Target 5 (22 page)

'This place is different,' Gorov said as he eased himself
up on one elbow. 'You have moved me to a new hut. Why?'

Surprisingly alert, Beaumont noted, but a man who had
made his way alone across the pack from North Pole 17 had
to be unusually tough. He asked Conway to examine him again and lit a cigarette while he waited impatiently for the verdict. He was convinced they only had a few hours to get
away from the ice island. Papanin would soon recover from
the shock of his initial reception and then he would be back - and the second visitation would be much more dangerous
than the first.

'He seems in good condition,
5
Conway said as he stood up
from his patient. 'I can't understand it - after that ordeal.'

Beaumont started his interrogation at once, firing ques
tions at the Russian who spoke good English. Like Papanin,
Gorov had learned his English at the Kharkov language
laboratory, a knowledge essential to his work. Once French
had been the international language of the scientific
fraternity, but for a quarter of a century it had been re
placed by English - and Gorov liked to read scientific
works in the original language. He was obviously taken aback by Beaumont's verbal onslaught.

'When were you last in Kiev?'

'Last week.'

'Meet any relatives there?'

'My brother, Peter . . .'

'He's in the Navy?'

'No, he's on a trawler . . .'

'What was the name of your girlfriend who died?'

Gorov's thick lips tightened. He stared bleakly at Beau
mont. 'She was my fiancee. We were going to be mar
ried

'I asked for her name.'

'Rachel Levitzer. Is all this really necessary?'

'Yes! Is it by God?' Conway burst out, appalled by Beaumont's brutality.

'Yes, it is by God,' Beaumont replied tersely. He watched
Gorov very carefully. 'Col Igor Papanin was standing in this
very room half an hour ago.'

Fear flashed into the Russian's eyes. He stared round the hut like a trapped man, tried to say something, swallowed
uncomfortably. It was the instantaneous reaction Beaumont
had been hoping for; if this man had been a stooge - sent to
the island by Papanin as a spy - he couldn't have pre
tended naked fear so spontaneously.

Beaumont explained what he had been doing and the
reasons for it. No photograph was available in Washington of Michael Gorov and this was the only way to check his identity. At least now when they started out across the ice on their terrible journey they would know they were taking
the right man.

Conway gave Gorov a drink from the bottle of brandy he
had brought with him, a bottle he kept securely locked
away in a cupboard so that Sondeborg wouldn't guzzle the
lot. At Beaumont's suggestion he prepared food for the
Russian on a primus in the research hut, and all the time
the fugitive sat at the edge of the bunk, lacing and unlacing
his strong fingers, running them nervously through his lank
black hair.

Earlier, soon after the interrogation had ended, he had got
up to stretch his legs and had wandered over to the chair
where his parka lay draped. Casually, he had lifted the
parka to sit for a moment; even more casually he had run
his hand over the pocket which contained the core tube, had
felt its cylindrical shape under the fur. Langer, standing
near the door, smiled to himself as Gorov sat down, visibly
relaxed that his precious possession was still safe.

That night it was fatal for Beaumont to think of sleep. He had just said that he was going back to the headquarters hut
to lie down for a while when they all heard it. The distant
drone of an aircraft coming in. The Hercules 0130 trans
port which Dawes, worried stiff by the 'sabotage' signal, had
sent, was circling overhead, waiting to land.

Col Igor Papanin was also listening to the drone of the
American transport plane. A few hundred metres away
from the snow ramp leading down from Target-5 he sat in the cab of his Sno-Cat alongside Kramer, calmly puffing at his little curved pipe. The atmosphere inside the sealed cab
was thick with smoke, so thick that Kramer thought he
would soon expire. But he dare not open a window be
cause that would let the Arctic flood in.

'They've switched the landing lights on,' he said ner
vously. The blurred glow of a single landing light wobbled
beyond the top of the cliffs, then the fog masked it.

'Naturally,' Papanin said, 'they have to show their plane
where to land.'

'And you still think Gorov isn't there?'

'I said I wasn't convinced that he had yet arrived - a different thing, Kramer. I was looking for fear and anxiety when we arrived but all I detected was indignation. That big man was very aggressively indignant.' he said thoughtfully.

'But if he has arrived - and the plane lands?'
'You worry too much. It's going to be all right - you'll
see.'

Seven hundred feet above Target-5 the plane's pilot, Alfred
Ridgeway, sat in front of his controls as he circled over what
another pilot, Arnold Schumacher, had called the oatmeal, the thick bank of dirt-grey fog below him. In the cargo
compartment behind him two rows of bucket seats lined the fuselage and the rear seats were occupied by twelve men in
Arctic clothing who carried concealed
weapons.

The twelve men belonged to the US Coastguard Service
and they had been specially chosen for this job. In Leningrad
the Russians had sent a Special Security detachment to the Arctic because this gave the expedition a non-military character - which neutralized the danger of an international incident building up only a few months before the Summit meeting in Moscow. Washington was taking the same precaution for the same reason: there must be no danger of an
international incident.

