by Joe Poyer
The thermite bomb exploded. Teleman, watching from a safe distance, saw the flames run in streamers up and down the capsule before fusing into a single sheet. In minutes the capsule was reduced to a shapeless, hissing mass in the steady snowfall. Teleman crouched at the base of a large pine until he was satisfied that the capsule-had been completely destroyed. His last link with the aircraft, in which he had spent what he considered the most important years of his life was severed. Now, cut off from the stabilizing effect of his semi-computer-controlled aircraft and thrown onto his own, he was confused and uncertain, and the drug residues only increased the intensity of his anxieties.
For a moment he felt as if the complexity of the situation was going to overwhelm him. The windblown snow swirling about him narrowed his world to a tiny circle. Into this world, he huddled against the base of the tree and buried his head in his arms, trying to shut out its effects.
The.roar of a jet aircraft, hidden in the clouds, but low enough to be clearly heard over the wind, shocked him into consciousness. He sprang up, head cocked to one side, listening. He could hear the fading scream of tortured air as the sound went toward the coast.
Teleman stooped down to gather up a handful of snow and rub it on his face. The.
Soviets had tried three times to kill him. They had succeeded in unhorsing him, so to speak, but he was not down yet, at least in any but the descriptive sense.
The pilot, with grim determination, shouldered his pack and, following his compass, set off due north to the cliffs of the North Cape.
Larkin chafing at the delay, paced the bridge, back and forth from meteorological gear to helm, making short sorties onto the deck to judge the condition of the storm. Larkin would never admit it to anyone, but he trusted his own innate weather sense more than all the meteorological gear in the world. That the gale was subsiding, he was now '
certain. And as swiftly as they begin, katabatic storms, by their very nature, are short-lived, but while living are possibly the most dangerous storms- of their kind. The aftermath would still be thoroughly dangerous, and the blizzard it •would bring would be both a help and a hindrance. It would at least keep the Soviet surface craft snug in port since the high seas would continue to run for quite some time yet, subsiding slowly over a matter of days, even after the winds had blown themselves out. Larkin was worrying about the pounding the bow was again taking as they. plunged toward the Gape at high speed. Each time the forefoot smashed, into a wave, the shock could be felt through the entire ship.
The engineers, still at work in the bow cofferdam, were complaining more and more frequently, and finally Larkin ordered the tank evacuated. The bow plates and patches had been restored earlier. Everything that could be done had been.
At 0500 the heavy seas began to abate. The temperatures rose above the freezing mark and the heavy snow turned to sleet. It poured down in buckets, ending -Larkin's tension-induced deck
watch for the time being. In two hours the deck heaters were able to clear away most of the accumulation of ice. The wind, still Mowing Force 9, in combination with the heavy seas, peeled and ripped the remainder of the ice away in great chunks, and the ship slowly became more responsive to the helm as she rode higher.
The cruiser beat its way southwest, now a gray shape slipping through the snow and rain and running seas, rolling thirty degrees to either side in the mountainous waves as it sought the shorter waters of the coastal shelf and the tiny indentation in the cliffs that was as close to the downed pilot as she could get.
Teleman had been trudging north for an hour when the wind died abruptly. One minute he had been leaning directly into the forty-mile-an-hour winds, struggling against the solid hand that barred his way, and the next he was standing beneath the trees wrapped in the eerie silence that heavy winds leave when they depart. He glanced up at the swollen cloud cover, lowering over the barely seen tops of the trees. With the disappearance of the wind, the snowfall began to thicken, and in a few moments he could barely see trees less than ten feet away.
He 'strained forward, listening for the boom of waves against the cliffs, but heard only the peculiar whisper of snow falling through the fir trees. A few moments later Teleman resumed his slow pace. The snow beneath the trees was almost mid-calf deep, but dry and powdery, and he had little trouble plowing through it. What bothered him most was the cold. He knew the temperature must be at least thirty below zero. The emergency kit had not included a face mask and Teleman rubbed his cheeks continually with his gloved hands to maintain circulation. The thin scarf tied across his mouth had crusted with ice from his exhaled breath and was practically useless.
The exertion of walking and fighting the wind was pure torture. Muscles and nerve endings screamed at the agony of movement after so many hours of physical inactivity.
Teleman knew he was weak beyond belief, and the deep cold biting into his body was taking a dangerous toll on his already overloaded metabolic system. Earlier, he had briefly considered using the radio and trying to contact the ship to give them an exact position fix. Then he could hole up in the lightweight tent in his pack until they 'got to him. The only trouble was that it- would give the Russians an exact fix at the same time. A couple of bombers and a saturation bombing run on the area would take care of him once and for all. The fact that the Soviets had tried to shoot him down three times had more than convinced him they were playing for keeps. If they could not have him, they did not want the Americans to get him back either. He had seen too much of their optical tracking system. Since no hint of the system had come out of the Soviet Union from Western intelligence operatives, he surmised that it was one of their most closely guarded secrets. The United States was too far ahead of the Soviets in electronics for radar and other sensor countermeasures for the Russians to compete effectively. The important computer, transistor, and circuitry technologies had been developed to a very high degree in the United States while the Russians were not concerned with the miniaturization and microminiaturization techniques that required advanced circuitry and electronic concepts.
