Authors: Joe Poyer
Teleman's voice came again, weaker and weaker as he talked: "I'll come in low . . . over coast . . . eject . . . plane . . . destroy."
Larkin, standing on the warmly lit bridge of the RFK, could picture the lonely man in the cockpit of his damaged aircraft. He would be going slowly through the motions of setting the timer on
the self-destruct charge. As soon as he ejected, it would begin to count off three. minutes. If Teleman did not eject within five minutes of setting the timer, it would go off anyway, with enough force to blow tiny pieces of. the aircraft over a five-mile area. Larkin figured quickly on a scratch pad, glancing from the Doppler distance readout to the radar operator, shaking his head.
"Target One, here. We are getting a position fix on you and will track you down. I'll bring the ship in and pick you up as soon as the storm subsides enough to get a helicopter or boat in."
Even as Larkin spoke the radio operator handed him a decoded note, which he read through and then handed to Folsom to read.
"The hell . . . you will.. Teleman muttered. "Get . . . those tapes back."
"Sorry, I've just been directed to pick you up. Obviously they are going to' want to hear about the bandits and fast. All overflights have been suspended until they can talk to you.
"
Teleman was now down to ten thousand feet. He glanced at the ground control panel to see the storm-thrashed tundra and forest sliding by below. He laughed bitterly. "If . . . I get . . . out... this . . . be . . . miracle. Good-bye." There was a sudden silence as Teleman's 'voice disappeared. Only the hollow hissing of static marked the open channeL Feeling strangely empty, Larkin strode to the radar console and, resting a hand to support himself against the violent motion of the ship on the back of the operator's chair, watched the screen intently. Coordinates were fed directly into the radar equipment from the communications room, but the operator, listening to The flow of words and numbers, made minute final changes in frequency, pitch, and direction.
Abruptly, he swore and sat back. "Hell, that does it. We've hit a dead area . . . it must be almost two hundred miles wide."
"Easy now," Larkin said. He leaned over to point to the white patch of light obscuring a large part of the screen. "Narrow your scope down to encompass this patch. That's the ECM equipment he carries. He will show up in a moment." The operator could not resist a muffled expletive. Ten minutes passed slowly while the white blur continued to fill the radar screen. Finally the radar operator muttered, "What the devil kind of equipment does he carry for God's sake . . . sir," he added.
'Better that you do not know any more right now," Larkin chided gently. "Just keep your eye on that . . ."
As ha spoke, the obscuring patch of light disappeared, and there, toward the center of: the screen, was an intense white dot, flickering in and out of scale with a steady pulsation. It appeared to be nearly two hundred miles southwest of them, which would put it somewhere close to the coast of the North Cape. At least Larkin hoped it would. It would be all too easy in this miserable storm to miss the coast and drop into the ocean. The ejection cap-sule was designed to stay afloat in water, but he doubted very much that it could withstand for long a storm as intense as this.
"Cet a damned accurate fix on that blip," he snapped. Then Larkin swung around to the plotting table. "Mr. Folsom, set a course for the coast and make as much speed as you can."
Moments later the great ship came around in a short, half circle that leaned her far to port like a sloop in a high wind. Tons of water flew from under (her heel and piled up behind in a tattered rooster's tail as the nuclear engines jumped to flank speed and she straightened out abruptly and settled into the waves. She resembled nothing as much as a motor torpedo boat, rather than a 16,5oo-ton battle cruiser, as she fought her way south toward the Cape, ignoring the waves piling before her bow. Low in the water as she was from the immense tonnage of ice, Folsom managed to crank twenty-three knots from the engines while a worried engineering crew watched the instruments below. Finally, Barrows could stand it no longer. He reached over and flicked on his intercom, dialed the bridge, and demanded the executive officer. When Folsom answered, he wasted no time on preliminaries.
"Mr. Folsom, if we don't cut back, we won't have any auxiliary condensers left either. They can't take the load from flank speed much longer."
"Then make do," Folsom said grimly.
Barrows, unaware of the events on the bridge, stared at the intercom in disbelief. Then be shook his head. "In that case, Mr. Folsom," he said acidly, "I Suggest we shift to the boost engines for one quarter power output."
