from the tiny engine were completely lost over the fifty-mile distance in spite of the reflecting layers of water that had temporarily expanded the senses of the ship.

Larkin touched the switch to the main radio room. “Put your sweep on the speaker system, please.”

A moment later the speakers on the bridge burst into life. Larkin grimaced at a noise that sounded like someone using a cat’s tail to play a musical saw. The radio operator was running up and down the bandwidth with the tuner. A small computer unit monitored and controlled the process, hunting until it picked up a definite signal. For three minutes the noise continued until the wearing howl was broken by a loud whistle, then a Russian voice transmitting a series of call letters broke over. This was followed by another voice spewing a choppy flow of Russian. The transmission was over quickly, to be replaced by the normal static of an unused frequency.

Almost at the same time, the radio operator was back on the speaker. “We have it all taped, sir.”

“Good, get it off immediately with a top priority rating. I want an answer in five minutes, sooner if possible.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Larkin got up and walked over to the plotting table, swaying with the motion of the ship. He stared down at the map, then picked up the pair of dividers from their holder and began to measure off the distances between Folsom and the Russians. He walked the dividers carefully over the distance and found that he did not like the story they had to tell. Less than twenty-two miles separated the two groups — twenty-two miles that the Russians would not waste any time at all in covering. The only thing in Folsom’s favor so far was the fact that the Russians did not know exactly where the ship was. But, even so, in spite of the storm and difficult terrain, the Russians would find them within twentyfour hours. He did not know exactly how many troops had been landed, but he was ready to lay odds that they would split up, one party marching along the top of the cliffs where they could search the coastline below while the other moved inland a mile or so. The beach party could not fail to spot the wrecked lifeboat. Once they had that, it would be only a matter of time until they found the camp.

Larkin turned back to his console and dialed the weather channel, although he already knew what it would say. But then one could always hope. So — it was no surprise when he found that both. the Greenland and Iceland weather stations were still predicting: another thirty-six to forty-eight hours of heavy seas and high winds along the Norwegian coast. They expected the winds to begin dropping in about twenty-four hours, but at sea they would remain strong enough to preclude launching the helicopter.

“Damn, damn,” he muttered to himself. Folsom was really in for it now. He returned to the plotting table and bent over the map and with the dividers measured out the distance to the Norwegian Coast Guard Station and then to the NATO base. The distance to the coast guard station was shorter by eight miles, but the route would take them directly into the arms of the Soviets. The only refuge, then, was the Norwegian-manned NATO base, twenty-six miles from where Folsom had pitched the camp — that or the interior of the Cape area, and Larkin doubted whether the pilot would survive for long there.

“Radio room to bridge, we have the translation.”

“Go ahead,” Larkin ordered.

“‘Shore party calling ST-101, shore party calling ST-101.’ This was repeated six times, sir. ‘Then, we have landed without injuries. Lifeboat is badly damaged. Will begin search immediately. Radio contact will be re-established hourly on this frequency.’ End of message. There was no reply from the ship, sir. They used a standard band, shortrange radio at 120 kc.”

“Very good. Establish a continuous monitoring watch as of now. Feed everything you pick up to Virginia, top priority, after running it through the computers for translation. I want Virginia’s literal translation as a check.”

“Aye, sir.”

Larkin turned to Bridges, still seated at Folsom’s console. “Well, Mr. Bridges, we are off. Gontact Mr. Folsom and tell him what has happened. Tell him I will call him again at”—he looked at his watch—“0600 with instructions… ah, amend that to suggestions. In the meantime, they are to get all the sleep they can. Also, they are not to call us except in an emergency. No sense in letting their position be pinpointed.”

“Aye, sir.” Bridges turned to the radio operator as Larkin went below for some badly needed rest.

Teleman came slowly awake to the sound of a hushed voice. For several minutes, still drugged with exhaustion, he lay in the sleeping bag, scarcely aware that he was awake. A darkness, half dispersed by a light source that he could not see, drew a curving line directly above his eyes. For a minute he thought he was back in the aircraft, looking down on the earth from two hundred thousand feet, seeing the bisecting dawn line. The lighted portion of whatever it was above/below him, he could not tell which, was a darkish blue color, the same as the earth from altitude at dawn. The other half was dead black and the bisecting line itself was fuzzy, shading through a spectrum of bluish gray from light to dark.

The voice puzzled him, but as yet he was not able to turn his head, for some perverse reason. Gradually he became aware that he was stripped to the skin and covered with some kind of heavy, heated material. Then he remembered the intense cold, the cold and the wind.

He mustered the will to turn his head. For a moment the scene refused to focus and vertigo gripped him, spinning him end over end. Gradually the picture before him steadied and he slowly began to make out details. The first was the fabric line of a sleeping bag. Beyond, the hunched backs of two other men bending over something hidden by their bodies. Various pieces of gear were stacked around the walls of the tent. The lantern casting the dim light was suspended from the center of the tent, a heavy flashlight, giving off a steady light.

Both men were unaware that he was watching and wondering who they were and where he was. Then in a rush the memories came back as that part of his brain cleared with an almost physical jolt. He remembered the aircraft, the long flight across Asia, the desperate running from the Russian interceptors, the ejection over the North Cape. The last thing he remembered was a. hissing flare landing nearby. As the fuzziness evaporated, Teleman began to realize that he had been picked up by somebody. But Russians, Americans, or Norwegians? He turned his head again to see the man whose back was nearest him nod two or three times, then reach out to part the tent flaps. Immediately a gust of wind danced in, bringing whirling snow with it.

“As far as we know right now, they sent only one boatload, maybe twenty men in the landing party.” The voice that came over the radio was almost lost in the sound of the wind battering the tent.

“Any idea how long it will take them to get here?” Teleman felt a flood of relief pour through him. At least they spoke English. They must have come from the rendezvous ship, he thought.

The tiny radio voice came again. “The MTI radar shows the coastal cliffs in that area as quite low and sloping back into what the map indicates as a level plain. I don’t see them waiting until the storm lets up. They are east of you by twenty-two miles.”

“Well, assuming that the terrain isn’t much different from what we’ve seen here, rd say it would take them nearly twenty-four hours to get this far. I’d also guess that they don’t know exactly where the pilot went down, or else they might have tried a landing farther up the coast.”

“That may be. But of course if they had wanted to avoid detection as much as possible they would. have landed in Parsangerfjord. It’s the only sheltered spot along the entire coast all the way to the naval base.”

“Well, unless the weather changes drastically, I’ll go along with your estimate of twenty-four hours. They have an awful lot of searching along the way to do in the meantime.”

“Yeah. I just hope we are reading the situation right and that they somehow did not track our boy by radar or somesuch. I’d look mighty foolish if they came marching in several hours from now, not even winded.”

He glanced around and saw Teleman staring at him. Folsom’s eyes widened in surprise and he waved a hand in greeting. Teleman continued to stare at him, too tired and fuzzy to do more. Folsom finished the report quickly and signed off. Then he crawled back to the sleeping bag in which Teleman lay.

“How do you feel?” he asked as he reached into the sleeping bag for Teleman’s arm to take his pulse. In contrast to the rapid, fluttery 166 beats per minute that he had exhibited several hours ago, his pulse had now slowed to 93, above normal, but probably due to the drug residues remaining in his system.

“Beat,” Teleman said weakly.

“Other than that?”

“Nothing. I think I could… sleep for a week.”

Folsom grinned at him. “Yeah, I bet you could.” He looked around at the sailor still folding up the radio and called him over.

“I want you to meet one of your helpmates. This character has an itchy trigger finger, or at least thinks he does,” Folsom amended, grinning. “He’s our chief gunnery officer — an empty title as we have no guns except for a one-inch popper for salutes. We stole him from the SEALS just for jobs like this. His name, and this you won’t believe, is Beauregard Hubert McPherson, which probably accounts for the majority of his, fierceness,” Folsom added.

McPherson grinned sheepishly and said, “Hello,” his big, warm hand all but engulfing Teleman’s.

Teleman looked up into the large, round face hanging over him like a second moon and smiled feebly, but did not find the strength to reply. Folsom saw that he was still exhausted and he and McPherson backed off.

“Okay, get some more sleep. We’ll make the rest of the introductions later.” Teleman nodded once and then was sound asleep. The two sailors looked down at the sleeping form and both shook their heads at the same time. “I’ll bet that guy has really been though hell,” McPherson murmured. Folsom was silent a moment, then: “Yeah, and I bet he’ll go through more before we are out of this.”

CHAPTER 16

Beauregard Hubert McPherson, Chief Petty Officer, United States Navy, and former member of the SEALS, the naval version of the U. S. Army Special Forces, shifted the AR-18 carbine to his left hand, and with his right eased himself down into the slippery defile leading to the beach. Half sliding, half climbing, he went down through the thick snow from rock to rock until he reached the beach. Once there, he did not hesitate, but turned east and began loping down the beach in an easy, ground-covering jog. The snow, whipped by the wind into swirling curtains, was heavier along the water’s edge than it had been above the cliffs, which was just what he wanted. Not only would the thick snow shield him from anyone approaching, but it would also serve to cover his tracks completely, something he could not depend on the drifting snow to do above the cliffs. He pushed on steadily for two hours, often having to climb over rock piles washed into weird positions by eons of waves and Arctic storms. Once he had to re-climb the cliffs when the beach, often little more than a narrow thread, ran out. As he trotted he kept a sharp lookout toward the sea, even though the snow was so heavy that visibility was zero after fifty feet at best. But McPherson was a careful man. He had fought with the SEALS in Vietnam five years before, raiding into the delta in small parties to perform kidnapings and assassinations of leading Viet Cong terrorists. They brought the same type of terror to the Viet Cong that the V.C. had used so successfully against the South Vietnamese. After Vietnam had come assignments in Thailand and Cambodia, and, finally, the famous raid into China to rescue the crew of a United States Intelligence ship captured on the high seas.

McPherson, in short, was an expert on survival under the worst possible conditions and had proven it time and time again. A SEAL had been assigned to the U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy at the request of the Secretary of the Navy, who had been far-sighted enough to realize that a SEAL’s talents might be needed at some future date. The pilots of the A-17 recon aircraft were the most valuable commodity in the world. Standing orders to the RFK, the Remote. Mission Control Point as she was known by the twenty or so men privy to her actual missions, were to get back the pilot of a downed aircraft at all costs, although McPherson was not one of those few who knew the exact nature of the missions that Teleman performed.

But even so, he continued down the beach at an easy run, heading for a point of land some eight miles west of Varangerfjord, which he and Folsom had estimated the Russians would reach by 1100. It was 1030 now, and he still had approximately two miles to go.

The wind was blowing in fiercely from the sea, driving the snow in ragged gusts, when McPherson found the point. High up on the cliffs and folded in among a series of chimneys and crags, McPherson found a cleft that was hidden from sight above and below, yet would afford him a clear view up and down the beach or at least it would have if the snow had not been so heavy. As it was, his effective seeing distance was almost nil at times.

But it was all McPherson needed. Directly below, the beach described a narrow, inward-turning arc. A small barrier of rocks, piled up by countless generations of waves, drew a dam from the base of the cliffs to the water. To negotiate the dam, a man would either have to climb up and over, which would leave him fully exposed for several minutes while he did so, or else work part way up the cliffs over a series of icy ledges. His hiding place afforded a view along the rim. The rock peaked at this point so that McPherson had a clear field of fire downhill, enabling him to control the terrain within rifleshot inland. As he sat in his well-shielded cubbyhole, he reviewed Folsom’s orders. The object of this little jaunt was to delay the advancing Russians as much as possible. By attacking them here, nearly eleven miles from the camp, then retreating as fast as possible, Folsom hoped to fool the Russians into thinking that they faced a sizable party. If it worked, the Russians already on the beach would call for reinforcements and, if everything went as it should, wait until they were landed.

Even if the Russians did not wait for the reinforcements, McPherson could make the eleven miles directly back to the camp in under half the time it would take the Russians, as they would be traveling more slowly, fearful of ambush. Teleman needed all the time for sleep that they could gain for him. For the run: or the Norwegian base he was going to require every bit of strength he had. So, in fact, were they all After nearly an hour of waiting, a flicker of movement on the beach caught McPherson’s eye. The wind, blowing laconically for the past few minutes, decided at that moment to freshen; and as the snow parted, he caught sight of three men dressed in Arctic gear, advancing toward his position, still several hundred yards away as yet. Carefully, McPherson edged first his parka hood, then his forehead over the edge of the cliff until his eyes were level with the ground. At first he saw nothing, but when he did he rather wished he had not. There was indeed a second party hiking along the top of the cliffs. There were five men, spread out in a line reaching from the edge, three hundred yards inland. The wide separation between each man was going to make it hard to keep track of them all once they dropped into the snow for cover.

McPherson shifted his attention to the three men approaching along the beach. His eyes narrowed as he studied the situation. The wind was blowing hard enough so that it should effectively cover the sound of his firing from the men along the top of the cliffs. By not revealing his position to the party advancing along the cliff tops, he might be able to damage the beach group and then get away before they could alert the others to flank him from the top. McPherson laid the carbine on the rock and sighted in on a featureless bundle of parka and boots trailing the main group on the beach by several yards. With luck he could knock him out and shift to the leadman before they realized they were being shot at. McPherson drew a deep breath and steadied the sights, then another movement caught his eye. One man was walking along the top with what appeared to be a portable radio. He was close enough to hear the report and perhaps see the muzzle flash if

McPherson fired. But he was also near enough to the edge so that he could be fired upon without the rest of the topside party noticing right away.

McPherson lifted his carbine and laid it on the shoulder of rock in front of him. He snapped the safety off and squinted down the barrel through the sights until the Russian was centered exactly. Slowly he opened both eyes and, as the man came into range, waited until he had approached to one hundred yards and slowly squeezed the trigger. The snap of the .222 cartridge was lost in the wind and snow. McPherson glanced hurriedly around to see if the others in the party on the cliffs had noticed. Apparently they had not. The soldier, shot squarely through the chest, had dropped, then slid down into a crevice. But his rifle had fallen out of his hands and slithered down onto the beach, fifty feet in front of the advancing troops. One of them scurried ahead and bent to pick it up. His shout of surprise carried clearly to McPherson and, with a sigh, he shifted the rifle to cover the men on the beach as they dropped flat and wormed quickly under cover. McPherson watched while the officer in charge ran up and examined the rifle. He stepped back quickly to examine the top of the cliff, then reached for his radio. McPherson dropped him with one shot, then followed up with a raking blast that drove the others deeper into cover.

He poked his head up for a quick look at the cliff party still approaching and unaware. A rifle shot splattered the rock above his head, and then a ragged fusillade splashed snow and ice around him. He returned the fire briefly, more to make them pull their heads in than to do any damage. At this range and in the heavy snowfall there was little likelihood of them hitting him, and his only chance lay in carefully selecting his targets, one by one. He did so and was rewarded by a thin cry and the sight of a body toppling out of the line of rocks. The volume of fire at his position increased. The Russians were quickly, but very gingerly, working their way closer to the shelter of the dam. Once they reached that point, he knew, it would be time to leave.

He opened up again with short bursts at the fleeting glimpses of uniforms below. The wind had increased sharply and, instead of working for him, was now beginning to work against him. Suddenly a flare burst almost directly over his position. McPherson forgot about the beach party and flung himself up to sight on the members of the cliff-top party, momentarily transfixed by the flare. Before they could move he pulled the trigger and swung the muzzle, traversing the line of tiny figures. At the first report they dropped into the snow, but McPherson kept up the fire steadily for several seconds. Then he sprang out of the cleft and charged inland at a diagonal, leading away from the cliffs into the trees. He had a good lead and in his white snowsuit made an impossible target to follow. Quick rounds of desultory fire followed, but none hit close enough to be seen. In less than a minute he reached the trees, slowed to a trot, and continued for half a mile until he reached an open glade.

The open area was several hundred feet across, large enough for the wind to have full play. As a result the surface toward the center was a smooth expanse of unbroken snow, while the southern end was drifted high. He thrashed out into the glade, making as deep a trail as he could. At the first line of drifts he threw himself down and kicked and thrashed for a moment, then stood up to survey his work. Even at the rate the snow was drifting this would remain for at least an hour. Satisfied, he carefully retraced his steps back to the trees on the same side of the clearing that he had entered and backtracked for several yards. A low-hanging branch gave him the opportunity to swing up and out of his trail and head deeper into the forest at a wide angle from the track he had made going in. Certain that he had both sidetracked the Russians and done as much damage as he could for now, McPherson trotted to the edge of the forest and, once out into the open, made for the edge of the cliffs and the comparatively easy going of the wind-swept rock. A couple of hours spent floundering around in the deep snow and woods should tire the Russians enough to delay them by at least four to six hours. Smiling happily to himself, he ran steadily on.

CHAPTER 17

When Teleman awoke for the second time, the period of disorientation was immeasurably shorter. In fact, after the dimly remembered cold and wind on the cliffs, the stark, blue walls of the tent, with the litter of survival gear and Arctic clothing, seemed almost comforting. Across the tent, cleaning one of the carbines, knelt the man who had introduced himself as the ship’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Peter Folsom. A second sailor, the one who had been asleep next to him before, worked over a pair of makeshift snowshoes. He was a small, almost rat-faced’ young man, Teleman thought, and he was instantly sorry for the comparison:. He hated snap judgments, but was forever making them and usually regretting it later. Teleman grimaced and shifted his head for a better look. Unconscious of the scrutiny, the other worked on, face screwed up in his effort to twist the webbing strings of the netting tighter over the frame. He had a pile of dishwater blond hair that could only be described as unruly, trite though the description was. It was his hands that Teleman noted almost at once. They had long, tapering fingers, but unlike most thin hands these were at once powerful-and sensitive. The sailor looked up from his work and a pleased smile crossed his face.

“Hey, boss, I think our partner in crime is awake.” Folsom looked away from the rifle and grinned as well. “So he is. How are you feeling this time around?”

Teleman pushed a hand out of the sleeping bag and rubbed his forehead. “Other than the damnedest headache you ever heard of, all right, I guess.”

