Target 5 (31 page)

His eyes were watering from the petrol fumes which had
seeped under his loose-fitting goggles as he descended into
the bowl. In his anxiety to get down fast he landed heavily on the ice: it was only a matter of time before the Russians pulled themselves together and then they would be swarming towards the place where they had seen the helicopter landing. Leaving the rotors running, he unfastened his seat-
strap, went to the door, opened it. He was rather careful of the whirling blades above his head as he jumped down on
to the ice.

'Watch those damned rotors,' were his first words. 'Get
the dogs aboard first - if trouble comes we leave the sleds.'

The dogs had already been released from the traces and they scrambled them inside the machine, lifting each kicking animal and shoving it unceremoniously aboard. Beau
mont waited a short distance from the machine, leaving it
to Grayson and Langer to hoist dogs and Gorov inside while
he stared round the circle of crests with his rifle ready. The
sleds went on board last, and when
Beaumont followed
them there was no trace left on the ice that the Beaumont
party had ever existed.

Beaumont went straight up to a thousand feet, taking them
out of range of rifle fire before he set course for the
Elroy.
Langer stood close to the transparent dome as they climbed,
hemmed in by whimpering dogs. He pointed downwards. 'We were only just in time.' Beaumont nodded. A group of six Russians was moving close to the amphitheatre as they
ascended.

From their altitude of one thousand feet the
Elroy
looked
like a ghost ship, one of the legendary vessels which drift round the oceans of the world without a crew, a ghost ship
set in solid ice. As they came closer Beaumont saw a channel
beyond its stern, a dark slash of sea where the icebreaker
had battered its way through the polar pack, but beyond
the slash there was continuous ice. As the ship hammered its
way north the icefield had closed behind it, locking it in.

'That other sub-killer is still hanging over the ship,'
Langer said suddenly.

'I know,' Beaumont replied. 'We're going to have to
shift it.'

He moved the stick and they started losing height, close enough to the ship to see men running to the rails and star
ing up as a second Russian machine homed in on them. And
some of the seamen carried rifles. Aft of the high bridge,
close to the stern, they could see now far below another heli
copter, a Sikorsky, resting on its launching pad while the Soviet machine clung to the air above it. So long as the
hovering machine held its present position it was im
possible for the American plane to leave its pad - it would
have ascended directly into the other machine. 'I suppose
that other sub-killer thinks we're his pal,' Grayson re
marked as he patted one of the dogs.

'He's in for a shock,' Beaumont said tersely.

'They may try to crash us . . .' Gorov who had sat in
silence on a folding seat at the back of the cabin was now alarmed enough to speak. He stood up to get a better view,
holding on to a rail to take the weight of his injured ankle.

'Sit down, Gorov!' Beaumont shouted. 'Didn't you hear
what Grayson said? The pilot will think we're Russian,
which gives us the edge.'

'Two pairs of rotors whirling close together, Keith,'
Grayson warned. 'We could end up with both of us taking
diving lessons . . .'

'I want that machine out of the way,' Beaumont insisted. 'I want it out of the way before we land . . .' He was almost over the ship now, flying slowly at an altitude of five hundred feet while four hundred feet down the other submarine
killer maintained its hover, hanging over the Sikorsky like a
threat. The ice-coated rails of the ship were lined with seamen now, all of them staring up at the new arrival, wondering what was going to happen. Standing close to the dome, Langer stared straight down on the machine below, saw the
dizzy circle of its rotors whipping through the night, the
gauze of vapour spiralling up towards him.

'Keith!' he shouted above the throbbing din. 'Could you take us down slowly alongside that bastard?'

'Yes. Why?'

Langer took down a folded toolkit bag hooked to the side
of the dome, opened it, extracted a large steel monkey
wrench. 'With our window open I might get his dome.
Then he would . . .'

'Got it - we'll try it,' Beaumont shouted. 'You know I
can't get too close to his rotors?'

'I'm ready.' Langer pushed two of the dogs away, took a
firm grip on the monkey wrench and opened the window. A
blast of icy air streamed inside the heated cabin as Beau
mont started to go down. Langer's dark hair flew out behind
him as he pushed back his hood to see clearly and leaned out
of the window. No one spoke again inside the cabin; Gorov
hunched nervously on his flap seat; and Beaumont was acutely conscious that he was handling a strange machine,
that he was attempting a dangerous manoeuvre which
could easily end in total disaster.

The drop went on as Beaumont took the helicopter down slowly. From the window Langer watched the deck of the
Elroy
coming up, the line of heads staring towards him, a peaked cap which poked out of the bridge window to look up, but above all he watched the giddy ellipse of the lethal rotors below him, slicing the air, rising up to meet him. So far as he could tell Beaumont was gauging his descent with
murderous accuracy - accurate because when he came
alongside the second machine his own racing blades should
clear the rotors below, murderous because the margin of
safety was so small.

