North Cape

CHAPTER 8

The well-defined southern edge of the Turfan Depression cut a sable horizon line through the pale gold of the Gobi and the dust-laden sky. To his right, the blue expanse of Bagrach Kol gleamed in the late morning sunlight. The Bagrach Kol had the singular distinction of being the largest and one of two free bodies of water in all the Gobi, and it is salty beyond belief. The other was the almost dry and equally salt-laden Lop Nor Basin. For some minutes now the eastern reaches of the Tien Shan had been in view, and from fifteen thousand feet Teleman could easily make out the dark smudge farther down on the southern horizon that was the Kun Lun range.

He flew steadily due south, leaving the alkaline lake and the pebble desert of the Depression behind. When the Tien Shan were well past his starboard wing, Teleman began the long turn east that would take him down the valleys between the two ranges to cross the Soviet border well south, or so he hoped, of the visual tracking net the Soviets had so hastily thrown up.

Beneath, the land began to rise as the flanks of either mountain chain spread out to form a comfortable supporting base. The ground flowing beneath resembled nothing as much as a flat plate, broken here and there with upthrust rock formations, the edges folding up on themselves and sprinkled with a black pepper of stunted scrub bushes reminiscent of mesquite. As always, he was amazed that deserts look so much alike. Looking at the scene sliding past, he would not have been able to distinguish between the Gobi and stretches of Nevada and New Mexico desert.

The Lop Nor was beginning to appear off his starboard wing as he looped back up from the far end of the turn. This last was a maneuver designed to shake any possible last vestiges of Soviet observation. He hoped that the long swing south would be interpreted as an attempt to fly out over the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean beyond. It was too bad he could not, he thought regretfully. It would certainly be one hell of a lot easier than the long way around that was still to come: As Teleman drew abreast of the second salt lake, the Tarim River, flowing down out of the peaks of Karakorum in. the western Himalayas to Lop Nor, appeared, a thin crooked line of a river swollen now with the first evidence of the spring thaw. As he crossed the Lop Nor he passed into Chinese Eastern Turkestan.

The countryside below appeared considerably colder between the ranges. The snow line reached almost to the floor of the new desert that was beginning to appear ahead, the Taklamakan. Pobeda Peak, rising in an almost sheer vertical from the banks of the Tarim on its southern face, reared up, higher by nearly ten thousand feet than the fourteen thousand feet at which he Was now flying. It occurred to him that this was the first time he had ever flown below a land feature and for some reason it made him uneasy. Possibly, Teleman considered, it was brought on because it put both himself and the A17 into perspective — a perspective that he lost at the two hundred thousand feet that lent him a minor godhead in which he was unconcerned with human fumblings toward power and gain, and made him content with observation and obscured the need for involvement. For long minutes he flew past the shining expanse of the 24,400-foot peak, gleaming along its crest as the sun inched light over its ridges.

For the next forty minutes he followed the Tarim southwest across the Taklamakan until it struggled up through a wicked series of foothills into the Karakormn. From here, relatively safe and comfortable in the heated/air-conditioned cabin of the silent aircraft, gazing at the twisted rills and cols of the mountains, he could feel the excitement that he knew men like Sir Edmund Hillary and Barry Bishop must have experienced when they stood at the foot of a peak such as Kanchenjunga, or Godwin Austen, or Mount Everest, preparatory to beginning the ascent to the “roof of the world,” a term the Sherpas had given the Himalayas, stretching a thousand miles from the Hindu Kush in the west to the Nan Shan in the east. But at the same time, he could only shake his head and wonder why a man would risk his life in the loneliest arena of the world to climb peaks that had been shrouded in snow and wind since man was little more than a gene spark in some species of reptile.

The Tarim had been left behind now and the Pamir Plateau, thirteen to fifteen thousand feet high, was beginning. Teleman lifted the airplane accordingly, another thousand feet. The two Tibetan cities of Yarkand and Kashgar would be slipping past in a few minutes and he ran a check on all of his antidetection gear. He would pass between the two cities, in reality little more than villages, but villages with large Chinese garrisons. He would be out of sight of both towns, Yarkand to the south and Kashgar well to the north. The only tricky spot would be the narrow dirt highway that ran between the two, and he was counting on the heavy snowfall of the previous night to make it impassable; he would be out of Chinese territory before fighters could be scrambled to intercept, even if they could break through his radar fouling.

