Target 5 (26 page)

The roll of the dead was beginning to mount. Vance
Carlson was the twentieth casualty so far - including
Nikolai Marov, Gorov's security guard, Tillotson, the six
teen who died aboard the plane on Target-5, and Matthew
Conway.

And the radar was gone. The
Elroy
was blind, engulfed in fog, surrounded by ice, on the verge of the icefield itself, an
icefield no one could see. This was beyond maximum risk, far beyond it; if any situation justified Alfred Schmidt in
turning round and making slowly for home, this was it.

At Curtis Field the code-signal, 'Oxygen-Strongbow', had been received and understood. 'We have Gorov, we are moving south to rendezvous with the
Elroy.'

It was not the only information Dawes had received as he
paced round the small office which had been made over to him, an office which glowed with warmth from the three heaters under the windows. The atmosphere was seventy
degrees and the warmth caressed his red face as Adams perched on a chair tilted against a wall and watched him.

'The ice west of Target-5 is
crawling with Russians,' he growled as he chewed at his unlit cigar. 'They've got chop
pers over the ice and sled-teams down on the pack - and the
Cats are beginning to appear.'

'It looks tricky,' Adams said.

'In Washington you said it would be simple,' Dawes reminded him. He looked up as Fuller, the airfield controller, hurried into the room. 'Time you got here. I want intensive air surveillance over the entire area between the coast and Target-5. I want one third of the machines you send up concentrated on the ice north of Target-5 . . .' He went over to the map he had brought with him which was pinned to the wall. 'Here - and here.'

'Nothing to the south?' Fuller queried.

'Nothing! And I want non-stop surveillance. They go out,
they come back, they refuel, they go out again . . .'

'There's a limit to how much the pilots can take,' Fuller
pointed out.

'Find that limit - then push them beyond it.'

'I don't get it,' Adams said when Fuller had gone. 'Beaumont's heading south, so why send the aircraft west and
north?'

'If you don't get it, maybe Papanin won't. Our chances of spotting Beaumont from the air in the polar 'waste are nil -
unless we got lucky. I'm not counting on that. So I'm
launching a deception operation.' Dawes paused as the
blast of a helicopter's rotor went past beyond the window.
'Papanin has a whole fleet of choppers scouring the ice. In a
couple of hours he'll hear of my air surveillance, so what will he assume? That I'm looking for Gorov - that I know
where to look. He'll withdraw his machines from the south and that may give Beaumont a chance to get out of range.'

'It could work, I suppose . . .'

'It will work!' Dawes grinned crookedly. 'I'm sending
that bastard Siberian a signal - Beaumont is corning out
north or west.'

'North or west?'

Papanin muttered the words to himself as he gazed down
at his pocket chess board in the headquarters hut at North Pole 17. On the table beside the board was a book open at the page recording the moves in the Fischer-Spassky game
at Santa Monica in 1966. The Siberian prided himself on
being able to do three things at once: play his own game,
study another man's game, and take a decision on the
current operation.

'All the machines are in the air,' Kramer reported from behind his chair. 'They are concentrating on the northern
and western approaches to Target-5 - all except the six
helicopters you told me to hold back.'

After the American Sno-Cat had crashed over the ramp
they had paid a second visit to Target-5 and they had found
the island deserted. No one was there - although Papanin
did not realize that two men, Rickard and Sondeborg,
should have still been at the camp. The Siberian had left a
small detachment to wait in case Gorov arrived, and had
then gone straight back to his own base. Until he received
the signal from Petrov at Leningrad Records he had been
puzzled.

'The Beaumont force we kept talking about doesn't exist,'
he commented as he fingered a pawn.

We? The Bait said nothing. When things went right
Papanin invariably referred to events in the first person
singular. When trouble loomed there were references to
'we' as the Siberian included him in the mess.

Papanin pushed back his chair, placed one booted leg carefully on the table beside the little chess board, and
explained. The signal had come back from Leningrad in reply to his query. The diligent Petrov had buried
deep into the massive archives and the mystery was
solved.

In 1971 the Americans had sent a three-man team clear
across the pack from Greenland to Spitsbergen. The
achievement was never reported in the press, but a Soviet
agent in Spitsbergen had sent a vague report. The expedi
tion had obvious military implications: in case of real
trouble Soviet forces might attempt to occupy Norwegian Spitsbergen - as the Americans had occupied Iceland in the
last war. The Americans had foreseen this; if they could
send men in over the pack they had a chance of occupying Spitsbergen first, So they had quietly sent a small team to see if it could be managed.

'It doesn't seem relevant,' Kramer protested.

'Doesn't it?' Papanin grinned unpleasantly as he filled his pipe. 'Beaumont is the name of the British Arctic expert who led the team to Spitsbergen. He had two men with him - an American, Samuel Grayson, and a German, Horst Langer. I think that big swine who had so much to say for himself at Target-5 was Beaumont.'