All of this passed through Teleman's exhausted mind in a very abstracted form. Yet he was well aware of every detail, every ramification. For two years his life had depended on his ECM gear. The optical tracking system was obviously the mainstay of Soviet hopes against an invasion force of supersonic and hypersonic aircraft. Teleman knew enough about the system to enable the American intelligence and scientific communities to analyze and develop optical countermeasures. The race would be evened up again.
The Soviets wanted him badly, but would kill him if there was no other way to shut him up—all of this coincidentally with their war on the Sino-Soviet border.
Teleman rubbed his ears vigorously with both gloved hands, cap tucked under one arm, and sighed. It was going to be rough on his ears, but there was no hope for it. He had to be able to hear aircraft coming enough in advance to duck under the closest tree.. If he did not and was spotted, he could expect the aircraft to make *an immediate pass over the area with rockets, napalm, bombs, cannon, or whatever devilish weaponry it carried, and that would be the end. He shifted the pack to a more comfortable position and started slogging forward once more.
Even though the wind had died, the going was not that much easier. The forest thickened quickly with dense stands of frozen pine. The ground, in spite of the intense cold, had become soggy underfoot, almost on the verge of muskeg, and after nearly an hour more of walking he had covered little more than a mile. Teleman had never seen such forest this far north of the Arctic Circle. He decided that it must be due to the last-gasp effects of the Gulf Stream. Current as it finally dissipated off the North Cape. He recalled that in Alaska, in the foothills of the Brooks Range nearly two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, there were similar fir forests.
Then, strangely enough, the pines thinned rapidly, almost in a matter of yards, it seemed.
The forest gave way to scattered brush and glacial boulders. Even though the groun
d was rough, full of snow-covered and treacherous rills, Teleman found it easier walking than the thick forest. But on the verge of exhaustion as he was, it hardly made a difference.
Even so, he hesitated on the edge of the last stand of trees.
He could see almost a hundred yards ahead now through the driving snow. The compass still showed him to be on course, but the open ground ahead would provide no cover from searching Soviet aircraft. Against that expanse of ice-cold white, on an IR screen he would stand out like a neon sign in a desert. Nor could he hope to burrow far enough into the snow to escape detection.
Finally, after several minutes of almost incoherent self-debate, which to his surprise he found he was conducting aloud with himself, in a weary fit of exasperation, he shook his head and started forward. To hell with it, he thought. If they were going to find him, they were going to find him and that was that. If he did not make the coast shortly he was going to die anyway. Almost imperceptibly at first the ground beneath his feet began to climb. The snow, slowly turning to sleet that drummed down onto him, plastering his hair against his head, which he had forgotten to re-cover with his hood, obscured his vision—vision that now was almost useless as his brain refused to sort and display images properly. The half snow, half sleet was melting and beginning to trickle down his ebony face and seep beneath his collar.
Teleman stumbled in one of the rills; he had stepped onto what appeared to be a solid surface. His foot had gone through the thin crust of. ice and his leg jarred down stiffly, pitching him forward. For minutes he lay half stunned until some inner instinct lifted him up and sent him stumbling forward again. It was several minutes later that he realized he had fallen.
After that his head seemed to clear a little. Teleman felt the wetness of his scalp and raised the hood. Ahead he could see a fairly large stand of bush, which appeared similar to cottonwoods, Almost without thinking he veered, and a moment later threw himself down beneath the outspread branches and rolled in as close to the base of the bush as he could.
He had never seen such godforsaken country. The sleet and snow swept across the almost barren muskeg with an ululating keening. The gray sky pressed down thickly and the galling snow lent additional oppression to the landscape. The entire scene reminded him of Dante's description of the tenth circle of hell, so unreal and remote from earth it seemed. The predominate color was gray: gray sky, gray snow, gray rocks, gray trees, and he was the doomed soul, doomed to wander forever in this gray hell searching for the stream of Lethe. Teleman shivered at his morbid thoughts. He could feel what little heat remained in his body quickly dissipating. He knew that he had to get up and keep moving or else he would very quickly freeze to death. But soft tendrils of sleep were curling around his eyes, forcing them closed. With a quivering effort, he forced them open again and struggled to his feet. He faced the snow and rising wind and went on.
Now; as the sleet stopped and- the snow fell thicker, blotting away every trace of detail in the barren landscape, he was moving on a treadmill in the middle of white nothingness. For hours it seemed to Teleman, he struggled onward as the wind rose higher, until he was again facing a thirty-knot wind. With vicious suddenness, the wind would quarter, driving him far off course. He no longer knew whether he was moving north. He had dropped the compass sometime back and now had nothing against which to check his direction. Far down in the depths of his conscious mind, he knew that, as long as he kept walking in the direction with which the terrain rose, eventually he would come to the coastal cliffs. Whether or not he would last that long never occurred to him now. Only his survival training was driving him forward, forcing him to plod forward rather than drop in his tracks to freeze to death.