As he drew abreast of the city of Kashgar, out of sight to the north, he cleared a ridge and the vista of the Pamir Plateau opened up before him. Ahead, less than five minutes flying time, was the Tadzhik SSR border. The radar net was indicating no hostile aircraft anywhere within the 1600-mile diameter of its extent, but Teleman was not banking on that. Although the Tien Shan range, rising yet another nine thousand feet above his flight level, formed a perfect barrier to questing radio impulses, the entire Soviet and Chinese air forces combined could have hidden behind the wall of rock and he would never know it. It was times like these, he thought resignedly, that made him regret the excessive caution that would not allow him to interrogate the satellite system at will for fear of detection. Especially now, when the Soviets appeared to know about the project anyway. Because of the surrounding mountains, his radar could show him only dependable information on a very narrow cone leading directly up the valley to the border. In very short order, he knew, he would find out just how smart he had been. Teleman came out of the sheltering arms of the two mountain chains fighting for altitude. At 150,000 feet he leveled off and took a good look around. He had narrowed his counterdetection radar to a circle two miles in diameter — no sense in. advertising his presence. Teleman took a look at the weather gear and found the friendly ice cloud bank still stretched above him. Below, the plains of Turkestan were beginning to open up and he could just make out the hairline of the mighty Amu Dar Ya that tumbled and roared from the Hindu Kush to the Aral Sea a thousand miles northwest. The area over which he had just passed had been the fabled lands of the Kyber Pass and British soldiery of Kipling’s tales. But for Teleman there would be no glorious charge of British lancers to rescue him at the last possible moment. All he had was himself and the A-17 to depend on.

A sudden flurry of the computer tapes and there on the screen, closing in from the north, was a Falcon. This time the Soviet pilot had been caught napping. Teleman was ahead of rather than behind him. It was going to be a stern chase, he thought without humor as he flicked the series of switches that fired the ramjets and scrambled to 200,000 feet. The intruder dropped behind momentarily, then increased power and began to close up. As the A-17’s speed increased, the PCMS reacted accordingly, infusing Teleman with a calculated mix of hallucinogenic and barbiturate drugs. Within seconds Teleman was no longer thinking of the aircraft as a collection of metal and plastic components, but as an extension of himself. Actually, he did not feel on a conscious level that he had become the aircraft; it simply did not occur to him that there was any distinction. He was a part of the aircraft.

That bastard is gonna catch me, he thought in surprise. The contact readout chattered noisily to itself and showed less than forty minutes needed for missile range to be achieved. Teleman paused, finger on the throttle lever. It occurred to him that the Falcon could not maintain that speed and altitude for more than a few more minutes. Even as he was thinking, his body was reacting and lifting the A-17 to 225,000 feet and Mach 4.5. Simultaneously, the trailing Falcon slewed off and fell below, angling down and north to the nearest air base, while a second came streaking up from just ahead of the Last Soviet aircraft’s position. The chase was now shaping up into a gigantic chess match. They were going to run him down and if they failed at that, they would chase him into an area where fate, resembling a Falcon with a loaded and ready missile, would knock him out of the sky.

Teleman’s mind was working furiously, weighing various possibilities, while he tried to sort out the various loopholes in each that would allow him to beat the odds stacking up against him. He could continue to climb to maximum altitude and speed, cutting into his remaining fuel load (already shaved to the danger point by the long flight into Tibet), to and maybe below the poundage needed to achieve rendezvous; or he could try and outfox his energetic pursuers. He checked the computers to see how much longer he dared defer the decision: ten minutes.

He was now flying at 225,000 feet at Mach 4.5 and heading due west across the southernmost part of the Soviet Union. Teleman made a small correction for the rendezvous patterns he had set up. Immediately the Falcon followed suit. He flew on, keeping a wary eye on the plane below. After five minutes, the second Falcon began to drop down in a long glide to its base, and then made an extended turn to the north, dropping lower all the time. At once, a third Falcon came roaring up to take position, still well behind, but having gained nearly twelve miles on his predecessor. The contact readout did a quick readjustment and flipped up the “comforting” news that it would now require only eight minutes before missile range could be achieved, and two minutes left to make his decision. After that, he would be committed to a stern chase across Russia. This third intruder seemed a little more impatient than the first two, Teleman thought, watching him close in faster. Probably wanted to hog the glory of bringing down the Americanski spion. Samolot. Teleman grinned. Only four hundred miles separated the two craft now, and Teleman considered it time to take some positive action.

