North Cape

Teleman smiled grimly. At last. He had been searching this entire mission for this patch of infrared as had his sister aircraft the week before. Word had been passed from the Defense Intelligence Agency of the sudden move of a very vital part of the new Soviet missile warhead countermeasures research operation. The testing location had been shifted for some unknown reason; perhaps it had something to do with the latest KGB announcement of a blown Western spy ring. Whether genuine or not, there was no way of knowing, but the fact remained that a large research installation had been moved, almost overnight it seemed. Thoughtfully, he programed the coordinates for his next sweep. Maybe the pieces of this little puzzle would finally begin to fall into place. But, for the remainder of this flight, it would be a milk run until he orbited the ship still a thousand miles north. Beneath his aircraft he could see the cloud-and snow-covered landscape of northern Russia turning black with its covering of pine. The forest, the taiga of Asian fame, stretched north for four hundred miles without a break — a last holdout of commercial enterprise in the — Soviet Union, the home of hundreds of fur trappers and family lumbering concerns, and the deathtrap into which whole divisions of the Moscow Army of the Nazi Vermacht had been lured to their destruction in the winters of 3.94z and '43.

Ahead, the terrain of Soviet Russia, slipping by the needle nose of the AR-17, was being covered by a heavy cloud layer. The cover thickened rapidly during the next ten minutes until a solid overcast was spread from horizon to horizon. Teleman reached forward and warmed up the infrared detectors and switched on the radar. The wide-scan radar beam knifed through the clouds to lay the pattern of the land below. Infrared came on-line moments later, laying a composite picture of heat patterns as it hunted through the lower frequencies to build a black and white image on the screen. The white, washed-out picture was quickly highlighted here and there with sharp black dots and patches as the warmer formations jumped out of the blizzard-and storm-covered ground below.

After a further ten minutes, an insistent code pattern containing airspeed and direction corrections appeared on the digital readout screen. Teleman altered course once more to suit the final rendezvous location. As the aircraft settled onto the new course, the cede pattern for rendezvous changed to that for the battle cruiser, his contact point for this portion of the mission. Still fifteen minutes short, he nevertheless began the check-out procedure on the transmission batteries.

CHAPTER 2

Forty degrees of frost. Eight degrees below zero F at sea level. The nuclear-powered Robert F. Kennedy came around sharply, bows swinging into the crushing fury of a Force 11 wind, twin screws churning furiously as she clawed her way-up a towering wave rising nearly twenty feet above her superstructure, then rocketed down into the pounding waters of the trough. The bows smashed deep into green Arctic waters. Tons of water sprayed over her decks, mast-high, turning instantly to ice that rattled-against the bridge like cannon shot. What liquid, not frozen instantly in the frigid air, clung to the bridge, the shrouds, any exposed part of the ship, added yet another microlayer of ice o the tons already weighting her down. Again and again the ship smashed into the waves, each time rising half submerged from an encounter that would have sent lesser vessels to the bottom with all the careless thought of a glacier crushing a hillock beneath its advance.

Fifty-to seventy-foot waves, whipped to a froth by the Arctic gale, marched down from the Great Barrier across two hundred _ miles of open sea. What was possibly the worst Arctic storm fir more than thirty years hunted through the desert wastes of the Arctic in a cyclonic storm of unbelievable proportions.