North Cape Page 8

  He accepted the coffee that Larkin ordered and sat back in the chair to watch his commanding officer pouring his own coffee. Folsom really knew little about Larkin, and he doubted that many men did. Larkin was old Navy, relaxed but steeped in tradition; he probably would have been more at home in the more easygoing Australian or Canadian navies if he were to be judged by his command style. In two years he had yet to hear the captain raise his voice to give an order. And he could not ever remember Larkin having to give an order twice.

  But the man kept his own counsel. Never had there been an exchange of personal information between them. What little he knew about Larkin had been gleaned from his service record, to which Folsom, as executive officer, had access, and from talk around the various officers' clubs. The service record had been exceedingly dry, as always, but at the same time was an intriguing document, more from what it had implied rather than described. Folsom knew, for instance, that Larkin had commanded a destroyer during the Vietnam conflict and had been decorated with the Navy Cross for bravery under fire. But it had remained a noncommittal note in a record until he ran into a chance acquaintance in San Francisco who had been communications officer on the cruise for which Larkin earned the decoration.

  The story was that Larkin had taken his destroyer to within a hundred yards of fringing reefs off the South Vietnamese coast just below the Demilitarized Zone. He was to lay down pointblank covering fire for a Korean patrol driven back and pinned down on the beach by a superior and well-dug-in North Vietnamese Army unit. Larkin had moved in so close that he had come under intensive mortar fire. The destroyer took three mortar rounds, one directly through the fan tail, which had exploded against the rudder controls, blasting them out of action. In spite of the damage, Larkin had remained on the scene, in fact moving in even closer to bring antiaircraft guns into broadside position to lay down a sweeping barrage for twenty minutes while army helicopters moved in to pull the Koreans out. The service record for some reason missed noting the award of the Republic of South Korea Distinguished Service Medal.

  Folsom's friend had many other tales of Larldn's skill and bravery, which he was more than happy to relate to Folsom during a long two-fifths-of-gin afternoon and evening. All were in a similar vein. But what stuck most deeply in Folsom's memory was his friend's description of Larkin as an aloof, although quite personable, and lonely man.

  Exactly Folsom's own conclusion.

  Even Larkin's face bore out his manner. It was a face that was at once alive but closed to outsiders. The gray eyes stared out at you from under straight, medium thin brows with a direct stare that forbade anything except the exact truth. Larkin was a tall man, but spare, almost to the point of gauntness in some respects. His face was thin, with the skin stretched tightly across the brow and nose. But the shoulders were broader than would have been expected for a man so tall and lean. There was something about the man, something in the posture, that Folsom could not isolate, that belied the personal -

  aesthetism that really existed. The furniture in the cabin may have been comfortable and pleasantly arranged, but it was certainly not opulent. The color scheme matched the paneled and steel walls, but that was all. The desk, set under the air vent, was clean and neat. A choice selection of books could be seen in the barred rack over the desk and the titles were intriguing, indicating a disciplined mind.

  Larkin settled into a chair facing him and balanced his coffee cup on the arm. He glanced at Folsom, who sipped at his coffee and waited. It was characteristic of Larkin, he thought, to unknowingly make you wait uncomfortably until he started to speak. The gray eyes peering out from the calm face gave the impression that Larkin was measuring your character and strength, It was not intentional, he knew. It was only that Larkin was marshaling his own thoughts.

  Larkin cleared his throat "I noticed that you made a course correction. Good thinking.

  These seas are going to get rougher."

  Folsom nodded. "I had engineering rig up strain gauges on the bow patch. If it starts to weaken, we'll want to know about it in plenty of time."

  Larkin smiled briefly. "Yes we will at that." He sat for a moment sipping his coffee. "I just got word from Virginia that our Russian friends are onto the system."

  Folsom sat up. He really knew very little about the supersecret games they had been playing lately. Between themselves they always used the name Virginia to refer to the agency that directed their actions. Although he did not know really who "Virginia" was, he could pretty well guess that it meant the forty-two-acre complex in the hills just outside Washington that was Central Intelligence

  Agency Headquarters. But what was the game the Russians were onto?

  Larkin pulled a sealed envelope off the desk top and handed it to Folsom. "Open it."

  Folsom tore the end off and extracted the folded papers. He spread them on his lap and picked up the top sheet. DOD 630-29K. That was one he had not seen before. He looked up questioningly at Larkin, but Larkin was gazing in deep absorption at the design on his coffee cup.

  The top sheet was an instruction page for the five that followed. It held one small paragraph that immediately caught Folsom's eye. If he accepted the terms of the attached contract and signed, he would be "liable to twenty years in a federal prison or $20,000

  fine or both if he revealed to any unauthorized person or persons any material or information given to him in connection with that relayed to him by Captain Henly Larkin, USN, Commanding Officer of the battle cruiser U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy, or in any way violated the provisions of the National Defense Act." The rest of the forms were standard Department of Defense Top Secret Clearance sheets, already filled out and dated the day he had received his Top Secret clearance. Puzzled, Folsom turned the pages until he came to the last. It was a simple, green-colored sheet with a short list of questions and space for his signature and the date. It was headed "Q" Prime Clearance.