Exposed to the bitter night air after the brief spell of warmth, Langer's face was already numb and frozen; his eyelids felt like leaden weights, desperately wanted to close, but he forced himself to keep them open, to stay hanging out of the window. Then he saw the vague shape of the top of a helmet under the dome; as he watched it the helmet tilted and something pale came into view, a pale blur seen under a clear patch in the ice-rimmed dome - the pilot's face watching Beaumont coming down almost on top of him. He had had no signal to leave his post. Now it was too late.

For the Russian the position was reversed. He had successfully immobilized the American helicopter, holding it down on its pad, but now he was sandwiched, unable to go down, unable to climb, caught in a press between the other two machines, and the press was closing, coming down on
top of him. Beaumont had hoped that the pilot's nerve
would crack, that the slow descent would make him run, and while they had been at five hundred feet the Russian
could have escaped. Now it was too late. Caught in an
emergency the Russian pilot's nerve hadn't broken, it had frozen. Unsure of what to do, he did nothing. Beaumont's
descent continued, the gap closed, the skids of his machine
hovered close to the Russian's transparent dome.

They were so close now that the air disturbance was
exerting full power, sucking air down, and Langer had the sensation that it was about to tear him out of the window down into the mincing machine of the whirling rotors. He pulled his head in, slammed the window shut, continued
watching from inside. The air disturbance was now causing another dangerous reaction - the machine was rocking from
side to side. It wasn't impossible that a whirlpool reaction would start - drawing both helicopters towards each other
until their rotor tips met in one brief grinding clash. Then they were alongside each other and Langer opened the
window again.

There was an observer as well as a pilot in the Soviet machine and Beaumont could see him operating his headset, talking' non-stop as he kept glancing across at them. A signal was being sent to someone. Then Gorov did a stupid
thing. Restless with anxiety, he stood up and peered towards
the dome of the other helicopter. 'Sit down!' Beaumont
roared. He didn't think Soviet pilots were insane enough to
use suicide tactics but he didn't know what instructions
they had received regarding Gorov. Beaumont held his own
helicopter in a hover, ready to fly forward, much of his attention focused on the thick silhouette of the mast which
had to be avoided whatever happened. 'OK, Horst,' he shouted. 'Get on with it!'

Below them the deck of the
Elroy
had cleared suddenly;
either by order of the ship's commander or through in
stinctive self-preservation, the American seamen had disappeared, taken cover. Beaumont watched Horst, his hand on the lever which would take them forward, away from
machine, ship and mast in
a.
burst of speed. The noise inside
the cabin was terrible now, shattering as the engines of the
other machine added their blasting roar to the din. And
the Soviet helicopter was rocking badly too, quaking as
though about to split open.

Langer screwed up his eyes to see more clearly, saw the curve of the Russian's dome only yards away. For seconds they wobbled close to each other. Langer leaned well out of
the window and was deafened, paralysed with the cold. He
raised his right arm, paused, hurled the monkey wrench in a
careful arc, slammed the window shut.

The missile struck the shatter-proof dome, a dome shuddering with vibration, hurtled away at an angle into the night. Langer stared through his own dome. It had
worked. Shatterproof, the Russian's dome hadn't shattered
- it had crazed. No longer transparent, its curved surface
was milky - the pilot inside was blind, couldn't see a damned
thing. Beaumont shot away from the blinded Russian,
banked away from the ship's mast which loomed like a
gigantic flagpole, flew on out over the ice.

Every helicopter has a smaller rotor at the .tail. Without a
tail rotor mounted at right-angles to the pitch of the main
rotor no helicopter would fly. The enormous power of the
overhead rotor has a natural torque reaction - whirling
through the air it would sweep the fuselage it supports
round and round at ever-increasing speed - but for the
counter-force of the tail rotor. This was something the
Soviet pilot and his observer were about to experience for
brief killing seconds.

As Beaumont had anticipated, the Soviet pilot did the
wrong thing. It was understandable; it was also fatal. At one
moment, sitting behind his controls, the pilot still had a
clear view of his surroundings. Then Horst's wrench struck and he was surrounded by opaqueness, by crazed windows
he couldn't see through at all. The world went milky on
him. He was confined to a view of his cabin. He panicked.

He had to get away from the mast, to fly clear of the ship
and out above the open ice where Beaumont had gone. He
moved a lever, misjudged it, went forward in a shallow
curve, banking to escape the menace of the huge mast. He
was only half successful, his main rotors swung clear, but
he forgot his tail and curved too sharply. The tail rotor
kissed the mast and the whole mechanism left the machine.
The balance-force which countered the torque tendency
was gone. Basic aerodynamics came into play.

Once in Sydney, Australia, Beaumont had seen a film
taken from an automatic camera mounted in a helicopter
which flew too close to a building in Sydney Harbour. The
tail rotor kissed the building, dropped into the water, and the camera recorded what happened. Later it was dredged
up from the wreckage containing two bodies and the film was re-run. It was terrifying. He recalled the film as he saw
what happened to the Soviet helicopter, knew with a
horrible clarity what was happening inside the doomed
machine.