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  Larkin became aware of a faint hissing noise filling the background as the pilot began to speak. For Cod's sake, he thought, not again. The last rendezvous had taken three hours while the communications section had struggled to maintain contact. For three hours Larkin had steamed a zigzag pattern around a fixed point while the aircraft had flown long, looping orbits around a rotating imaginary point and the ionosphere had wreaked havoc with the radio transmission. For three hours Larkin had sweated blood, knowing that even the vastness of the southern Indian Ocean was not big enough to hide both an aircraft and a large battle cruiser from hostile submarines or roving ASW patrols. Now he was praying that they would not experience similar trouble only 170 miles off the coast of the Soviet Union.

  But after a few moments the hissing began to fade and the pilot's voice came through again, slow and measured but clear:

  `Transmission complete . . . fuel load . . . low . . . proceeding to refueling . . . point . . . at minus . . . thirty-five minutes .. . everything in clear . . . working like a charm ... no . . .

  trouble from . . . Reds . . . ECM gear . . . working ... perfectly."

  Larkin hunched forward and spoke directly into the handset. "It looks as though you won'

  t be completing this sweep . . . or returning to base for a while," he said.

  "We have new orders for you in supplembntary transmission coming up. I have been instructed to tell you by voice that you are to review them after''—he stressed the word—

  "refueling. We will remain on station here, waiting for you to report in. The mission should he completed by i800 hours tomorrow. You will rendezvous with us tomorrow night, same location."

  Larkin paused and unconsciously lowered his voice. "I have also been instructed to add that this mission is of the highest importance to East-West relations and must be completed at all costs, short - of detection."

  "I . . . understand .. ."

  Larkin did too, only too well in fact. What he would pass along, locked into the tapes, was an almost impossible task. "Stand by for transmission." Larkin keyed the tape decks to transmit to the circling aircraft.

  Teleman sat thinking while the encoder clicked out the receipt of the transmission from the ship. He too understood only too .well what Larkin's verbal instructions meant. And he was rather puzzled. This certainly did not sound like a routine patrol, the last of this watch before returning to base. Never before had he flown a mission pattern that in any way brought him in range of enemy rockets or aircraft. Heretofore all missions over hostile territory—which was anywhere in the world, including the United States—had been flown at altitudes above eighty thousand feet. He glanced out the slit beside his head and banked the aircraft a few degrees to see the storm below.

  Darkness was only an hour away, but the setting sun shed enough light on the cloud cover to highlight the intensity of the storm, even from twenty thousand feet. The storm, seen from above, resembled a devilish badlands: long, twisting canyons and arroyos of saw-edged cloud. The depths of the canyons were filled with hell's own blackness, contrasting sharply with the evil red of the peaks and ridges. The late afternoon sunlight filtered suddenly as he passed beneath a thick blanket of high-flying ice crystals. The sun dipped below the rim of the storm and immediately its light turned a somber gray, deathly solid in its low intensity. In spite of himself, Teleman shivered involuntarily.

  "Looks . . . awfully rough . . . down there . . . you be able to hold . . . through that stuff?"

  "I don't anticipate any real trouble," Larkin replied. "So far it's nothing we can't handle."

  Inwardly though, Larkin was worried. Although the RFK was new and built to more exacting specifications than any other ship

  m history, she had been damaged' a week previously. Steaming slowly out of Newport, Rhode Island, Naval Base she had collided with a destroyer in a freak accident. In the heavy fog the destroyer had come off second best, but her sharply raked bow had gashed a hole in the RFK's port bow, slashing through several structural. members. An emergency patch had been rigged at the almost deserted Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Naval Yards by a skeleton crew and the bow section shored up with temporary braces.

  This mission was too important to delay and there had been no other ship with the required equipment anywhere-within steaming range.

