Target 5 (29 page)

'I do know him,' Grayson said quietly. 'He's a number
one bastard - and that's why he's here. How close do you reckon he is?'

'Seven miles away at a guess,' Beaumont replied. 'Any
objections to us pushing on?'

They pushed on for two miles at a speed they hadn't
achieved for hours, threading their way through the maze of ravines until they were within one mile of the open ice. And
because there were still no Russian choppers in the sky
Beaumont decided that now they could send the signal and activate the Elliott homing beacon which should bring the
Elroy's
helicopter over their heads.

It was very cold, colder than ever it seemed, but this
could be their overwhelming fatigue. And it was still clear, clear except for the plume of steam-like vapour which hung
over the sled-teams as they moved forward, the vapour
which was breath of dogs and men condensing in the bitter
atmosphere. Unlike the popular conception of the Arctic,
screaming blizzards were rare in this
latitude; it was simply
one of the coldest places on earth.

They halted inside a ravine. Grayson had pointed out
that no helicopter could land in this mess but Beaumont had
told Langer to unload the transmitter. 'They can winch us
up, Sam, one by one,' he explained, 'then I'll take the dogs
out on to the open ice.' Langer was unfastening the canvas
flaps round the transmitter when Gorov came down the ravine, moving so quickly that Beaumont watched him in
surprise. The Russian was breathing heavily as he stopped and spoke almost hysterically. 'Now we are safe I demand
you return my property immediately!'

'What the hell are you talking about?' Beaumont was
looking down as he spoke, gently heeling his right boot into
the ice. It didn't feel too hard and he suspected that the
pressure ridges on either side had only recently been formed
by the closing of a lead.

'My core! You stole my core! One of you stole it!' Gorov
was getting excited as he pulled out the heavy tube from his
parka and waved it in Beaumont's face.

'You're holding it,' Beaumont said. He frowned again as the heel of his boot suddenly sank a few inches. When he pulled it came up with an oozing plop. Soft ice. Gorov was
too absorbed to notice anything wrong.

'This is not the same core ...'

'You mean the other one had the Catherine charts inside
it?' Beaumont was staring directly at Gorov. 'As you said,
we may be almost safe. Not a good time to start shouting the
odds, is it?'

'The odds?'

'Go back and give Horst a hand with that set.'

Langer had hoisted the man-pack transceiver over his
shoulder and was now a long way back down the ravine,
carrying it to a more level section before he set it up. It was
almost too much for him in his weakened state but he
plodded on and then found a level gap in the wall. He put it down carefully as Gorov raved on in the distance.

'I must have my core! It is that core which makes me
valuable to Washington ...'

Gorov was still waving the metal tube about like a blunt instrument when Grayson took it off him. 'Valuable?' the American said. 'Until we reach that ship not one of us is worth a bent nickel. We may not have heard one of your choppers for over an hour, but we're not on board that ship yet. Now, give Horst a hand with that transmitter when he's finished.'

'Ground's sticky underfoot, Sam,' Beaumont murmured as Gorov went back up the ravine. 'We'll have to watch it.'

'I suppose it figures,' Grayson replied as he fondled Bis
marck to keep him quiet, 'we're getting close to the sea . ..'

They heard the Russian shout, looked along the ravine, saw him falling. He crashed full length along the ravine,
tried to get up, fell down again, 'Christ!' Beaumont snapped.
'He's twisted his ankle.' Langer was ready to transmit, had the telescopic aerial extended, and he was just moving the
set to a more level patch of ice when he heard the shout.
Swearing, he left the set and went down the ravine to help the Russian.

Gorov had twisted his ankle. He tried to stand up a
second time and collapsed as Langer reached him. The German grabbed him under the armpits, lowered him to a sitting position with his back to the ice wall, then noticed the boot of his right leg, the one which had brought him
down. Black ooze clung to the boot, ooze which was already
freezing. 'Keith! Soft ice here - and Gorov can't walk . . .'
With Grayson to help him, he formed an arm cradle and
they carried Gorov back to the sled where
he settled himself,
looking anywhere except in Beaumont's direction.

'Better hurry up with that signal,' Beaumont said.

Langer and Grayson went back up the ravine slowly,
careful of where they placed their boots, and when Langer
reached the gap in the ice wall he stared, wondering if he
was going mad. Then he let out a shout which brought
Grayson running. The Redifon set had sunk. The main part
of the transmitter had vanished and only the disappearing
aerial still showed above the surface as a froth of bubbling ooze closed over the box. Langer dropped to his knees, scrabbled desperately in the icy mess, but the box had gone
below the level his gloved fingers could reach. In despair he
grabbed at the aerial. A piece snapped off and he was left
holding it as the rest of it went down. It was gone. They had
lost their only means of communicating with the
Elroy.

'You have dealt with the caviar?' Papanin demanded.

