North Cape

"But it does. We have no way Of contacting the aircraft. The pilot must initiate all such contacts with us. Secondly, the radio transmitter that he uses is a VHF-FM set with a range of less than twenty miles, to reduce the chance that hostile ships or aircraft might pick up the transmission. If we aren't where we said we will be, then he is done. He can't contact us and we can't give him his next set of orders. And that set of orders has his next fueling coordinates. Everything possible has been done to lessen the chance of his being discovered by electronic snooping."

Folsom nodded. "So if we aren't there, he's as good as dead." He paused and massaged his weary eyes. They felt as if large boulders of jagged rock were slowly working their way up under the lids. He had been on duty, without sleep, „for nearly twenty-four hours, and his mental faculties were beginning to match the syrupy slowness of his body. "That is one job that I certainly do not want under any circumstances."

"How would you like the job of having to be in the right place at the right time, everytime," Larkin asked bleakly. "You've got it, Pete."

CHAPTER 8

The well-defined southern edge of the Turfan Depression cut a sable horizon line through the pale gold of the Gobi and the dust-laden sky. To his right, the blue expanse of Bagrach Kol gleamed in the late morning sunlight. The Bagrach Kol had the singular distinction of being the largest and one of two free bodies of water in all the Gobi, and it is salty beyond belief. The other was the almost dry and equally salt-laden Lop Nor Basin. For some minutes now the eastern reaches of the Tien Shan had been in view, and from fifteen thousand feet Teleman could easily make out the dark smudge farther down on the southern horizon that was the Kun Lun range.

He flew steadily due south, leaving the alkaline lake and the pebble desert of the Depression behind. When the Tien Shan were well past his starboard wing, Teleman began the long turn east that would take him down the valleys between the two ranges to cross the Soviet border well south, or so he hoped, of the visual tracking net the Soviets had so hastily thrown up.

Beneath, the land began to rise as the flanks of either mountain chain spread out to form a comfortable supporting base. The ground flowing beneath resembled nothing as much as a flat plate, broken here and there with upthrust rock formations, the edges folding up on themselves and sprinkled with a black pepper of stunted scrub bushes reminiscent of mesquite. As always, he was amazed that deserts look so much alike. Looking at the scene sliding past, he would not have been able to distinguish between the Gobi and stretches of Nevada and New Mexico desert.

The Lop Nor was beginning to appear off his starboard wing as he looped back up from the far end of the turn. This last was a maneuver designed to shake any possible last vestiges of Soviet observation. He hoped that the long swing south would be interpreted as an attempt to fly out over the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean beyond. It was too bad he could not, he thought regretfully. It would certainly be one hell of a lot easier than the long way around that was still to come: As Teleman drew abreast of the second salt lake, the Tarim River, flowing down out of the peaks of Karakorum in. the western Himalayas to Lop Nor, appeared, a thin crooked line of a river swollen now with the first evidence of the spring thaw. As he crossed the Lop Nor he passed into Chinese Eastern Turkestan.

The countryside below appeared considerably colder between the ranges. The snow line reached almost to the floor of the new desert that was beginning to appear ahead, the Taklamakan. Pobeda Peak, rising in an almost sheer vertical from the banks of the Tarim on its southern face, reared up, higher by nearly ten thousand feet than the fourteen thousand feet at which he Was now flying. It occurred to him that this was the first time he had ever flown below a land feature and for some reason it made him uneasy. Possibly, Teleman considered, it was brought on because it put both himself and the A17 into perspective — a perspective that he lost at the two hundred thousand feet that lent him a minor godhead in which he was unconcerned with human fumblings toward power and gain, and made him content with observation and obscured the need for involvement. For long minutes he flew past the shining expanse of the 24,400-foot peak, gleaming along its crest as the sun inched light over its ridges.