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  CHAPTER 1

  Fifty-eight degrees of frost. Twenty-six below zero F . . .

  From two hundred thousand feet, the surface of the earth below was void of all but the largest geological features. The land was a mixture of browns and grays, overlain with the misty white of a thin ice cover at sixty thousand feet. A barely discernible range of mountains stretched to the northeast beyond the narrow scope of vision allowed by the slit window. From this altitude, the lofty sixteen-thousand-foot peaks of the Urals appeared as softly rounded mounds almost lost in the sere browns of the surrounding plains. A thread of a river snaked down through, these plains from the narrow valleys and snowfields of the mountains and disappeared into the mist and cloud on the horizon.

  The land below spoke of peace and serenity; but the height obscured the hidden missile sites that could fling their deadly cargoes of thermonuclear death across continents and oceans; hid the military camps and bases scattered across the Asian mainland to meet the threat of enemies on two fronts.

  The weather screen shifted focus to the northwest. Here the contrast was startling.

  Stretching far into the north of the continent and out across the Arctic Ocean, the northwestern swell of the Scandinavian Peninsula was covered with a huge storm that built even as Teleman watched. A hundred-mile-long streamer of cloud twisted around the tiny eye of the cyclonic storm sweeping down across the Great Barrier. All but the foremost edges of the storm were lost below the horizon, but in his imagination Teleman could picture the whole storm, covering five hundred thousand square miles on its leading edge, and God only knew how much in total. On the surface, one-hundred-mile-an-hour winds would be lashing the ocean into sixty- and seventy-foot waves to send them crashing onto the northern edges of the continental shelf. Salt spray blown off the crests of the waves would be turned instantly to ice and would batter to death all but the strongest ships that had the misfortune to be caught in the storm. This was an Arctic storm at its worst, a gale that could laugh at the puny efforts of the largest of its Mid-Atlantic and Caribbean cousins, a storm even more powerful and deadly than the coastal typhoons of the China Sea. For the next hour he would watch it grow through the forward observation slits and on his screen as he approached the Barents Sea.

  Lazily the pilot read the course plot and made a minor correction. He felt the plane bank over, the gulping ramjets running up with a steady murmur. He checked the instrument panels, all 573 dials, verniers, and digital readouts. Airspeed, course fix, engine temperature, fuel, contact point countdown, ambient temperature, internal temperatures in a hundred different locations throughout the aircraft, star fix coordinates, metal flex, accumulators, liquid oxygen generators, batteries, hydraulics, altitude, trim, generators, cameras, blood pressure, acid-base balance, pee; p°s, renal function, EKG . . . all checked themselves green on the boards.

  Teleman—Major Joseph Teleman, USAF Ret—lay back in the acceleration couch and relaxed, suffused with the languid feeling of tranquilizers as the Physiological Control and Monitoring System (PCMS ) accomplished its programed tasks and he was fully in control of his body again.

  The airspeed indicated was slightly over Mach 1.5, with contact less than one hour away.

  The on-board computers had decided that he was fully capable of handling the aircraft at this relative crawl and had withdrawn all booster drugs. He settled back, one hand casually resting on the finger controls, and enjoyed the comfortable murmur of the engines and the passing scene below.

  For the next twenty minutes the reconnaissance plane would drone on across the roof of Soviet Russia, skirting the Moscow antiaircraft missile defense ring by 25o miles, as it headed for the Barents Sea and rendezvous with the U. S. Navy battle cruiser that would accept the cargo of precious military information.

  Above, traveling in overlapping polar orbits at six hundred nautical miles in carefully calculated paths that would circumscribe

  the earth every thirty minutes, a complex of Advanced SAMOS 3 satellites relayed information between one another and their ground point in Virginia. Shortly, the encoder on board clicked softly to itself and began displaying, in digital shorthand, information on a particularly suspicious ground location. One of the SAMOS 3 satellites had observed a small area of low-level infrared radiation where none had existed before.

  The location was in the vicinity of Magnitogorsk, the center of the Soviet electronics research.

