North Cape

He was holding an altitude of eighty thousand feet — a comfortable level for the A-17 that made the best use of its fuel capacity. It was now obvious to him that the Soviets had developed some type of sophisticated, visual tracking system that could not only pick him out at great altitudes and distances, but hold him at supersonic speeds as a Falcon closed. A visual tracking system would require a second man in the aircraft; this probably explained the limited stay-time. The increased payload taken up by the observer and the visual tracking equipment would cut well into the cruising range of the Falcon. Although it was designed for long supersonic flight, it could sustain its Mach 4.8 speed only for short durations, for the approach and attack. During the cruise to and from the target, the speed would be well down into the more conventional ranges. But the problem confronting Teleman now was: At what range could they track him? Did they have to have flying patrols in the air, or did they have ground observing stations with much more sensitive equipment than an aircraft could possibly carry?

The Soviets could have had plenty of opportunity to observe him while he was orbiting the fire fight involving the trucks, as well as during his pass across the valley where the shell had impacted.

That in turn led him to the next series of questions. Did they know about the A-17?

Obviously they did. A visual tracking system sophisticated enough to pick up what amounted to a flyspeck moving at speeds up to Mach 4.5 over even several hundred miles distance would require a substantial outlay of both men and money. And to have set-up in the vicinity of the Soviet-Chinese war zone, they would have had to know that the conflict would bring him on the run. There was nothing the Chinese could put into the sky that would require a visual tracking system. Teleman shook his head. It was all such a preposterous chain of events, but then so was the U-2 flight that was shot down over Russia in late 1959, by a missile whose existence was not even suspected by Western intelligence. And so vicious was the pace of missile development that in 1965, up-rated, second-generation versions of those same missiles were provided to the North Vietnamese for use against U.S. fighter-bombers as obsolete Soviet weaponry. The Soviets could very well have rushed the development of a visual tracking system in much the same way that they and the United States always had when a clear requirement arose. A-17 flights had been going on over Soviet territory for more than a year now, and the increasing appearance of dead spots in radar warning and detection systems would be enough to indicate that something or someone was intruding over Soviet territory with alarming frequency. Even if they had not been particularly worried about intelligence-gathering missions, they would be seared to death that the same ECM systems could be placed in manned bombers or even intercontinental missiles. So the knowledge that the Soviets were onto the A-17 overflights, and onto them with a visual tracking system, was suddenly more important than the information he had gathered from the war zone. The problem was how to get the information back to Washington.

By now he was six hundred miles into the northern reaches of Sinkiang and less than ten minutes from the Mongolian border. Mongolia was still firmly in the Soviet camp, perhaps not firmly enough to have the new Falcons, but it was not worth the risk of finding out. Coming up dead ahead was the faint thread of the Irtysh River. The floor of the desert was as deserted as only the