“Feel like you’re up to some traveling?”

“Traveling!” Teleman struggled into a sitting position. The effort left him dizzy and weak. Folsom got up swiftly and crossed the tent, grabbing up a pack as he came. He helped Teleman to sit up and shoved the pack behind his back for support. In the sitting position, Teleman could see that the sailor he had been introduced to earlier, McPherson, was now against the other wall, wrapped in a sleeping bag.

“What about this traveling? Out to the ship, maybe?” The grin disappeared from Folsom’s face to be replaced with a worried frown. “I’m afraid not. The seas are too rough to launch the helicopter and our lifeboat got smashed up as we came in. Now the waves are too high to launch another with even a hope of reaching the beach in one piece. So it seems we are pretty well cut off from the ship.” Teleman absorbed this for a moment “Then what’s the next step?”

“That’s where the traveling comes in. There is a Norwegian-NATO naval air base about twenty-five miles down the coast. We are going to have to head for it.”

“You mean we have to walk twenty-five miles?” Teleman was astounded. He doubted right now if he could walk twenty-five steps, let alone twenty-five miles, and said so. Folsom gave him a wan smile. “I know how you feel, or at least I think I do. I am not so sure that any of us can do it. The weather out there is like nothing you have ever seen before, worse even than when you landed yesterday.”

The executive officer smiled at the surprise on Teleman’s face. “Yeah, early yesterday in fact. You’ve been out for the twenty-four hours since we found you.”

“Good God, I had no idea…”

“Don’t feel bad about it. You were in pretty rough shape when we picked you up. Another few minutes out there and we would have had to chip you out of a block of ice.” Folsom turned. “Julie, wake Mac up. We got some talking to do, then we had better make tracks.”

Folsom stretched across the mound of gear and pulled another pack to him. While McPherson went through the motions of waking up, Folsom rummaged through the contents of the pack and came out with a zippered, waterproof plastic map case. He selected one and spread it out next to Teleman’s sleeping bag while. the other two gathered around. McPherson crawled up on his knees, scratching his heavy black beard. He smiled shyly again at Teleman and stuck out a hand. “Glad to see you awake again, sir.”

“This joker here,” Folsom said, indicating the other sailor, “the one you haven’t been formally introduced to, is Chief Warrant Officer Julian Gadsen. He’s another free-loader. His specialty is driving the captain’s launch — and eating.” Gadsen chuckled and reached a band through the maze of shoulders and shook Teleman’s hand. Teleman discovered that at least part of his first impression had been right. Gadsen’ s hands were indeed strong. Obviously Gadsen was something other than what Folsom suggested — a seagoing taxi driver.

“I didn’t get a chance to tell you before because you dropped off to sleep again, but we’re all three from the U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy.”

Immediately, Teleman glanced sharply at Folsom.

“Now wait,” Folsom said, “I’m aware of what’s going on. These two aren’t, but. at this point in the situation we are all in, you don’t have to worry. Both are cleared about as high as you can go. You have to be to get assigned to the RFK.” Teleman thought about it a moment. “Okay,” he said tightly, “maybe you are right for now. I’m in no position to bargain at the moment. But let’s just stay away from that area right now.”

Folsom nodded. He could see that Gadsen and McPherson were doing their best to maintain noncommittal smiles. He knew that security procedures do funny things to people, particularly when they are not privy to the secrets being discussed. Innuendoes or oblique references always create hostilities no matter how much you realize the need for security and secrecy in military or defense affairs. He only hoped that Teleman wasn’t going to turn out to be a son of a bitch on such a minor matter — at least at the moment. Teleman was well aware of what Folsom was thinking. He could see by the withdrawn expressions that maybe he had overstepped a little. He was about to say something to ease the situation when the thought suddenly occurred to him that he really did not know who these people were. The idea that they could be. Soviet agents acting out a part was half rejected in his mind as being overly dramatic, when angrily he pushed the modifying thought down.

It was not too farfetched. It was not any more farfetched than his flying a supersecret aircraft at one to two hundred thousand feet over the continent of Asia for five and six days at a time, or that they should shoot him down and on, of all places, the North Cape of Norway. He studied the three men gathered around him and for a moment found himself ready to listen for traces of a Russian accent. That did it. He burst out laughing. The three sailors were taken by surprise. “Now what the hell are you laughing about?” Gadsen demanded.

Teleman laughed even harder. “You… wouldn’t believe… it if I—I… I told you,” he choked out at last. Then he went into throes of hysterical laughter. Gadsen and Folsom exchanged glances, then Julie leaned forward and slapped him sharply, once, then twice. The second slap brought Teleman around and he stopped, shut his eyes, and sank back down into the sleeping bag. In seconds he was sound asleep.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Folsom said.

“You probably are anyway, chief,” Gadsen snorted. “That was a classic case,of nervous release. God, what that poor guy must have been through lately. Judging from his reaction, he must have been close to a complete nervous collapse. Now he’ll probably sleep for an hour or two, then when he wakes up he’ll be all right.”

“Julie” — Folsom clapped him on the shoulder — “even if you never finished medical school, you are a definite comfort to have around. Come on you two,” he said, shaking his head, let’s get this junk ready to go.”

This time, as Teleman slept, he dreamed that he was back in the A-17, being pursued by a series of Falcons. As each aircraft rose to replace the one ahead it closed quickly and fired a missile.. The ice-sharp clarity of the Asian terrain unreeling before him shifted’ with the watery changes of dreams, but somehow the mass of the Himalayas to his right never varied, either in view or intensity. He was passing so close to the bulk of the mountain flanks that he could clearly see a Mongolian sheepherder, mounted on a wiry pony, waving to him. As he watched the man, the A-17 came to bang opposite, so close that the wing tip, fully extended, seemed to brush along the Mongolian’s cap. The sheepherder glanced back along the way Teleman had come, and turning himself, Teleman could see through the solid wall of the cockpit the entire valley spread out below. Close behind were two Falcons, so close that rockets emerging in slow motion from the pods on either side of the aircraft’s nose were already visible. Both he and the sheepherder turned at the same moment to stare directly at one another. The Mongolian began to wave at the following aircraft, his face suffused with the agony of helplessness. Teleman turned again, and this time the rockets had traveled half the distance and grown in size until they were as wide as freight cars. They traveled in three sets of pairs and seemed to reach out to encompass him. The Mongolian was still waving desperately at his wings. Sittihg in the pilot’s couch, face pressed against the glassite of the view port, Teleman could not understand why the A-17 was not moving. The sound of the engines thundered in his ears, yet the aircraft would not budge. The Mongolian vaulted from his horse and ran forward to grasp the extended wing and, with a mighty heave, wrenched it backward. Then Teleman understood. With a last glance back at the rockets reaching out hungry hands for the tail section of the A-17, he threw the switch that swung the wings back. The aircraft vaulted forward, instantly leaving the now smiling face of the sheepherder disappearing in the distance. The crazy patchwork of the dream began to flow backward into a smooth whirlpool that suddenly sprang high and Teleman was sitting both upright and awake. Folsom sprang up, startled by Teleman’s sudden movement. “Ye gods, you startled me.” Teleman looked around for a moment, not quite sure what was reality and what was dream. “Where are my clothes?” he asked thickly.

Cadsen picked up a pack and crawled over to Teleman’s sleeping bag. “The clothes you arrived in are not the kind you want to wear when hiking in the Arctic, my boy.” He opened the pack and pulled out a pair of wide-mesh nylon underwear, lined ski pants, a loose nylon sweater, and a quilted dacron parka and hood and pushed them toward Teleman.

“Put these on. I think you’ll find them quite a bit warmer than a flight suit.”

“Yes, and hurry too. We were just about to wake you.” Teleman did as he was told, fumblingly at first as his tired brain sorted out fact from dream fiction. Some of the iron weariness had left him after his long sleep. But not enough, he thought. His body was still sluggish, although he knew he would lose some of that once out into the cold fresh air. But he knew damned well that he would never be able to walk twenty-five miles… why did they have to walk twenty-five miles anyway? He could not remember at first, then gradually, as the cobwebs cleared away, he remembered snatches of conversation they had had earlier. Teleman pulled the parka over his head, found his .22 revolver on top of his pack, and surreptitiously tucked it inside. Then, with the boots in his hand, crawled over to where the other three were clustered around a map.

“Our Red friends,” Folsom started without preamble as soon as Teleman joined the circle, “appear to want to welcome us to the land of the midnight sun.” In spite of the flippancy of his words, his voice was grim.

“We were informed about twelve hours ago that a suspected Russian submarine had landed a party of eighteen men about twenty-two miles southeast of here in Porsangerfjord. Then the sub withdrew’ a few miles and submerged. The landing party headed westward, apparently searching for you,” he said glancing up at Teleman. Teleman shook his head in confusion. “How the hell would they know where I was?” Folsom grinned wryly. “I suppose if we could track you down by radar they could too:’

“But that’s impossible. The ejection capsule carries its own ECM gear. They would never have been able to track me.”

“Could be,” Folsom admitted, “but somehow they are onto you. Maybe they just figured that you would have bailed out somewhere along the coast and as a last-ditch measure sent out the landing party in the hopes of picking you up.

“Be that as it may, they are out looking for you. Three hours ago Mac, here, got back from a little delaying action. He waylaid the party about twelve miles down the beach, shot them.up a little, then led them off into the forest. He estimates we gained about six hours while they sort themselves out of the trees enough to realize they have been tricked. When they figure that out, they will head west again, even faster.”

“Do you think they know exactly where we are?”

“I don’t think so. If they did, they would have come straight here. As it is, Mae says they have one group down on the beach and the other along the top of the cliffs.”

“Well if that’s it,” Teleman said with a deep sigh, “then there isn’t much to worry about. I landed about five miles into the trees. The capsule contains a self-destruct mechanism that literally reduces the thing to a lump of metal. If it’s still snowing, it ought to be pretty well covered up by now. How far back from the cliffs are we?”

“Wait a minute,” Folsom said quietly. “It’s not that simple. We are about a mile back from the beach. And we could move the tent farther south if I thought it would do any good. But our lifeboat is still on the beach. And the damned thing weighs about three tons. There is no way to move it, short of using explosives, which we haven’t got. So the Russians are going to find us if we stay around.”

“Now there is a problem there, isn’t there?” said McPherson, peering through the tent flap.-In spite of himself, Teleman shivered in the icy touch of the Arctic wind.

“It looks as though the wind will be kicking up the sea pretty badly by now. You can even hear the waves smacking into the cliffs. On top of which, the snow is so thick that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. -That rules out the helicopter on two counts…. So we walk.”

“Walk?” Teleman repeated weakly.

“Walk. All the way to the Norwegian naval base, or at least as far in that direction as we can to stay ahead of the Russians. We walk until the helicopter can get in to pick us up or we reach the base.”

Gadsen, who had been studying the map, looked up. “Commander, you’ve studied this place pretty thoroughly, just what kind of a base is it?”

“It’s now a combination radar and naval station. Pretty heavily defended and with some outmoded coastal artillery left by the Nazis, but supplemented with Hawk missiles. Our Ruski friends won’t risk outright aggression to get Teleman back — at least I hope they won’t — and if they do the Norwegians know how to use both the missiles and the artillery.”

“Well why in hell don’t we call them up and ask them to send some help. They must have Sno-cats or something like that.” Folsom looked pained for a moment. “Come on, you know the answer to that as well as I do. The old man says no. And that is that.” Teleman glanced away, slightly ashamed. He knew why the “old man” said no. And he knew that Folsom was practicing a slight deception. The old man was not the commanding officer of the RFK, but his own boss sitting warm and comfortable somewhere in the Virginia foothills. They could not ask, except as a last resort, for help from the Norwegians because he was not supposed to be in Norway. The United States had no authorization from the Norwegian Government for overflights. And the only way to avoid embarrassing questions and strained relations was not to let the Norwegians know that he was in Norway. So they would have to start walking toward the base in the hope that something would happen — either the weather would moderate or else they would be able to get some other kind of aircraft in to pick up the party. If all else failed, they would have to walk in on the Norwegians. The problem at the moment was to stay far enough ahead of the Russians to keep from being captured. Teleman’s head ached with the intensity of tightening thumb screws. In addition to being weary beyond reason, his vision was hazy and full of wild afterimages resulting from the microtraces of lysergic acid remaining in his system. As he sat across from the executive officer he was positive that ample precautions had been taken to ensure that he would not be captured by the Russians. But which of the three sailors had orders to kill him if capture appeared imminent?

Was it Folsom? he wondered. Folsom knew too many details, knew the vital importance of his missions — details that could not be gained by conjecture alone. If not Folsom, which of the other two? McPherson, if what Folsom had told him was true, had hiked eleven miles one way to waylay the Russians. A former member of the SEALS, he would know all about assassination. But, on the other hand, he knew nothing about the other—

What was his name? — Gadsen. Maybe the question, he had raised about the Norwegians sending help was only a blind to allay any suspicion that he, Teleman, might have. God, maybe they were all three in on it. They could be waiting to see how things would work out before they moved. He would just have to waif and see, he decided. But Teleman knew one thing: nobody was going to put a bullet in his back, not after all that he had been through. If he was going to die, then it was going to be from a Russian bullet.

Teleman unconsciously sank back a little farther against the gear. His face took on for the briefest of moments the haunted look of a hunted animal. His eyes were narrow and glittering in the. uncertain light and the skin of his face drew into a drum tightness. If one of the three sailors had been watching, what he would have seen in Teleman’s face might have prevented a portion of tragedy.

Folsom interrupted Teleman’s thoughts as he spread out a more localized map of the North Cape and pointed to a small indentation on — the western side of the deep gash cut in the coastline by the Porsangerfjord. “This is the point where they landed. In this weather it will take them almost a day to travel far enough to reach the lifeboat. Now that Mac has had a crack at them, we can safely assume that we’ve gained another six to eight hours while they chase themselves through the boondocks after the phony trail he left behind. But we have now used up nearly four hours of that time. So, all in all, we are probably still five hours ahead of them, until they get far enough along the coast to spot the lifeboat.

“Now,” he said, staring speculatively at Teleman, “the Russians probably had a darn good idea where you were. But until Mac hit them they probably had no idea you had any help at. all. We. can-expect them to be confused for a while, wondering how many others are waiting in ambush along the way. I think we can consider the RFK as a hole card — although whether a joker or an ace is hard to tell at this point.”

“You know, Pete,” Gadsen interrupted, “if we do get into enough of a bind that we do have to call the Norwegians for help, that damned sub could very well be monitoring for just such a transmission. If that happens, they will probably just move in and shell the. hell out of us. They must be carrying some kind of — deck gun or surface-to-surface rockets.”

“Yeah, I thought of that too. If we do have to call on the Norwegians, it will be up to the captain to decide whether he wants to open fire on the sub Or not. If he does, there will. be no way of hiding the fact. Talk about conditions for an international incident, whew!”

“Kind of in a bind ain’t we, then?”

“Precisely, so lets git. Here’s our destination,” he said, pointing again to the base, marked on the map in red. “We had better move out of these trees and onto the cliffs. It will be rougher going, but we can follow the coastline for a while. About here it turns into tundra, which should be swept pretty free of any deep snow.” He indicated a point about six miles down the coast. “There, I expect, it’ll be a toss-up whether or not the tundra is passable. If so, we go across. If not, we follow the coast.” Teleman leaned closer to examine the chart. It showed an irregular jut of land that bulged around the tundra for a distance of nearly thirteen miles. The contour lines on the chart indicated that the bulge was composed mainly of steep crags and shelving granite, leading to a sharp drop of fifty feet or so to the water. Once past this bulge, the land flattened again to narrow beach and even narrower pine-and scrub-covered terrain fronting the tundra.

“Pray for the tundra,” he murmured. “That climb around the point will be hell.”

“There is one other possibility,” Folsom said thoughtfully. “I had thought of heading south to Kistrand at the head of Porsangerfjord. The only trouble with that is this range of hills, just about here. They rise to a little over a thousand feet in less than the two miles between us and the town. And the only pass or anything resembling a pass leads west, and then south for a total distance of thirty-five miles. According to the map, the pass is at eight hundred feet. Teleman could never make it.

“So then, the only choice we have is to go west toward the naval station at Tanafjord. If the weather breaks, the ship will be able to reach us with the helicopter on the way.” Teleman nodded acquiescence. “All right. If it turns out that somebody has to carry me, don’t say I didn’t wain you. Either.carry me or shoot me,” he added, looking sharply from face to face. He thought he saw a faint tinge of surprise in Folsom’s eyes, but he could not be sure. It did not make any difference, he thought. He must watch all three of them closely now.

Folsom smiled. “All right, we’ve been warned. But don’t worry about it. Even if we do have to carry you, we will get you back, one way or another.” The executive officer stood up. “Okay. We head out in five minutes. Julie, pass out those snowshoes.”

Gadsen got up and pulled out four pairs of make-shift snowshoes from under the pile of gear on his side of the tent and passed them out.

“Sorry about the pack frames,” he apologized, “but I figured sore shoulders were better than tired legs.”

The snowshoes were made from aluminum bracing taken from the Himalaya mountain packs. Gadsen had straightened the frames and bent them into rough circular shapes, then used nylon line for webbing and the rough bootstraps. They were clumsy, but would serve to keep the wearer on top of, rather than floundering knee-deep in, the snow. While Teleman pulled on a pair of insulated boots over two pairs of heavy wool socks and one pair of felt underboots, McPherson and Folsom loaded the gear and sleeping bags into the packs. Then he pulled his dacron parka tighter and zipped it close to his throat, pulling the hood up and tying it tightly. Around his neck went a six-inch flap that snapped in back, covering chin and throat. Folsom handed him a face mask, which he snapped to the throat flap and along the rim of the hood.

“I feel like a man from Mars,” he muttered through the muffling fabric. The others looked much the same.

“The very best Arctic gear the U.S. Navy has, Major.” McPherson laughed. “Once we get outside, you’ll wonder why the damned clothing couldn’t be warmer. Me, I intend to write a letter to Naval Supplies when I get back, telling them just what I think of this stuff.”

