North Cape

Teleman was completing the final leg of the search pattern preparatory to shaping a course northeast for_ rendezvous. He was flying at eight thousand feet in the vicinity of Lach Rom on the Chu River. The aircraft was on automatic, following the irregular border by star-fix coordinates when Telemen caught a tiny flicker on the trailing edge of the surveillance radar screen. The blip showed at sixty thousand feet near Pezhevalsk, on the Soviet side of the border. As he watched, the blip was read out as an Ilyushin Falcon, closing the four-hundred-mile gap at Mach 2.5. For long seconds he continued to watch, wondering where the Soviet aircraft was going in such a hurry. The Falcon was the latest Soviet interceptor, capable of Mach 3.2 and carrying an armament consisting of four Mach 4.8 air-to-air missiles that could be armed with small nuclear warheads. The aircraft was only recently being distributed to the Soviet Tactical Air Command as a high-speed, high-altitude interceptor with a ceiling of a little less than 180,000 feet. Its major task was to act as defense against the new, high/low-level Mach 3 penetration bombers of the USAF Strategic Air Command. Teleman had spotted flights several times before over the Soviet Union, but always either on training jaunts or border patrols. None had heretofore been aware of his presence.