Authors: Joe Poyer
Soviet. He had caught him by surprise again. At sixty thousand feet Teleman leveled out. The Russian was still well behind, nearly eight miles, and still climbing for altitude. With the A-17 leveled out and the engines in the turbojet mode with afterburners, Teleman streaked for the North Cape at Mach 4.
But the Soviet Falcon was not through. This was the last chance and both pilots knew it. Neither had anything to lose. Teleman judged the Soviet pilot had passed his point-of-noreturn when he went into the dive after him. Now he was rapidly closing the gap in one last desperate try. And there was nothing remaining that Teleman could do about it. He now had barely enough fuel to make the rendezvous point. Even if the tanker was waiting, he doubted whether enough flying time remained to complete refueling. The Soviet pilot was pulling out all stops. He closed on Teleman at Mach 4.5, boring straight in, then lifting abruptly to pounce from above. As he neared, his guns opened up. He kept his thumb down on the firing button and walked a stream of tracers across the A17. Where were the missiles? Teleman screamed silently. Twisting his head to glance back through the rear observation slit, Teleman could see the sheet of tracers marching toward him. The aircraft rocked violently as at least one cannon shell smashed through his starboard wing without exploding. Then the Falcon slipped below to come streaking up from beneath. Teleman sheered away but the Russian remained locked on. He slammed the A-17 from side to side, nursing every last bit of speed he could from the engines. For seconds both aircraft twisted and wrenched through the frozen air with tracers from the. Falcon's cannon probing around the A-17. Like a wounded snake, they thrashed through the Finnish skies. A second burst chewed into the tail structure. The A17 fluttered like a wounded bird and went out of control. The Falcon edged up, cannons waiting for the optimum moment, the Russian pilot waiting hungrily, with the patience of death, for the A-17 to line up crosswise in his gun-sights, waiting to place the last burst. Then Teleman knew why there had been no missile. Because of their bulk and weight the missiles had been removed and replaced with electric cannons, to save fuel and add speed. Now both pilots were waiting for the inexorable closing of their flight paths. The milliseconds turned into
minutes for both as they approached the invisible spot in the sky that would nebulously mark Teleman's grave.
The Falcon fluttered, arced up slightly, and fell off, arrowing down until lost in the clouds below. The Soviet pilot had waited perhaps a second too long.
Teleman watched the black dot of the Falcon on his radar screen disappearing into the black night until the Russian aircraft vanished into the carpet of cloud. Beneath were the heavily forested northern reaches of the Kjolen Mountains and the empty taiga surrounding the Ounas River, an area inhabited only by Lapps who still followed the migrations of their reindeer herds. Unless the Finns had picked up the final moments of the Falcon on their own radar, it could be years before the wreckage was found. Teleman stared at the screen, sick with exhaustion ,and despair. The Russian crew's suicide had been for nothing. The gamble, their fuel load, against his, coupled with their ability to knock him out of the sky, had been lost. Now both were dead. Teleman knew that, if they had managed to eject, they could never have survived the buffeting of the gale and its sub-zero fury. He examined the fuel gauge. There were eight hundred pounds of the liquid hydrogen fuel remaining in the reserve tanks, another fifteen minutes flying time. If the commanding officer of the battle cruiser was as intelligent and resourceful as he had shown himself to be in the past, there would be a tanker waiting at the rendezvous point. He might be able to make it after all . . . unless more trouble showed up.
