North Cape

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The North Cape of Norway is perhaps at once the most beautiful and the most savage of lands on this planet. In summer it becomes a rendezvous point for devotees of the midnight sun who come as tourists to view the endless daylight of midsummer from this northernmost point on the Scandinavian Peninsula. But in winter the Cape is deserted of all but the fishermen and their families who occupy its handful of fishing villages. Only they are able to survive the rigors of its subzero cold and the Arctic storms that rage down from the Great Barrier two hundred miles north.

In these days of developing international maturity, which are more often expressed through individuals rather than their governments, no part of the world, no matter how isolated or desolate, is free from the complications of national competition for that hegemony called national security.

I wish to thank certain people for their cheerful assistance with this book. First of all, Susan my wife, for her unflagging encouragement and devotion to the typing and editing chores; then to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gillon of the United States Marine Corp, a seventy-three-mission fighter pilot veteran of Vietnam for reading the manuscript and advising on and correcting the technical aspects; to Olin Witthoft, my good friend and capable representative of United Aircrafts’ Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Division, who spent many hours with me working out the technical details of the A-17 aircraft; and to John Shell, Ph.D. and associate director of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, for his analysis of the effects of the amphetamine and lysergic acid families of drugs under conditions of physical exhaustion and subzero temperatures. And, finally, for assistance in coming to know and describe properly the North Cape area and its weather, both the Royal Norwegian Government and the United States Navy.