Without waiting for an answer from the bridge, he flicked off the intercom and swung around to his waiting crew and began snapping orders. Within four minutes the boost gas turbine engines were coupled to the main drive shafts and the last of the explosive starter cartridges were echoing in the narrow steel cavern of the engine room. Barrows watched as great gas turbines, now on line, whined up to peak RPM, then he began trimming them back until the ship was running steady under the combined thrust of five of the six power plants.
Teleman shut off the radio and sat staring at this last link with safety. Then he turned to the radar panel. From the activity it was showing, he had finally been spotted. At least three blips were closing fast, but not fast enough. They were still at least three hundred miles away and the eight minutes it would take them to get within cannon range would be more than enough for what he had to do now. Even if they carried visually guided airto-air rockets they would be useless in the depths of the storm clouds. He pulled the plastic-coated check list from the clip on the rim of his seat. Twelve items were listed, a matter of a few seconds. He pressed the destruct button and closed the spring-loaded clip over it to hold it firmly down. Once the ejection sequence began, the spring clip would be released, and three minutes later one hundred pounds of strategically placed deta-sheet explosive would shred the aircraft beyond reassembly. Then he removed his soft, cloth flight helmet and slipped on the hard plastic headgear and plugged the oxygen lines into the ejection module supply. When the list was finished, Teleman hunched forward and studied the ground control map. He was still a little more than hundred miles from the North Cape and the ground unrolling below was all tundra. He did not, under any circumstances, want to go down in that. In his condition even a few minutes without shelter on the open, windswept tundra would be enough to kill him.. According to the computer display describing the North Cape area, he could expect to cross a band of highlands that would end the tundra, about ten miles from the coast. On the far slopes, leading down to the cliff-barred coastline facing the Barents Sea, an open forest of fir should furnish the shelter he would need. -Teleman began to take the wounded A-17 down deeper into the storm. According to the RFK he should break out of the cloud cover, after he ejected, around two thousand feet. He did not particularly like the idea of having to bail out blind, but it was certainly preferable to hanging around until the Russians showed up. He hoped that his heading for the deck was causing the Soviet pilots as much consternation as it was him. But, then, they would have orders to get him at any cost. As long as he kept the ECM going, they would not be able to get a fix on him. If he could get down to about three thousand feet before he had to eject, then he would be low enough for the ejection capsule to be shielded against the ground.
The minutes passed slowly while the A-17 wobbled on. The , engine was cutting in and out steadily now and Teleman knew it must be draining the tanks right down to the last dregs. The North Cape was now clearly outlined by the IR panel as a white ragged line against the dark gray of the warmer water off the coast. The ground control map, with its simulation of the terrain below, was too gross to show any helpful details. The IR was all he had to go on. The ejection was going to be mighty tricky, he thought. He would have to time it so that he would land well back of the cliffs rather than in the water, yet not far enough back so that he could not walk to the beach to meet the boat. With these high winds now almost off the Beaufort scale, Larkin was quite optimistic if he expected to get a helicopter in to pick him up. It would take days before the winds abated enough for the helicopter to make it off the deck, let alone land over the strong updrafts that would be blowing off the cliffs.
He watched closely as the aircraft passed slowly over the cliffs, its speed now below 250
knots. Neither the visual nor the IR scopes told him much at all. The temperature was too low, too bone-chilling, for much warm detail to show among the granite surfaces of the coast. From the IR display there appeared to be no beach at all, but whether this was from the action of high waves he could not tell. If there was no beach he was going to have a devil of a time getting off those cliffs. They would not be able to get a boat in and he knew damned well that he could never survive three days. With these happy alternatives facing him, Teleman brought the A-17 around in a long turn that would bring him in a circle back over the cliffs. As he began his second pass over the coast he dropped the A-17 still lower until he was only fifteen hundred feet above the cliffs. Visually, he was totally blind. His instruments told him only that there was a solid surface below. Whether it was thickly forested or a mass of jumbled boulders he had no way of telling, but time was running out too fast to worry about that. Teleman wiggled his feet into the stirrups and shoved the control column into its locked position. His last act as pilot of the aircraft he had flown for the past three years was to arm the bomb that would destroy it completely.
