North Cape

by Joe Poyer

  The silence descended again, unbroken even by the roaring wind that had been their constant companion for so long. The silence

  was thick, thick and heavy with the threat of their total exhaustion and potential capture.

  Teleman settled down into the sleeping bag and pushed his thawing feet against the chemical warming pad. In spite of his utter exhaustion, his mind was churning with the implications of Folsom words. They did not have much chance. That much was clear to a blind idiot. There was still nine miles to go to the Norwegian base, nine more miles that would take them all day tomorrow in their steadily degenerating condition. He knew that he could not make it and he doubted very much if the others would be able to either. The temperature was dropping fast, and six miles over the frozen, knee-high tufts of tundra grass in forty-below weather was too much to expect of any man.

  His mind began turning insidiously back to the thoughts that had nagged at him during the endless day. Which of the three men had the orders to kill him?

  Teleman groaned inwardly. He was certain that one of them would try to kill him, but which one. He could not watch all three at once. McPherson had the training and the skill, that he knew. He had also been very solicitous of him all day, almost carrying him since noon. But Gadsen—he had not learned very much about the man at all. Except for a few wise comments on their predicament during the day, he had not spoken much.. . .

  In the middle of his self-created maze of danger, Teleman's brain blanked and he was deeply asleep.

  'Well, we can only wait and see what the new day brings,' Gadsen sighed.

  Folsom pulled on his face mask and gloves. "Yeah, I guess so." What else was there to say? he thought.

  He slammed a new clip into his carbine and shoved extras into a pocket. "Night-night."

  He grinned and pulled the face mask tight, then pushed through the tent flaps and crawled outside.

  The cold air hit him with the force of a truck, sucking the warm air from his body. Still on his knees, he curled into a tight ball, coughing into his fur-lined mittens, breathing slowly to avoid frosting his lungs. In a few moments the spasm passed and he straightened out, face still buried in his gloves while he breathed carefully to regain his breath. Even through the fur and nylon parka, the touch of the air was like hot iron. He stood up and began

  beating his arms together. We have to walk nine more miles through this, he thought, and he knew that they would never be able to make it, no matter what the circumstances were, no matter what the prize, up to and including life itself. It was an impossible task.

  But deep inside he knew that they would do it or die trying. Just as the Russians would catch them or die And he also knew that the Russians would not be waiting out the night in a tent—they would be using the night.

  The harsh moon was a quarter of the way up in the sky. Its light falling on the freshly snow-covered ground gave him visibility almost to the horizon in every direction. The wind had died away completely, and in the frigid, still air his breath froze instantly, wreathing his head in a clammy fog if he stopped too long in one spot. The moon highlighted the tundra, with the hummocks of grass standing out in bold relief. Folsom had never dreamed it could be so cold. He had never experienced anything like this before.

  The stars burned in the sky in spite of the moonlight, and the air was so cold and dry that he could detect no trace of ring around the moon. As if to form a backdrop for the unearthly beauty of the moon, the aurora had sprung into the northern sky, shimmering curtains of color that fluctuated and flowed in the gentle breeze of the electron stream arising eight minutes away in the sun's corona. At any other time he would have been entranced with the shifting tapestry of color and form, but not tonight He moved slowly away from the tent, walking carefully around the tufts of frozen grass as they had been doing since entering the tundra. Not one of them could afford a twisted ankle now. Folsom stopped to peer around. He could see nothing on the waste of frozen terrain in any direction. At this point he knew that they were about seven miles from the sea. But in the crystal air the fury of the sea against the cliffs was faintly audible.

  At a thousand yards distance from the tent Folsom turned and began to move in a circle, with the tent as the center point. He would leave tracks in the snow, tracks that the Russians could not miss, but it didn't matter. Tomorrow the Russians would find the campsite anyway.

  There were two directions from which the Soviets could approach: east or west. The main party would come from the west

  Although Folsom did not make the mistake of discounting them, he was fairly certain that this group, after traveling for almost a day longer than themselves, would be as exhausted. It was the group from the east, the expected second landing party, that he was worried about. They would be fresh.