  Teleman smiled grimly. At last. He had been searching this entire mission for this patch of infrared as had his sister aircraft the week before. Word had been passed from the Defense Intelligence Agency of the sudden move of a very vital part of the new Soviet missile warhead countermeasures research operation. The testing location had been shifted for some unknown reason; perhaps it had something to do with the latest KGB

  announcement of a blown Western spy ring. Whether genuine or not, there was no way of knowing, but the fact remained that a large research installation had been moved, almost overnight it seemed. Thoughtfully, he programed the coordinates for his next sweep. Maybe the pieces of this little puzzle would finally begin to fall into place.

  But, for the remainder of this flight, it would be a milk run until he orbited the ship still a thousand miles north. Beneath his aircraft he could see the cloud- and snow-covered landscape of northern Russia turning black with its covering of pine. The forest, the taiga

  .of Asian fame, stretched north for four hundred miles without a break—a last holdout of commercial enterprise in the - Soviet Union, the home of hundreds of fur trappers and family lumbering concerns, and the deathtrap into which whole divisions of the Moscow Army of the Nazi Vermacht had been lured to their destruction in the winters of 3.94z and '43.

  Ahead, the terrain of Soviet Russia, slipping by the needle nose of the AR-17, was being covered by a heavy cloud layer. The cover thickened rapidly during the next ten minutes until a solid overcast was spread from horizon to horizon. Teleman reached forward and warmed up the infrared detectors and switched on the radar. The wide-scan radar beam knifed through the clouds to lay the pattern of the land below. Infrared came on-line moments later, laying a composite picture of heat patterns as it hunted through the lower frequencies to build a black and white image on

  the screen. The white, washed-out picture was quickly highlighted here and there with sharp black dots and patches as the warmer formations jumped out of the blizzard- and storm-covered ground below.

  After a further ten minutes, an insistent code pattern containing airspeed and direction corrections appeared on the digital readout screen. Teleman altered course once more to suit the final rendezvous location. As the aircraft settled onto the new course, the cede pattern for rendezvous changed to that for the battle cruiser, his contact point for this portion of the mission. Still fifteen minutes short, he nevertheless began the check-out procedure on the transmission batteries.

  CHAPTER 2

  Forty degrees of frost. Eight degrees below zero F at sea level. The nuclear-powered Robert F. Kennedy came around sharply, bows swinging into the crushing fury of a Force 11 wind, twin screws churning furiously as she clawed her way-up a towering wave rising nearly twenty feet above her superstructure, then rocketed down into the pounding waters of the trough. The bows smashed deep into green Arctic waters. Tons of water sprayed over her decks, mast-high, turning instantly to ice that rattled-against the bridge like cannon shot. What liquid, not frozen instantly in the frigid air, clung to the bridge, the shrouds, any exposed part of the ship, added yet another microlayer of ice o the tons already weighting her down. Again and again the ship smashed into the waves, each time rising half submerged from an encounter that would have sent lesser vessels to the bottom with all the careless thought of a glacier crushing a hillock beneath its advanc
e.

  Fifty- to seventy-foot waves, whipped to a froth by the Arctic gale, marched down from the Great Barrier across two hundred _ miles of open sea. What was possibly the worst Arctic storm fir more than thirty years hunted through the desert wastes of the Arctic in a cyclonic storm of unbelievable proportions.

  Formed from a katabatic storm somewhere on the Greenland Icecap and fed by a smaller low pressure area of relatively warmer, moister air, the two centers had met; the colder, moist, and therefore heavier air had settled down onto the glacier. The Greenland Icecap rises from the coast to nearly two thousand feet in the interior. The settling cold air had merely flowed down the eastern

  side of the icecap, encountered a low-pressure area off the foggy coast into which it rushed, picked up more moisture and speed, and spewed itself out into the Greenland Sea as a full-scale cyclone. Now, the storm, fully built and overpowering everything in its path, was sweeping in a huge curving arc up into the Norwegian and Barents seas.

  Lieutenant Commander Peter Folsom swiveled on his high seat as- Captain Henly Larkin, commanding officer of the RFK, came onto the bridge, peered out through the driving wipers, and shuddered. Folsom indicated the coffee pot and grinned as Larkin poured his famous oversized cup and carefully took a sip of the steaming black liquid as he came over to stand by Folsom.