Folsom looked Teleman over carefully. “How do you feel now?”

“To he truthful, pretty weak. But I think I can make it.” Folsom undid a pocket flap on his pack and pulled out an aluminum tube. “Try a couple of these, Benzedrine. They’ll pick you up.”

“Yeah, I know. But I’ll wait awhile.” Teleman wondered if Folsom had any idea what effect that Benzedrine would have on him. “No sense exhausting myself too early.” Folsom nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He turned and quickly looked over the other two. “All right, let’s move out.”

They broke camp quickly, each man carrying a carbine, canteen, and thirty-pound pack, with the exception of Teleman. He insisted that he carry at least his own carbine and the tent. Reluctantly, McPherson gave it to him. The tent folded into a compact package weighing less than ten pounds, but even so McPherson knew that in his weakened condition the extra ten pounds would soon begin to weigh on Teleman like ten thousand.

Folsom took the lead. Head down, and with the queer shuffling gait that snowshoes force, he struck out through the scrub forest toward the cliffs at a steep diagonal. The snow was deep and the wind whistling through the trees swept at them from every direction, dumping snow from the laden branches onto the four men trudging below. Folsom led them around the deepest drifts, sticking to the open areas as much as possible so that the drifting snow would thoroughly cover their tracks.

It took them an hour to walk out of the trees and reach the cliffs. An hour of tense shuffling on the round snowshoes that cramped muscles unknown to Teleman until then. The width of the snowshoes forced him to walk with his legs farther apart than he was used to, and shortly the muscles on the inside of his thighs were screaming for relief. And the dense underbrush made the walking that much harder. Bushes, half hidden in the snow, caught at the rims and webbing of the shoes. Within the first hour Teleman had fallen twice.

As soon as they stepped from the tree line, the full force of the wind caught them squarely. Snow, swirled up into a ground blizzard, stung at their eyes and any exposed skin surface, finding its way inside snow masks, around the elastic wrist and ankle bands and between hood and parkas with an insidiousness that was almost human. It had been Folsom’s intention to strike west along the rim of the cliffs as long as they lasted, but the ground blizzard, whirled into a fog of ice crystals, made travel along the cliff tops too hazardous. It would have been very easy to walk over the edge before realizing it. McPherson led them back away from the cliffs for fifty yards and, bent into the rising wind, they moved parallel to the line of cliffs, using their meager lee for what shelter that could provide from the gale-force wind.

Within the second hour the wind rose to what Folsom judged was fifty miles an hour. It had also backed several points until it was blowing from almost due north. The wind carried the scent of the icy wastes from the Great Barrier, less than two hundred miles north, bringing with it the same fierce temperatures and flying. ice spicules that scoured the ice of the polar cap into tortured shapes. Folsom traveled now with the compass constantly in his hand, fighting to keep them on a course leading generally westward. But the proximity of the north magnetic pole made it all but useless for more than general direction keeping. As the wind increased, so did the labor involved in walking. The snow had drifted to three and four feet deep in some places, and where it hadn’t drifted at all it stood at least two feet deep. The snowshoes were of some help in keeping them above the crust, but the extra work of adjusting their gait to the peculiarities of the webbed shoes made Folsom wonder if they were not just trading one exhaustion for another. The only thing that seemed to be in their favor was that the top of the cliffs was fairly level, sloping gently downhill to the south. Folsom was under no illusions that the Russians would stop to wait out the storm. They would assume that their quarry was also taking every advantage the storm offered. Once they found the damaged lifeboat but no sign of a camp, it would not take them long to conclude that they were heading for the Norwegian naval base. The only hope the Russians would then have would be to cut them off before they gained the naval installation. And Folsom knew damned well that, if they did call for help, either the submarine or Soviet aircraft would arrive in quick order to shell the hell out of them. With these thoughts to keep him company, Folsom grimly forced them on through the Arctic desert.

For Teleman the hours passed endlessly in a haze of pain as tired muscles and joints protested every movement. The cold was more than insidious. In his weakened condition it was waiting to kill him if just once he let down his guard. His only hope was to keep moving, forcing his body to make optimum use of the slender reserves twenty-four hours of sleep had rebuilt. What would happen when these reserves were exhausted he knew very well. At one time Teleman had voraciously read everything he could find on Arctic and Antarctic exploration. He knew, for instance, that in spite of the tremendous will to live that had infected Scott and his crew in the Antarctic, it had been impossible for them to travel that last eleven miles to the supply cache that had literally meant life or death. And now he understood why. He was fast reaching that point where it becomes impossible for the body to put out that last ounce of strength, that last bit of will that forces dying muscles to one more movement. The intense cold of the Arctic activated the body’s main defense system against cold, involuntary shivering, but it also killed after a few hours. Shivering is an involuntary or autonomous muscle movement that cannot be controlled consciously. And it takes energy to shiver, and a prolonged bout at last saps all reserves. Then the body dies because there is simply no more heat to power the machine.

Teleman was shivering, shivering violently. He had never been so cold in his life. And in spite of the Arctic clothing and the heavy parka, the cold cut as if they were merely tissue. The first touches of frost had long since begun to reach through the insulated soles of his boots. By now, after four hours of walking, his feet were completely numb. He hated to think of what was going to happen when his feet and hands began to thaw… if they ever did.

From then on he stumbled constantly, half supported by the giant McPherson, whose strength seemed endless. Through the snow mask Teleman could feel the skin of his face grow numb, then contract in the cold as if it were trying to pull his skull apart. Feebly he rubbed his cheeks and nose with gloved hands, and the pain of even this faint bit of returning circulation was fantastic.

As they traveled farther across the rough crags of the rear cliff tops, clambering over rock outcroppings to slide painfully down the snow-and ice-slick far sides, Teleman marveled, with the part of his mind that was still conscious, at the strength that McPherson, was exhibiting. Even now as Folsom and Gadsen were beginning to slow, their movements becoming more and more unsteady as they fought against the exhausting wind and cold, McPherson still half carried him, still showed no signs of weariness.

After the sixth hour Folsom began to call five-minute halts every half hour or so, but after the morning and the brief brightening of the five to ten minutes of clouded sunlight at noon, they rested standing. No one dared sit or lie as the cold deepened and their exhaustion grew. Once down, they knew they would never be able to get up again. Finally even McPherson dared not rest for more than a few moments. By late afternoon they had entered another branch of the forest, this one clutching the coast. The pounding of the surf was violent in the almost still crystal air. The wind had suddenly died away to a light breeze and the continuing heavy snowfall did little to muffle the crash of waves against unyielding stone. The trees, stunted and twisted by years of storm, were widely spaced and unchoked with the undergrowth that had marked the inland forest. But the trees, forced to grow lower, made up for the lack of brush with low-hanging branches pregnant with fresh snow. At 1600 that afternoon the wind had stopped completely. The tired party of four men came to a stop. For the last hour Teleman had been traveling in a semi-daze, barely conscious. But now even he was revived momentarily. Folsom peeled back his face mask and hood and the others followed suit. He turned his head in a slow circle, searching for any trace of breeze. The air was silent, barely moving. The intense cold seemed even more pressing now in spite of a lack of wind to stir it across their exposed faces. The wind-scattered trees of the stunted forest were immobile, drooping even lower with the steadily accumulating snow.

The small party began to stumble forward again, reeling under the load of their weariness and the heavy, depressing atmosphere that had descended with the cessation of the wind. Even McPherson was growing exhausted. His gait grew less and less steady. Teleman exerted a tremendous effort and managed to walk upright by himself for a few moments before the snowshoes caused him to stumble. From then on each of the three sailors took turns supporting him.

A muffled crack sounded somewhere behind them. Instantly they were on the ground, searching for cover in the meager waste. For long moments they lay, all thoughts of their weariness forgotten. Folsom shifted his carbine and peered over the barrel, trying to penetrate the snow-filled landscape, then after a moment he got shakily to his feet, laughing softly.

“Come on you deadbeats. Up and at ’em.” He helped Teleman up as another sharp rifle report was beard.

“Trees,” he explained shortly. “The cold is beginning to crack the damned trees.” By 1800 they reached the edge of the tundra. The jut of the coast pulled away to the north at this point, heading into a region of higher ground which the line of cliffs rode in lazy undulations of crags and clefts. McPherson edged out into the beginning of the tundra plain and knelt to brush the accumulated snow from the frozen dirt and rotting vegetation that overlay the hard surface of never-melting ice. After a few moments he motioned the others out.

Folsom; Gadsen, and Teleman followed him out to where he was staring at the darkness that obscured the way ahead. Behind them a three-quarter moon was beginning to break through the rack of clouds, its pale gold light lending a warm tint to the ghostly, wasted landscape. Teleman reversed his carbine and sank to his knees, leaning on the gun for support. He had been profoundly grateful when the wind had died; at these temperatures snow froze into solid crystals of ice, tiny particles that, whipped by the wind, worked their way between snow mask and hood and glove and cuff. After hours of exposure Teleman felt as if his wrists and neck were ringed by crusts of burning ice. His gratitude had been short-lived, however. As the wind had died the cold had deepened, until now he guessed it was close to forty below zero.

Folsom dropped down beside him. “How are you feeling?” When Teleman, too tired to speak, only nodded, he grinned in sympathy. “We’ve covered about thirteen miles so far. I think it’s going to be a little easier from here on in. The map shows this tundra stretching almost to the base. At least we can get rid of these damnable snowshoes.”

Teleman nodded again, barely aware of what Folsom said. His mind was wrapped in a warm haze that not even the bitter cold of the Arctic could penetrate. Folsom’s words meant nothing to him… he was suspended in a sort of limbo through which he floated not caring what happened to him. But when Folsom’s arms went under his to help him to his feet, the haze failed and he was suddenly back in the hell of cold and wilderness. Gadsen cut the thongs that held the snowshoes on, then *collected the four pair and tied them onto his pack. He said nothing and neither did the others. Each man was conserving every last bit of energy he possessed with all the avidity of a miser. Each knew that to expend even the tiniest fraction could mean the difference between reaching the base and freezing to death within sight of it.

The four men struggled on, pushing as far into the tundra as possible before stopping for the night. Teleman continued to move mechanically in the semi-daze that had overtaken him earlier, but the rest had refreshed him somewhat and he was now able to stumble forward by himself. He had long ceased to feel the cold as such, to feel it as anything but an iron pain clamped down upon his entire body. His heart, he was dimly aware, was beating at the same trip-hammer rate that had alarmed him during the final moments of flight. Every movement was sluggish in the extreme, and he no longer thought about the damage being done to his body by the impossible stress being placed on it by the intense cold and the bone-breaking task of hiking twenty-five miles through subzero cold. He longed for the warm hospital bed and the intensive care that normally followed each flight. Instead he moved in a world of his own, in which the glimmering moon and the pale stars beginning to show as the clouds were slowly torn to pieces by the aftermath of the storm were a blur overhead. He had even stopped concentrating on placing one foot in front of the other. His subconscious had now taken over the task of moving his legs in proper rotation. He was only hours from death and he no longer cared.

CHAPTER 18

Larkin paced slowly back and forth before the insulated windows fronting the dimly lit bridge, apparently oblivious to the scene around him. At eight consoles, eight technicians sat hunched before the banks of instruments. The atmosphere was heavy with depression. Nothing had been heard from the shore party for nearly twelve hours. During that time the shadowy Soviet submarine had moved slowly out of the Porsangerfjord and rounded the point to slip carefully down the northern coast of the island at a depth of sixty feet.

The RFK, standing twenty miles offshore, had long since run out of the freakish waterlayer conditions that had expanded her sonar range earlier in the day. In fact, reverse conditions were now in effect. The RFK’s sonar gear had an operational echo-ranging capability of thirty-eight miles under optimum conditions. Now she was able to pick up firm signals only at a maximum of twenty-two miles. Beyond that the decreasing signalto-noise ratio wiped away any traces of the target. In spite of the trouble with the sonar gear, they had been able to follow as the submarine had moved twice from the southeastern end of the island in Porsangerfjord to its mouth on the western side, and then out into the Barents Sea to proceed slowly down the coast as if searching out a landing site. They passed the point of beach where the American party had landed, and continued down the coast. At first Larkin had thought, as the submarine had come to a stop to lay off the coast with only the sail showing, that they were examining the terrain. Now he was not so sure. The sub had remained surfaced for twenty minutes, long enough to have launched a raft. If indeed a second party had gone ashore they would logically have landed several hours travel up the coast from where Folsom and his men were. Larkin had no firm idea of just how fast and far they had traveled, but his last radio contact with Folsom, several hours after they started out, had put him a mile west of where the sub came to a stop. By the time the submarine had arrived off the coast in the late afternoon, Folsom would certainly have moved several miles farther west. Evidently the Soviet commander had misjudged the Americans’ rate of progress.

His face betraying none of the anxiety he felt, Larkin continued his pacing back and forth across the bridge, stopping now’ and then to examine a scope over a technician’s shoulder. If ever there had been a hand-picked crew aboard any United States Navy ship, the small complement of eighty men aboard the highly automated RFK were it. Every man had been personally requested by Larkin, many from personal knowledge of their capabilities and the rest from service records. They were the best there was, he knew. And he had drilled them mercilessly into an operational team in which every man knew exactly what was expected of him — the basis of proper and workable military discipline. It was not, however, the crew’s reaction to the tense situation facing them — or their future performance — that he was worried about. Each and every crew member was aware that the Russian submarine they were stalking could easily be carrying nuclear missiles. And at a few miles, even if their missile defenses were quick enough to destroy incoming weaponry, any nuclear explosion could be fatal to the ship’s crew. No, Larkin was not worried about the crew. They knew what they faced, and had known since the day they agreed to sign on — that this possibility was more likely to come to pass on the RFK than on any other operational ship of the Navy. For a moment the grim humor of the situation relaxed Larkin’s mind. The ship, the most advanced in any navy in the world, the one always earmarked for just such clandestine operations as played tag with nuclear destruction, had been named for a man whose overriding concern was the nuclear disarmament of the world. Larkin shook his head and turned to face the line of windows.

The cold seas were running savagely; there was no relief for his introspective mood from that quarter. Larkin swung himself into the high seat before his own console. The meteorological officer two consoles away tore off a Xerox and reached over to hand it to him. Larkin took it with some misgivings. But it was only the quarter-hourly weather report indicating moderating seas for the next thirty-six hours. He turned again toward the window.

The seas, this close onto the coast, were no longer breaking over the bow in huge runnels of water, but the waves were still running forty feet or better. The lingering half light of the short midwinter day was still bright enough to show the grayish-green color of the half-frozen surface as it billowed up into sharp-edged mountains only to be struck broadside by violent winds that sheered off the crests, as neatly as would a razor, in long foamy streamers. The seas might be in the process of moderating, but here on the Norwegian north coast, exposed to the full force of the dying gale, actual conditions were showing little support for such optimistic predictions. As he continued to gaze out the ports, his mind turned to the supplementary orders that had come in over the private channel minutes earlier. The gist of the orders was that Larkin was empowered to notify the Norwegian Government and request their assistance if the situation got out of hand too rapidly for long-distance consultation. If that was not forthcoming, then he was instructed to ask for asylum for the pilot and his three crewmen. He was not, and the not was underlined, allowed to do so except in the most extreme emergency.

But it was the last paragraph of the message that added a few more gray hairs to his head. The message stated that he was to use all powers of persuasion at his disposal to rescue the pilot if the Norwegians should prove to be uncooperative — as they had every right to be, he thought. It was utter nonsense for the State Department not to notify the Norwegian Government as soon as possible. Not only could they render valuable assistance, but for God’s sake, it was their country and they were allies. He might have his orders to bring Teleman out with all of the force at his disposal, but he was damn sure that no copy of any such message existed in Washington. Washington, if caught, would merely claim that it was a transmitting error or that Larkin had exceeded his authority. In any event, if he had to act pursuant to those orders, the entire wrath of both governments would fall on him like a ton of bricks. His naval career would be at an end. And, if he did not act in accordance with the orders, he would be either secretly court-martialed or shunted out of the Navy. It had happened before, he knew. And Larkin could count at least fifteen qualified naval officers waiting to step into his shoes.

It was no wonder that Larkin got out of the high seat and resumed his pacing. A lesser man would have gone screaming off the bridge in frustration. It was nearly 2100 before Folsom called a halt for the night. During the last few hours they had straggled into a line over a mile long. McPherson, still the strongest of the party, had taken up the tail-end position to act as rear guard and to make sure no one was left behind in the snow-filled wastes. Teleman was only a few paces ahead of him. Folsom had chosen the campsite on the basis of time rather than location. The tundra stretched for miles in all directions, flat and unbroken except for two miles north, where one could barely make out the faint line of cliffs against the night sky. As he waited for the others to catch up, he felt as if he were standing in the middle of a flat dinner plate whose white lack-of-color under the three-quarter moon and cloud-free sky reflected enough light to hurt his eyes after the deep gloom of the past day. If the snow had not been fresh Folsom knew there would have been virtually no light reflection from the surface. Ice crystals would have tended to absorb light and reflect only a little at random. He had witnessed this phenomenon before while aboard a destroyer standing off the Great Ice Barrier in the depths of winter. The icy surface had reflected virtually no light unless it was coated by fresh snow.

Gadsen staggered — literally staggered — up and sank down in the snow a few feet away. He sat, knees drawn up and head down, for several minutes before regaining breath enough to speak coherently. Folsom, glancing down the trail of disturbed snow they had left, could see McPherson and Teleman approaching, still more than a hundred yards away.

“Cod, if you hadn’t… stopped… I would have collapsed. in another few feet.” Gadsen managed to force out between ragged gasps for air.

Painfully, Folsom,shrugged out of his pack and let it fall with a solid thump to the frozen ground. His voice when he spoke was as weary as Gadsen’s, reflecting none of the lightheartedness of the words. “Courage me boy, only another nine miles to go.”

“Courage hell… the only thing that keeps me going… is the Russians…”

“Yeah,” Folsom said, nodding. “I just hope to hell that they are as bushed as we are.” He watched the approaching pair and saw one fall heavily. The other bent over and slowly helped him to his feet.

