North Cape

CHAPTER 10

For a curious moment Larkin was aware only of the beams of the twin searchlights probing into the depths of the trough, immeasurably distant. The stark, white light caught and held the peculiar green-blue color of the frigid Arctic waters. With an effort he wrenched his eyes away and strained through the gloom to the next wave, not quite a quarter of a mile away. Light flashes from the searchlights danced in front of his eyes, obscuring the express train speed of approach. In spite of the pounding, the cold, the spray, and the near panic, he found he was still counting smoothly.

“Now, hard to port, all engines emergency full.” Again his voice was a near scream. In spite of the violence of the wind on the crest, the ship shuddered along its stem as the nuclear engines were supplemented by the six gas turbine engines spewing thirty thousand shp apiece in less than eight seconds from idle. The cruiser, which had begun to swing from the wind, stopped as suddenly as though it had hit a brick wall. The engines drove her deep down below the crest, and momentarily out of the full force of the wind. The RFK slewed to port, its stern snapping around as the rudders came hard over. As she reached the, trough she was broadside to the next mountainous wave. Larkin groaned in agony. That damned ice, he cursed. The vast tonnage of ice had slowed her, pressed her too deep into the water for the engines to cope. And the next wave was already towering above her and would roll her like a stick. The ship heeled, farther and farther over, until Larkin gave up hope. A deluge of’ water washed him under, burying him completely. Then the great battle cruiser broke free; shaking her head like an angry terrier, she righted herself and shed water in torrents. She came up with a bone in her teeth as she surged around to point in the opposite direction. The following wave rolled under and lifted her high into the wind. The ship skidded down into another trough, her bow smashing deeply into the water. For a heart-sickening moment, Larkin thought again she would never surface, but once. more the bow knifed up, and she shed water. The next wave was easier, as the engines were cut back to one third. And finally she ran before the wind, moving with an easy rolling motion through the towering waves.

Larkin hung exhausted and freezing as the: ship straightened and lifted more easily into the next wave, now chasing water to the crest. Water was no longer breaking over her bow in a steady stream, but came instead in fitful spurts. Larkin felt two hands go under his arms and he was lifted to his feet. The forward portion of.the bridge on which he stood was now in the lee of the wind as the storm pounded in from directly astern. Half supported, he stumbled across the deck and into the heat and glare of the bridge. After the intense cold, the 72° temperature of the interior was almost intolerable. He slumped into the seat and Folsom pulled off his helmet and boots. It was Bridges who had come out onto the deck for him, and now he stripped off his mask and gloves and fetched a cup of hot coffee. Larkin gulped it down as fast as the scalding liquid would allow.

Folsom walked easily across the bridge to where Larkin was seated clutching his coffee. He stopped and grinned down at the captain. “Aren’t you the iron sailor,” he chuckled in a low voice. Larkin smiled back.

“I thought I was before I went out there. Now I’m not so sure.”

Folsom bent to read the dials on the strain gauges. “Well, at least that’s one worry gone. At this rate we could keep on for the next ten years.”

“Good. In that case, I’m going below for some sleep. Call me in two hours.”

“I’ll call you when we hit the rendezvous point, not before.” Larkin glanced up, startled.

“Not before I said.”

The captain stood up, trying valiantly to square his shoulders. “That is mutiny, I think, Mr. Folsom,” he said in mock anger.

“Yeah, I know. Now get below, before I call a marine to escort you.” Folsom watched fondly as Larkin went below to his quarters, then he turned and went back to the plotting table. He studied the map and the course he had laid out to the rendezvous point for a long while, then he went to stand before the screen. He reached down and flicked on the searchlights and swiveled them around to scan the sea on both sides of the bow. Clean circles of light were cut into the mountainous waves by the two million candlepower lights, which picked green out of the freezing Arctic waters and gleamed off white crests now blowing in the same direction as the RFK. He concentrated on the motion of the ship under his feet and found that she was moving in a rhythmic dance in time to the roll of the waves under her keel. Darkness had fallen in all of its intensity. The frozen air glistened with a million scattered stars, the very crispness of their light indicating the depth of the cold. Low on the southern horizon was the storm bank, spun out from the leading edge of the storm. Folsom knew that the seas would be at their worst in that area. But they could run on into the sheltering lee of the Soviet coast, safe in the knowledge that no Russian ship or aircraft could put out to look for them, nor would submarines be cruising near enough to the storm-wracked surface to spot them electronically. By the time the storm abated enough for the Russian Navy to resume regular patrols, they should be putting into the Glyde, their intermediate base before sailing for Newport Naval Base, Rhode Island.

