Target 5 (18 page)

'What the hell is it?' Grayson croaked.

Beaumont didn't reply. Taking the compass from the American, he bent over, staring at the luminous dial carefully as he took a bearing. When he looked up the flare had
become a dull, dangerous-looking glow, the kind of glow
he had once seen from four miles away across the ice when
an American research base off Alaska was burning.

'What is it?' Grayson repeated. 'It looks God-awful.'

'Forget about your kip,' Beaumont said grimly. 'We're moving again - as fast as we can drive the dogs. That's Target-5 going up in flames.'

Tuesday, 22 February: 12.15AM-8AM

'Some maniac has done this crazy thing deliberately - it's
sabotage ...'

Matthew Conway, the fifty-year-old station leader, was
blazing, blazing almost as furiously as his radio hut had
blazed when it became a flaming beacon in the night. Beside him in the drifting fog Beaumont studied the wreckage as Dr
Conway played a powerful lamp over what had recently been a large hut. Charred stumps showed where the walls
had stood, a twisted hunk of metal lay half-buried under a
pile of ash, and an acrid smell of burning was still present
in the windless night. The hut had burned down to its
foundations and smoke wisps eddied and mingled with
the fog.

'Why sabotage?' Beaumont asked as he hitched up the
rifle looped over his shoulder.

'When I got here the place was well alight but it wasn't
like this,' Conway said savagely. 'Rickard, the wireless operator you met when you arrived, found it on fire. When I got here it was becoming an inferno - but the door hadn't
gone. I noticed fresh wood splinters round the lock - it
looked as if it had been forced open.'

'Could have been the fire,' Beaumont said casually. He was trying to calm everyone down; since they had arrived
ten minutes ago he had detected an air of tension in the
three men waiting to be evacuated from the doomed base, a
tension which had been there before the hut went up in
flames.

'It didn't look like it,' Conway protested. 'Then there
was the Coleman space heater - that twisted bit of
metal. I could see through the open door and it was lying
on its side. It was upright when Rickard left the hut
earlier.'

'Maybe the fire caused it to keel over ...'

'For God's sake, do you think I'm going out of my mind? I may have been on this island for three years but I've still kept my sanity! Those space heaters are heavy - you'd have to kick one hard to send it on its side.'

'All right, Matt, take it easy.' Beaumont walked round
the smouldering ruin. He had known Conway for three
years off and on, and twice he had visited Target-5 when it
was drifting many hundred miles north of its present
dangerous position. But in the fog it had all seemed different.
When they saw the fire they had rushed across the ice and
made their way up on to the island without trying to find the
Sno-Cat ramp. They had dragged the sleds up a gully in the twenty foot high cliffs which reared above the pack and
headed for the orange glow in the fog.

'That chunk of metal you can hardly see in the corner is our transmitter,' Conway called out. 'Was our transmitter,' he amended. 'Now there's no way of getting through to the mainland - we're cut off until our plane comes in.'

'Which is in ten days' time,' Beaumont said as he stood
next to the American. 'Why did they leave it so late?'

'It was my crazy idea.' Conway sounded disgusted.
'We've never had the chance to carry out depth-sounding
and salinity tests this far south so I thought it was a heaven-
sent opportunity. But I didn't count on the fog coming.
And now this ...'

'Who could have sabotaged the hut anyway?' Beaumont asked.

'There are only the three of us here - so no one. I don't
know, the strain must be telling on me as well.' He changed the subject. 'What about this Russian that's supposed to be coming here?'

'He's a man called Gorov, Michael Gorov.' Beaumont's
tone was off-hand and vague: Conway hadn't got top
security clearance for his work. 'I don't know a lot about
him, but I gather Washington thinks he could tell them
something about the political set-up in Russia. He's supposed to be on his way here from North Pole 17.'

'And that's why you're here?'

'I have to pick him up and take him back to Curtis Field.
It's as simple as that.'

'Simple - going back across the pack?' Conway stared at the Englishman. 'I wouldn't make that trip for sixty thousand dollars.' Conway grinned as he rubbed globules of ice off his eyebrows. 'And I could do with sixty thousand dollars. Do we get back to the others now?'

'Is there somewhere we can talk first - on our own?'

'The research hut's just across here.' Conway led the way
along a beaten snow-track between the surviving huts and
Beaumont was pretty sure that the fog was thickening again.
He was also sure that Conway was dead right: the radio hut
had been sabotaged. But there was no point in increasing the tension on the island and he had a grimmer reason for keeping quiet. If Gorov did get through and they took him
out they would be leaving the three men behind on
Target-5. Conway he had no doubts about, but Rickard he
didn't know and Sondeborg he didn't have to know: one
look at the gravity specialist had told him he was on the verge of a crack-up. If the Russians arrived after they had
left with Gorov and started putting on the pressure the men
staying behind couldn't tell them anything - if they didn't
know anything.