The two seats nearest the pilot's cabin were occupied by a different type of passenger, by a doctor and a nurse. Dr Maxwell Hergsheimer, forty-eight years old and grey-haired, who was equipped with a medical kit and oxygen cylinders for his Russian patient, stared out of the window as the fog rolled in great banks below. Behind him sat Nurse Anne Clyde from Brooklyn, the thirty-year-old girl who had volunteered to come with him. Hergsheimer was worried about her; not every girl would have so calmly contemplated a trip out over the polar wastes. And to emphasize the civilian character of their mission she wore her uniform. She leaned forward over his shoulder. 'Do you think Captain Ridgeway will get us down?' she inquired.

'I think so, yes. He comes from my home state, Illinois,
and I've known him for years. He'll go on circling until he
does see his way in.'

In the pilot's cabin Ridgeway's sentiments were rather
less optimistic. In fact, Ridgeway was very worried indeed. There was no sign of a gap in the fog anywhere; if anything
it was getting worse as it floated like a dark, poison-gas
cloud under the pallid light of the moon. He glanced at the
fuel gauge. Plenty left: he'd damned well go on circling until
there was only enough gas to get them back to Curtis.

'I'm beginning to wonder whether I saw those landing
lights at all,' van Beeck, his co-pilot, commented.

'Want to go home, Jim? You said you saw them - did you?'

'I saw them, Captain.'

'OK. So we keep circling.'

Beaumont was sweating with anxiety as he stood close to one
of the landing lights Conway had switched on. In the fog it glowed like a small greenish fire. He was standing with Conway at the edge of the airstrip, a quarter of a mile away
from the cluster of huts where five more men waited in equal anxiety. Then he heard the faint drone of the plane
coming back, a drone growing steadily louder.

'Thank God,' Conway muttered. 'I thought he'd given
up.'

Thank God, Beaumont agreed to himself. And the fog was
thinning a little. The plane only had to land to secure their
salvation; at Curtis Field Dawes had told him about the coastguard detachment standing by and Beaumont was confident it would be on board. With a detachment of a dozen armed men on the island Papanin would be check
mated.

'Do you think he can land in this stuff?' Conway
whispered.

In the fog, whispering came naturally. It shifted all
around them, assuming strange, menacing shapes, and the
cold was intense. They shifted their boots frequently,
stretched their toes inside them, anything to keep a fraction
of circulation moving while they waited and the invisible
plane's
engines built up into a muffled roar. Soon it was dead overhead, and the fog thinned a little more. But not
enough, Beaumont was thinking. 'He can't be thinking of
landing yet,' he murmured. 'I wonder what visibility is like
up there .. .'

Visibility from five hundred feet up had improved: instead of being impossible it was bad to awful. Ridgeway banked
the plane more steeply to get a better look down and
grunted. It was a habit of which he was unaware - grunting
- but the noise was significant for van Beeck. It told the co
pilot that his captain had just taken a tricky decision. He waited while Ridgeway stared hard into the fog.

The pilot had seen the landing lights, he had guessed that this improved situation would be short-lived, that soon the fog would roll over again. It would have been a consider
able overstatement to say that the parallel lines of lights
were visible - they showed to Ridgeway in the banked plane
as two vague strings of pale glows: no more, but they showed
him where the airstrip was. It was between those two faint
lines and that was enough for him.

'We're going in,' he said. 'Tell them.'

The co-pilot left his seat, went back into the cargo compartment and called out to his fourteen passengers. 'Time to strap yourselves in - we're going down . . .'

'You see,' Dr Hergsheimer told Nurse Clyde, 'I was right
- he's from Illinois.'

In the control cabin Ridgeway was banking his machine away from the island, turning in a wide sweep to give himself a good run-in. The lights had vanished now and he was
praying he would see them again when he had completed
his turn. The sweep continued, swinging out over the deso
late polar pack which was invisible, then he was on course,
screwing up his eyes as he stared ahead.

The damned lights seemed fainter now, hardly more than
a blurred phosphorescence beneath the fog. The machine
went into a shallow glide, the blur came up to meet it. Gear and flaps down. The four propellers whipped through wisps
of fog, the motors beat steadily, the ice island came up to
meet them. It was an exercise Ridgeway had repeated many
times before. He had landed five times on Target-5 in
various parts of the Arctic - all of them hundreds of miles
north of this latitude.

Don't overshoot!
The warning flashed through his brain.
There was just sufficient length of airstrip to land on - pro
vided he touched down in time. The lights merged into glow-lines, the skids touched down, the machine wobbled
as though starting to skid, so they were tearing over the ice
blind except for the glow rushing past them on either side.
So long as there was no obstruction in the way. . . The
propellers beating the air thrashed up a storm of snow, obliterating the glow on either side, and then Ridgeway completed the landing, reversing propeller pitch and braking to
bring the machine to a halt.