Folsom turned away from the screen and started his regular watch tour of the various consoles, checking on the condition of the ship. He was still worried about the deck heaters. Even with the extra heat being piped up from the reactor cooling system, they still were not coping with the ice. Perhaps, now that they were running before the waves, they would not be taking aboard as much spray, not unless the wind veered, anyway. And to judge by the satellite photos of the storm center, if they maintained present speed and heading they would sail into a radial arm of wind within two hours. Then they would be taking the wind and spray across the bow quarter as well as one hell of a cross chop from the waves as the wind tried to push incalculable gallons of sea water from their already set path. It was going to be one hell of an afternoon. Two hours later Folsom was ready to modify his judgment as to what kind of afternoon it would be, but modify it downward. He turned away from the ship’s intercom. Barrows, the engineering officer, had every right to be extremely unhappy with Folsom, but his voice had been steady enough, with no hint that he did indeed blame the executive officer. Barrows had just finished reporting that the main condenser system had frozen solid. It had been Folsom’s order to use the major part of the reactor heat to feed the deck heaters. This meant that the heat normally used to maintain the condenser system at an even 36°F had to be channeled into the deck heaters and the reactor crew had to vary the power output to control the condenser system by hand. When Larkin had called for full emergency power from all engines, an overload had been thrown onto the condensers. The temperature had dropped quickly while the reactor worked at full power, until, when the engines had been cut back to one third, the temperature in the condensers stood at 33°F. The reactor crew had gone furiously to work to try and bring the temperatures back up to a safe 36°F, but in the succeeding two hours the system had oscillated widely, and, finally, the first seed crystal of ice had formed in the outside banks. Even rechanneling all heat being fed to the decks had not been enough to stave off the rapid icing. Five minutes later the webbing of pipe was full of half-frozen slush. Barrows had closed down the main system and shifted to the auxiliary condensers. If needed, he could go directly to sea water, but the resulting corrosion would mean a major overhaul for the system and two months in drydock to complete the job. Damn it all, Folsom swore to himself. Why now of all times? This whole blasted cruise seemed to be jinxed. First the collision, then the storm, and now the condenser system. What in the name of the God was next? Barrows estimated that he would need at least three to four hours to thaw and flush out the condensers. In the meantime the auxiliary banks could handle slightly less than eight knots speed. That in itself would put them nearly forty minutes behind on the rendezvous.

He snapped on the intercom and punched the code for engineering viciously. “Chuck, use the auxiliaries. If you can’t get the main condensers thawed in three hours, we’ll have to use the boost engines to make up forty minutes.”

“Right, sir. I’ve got a crew checking them over right now. How does the deck ice look?”

“Just a minute.”

Folsom turned and pressed against the glass. The decks showed up clearly in the searchlights. The glare from the ice was strong, but not so strong that he could not make out the forward winch boom lying horizontal on the deck where it had been lashed. It was covered by ice that barely showed a mound. The’ boom, when horizontal, lay three feet above the deck.

“Still too damn thick for me,” he said into the intercom. “But that’ll have to wait. Use all the reactor heat you need to get those condensers thawed!” Teleman lay relaxed in the acceleration couch, Jotting the liquid pulsing of the aircraft flow placidly through his body. The PCMS was bringing him slowly out of a two-hour nap, a much-needed nap that, while it would not completely restore him, would bring his body systems to the point where the proper dosages of amphetamines could keep him awake and completely aware. He eased the couch forward into a semisitting position and lazily scanned the ground control monitor currently displaying the Pomeranian coastline of Poland 180,000 feet below. Even at this distance he could see specks of white dancing on the surface of the Baltic Sea as it rolled and thrashed to the commands of the storm front beginning to reach across northern Europe.