Teleman extended his radar fully and waited. The silver-green screen was empty—so far. But it was doubtful if the Soviets would depend only upon one aircraft to complete the job. They rarely played gambles or depended on half measures, and the depth of the system they had erected against him in Asia was more than proof of that. All of a sudden the A-17 rolled out of control and pitched ,over into a dive. Teleman's head snapped back hard against the headrest. The A-17 began to spin wildly. A tremendous banging sounded aft in the fuselage and, twisting around, Teleman saw the starboard rudder assembly through the rear observation slit flap madly. Terrified, he slammed the throttle forward and ran out the landing flaps for the second time. The A-17
was still rolling, down through seventy, sixty-five, sixty, fifty-five, fifty thousand feet before she began to slow. Carefully, his body now under full control of the PCMS, he began to increase power, running the wings forward again. Abruptly the pounding ceased and the A-17 began to bring its nose up into a level attitude. For the next ten minutes Teleman fought furiously with the controls to maintain the damaged A-17 in some semblance of level flight. He had cut the speed back to sub-sonic and managed to fight his way to eighty thousand feet where, hopefully, the thinner, air would lessen the drag on the twisted metal of the tail section. The aircraft still had a tendency to twist into an uncontrollable wingover that would drag him down into the roiling clouds of the storm-filled night below. The computer-controlled linkages aft through the fuselage had been damaged beyond the ability of the alternate circuitry to compensate. The rudder controls were next to useless and he was forced to depend on ailerons and landing flaps for lateral control.
In spite of all he could do, Teleman was slowly losing altitude. The altimeter was circling down through seventy thousand feet with a steadiness that was almost terrifying in its deadliness. The encounter with the Falcon had taken place over the Finnish coast of the Baltic Sea and stretched into the wide margin of mountain separating Sweden from the Norwegian Sea. The Russian had crashed somewhere in Finland, and Teleman hoped to God that the Russians would have a mighty hard time explaining what an advanced Soviet interceptor with empty cannons was doing in Finland—if the Finns ever found it. And if he wasn't careful, he thought humorlessly, the Americans would be doing the same kind of explaining about him, only in spades when the Finns got a look at his equipment.
From the feel of one of the engines, he was beginning to wonder if a stray cannon shell or perhaps a piece of ricocheting metal had not blasted loose a couple of compressor blades. He was beginning to lose power in number two. A moment later his theory was confirmed when a shattering vibration wracked the aircraft. His hand darted to the cutoff switch and abruptly the racket vanished. At the same time the other engine whined up to power to carry the increased load.
Teleman rubbed his aching head and tried to think clearly. The baleful eye of the PCMS
warning light glowed at him in exasperation, warning that he was overextending himself. Big news. He could certainly feel it. His head ached abominably •from the overdose of drugs he had been absorbing in the past few hours as well as from the lack of any real sleep. He swore at the light and dialed an increased dosage of amphetamines. He hardly felt the new dose.
"If ever I get out of this mess," he muttered aloud, "I am going to need at least three months in the hospital to get washed out.'
Talking to himself was something he rawly did. This time it made him feel a little better. For the last twenty minutes he had been telling himself that he was not going to make it, at least in one piece. But, obviously, his subconscious had refused to accept that. He considered the computer for a moment, then began to feed in coordinates and switched the monitoring gear to add information on the aircraft's condition and fuel load. The answer that came out seconds later was worse than he expected. He was still nine hundred miles from the coast of the North Cape and twelve hundred short of the rendezvous point. By throttling back the remaining engine and staying subsonic, he could just about make it to the Cape—which was sure as hell a lot better than going down in the Barents Sea, all things considered.
As he thought about it, a germ of an idea began to take shape. Teleman forced himself to lean back in the couch and relax. He was so tensed up and worn out from the last several hours of flying hide-and-seek that unless he eased off he never would bring the idea into the open.
Trying to think like the Soviet commander responsible for bagging the Americanski spion, he knew that he would have only the reports from the downed aircraft to go on. And he doubted
whether the Russian pilot had been close enough to get much of a reading on the damage his cannon fire had done. The entire sequence had taken less than two minutes, and any time the Soviet crewman would have been close enough for a detailed look would have been limited to a few seconds. And the last burst fired had come while the Russian was diving past and beneath.