  Folsom concentrated his attention then on the east and the west. After forty minutes of plodding around the mile-long circle, it became a question of whether he could last the remaining hour and twenty minutes. Even with the most intense concentration and violent shivering and the continual plodding, he had to fight desperately the sleep that would steal quietly into his mind. Sleep that made him the same promises of warmth that it had made to Teleman all day, sleep and the warmth that his body craved now more than anything in life.

  Folsom strove to shake off the exhaustion that was wearing him down, reaching at his eyelids with sandpapery fingers, and forced himself to keep plodding. Somewhere in the back of his mind, as he trudged through the endless circle under the erratic northern lights filling the sky with trembling curtains of fire, somewhere deep, almost below the conscious level, something was wrong, but his mind was too hazy, too sticky and numb, to pinpoint the sense of wrongness. Vaguely he realized that the missing factor was important, but the longer he walked, the more time that passed, the farther away the vagrant thought slipped. Now it was beyond his capability to muster the necessary energy to concentrate, and soon it had slipped completely from him.

  On a sweep to the north,' half asleep and mumbling to himself, McPherson came up behind and laid a hand on his shoulder. Folsom felt the big man's hand grasp at his parka and automatically swung around, the butt of his carbine whipping through a vicious arc at the other's unseen midsection. Orly Folsom's tired reflexes saved McPherson from a solid clout in the belly. McPherson caught the rifle in one huge paw and stopped it, then gave Folsom a gentle shove toward the tent and watched him stumble away before he too began the chase around the endless circle.

  Teleman was at 'the bottom of a long shaft. Above, the velvet-black sides of the hole spiraled up to an undefined blob of half light, a formless nothing. His mind refused to work, refused to

  coordinate sensory impressions, was mired in a haze of quicksand. He fell sharply .. .

  Teleman sat up in the darkened tent and waited for the shapeless blurs of darkness to form into patterns that represented walls of the tent and pieces of gear scattered about.

  The hoarfrost from their breathing was growing thick on the nylon walls. The suddenness of awakening had disoriented him for several panicky minutes before he realized that huddled next to him in sleeping bags were both McPherson and Folsom, and Gadsen's sleeping bag was empty. That told him that it was the last watch before they would move on again. After the few hours of sleep, his mind and senses were preternaturally sharp.

  He did not realize that this was due to almost complete exhaustion and that it would melt away after the smallest exertion, leaving him again a semiconscious drone.

  He got quietly out of his sleeping bag and fished out the chemical heating pads. Of the three that Folsom had put in with him, only one retained any heat at all. He tucked it underneath his parka against his chest and picked up his carbine, a ration pack, and face mask and moved quietly to the tent flap.

  When he poked his head out through the tent flaps, the mask, still heated from the tiny stove, warmed the air passing into his lungs to a breathable temperature. The combination of aurora borealis and moonlight illumin
ated the surrounding tundra with midevening intensity. After a moment he caught sight of Gadsen coming up from far to the east. The sailor was walking slowly, stopping every now and then to search the horizon carefully through the field glasses.

  Teleman squirmed through the flaps and in a crouching run started south. After two hundred yards he flung himself flat in the snow and wriggled around to see if Gadsen had spotted him running from the tent. Gadsen had not and was now coming around the far side of the tent, almost a mile away from where he lay. Teleman decided to stay put until Gadsen had completed that part of the circle and started around again to the east. In his white parka he would be invisible at half the distance. So he lay unmoving in the snow, watching as the distant figure traveled farther around in his wide orbit.

  What chain of reasoning had prompted him to leave his companions and strike out on his own he did not quite understand.

  He realized that he was carrying extremely vital information the American state-of-the-art in electronic countermeasures, aircraft and engine design and sensor technology. He also knew that this information locked away in his brain could easily be unlocked by the Soviets, and, therefore, he was much too valuable to let himself fall into their hands.

