North Cape

CHAPTER 12

Folsom stared pensively out the starboard port, watching the storm-thrashed waves towering on either side of the ship. Only rarely now did they break over the bow to come dashing down the length of the ice-smooth deck. He became aware that Larkin had come onto the bridge and had moved over to stand behind hint

“The seas seem to be easing somewhat”

“Yes, sir. We aren’t taking such a pounding now. The repair crew has managed to reweld the cover plates in the bow section and rig a couple of beams to help hold it in place. I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble, from that quarter at least”

“Then there are small things to be grateful for.” Larkin smiled. “You have managed quite well, Mr: Folsom. I must say that I am proud of both you and the crew.” Larkin delivered this rare compliment in a matter-of-fact voice, but Folsom was deeply touched by it.

“Thank you, sir. Although you might want to modify that when you hear about the condensers.”

Larkin chuckled. “Expecting a rocket were you? I read the report when I came up. Don’t worry about it. As you know, man does not always triumph over machinery,” he quoted solemnly. “There was nothing else you could have done. And I think the auxiliary condensers can handle the cooling system for now.”

He paused and stared out at the waves. “What have you decided about using the boost engines?”

“Uh, nothing really, at least at the moment. I didn’t…”

“Well, think…”

“Come now, you are the executive officer. You probably know this ship and her engines better than I do. Do you think she could handle seas like this under emergency power?” Folsom hesitated a moment before answering. “Yes, I think maybe she could,” he said thoughtfully. “Ordinarily I would suggest that we go farther under the lee of the Cape. We might find easier waters there. The only thing that worries me is whether or not the hydrofoils could stand the pounding. In and out of the water so much… shorter seas would be a lot easier on the struts.”

Larkin rubbed his mouth and chin. “Go in closer to the coast… I don’t really know. Most of the charts for this area are not accurate. This coast hasn’t really been thoroughly re-charted since the Germans did it in 1941. The coastal shelf is full of reefs…. How close in would you want to go?”

“At least five miles.”

“Five miles!” Larkin exclaimed. “That puts us inside Norwegian waters.” Folsom nodded. “I know, sir, but anything less would do us no good. That’s why I don’t think we should try. The Norwegians probably Wouldn’t raise a fuss if they spotted us. But, if for some reason they did, the investigating board would have to examine our logs and there would be no way of concealing the fact that we did violate Norwegian waters without permission.

“We can gain a few extra knots by coupling the boost engines to the main drive shafts anyway.”

Larkin nodded assent and turned away to cross to his high seat. He sat down and scanned the readout dials that presented the status of every vital portion of the ship. Both Larkin’s and Folsom’s panels — identical in every way — were to the Robert F. Kennedy what Teleman’s PCMS console had been to the A-17.

“All right, Mr. Folsom,” he said finally, “let’s play it that way.” The Robert F. Kennedy came to the rendezvous position hike an icy ghost. Every external fitting that faced the sea and wind was covered to a depth of three feet with gray, rock-hard ice. Long rills ran along the length of the weather deck, covering every shroud and stay and the lower reaches of the single antenna mast protruding from the superstructure. Only the upper, working portion of each antenna was clear due to its own independent electric heater. The RFK was streamlined like no other ship had ever needed to be. Instead of the block-like superstructure characteristic of modem destroyers and cruisers, the RFK’s bridge was built in a V and sloped aft. Her fore and after decks were free of the usual cannon turrets and other protuberances and the weather deck ran smooth from bow to stem in a gentle line except for the superstructure. At the same time, the sides of the deck curved, from a center line formed by a ten-foot walkway, downward to meet the hull. But now the ship resembled nothing as much as a child’s plastic toy boat covered with ice.

Larkin ordered the ship into a station-keeping pattern and re-.. duced speed to eight knots, only enough to maintain steerageway in the heavy seas. The RFK came about to fight the seas around a four-mile rectangle, with the legs into and running from the waves.

