North Cape

Gobi could be. In this particular area not even Mongolian herdsman could live. The river, here near its headwaters in the low hills that lay two hundred miles off his starboard wing, was still little more than a muddy stream, not yet purified and strengthened as it would be later on during its 2500-mile rush to the Arctic Ocean. South, the Gobi cut into the province of Sinkiang, cut a swatch of utter desolation for another five hundred miles before the land began the long climb back to the fertile steppes leading to the Tien Shan, whose eastern flank's began on the far side of the Turfan Depression. Teleman punched the tabs to key in the ground control maps of the Tien Shan. When the image centered, he stopped the flow and asked for the altitude overlay, then settled back to study the lofty summits. The Tien Shan was actually the northern extension of the Himalaya chain, reaching north and east for nearly fifteen hundred miles. Next to the Himalayas, the Tien Shan was the longest mountain chain on the Asian continent. The southern slopes on the west rose out of the Pamir Plateau and covered more than four hundred thousand square miles. It was a cinch that the Soviets would not be able to cover the entire range with visual tracking equipment. But he still did not know the altitude range of that equipment. And the Soviets would be expecting him to try and break through somewhere. They must know, or at least suspect, that he had to recross Soviet territory. And he did, he thought ruefully. Normally he would fly out of the fix by crossing China and refueling over either the Bay of Bengal or the China Sea. But not this time. They must have been watching the progress of the blind spots on the radar screens as he crossed Soviet territory, making educated guesses with their computers until they hit upon a familiarity with his flight schedules. He had no support waiting anywhere except in the Barents Sea. The mission was too complex and the secrecy too great to try and stretch it to alternate points. Each flight was carefully made up and very little margin of error allowed. He had no alternate landing bases outside the continental United States. No landings in foreign territory could be allowed. If he had to abort a mission, he was to head for the nearest ocean and bail out.

So this mission, it was back to the Barents Sea or not at all. Teleman decided that the risk of crossing Soviet territory with the information he had so far collected justified the attempt

As he continued to study the map of the Tien Shan, a plan began to take shape. The range averaged 25o miles wide and the peaks ranged up,to 23,620 feet in the Tengri Khan, in the center, to 17,946 in the Bogodo Ula in the east. A good chunk of the range was glaciated or thickly forested. For the most part, the average elevation ran close to twenty thousand feet, and, located as it was on the edge of both the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas, the interior slopes on the southern face would be sparsely inhabited. Teleman leaned forward and began setting up a flight plan that would carry him directly south of his present position to the vicinity of the Turfan Depression. There he would drop to fifteen thousand feet and wriggle in between the northern flanks of the Altyn Tagh Mountains in the Kun Lun range on the northern reaches of the Himalayas and the Tien Shan. At fifteen thousand feet he would be able carefully to pick his way through the valleys and canyons of the Tien Shan and come out far south of the war zone, thus crossing the border at 49° latitude into Kirghiz SSR. By staying down on the deck through the mountains, it would be impossible for the Soviets to track his progress. Teleman hoped only that by now, six hundred miles into Sinkiang, he was well off their scopes. Seconds later, after checking fuel levels, the computer agreed with the revised flight plan. It would be cutting it fine, he decided, but it could be done without having to touch the fuel reserves. And, as a bonus, it would put him less than ten minutes off the rendezvous schedule he had set up with Larkin.

Thoughtfully, Major Joseph Teleman turned to the never-beforeused direct line communication channel to his headquarters, nestled deep in the soft Virginia hills, and began composing the message that would shake one of the most vital, least known, and smallest portions of the United States military establishment.

CHAPTER 7