  "How's she look, Pete?"

  "A real ball coming up, Captain. The wind is about seventy-five knots and rising. The barometer is 28.52 and still falling—fast. We've had a four-tenths drop in the last half hour."

  "Anything coining in over the weather channel?"

  "Thule's forecasting what they call 'heavy weather' again. They claim that little breeze two days ago was only a prelude. At least 125-knot winds, possibly higher for this area in the next twenty-four hours."

  Folsom passed over the sheaf of flimsies that had come in since Larkin went off watch four hours before. Larkin took them over to his console and settled into the high stool with a muffled sigh of weariness and began to read. The picture was not good. Arctic cyclones are not to be fooled with. Any shipping without dire need steered well clear of such storms and even submarines moved down to the two-hundred-foot level to avoid the angry currents and crosscurrents churned up by the furious winds above. Larkin read on.

  The volume of meteorological information that had been gathered, collated, and disseminated in the past four hours was far more complete than that available to commercial shipping. In addition to the reports from the civilian agency weather satellites, the Department of Defense maintained a series of its own, devoted exclusively to gathering weather information strictly for the military. Larkin therefore had available to him more data about the storm and more accurate projections as to its future course than did commercial shipping. But Larkin had one other thing that commercial captains did not have—strict orders to maintain station in the Barents Sea at all costs, short of losing his ship. However,

  if it should become clear to Larkin that he was about to lose his ship, it would probably be too late to save her.

  Larkin rubbed his eyes aid swiveled around to face Folsom at the adjacent panel. "Ah . . .

  my aching back. How long till contact?" He peered at his watch and checked it against the chronometer readout above his command console.

  "Five minutes to go. Communications tells me everything is set. There shouldn't be any trouble on this end." Folsom slid out of the seat and walked over to the forward ports and stared out through the revolving screen into the wind- and wave-filled night. The ship crested another wave, tipped, slid and smashed again into the Arctic seas. Folsom hung onto the coaming, riding easily with the motion of the ship, and winced involuntarily as solid spray rattled like grapeshot against the tempered glass.

  "Thule also said that we can expect snow toward the end. It seems to be one of those blasted Greenland storms, and when this one finally spilled over the edge it found a low-pressure area along the coast and kept coming . . . bringing everything in its path with it."

  Larkin merely grunted as he continued to stare thoughtfully into the storm. His mind was churning with dozens of lines of thought, all ending at one consideration . . . the safety of the ship. Fourteen years of sea duty in every ocean of the world had taught him one certain lesson: the sea can never be trusted. Even the weather satellite system, with its computerized data reduction processes, was not to be trusted completely. There were too many unknowns, too many variables in the billions of cubic miles that comprised the ocean of air and the ocean of water that always obscured the pattern. Larkin had weathered both Mid-Atlantic hurricanes and South Pacific typhoons. He had seen a destroyer almost turned turtle in a South China Sea typhoon off the coast of Taiwan and rode out the Pacific typhoon of '57 in a light cruiser. If nothing else, Larkin had immense respect for the sea. He was worried about this storm. If the predictions were right, it was going to get an awful lot worse before it got better. And, he remembered, it was here in the Barents Sea in 1942 that two lend-lease British destroyers had been sunk by just this same kind of Arctic cyclone. The RFK was a much more powerful and stouter ship than those two World War I tin cans—"tin cans" built in a day when they were really not much more than that—but still, every ship, every crew had its limit. One small mistake could be extremely fatal.

  He turned to survey the bridge quickly, noting each station manned with all of the ship's electronic and visual eyes and ears tuned outward to register the slightest alteration in the storm or the condition of the sea. Radar units quested ceaselessly to pinpoint the most insignificant object revealed by an instant's break in wave or cloud that might turn out to be the conning tower of a submarine or rocket-loaded fighter bomber. For all intents and.

  purposes, the Barents Sea, edging the northern coasts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as well as Norway and Finland, was enemy water. The panel above the ECM—electronic countermeasures—console was lit a bright red, indicating that the highly secret sonar, radar, and infrared jamming devices were in full operation. Any contact with a Soviet vessel—or that of any nationality—would be a matter of pure, blind luck in these seas, but Larkin was not one to trust luck any more than he trusted the sea.