On the bridge, Folsom glanced warily at Larkin, standing before his console, his eyes glued to the radio operator’s hunched back as he sat ears straining under the earphones to catch the slightest whisper of sound over the VHF-FM frequency. Folsom knew Larkin was extremely worried. Knowing the full story and the knife-edge schedules the reconnaissance aircraft had to keep to, he was worried as well. Minutes before they had received a transmission from the refueling tanker, maintaining his assigned rendezvous position two hundred miles to the west. Everything was waiting, the stage set for the final scene. But where was the leading actor? Larkin shifted his weight from one foot to another. Imperceptibly at first, the motion of the ship was becoming rougher as she turned into a crosswind run. Larkin noted it with a sharp glance at the gyroscopic-driven indicator and immediately turned back to face the radio operator. Teleman was less than four hundred miles from the North Cape when he decided that perhaps he had pushed his luck as far as it would go. His fuel readouts were showing barely enough left to reach rendezvous, but the single, remaining engine was certainly not acting like there was. Twice, within the space of two minutes, the engine had coughed like, an old man on a cold winter morning and then resumed its steady drone. Teleman had never experienced a fuel shortage in the A-17 and he was at a loss as to how to diagnose the malady.

He was still maintaining a steady twenty-two thousand feet deep in the top layers of the Arctic storm. So far he had not been spotted by the searching Russian aircraft, but the radar screen was showing them strung out like pickets in a fence. They were putting out quite a bit of effort to greet him, he thought, but it was one honor that he would be happy to do without.

Teleman ran a correction bug-hunter program through the computer directed at the fuel readouts. Nothing showed up and he tried to relax; telling himself that if anything had been wrong the computers would have spotted it. He had almost convinced himself when the engine shuddered again. This time the unevenness persisted, the engine’s RPM’s dropping quickly until he thought he was going into a flame-out condition. At twenty-one thousand RPM, they caught again and the compressor came back up to the proper rev level. If he was running low on fuel, he figured, it was probably due to the increased drag from the damaged tail section. He had been checking on it steadily for the past hour, watching larger and larger chunks peel lose. Added to the fuel problem, he was now worrying about how much longer the entire aft fuselage was going to hold together. Of all places he did not want to eject, he could think of few that ran second to the top of Norway in the middle of an Arctic storm. If he was lucky, a wandering Lap might find his body, perfectly preserved in its thick coat of ice, several years hence. Leaning back as comfortably in the acceleration couch as he could after six straight days he stared at the instrument panel and the various displays trying to decide how soon to raise RFK to transmit his information. He was so tired that the various displays and panels full of readout dials and verniers refused to focus into concrete entities. Instead they were all running together into a fuzzy, jumbled mass of softly glowing colors. He was so tired that he knew if he closed his eyes not even the last trumpet would be loud enough to wake him.

When the engine failed a fourth time and the RPM’s fell and, kept on falling, he decided, enough, and threw the radio transmitter switches.

“Target One, Target One, acknowledge.”

The communicator buzzed on Larkin’s console. He snapped it on with an impatient motion and acknowledged sharply.

“Captain, this is the communications room. We are receiving an in-clear radio message from identity Beatle—”

“What the hell?” Larkin roared. “Did you say Beetle?”

“Yes, sir, he’s coming in on no Mo. and his voice is funny… kind of slow and broken.”

“All right…” Larkin was thinking fast. Obviously something had gone wrong. The recon aircraft was already fourteen minutes-late and now he was transmitting over an open channel, in-clear. “All right,” he repeated. “Pipe him up here and acknowledge.” Almost instantly, the bridge speakers burst into life with a rumble of static.

“Target One, Target One, acknowledge.”

Much longer, Teleman thought, and it would not matter. Already he could see several radar blips that he knew to be radio monitoring aircraft beginning to form a triangulation pattern.

“Target One, Target One, come in you blasted idiots. What the hell do… you think is going on up here?”

Teleman followed with a long string of profanity. If nothing else, that should convince them that he was an American.

“Identify yourself.” The message was short and in the clear. “Target One, Target One, stop playing games. This is Beatle!”