“Enough of this fooling around,” he muttered aloud, his voice sounding depressingly empty in the silence of the cockpit. Teleman went to work with the decoy missile setups, programing a new flight pattern into the computer. The computer would have to take care of the cubs, he thought. He was going to be too busy shortly to draw a decent breath. Teleman was about to give the Soviet detection systems a thorough workout. He knew that the observer would be busy with the optical tracking gear, but the pilot would have time to operate the semiautomated radar gear they would still carry. He doubted that they would remove all of that, as it would at least provide the approximate area in which to search. Obviously, the optical gear had a range of at least four hundred miles since that was the distance at which they had picked him up as he came out of the mountains. At five hundred miles, with his own ECM now narrowed to a mile in diameter, he would be only a hole in the sky to the Falcon radar. But he could really give them a red herring to play with. Teleman chuckled. A red herring for Reds. Quite appropriate. He began to flick the ECM switch controlling the antiradar gear on and off in a haphazard pattern, hopefully making the Soviet pilot think that his own radar gear was breaking through the electromagnetic interference the American gear was causing. At the same time he put the A-17 into a steep downward curve south and continued around into a tighter and tighter spiral, all the while keeping a close watch on the digital counter clicking off the closure rate to missile range. On the radar scope, the Russian pilot smoothly followed suit, never hesitating once. The flickering image of the A-17 must have been clearly visible on the radar scope. Teleman followed the course of the Falcon, waiting patiently. He was counting on the natural impatience, coupled with anxiety over losing the target, that he knew the Russian pilot must now be feeling. He had just begun the third spiral when it happened. He saw the Falcon clearly increase speed and go into a tighter and faster curving descent than the A-17. It was so impetuous that he did hot even need the readout to tell him that the Russian had moved, moved to catch him within missile range by turning faster and steeper. Teleman waited a moment longer to be sure the Russian was committed.

He straightened the turn abruptly and pulled the nose up quickly. The ECM was in full operation again and, as he started into the climb, the A-17 released a ghost-image missile that, traveling at his speed, began to pull away from the aircraft into the same spiral course that he had been flying. The violent turn that the Falcon had made in an effort to catch him inside should have lost the A-17 to the visual observer. The ghost image, a small, ramjet-powered affair, was further complicating matters by producing the same signal that simulated the mother A-17. Teleman could see the pattern plainly on his own radar screen as it pulled farther and farther away. After the two were separated by several mile; the computer, following Teleman’s instructions, began to turn the ghost away from the spiraling descent into a straight run south, as if running from the Soviet aircraft.

Teleman hoped, hoped so hard it was almost a prayer, that there was a terrific argument going on between the pilot and observer on board the Falcon. If this bird was going to hold true to pattern, he had about another five minutes or so to go before he would have to drop out and turn the chase over to the next in line. Teleman wondered at the organization they must have to be able to figure out what he was up to: return the Falcons from their rotating picket duty nearly fifteen hundred miles northeast, land and refuel them, and put them back into the air less than two hours later, strung out in a perfect line to intercept him as he came sneaking across the border. Then he stopped cold. Or else they had one hell of a lot more of-these specially rebuilt Falcons than he had counted on. So far, he had faced four, and that meant they must be supported by at least twelve more if the pickets were to be effective. Since they would not know for sure where he would try to cross, the Soviets would have to keep at least thirty-six modified Falcons on the ready line. One set of twelve on station, twelve on their way from the base to the line, and twelve on the ground being serviced and fueled. “Ye gods,” he muttered.

Now it was beginning to look as if his long shot was going to pay off. The following Falcon began to come around on a course halfway between Teleman and’ the ghost so that he could keep an eye on both until he decided which was the real intruder. He was being a little more cautious than Teleman had planned on. The gap between him and the ghost had widened to 160 miles and he instructed the computer to pour it on. Instantly, the ghost leaped ahead at close to Mach 5 and the range began to open. By now, the crew of the Falcon must be desperate. He checked his altitude and leveled off at 180,000 feet to watch for further developments.

As he waited, a fourth Falcon appeared on the scope, screaming for altitude. The third began to drop back and finally, after a few seconds, turned sharply into a bank and began spiraling down. Overshot his fuel, Teleman thought grimly. He hoped their escape capsule was in good operating condition. The fourth Falcon moved up fast, but still was far below the altitude at which the third had fallen out. This was exactly the situation Teleman had been hoping for. He ran for the ice layer. The crystalline structure of the high altitude cloud was so tenuous as to be almost nonexistent, in fact it was detectable only by instruments, but still thick enough to reflect radar waves. He did not have to worry about radar sighting, but the thin haze the cloud.cast would also make optical tracking that much more difficult in the strong, late morning sunlight. Seconds later he began the second phase of his plan by falling off slowly southward.

