Target 5 (3 page)

'Supposing Target-5* gets fogbound,' Dawes suggested
with a grim note in his voice. 'How do we
get in then to take
out Gorov? We can't fly in - we can't sail in across solid
polar pack - so we'll have to walk in, sled across the ice.
That's why we could need Beaumont.'

*
Very large ice islands in the Arctic are called Targets by the Americans. T-1 (Target-1), the earliest known ice island, was fast seen by the radar officer of a Superfortress off the Canadian Arctic coast on 14 August 1946.

'He's a piece of insurance?'

'Yes.' Dawes looked at the closed door to his office as
though Beaumont might fill the doorway at
any moment.
'The only trouble is he doesn't know he's just a piece of in
surance - and I'm not telling him. Just to put your anxious
brain at rest, Adams, I'll list his qualifications . ..'

'We have no one else who could take a sled across the pack?' Adams asked with a note of incredulity. 'Surely that's a simple enough operation?'

'Sometimes I wonder why I employ you,' Dawes said
with a genuine tone of wonderment. 'Sledding is the
roughest, toughest job on the face of God's earth.' He stood
up and walked quickly over to a huge wall map. 'Come here
and I'll teach you something they forgot to tell you at
Harvard.'

He stared up at the map of the Arctic zone. At the top
hovered the coast of Russia with Murmansk and Leningrad
to the right. The centre point of the map was the North Pole with Spitsbergen, Greenland and the Canadian and Alaskan coasts below. The marker showing the present position of
Target-5 was very low down, pinned just above Iceberg
Alley, the dangerous funnel of moving ice between Green
land and Spitsbergen.

'Target-5 is now drifting a hundred and twenty miles off
the Greenland coast,' Dawes said quietly. 'Twenty-five
miles further east is the Soviet base, North Pole 17, where
Gorov will make his run from. Every day those two slabs of
ice supporting those bases are drifting with the pack closer
to Iceberg Alley. Beaumont calls it the most dangerous place
on earth - and I agree with him.'

'His qualifications?' Adams pressed.

'Unusual. His mother was Canadian, his father British -
he was killed during the war. They're both dead now. Beau
mont was brought to Canada as a child in 1943 and taken
to Coppermine at the edge of the Arctic. He grew up among
the ice - close to where the ice islands are born when they
crack off the Canadian ice shelf. In 1952 he was sent back to
Britain to complete his education and he became interested
in aviation. He married in 1965 - when he was twenty-five -
and three weeks after the marriage a hit-and-run drunk
killed his wife.'

'Traumatic,' Adams murmured.

Tor the hit-and-run killer, yes. They found him, charged him, and Beaumont was in court when he was sentenced in
London. Before they got him out of the witness box Beau
mont got to him and half-killed him. He was let off with a
suspended sentence and came straight back to Canada.'

'That would be seven years ago?' Adams estimated.

'Nice to know you can add up,' Dawes commented.
'Since then he's spent most of his life in the Arctic - working
part of the time for the Arctic Research Laboratory people at Point Barrow, part of the time for us. He's the man who
brought us all that data on the Soviet submarine killer
chopper when it first showed in the Arctic.' Dawes grunted at the memory. 'He's got top security classification and he speaks fluent Russian. If that isn't enough there was the
Spitsbergen trip.'

'What was that, sir?'

'Our security must be better than I thought,' Dawes observed with a wintry smile. 'But you were in Saigon at the time. Last year three men set out across the pack to prove
something we thought was impossible could be done - they crossed all the way from Greenland to Spitsbergen by sled.
It didn't get into the papers because that trip has military
implications. The three men were Sam Grayson and Horst
Langer - now waiting up at Thule - and their leader,
Beaumont.'

'He sounds - promising,' Adams conceded. 'But we only use him if Target-5 becomes fogged in?'

'Correct! The trouble is Beaumont will only go straight back to Greenland if I tell him he's going
there to bring out
Michael Gorov ...'

'But you don't know that,' Adams protested. 'The latest
met report shows clear weather over the whole area ...'

'So I show him my latest met report.' Dawes went back to
his desk and extracted a typed form which he handed to
Adams. 'He's just spent two bad years in the Arctic so it's
going to be hell's teeth to persuade him to go back. That bit of forgery should help.'

Adams stared at the sheet of paper. It was an official met report, dated and timed eight hours earlier.
Weather con
ditions vicinity Target-5 deteriorating rapidly. Dense fog. Visibility
nil. Temperature forty-five below. Conditions expected to worsen.
Adams looked up from the report. 'What happens when he finds out you've fooled him?'

'He'll blow his top - but by then he'll be at Thule, Greenland, I hope.' Dawes took a short fat cigar out of a box and
put it in his mouth without lighting it. He was trying to give
up smoking for thirty days and so far he'd lasted out a fort
night. 'You've heard about the security leak at Thule?'
he asked casually.