In Hamburg, less than three hundred miles west, it would be colder than the gates of hell a thousand years before the fires were lit, he thought. It always seemed that the bottom had fallen out of the thermometer when one of these Arctic storms came sweeping out of the Baltic into Germany. He recalled with fondness the two years he had spent with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Europe. He had toured Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and Belgium to Rumania — all but Scandinavia, with the exception of Denmark. He had never crossed the Kattegat. For some reason he had kept putting off Norway and Sweden and Finland, meaning to cross the channel, but never quite making it. He shrugged in a half stretch to ease cramping muscles and shook. himself out of his reverie. One of these days he would go back, and Scandinavia would be first on his list. By now he could make out the southern coast of Sweden lying beyond Bornholm Island. The cloud cover was closing in quickly below and the northern end of the Baltic Sea had turned slate gray. Patches of cloud to the west were beginning to glow red in the waning twilight.

Teleman was heading directly north across the Baltic toward the Gulf of Bothnia. He would fly up the length of the gulf, then over the curve of the Scandinavian Peninsula where Sweden joined Finland. By following the twenty-fifth meridian due north, in less than two hours he would enter Norwegian airspace north of Finland. Then, twenty minutes flying time later, he would rendezvous with the Robert F. Kennedy off the North Cape, completing a twelve-thousand-mile round trip, dump his information, and head home.

“And a damn good thing, too,” Teleman said aloud to hear his own voice. Rendezvous was still some 2500 miles away and the gauge needles for his main tanks were already well into the empty zone. Shortly he would have to switch to the reserve tanks with their two-thousand-mile additional range. By that time, he figured on his knee pad, he should be somewhere in the vicinity of the Finnish coast. He was also going to come onto the rendezvous point nearly thirty minutes late. Teleman wondered how the ship was going to take that. He hoped to hell that they would have a refueler standing by. The flight plans be had been given hours ago called for him to swing west and rendezvous with the tanker over Iceland. At this rate he would be lucky to make the Cape. Directly below, he caught a fading glimpse of Gotland sliding through the clouds. The cloud cover was closing down fast and he wondered idly whether or not he would be able to see the lights of Stockholm as he passed over the city.

The run into and across the Soviet Union had not been disastrous after all. It appeared that he had lost his tail over Iran, since the last Falcon had dropped down at the end of its ten-minute run and none had come up to take its place. Perhaps they were figuring that they had scared him badly enough when he fell off into Afghanistan and had decided to opt for the Indian Ocean. He sincerely hoped so: He had flown the tightrope between Tehran and the radar base at Gurgan, and then out over the Caspian Sea without being spotted. East of Baku he almost had heart failure when a blip showed up suddenly on his screen and the readout put it at 150 miles distant. It had turned out to be nothing more than a fragment of the same ice cloud he had used for cover, but even so it was several minutes before the adrenaline stopped playing hockey in his bloodstream. Teleman was sure that he had nearly blown out the PCMS unit.

Once past Baku, with, its intensive radar net, he had made a long, sweeping turn west to cross the Russian SSR between Makhachkala and Kizlyar on the Caspian coast. The long flight across the Ukraine to Poland had been accomplished while he slept without so much as a radar bogie to disturb his dreamless exhaustion. He was about done in and he knew it, and the PCMS knew it. He had had to program specific orders into the computer or else it would promptly have dropped him back off to sleep once more. With the end of the mission less than two hours away, and that comfortable hospital bed in California only five and a half hours off, he felt he could afford to lose the extra sleep. Teleman could not explain why, but he had rather an uneasy feeling about the next two hours. The escape from the Soviet trap had been just a little too pat; that last Falcon had given up a bit too easily for all the effort it and the others had expended. He had a hunch, and in this business, he had found, you played your hunches. The ground control map showed him the narrows of the Gulf of Bothnia. The infrared gear was displaying sharply detailed pictures of the Finnish towns of Kikkola, jacobstad, and Nykarleby and the Swedish town of Umea opposite. He knew that both the Swedes and Finns had small military garrisons well hidden nearby and the Swedes had a squadron of aging Hawk antiaircraft missiles, but nothing to worry him. Both concentrated the bulk of their military establishments to the north in concert with the Norwegians to meet the threat of the Soviet armies heavily invested in the Kola Peninsula north of Finland and east of Norway.

The ground control map was beginning to describe the northern coast of the gulf when a small blip appeared on the forward edge of his radar screens, coming south from the direction of Finland and on an intercepting flight path. Quickly he checked his systems and carefully increased the ECM range.