The eleven men on the bridge swiveled almost as one to stare in surprise at their captain. In a year and a half of these mysterious missions around the world this was the first time that anyone except Larkin had heard the hushed voice that came in at periodic intervals. The marine guard started forward, hesitated, as if not knowing,what to’ do. Then training took over and he strode over to Larkin’s desk. Larkin ignored him. He was now concentrating on the speaker and his communications officer acknowledging the call. The bridge operator had still not recovered from the unexpected shock and sat staring at his captain with a quizzical look on his face. Folsom moved to stand behind Larkin, he too ignoring the flustered marine.

“Quit horsing around down… there, I’m… I’m…”

“Target One, here, Target One here, status quickly.” Larkin’s voice was tight, the strain evident. He knew as well as did Folsom that this could be a Russian trick to draw them out, to establish radio fix down which a salvo of missiles could streak at any moment. The radar operator came to suddenly and with a half-choked shout swung back to his screens.

“Bandit… jumped over… Finland. Tail… surface badly-shot up… losing altitude… fuel almost gone… bandits waiting… stand by for transmission… this channel.”

“Beatle wait until within usual procedural range. Repeat, wait until within usual procedural range.”

“No good… cannot last that long.”

Teleman stopped, breathing deeply with the effort. The warm, comforting hands of sleep were again closing around him. He had to shake his head several times before he could focus his thoughts enough to even wonder why the PGMS was not compensating. Then he saw why. The single-minded computer feedback systems were convinced that he was jeopardizing the mission. The flashing MISSION ABORT sign was flickering at him. If he had. not over-ridden the controls earlier, the computer would probably have disregarded the threat of the Soviet fighters and decided Whether or not to run for home at top speed or trigger off the destruct bomb carefully packed away in the center of the aircraft.

Now he was becoming aware that his heart was beating like a trip hammer. His vision had closed to a narrow tunnel that encompassed only the instrument panel. How much more of this total body-system abuse he could take before his heart quit or he had a stroke he did not know. He knew only that he must get the message through to the RFK that the Russians had the optical tracking system.

“Target One, do not interrupt… prepare to receive… transmission. Bandits are onto… ball game… all in transmission…”

“No,” Larkin shouted. °We have a tanker on the way. He can reach you in less than fifteen minutes.”

If he could have, Teleman would have laughed. In fifteen minutes he could very well be dead, from several causes, not the least of which were Soviet interceptors.

“On my mark… five seconds to transmit… five… four… three… two… one… transmit.”

Over the radio Teleman could hear the squeal of tape decks spinning madly as twenty-six hours of constant speed recording on sixty-eight channels was transmitted. Then he leaned back exhausted. His job was done. The strain of the mission and the almost constant skirmishing with Soviet interceptors in the last eight hours, with only a few minutes sleep at a time, and the overload of drugs in his system caused a stultifying lethargy that was interrupted only by his heart rate. His portion of the task was indeed finished. And so was he. It had been twenty hours since he had more than a few snatched hours of drug-induced light sleep, with the rest of the time occupied in intense mental and physical’ concentration, again prompted by drugs. The A-17 began to fall off and he brought it back with difficulty. The tail section was beginning to vibrate badly again as he lost altitude into the storm, threatening to come loose somewhere aft of the cockpit at any moment. The engine coughed once more and resumed its dull steady murmur. The emergency reserve tank levels were pushing well into the danger zone now.

“Can you hold for tanker?” Larkin asked again. The familiar voice, was high pitched over the radio, rumbling faintly with storm-induced static.

Teleman brought himself upright with difficulty. “No… fuel almost gone… not even reach you… sorry about clear message… no difference… bandits onto everything… so don’t worry…”

Teleman stopped abruptly. He was beginning to ramble and every second he continued to talk brought the Russians that much closer. “Approximately ten minutes… flight left… losing altitude… down on… coast… destroy… plane.”