'You'll thaw out in here,' Conway said as he unlocked the
door of a hut at the end of the line. 'We've left the heater
on.'

The hut was about the same size as the headquarters
building they had gone inside when Beaumont arrived, one
large room measuring about fifteen feet by twenty. Packing
crates ready for the evacuation were pushed against the
walls, but at one end a huge iron tripod reared up and supported a large winch mechanism. Conway pointed at the
tripod. 'That's where we sling the underwater camera we send down to take a look at the seabed. We've sent the
drilling core down through the same hole. Care to take a
look?'

Conway bent down and levered up a section of the floorboards under the tripod. It came up as a large trap and Beaumont stared down a square hole about four feet across. Six feet below there were more floorboards. 'That's where we could hide Gorov in an emergency,' Conway suggested. 'He'd be damn cold but it's the best I can do.'

Beaumont stared at Conway across the deep well. 'What
are you talking about?'

'Look, Keith, I told you I was still holding on to my sanity. And I can still work things out for myself. You bring two men over the pack from the edge of the fog - and all of you were flown there by chopper, you said. So this Gorov character, who must be pretty important, has taken off from the Russian base to come here - which means the Russian security people will be after him now. Correct?'

'I told you that.'

'Yes, but you didn't tell me that's why my radio hut has
been sabotaged! They've done that to cut us off-,so we
can't signal Curtis Field when your Russian arrives. I worked
that out while we were walking here from that mess up the
street. Correct?'

'What's under that next lot of floorboards?' Beaumont asked. 'And you're correct - but don't spill any of it to Rickard or Sondeborg.'

'Soul of discretion!' Conway bent down again, took hold
of a rope attached to a hook, pulled it. The lower boards
opened up as a hinged trap and below there was darkness. Conway switched on his lamp, shone the powerful beam down the hole and the beam lost itself in a blackness which
didn't end. A sour tang of salt drifted up into Beaumont's
nostrils. At the edge of the beam walls of ice glistened.

'That's the Arctic down there,' Conway said. 'Two hun
dred feet down through the ice. Make a good place to hide a
body.'

'Let's hope it doesn't come to that,' Beaumont replied
tersely.

'It was a joke - helps to release the tension.' Conway
lowered the trap on the sinister hole. 'You've probably noticed I'm a bit jumpy - maybe you'll understand why when I tell you I've got Michael Gorov in the next hut.'

The Russian fugitive, the Soviet Union's chief oceano
grapher, the architect of the Catherine system, lay un
conscious in the single bunk which stood against one wall of
the hut. Blankets pulled up to his chin still showed the hideously scarred face, the thick lips which were half-open
as Gorov breathed noisily, the mass of straight dark hair
pushed back over his forehead. Like Leonid Brezhnev he
had thick eyebrows, but his cheeks were pinched and sallow.

'He arrived half an hour before you came in,' Conway explained. 'I was alone by the burning radio hut when he
came staggering through the fog. I brought him in here to
start with because it was the nearest place.'

It was ironical, Beaumont thought - someone had made a
very bad mistake when they set fire to the hut. Because it was
the blazing beacon of the burning hut which had shown him
how to locate the ice island - and Gorov had undoubtedly
used the same flaming landmark to find his way to Target-5.
The Russian stirred restlessly in his sleep, murmured some
thing which could have been a girl's name - Rachel - then he subsided again.

'Is he very bad?' Beaumont asked. 'You practised medicine once, so you should know.'

'The frostbite isn't as bad as it looks. Some of it is old scars
and the fresh wounds I've treated. He couldn't stop talking
and he was a bit hysterical, so I gave him a mild sedative to
help him rest. He talked as though I should know he was
coming so I let him - I thought that was part of the
hysteria.'

'How did he get here?'

'He came over the pack by sled apparently ...'

'Don't you know, Matt?' Beaumont demanded.

'There's no need to blow your top . . .'

'It's important! If that sled is lying out in the open and the Russians find it they'll know he's here.'

'I'm sorry, I see what you mean. He told me he lost his
dogs somewhere close to here - he was taking a catnap and
he hadn't tethered them properly. He had to manhaul the
sled the rest of the way and it nearly killed him. Then he
saw the hut blazing in the distance, so he took a quick com
pass bearing, abandoned the sled and made it here on foot.' Conway took the cigarette Beaumont offered him and the
Russian stirred again as a match was struck. 'My guess would
be he left the sled maybe half a mile beyond the cliffs. Is that
bad?'

'Not too bad. How do you know he's Michael Gorov?'

'He said so . . .'

'Is this his jacket?' Beaumont picked up the jacket off a
table and started going through the pockets. 'I don't re
member you having a bunk here when I was last on the
island.'

'I didn't.' Conway smiled grimly. 'The official reason is I do a lot of calculations in here and when I'm finished I can
just tumble into bed. The real reason is it gets me away from
the others for a few hours.'