North Cape (8 page)

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. Ex. perimentaily, 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 threehundred-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 i.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 25o 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.

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 coaming 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 compart-.. ments. 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