North Cape (3 page)

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-3o fanjets and outboard ramjet wing-tip engines and held her steady. The juggling for position, too precise even for the most advanced computercontrolled 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-thousandpound 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 tTnited 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 engi-. neered 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 195os, 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 au 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 toofar 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.