'No.' Adams straightened up in his chair. 'What leak?'

'Callard of the FBI warned me two hours ago.' Dawes blew out the match he had absentmindedly lit and his expression was grim. 'It appears a top Soviet agent has been sending out a stream of information for over two years. They know his code-name - Crocodile - and they expect to come up with his real identity soon.'

'That could jeopardize this whole operation,' Adams said
slowly.

'I don't think so - I'm going to warn Beaumont to deal
only with the security chief up there, Tillotson.' Dawes
checked his watch. 'And Beaumont should be here soon, so
brace yourself, Adams.'

The moon was high, the night was clear, and the sky
glittered with the spread of the Great Bear
constellation
hovering above the polar pack. In the bitter cold of the long
night Target-5 was besieged.

One hundred and twenty miles east of the Greenland
coast, only twenty-five miles west of the Soviet ice island,
North Pole 17, Target-5 was besieged by the pack grinding
up against it, pressing against its cliff-like fringes, a con
stantly moving pack of billions of tons of ice which squeaked
and gibbered as it tried to smash the island trapped inside
its pressure.

It had been trying to smash the island for thirty years -
ever since Target-5 had broken away from the Canadian ice shelf in 1942 when it started its spectacular orbits round the
North Pole. But so far the pack had made no impression on the twenty-foot-high cliffs which reared above it because it was salt-water ice - ice formed out of the sea. The massive
island, a mile in diameter, was tougher.

Target-5 was made of freshwater ice, which is harder than
its salt-water counterpart. And it had a long pedigree. For
hundreds of years the ice shelf at the edge of the Canadian
coast had been built up by the slow-moving flow of glaciers debouching into the frozen sea. Layer by layer the shelf had
been formed until it was two hundred feet deep. Target-5
was a fragment of this shelf - a mile-wide fragment which had broken loose and drifted with the pack for thirty years.

It was starting its fourth ten-year orbit round the Pole,
was heading once more for the Canadian
Arctic coast, when
the Greenland Current caught it. The huge slab of ice was
dragged further south than it had ever moved before. Soon
it was close to the funnel between Greenland and Spits
bergen, and then it reached the point of no return and con
tinued heading south instead of west, south towards Iceberg
Alley.

In faraway Washington Dawes was still waiting for Beau
mont when Dr Matthew Conway, the fifty-year-old station
leader on Target-5, came out of the headquarters hut to take
another star-fix with his sextant. A normally placid man,
Conway was edgy as he fiddled with the instrument, and his
irritation wasn't helped by the fact that a second man joined
him almost as soon as he was outside. Jeff Rickard, the
thirty-two-year-old wireless operator shut the door behind
him quickly to keep in the warmth. 'Any sign of activity,
Matt?' he inquired.

'Lots of it,' Conway replied with forced humour. 'A Grey
hound bus for Omaha just went by.'

'Jesus, if that were only true! Any sign of the Russians, I
meant.'

'I know what you meant.'

They stood in the middle of the twelve flat-roofed huts which formed the research base in the centre of the island. Across a narrow avenue of beaten snow six huts faced six more, and from a hut further down the avenue a wireless mast speared up into the moonlit night. In the distance all around them, at no point more than half a mile away, the enemy - the polar pack - was squeaking and gibbering like some huge beast in pain. It reminded them that the pack was alive, was moving and grinding up against the small cliffs which still held it back. A fresh sound came, a sharp report like a rifle crack.

'What the hell was that?' Rickard whispered.

'A piece of ice breaking off,' Conway said wearily. 'Get
back inside with Sondeborg, would you, Jeff. I want to
finish this job.'

'He's in one of his moods. I think he's getting worse,
Matt.'

Conway, his face turned away from Rickard, tightened
his mouth as he tried to concentrate on the star-fix. Sonde
borg, twenty-six years old and the youngest of the three
men, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, whatever
that might be. It was the isolation, of course, and it was near
the end of their time on the island. In twelve days the plane would come to evacuate them from the doomed
island and
now the hours - even the minutes - were like years.

There search base was surrounded on all sides by a smooth
snowbound plateau running away to the cliffs - on all sides except to the south where a small hill rose, its summit forty feet above the plateau. Here, over a hundred miles from the nearest coast, was a hill littered with giant, snow-covered
boulders, real rocks, some of them the size of small bungalows. Ages ago they had been carried down inside a glacier and deposited on the Canadian ice shelf- and when the huge slab of ice had torn itself loose it had carried the hill with it.

The door behind Conway opened again and he felt his
self-control going. Sondeborg was joining them. It was get
ting very difficult: no man wanted to be left on his own in
this terrible solitude, even inside a warm hut, but when they were together they ground up against each other like the ice
grinding against the nearby cliffs. 'Shut that door, Harvey,' Conway said as he pressed his eye to the
instrument. The
door slammed behind him.