“You can’t,” Larkin almost shouted. “Try and make it…” Then he realized the futility of what he had been going to say. At five hundred miles an hour, that meant almost forty minutes or more to the ship, and with only ten minutes of fuel left — idiotic, he told himself savagely.

Teleman’s voice came again, weaker and weaker as he talked: “I’ll come in low… over coast… eject… plane… destroy.”

Larkin, standing on the warmly lit bridge of the RFK, could picture the lonely man in the cockpit of his damaged aircraft. He would be going slowly through the motions of setting the timer on the self-destruct charge. As soon as he ejected, it would begin to count off three. minutes. If Teleman did not eject within five minutes of setting the timer, it would go off anyway, with enough force to blow tiny pieces of. the aircraft over a five-mile area. Larkin figured quickly on a scratch pad, glancing from the Doppler distance readout to the radar operator, shaking his head.

“Target One, here. We are getting a position fix on you and will track you down. I’ll bring the ship in and pick you up as soon as the storm subsides enough to get a helicopter or boat in.”

Even as Larkin spoke the radio operator handed him a decoded note, which he read through and then handed to Folsom to read.

“The hell… you will…” Teleman muttered. “Get… those tapes back.”

“Sorry, I’ve just been directed to pick you up. Obviously they are going to want to hear about the bandits and fast. All overflights have been suspended until they can talk to you.”

Teleman was now down to ten thousand feet. He glanced at the ground control panel to see the storm-thrashed tundra and forest sliding by below. He laughed bitterly. “If… I get… out… this… be… miracle. Good-bye.” There was a sudden silence as Teleman’s voice disappeared. Only the hollow hissing of static marked the open channeL Feeling strangely empty, Larkin strode to the radar console and, resting a hand to support himself against the violent motion of the ship on the back of the operator’s chair, watched the screen intently. Coordinates were fed directly into the radar equipment from the communications room, but the operator, listening to The flow of words and numbers, made minute final changes in frequency, pitch, and direction.

Abruptly, he swore and sat back. “Hell, that does it. We’ve hit a dead area… it must be almost two hundred miles wide.”

“Easy now,” Larkin said. He leaned over to point to the white patch of light obscuring a large part of the screen. “Narrow your scope down to encompass this patch. That’s the ECM equipment he carries. He will show up in a moment.” The operator could not resist a muffled expletive. Ten minutes passed slowly while the white blur continued to fill the radar screen. Finally the radar operator muttered, “What the devil kind of equipment does he carry for God’s sake… sir,” he added.

“Better that you do not know any more right now,” Larkin chided gently. “Just keep your eye on that…”

As ha spoke, the obscuring patch of light disappeared, and there, toward the center of: the screen, was an intense white dot, flickering in and out of scale with a steady pulsation. It appeared to be nearly two hundred miles southwest of them, which would put it somewhere close to the coast of the North Cape. At least Larkin hoped it would. It would be all too easy in this miserable storm to miss the coast and drop into the ocean. The ejection capsule was designed to stay afloat in water, but he doubted very much that it could withstand for long a storm as intense as this.

“Get a damned accurate fix on that blip,” he snapped. Then Larkin swung around to the plotting table. “Mr. Folsom, set a course for the coast and make as much speed as you can.”

Moments later the great ship came around in a short, half circle that leaned her far to port like a sloop in a high wind. Tons of water flew from under (her heel and piled up behind in a tattered rooster’s tail as the nuclear engines jumped to flank speed and she straightened out abruptly and settled into the waves. She resembled nothing as much as a motor torpedo boat, rather than a 16,500-ton battle cruiser, as she fought her way south toward the Cape, ignoring the waves piling before her bow. Low in the water as she was from the immense tonnage of ice, Folsom managed to crank twenty-three knots from the engines while a worried engineering crew watched the instruments below. Finally, Barrows could stand it no longer. He reached over and flicked on his intercom, dialed the bridge, and demanded the executive officer. When Folsom answered, he wasted no time on preliminaries.

“Mr. Folsom, if we don’t cut back, we won’t have any auxiliary condensers left either. They can’t take the load from flank speed much longer.”