So, not knowing the extent of any possible damage, they would reckon him to continue on his present course, perhaps varying a few degrees in either direction to throw them off. They would suspect, although they had no way of knowing for sure, that his fuel was running low. How low, they could only guess. And they would know that he was either heading for a rendezvous somewhere north of Norway or else for a sub-polar route to the States. Following that most logical line of reasoning, they knew he could outrun any pursuing Soviet interceptors. The last thing in the world they would expect would be a reduction in speed. Or would they? In any event it was his only chance. Fortunately, their optical tracking gear would be useless until they broke out of the storm. As it stood now, then, he could make the coast—' that is if nothing else went wrong, if no more Russian aircraft appeared, and if nothing else fell off the aircraft. Surely the Russian pilot had been sending back a play-by-play description of the onesided dogfight. The Soviets must know that their boy crashed and that the A-17 was still in the air when last seen. And with only one path open, straight north, they ought to be able to field enough aircraft to knock him down. About now, he thought grimly, one of those Russian copies of the old Steerman biplane ought to be good enough for that job. Teleman flipped the warm-up switches on the transmitters. This new development was going to force him to break the strict radio silence always maintained on overflights. To get the information to the RFK he was going to have to transmit over normal and open commercial channels. The whole secrecy bit was blown anyway, and there remained no need to preserve what faint modicum of secrecy remained. The Soviets could and would monitor all they wanted. The codes were supposed to be "breakproof," and in any event they would certainly be changed after this disastrous mission. Stiffly, he leaned forward to examine the cloud cover below. The UV Doppler gear gave him a reading of twenty-two thousand feet on the cloud tops. If he ducked down and into the upper reaches of the cloud cover, with his ECM gear he just might be able to elude Soviet aircraft long enough to reach the Cape. What he would do then, he would figure out when he got there. One problem at a time for now. Very carefully, Teleman eased the nose down into a shallow glide that would help to stretch the fuel. He eased the engine speed back until he was flying at 450 knots and anxiously scanned the sky with the search radar. So far so good. As he dropped lower the half moon illuminated the soft bosoms of cloud with a pearlish light. In spite of the hundred-mile-an-hour winds that he knew must be raging lower down, the surface of the cover appeared untroubled. The A-17 dropped lower still and the softness began to give way to scudding rags of cloud that did not look so peaceful after all. At thirty thousand feet he caught the first faint whisper of the wind and marveled at the power of this storm that sent the thin molecules of air whispering along at even this altitude. It wasn't until he was down a thousand feet into the cloud cover that he felt he had eluded, at least for the time being, pursuit by Soviet fighter aircraft eager to finish him off. Now, if the cover would only last until North Cape. The winds within the clouds were not as bad as he had expected them to be. In spite of the jolting, the A-17 seemed to be taking the ill-use without immediate danger of coming apart. The tail section, according to his instrumentation, was pretty badly chewed. The skin covering was torn, but the thin titanium was holding together quite well. He still had no ,control over the rudder assembly, but was able to compensate with wing surfaces and landing flaps.
For the first time in half an hour he was able to sit back and begin to think carefully about what evasive action he might take if jumped again. He wished desperately that he could take the chance of snatching a few moments sleep before the ordeal of the ejection and landing took place. But he did not dare. After the volume of drugs he had absorbed, he knew that, in spite of everything the PGMS could do, he would not be able to wake quickly enough to deal with split-second emergencies.
The A-17 stumbled on through the wrack of shielding cloud toward the North Cape of Norway. Somewhere ahead, Soviet aircraft searched the Finnish and Norwegian skies with optical and electronic detection gear for any traces of Teleman. Soviet picket aircraft and ships joined ground stations monitoring the entire spread of communications bands Teleman would be likely to use in transmitting his information. In his office at the Lenin Air Base outside Leningrad, the Soviet commander of the search mission fumed at his helplessness. Somewhere in the Barents or Greenland sea a picket ship was waiting for the American aircraft. Submarine or surface ship, it would make no difference to the aircraft and ships he could put onto the task of finding the intruder aircraft at its rendezvous point. But the storm negated his best efforts. No surface ship could put successfully to sea until the seas moderated. Aircraft could not penetrate the storm beneath the cloud layer. Instead he was forced to string fighters out in a long line with no guarantee that the American would fly obligingly up the gauntlet. The American pilot had bested the Soviets once along the Afghan border. It was the sheerest luck that they had spotted the trailing fringe of his ECM net as he turned north over Poland. Luck like that could not happen twice, damn id