  Folsom, McPherson, Gadsen—all, or one, meant to kill him. Only that factor was ice clear in his drug-crazed mind.

  What Teleman had endured in the past seventy-two hours might easily have killed a lesser man. Instead of recovering in the special-care unit of a military hospital, he was staggering around the North Cape of Norway in the midst of the century's worst Arctic storm. His body still contained microresidues of the various psychic and-physical energizers and, without the compensating PCMS, was on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. The momentary hysteria hours before, which had sent him into a shallow coma that Folsom and Gadsen had mistaken for sleep, had been the beginning.

  The deepening cold endured since then was affecting the action of the drug residues, changing and catalyzing their effects to an extent never before tested. As a result Teleman's mind burned with the steady intensity of an arc lamp. As he lay in the snow his mind was busy collating drug-affected impressions, misunderstood facts, and skewed extrapolations, all of which only served to reinforce his conviction that those helping him were actually his assassins. Forgotten was the intense effort, at the risk of their own lives, that had already been expended to aid him.

  As Gadsen disappeared around the far side of the tent, Teleman got shakily to his feet and hegan to run at little more than a half trot due south. He had no firm plan in mind for his escape. The sudden awakening minutes before had brought only the galvanizing need for escape. Somewhere deep in his mind was the idea of heading south for several miles, then turning east into a shallow arc that would bring him to the naval base from the southeast at an angle great enough to pass unseen by Folsom and the others. If they had already arrived at the base he would simply denounce them as his would-be killers and claim asylum.

  Teleman trotted on for several more minutes under the wavering streamers of electrons decorating the sky. The weird light made seeing difficult and twice he tripped and fell headlong. The

  third time he fell he found that he could not immediately get up. Stunned more by the lack of movement in his legs than by the force of the fall, Teleman lay prone, able to move only his head. The few minutes of running had taken him well away from the vicinity of the tent. He lay now in a blank white desert where the only movement was the aurora borealis dancing solemnly overhead. After several minutes during which the cold penetrated his furs with ice-fingers, he was able to get to his knees and, using the carbine as a crutch, pull himself to his feet.

  Teleman staggered forward again at a shuffle, leaning heavily on the carbine. But to his mind's eye he was running as swiftly as an arrow. Only a few more hours, he thought happily to himself, and he would reach the naval station—well ahead of the others. Once there, he would tell them all that had happened in the past two days, tell them that both Americans and Russians had violated their territory. Maybe they would even let him go along when they went out to round up the intruders.

  Now he was strong and fresh again. The territory unreeled beneath his feet as he bounded over the snow. On the horizon was the low bulk of the naval base and the slender stems of gun barrels thrusting out toward the sea. He was so close, he thought, that he could stop and rest awhile, for there was no sense in arriving so out of breath that he could not tell his story. He stopped and sank down in the snow. Only a few minutes rest and then he would finish the last half mile. The brilliantly lit base area was now clearly visible, even if it was a few feet above the ground. That would make no difference. He could jump that high. Funny, these Norwegians, that they should paint the buildings and the compound a bright green. It was a naval base . . . it should be blue. . . .

  Folsom came completely awake the instant Gadsen burst through the tent flaps.

  "Off to the west, about a dozen men . . . a mile out."

  Folsom was already shrugging into his parka as McPherson grabbed up his pack and twisted to wake Teleman. "Goddamn," he bellowed.

  Folsom swung around and stared at the empty sleeping bag. "For Christ's sake, where the hell has he gone?" he roared. Gadsen popped his head outside and then back in again.

  "Wherever it is, we ain't got much time to look for him. It's going to take these bastards about ten minutes to get here."

  Folsom stood stock-still in the center of the tent, his mind churning furiously as he tried to decide what had to be done next. "All right, leave everything here but the carbines and ammunition. Outside and keep low so they can't see us."

  The three men crawled quickly outside into the bitter air and huddled close to the ground.