The trees were totally gone, as was the brush. Dimly he knew that he was struggling to climb a steep hill. By now Teleman was nearly asleep, only his subconscious operating his body. He neither knew nor cared where he was or what he was doing except on the dimmest conscious level. But still he went on, climbing the bill that stretched away before him, apparently forever.
Suddenly the wind died for a moment and the snow swirled away as if a curtain had been drawn. Teleman was standing on the lower lip of a hill, which in actuality was the back side of the cliffs leading to the coastal waters. Then the wind came again and the snow fell harder around him. Teleman went to his knees and began to crawl forward, blindly until he had worked his way to the top and the forward edge, which was sheltered from the wind and where the snow fell more thinly than it had before. There was no place for the wind to whirl snow from the drifts to add to the blizzard. He could see, far below, the pounding sea—the waves tall and cold green, smashing into the jagged baseline of the cliffs less than thirty feet away. The waves swept in from the sea in tremendous combers that, as they approached the cliffs, curled up, drawing a paler line at the fold and collapsing against the restraining wall of rock with a shattering roar. Teleman saw that there was no beach. If there had ever been, it had surely been washed away under the onslaught of the waves. The snow was now so heavy that he could see no more than a few hundred —feet out to sea.
After-a few minutes more, the wind slicing it from the sea with the keenness of a razor forced him back from -the cliff edge. Teleman carefully backed away and then moved along paralleling the crest until he found a depression surrounded by two large boulders, which offered some protection against the wind.
Teleman huddled into the lee of the rocks and shrugged off the pack. He sat on his heels, leaning back against the rock, and let the weariness that was exhaustion flow through him. If he could only stay awake long enough to contact the ship, he thought. If the Russians did not pick up the transmission, if the ship was there, if they could get a boat in, if they could beat the Soviets to him
.. if . . . then he would have made it. In spite of his tiredness, he grinned weakly before pulling the pack over and digging through it for the radio. Those were some pretty large ifs.
The lightweight unit was almost too much for the meager remains of his strength.
Teleman pulled the radio to him and leaned it against a rock. His numbed hands refused to curl around the tip to the antenna for an endless time before he managed to pull it out.
"Target One, do you read me? Target One, do you read me?"
The dials were softly illuminated and the power light was glowing red. His watch showed nearly thirty minutes past the time the ship should have come into radio range.
The radio had both military and VHF-FM side bands. The VHF was for short-range lineof-sight work, not much more than fifteen miles. The military side band gave the transceiver a range of nearly two hundred miles. He used the VHF-FM band, hoping that the Soviets would not be monitoring within that range. Somewhere out there the ship should be standing less than five miles off the coast, waiting for his call.
"Target One, Target One, do you read me? Do you read me?"
The small radio sputtered with a faint static composed of low rumblings overlain with a high-pitched hissing. Teleman wondered momentarily where the hissing was coming from. The transceiver employed transistors and printed circuitry, not vacuum tubes.
Kneeling in the soft, powdery snow, Teleman tried again and again to raise the ship. In the nine hours since he had last had communication with the RFK innumerable things could have happened. Soviet aircraft or submarines could have found her .. . could have attacked . . . sent her to bottom . . . could have .. . hit seas too much . . . where hell was . .
. damned ship .. . could not last . . . much .
Teleman had lost all feeling in his feet and hands and was forced to use his clenched fist to work the transmit switch. Over and over he repeated his monotonous call, his voice becoming weaker and weaker until he was barely whispering into the microphone. He huddled on his knees, back against a sheltering rock, drifting hypnotically with the falling snow, whispering over and over again his call signal as the snow began to cover him with a soft, warm blanket. The will to stay awake was gone. He no longer even
thought about the importance of staying awake. After a while he became aware that he had stopped calling. The radio was there in front of him, half covered with snow. He wanted to move closer, check the settings, but somehow he could not. It was as if he were paralyzed.
Still kneeling, half bent over the radio, his mouth half open, he decided to rest a moment then try again. Almost without volition, his eyes closed and the warm softness of sleep began to infuse his body.
He pulled them open with a jerk, for a moment dear-headed
and wide awake. The radio was spitting and crackling at him. He stared, then with an effort that, literally, almost killed him, reached out his frozen hand and pushed the receive switch. The answer drew his conscious mind back from the brink of the killing sleep and summoned his will and strength to go on a few minutes longer, drew it up from some dark recess of his body.
"Beatle, this is Target One, Beatle this is Target One, do you read me? Do you read me?"
The voice on the other end of the tight radio beam could not conceal the anxiety beneath the calm exterior of the professional radio operator's voice.
"Target One?" he managed to croak, not knowing whether his voice was loud enough to be heard.
The radio operator's voice, almost lost in the storm of strange-sounding static, came over the tiny speaker again:
"Leave your transmitter on, we are getting a position fix."
For a long time Teleman digested the message, trying to force his leaden mind to understand. Then he pushed the transmitter switch to position identification and a second transmitter built into the radio began sending out a tight VHF beam that the ship would ride in.
A voice that Teleman recognized as belonging to Larkin broke in. "We are standing off the coast about a mile from where you appear to be. Can you fire a flare to pinpoint your position?"