  "Helmsman, course and speed," he called out. Folsom glanced at him for a moment, then went back to staring out the ports.

  "026° at sixteen knots sir."

  Larkin considered a moment. "Sixteen knots against these head-winds, not bad. Let's cut her back to ten. I don't want to carry any more pressure on that bow patch-up than we absolutely have to have."

  Folsom nodded agreement and called out the changed speed, then ordered communications to make the proper correction in the rendezvous location and time and get it off. As he finished talking, the screen door swung open with a bang and a fur-shrouded figure stumbled in, followed by the banshee shriek of the wind. A howled chorus of "shut the door" rose from the bridge crew as they swung around as one man from their consoles to glare at the snow-covered apparition. The hatch was jerked from the man's grip by the wind and thudded back against the stops, then just as perversely swung the other way and slammed shut, abruptly ending the noise. Lieutenant Commander Joel Bridges leaned wearily against the hatch and stripped the Arctic mask from his face with a great deal of care. The mask and his nylon all-weather gear were coated with an inch of solid ice. Bridges worked the zipper on the parka loose and pulled it down. The parka then fell away of its own volition and the ice coating dumped onto the deck plates in thick chunks.

  Bridges stood swaying among the ruins of his parka, his face flushed in the sudden ninety-degree temperature change. His expression, as circulation began returning to his legs and anus, was almost comical.

  "It's colder than a bitch kitty out there!"

  "Now, now, that's no way to talk in the presence of your ranking officers, is it, Lieutenant?" Folsom asked innocently.

  Bridges delivered a muffled comment, glaring from the corner of his eyes as he stumbled around in a wobbly circle looking f
or the coffee. Larkin chuckled and poured coffee for him. "I take it that it is cold. Anyone else out there?"

  "No, sir, I sent them in about twenty minutes ago."

  "Good, there is no need to stand watch outside tonight. You can't see anything anyway."

  "Amen. Your eyeballs freeze." Bridges took the coffee and stumbled over to the second officer's console and pulled himself up into the high seat and began massaging his legs.

  Twenty minutes passed slowly, twenty minutes in which the ship fought the angry seas while Larkin calmly continued to study the weather reports and maps displayed by his console. Only the intenseness of his concentration betrayed his worry.

  Larkin turned sharply at the buzz of the intercom. Folsom picked up the handset.

  "Communications is ready. Shall I have them pipe it up here, sir?"

  Larkin nodded. He lit a cigarette and made himself comfortable at his console, then picked up the handset and pressed the button that cut in the secrecy circuits and slipped the ear-plug wire around his ear. Immediately he heard the operator two decks below begin his "ident" call on the ultratight FM scrambled frequency.

  "Got him, sir."

  "Beatle to Target One : . . I read your signal . . . five by five .. . stand by . . . for transmission."

  The characteristically drowsy voice of the reconnaissance pilot came through on the FM

  channel clearly in spite of the storm and havoc raging in the intervening twenty thousand feet between ship and aircraft. Larkin pressed a third tab and glanced around quickly to make sure the banks of tapes were all running, and then took a long drag at his cigarette.

  "Clear, go ahead."

  High-frequency chatter sounded briefly over the handset. The tape reels spun madly and the bridge echoed to the tortured squeal of the telemetry. The guard stood looking straight ahead impassively. Folsom sat on his stool at the executive officer's console and tried to appear disinterested in the little drama being played out at the next console. He did not succeed any more than did the eight other officers and enlisted men on the bridge. Only Larkin knew who was aloft or why. Only the captain of the rendezvous vessel was entrusted with the knowledge of the trite but very true phrase—supersecret mission—so secret that the entire project did not possess a code name. The identification label was changed with every mission flown. Tonight the mysterious pilot and aircraft were known as Target. Two weeks ago in the Indian Ocean the name had been Phoebus.