North Cape

For the next forty minutes he followed the Tarim southwest across the Taklamakan until it struggled up through a wicked series of foothills into the Karakormn. Froni here, relatively safe and comfortable in the heated/air-conditioned cabin of the silent aircraft, gazing at the twisted rills and cols of the mountains, he could feel the excitement that he knew men like Sir Edmund Hillary and Barry Bishop must have experienced when they stood at the foot of a peak such as Kanchenjunga, or Godwin Austen, or Mount Everest, preparatory to beginning the ascent to the "roof of the world," a term the Sherpas had given the Himalayas, stretching a thousand miles from the Hindu Kush in the west to the Nan Shan in the east. But at the same time, he could only shake his head and wonder why a man would risk his life in the loneliest arena of the world to climb peaks that had been shrouded in snow and wind since man was little more than a gene spark in some species of reptile.

The Tarim had been left behind now and the Pamir Plateau, thirteen to fifteen thousand feet high, was beginning. Teleman lifted the airplane accordingly, another thousand feet. The two Tibetan cities of Yarkand and Kashgar would be slipping past in a few minutes and he ran a check on all of his antidetection gear. He would pass between the two cities, in reality little more than villages, but villages with large Chinese garrisons. He would be out of sight of both towns, Yarkand to the south and Kashgar well to the north. The only tricky spot would be the narrow dirt highway that ran between the two, and he was counting on the heavy snowfall of the previous night to make it impassable; he would be out of Chinese territory before fighters could be scrambled to intercept, even if they could break through his radar fouling.

As he drew abreast of the city of Kashgar, out of sight to the north, he cleared a ridge and the vista of the Pamir Plateau opened up before him. Ahead, less than five minutes flying time, was the Tadzhik SSR border. The radar net was indicating no hostile aircraft anywhere within the 1600-mile diameter of its extent, but Teleman was not banking on that. Although the Tien Shan range, rising yet another nine thousand feet above his flight level, formed a perfect barrier to questing radio impulses, the entire Soviet and Chinese air forces combined could have hidden behind the wall of rock and he would never know it. It was times like these, he thought resignedly, that made him regret the excessive caution that would not allow him to interrogate the satellite system at will for fear of detection. Especially now, when the Soviets appeared to know about the project anyway. Because of the surrounding mountains, his radar could show him only dependable information on a very narrow cone leading directly up the valley to the border. In very short order, he knew, he would find out just how smart he had been. Teleman 'came out of the-sheltering arms of the two mountain chains fighting for altitude. At 150,000 feet he leveled off and took a good look around. He had narrowed his counterdetection radar to a circle two miles in diameter — no sense in. advertising his presence. Teleman took a look at the weather gear and found the friendly ice cloud bank still stretched above him. Below, the plains of Turkestan were beginning to open up and he could just make out the hairline of the mighty Amu Dar Ya that tumbled and roared from the Hindu Kush to the Aral Sea a thousand miles northwest. The area over which he had just passed had been the fabled lands of the Kyber Pass and British soldiery of Kipling's tales. But for Teleman there would be no glorious charge of British lancers to rescue him at the last possible moment. All he had was himself and the A-17 to depend on.

A sudden flurry of the computer tapes and there on the screen, closing in from the north, was a Falcon. This time the Soviet pilot had been caught napping. Teleman was ahead of rather than behind him. It was going to be a stern chase, he thought without humor as he flicked the series of switches that fired the ramjets and scrambled to 200,000 feet. The intruder dropped behind momentarily, then increased power and began to close up. As the A-17's speed increased, the PCMS reacted accordingly, infusing Teleman with a calculated mix of hallucinogenic and barbiturate drugs. Within seconds Teleman was no longer thinking of the aircraft as a collection of metal and plastic components, but as an extension of himself. Actually, he did not feel on a conscious level that he had become the aircraft; it simply did not occur to him that there was any distinction. He was a part of the aircraft.