It was rare to see an ice cloud layer of this extent much above ninety thousand feet; although scattered and shredded bits of ice could always be found at this altitude. The effects of the Arctic storm, Teleman thought, even 3600 miles south. Anyway, it was here and he was going to make darned good use of it. Safely into the nebulous ice layer, he, settled back to the long chase that would lead him north and west across the Asian landmass.

His radar screens indicated that the Falcon was still tracking the ghost by radar. The readout indicated that they would close.up enough within four minutes to spot it as a phony on the visual apparatus. And when that happened, all hell was going to break loose. And sure enough, after four long minutes, in which Teleman widened the gap between the A-17 and the pursuing Falcon by nearly five hundred miles, he spotted the Soviet craft coming around in a tight half turn. Obviously they had discovered the ghost for what it was and were now running back to the projected path of the last visual sighting. When they got there, they would find him nowhere in sight — he hoped. Sure enough, here came the reinforcements. Four more Falcons were rising fast along the path where they had last sighted him. As unobtrusively as possible, he fell off.even farther south. Now that the Reds were lost in the dust, he was free for the moment to cope with other problems. Right now he was safely out of range of the visual gear. In fact, by dropping off south, he was now falling behind the fourth and rearmost Falcon. He was pretty sure the Soviets would figure that he would pull a trick like this and would right now be using all of the radar at their disposal to try and spot the blind area, now less than a mile wide, that his ECM gear was causing. That would explain the systematic spacing of the four Falcons, each two hundred miles apart. In addition, they might shortly be using their mid-continental radar line, jacked around south to search for him. It was time to increase the ECM before they did pick him up.

As Teleman reached for the ECM gear panel, he caught a flicker of light on the radar screen as one of the Falcons changed course.

The digital readout chattered quickly. Too late, he groaned inwardly. Either one of the aircraft or the ground stations had picked him up. The Falcon was heading directly for him. Working quickly, he extended the counterdetection range to its full sixteen-hundred-mile range. It seemed to have no effect on the approaching Falcon. He could not spot a single indication of wavering or uncertainty. Swearing softly, Teleman checked the fuel-load readouts. Mach +5 was the limit unless he wanted to crash somewhere in Poland or France, out of fuel. The contact-point readout.now gave him six minutes before the Falcon reached missile range. He checked his location quickly and found that he was south of the ancient capital of the Mongolian Khan Timur-i-leng, the city of Samarkand, less than three hundred miles from the Afghan border. Would the Soviets hesitate to cross the border, as they had north over Sinkiang? There was only one way to find out, he thought grimly, and dropped into a steep turn south, sliding down in a long glide that would bring him across the border at 140,000 feet. It was a desperate gamble, but one that had to be taken.

The next six minutes passed slowly. Teleman fled south for the border pursued by the Falcons, slowly gaining ground by their relay tactics. As the chase lengthened, Teleman began to observe the flight characteristics of the other pursuing aircraft. His radar showed two other bandits wheeling into the flight line from the north. He could imagine them strung out in a long line, in both directions, all the way to the air base at Alma Alta. Of the two on his radar beside the immediate pursuer, one was heading back. The sudden flurry of activity involving the four Falcons when they thought they had lost him obviously had not exhausted them. Then on the horizon Teleman spotted the Amu Dar Ya, the river that formed the northeastern border, separating the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

The radar screen showed the second following Falcon almost within range, and indicated that Teleman would cross the border with seconds to spare. As if realizing that he was losing his prey, the Soviet pilot fired a salvo of missiles. Teleman watched the two rockets spurt ahead of the aircraft and begin to close in on him with deadly silence. As soon as the missiles were away, the Falcon throttled back and dropped swiftly down in a sharp turn, trying desperately to conserve fuel for the impossible run back to the Alma Alta base eight hundred miles north.

The missiles fell far short, not a serious hazard after all. Teleman bent wearily forward and programed the ECM to respread the sixteen-hundred-mile safety net around the A17. The remaining three Soviet Falcons had pulled around to the north as he crossed the border, and climbing swiftly up to his altitude was a single replacement with which the Soviets would probably try and keep him in sight. But it would be a hopeless task, Teleman knew. He now had a pretty good idea of the effective range of their visual tracking gear. Five hundred miles seemed to be the ultimate, limit and accurate tracking could be performed properly only at less than four hundred miles. Accordingly, Teleman pulled into a long arc to the southwest that would bring him out of range in less than twelve minutes, and throttled back to Mach 1.9.

Two problems, both serious, still faced him. One was how to repenetrate the Soviet Union in order to make the rendezvous point on time; the second was his dwindling fuel load. Both problems were interdependent.