The Siberian had a new temporary headquarters, a
mobile headquarters a thousand feet above the pack as the submarine killer flew steadily south. And he was talking to Vronsky in another machine much further south, using the
code-word
caviar,
for
Elroy
because he was talking direct on
the radio-telephone.

'The caviar is sandwiched,
5
Vronsky replied.

Papanin grunted as he switched off and stared down at
the icefield below. It was getting close to some kind of climax
in the game and he wanted to be there to direct the moves
himself. 'By midnight we'll have them,' he said.

'They haven't been seen yet,' Kramer pointed out, ever
pessimistic.

Papanin frowned ferociously to shut him up as static crackled in his ear. He listened with an expressionless face, acknowledged the new message, then glared at the pilot. 'Get this thing moving,' he said coldly, 'or are you anchored to the ice?' He turned round and stared at Kramer who was perched on a flap seat at the back of the cabin. 'By midnight, I said. They have just located the target.'

'Keith, the bastard's coming in to land!'

'I expected that.' Beaumont stared up from the top of the ice wall while he watched the submarine killer dropping,
both rotors moving more slowly as the machine came down vertically to a point on the level ice a quarter of a mile from
where he crouched.

They had been spotted. The helicopter now landing had
flown over them twice, and it was landing between them and
the icebound ship. He lowered his glasses. Papanin never missed a trick: a second helicopter was hovering over the ice-encrusted silhouette of the ship, poised over the launch
pad so Schmidt couldn't send up his own machine.

'We were nearly there,' Grayson said bitterly as he
crouched beside Beaumont. 'Another couple of hours and
we'd have made it . . .'

'Might as well be a couple of hundred^' Langer said from the other side of Beaumont. He slithered back inside the ravine quickly as the dogs started jumping about. The beating roar of the descending machine echoed along the pressure ridges which crisscrossed the ice in all directions. It touched down, its rotors still whirling. A door opened and men began dropping to the ice, men with rifles. Furry and hooded in the moonlight, they spread out in a broad crescent and began advancing towards the pressure ridges. Again the speed of the operation impressed Beaumont.

'I didn't know that machine could hold so many,' Gray-
son said grimly.

'You know what you have to do,' Beaumont reminded
him. 'Keep a close eye on Gorov - I don't want him
panicking at the psychological moment.'

'You're committing suicide . . .'

'We'll die if we just wait for them. They want Gorov and we're expendable witnesses.'

Beaumont slipped down the side of the ice wall, trailed his rifle and began running down the ravine. Behind him the others watched him go until Grayson gave them a sharp order. Despite the fact that the ice walls on either side towered above him Beaumont ran in a stoop, ignoring the fact that there could be soft ice ahead, praying that the ground would stay firm. In the emergency the fatigue had temporarily left him; he was clear-headed and he had complete control over his limbs. It was hardly surprising that Grayson had called what he was trying to do suicide - Beaumont was running straight towards the Russians.

It was not quite as foolhardy an action as it seemed. He
had waited to see what came out of the machine, now they were advancing towards the pressure zone, and now he was
running towards the approximate centre of the crescent of men he couldn't see. They would come inside the ravines
trying to keep their crescent-shaped formation - so when
the right moment came the security detachment could close their crescent, encircling their target. It was the element of surprise Beaumont was counting on: the last thing the sec
tion leader would expect would be for one of the hunted
men to run towards him.

He ran light-footed, making as little noise as possible as he
followed the snaking ravine which twisted and turned; from
his high point on the crest Beaumont had noted the course
of this ravine, and so far as he could tell it eventually led out on to the open ice at a certain point. In places the ice
corridor was in shadow, in other places as he went round a corner he ran into moonlight. Soon he would have to slow
down because soon he would be close to the incoming
Russians. As he ran he heard in the distance the faint humming beat of the helicopter muffled by the ice walls. The pilot wasn't taking any chances; he was keeping his engines
going for fear they might never start again in this tem
perature. He stopped running, began moving very cau
tiously. He would meet the Russians soon.

Crouched close to the lee of the right-hand wall, he crept forward, noting alcoves he could dodge back into when he
heard them coming - if he heard them coming in time.
Beaumont was under no illusion that he faced amateurs: the Soviet Special Security detachments which operated in the
Arctic were trained men accustomed to operating in sub-
zero temperatures. But they weren't too accustomed to
moving on foot over the pack. He was holding his rifle in both hands when the fur-clad Russian came round a corner very quietly.

Both men were startled, but the Russian hadn't been
expecting to meet anyone so close to the helicopter. He was
carrying an automatic weapon over his shoulder and he
made a mistake: he tried to unsling it. Beaumont reacted
without thinking, swinging the rifle round in his hands so
that the heavy metal butt-plate faced the Russian. He
slammed it forward at head height. At the last moment the Russian jerked his head sideways and the butt-plate only
grazed his jaw, but it was enough to unbalance him, to send his boots slithering over the ice as he fell backwards and Beaumont moved forward.