  Now, the weather satellite information and photographs that had come in just prior to contact had shown the entire Arctic region as far east as Novaya Zemlya and west to Iceland in for the worst Arctic gale in years—worse in all appearances than the Great Storm of 1942. And now, the RFK, less than 170 miles from the Soviet coast and forty miles off Norway's North Cape, was also directly in the storm's track.

  "We'll be here," he said: with considerably more confidence than he felt at the moment.

  The seas were increasing and the stabilizers were just about useless in the heavy waters.

  He noted that Folsom, bent over the console, had just ordered the RPM's on the engines stepped up to furnish stabilizing air around the hull.

  "We are going to start quartering a fifty-mile circuit in fifteen minutes." Out of the corner of his eye he saw the white flicker of another wave break mast-high and come crashing down against the forward ports. "So we'll be here."

  "Good . . ." The transmission garbled and quickly cleared. "Say again," Larkin requested.

  "Good . . . take it . . . easy . . . down there . . . see you tomorrow."

  "Right, clear." Larkin stubbed his cigarette out and got up from the console. He waved to the marine and ordered Folsom to stand down from security. He thought for a moment, leaning against the console, feeling again the crushing weight of responsibility come down over him just as it had the night the destroyer sheared through the bow, or that afternoon off the North Vietnamese coast. He took a deep breath and shook his head reluctantly, then beckoned Folsom to join him at the plotting table, and quickly explained that they would stay on station for another twenty-four hours.

  For the next ten minutes they discussed the advantages and dis-advantages of various courses that would allow them to take the brunt of the storm in the easiest manner possible. Finally, they settled on a straight run to the northeast that would bring them abreast of the North Cape, some one hundred miles north by 1100

  hours. Both were convinced that it would be better to ride

  directly into the teeth of the gale now, before it unleashed its better than one-hundred-mile-an-hour winds, as it was expected to do late tomorrow. They Would then be able to run before the storm, arriving back on station at 1700 hours. This allowed a one-hour lead time for any unexpected delays or heavier seas than Folsom picked up the maps and spread them out on the chart amble. He drew a fine line in red between their present position and the expected turn-around point north of the Cape.

  He pointed with the pencil at the exposed position. "Actually it might be better to come farther west to bring us under the lee of the Cape." He waited expectantly for Larkin's answer.

  Larkin shoved his cap back and rubbed his forehead. "Ordinarily, yes. But in this weather, I just don't trust these waters. They shoal too damned easily and the average depth runs less than ten fathoms. If we pick up any more ice, and it looks like we're going to, we'd be in big trouble. No, I think I'd prefer to make the turn in the open sea and take my chances with the wind and waves."

  "You're the boss." Folsom nodded and bent over the table again, to -begin the intricate task of plotting a course that would take them into the teeth of eighty- to ninety-knot headwinds that had a tendency to quarter unexpectedly. Even with the latest in inertial gyroscopes aboard, he still had a tricky problem in navigation on 'his hands—to take them a total of 223 nautical miles in twenty-four hours and bring them back to a starting point less than half a mile wide, all with terrible winds and towering waves that would combine to push the battle cruiser in a myriad of directions during the voyage.

  Larkin nodded to himself and turned away, satisfied that the ship was in capable hands with
Folsom at the helm. He went below for breakfast.

  CHAPTER 3

  Teleman fell off to the north and west at a leisurely pace for the refueling point. Beneath him, the storm-filled Arctic Ocean gave way to the frozen wastes of the Great Ice Barrier, now at its farthest point of advance south in late March, well past the Norwegian outpost of Bear Island. Only the Great North Atlantic Drift, still retaining some of the slightly warmer waters of the Gulf Stream, kept the vast plateau of ice from moving farther south toward the European mainland. Crumpled and tom, the jagged edges of ice near the rim, twisted and warped by the pressure of billions of tons of slowly, insidiously moving ice from its vast interior, threw up blinding sheets of minute ice crystals that filled the frozen air to a height of twenty feet with fiery, needle-sharp spicules that screamed through the pressure ridges and hummocks, which carved them into tortured shapes. A frozen hell from insanity's worst imaginings.