“Come on, Julie. Can you make another few yards? I don’t think those two can.” Gadsen nodded, got up, and followed Folsom back to where McPherson had stopped to wait as he saw them returning. By the time Folsom and Gadsen had reached him, he had already unpacked the tent and was in the process of rigging the lightweight metal frame. Teleman half sat, half sprawled on the snow, watching him work with dull eyes. While Gadsen helped McPherson with the tent, Folsom came over and knelt beside the exhausted pilot.

“How do you feel?”

“Tuck”

“That’s what I figured.” Folsom peeled Teleman’s mask off and studied the graying face while he fumbled with his own mask. The pilot’s face was drawn and white and covered with yellowish cold blisters. Teleman had been shivering ever since the afternoon rest stop. Folsom had noticed it earlier, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, even though he knew the combination of shivering and difficult exercise of hiking across the uneven, snow-covered tundra had completely worn the man out. But he had not dared stop earlier. So far they had seen no sign of the Russians pursuing them and he wanted to keep it that way as long as possible.

Folsom helped Teleman up and into the tent. He did not wait for Gadsen to pump up the stove and get it going, but hustled Teleman into a sleeping bag fully clothed, between the last of the chemical heating pads.

After a few minutes of steady pumping and priming Gadsen got the stove going, and shortly the temperature had risen to the freezing mark inside the tent. Gadsen adjusted the flame to keep it at that temperature and laid four ration packs on the cover to warm.

“If this cold gets any worse,” McPherson said a few minutes later as the four men ate, “it’ s going to be the roughest last few miles you ever saw.”

“I’ve been thinking, about that all afternoon,” Folsom said. He laid the empty ration pack down and stretched out on his sleeping bag, using his pack for a back support. The ration pack dropped from Teleman’s hands. He was too weak to hold it any longer. It fell softly onto the folds of the sleeping bag and for the moment no one noticed. He was barely awake now, struggling to keep his eyes open long enough to listen to the conversation. He had never been so tired in his life. Circulation was beginning to return to his feet and hands and the pain was as unbearable, as he had feared it would be. In spite of the agony he felt that, if he once closed his eyes, he would sleep forever. To stay awake he massaged the tender skin of his face.

“The Russians will be desperate to catch us by now. They will have found the lifesphere ten hours ago at the least. And the life-sphere will tell them that we came from a ship, an American ship at that. What they will want to know at this point is whether or not the Norwegians are involved. But you can damn well bet that they will be searching with everything they have to locate the ship.” Folsom stopped for a moment to think.

“I feel sure,” he continued, “that even if they think some Americans have gotten ashore to find Teleman here — especially after Mac shot the hell out of them — they are not going to be scared off by the possibility of a pitched battle. In fact, I would even be willing to bet that they are figuring just as we are — that we don’t dare get the Norwegians involved at this point. So, if anything, the Russians are going to move faster and harder.*

Folsom stopped to examine the three haggard faces peering at him in the dim light of the stove. Bone-breaking fatigue was on their faces, Teleman’s especially. The hike under normal circumstances would have been nothing to these men, but the intense cold, Teleman’s deteriorating condition, the wind, deep snow, and exceedingly dry cold all combined to sap strength at a magnified rate. His own legs and feet were screaming with returning circulation and fatigue. It was only with the greatest difficulty that he was able to still his shaking hands, Earlier in the afternoon a thought had occurred to him, a possibility that should have been amply clear to him earlier. He was extremely angry with himself for not having thought of it before. The only excuse he could make was the cold, the cold that sapped every last bit of strength, that required the utmost concentration just to place one foot in front of the other, the cold that required of you that no outside considerations interfere with this concentration because, if they did, you would find yourself slowly freezing to death, prone in the snow, without any awareness of having stopped moving minutes before. He was apprehensive about releas-ing this bombshell. Not only was endurance at the bottommost point for the three men facing him, but so was morale. It would not take much at this point for them to give up and climb into their sleeping bags. If this happened the Russians would certainly find them in a few hours at the most.

“Whether or not the Soviets will travel all night,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully at first… then Folsom realized that he need not he careful, that these were not men to give up so easily after having come so far. If that had been the case they would have done so hours before…. He began again. “I did not think of this until a few hours ago, but the submarine… there will be no need for it to stay in the Porsangerfjord. In fact, it will probably put out to sea to keep pace with the search party.” The other three continued to watch him, flickers of apprehension growing in their faces.

“When the search party finds that we left without waiting for them, they will probably inform the submarine, which will then break all speed records moving down the coast to drop off another party, well ahead of us. It will be quite plain to them where we are heading. They can read a map as well as we, and they will know that we sure as hell are not going to head inland to Kistrand. If they do drop another party, then they’ve got us in a vise.”

The other three reacted with varying degrees of anger or disgust, mostly directed at themselves for not having seen this possibility before. Teleman was awake now, the pain and fatigue of his screaming muscles forgotten for the moment.

“Okay, what do we do then?” Gadsen asked.

Folsom rubbed both hands across his face, massaging his weary eyes and wishing to God he had never left the Pentagon. “Well, first we all need sleep. So we take four hours out. That means we stop six hours and everyone but Teleman will stand a two-hour watch. Teleman is out, he needs all the sleep he can get.”

He ignored Teleman’s angry but feeble protest and continued. “Two hours each on watch will give us four hours of sleep. I’ll take the first watch, Mac, you take the second and Julie the last.” They nodded in agreement.

“What about tomorrow?” McPherson asked. “If we stop tonight, the Russians are going to be breathing down our necks.”

“I agree,” Folsom replied. “But I don’t see what else we can do, We all need rest too badly to move on any farther tonight. I don’t think it will do us any good to turn inland and try and approach the Norwegian base from the south. They will probably be watching for just such a move. I would guess the submarine will drop the second party as close to the base as they dare and work them back toward the first group. So about the only option left us is to make tracks for the base as fast as possible and hope to God that somehow we will miss the second party.”

“How about letting the RFK know?”

“No good. If we use the radio they’ll pick us up and pinpoint our location right down to the last meter. I can’t conceive of them not keeping a watch on the possible frequencies that we might use. All we can do is wait until they find us before calling for help. The captain should be able to figure some way to give us covering fire… if not, then he can contact the Norwegians for help.”

The four sat in silence for several minutes before Gadsen commented, “I sure as hell wouldn’t give a plug nickel for our chances.”

“Don’t quit yet,” Folsom warned. “We still have a couple of things in our favor. Number one, they have to move a lot more carefully than we do. They never know when Mac is going to open on them again, or even the Norwegians for that matter. They are in unfriendly territory. We, at least, can be assured of asylum in Norway. They can’t.

“Number two, they don’t know where we are, at least exactly where we are. And they don’t know that the ship is standing off the coast… at least I hope they don’t.” The silence descended again, unbroken even by the roaring wind that had been their constant companion for so long. The silence was thick, thick and heavy with the threat of their total exhaustion and potential capture. Teleman settled down into the sleeping bag and pushed his thawing feet against the chemical warming pad. In spite of his utter exhaustion, his mind was churning with the implications of Folsom words. They did not have much chance. That much was clear to a blind idiot. There was still nine miles to go to the Norwegian base, nine more miles that would take them all day tomorrow in their steadily degenerating condition. He knew that he could not make it and he doubted very much if the others would be able to either. The temperature was dropping fast, and six miles over the frozen, knee-high tufts of tundra grass in forty-below weather was too much to expect of any man. His mind began turning insidiously back to the thoughts that had nagged at him during the endless day. Which of the three men had the orders to kill him?

Teleman groaned inwardly. He was certain that one of them would try to kill him, but which one. He could not watch all three at once. McPherson had the training and the skill, that he knew. He had also been very solicitous of him all day, almost carrying him since noon. But Gadsen — he had not learned very much about the man at all. Except for a few wise comments on their predicament during the day, he had not spoken much…. In the middle of his self-created maze of danger, Teleman’s brain blanked and he was deeply asleep.

“Well, we can only wait and see what the new day brings,” Gadsen sighed. Folsom pulled on his face mask and gloves. “Yeah, I guess so.” What else was there to say? he thought.

He slammed a new clip into his carbine and shoved extras into a pocket. “Night-night.” He grinned and pulled the face mask tight, then pushed through the tent flaps and crawled outside.

The cold air hit him with the force of a truck, sucking the warm air from his body. Still on his knees, he curled into a tight ball, coughing into his fur-lined mittens, breathing slowly to avoid frosting his lungs. In a few moments the spasm passed and he straightened out, face still buried in his gloves while he breathed carefully to regain his breath. Even through the fur and nylon parka, the touch of the air was like hot iron. He stood up and began beating his arms together. We have to walk nine more miles through this, he thought, and he knew that they would never be able to make it, no matter what the circumstances were, no matter what the prize, up to and including life itself. It was an impossible task. But deep inside he knew that they would do it or die trying. Just as the Russians would catch them or die And he also knew that the Russians would not be waiting out the night in a tent — they would be using the night.

The harsh moon was a quarter of the way up in the sky. Its light falling on the freshly snow-covered ground gave him visibility almost to the horizon in every direction. The wind had died away completely, and in the frigid, still air his breath froze instantly, wreathing his head in a clammy fog if he stopped too long in one spot. The moon highlighted the tundra, with the hummocks of grass standing out in bold relief. Folsom had never dreamed it could be so cold. He had never experienced anything like this before.

The stars burned in the sky in spite of the moonlight, and the air was so cold and dry that he could detect no trace of ring around the moon. As if to form a backdrop for the unearthly beauty of the moon, the aurora had sprung into the northern sky, shimmering curtains of color that fluctuated and flowed in the gentle breeze of the electron stream arising eight minutes away in the sun’s corona. At any other time he would have been entranced with the shifting tapestry of color and form, but not tonight He moved slowly away from the tent, walking carefully around the tufts of frozen grass as they had been doing since entering the tundra. Not one of them could afford a twisted ankle now. Folsom stopped to peer around. He could see nothing on the waste of frozen terrain in any direction. At this point he knew that they were about seven miles from the sea. But in the crystal air the fury of the sea against the cliffs was faintly audible. At a thousand yards distance from the tent Folsom turned and began to move in a circle, with the tent as the center point. He would leave tracks in the snow, tracks that the Russians could not miss, but it didn’t matter. Tomorrow the Russians would find the campsite anyway.

There were two directions from which the Soviets could approach: east or west. The main party would come from the west

Although Folsom did not make the mistake of discounting them, he was fairly certain that this group, after traveling for almost a day longer than themselves, would be as exhausted. It was the group from the east, the expected second landing party, that he was worried about. They would be fresh.

Folsom concentrated his attention then on the east and the west. After forty minutes of plodding around the mile-long circle, it became a question of whether he could last the remaining hour and twenty minutes. Even with the most intense concentration and violent shivering and the continual plodding, he had to fight desperately the sleep that would steal quietly into his mind. Sleep that made him the same promises of warmth that it had made to Teleman all day, sleep and the warmth that his body craved now more than anything in life.

Folsom strove to shake off the exhaustion that was wearing him down, reaching at his eyelids with sandpapery fingers, and forced himself to keep plodding. Somewhere in the back of his mind, as he trudged through the endless circle under the erratic northern lights filling the sky with trembling curtains of fire, somewhere deep, almost below the conscious level, something was wrong, but his mind was too hazy, too sticky and numb, to pinpoint the sense of wrongness. Vaguely he realized that the missing factor was important, but the longer he walked, the more time that passed, the farther away the vagrant thought slipped. Now it was beyond his capability to muster the necessary energy to concentrate, and soon it had slipped completely from him.

On a sweep to the north,’ half asleep and mumbling to himself, McPherson came up behind and laid a hand on his shoulder. Folsom felt the big man’s hand grasp at his parka and automatically swung around, the butt of his carbine whipping through a vicious arc at the other’s unseen midsection. Orly Folsom’s tired reflexes saved McPherson from a solid clout in the belly. McPherson caught the rifle in one huge paw and stopped it, then gave Folsom a gentle shove toward the tent and watched him stumble away before he too began the chase around the endless circle.

Teleman was at the bottom of a long shaft. Above, the velvet-black sides of the hole spiraled up to an undefined blob of half light, a formless nothing. His mind refused to work, refused to coordinate sensory impressions, was mired in a haze of quicksand. He fell sharply… Teleman sat up in the darkened tent and waited for the shapeless blurs of darkness to form into patterns that represented walls of the tent and pieces of gear scattered about. The hoarfrost from their breathing was growing thick on the nylon walls. The suddenness of awakening had disoriented him for several panicky minutes before he realized that huddled next to him in sleeping bags were both McPherson and Folsom, and Gadsen’s sleeping bag was empty. That told him that it was the last watch before they would move on again. After the few hours of sleep, his mind and senses were preternaturally sharp. He did not realize that this was due to almost complete exhaustion and that it would melt away after the smallest exertion, leaving him again a semiconscious drone. He got quietly out of his sleeping bag and fished out the chemical heating pads. Of the three that Folsom had put in with him, only one retained any heat at all. He tucked it underneath his parka against his chest and picked up his carbine, a ration pack, and face mask and moved quietly to the tent flap.

When he poked his head out through the tent flaps, the mask, still heated from the tiny stove, warmed the air passing into his lungs to a breathable temperature. The combination of aurora borealis and moonlight illuminated the surrounding tundra with mid-evening intensity. After a moment he caught sight of Gadsen coming up from far to the east. The sailor was walking slowly, stopping every now and then to search the horizon carefully through the field glasses.

Teleman squirmed through the flaps and in a crouching run started south. After two hundred yards he flung himself flat in the snow and wriggled around to see if Gadsen had spotted him running from the tent. Gadsen had not and was now coming around the far side of the tent, almost a mile away from where he lay. Teleman decided to stay put until Gadsen had completed that part of the circle and started around again to the east. In his white parka he would be invisible at half the distance. So he lay unmoving in the snow, watching as the distant figure traveled farther around in his wide orbit. What chain of reasoning had prompted him to leave his companions and strike out on his own he did not quite understand.

He realized that he was carrying extremely vital information the American state-of-the-art in electronic countermeasures, aircraft and engine design and sensor technology. He also knew that this information locked away in his brain could easily be unlocked by the Soviets, and, therefore, he was much too valuable to let himself fall into their hands. Folsom, McPherson, Gadsen — all, or one, meant to kill him. Only that factor was ice clear in his drug-crazed mind.

What Teleman had endured in the past seventy-two hours might easily have killed a lesser man. Instead of recovering in the special-care unit of a military hospital, he was staggering around the North Cape of Norway in the midst of the century’s worst Arctic storm. His body still contained microresidues of the various psychic and-physical energizers and, without the compensating PCMS, was on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. The momentary hysteria hours before, which had sent him into a shallow coma that Folsom and Gadsen had mistaken for sleep, had been the beginning. The deepening cold endured since then was affecting the action of the drug residues, changing and catalyzing their effects to an extent never before tested. As a result Teleman’s mind burned with the steady intensity of an arc lamp. As he lay in the snow his mind was busy collating drug-affected impressions, misunderstood facts, and skewed extrapolations, all of which only served to reinforce his conviction that those helping him were actually his assassins. Forgotten was the intense effort, at the risk of their own lives, that had already been expended to aid him.

As Gadsen disappeared around the far side of the tent, Teleman got shakily to his feet and began to run at little more than a half trot due south. He had no firm plan in mind for his escape. The sudden awakening minutes before had brought only the galvanizing need for escape. Somewhere deep in his mind was the idea of heading south for several miles, then turning east into a shallow arc that would bring him to the naval base from the southeast at an angle great enough to pass unseen by Folsom and the others. If they had already arrived at the base he would simply denounce them as his would-be killers and claim asylum.

Teleman trotted on for several more minutes under the wavering streamers of electrons decorating the sky. The weird light made seeing difficult and twice he tripped and fell headlong. The third time he fell he found that he could not immediately get up. Stunned more by the lack of movement in his legs than by the force of the fall, Teleman lay prone, able to move only his head. The few minutes of running had taken him well away from the vicinity of the tent. He lay now in a blank white desert where the only movement was the aurora borealis dancing solemnly overhead. After several minutes during which the cold penetrated his furs with ice-fingers, he was able to get to his knees and, using the carbine as a crutch, pull himself to his feet.

Teleman staggered forward again at a shuffle, leaning heavily on the carbine. But to his mind’s eye he was running as swiftly as an arrow. Only a few more hours, he thought happily to himself, and he would reach the naval station — well ahead of the others. Once there, he would tell them all that had happened in the past two days, tell them that both Americans and Russians had violated their territory. Maybe they would even let him go along when they went out to round up the intruders.

Now he was strong and fresh again. The territory unreeled beneath his feet as he bounded over the snow. On the horizon was the low bulk of the naval base and the slender stems of gun barrels thrusting out toward the sea. He was so close, he thought, that he could stop and rest awhile, for there was no sense in arriving so out of breath that he could not tell his story. He stopped and sank down in the snow. Only a few minutes rest and then he would finish the last half mile. The brilliantly lit base area was now clearly visible, even if it was a few feet above the ground. That would make no difference. He could jump that high. Funny, these Norwegians, that they should paint the buildings and the compound a bright green. It was a naval base… it should be blue…. Folsom came completely awake the instant Gadsen burst through the tent flaps.

“Off to the west, about a dozen men… a mile out.” Folsom was already shrugging into his parka as McPherson grabbed up his pack and twisted to wake Teleman. “Goddamn,” he bellowed.

Folsom swung around and stared at the empty sleeping bag. “For Christ’s sake, where the hell has he gone?” he roared. Gadsen popped his head outside and then back in again.

“Wherever it is, we ain’t got much time to look for him. It’s going to take these bastards about ten minutes to get here.”