As he-did, so, the computers took over total control of the aircraft. He saw the red, flashing DESTRUCT light come on just as the metal shields slid down between him and the instrument panel. The two halves of the flattened hemisphere joined together with a solid thunk and the blowers switched on with a high-pitched whine. Teleman settled himself securely into the acceleration couch as it adjusted to a semireclining position. He took a secure grip on the handholds and drew a deep breath, just as the bottom of the A17 exploded away and the ejection capsule was jettisoned downward. As he fell he could see the distorted bottom of the fuselage pass over him. The capsule began to tumble end over end in the high winds, but not before he saw the lightened plane, huge and sleek in the dead light, bound up, corkscrew, and then recover as the autopilot caught hold of the control surfaces.
Teleman did not see the aircraft bore on into the Barents Sea, where five miles off the coast it erupted into a burst of white flame and plummeted into the icy seas. Pieces of wreckage were blown in every direction, much of it burning fiercely as it hissed into the waves.
The ejection capsule smashed upward, jerking Teleman cruelly against the restraining belts. Through the observation slit Teleman could see the orange and white parachute pop open wide. The ejection capsule bounced several more times, then settled down to a steady swaying. Inside, Teleman was powerless to control the descent or landing area, in fact helpless to do little more than lie there while the capsule was swung and jostled at the mercy of the winds. From fifteen hundred feet it should not have taken more than two minutes to make the descent. Instead it took eight—eight minutes of endless swinging, and Teleman 'had no idea in which direction.
When the capsule did land it hit with such force that it ruptured the inflated air pods beneath. The wind caught at the parachute and began to drag the capsule. The automatic chute release did not go off as it should have. As he grabbed for the manual release Teleman had a confused impression of trees and rocks roiling past the observation slit. Teleman yanked several times on the manual release before it finally gave and the capsule rolled free and came to a rest with a grinding sound that presaged the blast of wet snow and air that barreled in.
Teleman tore the straps loose and wiggled around in the seat to peer at a foot-long gash in the metal beneath his feet. The capsule had stopped against some obstruction, so that it was canted over at a steep angle. The close confines of the interior gave him little room to move about, but he managed to reach the emergency pack strapped beneath the seat and haul out the sleeping bag, cursing fluently under his breath. He got the sleeping bag jammed into the hole and at once the shrieking sound of the wind died away to a thin whistle. Teleman struggled back into the couch, breathing hard. The amp meter showed a full charge in the batteries that should be good for several hours of steady heat output, providing he ran nothing else at the same time. The interior temperature was already down to twenty-two degrees above freezing, and unless he wanted to freeze to death while he slept he had to bring it back up. Forcing his fuzzy mind to work, he did a rough calculation on how long it would take the RFK to reach the coast. As near as he could tell, he could not be farther than five miles from the cliffs, probably three hours hiking in this miserable storm. He felt the best the RFK could make in the seas that he had glimpsed briefly from the air was about twenty knots, this close to the Cape. At two-hundred-odd miles that would be at least ten to eleven hours. Teleman knew that he had to get some sleep, no matter what happened. His heart was thudding painfully again and his eyes refused to focus. Hell, he thought, he would make it six hours of sleep. They would wait for him.
Painfully, he brought his arm up and fumbled with the alarm on his wristwatch, setting it for six hours. The last thing he remembered was trying to peer out of the narrow slit to see what the terrain was like. The roar of the wind in the trees and the delicate shuddering of the capsule knocked him out as effectively as a blackjack.
The storm crested a few hours after Larkin turned the ship to run before the heavy seas crashing down on the battered, ice-shrouded shape with winds of gale force as it ran toward the coast at twenty-three knots. Teleman's call had come just after she had reached the rendezvous point. As soon as Teleman had bailed out, the radar operator had done his best to track the ejection capsule as it plummeted into the thick forest edging the coastal cliffs. They now had the pilot's location pinpointed to within a mile and were running for the location as fast as they dared in the heavy seas. Larkin motioned Folsom over to his console and handed him a flimsy that had just come in.