North Cape

Ten minutes to contact. All detection systems were silent. The low light-level television cameras were showing him apparent one-mile altitude shots along his flight path for ten miles on a side. He could make out no sign of life, no roads or tracks or signs of" human habitation. A few minutes before, he had left the desert and scrublands behind as the terrain climbed to eight thousand feet and became grasslands, depending for their meager water supply on the swift rivers flowing down out of the Tien Shan and its foothills. The winter was fierce, but the scouring winds had kept the sloping hillsides relatively free of snow below seven thousand feet. The plateau would rise another two to three thousand feet before cresting and beginning to flow downward toward the Kazakh border seventy miles west.

Fifty miles due east of his present position lay the Chinese city of Urmachi, probably the staging point for Chinese troops fighting in the hinterlands below. Off to the southeast glinted the frozen surface of the Kara Nor that would mark a rough position from which he would make a sharp turn to the northwest and fly up to the first checkpoint to pick up the star-fix coordinates for the border sweep.

As he made the turn the night-light TV cameras blanked for a moment, shifting resolution and iris assemblies as the sun began to brighten the snow-splotched landscape. He could still discern no sign of troop movements, or of life, period. But he knew he would, soon enough.

Now he was less than ten miles inside the Kazakh border, roughly paralleling the line the Soviets were reported 'to be holding. A swollen river rushing out of the hills, snow covered now, but green in the spring and early summer, slipped tantalizingly past on the ground surveillance screen. The countryside was deserted because of the winter and the war, but in more peaceful and warmer times, Mongolian and Tartar sheepherders shared the valleys, fresh steppe grass, and frequent small rivers from the mountains. In normal times they drove their flocks into the region for the long summer pasturage, peacefully net interfering with one another. Now, he knew, the valleys below were full of) radar sites, long-range missile and artillery positions, and troop concentrations of both sides. A range of pockmarked hills marched across the land that was beginning to fall away into a long valley stretching westward to the border. Abruptly the scene swam as the aircraft navigational sensors locked onto the proper stars and altered the course of the fleeting shadow until it was solidly on the wire. For the next hour the A-17 tacked back and forth across the irregular border, defined only by the series of star-fix coordinates held in magnetic tape., Teleman had completed the first pass at one hundred thousand. feet over the border city of Tahcheng and negotiated the turn-around point some sixty miles north. In manual control again, he was very carefully edging the aircraft down to forty thousand feet, the lowest he had ever flown over enemy territory. He knew that he could be sighted visually by either side and hoped that the lack of radar fixes would be, thought due to opposition countermeasures. Just in case, he warmed up the decoy rigs and slapped them onto standby. If radar beams came questing after him, their distinctive pulse patterns could be analyzed. The ECM would then broadcast high-frequency radio signals up and down several bandwidths. This would have the effect of presenting to the radar operator a broken, rapidly flickering signal that hopefully would be blamed on freak atmospheric conditions.