Folsom stood stock-still in the center of the tent, his mind churning furiously as he tried to decide what had to be done next. “All right, leave everything here but the carbines and ammunition. Outside and keep low so they can’t see us.” The three men crawled quickly outside into the bitter air and huddled close to the ground. Folsom pulled the binoculars to his eyes and examined the approaching Russians. There were six men spread out into a skirmish line almost half a mile long, both ends beginning to curl around to flank the tent. Quickly he swept the horizon north and then south. Turning to the east, he scanned the snow carefully to the horizon, but saw no sign of any second party closing from that direction.

In the meantime McPherson had been searching the snow around the tent. He raised an arm and motioned the others to join him, then pointed at a line of tracks leading south.

“I’ll lay odds that’s our boy.”

“Okay, south is as good a direction as any now. We go get him,” Folsom ordered, his angry voice gritting through clenched teeth. “What the hell do you suppose got into him anyway?”

Neither Gadsen nor McPherson replied, and in moments, hunching low to the ground, they were running south along the line of tracks. McPherson had unslung his pack and was dragging it after him in a vain effort to wipe away the trail they were leaving. If anything, the temperature had fallen even lower in the past five hours. As the men ran they left long streamers of frozen breath hanging in the crystal air. Above them the multicolored aurora borealis glimmered and writhed across the northern sky and Folsom again felt the strange, nagging sensation that he had forgotten some vital point. But as his body began to tire after the insufficient three hours of sleep, he found himself concentrating to the exclusion of all else, on running.

They stopped after ten minutes and threw themselves prone in the snow to rest and check on the Soviets. Through the glasses Folsom could see that the Russian troops were less than a hundred yards from the tent. The northern and southern ends of the line had circled until the tent was in the center. They were lying prone in the snow while two soldiers were crawling up to the tent. Folsom rolled over on his back and waited for his ragged breathing to smooth. In the ten minutes the three had been running they had covered perhaps one mile at a half trot, half run. All three were severely winded, but at least, Folsom thought, they had put enough distance between themselves and the tent so that they could now go on without being spotted in the fitful light.

“How far do you think Teleman managed to get?” he asked McPherson.

“I doubt if he could have gone much farther. I’m surprised we haven’t found him yet. He was in pretty bad shape when we stopped. We’ll be lucky to find him alive,” McPherson finished bleakly.

Folsom swore savagely. “The old man will have my head if we don’t.” Gadsen, looking miserable, rubbed his face with gloved hands. “I don’t see how the hell he could have gotten out of that tent without me seeing him,” he muttered.

“Hell, how were you to know that he would take off? You weren’t watching him. You were watching for the Russians. If there is any fault here at all, it’s mine. We should probably have rigged up something to wake us…” Folsom shook his head. The “what-if” line of excuse-making was a waste of energy. He stood up and took a last look at the Russians through the glasses, then swept the east once more. The two scouts had almost reached the tent. He knew it could not take them much longer to find out that their quarry had flown the coop. Whether they would automatically assume that the Americans had left ahead of them or would discover their tracks was a toss-up. In either case he wanted to get as far away as possible. Nothing had shown on the eastern horizon yet, but somewhere out there another Russian party was approaching. He wished to God he could get in touch with Larkin. Suddenly he felt completely inadequate to cope with the situation.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said quietly, starting south again along the parallel set of tracks that Teleman had left.

Teleman’s tracks were becoming more and more irregular as they trudged on. Shortly they came upon the spot where their quarry had first fallen. The depression in the snow, almost invisible in the uncertain light, showed that he had fallen cleanly and gotten up again without hesitation. Not daring to pause, the three sailors pushed on. Now the pace that Folsom had set was beginning to wear heavily. Their breath was coming in gasps of exhaustion, their half run, half trot beginning to flag. When they reached the second indentation in the fresh snow surface Folsom waved them to a halt. Gasping for breath and leaning heavily on their carbines, they knelt in the snow. Finally, after a few minutes, McPherson dragged himself forward a few yards and came back with Teleman’s insulated canteen. The three looked at one another and with the same thought were up and running at once. Within the next few hundred yards they found his carbine, the lightweight pack, and finally the spot where he had fallen the third time.

Folsom looked around wildly but the horizon ahead was bare. In the past few minutes the aurora borealis had grown in intensity, but its wild gyrations made visibility even poorer. All three were gasping hoarsely for breath, barely this side of collapse themselves. But not once did they stop to consider their own bodies. The thought uppermost in their minds was: If they were this bad off, how much worse was Teleman?

With a hoarse command from Folsom, they started forward again. By now they had come three miles from the tent. The tent and the Russians were lost in the gloom on the northern horizon. For the first time since he had landed on the. North Cape, Folsom began to hope for a resurgence in the high winds that had buffeted them all through the day, or better yet, another blizzard. Given either to wipe out the last traces of their trail and they might win yet. But the cloudless sky offered the hope of neither. They were running again, running with the desperation of exhausted men who must run to save their lives and that of a comrade. Under the eerily lighted sky they raced on across the snow-covered expanse of the tundra plain in pursuit of the staggering track of the delirious pilot.

Once they stopped for a brief rest and Folsom searched the horizon with the binoculars. There was no sign of pursuit in any direction. But he knew that condition would not last. Then they were off again, to stop almost immediately. Gadsen had seen it first, a lump of rags huddled into the snow.

Complete and utter silence had descended over the vast reaches of the North Cape. Along the shore the storm-raised combers continued to pound against the rock with monotonous regularity. But inland nothing moved on the plain of snow. It was as if the cold had frozen even the air into immobility. Folsom knelt down by Teleman’s body and turned him over slowly. He pushed back the neck flap, pulled off one of his own gloves and felt for a heartbeat.

“I’ll be damned. He’s still alive,” he said wonderingly. “You’re kidding,” Gadsen said, dropping down beside him. “How the hell could he be?” Folsom shook his head and rebuttoned Teleman’s neck flap. “You’ve got me. Now, how do we get him out of here?”

McPherson shrugged out of his pack and reslung his rifle. “I’ll carry him.”

CHAPTER 19

The strident sounds of the battle alarm echoed through the ship. No practice situation now; each crew member understood fully that this was the real thing. Lieutenant Commander Bridges, strapped into the seat of the executive officer’s console, watched the battle lights flick from amber to green as each station reported in. A hard knot of both fear and excitement was building in his stomach as the track of the submarine, relayed to his console from the large bridge display, began to move steadily towards the battle cruiser.

“All stations manned and ready, sir,” he reported, as the last light, the security room, turned green.

“Thank you, Mr. Bridges,” Larkin said calmly. “Bring her around on a course of op° and ten knots, rig for silent running. All ECM to on.”

Bridges punched the heading into the computer console and stabbed down the ECM gear switch. The computer control net within the ship allowed either the captain or the executive officer to control the ship during battle stations, thus avoiding the delays encountered in relaying orders through the helmsman and then to the engine room. Larkin still preferred to sit aloof on his high seat and give orders, leaving it to the executive officer to handle the ship. No provisions had been made for controlling the ship from any other location, nor was there need. In nuclear sea warfare there is no such item on the shipwright’s bill of materials as armor plate. And conventional weapons were of no value against the U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy, as she was well,protected by her speed, defensive weaponry, and ECM gear. A direct hit on the bridge would not matter. A hit with nuclear weapons within 500 yards would destroy her utterly. Within one mile, a direct hit would probably kill the entire ship’s complement with radiation. Larkin had not moved his eyes from the holographic map display since the Russian submarine had turned toward them and begun to run out to sea, directly away from North Cape Island, where it had lain since early that afternoon. Since 1500 the RFK had tried in vain to maintain a radar and sonar watch on the submarine, but its proximity to the rock walls of the cliffs edging the island had created a maze of conflicting signals. All during the long afternoon and evening, the feeling that the Russians had indeed landed a second party had grown. Now, with the submarine moving for a third time, it could mean either that the Soviet commander had realized his mistake and was moving to land a third party ashore between Folsom and the naval base, or that the RFK had been spotted. Long, agonizing minutes passed with the speed of a glacier’s tread as the submarine increased its speed to twenty-two knots on a course that would bring an intercept in less than an hour. Finally, after twenty minutes, the submarine came about to a course paralleling the west coast. Larkin let loose a sigh of relief that was lost in similar sounds from the other eight men on the bridge. The submarine was still unaware of their presence. But an even greater dilemma now presented itself to Larkin. His theory, that the submarine was moving down the coast to drop the third shore party as close to the unsuspecting naval base as it dared, from which they would then work their way back to meet Folsom, was confirmed.

He knew that he could trust Folsom to avoid capture as far as possible. But Folsom was surrounded and probably not even aware of it. As he weighed the possibilities, the choices became clear to him.

As captain of the U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy, and responsible not only for the safety of the ship but his own shore party and the downed pilot, Larkin indeed had a choice to make: reveal his position to the submarine and engage, or wait until the third shore party was dropped and move in to destroy the submarine and save his own landing party with whatever fire support he could provide. The first choice was the more logical, but its danger lay in the fact that the Soviets had already expended a great effort to capture Teleman, and it was more than likely that the submarine would turn and fight rather than run. If that happened, it could very well be the start of, if not a third world war, then a major freeze in East-West relations, which could be even more disastrous in the long run. A third possibility, that Teleman would be captured and taken aboard the submarine, which would then be sunk, to Larkins credit, never even suggested itself.

Larkin, very uncharacteristically, had sent off a blistering message to Virginia with instructions to relay to Washington and the White House Position Room for immediate action. The message had laid down in no uncertain terms exactly what would happen if the submarine was allowed to disgorge its human freight. Minutes ago a terse message had come in over the direct channel ordering him to wait for orders. Now he sat at the command console, the power and weaponry of an entire World War II Navy at his command rolled into one single ship, and he was powerless. All he could do was shadow the submarine at a distance of eighty miles. It was now obvious to Larkin that the submarine commander was heading for a sheltered spot on the western. coast of the North Cape to drop a third landing party. The Soviet skipper was obviously going to attempt to take advantage of the bad sea conditions as cover *for his landing party above the Norwegian naval base. If he did so, all hope for Folsom and his party outrunning the other two parties was gone. They would fall right into the arms of this third party. Larkin was caught in a quandary and his helplessness showed in the steady drumming of his fingers on the console panel. He decided to wait. The submarine was now moving around the lee of the North Cape. and into the weather side, exposed to the wind and waves that screamed down from — the Great Barrier across two hundred miles of open sea. It was just possible that the submarine would not be able to spot a location where a third shore party could be landed.

The U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy dug into the waves as Larkin ordered her speed increased to fifteen knots. She burrowed into the high waves and thrust forward, white water breaking around her bow as she swept on, running for position off.the mouth of the fjord.

“Hold his head up a little higher… he’ll choke if…” Teleman did choke as the steaming hot tea dribbled in equal portions down his chin and throat. He coughed wealdy, tried to sit up, and found he could not.

“I’ll be damned,” he heard someone say. “I never thought he’d wake up again.” He managed to open his eyes, focus on the face above, but it was a moment or two before he recognized Folsom beneath the beard and cold blisters. He lay back exhausted until a heavy voice, speaking a guttural language, brought him bolt upright, mind clear and sharp for the first time in two days. In back of Folsom was a parka-clad. figure holding a rifle loosely but ready on the back of Folsom’s head. Beyond the Russian soldier were several more, all crowded into the tent, heads bent together as they talked. Every few moments one of them would look over at him, a smite of victory on his face. He found Gadsen and McPherson, both cramped against the tent wall with their hands and feet bound securely. Only Folsom was unfettered, and the Russian guard never took the rifle off the back of his head.

“How the hell…” he began.

Folsom gave a brief smile. “You decided to…”

That was as far as he got. The Russian jabbed him in the back with the rifle and motioned him away from Teleman. Then he called out a phrase in Russian to the group of men. One of them, stooping in the low tent, came over to where Teleman. was sitting and grabbed his wrist. Angrily, Teleman shook his hand loose and pushed the man away. The guard stepped in close with the rifle, shoving it into Teleman’s face, forcing him back against the rolled-up sleeping bag.

“You goddanined idiot, get that thing out of my face before I take it away from you and bend it over your head.”

The Russian did not understand English, but the intent of Teleman’s words was clear. His smile grew wider and he moved in closer, snapping off the safety at the same time. A harsh word from the man Teleman had pushed away stopped him and he backed up, still wearing the grin that plainly invited Teleman to try and back up his outburst. Teleman saw that, like Folsom, the Russians were heavily bearded and their faces all bore traces of frostbite and the chapping effects of the dry, bitter air. This must have been the first party, he thought, the group that had been chasing them for nearly three days. He wondered how they had managed to take them unaware in the tent. He glanced over at Folsom, but the exhausted executive officer was sitting with his forehead resting on drawn-up knees, almost asleep.

“You are the pilot of the American spy airplane?” the Russian asked in accented but perfectly understandable English. “What kind of airplane?” Teleman mimicked the accent.

“You are stubborn. However, that will not last. For now, are you feeling all right?”

Teleman ignored him and slumped back down on the sleeping bag and closed his eyes. “Get lost,” he said wearily.

The Russian gave the guard instructions in Russian and Teleman caught the words chyornii chelovek, and knew they referred to him. The guard nodded and backed away to sit down against the wall of the tent, rifle in his hands, relaxed but ready. Behind his shut eyelids Teleman’s mind worked furiously. Flashes of memory having to do with running across the tundra kept passing through his mind, but he could not decide if they had to do with the long day’s hike or were somewhere in between. He kept recalling green buildings on the horizon, but ascribed these to dreams. He still had vivid memories of the dream involving the Mongolian sheepherder. As Teleman got himself under control and began to think clearly again, he realized that for the past forty-eight hours he had been fighting off the effects of lingering traces of lysergic acid and amphetamines. Even without the drug effects, the long periods of the desperate flight across the North Cape should have been forgotten as they occurred. This would have been normal for any man as exhausted as he was. But not to be able to remember more than highly colored and wavering details as seen through a glass partly obscured with flowing water, Teleman knew was not normal. Then with a shock he realized that he could remember nothing at all since one of the late afternoon rest stops. He could recall no more than hazy snatches of a warm sleeping bag and Folsom’s voice laying out the’ guard-duty pattern.

Teleman concentrated on what Folsom had said, trying to bring back a little of what remained… he had awakened to see Folsom and McPherson rolled into their sleeping bags. Gadsen had been on guard duty and he remembered that he had crept away from the tent. The entire sequence of events suddenly was clear to him. He had been convinced that the three Americans were plotting to kill him, to keep him from falling into Russian hands. He had crept away from the tent to run south with the idea of reaching the Norwegian naval base. He recalled the bitter cold… falling… and after that, nothing, until he had awakened a few minutes ago as Folsom forced the hot tea down his throat. He opened his eyes, sick with the realization that Folsom, Gadsen, and McPherson had been captured because they had come after him rather than save their own skins by abandoning a madman and making a run for the Norwegians. Now the four were exhausted, their last hope completely gone. Five Russians were in the tent and, as he glanced about, the tent flap parted and a sixth entered.

He closed his eyes again. He was to blame for their being captured. It had been a foolish stunt to try and run-for it alone. It had been a stupid reaction to believe that the three sailors who were risking their freedom, their very lives for him, would try to kill him. That this reaction was due to the traces of the drugs still left in his system, coupled with exhaustion and intense cold, did not occur to Teleman. He knew only that he was to blame.

“Hey, Commie, come over here.” Teleman struggled up into a sitting position again, sneering at the guard who swung the rifle to cover him.

The English-speaking Russian approached and Teleman motioned toward the guard. ” Tell that fool to put that thing away before he shoots himself.” The Russian ignored him; his face bore no traces of humor at. Teleman’s attempted levity. “What do you want?”

“I want to know what happens next.”

The Russian turned away and Teleman grabbed his sleeve. The Russian swung around and hit him squarely across the face. “Keep your hands to yourself,” he said through clenched lips. “You or your friends killed two of my men. I do not like that. If I did not have such orders, I would kill you all and have done with

Teleman rubbed his face where the other had struck hint “Did it ever occur to. you that your own pilots tried, and almost succeeded, to kill me?”

“Of course. You are a spy,” the other hissed and left him. So that’s that, Teleman thought. No information is going to come out of that one. Of course he knew what was going to happen now. Very soon there would be more Russians, and then a long walk to the coast and the waiting submarine. Then back to Murmansk at high speed where an MVD cellar and an intelligence squad would be waiting to question him. Oh, very carefully of course. There would be no actual physical torture, but Teleman knew what successive hours of sleeplessness could do, particularly in his condition. And after they had taken blood samples and found the drug traces in his system, they would know just what chemicals and combinations of interrogation to use. He would never know just what he would sign in a matter of hours. Nor, for the purposes the Russians had in mind, Would he need to know. With a signed confession and carefully edited television tapes to play to the world, it would make little or no difference what he said or did. His capture and subsequent confession would not offset the black mark the Russians were going to take over the war in Sinkiang, but the information they would extract from him would make the trouble more than worthwhile. Then it would be years before the United States would be able to develop a new surveillance system of such magnitude — the completion of the Super SAMOS system was still five years away. Damn it all, he thought bitterly, he had really blown it now. Teleman lay back against the sleeping bag and closed his eyes, trying to shut out the knowledge of what the coming hours would bring, not only for himself, but for Folsom, McPherson, and Gadsen. Be knew they would receive the same kind of treatment. The capture of three American sailors would only be the icing on the propaganda cake. For the Russians it would be a double victory. Not only would they have the pilot of the most advanced aircraft the United States had ever built, but three crew members, of the most advanced naval ship — all for practically free.

Teleman shifted uncomfortably, and as he did so his hand brushed something hard beneath his parka. His breath caught in his throat. Very carefully, as casually as he could, he moved his hand away. The Russians had not searched him. Of course not, he thought, he had been almost dead when they found him. They would have been in too much of a hurry to get him back to the tent. And, in failing to search him, they had missed the .22 caliber survival pistol he had pushed into the waistband of his trousers when he had dressed for the start of the long race. Probably not even Folsom was aware that he had the pistol. It had remained tucked inside the folds of fur and nylon where even he had forgotten about it.