  Teleman climbed slowly to one hundred thousand feet and held. Here the air, what little there was of it, was quiet, knifing past the razor-sharp leading edges of his half-extended wings as he flew westward, overtaking the sun. After another hour of flight, the trailing edge of the storm appeared low on the horizon, and within minutes he could see the gray shape of the ice surface below. The low Arctic sun broke suddenly through the edge of the cloud cover that reached westward to Greenland and flooded a two-dimensional pyramid of burnished ice with blood. The sunlight shining through the small observation slit to his right carried no warmth, only the cold glare of death.

  He flew on for another twenty minutes, lulled by the muffled sound of the engines working in a throttled-down ramjet mode and by the slow infusion of relaxant drugs seeping into his bloodstream: He was eight hundred miles north of Greenland when the radar contact panel lit suddenly. Instantly the computers responded and the PMC

  injected a neutralizer followed by a timed release of an Adrenalin derivative that jumped his heart rate to - double the normal rate of 72 beats per minute, with a correspondingly increased respiration ratio. Teleman hunched forward, taking in the full significance of the radar signal and the digital readout that was feeding closing range and speed into the display. At the same time, his body, acting in a blur of motion—a controlled berserk reaction—took over the aircraft and prepared for a series of evasive actions. Teleman knew that the blip on the radar screen could only be the refueling aircraft climbing up to meet him. But this made no difference to his reflex patterns. Friend or foe, he repeated the drill precisely as laid down in his subconscious by intensive training. The digital panel displayed a "friendly contact" signal and one second later flashed the recognition pattern for the refueling tanker.

  The computers stepped down the flow of reaction drugs and Teleman relaxed slightly.

  He was now in full control of the aircraft and approaching the tanker, still two hundred miles distant, at a closing rate of better than three thousand miles an hour. The radar screen indicated that the craft was a KB-58 tanker. His speed was close to Mach a, near his limit, and Teleman's was Mach 2.1. The tanker did not slack his speed and Teleman barely caught a glimpse of him as he pulled past and below his nose in a tight turn to take up his station ahead and above.

  Only then did Teleman cut back his speed to match that of the KB-58. The boom was out of the tanker and he maneuvered carefully, bringing the aircraft up and just off the boom. Teleman watched it waver in the nebulous slipstream and, judging the right moment, increased power slowly to slip the nozzle into the housing aft of the cockpit.

  The maneuver was all performed by Teleman. The KB-58 pilot merely brought his straining aircraft up to the one-hundred-thousand-foot altitude for which it had been specially modified with TF-3o fanjets and outboard ramjet wing-tip engines and held her steady. The juggling for position, too precise even for the most advanced computer-controlled instrumentation, was

  performed by Teleman, who depended upon the extended reach that the controlling drugs provided his body.

  When he felt the sharp bang of the nozzle slamming home and saw the safety light go on, he signaled the KB-58 and high-pressure pumps forced the two-hundred-thousandpound cargo of liquid hydrogen into the -cryogenic tanks. Eight minutes later the refueling process was complete, and he broke away. Speed was of the essence during these midair refuelings, as both aircraft were_ totally helpless. Due to the advanced electronic detection and countermeasure equipment carried by Teleman, it was not likely that hostile aircraft would have the capability to track and ambush the two planes, but then in this operation nothing had been left to chance. Once, nearly twelve years before, it had been, and the one in a million gamble had occurred—with disastrous results. The United States Government was determined that it would not happen again.

  The KB-58, gleaming and sharply defined in the reddish light, dropped down and pulled ahead. Teleman answered the cocky, rocking wings and watched as the KB-58 pulled into a wide turn to the south that would take it back to its base at Thule. Then he settled into an orbiting pattern and keyed in the contents of the taped orders that Larkin had transmitted from the ship. -

  For long minutes, Teleman sat silently, waiting for his next command and absorbing the message encoded on the tape while the aircraft described a vast orbit nearly fifty miles in diameter. When he finished, he sat for a few ,moments thinking that his orders amounted to international blackmail on a grand scale.