The image grew swiftly, closing on him at near his own speed, but still a hundred thousand feet below. At first he thought it might be one of the Concorde polar flights, but the recognition pattern was all wrong and the approaching craft too small. Puzzled, he reached out and upped the ECM range even more; then he realized that he had made a fatal mistake. The approaching aircraft had to be a Soviet Falcon. By increasing the range of the ECM, he had advertised his own presence as thoroughly as if he had radioed Moscow his exact position. Teleman banked suddenly to starboard, then straightened abruptly and ran for 220,000 feet.

The Falcon maintained course for a moment, then suddenly doubled its speed and rocketed upward. Both the IR and radar screens showed the long ionization trail of the afterburner.

Teleman held for a few minutes, watching the other plane. The Soviet pilot was out to get him once and for all, and Teleman knew it. As if to prove it, the interceptor did not waver but bored steadily on, closing the four-hundred-mile range in seconds. Desperately, Teleman slammed the nose down and blasted the ramjets to full thrust. He shot away beneath the Russian and pulled up sharply behind, wishing mightily for at least a 20-mm cannon, and preferably a wing pod full of heat-seeking missiles. As he came up behind, he straightened out, running for the Arctic. His only hope was to stay as far away from the Russian as possible and outlast him.

Teleman had gained a few miles by pulling beneath and behind the Soviet pilot. But even as he was pulling away, the Russian, without a wasted second, had begun to climb into a loop. Now Teleman watched him spiral into a loop so tight that it should either have killed the pilot or torn the wings off the plane or both. At the top of the climb the Russian did a vicious wingover and arrowed down after him.

Now Teleman realized that he had been underestimating the Soviets’ desperation. Not only did they want very much to bring him down, but they were willing to violate any territory’ since he had escaped their trap in Asia. It should all have been amply clear to him in view of the magnitude of effort they had expended in shifting the Falcons around to run him down over Tashkent. His overtaxed mind finally saw what he should have realized earlier, what the Soviets had already figured out. There was no chance of the aerial fight being recorded on radar. Only the Falcon would be seen. The Russians could either ignore any protests that might be forthcoming from the Finns or Swedes or pass it off with an apology and explanation that the Soviet pilot had merely strayed while on a test flight of a new aircraft. His peculiar antics could be explained as part of the test-flight regime. Teleman himself would be invisible from the ground and there were thousands of square miles of forest-covered mountains to hide the wreckage of the A-17 from everyone but Russian search parties.

The radar panels were showing the Falcon rapidly approaching from the rear. Teleman had just enough fuel left to reach the rendezvous point and loiter for perhaps five minutes waiting for the tanker. Unless he could shake this bastard, he thought grimly, he would never make even Norway. It all depended now on who could outlast whom. The Soviet pilot must be running low on fuel as well. He had made his initial approach at Mach 2.5 and followed that up with a series of bursts to Mach 4. Figure twenty minutes flying time from Leningrad or thereabouts — maybe he could lose him yet.

Teleman decided fast. He put the A-17 into a shallow climb and rocketed to 175,000 feet at Mach 3.7. His pursuer dwindled for a moment and then came on again, afterburners flaming a long trail of ionized gas on Teleman’s radar screen. He was watching his fuel readout now as closely as he monitored the radar. He was going to have to cut the fuel load fine, yet leave enough to permit him to at least reach the ship. He had to be within radio range to transmit. If the refueling tanker was there, great; if not, it would be a short swim in those water temperatures. Teleman had had no illusions about coming out of this mission alive from the moment he recognized the Soviet aircraft over the Baltic. But the information had to be gotten back. Not that the mission was so vitally important, in fact it was probably only someone’s bright idea — we have the aircraft in that vicinity, let him go take a look. What was important was the fact that the Soviets had developed an optical tracking system that ignored the ECM efforts. The next A-17 flight was due to go out in a little less than seven hours from now. If it went, the Soviets would be waiting for it.