For several seconds he did not move a muscle, as his mind raced to find a way to capitalize on the possession of the revolver. One .22 caliber, nine-shot revolver against a 7.65 mm Soviet service rifle_ and five other assorted weapons. In the semidarkness of the tent could the guard determine its puny size? If he could, would it make a difference?

Would he guess at the power of the magnum charges? Could he, Teleman, cover him in time to prevent an outcry that would alert the others? Too many questions, too damn many, but then, it was their only chance.

Teleman settled himself as if falling asleep and cracked his eyelids only far enough to watch the guard. Obviously the man was as weary as they. Although he still sat upright, the rifle now rested across his lap and his eyes were half closed. Even so, Teleman could see that they glanced steadily around the tent, watching, aware of every move being made.

Teleman felt the deep gulfs of sleep tugging at him again. The tent had warmed considerably from the heat of, packed bodies and the small stove. The folded sleeping bag made an excessively comfortable bed, and he had to continue the portrayal of the exhausted pilot in order not to arouse their suspicions. Teleman knew that it was now a race to see if the Russian would relax his vigil before he, himself, fell asleep. Five minutes passed, then ten minutes. Teleman concentrated so hard on staying awake that his eyes watered, blurring his vision. He turned his head ever so slightly to the left and felt a sharp disappointment. Folsom would be of no immediate help. Although he had not been tied, he was sound asleep, and Teleman was certain that it would take something akin to the last trumpet to wake him.

But he was wrong. Folsom groaned and started to turn over. In the process he half sat up and so was facing directly across the tent from the guard. Immediately the Russian came to his knees, raising the rifle, pointing it directly at Folsom. This was the opening that Teleman had been waiting for.

The guard leaned forward to prod Folsom and his shoulder momentarily obscured his view of Teleman. Quickly, yet carefully, Teleman reached beneath his parka and pulled the revolver from his waistband. Before the guard had settled back, glaring at Folsom, Teleman had dropped his arm back to his side, hiding the pistol under a fold of his parka. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Folsom half sit forward, ruhbing his forehead where the guard’s rifle muzzle had jabbed him. Every second counted now, literally counted, Teleman knew. The five Russians in the front of the tent were still deeply engrossed in their conversation and nearly all had their backs to him. The guard was still watching Folsom. In a moment he would settle back across from Teleman.

Teleman raised his hand and arm until the pistol was lying across his chest, muzzle pointing directly at the Russian’s heart. The guard, rifle still aiming at Folsom, turned and Teleman watched with satisfaction as his face took on a comical look of surprise. Very carefully Teleman pointed with his left hand, motioning for the guard to keep silent. Then he kicked Folsom.

For a minute Folsom did not respond, and Teleman felt sweat break out on his forehead in fear that the executive officer had fallen asleep again. He did not dare take his eyes off the guard, who any moment now would recover from his surprise. Teleman motioned savagely for him to raise the rifle toward the tent roof and kicked Folsom squarely in the knee. This time he jumped.

The entire scenario unfolded as a slow-motion dream. Each action was drawn out to a nervous breaking point and Teleman was almost convinced that the Russian would blur into motion and pluck the pistol from his unresponsive fingers. Then Folsom was moving out of the line of the muzzle and extracting the rifle from the dazed guard. Folsom glanced at Teleman from his kneeling position and shook his head in wonderment. Feeling very aged and decrepit, Teleman got to his knees, then both Teleman and Folsom faced the five Russians in the front of the tent.

“The first one who makes the slightest move gets shot,” Folsom intoned solemnly. They stiffened as one man and swung around. The same shock suffused the five faces as had colored the face of the guard. Finally the one who spoke English managed to stammer out a confused question. His answer was the roar of the heavy military rifle tearing a hole in the tent flap. Folsom said nothing more, merely glared over the rifle barrel, his meaning intently clear in the acrid cordite fumes filling the tent. Satisfied that they were thoroughly cowed, Teleman crawled around behind Folsom and went to work on the lengths of nylon cord binding Gadsen and McPherson.

“All right; if you are all ready let’s move out.” Folsom finished a quick survey of the tent and motioned toward the tent flap. He turned once and grinned back at the miserable and bound Soviet troopers as Teleman, Gadsen, and McPherson, shouldering a large bundle, pushed past him and out into the cold. “Have fun boys. We’ll send the Norwegians back for you. Strasvechil.”

“Oh… that means ‘Hello,’ Pete,” Gadsen chortled.

“Oh, yeah… how ’bout that?”

Still grinning, he followed the others out and they turned southwesterly. The Russians had been stripped of their clothes down to long underwear and socks. Their clothes were in the bundle McPherson was carrying. Without clothes, these six Soviet troopers would he unable to chase them farther. Five minutes exposure in the bitter, subzero weather would kill them if they tried. Instead, they were left with an ample supply of fuel, at least enough to last until the Norwegians or their own comrades could rescue them from their predicament.

The four men, heightened with the excitement, almost, but not quite looked forward to the remaining miles of the trek across the tundra and down through the edging cliffs that would bring them to the Norwegian naval base. Even the fact that Folsom had added an extra three miles to the trek to take them far south of the anticipated second party did little to dim their spirits. In a matter of five or six hours at most they would be trudging into the safe hands of the Norwegians. The warmth of that reception they would worry about when the time came. The worst that could happen would be internment—

preferable under any conditions to the MVD cellars in Murmansk. Although still exhausted by the three days and more of exposure to. the Arctic storm, the several hours of forced rest had done much to revive them. Teleman was completely clear-headed, though still experiencing brief periods of dizziness and disorientation from the remaining drug residues. Even so, he was confident that he would make it through. What shape he would be in he did not know, or even much care any more. Just to make it through, that would be enough now. Folsom set an easy yet steady pace. The four men moved along under the brightening aurora borealis. They were strung out in a line one hundred yards long, Folsom leading off, Gadsen second, followed by Teleman and McPherson, with his bundle of clothing, acting as rear guard.

McPherson, as he strode along carefully watching Teleman, smiled to himself every once in a while, recalling the scene in the tent. The first he remembered after falling asleep in the overheated tent was Teleman sawing away at his, McPherson’s, bonds with the guard’ s knife. It had taken him several moments to awaken enough to realize what was happening. The Russian troopers had been lined up in front of the tent and ordered to lean precariously forward with legs and arms spread and hands on the tent wall, which provided a not-too-firm support. Folsom had watched every move with the heavy Russian army rifle cocked and ready as the Russians stripped under his watchful eye. Gadsen, cradling a Russian submachine gun, had joined him, making pointed comments in Polish, which some of the Russians understood.

McPherson shook his head. First he runs away and manages to get us all captured because we were so intent on trying to bring him around that the Russians just walked up on us, then he pulls a pistol and we all walk away.

“Hey, Major,” he yelled ahead to the stiff figure. Teleman turned his head to glance at the burly sailor.

“Hey, Major, when you get tired of this airplane nonsense, I’ll get you into the SEALS—if you promise to lay off the acid!”

It was close to four hours of very nearly steady travel before the party reached the first indications of the cliffs leading down to the Norwegian base, still two miles distant around the headland. The going had been both easier and faster than they had expected. So far they had seen no sign of the supposed pursuing forces and Folsom had about decided that any threat of a third party had been pure imagination. The Soviets could not carry unlimited manpower aboard the submarine. In any event they had swung nearly three miles south of their former line of march and so had probably avoided them. Folsom called a halt and hunkered down to wait while each man trudged up. During the long march the line had gradually lengthened until Teleman and. McPherson were half a mile behind. Teleman was still walking under his own steam, but the set, agonized look on his face was an eloquent indication of his physical condition. McPherson had discarded the bundle of winter clothes three miles south and west of the tent, pitching them behind one of the hummocks of tundra grass growing in the otherwise desolate plain of snow and ice.

While he waited, Folsom scanned the area ahead with the binoculars, knowing that the roughest part of the journey still lay ahead. Seen through the field glasses, the tundra in front of them appeared little different from what lay behind unless one noted the low ridges and hummocks that marked the edge of the coastal cliffs. How high, and how rugged they would be to negotiate, he had no idea. He only hoped that they would not prove impassable. The edge of the cliffs were, he judged, now less than a mile ahead. He swept the glasses to the north, but the terrain was bare of any movement or sign of life. As the others drifted up he hunkered down on his heels and waited. The continuous walking through the savage, subzero cold was fast reducing them to walking ghosts. The euphoria that had infused them on leaving the tent had long since evaporated during the gruelling hike. Folsom knew that the stick figures in their flapping Arctic gear clustering around him were close to the very last extreme of physical effort. If any of them felt the way he did… and Teleman for one was in even worse condition… Briefly he described the route ahead. All knew that the only information about the cliffs came from the topographical map he carried in his pocket. How reliable it was, they did not know. Guriously enough, their lives might depend in the next few hours on some remote German cartographer of the defunct Third Reich Vermacht The map had originally been drawn for the Nazi Occupation forces in Norway. Teleman groaned and got to his feet, swinging his arms. “Hell man, I don’t care how hard it’s going to be, let’s just get it over with. If I spend much more time in the great outdoors, all you’ll have left to carry back will be a solid block of ice.” Folsom nodded and stood up. “Okay with me too. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The small party struck out toward the fringing hummocks. After a few hundred yards the hummocks began to turn into slab-sided hills as they emerged in the deceptive light. Shortly the party had reached the base of the first line of hills and began the steep climb to the top. Before they had gained half the distance Folsom ordered a halt while they tied themselves in line with a length of nylon rope. In their weakened condition a misstep resulting in a fall would take the individual all the way back down. And they did not have strength to waste reclimbing hills. It took the four men twenty minutes of climbing to reach the gently rolling crest, less than four hundred feet above the level of the plain. Folsom untied the rope from his waist and walked forward to where the downward slope began and-pulled the field glasses from beneath his parka.

Standing on the crest of the hill, he could make out the sheen of the fjord waters below. Between the hill on which he stood and the final line of cliffs leading down to the fjord were a series of rugged and broken hillocks and cols of bare rock, resembling the snaggle-toothed mouth of some mythical Scandinavian giant wrenched up from the fringing rock.

Disappointment crashed down on Folsom. They would have at least another hour of rugged climbing before they could reach the fjord. And then there still remained the hike to the Norwegian naval base, out of sight around a headland a mile or so north. So damn close… so damn close…

Folsom turned away from the depressing scene and trudged back to where the others waited and sank down beside them.

“There’s a stiff climb ahead,” he said bitterly. “Another hour of climbing before we hit the cliffs.” He picked up his, carbine and fiddled with the stock. After a moment of silence, McPherson stood up and took the glasses to search the horizon to the east and north. The four-hundred-foot height of the. hill gave him a wide scope of vision. hi the uncertain light he almost thought he had spotted their tent far to the north and east, but when he tried to find it again, he failed. Finally he swung around restlessly and went back to the far side of the hill. The spectral figures of Folsom, Teleman, and Gadsen joined °him as he went past.

Folsom accepted the glasses again and, after another moment’s hesitation, trudged to the rim of the hogback and lay down full length in the snow. The expanse of frosted rock stretched away below him, resembling the familiar waves of the Arctic storm, each crest of rock capped with a dusting of snow. He rewarmed the eyepieces in his hands. Directly below, the hillside sloped away at a gentle angle until it met a sharp drop of some forty or so feet to a shelf of granite, a man’s height below that. From there the slope was gentle for a half mile until it rose abruptly to a sheer rock wall that, from this distance anyway, offered little hope of hand-or footholds. He shifted slowly south, Ending-nothing that would indicate an easier way, then north. After several minutes he located a shelf that seemed to have been slashed out of the rock wall, forming a small pass that cut through at mid-height. From what he could see of the other side, there were no impassable obstacles.

He rolled over and sat up. “I think maybe there is a way to at least get through that rock wall down there.”

Teleman nodded painfully and shifted the burden of the Russian carbine he had been carrying since leaving the tent. So far he had successfully resisted McPherson’s attempts to exchange it for his own lighter AR-18. Teleman shifted the carbine on its sling around his neck and shoulder and nodded. “After having come so far, it would be a shame to quit now.”

McPherson nodded.

“I guess that makes it unanimous then,” Gadsen said. “Let’s move out.” Once again Folsom watched the motley crew of scarecrows assemble and rope themselves together. On the verge of exhaustion, as he himself was, he marveled at the deep reserves in Teleman that enabled the man to go on.

They headed down the slope with the shuffling gait of tired men, each fighting to retain his foothold in the hard-packed snow of the windward side. At the foot of the hogback they halted while McPherson hauled a longer rope out of his pack and fastened one end into fixed loop.

“You first, Commander?”

Folsom nodded and slipped the noose over his head and down under his shoulders. He backed off a ways and tested the firmness of the knot by pulling against McPherson, then swung carefully over the edge of the steep slope and half slid, half climbed down until he was just above the vertical drop to the shelf. He glanced up at McPherson and waved one hand for slack and disappeared abruptly over the edge. He reappeared a moment later, standing on the ledge and slipped the noose off. McPherson pulled it up and motioned Gadsen to go next. Gadsen followed Folsom down, and, in minutes, McPherson was hauling it up for Teleman.

“Feel up to it, Major?”

“There’s only one way down…”

“Yeah, there is at that. Look, just take it easy. I’ll pay out the rope. You just hang on for the ride. The commander will help you down that last bit.” Teleman nodded. “How are you going to get down?”

“Just tell the others to stand clear. I’ll be right behind you.” He grinned. Teleman smiled back at him. “Thanks for your help, Beau. I couldn’t have made it this far without you.”

Teleman grasped his arm, then started down the slope. A few feet away he slipped, and McPherson hauled back on the rope to keep him from tumbling. The stretch with Teleman was the hardest of all for McPherson, who had to maintain a steady tension of the line to keep him from going over the edge of the drop-off. His strength, as prodigious as it was, was nearly exhausted by the past days’ efforts. Teleman, all but dangling on the end of the rope, realized this and scrabbled hard with his boots for a foothold in the wind-packed snow. Finally he managed to kick through the crust and dig the toe of a boot in and bring himself to a halt. Teleman waved weakly up to McPherson to wait and gratefully felt the cutting edge of the rope slack off. He knew that both of them needed a moment’s rest.

With his left boot he kicked a second toehold in the snow and lowered himself the length of his drawn-up knee and kicked a third hole with the right boot. Then he rested a moment and peered over his shoulder to see how near the drop-off was. Still twenty feet or so to go. Teleman lowered himself again and clutched at the first toehold with his gloved hand. Now he was able to work his way down carefully, saving McPherson the effort of fending his 172-pound weight. Shortly he felt empty space beneath his boot, then a moment later Gadsen had reached up and caught his foot. The rope slacked enough to give him room and he waved Gadsen away and dropped the last eight feet into the banked snow at the foot of the wall. The rope followed him down like a snake and he got shakily to his feet and backed away from the wall, motioning Gadsen and Folsom to do the same.

“The man says watch out…”

At the same time he caught sight of McPherson scrabbling down the slope on his seat, legs extended to break his speed, an idiot grin affixed to his face. He slowed slightly above the drop-off, then shot over to land relaxed in the trained parachutist’s roll, legs bent and a roll-over onto the left hip. McPherson got to his feet, brushing away the snow, still grinning.

“Most fun I’ve had since I started this cruise.”

“Crazy idiot, you could have busted your neck in three places.” Folsom grinned and waved at the other two. “Come on, let’s tackle the next phase of this endless jaunt.” The next mile was an easy slope downhill leading to what Folsom had optimistically termed the pass through the rock wall that now stretched above them. Close-up the wall did not appear as formidable as it had through the glasses, but still the pass offered an easier and less strenuous climb.

The faint touches of wind that had begun to spring up again on the plain were stronger among the rock formations. The weirdness of the tiny valley was accentuated by the aurora borealis, which, at the same time, made seeing so difficult that Folsom had been forced to an easier pace than he would otherwise have chosen. Even so, they had covered the mile to the pass quickly enough. The pass was a natural path leading up, twisting through the rock until it disappeared around a curve several hundred feet away. For a moment Folsom hesitated to start forward. The narrow way was an ideal ambush site. Ridiculous, he thought, there was no way in the world that the Russians could have selected this particular place to lie in wait…. Folsom snorted and started the climb.

CHAPTER 20

Folsom had been partially right The pass, such as it was, had been clear through the rock barrier barring their way to the narrow ledges that marked the beginning of the steep slopes leading down to the fjord. The Russians spotted them as they were midway in their descent.

The four had reached the top of the pass and rested for a few minutes before going on. On the narrow ledges between the top of the pass and the edge of the cliffs they were buffeted again by the stiffening winds blowing in from the sea. After a brief exam-nation of the cliffs Folsom was surprised with the apparent ease with which they could make the descent Although steep, the cliff face — sheltered from the generations of wind in the deep fjord, which had worn the seaward-facing rock smooth — was broken and channeled enough to present an almost ladder-like descent of its 160 feet They began the climb down to the beach with some faint degree of optimism. It was Gadsen who first heard the faint rifle report and saw the spurt of rock indicating where the bullet had struck. His warning shout thrust them under an overhang into the cover of the wall itself, from which they tried to spot the Soviets on the cliff top. The overhang was invisible from above and prevented a clear shot from the top of the cliffs. It had been pure luck that someone, overeager perhaps, had fired too soon. In any event, the four Americans were safe for the moment

But only for a moment There were several alternate ways leading down from the cliff edge and the Soviets could flank them easily and within minutes. While the overhang furnished cover from above, there was nothing to use as shelter against fire coming from either side. The four men knew that they had to move and move fast.

“Down that way, through the cleft,” Folsom shouted over the wind gusting through the rock crannies. “One at a time. Mac, lead off. When you reach the cleft, give us covering fire.”

McPherson nodded, crawled to the edge of the overhang, and peered carefully upward. Nothing moved on the cliff tops, above or on either side. He looked down and spent a few seconds examining the route he would follow. Then, satisfied, he came to his feet and plunged downward to a narrow shelf, ran lightly along it for several feet, and vaulted over a boulder into the shelter of a slot in the rock wall. A single shot snapped after him, but no spurt of rock indicated where the bullet had struck. McPherson waved a hand over the top of the boulder to show that he was all right A moment later Teleman saw the muzzle of his carbine appear and he nudged Gadsen.