  He whistled softly. He had heard of the QPC, but never had expected to receive it.

  Usually, it was a clearance reserved for the President, cabinet officers, and the joint Chiefs of Staff, to whom there were no secrets. Not even the highest-ranking members of Congress got that one. He looked up.

  "Rather surprising, isn't it? But that's how important this project is. Will you sign the form?"

  Folsom nodded, and Larkin handed him a pen.

  "Then do so," he said quietly. Folsom scribbled his name and added the date.

  "You are now cleared to receive 'Q' Prime information," Larkin said. "The clearance search was run the day you came aboard, and if something had happened to me while we were on duty you would have found all of the instructions in my safe. The decision as to when to bring you into the project was left up to me. Because I believe that the fewer people who know about this project

  the safer it will be, I have not done so until now." He paused to drink slowly.

  "Why did you decide now that I should know about it?" Folsom asked much more calmly than he felt.

  Larkin waved his hand in a manner to take in the ship and the storm raging outside. "To date there has been no emergency that has warranted it. But now there is what you might call a proper combination of circumstances. As I said, the Russians are onto our most closely guarded secret since the Manhattan Project. Additionally, the sea is running into one of the worst storms on record and our ship could be in very serious danger. In the next few hours you are going to have to have a full understanding as to why we are not going to be able to do anything more than complete our assigned mission at all costs.

  And, if we survive the storm, we may have trouble of a kind we have never encountered before except in practice"—Larkin hesitated, letting the tension build—"Soviet submarines may be out to sink us."

  Folsom stared at him, wondering if the old man had not finally succumbed to the pressures of commanding a ship. As if aware of what he was thinking, Larkin grinned and shook his head. "No, I haven't gone out of my mind."

  He got up and pul
led a map from the desk drawer and spread it on the table. It was a map of the northern Eastern hemisphere showing the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Arctic.

  On it was penciled in red a line paralleling the go° meridian to the Sinkiang border, then swinging north in a long, curving arc across the Soviet Union to their rendezvous position off the Ryabchi Peninsula of Scandinavia.

  "This map shows the flight path of one of our three specially equipped reconnaissance aircraft. The aircraft is capable of speeds in excess of Mach 5 and flight times of . . ."

  For a long time Folsom listened to the dry matter-of-fact voice explaining one of the nation's most closely guarded secrets. After the first few minutes he recovered quickly from the astonishment accompanying the discovery of the exact depth and extent of the surveillance missions that the United States had conducted over the past two years and the role he, or the RFK to be exact, had played. The deeper Larkin went into the explanation/briefing, the more he understood the almost fanatical secrecy that surrounded the project. Not counting the employees at Lockheed and the Air Force crew at GilIon Advanced Test Site, who never were allowed to know the full story, Larkin told him that there were less than fifty people in the United States who knew about the A-17. Fifty people and possibly the entire Soviet military establishment, Folsom thought ironically. Larkin was the only U.S. military official outside the United States territorial boundaries who knew about the A-17, with the exception of a submarine commander in charge of all relay operations for the entire southern hemisphere.

  "And that, Pete, is the whole story, or at least as much as I think it is necessary to tell you at this point." The old man looked piercingly at him. Folsom met his eyes unwaveringly.

  "What are your orders then, sir?"

  Larkin rubbed the back of his head and walked over to stand and stare out the porthole.

  His voice, when he spoke, was low, barely carrying across the ten feet that separated them, hinting all the actual loneliness of command that only the captain of a ship, or perhaps the commander of a Strategic Air Command bomber, could feel. The loneliness in knowing that you had no one to *horn you could turn to for advice. "I wish I knew . . .

  " He let his voice trail off.

  But with the next breath he swung quickly around from the porthole and said firmly, "For now, we have no choice but to continue to the turn-around point and rendezvous tonight on-station." He walked briskly back to the desk and handed Folsom another flimsy.

  "This is the last message we received after I made the status report an hour ago. It says, quite simply, 'Imperative maintain station—Soviets on."

  "Why _couldn't we continue to the lee side of the Cape and wait for him there. One hundred and fifty miles shouldn't make that much difference to the pilot," Folsom continued.

  "But it does. We have no way Of contacting the aircraft. The pilot must initiate all such contacts with us. Secondly, the radio transmitter that he uses is a VHF-FM set with a range of less than twenty miles, to reduce the chance that hostile ships or aircraft might pick up the transmission. If we aren't where we said we will be, then he is done. He can't contact us and we can't give him his next set of orders. And that set of orders has his next fueling coordinates. Everything possible has been done to lessen the chance of his being discovered by electronic snooping."

  Folsom nodded. "So if we aren't there, he's as good as dead." He paused and massaged his weary eyes. They felt as if large boulders of jagged rock were slowly working their way up under the lids. He had been on duty, without sleep, „for nearly twenty-four hours, and his mental faculties were beginning to match the syrupy slowness of his body. "That is one job that I certainly do not want under any circumstances."

  "How would you like the job of having to be in the right place at the right time, everytime," Larkin asked bleakly. "You've got it, Pete."

  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 A-17 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. Froni 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.