“Then make do,” Folsom said grimly.

Barrows, unaware of the events on the bridge, stared at the intercom in disbelief. Then be shook his head. “In that case, Mr. Folsom,” he said acidly, “I Suggest we shift to the boost engines for one quarter power output.”

Without waiting for an answer from the bridge, he flicked off the intercom and swung around to his waiting crew and began snapping orders. Within four minutes the boost gas turbine engines were coupled to the main drive shafts and the last of the explosive starter cartridges were echoing in the narrow steel cavern of the engine room. Barrows watched as great gas turbines, now on line, whined up to peak RPM, then he began trimming them back until the ship was running steady under the combined thrust of five of the six power plants.

Teleman shut off the radio and sat staring at this last link with safety. Then he turned to the radar panel. From the activity it was showing, he had finally been spotted. At least three blips were closing fast, but not fast enough. They were still at least three hundred miles away and the eight minutes it would take them to get within cannon range would be more than enough for what he had to do now. Even if they carried visually guided air-to-air rockets they would be useless in the depths of the storm clouds. He pulled the plastic-coated check list from the clip on the rim of his seat. Twelve items were listed, a matter of a few seconds. He pressed the destruct button and closed the spring-loaded clip over it to hold it firmly down. Once the ejection sequence began, the spring clip would be released, and three minutes later one hundred pounds of strategically placed deta-sheet explosive would shred the aircraft beyond reassembly. Then he removed his soft, cloth flight helmet and slipped on the hard plastic headgear and plugged the oxygen lines into the ejection module supply. When the list was finished, Teleman hunched forward and studied the ground control map. He was still a little more than hundred miles from the North Cape and the ground unrolling below was all tundra. He did not, under any circumstances, want to go down in that. In his condition even a few minutes without shelter on the open, windswept tundra would be enough to kill him.. According to the computer display describing the North Cape area, he could expect to cross a band of highlands that would end the tundra, about ten miles from the coast. On the far slopes, leading down to the cliff-barred coastline facing the Barents Sea, an open forest of fir should furnish the shelter he would need. Teleman began to take the wounded A-17 down deeper into the storm. According to the RFK he should break out of the cloud cover, after he ejected, around two thousand feet. He did not particularly like the idea of having to bail out blind, but it was certainly preferable to hanging around until the Russians showed up. He hoped that his heading for the deck was causing the Soviet pilots as much consternation as it was him. But, then, they would have orders to get him at any cost. As long as he kept the ECM going, they would not be able to get a fix on him. If he could get down to about three thousand feet before he had to eject, then he would be low enough for the ejection capsule to be shielded against the ground.

The minutes passed slowly while the A-17 wobbled on. The, engine was cutting in and out steadily now and Teleman knew it must be draining the tanks right down to the last dregs. The North Cape was now clearly outlined by the IR panel as a white ragged line against the dark gray of the warmer water off the coast. The ground control map, with its simulation of the terrain below, was too gross to show any helpful details. The IR was all he had to go on. The ejection was going to be mighty tricky, he thought. He would have to time it so that he would land well back of the cliffs rather than in the water, yet not far enough back so that he could not walk to the beach to meet the boat. With these high winds now almost off the Beaufort scale, Larkin was quite optimistic if he expected to get a helicopter in to pick him up. It would take days before the winds abated enough for the helicopter to make it off the deck, let alone land over the strong updrafts that would be blowing off the cliffs.

He watched closely as the aircraft passed slowly over the cliffs, its speed now below 250 knots. Neither the visual nor the IR scopes told him much at all. The temperature was too low, too bone-chilling, for much warm detail to show among the granite surfaces of the coast. From the IR display there appeared to be no beach at all, but whether this was from the action of high waves he could not tell. If there was no beach he was going to have a devil of a time getting off those cliffs. They would not be able to get a boat in and he knew damned well that he could never survive three days. With these happy alternatives facing him, Teleman brought the A-17 around in a long turn that would bring him in a circle back over the cliffs. As he began his second pass over the coast he dropped the A-17 still lower until he was only fifteen hundred feet above the cliffs. Visually, he was totally blind. His instruments told him only that there was a solid surface below. Whether it was thickly forested or a mass of jumbled boulders he had no way of telling, but time was running out too fast to worry about that. Teleman wiggled his feet into the stirrups and shoved the control column into its locked position. His last act as pilot of the aircraft he had flown for the past three years was to arm the bomb that would destroy it completely.