“Let’s get set,” he muttered.

“You first, Major,” Folsom said tightly, “and don’t stop. Just go!” Teleman nodded. McPherson popped up and fired a fast burst, then ducked back down again to scramble to the far end of the slab-shaped rock. A fusilade of rifle fire danced off the rock where he had been. McPherson waited for it to die away and jumped up to fire again, a long burst this time that raked across the top of the cliff. Teleman scrambled forward at the same time. As he dropped onto the ledge he thought he heard a faint scream, but the sound whirled away on the wind, almost instantaneously. It sounded as if it had come from above, but he couldn’t be sure. He shuttled along the ledge awkwardly, wondering if it had come from McPherson, until he heard Mac’s carbine stuttering again, and he concentrated on his running.

The ledge was less than eighteen inches wide and the footing treacherous with scattered rock and shale. As he neared the end he slipped and fell forward onto the boulder with stunning force. His head glanced off the rock and exploded with pain. Feebly cursing, he dragged himself over, almost directly beneath McPherson’s carbine, and slid down the other side. Seconds later

Gadsen fell over on top of him and Folsom followed in a dive that just missed the tangle of arms and legs.

McPherson crouched down beside them. “Everybody get here in one piece?” Teleman sat up, massaging his forehead, and his hand came away coated with blood. So what else is new, he thought with resignation.

“Julie, check that cut,” Folsom snapped. “Mac, what’s the situation?”

“About seven of them, I think. One was going over the edge when I hit him. He got hung up on that spur of rock there,” he finished.

Folsom pulled the binoculars from beneath his parka and turned them on the cliff tops. In the brightening light of midday he could make out a green-clad arm draped over the same out-thrust of rock McPherson had pointed out. Nothing more. The cliff top was bare.

“Okay, you convinced them to keep their heads down anyway. I think we have enough cover, if we move fast and stay close to the rock, to make it down to the beach. We should be able to reach that headland before they hit the beach.” He turned to Teleman and squatted down beside him, where Gadsen was wrapping a piece of cloth around Teleman’s forehead. The make-shift bandage was already stained bright red, but the blood was congealing quickly in the cold. Folsom had caught a glimpse of the cut before Gadsen had gone to work on it. An ugly gash across the bend of the forehead on the right side, almost three inches long. The fall on the rock had laid the skin open to the whitish bone.

“That cut is going to leave a nasty scar,” he murmured as Gadsen tied the bandage tight and sawed off the ends with his sheath knife.

“Big deal,” Teleman muttered.

Folsom backed into the shelter on the cleft, stood up, and carefully edged forward until he could just see over the boulder. The sun was just edging above the horizon as they went over the top. Now the line of the cliff was back-lit with what to his night-adjusted eyes appeared as full daylight. Down in the cleft, where the sun would not reach until at least May, he knew that it was still pitch dark. He was counting on the gloom in the southwestward-facing cliff to provide as much shelter as the rock.

He watched for a full minute before he caught sight of someone moving on the top. As he watched, the figure crawled cautiously to the edge and peered over. Folsom motioned to McPherson to raise his carbine. Mac joined him quickly and as Folsom fired a snap shot Mac followed up with a burst. The figure rolled back. Whether or not they had hit him was impossible to tell. Folsom watched for another minute to see if he would try again.. McPherson nudged his arm and pointed to the left of where the figure had appeared. A soldier, almost invisible in his green uniform as he slid over the edge into the gloom, caught Folsom’s eye. He nodded to McPherson and together they poured bursts of fire at the figure. But they were too late. The trooper had made it into shelter.

“All right,” Folsom called softly. “Let’s get out of here before they start tossing grenades down.”

McPherson led the way down the cleft, and, singly, they made a dash out of the cleft into the shelter of another overhang. No shots were fired after them. The way down would have been no trouble to rested men, but in their exhausted condition, the journey was another nightmare of snow-covered rocks and icy sheathing. They moved from cover to cover, never daring to pause for rest as they slipped and slid and climbed down and around the cliff face. Near the base they encountered a sloping pile of rubble that eased the steep descent SOME, what, but threw in their path another obstacle of large boulders and chunks of fluted rock that had to be circumnavigated and wriggled through rather than climbed over.

Twenty minutes later they were on the pebbled beach. In spite of their desperate need to go on, Folsom called a rest halt. Teleman sprawled out on his back, barely conscious of the biting cold and snow that lay thickly in the shelter of the fjord. The soft lapping of the waves against the shore less than a hundred yards away belied the fury of the storm, whose final traces they were still experiencing. Teleman lay, gasping for breath. Above him, he realized for the first time that the sky was brightening quickly. The gap of space between the narrow walls was changing to velvet blue and the stars were disappearing from sight.. The wavering aurora borealis had all but evaporated in the sunlight, weak as it was. This was the first sunlight he remembered seeing since several hours before he had ejected, and for some reason it felt good. The steadily increasing light gave him a measure of badly needed hope.

He sat up. “Commander,” he croaked, “I don’t even know your first name.” Folsom rolled over on his side and grinned lopsidedly. “Hell, you don’t do you? It’s Pete.”

And he stuck out his hand.

“Glad to meet you… hell of a place for it though.” Then he remembered: “How about the radio. Since everyone knows where we are now, maybe you should tell the ship.”

“Yeah… Julie, break out the radio and see if you can raise the ship. If not, then the Norwegians. We’re gonna need some help, man, and fast.” Gadsen pulled the transceiver out of his pack and, as they started down the beach in a half walk, half trot, began to fiddle with the dials.

“Hell of a note if the Russians get us two miles from the Norwegian base.”

“Don’t worry, Major, soon as we round that headland, orders or no orders, I’m going to fire every damn flare I got.”

The low profile of the headlands rose starkly out of the sea off the portside of the U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy as the battle cruiser ran past the eastern entrance to the fjord. The cruel gray waters of the Barents Ka were still running heavily and even from two miles out the bridge crew could make out the dash of spray rising from the fringing rocks. The, fjord was dangerously narrow for any ship the size of the RFK, even one as well equipped with underwater navigational aids as she was. Only cutters called at the Norwegian naval air base through the fjord. Larger ships unloaded, when they had to, in the deep-water port on the Norwegian Sea side and supplies were trucked five miles to the base on the all-weather road. But for the most part, resupply was accomplished by aircraft.

At sea the winds were still running an average of thirty-seven knots, as Larkin had known they would be. Now he sat helplessly, eight line-of-sight nautical miles away from the shore-based Norwegian help, and he was still powerless to do anything to request their aid. In addition, they had long since lost the submarine as it had entered the fjord. He was, however, very certain that the sub was still deep within the rock walls, and that it was going to get a very nasty surprise when it tried to leave. But for the moment there was little or nothing that he could do. Daylight had come with a vengeance. The aurora borealis had been driven away by the low-hanging but brilliant sun as it edged farther across the narrow band of sky for its brief two-hour appearance. The uncertain light of the aurora borealis had been almost worse than no light at all. Its constant flickering and dim glow made firm visual sightings impossible. In spite of this handicap, Larkin had managed to sketch the outline of the fjord’s mouth on a pad to fix the details in his mind and had marked in the rough positions of both ships. The radar provided an approximate outline of the fjord walls for a distance of three miles into the meandering canyon and indicated just enough room to swing the ship almost on the axis point of her keel. The sonar confirmed the chart depth markings. There would be sufficient room beneath her keel Larkin tapped the pencil on the pad and made his decision.

“Mr. Bridges, lay a course into the fjord six thousand yards up from the mouth. We’ll swing about and sit there until we see how things are going to shape up.” Bridges acknowledged the orders and picked up the microphone to the engine room. Slowly the RFK got under weigh and, at eight knots, began to edge her way carefully into the mouth of the fjord. Larkin got up from his console and shrugged into his parka, picked up a pair of binocolars, and went out onto the catwalk The night, with the stiff wind, was bitterly cold. He dialed the proper lenses into place and began to search the fjord mouth from side to side.

On the eastern flank of the steep rock walls plummeting almost straight down, a cluster of needle-sharp rocks reared up jaggedly from the sea bottom. The glasses showed waves dashing themselves furiously, but in vain, at this miniature bastion. Plumes of spray were probably topping sixty feet, he thought to himself. Those rocks might present a hazard if they possessed an underwater ridge jutting away into the mouth. The western entrance was clear, at least of visible obstructions. At least two hundred feet separated the nearest possible approach for any underwater ridge extending from the eastern flank from the western walls, which were not quite as sheer in their drop to the water. There was barely enough room to take the battle cruiser through, but it could be done — if done carefully. Beyond the entrance there were only a few indications on the chart that suggested small islands. Once past the entrance, Larkin knew that he would be able to take the battle cruiser anywhere that the submarine could go. He did not trust the map, but he did trust the ability of the Soviet commander.

Twenty minutes later the Robert F. Kennedy was gently nosing her way past the entrance. The sonar gear showed an unexpected two hundred feet beneath her keel, even more than normal for Scandinavian fjords on exposed ocean coasts. Bridges was the conn and Larkin, with a microphone conveniently at hand, had again joined the lookouts on the catwalk. The slopes of the fjord slipping past were completely deserted, as they usually were. Only a fool would venture into this hellish terrain in these weather conditions — or even at midsummer for that matter. Not one sign of vegetation marred the granite structure of the walls. In sheltered recesses patches of snow could be seen, and occasionally long sheets of ice reaching from some unseen crevice stretched in a long icicle to the water. The walls on the eastern side were patently unscalable. Larkin knew that, unless the steepness and height of the cliffs grew less the deeper they penetrated, Folsom and his party could very well find themselves stuck on the cliff tops until the helicopter could be launched.

Larkin was heartened somewhat by the fact that the pitch and chop of the ship were lessening inside the fjord. The winds, obstructed by the narrow entrance, were rapidly diminishing in power and it was possible that the helicopter could be launched in a few hours. But for the moment the winds were blowing Force 6, between twenty-five and thirty-one miles per hour, and the waves running to five and six feet in a strange eddy of currents and crosscurrents deflected from the underwater walls. Time — Larkin needed time now more than anything else. What he was going to do when they spotted the submarine, he did not yet know. So far, past the entrance, he had been hugging the steep eastern wall, knowing that he would be invisible to the submarine’s sonar as the reflections from the underwater walls scrambled.

The microphone whistled at him.

“Captain, we have a sonar contact, possibly the submarine.”

“Bearing?”

“Dead ahead sir, on the western side. They are not using any ECM at all, so they must not suspect we are around. Range is five thousand yards.” Larkin thought for a moment. “Thank you.” He keyed the bridge channel. “Mr. Bridges, all engines stop. Run a check on the ship status.”

“Aye, sir.”

Larkin turned back to the railing and stared down the fjord. A shallow bend in the fjord wall blocked’ his view of the submarine less than three miles away. The sonar had picked up the submarine under an outthrust of the wall that did not extend more than a few feet below the water line. With the ship’s engines halted, the vicious rocking of the ship became more pronounced in the heavy chop. He watched the eastern wall, gauging to himself the speed at which they were being swept onto the knife-sharp ledges. It was faster than he expected. There was no possibility that they could maintain their position without running the engines. And if they did that, it would be only a matter of time before the submarine picked them up. Anchoring was out of the question. He needed mobility, instantaneous mobility. He could have that by standing outside the entrance and keeping an eye on what the submarine was doing.

For-the first time since taking command of the RFK, Larkin cursed the fact that she possessed no more than the 1.5-inch salute gun. With a four-inch cannon, or even an antiaircraft gun, he would have merely steamed around the curve, leveled the cannons, and called for a surrender. With the submarine facing away from them and riding on the surface, he could have blown her out of the water if she resisted. He almost hammered the railing in a measure of frustration. How in hell could he bring that damned submarine to terms? A boat party was out of the question… or was it? Ever since Teleman had been shot down, Larkin had been aching for a chance to take some kind of direct action. Five thousand yards. They could be on that damned submarine before they knew what was happening. If the hatches were closed, as they would be in this chop, a couple of charges of gelignite would take care of that. Lookouts could be dealt with. His mind raced furiously as he forced himself to remain calm. He would need the whaleboat, eight men, carbines, gelignite charges…

“Mr. Bridges, assemble an armed boat party.”

Ten minutes later Larkin sat in the stern sheets of the whaleboat with the tiller under his arm as they pulled away from the almost flush afterdeck. Feeling somewhat like Horatio Hornblower, he had buckled a revolver belt around his waist and stuck a flare pistol in his pocket. On his signal Bridges would bring the RFK around the headland and run down on the submarine. Unless a second flare was fired, his orders were to run the submarine under. Larkin and Bridges both knew that this was absolutely the last resort in case the armed attack by the nine men failed. The battle cruiser bows, cutting into the hull of the submarine, would crumple to the first main bulkhead if that happened. But in any event the submarine would be sitting on the bottom of the fjord. It would then be Bridges’ obligation to see that the same thing did not happen to the RFK. Behind him Larkin could hear the coughing of a second whaleboat starting up. Ten men were in that party and they would continue down the fjord to find Folsom’s party and render whatever assistance they could. It was probably a futile effort at best, but at least they had done everything they could. Larkin had sent a message direct to Virginia by satellite relay detailing his plans, but had not waited for a reply. Those short-sighted idiots would probably countermand his decisions.

Larkin took the whaleboat in as close to the narrow beach as he dared before turning parallel. The depth of the fjord made it possible for him to come within twenty yards of the rocky beach. Ahead, the jutting headland that screened the two ships from each other stood out boldly in the weak sunlight. Larkin could have wished for darkness, but he suspected that to wait for the remaining hour of daylight to pass could very well be too late. By the time they rounded the headland and came within a thousand yards of the ship, he judged that the sun would be dipping close enough to the horizon so that darkness would be almost complete within the fjord.

As the whaleboat puttered on with the muted roar of its muffled forty-horsepower engine, Larkin felt his own excitement reflecting back from the armed party. Each sat, staring forward, backs stiff with tension and hands firmly clasped around weapons. The gelignite charges were in two packs resting on the floorboards. One of the sailors had his foot resting on the top of the packs and a cord fastening both together looped around his wrist. Larkin reached down and picked his carbine up and ejected the clip, checked it, and then slammed it home. The sharp snap made the sailors jump. Larkin grinned at them and settled back against the thwart, portraying a relaxation he was far from feeling. He swung the tiller over, turning the bows to pass as close to the headland as possible, and looked back. The sunlight filtering down through the canyon was beginning to wane, but the bows-on silhouette of the RFK was sharply etched against the crack of blue-gray sky.

The boat ran on, cutting around the final curve of the rock out-thrust, and cautiously Larkin edged even closer to the rock wall. The noise of the engine was faint, but he wondered if the soft whoosh of the steady wind would be enough to conceal it from the lookouts that would surely be stationed on the sub’s bridge. Before they cleared the final jut of rock, Larkin idled the engine down and let the boat drift, slipping the gears into reverse but keeping the clutch depressed. The whaleboat continued under its own momentum, and there against the far shore was the sail of the submarine. The bows were pointing in toward the eastern side and she seemed to be anchored in the middle of the fjord, although Larkin knew that no skipper in his right mind would anchor under these conditions. Then he heard the muffled chugging of engines. She was using her engines to keep station. Larkin was flabbergasted. She was not nuclear powered. Those were diesel engines.

What a lucky break, he thought If they cut directly across the fjord and approached from the stern the chances of being spotted by the lookouts, who would be watching the eastern cliffs, were remote. And he could make speed. The noise of the submarine’s own engines would cover the whaleboat’s.

“Watch them very carefully. We’re going in.”

Larkin shifted back into forward and let the clutch out in one smooth motion. He pulled the throttle out and felt the reassuring feel of the boat as it leaped ahead. Five minutes. That’s all he needed. Five minutes.

He almost got it. They were fifty feet from the submarine’s stern when they were spotted. Larkin kept the throttle out until the last moment, as two sailors from the lookout stations came running aft to see who they were. One called out something questioning in Russian that sounded like Norski.

“Norski,” he shouted back, promptly exhausting his Norwegian vocabulary. He cut the engine and called softly to his men, — “When I yell go… do so. But no shooting unless you have to.”

As they pulled up to the stern a figure appeared on the bridge, took one look, and ducked back out of sight. Larkin could almost hear him frantically calling the bridge. A line was thrown to the two Russian sailors, who caught it and pulled in. While they were occupied with the rope, Larkin bellowed, “Go.” His own men poured out of the whaleboat and onto the sloping stern to the surprise of the two Russians, who dropped the rope and reached for their slung rifles. They never had a chance. It seemed that half a dozen carbine butts hit all at once. They dropped without a sound.

Larkin leaped onto the stern and immediately felt a vibration run through the ship as the beat of the engines deepened at the same time.

“Get those charges set!” From forward and the bridge simultaneously came the sound of hatches slamming shut.

“Peterson, you and Johnson take the aft hatch. Orlowski and Brone get a charge against that ballast tank, where it joins the hull five feet toward the hatch. Move!” As the men jumped onto the decking with the demolition charges, Larkin could feel the submarine begin to move. He knew that it would take less than thirty seconds to get up enough weigh and ballast to get the decks under water.

He yelled at the remaining four men and ran for the sail and bolted up the ladder. The bridge was clear, all hatches battened down.

“Two of you up on the lookout. The rest, get around the sides, out of sight.” Larkin backed away rapidly. He knew that when the charges went off somebody was going to come out of that hatch, and they would probably come out shooting. He waved the two men now on the catwalk to watch the forward hatch.

“Anybody comes out, open up.”

He glanced around quickly and swung back down over the side to see how the demolition parties were coming. Both were running for the bridge, the ignition wires trailing out behind them to the charges taped against the hatch and ballast tank. Larkin hopped back onto the bridge and shouted-down to fire the charges. Already the after portion of the deck was under water and forward, waves were curling up around the forepeak.

The explosives went off with a resounding clang. The submarine shuddered along its length and the engines changed beat as he heard the high-pitched whoosh of compressed air blowing ballast from the tanks.