'They wouldn't send in only three men to take out
Gorov . . .'

'Wouldn't they? It could be clever, it could be enough. How easy is it to spot four men from the air in the polar wastes, Kramer?'

'So there's no large expedition?' Kramer said dubiously.

'Just Beaumont and his friends. Remember those three
men we filmed slipping into the fog two days ago?'
Papanin's tone changed. 'Send a coded signal to all planes in the air - they are looking for a very small group. Prob
ably two sled-teams and four men only.'

'And the six machines still waiting?'

'They are to fly south - due south of Target-5.'

'But the Americans are looking north and west ...'

'Carry out my orders immediately,' Papanin said quietly.

Alone in the hut, the Siberian dropped his leg to the floor
and frowned as he studied the chess board. Some of his more
bizarre decisions he never explained: it was part of his
technique for keeping his subordinates in permanent awe
of their huge chief. Like De Gaulle, Papanin believed in
surrounding himself with a certain mystic aura - it also
helped when some of the decisions turned out to be wrong.
No one knew what you had been trying to do in the first
place.

But Papanin had a definite suspicion in his head, a growing suspicion. During the flight of the Bison bomber from
Murmansk he had studied a dossier on Lemuel Quincey Dawes, whose speciality was deception operations. He
couldn't ignore the obvious - that the concentration of
American machines north and west of Target-5 was indeed
searching for the Beaumont group; if it all went wrong
he would be severely criticized for not checking those
areas. But the southern sector was beginning to interest
him.

Kramer came back into the hut a few minutes later. 'They
will be airborne within five minutes,' he informed the
Siberian.

'Excellent. Now send a signal to the carrier
Gorki
that I need an immediate check on the position of the American
icebreaker
Elroy.'

Mystified again, Kramer hurried away to the wireless hut. And again Papanin carefully did not give his reasons. When
the Beaumont team was approaching Spitsbergen in 1971 it
had made a prearranged rendezvous with the icebreaker
Edisto;
now another icebreaker was involved, the
Elroy.
Papanin had an idea he was getting close to Beaumont as he
made up his mind and moved the pawn.

Tuesday, 22 February: Noon-7PM

Beaumont wouldn't listen to reason; perhaps it would be
more accurate to say Beaumont wouldn't listen to anyone as
he kept men and dogs moving remorselessly, driving them on, refusing to stop for food or drink, refusing to stop for anything or anyone as they moved further and further south
down the tenth meridian and closer and closer to the edge
of the icefield, to Iceberg Alley.

Hemmed in by pressure ridges, huge walls of jagged ice
which loomed all around them, they sledded south down
the ravines in the moonlight. And Beaumont had now taken
over Langer's team, had the powerful Bismarck as his lead dog as he gripped the handlebar and cracked his whip over the dogs' heads. Which was an unmistakable sign that they
were going to be driven to their limits as Langer observed to
Grayson - to their limits and beyond them.

This was what had happened during the last stages of
their drive over the pack to Spitsbergen and their rendez
vous with another icebreaker,', the
Edisto.
Beaumont had
taken over the Bismarck dog team and they had never let
up for twelve hours - not until the
Edisto
was in sight, the Elliott homing beacon had been switched on, the radio sig
nal had been sent and the chopper from the icebreaker had
come winging towards them. This time it was Langer who
started the argument, who thought that Beaumont had
over-reached himself. He handed over his sled-team to
Grayson, ran ahead down the ravine and caught up with
Beaumont.

'I don't think we can keep this up much longer ...' he panted.

'Keep moving!'

Beaumont, his face set inside the narrow aperture of fur hood, cracked the whip, coaxed a little more speed out of Bismarck and the other animals increased pace. They came
to a bend in the ravine but Beaumont didn't slacken pace; he took the sled round on one runner and it scudded over
the hard ice.

'This is crazy,' Langer blazed. 'We need some rest - the
dogs need some rest. The
Elroy
is miles and miles away. We
can't possibly make it tonight. ..'

'We have to keep moving, for Christ's sake! Every half-mile is a half-mile closer to the
Elroy.
It's better than that -
the bloody ship is moving towards us!'

'Gorov is feeling the strain.'

Beaumont glanced quickly over his shoulder. Behind him
Grayson was driving the second team, forcing them to keep
up with Bismarck - and Beaumont. Behind them the
Russian followed on foot, his teeth gritted as he fought to keep up with them. It was a deliberate, brutal act of policy
on Beaumont's part to put him at the rear; travelling on a
sled he slowed everything down, but following them on foot
Gorov was constantly afraid that he would be left behind,
lost in the polar waste, and his fear of being left was keeping
him moving, was forcing him to summon up reserves -of
energy he didn't even know he had. 'He'll move if he's
scared,' Beaumont had said three hours earlier, 'so keep him
scared.'