After fifteen minutes of intense work with the computer, Teleman sat back and studied the results. Keeping him company the entire while was the lone Falcon, six hundred miles north and safely inside his own border. Teleman was sure he was out of sight of the Soviet aircraft. He had to be in order for this new course to work. The computers, taking all the variables into account, including the fact that it was very possible for the Soviets to again pick him up deeper into the Soviet Union, had drawn a flight path that would keep him outside the boundaries of the Soviet Union until he reached the vicinity of the Caspian Sea. He would re-enter the Soviet Union from northern Iran, skirting the southern edge of the Caspian at two hundred thousand feet. He would use a full ECM range of sixteen hundred miles, as the Soviet border radar net would he on alert and it would be impossible to escape their notice anyway. It was very likely that, if they could have visual tracking systems for aircraft, then they could also have ground stations to perform the same job over a wider range and with greater accuracy. But radar disruption of sixteen-hundred-mile diameter should make it impossible for the radar net to provide enough of a course approximation to the visual tracking stations to aid in spotting him in the three minutes or so that he would be within range. Telcman fell off slowly, deeper into Afghan territory, always paralleling his original line of flight, keeping the Russian plane on the edges of his radar screen while slowly leaving him behind. The one-sided chase continued due west now, until he had left the torn earth of the Hindu Kush far behind and below lay the rugged Plateau of Iran. Every ten minutes, regular as clockwork, he watched another Falcon spiral up to take his station on the other side of the border. The A-17 was on full automatic now and Teleman was merely a passenger. At a certain point the aircraft banked steeply to the south, then steadied in response to a small correction in the flight plan. After half an hour of this blind run and chase, his, companion, now six hundred miles behind him, overstayed his ten-minute pattern. Teleman bent to the radar screen, watching to see what would happen. A minute passed, then a second and a third. In the fourth minute the Falcon slid off one wing and dropped quickly into a long glide northwest. Teleman checked his maps. The air base at Ashkhabad on the Soviet side of the Turkman SSR-Afghanistan border was now within range. Operations had probably been shifted accordingly, Teleman thought.

He turned his attention to the ground control map rolling out on the screen. His flight path was marked by a triangular bar reaching to the black horizon line. The flight path was superimposed on an actual view of the terrain below. Off his starboard wing was the Iranian city of Meshed and he knew that the Iranians had a large radar complex north of the city, watching the Russian border. His crossing point would be almost directly over the city of Babol, two hundred miles northeast of Tehran.

After this little bit of unscheduled horseplay, his’ fuel load was going to be cut mighty fine to get him to rendezvous. He would have to reduce speed severely and yet he still had to get there on time. He was certain that Larkin, from what little he knew of his contact man, could be depended on, gale or no gale. He had not received any weather reports on conditions between Greenland and Novaya Zemlya since he started his run south from the Arctic. To avoid the least possibility of detection, all but two monitoring channels were shut down automatically during the mission portion of any flight over Communist territory. The Soviets were known to monitor the Advanced SAMOS satellite system by ground and shipboard stations in an effort to break the codes used. The only weather information he could receive, then, was from the military weather satellites directly overhead, and they reported on local conditions only. Satellite-to-satellite transmissions were too easily monitored and traced to allow him to interrogate at will. Teleman could therefore only guess at weather conditions in the Arctic, and if the ice clouds that overlay most of Asia were any indication, he had to conclude that they were extremely bad.

Once more he had the computer review the flight plan for him. In twelve minutes he would be crossing the border into Soviet territory. Teleman was well aware that, if he had missed anything while setting up the course, the flight plan would end with him and the A-17 scattered across miles of steppe, rather than orbiting the Robert F. Kennedy prior to refueling for home.

After crossing the border, the flight path would take him over the southern end of the Caspian Sea to the Caucasus Mountains and across the Sea of Azov, then over the bend in the Dnieper River to bypass Kiev, and out across the Ukraine to Poland. Over the Ukraine, he had a choice to make. Depending on local weather conditions and any indications of Soviet fighter activity, he could, if he had to, drop farther south into the Czechoslovakia-Hungary region and run for West Germany and the North Sea. That alternative was his last-ditch escape attempt if they tried to intercept him over continental Russia. If not, he would make for Poland and the Baltic Sea and up across the Scandinavian Peninsula. That route would put him at the rendezvous point with ten minutes of fuel left, much more preferable than ditching in the Barents Sea. He could do the last in seven hours by holding his speed to Mach 1.5, his most economical cruising speed.

Ahead now was the Soviet border, and it was time to crank out the radar counterdetection gear. A circle of interference sixteen hundred miles across would keep them busy for a long time, hunting for him with that damned visual gear.