  From all outward appearances, the Soviet Union and the tTnited States had been moving toward a rapprochement ever since the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when both nations, and indeed the world, had teetered on the brink of the nuclear abyss. Teleman knew that, although the outward hostilities bad been submerged fairly well from public view, they bad not disappeared. Now it was a much more subtle thrust and counterthrust.

  The Cold War had become economic war; carefully conducted war in which both great nations vied for the largest slice of world trade and world influence. Espionage had increased to such an-extent that dose to -one- percent of the national budget of both countries went to support their numerious "spy" establishments. Overt hostilities were engi-. neered and "carried out through third and fourth parties as insurgency-counterinsurgency wars in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa testified. But lately the world had tired of playing patsy for these two giants.'

  Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact had all but died in the past two years. The Southeast Asian nations had subtly declared that neither Western nor Eastern influences were welcome any longer, only trade. To reinforce their new demands, they had formed the Southeast Asian Common Market, in effect a revival of the old Southeast Asian Sphere of Greater Co-Prosperity dominated and led by, naturally enough, japan. What could not be achieved by war was finally won by the ancient oriental traits of patience and discipline. Since the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution had elevated Mao Tse-tung to the status of a semidivinity—a new Confucius—the flagging Chinese resolve had been stiffened by the infusion of a new spirituality into a people that had always existed in its soul. This newly revived and expansionist character, foiled by the SACM, had turned on the Soviet Union for the fuel of hatred to replenish the Communist Revolution. The Soviets had been challenged in fact as well as word for the leadership of the Communist world and for the "uncommitted nations." Fortunately enough for the world, the smaller developing nations had tired of the empty promises of Communism, found the exhortations and money of the United States to be quite unapplicable to their own problems, and discovered that on a planet where the farthest neighbor was no more than eight hours away by supersonic transport and milliseconds by communication satellites, that even nationalism no longer held the key. Suddenly the wave of nationalist sentiment of the 1960s was dead.

  By the mid-1970s a new trend—the first tentative edgings toward international cooperation that far surpassed that of the 1930s and completely disregarded the regional blocism of the late 1940s and early 195os-was gaining momentum.

  And so, rebuffed like the other two giant
s, Red China turned again, as historically she had done for thousands of years, to fomenting trouble on her frontiers—her Asian frontiers. And not without some small justification.

  Between the Soviet Union and Red China stretches nearly two thousand miles of common border. That this borderland includes some of the most worthless land on the face of the earth made absolutely no difference to either party—just as it never had in four

  hundred years of struggle. In the mid-1800s the troops and diplomats of the Romanov tsars, after their rebuff at the Dardanelles by Britain and France during the Crimean War, turned their attentions toward the still mythical lands of Cathay. By the turn of the century they had managed to annex some fifty million square miles of former Chinese territory in a fashion that not even the wily Ch'ing emperors completely understood. That fifty million square miles of desolate and useless land remained a bone of contention ever since. Most of it consisted of a northeastern extension of the Himalayas called the Tien Shan Range; the Takla Makan, a cold, wind-swept, and totally barren desert ranging from three to six thousand feet in altitude; and the equally desolate and useless western reaches of the Gobi Desert. Since the late 195os, China and the Soviet Union had continually fought a series of small-scale battles up and down the border and throughout the land on either side; the Chinese side was known as Sinkiang and the Russian, the Kazakh S.S.R. So isolated was this area, so far removed from human civilization was this region, that very little word of conflict ever leaked out to the Western world. Teleman recalled that it was in this same area, along these same borders, that in 1938-39 the Soviets and the Japanese fought a small-scale war—so small in fact that in 1940 over three thousand Soviet officers were decorated for war action—and promptly shipped off as badly needed reinforcements for Soviet troops in Finland.