The Russian interceptor had caught up quickly, apparently throttling back as he came up on target. Teleman sheered violently off his starboard wing, but the Russian flier had anticipated him and came around smoothly, still locked onto Teleman’s tail. They were deep into Finnish territory now and the Russian had cut the distance to less than a mile. Teleman could not understand why he did not fire. Those damned missiles the Falcon carried had appeared to have a range of nearly two hundred miles and were optically controlled from the interceptor. Teleman twisted and turned, trying to lose his remorseless pursuer. But the Russian, with laughable ease, remained locked onto his tail. Teleman suddenly dropped his speed, cutting his engines back to idle, and dropped both landing flaps and gear. They were nearly useless in the almost nonexistent air of 175,000 feet, but every miniscule bit of drag would help. For an uncertain moment the A-17 slowed relative to the Falcon. The pilot, surprised by this unexpected maneuver, streaked past him. This brief relief in the unbearable tension caused Teleman to laugh wildly; then, regaining some measure of control, he slewed violently to the right, again falling off his starboard wing and down. He was once again behind the Russian and he meant to make the best of it. In fatal desperation, he arrowed straight down, running flat out for the cloud cover at twenty thousand feet. Ahead of him the radar showed the Falcon dropping into a full-powered dive as he pulled out of a sharp right turn and followed Teleman down.

Carefully, Teleman eased the power up, keeping the nose pointed down as sharply as he dared. The wings were fully retracted against the fuselage and he was little more than a powered dart, struggling to keep the A-17 from entering a spin mode that would finish him against some mountainside in Finland. The Russian, clawing into a shallower dive, began rapidly catching up again. In agony, Teleman watched the digital readout on the radar panel as the margin narrowed. It was clear that within seconds the Russian would make it to the cloud cover ahead of Teleman, there to use the three-or four-second lead to unleash the two deadly missiles nestling in the fuselage. Teleman ground his teeth in frustration and shoved the throttle forward to its stop. At the same time he slammed the wings forward for maximum lift and lit off the ramjets with a bang. The A-17 shuddered under the giant hand of acceleration, but the magnificent aircraft rose to the challenge. Through the red acceleration haze Teleman saw the altitude indicator strain upward. The PCMS audio and visual alarms clattered and clanked wildly as they fought to keep Teleman from blacking out. The acceleration indicator read out 12 G’s as the A-17 started into a climb.

Teleman ignored everything except the altitude indicator and the throttle. Gradually he was pulling up short in relation to the Soviet. He had caught him by surprise again. At sixty thousand feet Teleman leveled out. The Russian was still well behind, nearly eight miles, and still climbing for altitude. With the A-17 leveled out and the engines in the turbojet mode with afterburners, Teleman streaked for the North Cape at Mach 4.

But the Soviet Falcon was not through. This was the last chance and both pilots knew it. Neither had anything to lose. Teleman judged the Soviet pilot had passed his point-of-no-return when he went into the dive after him. Now he was rapidly closing the gap in one last desperate try. And there was nothing remaining that Teleman could do about it. He now had barely enough fuel to make the rendezvous point. Even if the tanker was waiting, he doubted whether enough flying time remained to complete refueling. The Soviet pilot was pulling out all stops. He closed on Teleman at Mach 4.5, boring straight in, then lifting abruptly to pounce from above. As he neared, his guns opened up. He kept his thumb down on the firing button and walked a stream of tracers across the A-17. Where were the missiles? Teleman screamed silently. Twisting his head to glance back through the rear observation slit, Teleman could see the sheet of tracers marching toward him. The aircraft rocked violently as at least one cannon shell smashed through his starboard wing without exploding. Then the Falcon slipped below to come streaking up from beneath. Teleman sheered away but the Russian remained locked on. He slammed the A-17 from side to side, nursing every last bit of speed he could from the engines. For seconds both aircraft twisted and wrenched through the frozen air with tracers from the. Falcon’s cannon probing around the A-17. Like a wounded snake, they thrashed through the Finnish skies. A second burst chewed into the tail structure. The A-17 fluttered like a wounded bird and went out of control. The Falcon edged up, cannons waiting for the optimum moment, the Russian pilot waiting hungrily, with the patience of death, for the A-17 to line up crosswise in his gun-sights, waiting to place the last burst. Then Teleman knew why there had been no missile. Because of their bulk and weight the missiles had been removed and replaced with electric cannons, to save fuel and add speed. Now both pilots were waiting for the inexorable closing of their flight paths. The milliseconds turned into minutes for both as they approached the invisible spot in the sky that would nebulously mark Teleman’s grave.

The Falcon fluttered, arced up slightly, and fell off, arrowing down until lost in the clouds below. The Soviet pilot had waited perhaps a second too long.