Larkin yanked the VERY pistol from his belt and fired the flare straight up into the rapidly darkening sky. The flare arced up to three hundred feet and burst with a beautiful display of red flame. In less than two minutes the RFK should burst around the headland. He broke open the pistol, ejected the second flare, and rammed a new one home. Larkin had estimated that it would take the RFK six minutes or so to reach the submarine. He had managed to stop the submarine; now could he capture it before the RFK smashed it to the bottom under her forefoot?

He leaned over the coaming once more and shouted down. “Peterson, you and Johnson get back to the boat and be ready to take us off. Orlowski, you and Brone cover that aft hatch, just in case.”

He swung around in time to hear the squeal of the hatch being opened, and drew his pistol with his right hand. He waved the others back around the curve of the bridge. The hatch cracked open, held a moment, then pushed farther up. Larkin knelt down, almost in back of the hatch, and waited. From where he knelt, he was out of sight. A head appeared, looked around, and, seeing no one, pushed the hatch back until the lift engaged and it clicked back. Larkin leaned forward and pressed the pistol muzzle into the temple of the emerging sailor.

Larkin had never seen anyone turn white so fast, and in spite of the tension he grinned.

“Strasvechi, tovarish — Americanski.” Then in English, “Do you speak English?” Very carefully the head wobbled back and forth in what Larkin took for a negative answer. The sailor, with the .445 Navy Colt pressed against his temple, looked ready to faint.

“Nyet,” he managed to force out.

Above his head, Larkin heard two carbines firing.

“What’s going on?” he demanded sharply.

“Trying to get out the forward hatch, sir. We fired a couple of bursts across the deck and they changed their minds.” “Good, keep ’em scared.” Larkin risked a quick look at his watch. Pour minutes to go. “Any sign of the ship?” he yelled.

“No, sir… wait, aye, sir, just rounding the headland now.” “Anybody down there speak English?” Larkin called through the hatch.

After a moment, a voice answered, “Yes.”

Larkin tapped the sailor on the head with the pistol butt “Down, buddy…. All right, get up here fast.”

A minor commotion was created in the narrow hatchway as the reprieved sailor scrambled down past the other climbing up. Another minute was wasted while he did so. Larkin waved his pistol and an officer climbed out to stare around in shock. The Russian was dressed only in shipboard uniform and gasped as he felt the cold. He immediately huddled against the canvas windbreak that had been rigged on the bridge.

“My name is Larkin, commanding officer of the battle cruiser Robert F. Kennedy, United States Navy. You are now a prisoner of war and your ship a prize of war.” Larkin knew that this was not true since no state of war had been declared, but he was depending on the shock value of the statement to unbalance the Russian even more. The Russian glanced around and saw the others with leveled carbines, gulped once, and swung back to stare at Larkin, who was casually slinging his carbine over his shoulder.

“I… I… I am Ptior Shafesky Rasnikov, Lieutenant Commander…” He broke down and finished up lamely, “Executive Officer… what are you—”

“Cut it,” Larkin grated harshly. “You have just two minutes left to surrender this ship. Look out there.”

The Russian officer followed Larkin’s pointing finger and saw the RFK running at full speed for the submarine, less than 1500 yards off. His eyes, as they turned back to Larkin, were round with surprise. Larkin waved the flare gun in his left hand. “Two minutes. If I don’t fire a flare before then, she’ll run you under.”

It took a full half minute for Rasnikov to digest what Larkin had just said, and then he swung around and grabbed the bridge microphone and shouted a stream of incomprehensible Russian. The sounds that emerged from the speaker were just as incomprehensible, but seconds later Larkin heard feet scrabbling on the ladder. He jumped to the hatch and pulled it loose, but Rasnikov screamed at him to stop.

“The Captain…” he explained weakly.

A slim figure jumped from the hatch, brushed past Larkin, and leaned across the railing to peer at the approaching RFK.

The RFK had come to within two hundred yards and every detail behind the ports of the lighted bridge was plainly visible. The curling bow wave served to accentuate the sharpness of the prow, aimed directly for The submarine’s bridge. The Russian captain stiffened, and turned slowly to face Larkin. As they stood there examining each other, Larkin sensed the shock that he knew must come with the knowledge of a ship lost. He’ thought that perhaps he must have come close to this same feeling the day he had run in under the North Vietnamese coastal guns and taken that hit in the fantail.

Slowly the Russian nodded and turned his palms outward. He said something in Russian and the executive officer translated.

“We surrender,” he said quietly. Larkin looked sharply at the Russian officer. He was certain that the captain had said I. The we surrender was indicative to Larkin of both discipline and ability. He nodded with approval and raised the VERY pistol and fired the second flare.

Twenty minutes later Larkin was climbing the netting thrown over the side of the RFK. Behind him, on the deck and bridge of the submarine, RFK crew members were herding the Russian crew up on deck and filing down into the submarine. As he regained the deck he looked down the fjord, then back at the Russian captain clambering up after him. Suddenly he jerked his eyes back to the fjord. There against the sky a red flare was climbing. Seconds later it was followed by a third and then a fourth. Forgetting about the Russians, he ran for the bridge.

As he came through the hatch Bridges swung around on him. “Captain, flares at 8563 yards down the fjord. Our recognition signal — one long, two short. We had part of a radio transmission a minute ago. They need fire support.” Larkin did not hesitate. “Answer fast. Plot the range and get me an open channel to Virginia.” Seconds later he was explaining quickly the capture of the Russian ship and advising official contact with the Norwegians before he had to contact them.

CHAPTER 21

A sick feeling of despair settled over Folsom as Gadsen struggled with the radio to raise the ship. Each time he flicked the switch over to receive, a steady stream of hissing poured from the speaker.

“Damn it all, it’s no use,” Gadsen said bitterly. “The aurora is blanking everything out.” The problem that had been nagging at Folsom throughout the night and into the early morning hours now burst upon him. It had been the intensity of the northern lights, the aurora borealis. The stream of electrons pouring into the magnetic field of the earth from the sun was probably causing a world-wide disruption of radio transmission — at least for all communications depending upon ionospiheric bounce. For all practical purposes, under the onslaught of the solar storm, there was no ionosphere right now.

“Any chance of getting through at all?”

Gadsen settled his carbine on his shoulder, slung the radio set around his neck, and began to play with the transmit switch, flicking it back and forth in a code pattern. “Maybe we can stir up some interest in a code,” he muttered.

The jerky gait over the rocky beach of the fjord did, not help Gadsen any and twice he stumbled as he concentrated c-n the radio. After a few minutes he switched to receive.

“Nothing,” he said over the hiss of static. “Damned thing is useless for now.” Darkness was falling swiftly now. Only a few brief glimpses of light were visible over the top of the eastern wall. Folsom glanced back and saw Teleman stumbling along, half carried by McPherson.

There was nothing yet visible of the pursuing Russians and they had almost reached the headland. They had gained at least five hundred yards, but Folsom knew that, as soon as the Russians reached the beach, they would come on with twice the speed his people were able to make.

Grimly he concentrated on reaching the mass of rock that would furnish them a small measure of cover, perhaps enough for the last mile to the Norwegian naval base. He only hoped to God that flares would attract attention in time for the Norwegians to get a boat across the fjord to pick them up. Maybe, just maybe, the Russians would not pass the headlands. But he doubted it. With._ the wind blowing straight down the fjord they could hold a major gun battle, complete with artillery, within sight of the Norwegians and not he heard. Again he looked back the way they had come and this time saw that Teleman had fallen and McPherson was wearily trying to get him up.

“Go on, Julie… the headland…”

Folsom ran back to where Teleman was still on the ground. As he came up, McPherson had stooped down and was trying to lift him in a shoulder carry. But Mac had pushed himself too far. Even this last effort was too much for the giant reserve of strength he had inherited from his Scotch ancestry.

Folsom slid to a stop, panting too heavily to speak: Teleman opened his eyes and saw Folsom bending over him.

“Seem’s I see you from… this position… quite a… bit…” Folsom grinned in spite of himself and rummaged in the pocket of the parka and came up with the aluminum tube of Benzedrine tablets.

Teleman stared at them, then nodded. “Yeah.

Folsom willed his shaking hands steady as he uncapped the tube and poured out two tablets each for Teleman, McPherson, and himself. Mac unstoppered his canteen and they choked the pills down.

Teleman sank back down. “You may deliver a dead pilot, but at least you’ll deliver a pilot,” he whispered.

Folsom smiled, feeling very small and weak in the face of the endurance and courage the man on the ground in front of him had shown. “You’ll be alive, or none of us will be.” Mac got ponderously to his feet and bent and helped Teleman up. Already, in their weakened condition, they were beginning to feel the effects of the pills. To Teleman the vile taste of the half-chewed capsules was the first real indication of returning sensation he had felt in hours of trudging through the subzero cold. The taste of the capsules also increased his thirst, but as the effects of the pills heightened the taste was soon forgotten.

As his mind cleared he felt a measure of strength returning. The misty edge of unconsciousness began to recede somewhat and, like the others, he began to run in a jerky half trot. Shortly, as they approached the mass of rock that marked the headland, he lost all sense of weariness. He knew it would not last long. His only hope was to hang on until he could obtain medical care, before his heart burst from the overload. He put aside all thoughts of what might happen and concentrated on moving ahead as fast as possible while he could.

As they caught up with Gadsen, Folsom handed him two pills and without a word they trotted on.

They passed the headlands and came out onto a long, straight stretch that disappeared around a sharp curve in the fjord, three miles north. Folsom cursed violently and yanked the map out. The beach to the headland was accurately marked, but the area beyond showed no long stretch of beach, merely a short bend to the east and then the naval base on the western side of the fjord. Folsom threw his head back and breathed deeply through his mouth, fighting to control a futile anger. The damnable chart had been wrong, wrong all across the island. This time it was so wrong it would kill them. They could never clear the three miles of beach before the Russians overtook them. They did not have the strength. Goddamn it all, he swore savagely to himself, we could have stayed in the tent and gone peacefully back to Murmansk and saved all this trouble. The effects of the Benzedrine tablets still held them, but Gadsen, Teleman, and McPherson stood in a stupefied circle around Folsom waiting for his decision. He recalled what he had told Teleman only minutes before — “You’ll be alive, or none of us will be.”

“Come on. Let’s go.”

Darkness had fallen completely and their old comrade the aurora borealis was again triumphant in the night sky to light their way. They had covered nearly a mile when the sound of a rolling explosion reached them. As one man, they came to a halt, ears straining forward. No other sound came, merely the echoes of the boom. Folsom did not wait. He grabbed the VERY pistol and fired a flare straight up. Then they broke into a run. Folsom fired a second and a third in their recognition signal. It could have been the Russian submarine he knew, and then again it could have been the Norwegians, or even the RM. In any event, it no longer mattered. Twice more, at four-minute intervals, Folsom fired flares in patterns, and each time, as they ran, their eyes fastened on the line of cliffs to the north. On the fifth volley an answering pattern ascended into the night sky, low over the cliffs, two short and one long intervals. If they had had the breath, they would have cheered. Instead, they ran even faster, though the effects of the Benzedrine tablets were beginning to wear off.

Ten minutes later the first bullets kicked up sand and pebbles beneath their feet. Without breaking stride, Gadsen swung the radio up and frantically began to call their ID in the hope that, somehow, he could punch through.

“Down,” Folsom yelled.

The open beach offered no shelter of any kind. Their only hope now was to hold the Russians at a distance where their bodies, lying prone, would offer an almost impossible target. McPherson hit the ground in a firing position, the sling of his carbine already wrapped around his forearm in manual-approved fashion. Carefully he selected his targets and snapped off shots. The distance was too far for rapid fire; it would only waste the remaining ammunition already pretty well exhausted by the two previous actions. Folsom and Teleman followed suit, and at least had the satisfaction of seeing the approaching Russians drop to the beach, although whether from strikes or for cover they had no way of telling.

Folsom rolled half over, “Any luck with that damned radio?”

“Nothing.”

He reached under his parka and extracted the flare pistol. He had two cartridges left. Just as he brought the pistol into firing position, Gadsen’s voice screamed excitedly:

“I got ’em, for a moment, Commander.”

“Fox Baker, read you loud… under fire… do you need, support?” Gadsen twirled the gain to maximum, and there, on the rock-strewn beach of a deserted Norwegian fjord, Folsom, Teleman, McPherson, and Gadsen heard the most beautiful sound of their lives to date — the flat tones of the ship’s radio operator.

“…flare… pinpoint… your…” The rest was lost in the roar of static. Seconds later Folsom fired the next-to-last flare and all three watched as the thin trail of red formed the stalk of a blossoming rose. As it faded Folsom fired the last for good measure.

“Now, run like hell,” he roared.

The four men ran as they had never run before. They pounded down the rocky beach, skirting along the water’s edge where the footing was firm. The breath whistled in their lungs as they ran, ran with the desperation of life itself. Behind them the Russians were running also, no longer firing, but running to overtake them. In spite of efforts that came with an impetus from their innermost beings, the Americans were losing ground. The pursuing Russians, fresher by many days of sleep, were less than two hundred yards behind when the first salvo of rockets screamed in to explode across the beach and out into the fjord. Almost immediately a second salvo followed twenty yards to the rear of the first, and then a third and fourth salvo, each moving back on the Russian troops, who broke and ran for the cover of the cliffs. It seemed almost as if the fire control officer on board the RFK could see his target. A rain, a curtain of fire exploded behind them, the concussions hammering at their bodies while the air filled with the continual roar of exploding missiles.

They ran on, Teleman straining every last ounce of energy he possessed to keep up. Then, as suddenly as it began, the, fire died away, and behind them they could see the stick figures of the Russians up and running after them again. The rock walls of the cliffs had furnished sufficient protection from the missile. fire and they came on unharmed. Teleman suddenly became aware that bullets were kicking up the beach around them again. He flattened, threw a glance over his shoulder, but Gadsen was past and running back before he could stop him. Teleman saw Julie’s slight figure go to one knee, heard the sharp crack as he began firing rapidly. The lead figure screamed, threw up his hands, and tumbled headlong. Bullets smacked around Gadsen with curious popping noises, but he continued to fire coolly, the crack, crack, crack of his AR 18 abnormally loud in the cold air. Folsom yelled at Teleman to run and himself, turned, his rifle blazing toward the Russians. Teleman heard the faint plat of the bullet that struck Gadsen and knocked him backward across the beach.

As if at a great distance, he heard someone ask if Gadsen was dead and realized that it was his own voice. Folsom screamed at him, but he saw from the angular position of Julie’s body, where it lay at the water’s edge, that he was dead. Nothing exploded inside his brain, no-galvanizing fury flung him at the Russians. Instead a cold fury at the entire foolish system that was responsible for this man’s death took hold of him. He cocked the Russian submachine gun, he was carrying and walked back down the beach, away from Julie’s body. The submachine gun kicked in his hands and he saw the line of Russians hesitate, then scatter to the right and left. He tripped over a rock and fell headlong. He put his head down on the cold snow and knew that he would never run another step from where he lay. His frustration came out a harsh scream. Folsom and McPherson dropped down beside him and began firing at the zigzagging figures that, in spite of the barrage, seemed to pass through untouched. McPherson emptied a clip at the approaching Russians and rammed a new one home. Carefully he picked his targets as Folsom kept up a continual line of fire to keep the approaching soldiers off balance. McPherson sighted carefully and fired and watched as the soldier in his sights disappeared, his rifle flying from his hands. Then a bullet struck him in the cheek and tore through his shoulder.

Without thinking, Teleman threw away his empty Russian submachine gun and scrabbled for McPherson’s carbine. He fired twelve shots, closely spaced, but very carefully, and thought he hit one.

The answering fire was striking ever closer now. The Russians were less than a hundred yards away and still they came on, four left, crouching low and running swiftly forward, firing as they came. These were no sailors, Folsom realized, but trained soldiers, probably marines.

A bullet kicked stone chips and snow in Teleman’s face, forcing him to jerk his head away. He rubbed viciously at his eyes to clear them and swung back, but the Russians had turned and were running back to the south. Teleman, stunned, rolled to see Folsom staring after the Russians. Then they heard the heavy, staccato bark of automatic weapons behind them. Both turned to see bluejacketed sailors pouring from a beached whaleboat. Disbelieving, Teleman got to his lames as sailors rushed past them after the fleeing Russians. Then-he — and Folsom began to laugh, both with great tearing gasps that were almost sobs. They were still laughing when the chief petty officer ran up to be confronted with the spectacle of his executive officer alternately laughing and sobbing, his arms around a gaunt scarecrow of a man with a bandaged head.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The North Cape of Norway is perhaps at once the most beautiful and the most savage of lands on this planet. In summer it becomes a rendezvous point for devotees of the midnight sun who come as tourists to view the endless daylight of midsummer from this northernmost point on the Scandinavian Peninsula. But in winter the Cape is deserted of all but the fishermen and their families who occupy its handful of fishing villages. Only they are able to survive the rigors of its subzero cold and the Arctic storms that rage down from the Great Barrier two hundred miles north.

In these days of developing international maturity, which are more often expressed through individuals rather than their governments, no part of the world, no matter how isolated or desolate, is free from the complications of national competition for that hegemony called national security.

I wish to thank certain people for their cheerful assistance with this book. First of all, Susan my wife, for her unflagging encouragement and devotion to the typing and editing chores; then to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gillon of the United States Marine Corp, a seventy-three-mission fighter pilot veteran of Vietnam for reading the manuscript and advising on and correcting the technical aspects; to Olin Witthoft, my good friend and capable representative of United Aircrafts’ Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Division, who spent many hours with me working out the technical details of the A-17 aircraft; and to John Shell, Ph.D. and associate director of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, for his analysis of the effects of the amphetamine and lysergic acid families of drugs under conditions of physical exhaustion and subzero temperatures. And, finally, for assistance in coming to know and describe properly the North Cape area and its weather, both the Royal Norwegian Government and the United States Navy.

J. POYER

Content

Joe Poyer
NORTH CAPE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

AUTHOR’S NOTE