  Folsom pulled the binoculars to his eyes and examined the approaching Russians. There were six men spread out into a skirmish line almost half a mile long, both ends beginning to curl around to flank the tent. Quickly he swept the horizon north and then south.

  Turning to the east, he scanned the snow carefully to the horizon, but saw no sign of any second party closing from that direction.

  In the meantime McPherson had been searching the snow around the tent. He raised an arm and motioned the others to join him, then pointed at a line of tracks leading south.

  "I'll lay odds that's our boy."

  "Okay, south is as good a direction as any now. We go get him," Folsom ordered, his angry voice gritting through clenched teeth. "What the hell do you suppose got into him anyway?"

  Neither Gadsen nor McPherson replied, and in moments, hunching low to the ground, they were running south along the line of tracks. McPherson had unslung his pack and was dragging it after him in a vain effort to wipe away the trail they were leaving.

  If anything, the temperature had fallen even lower in the past five hours. As the men ran they left long streamers of frozen breath hanging in the crystal air. Above them the multicolored aurora borealis glimmered and writhed across the northern sky and Folsom again felt the strange, nagging sensation that he had forgotten some vital point. But as his body began to tire after the insufficient three hours of sleep, he found himself concentrating to the exclusion of all else, on running.

  They stopped after ten minutes and threw themselves prone in the snow to rest and check on the Soviets. Through the glasses Folsom could see that the Russian troops were less than a hundred yards from the tent. The northern and southern ends of the line had circled until the tent was in the center. They were lying prone in the snow while two soldiers were crawling up to the tent. Folsom rolled over on his back and waited for his ragged breathing

  to smooth. In the ten minutes the three had been running they had covered perhaps one mile at a half trot, half run. All three were severely winded, but at least, Folsom thought, they had put enough distance between themselves and the tent so that they could now go on without being spotted in the fitful light.

  "How far do you think Teleman managed to get?" he asked McPhe
rson.

  "I doubt if he could have gone much farther. I'm surprised we haven't found him yet. He was in pretty bad shape when we stopped. We'll be lucky to find him alive," McPherson finished bleakly.

  Folsom swore savagely. "The old man will have my head if we don't."

  Gadsen, looking miserable, rubbed his face with gloved hands. "I don't see how the hell he could have gotten out of that tent without me seeing him," he muttered.

  "Hell, how were you to know that he would take off? You weren't watching him. You were watching for the Russians. If there is any fault here at all, it's mine. We should probably have rigged up something to wake us . . ." Folsom shook his head. The "what-if" line of excuse-making was a waste of energy. He stood up and took a last look at the Russians through the glasses, then swept the east once more. The two scouts had almost reached the tent. He knew it could not take them much longer to find out that their quarry had flown the coop. Whether they would automatically assume that the Americans had left ahead of them or would discover their tracks was a toss-up. In either case he wanted to get as far away as possible. Nothing had shown on the eastern horizon yet, but somewhere out there another Russian party was approaching. He wished to God he could get in touch with Larkin. Suddenly he felt completely inadequate to cope with the situation.

  "Come on, let's go," he said quietly, starting south again along the parallel set of tracks that Teleman had left.

  Teleman's tracks were becoming more and more irregular as they trudged on. Shortly they came upon the spot where their quarry had first fallen. The depression in the snow, almost invisible in the uncertain light, showed that he had fallen cleanly and gotten up again without hesitation. Not daring to pause, the

  three sailors pushed on. Now the pace that Folsom had set was beginning to wear heavily. Their breath was coming in gasps of exhaustion, their half run, half trot beginning to flag. When they reached the second indentation in the fresh snow surface Folsom waved them to a halt. Gasping for breath and leaning heavily on their carbines, they knelt in the snow. Finally, after a few minutes, McPherson dragged himself forward a few yards and came back with Teleman's insulated canteen. The three looked at one another and with the same thought were up and running at once. Within the next few hundred yards they found his carbine, the lightweight pack, and finally the spot where he had fallen the third time.