As he-did, so, the computers took over total control of the aircraft. He saw the red, flashing DESTRUCT light come on just as the metal shields slid down between him and the instrument panel. The two halves of the flattened hemisphere joined together with a solid thunk and the blowers switched on with a high-pitched whine. Teleman settled himself securely into the acceleration couch as it adjusted to a semireclining position. He took a secure grip on the handholds and drew a deep breath, just as the bottom of the A-17 exploded away and the ejection capsule was jettisoned downward. As he fell he could see the distorted bottom of the fuselage pass over him. The capsule began to tumble end over end in the high winds, but not before he saw the lightened plane, huge and sleek in the dead light, bound up, corkscrew, and then recover as the autopilot caught hold of the control surfaces.

Teleman did not see the aircraft bore on into the Barents Sea, where five miles off the coast it erupted into a burst of white flame and plummeted into the icy seas. Pieces of wreckage were blown in every direction, much of it burning fiercely as it hissed into the waves.

The ejection capsule smashed upward, jerking Teleman cruelly against the restraining belts. Through the observation slit Teleman could see the orange and white parachute pop open wide. The ejection capsule bounced several more times, then settled down to a steady swaying. Inside, Teleman was powerless to control the descent or landing area, in fact helpless to do little more than lie there while the capsule was swung and jostled at the mercy of the winds. From fifteen hundred feet it should not have taken more than two minutes to make the descent. Instead it took eight — eight minutes of endless swinging, and Teleman had no idea in which direction.

When the capsule did land it hit with such force that it ruptured the inflated air pods beneath. The wind caught at the parachute and began to drag the capsule. The automatic chute release did not go off as it should have. As he grabbed for the manual release Teleman had a confused impression of trees and rocks roiling past the observation slit. Teleman yanked several times on the manual release before it finally gave and the capsule rolled free and came to a rest with a grinding sound that presaged the blast of wet snow and air that barreled in.

Teleman tore the straps loose and wiggled around in the seat to peer at a foot-long gash in the metal beneath his feet. The capsule had stopped against some obstruction, so that it was canted over at a steep angle. The close confines of the interior gave him little room to move about, but he managed to reach the emergency pack strapped beneath the seat and haul out the sleeping bag, cursing fluently under his breath. He got the sleeping bag jammed into the hole and at once the shrieking sound of the wind died away to a thin whistle. Teleman struggled back into the couch, breathing hard. The amp meter showed a full charge in the batteries that should be good for several hours of steady heat output, providing he ran nothing else at the same time. The interior temperature was already down to twenty-two degrees above freezing, and unless he wanted to freeze to death while he slept he had to bring it back up. Forcing his fuzzy mind to work, he did a rough calculation on how long it would take the RFK to reach the coast. As near as he could tell, he could not be farther than five miles from the cliffs, probably three hours hiking in this miserable storm. He felt the best the RFK could make in the seas that he had glimpsed briefly from the air was about twenty knots, this close to the Cape. At two-hundred-odd miles that would be at least ten to eleven hours. Teleman knew that he had to get some sleep, no matter what happened. His heart was thudding painfully again and his eyes refused to focus. Hell, he thought, he would make it six hours of sleep. They would wait for him.

Painfully, he brought his arm up and fumbled with the alarm on his wristwatch, setting it for six hours. The last thing he remembered was trying to peer out of the narrow slit to see what the terrain was like. The roar of the wind in the trees and the delicate shuddering of the capsule knocked him out as effectively as a blackjack.