North Cape

In Hamburg, less than three hundred miles west, it would be colder than the gates of hell a thousand years before the fires were lit, he thought. It always seemed that the bottom had fallen out of the thermometer when one of these Arctic storms came sweeping out of the Baltic into Germany. He recalled with fondness the two years he had spent with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Europe. He had toured Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and Belgium to Rumania — all but Scandinavia, with the exception of Denmark. He had never crossed the Kattegat. For some reason he had kept putting off Norway and Sweden and Finland, meaning to cross the channel, but never quite making it. He shrugged in a half stretch to ease cramping muscles and shook. himself out of his reverie. One of these days he would go back, and Scandinavia would be first on his list. By now he could make out the southern coast of Sweden lying beyond Bornholm Island. The cloud cover was closing in quickly below and the northern end of the Baltic Sea had turned slate gray. Patches of cloud to the west were beginning to glow red in the waning twilight.

Teleman was heading directly north across the Baltic toward the Gulf of Bothnia. He would fly up the length of the gulf, then over the curve of the Scandinavian Peninsula where Sweden joined Finland. By following the twenty-fifth meridian due north, in less than two hours he would enter Norwegian airspace north of Finland. Then, twenty minutes flying time later, he would rendezvous with the Robert F. Kennedy off the North Cape, completing a twelve-thousand-mile round trip, dump his information, and head home.

"And a damn good thing, too," Teleman said aloud to hear his own voice. Rendezvous was still some 2500 miles away and the gauge needles for his main tanks were already well into the empty zone. Shortly he would have to switch to the reserve tanks with their two-thousand-mile additional range. By that time, he figured on his knee pad, he should be somewhere in the vicinity of the Finnish coast. He was also going to come onto the rendezvous point nearly thirty minutes late. Teleman wondered how the ship was going to take that. He hoped to hell that they would have a refueler standing by. The flight plans be had been given hours ago called for him to swing west and rendezvous with the tanker over Iceland. At this rate he would be lucky to make the Cape. Directly below, he caught a fading glimpse of Gotland sliding through the clouds. The cloud cover was closing down fast and he wondered idly whether or not he would be able to see the lights of Stockholm as he passed over the city.

The run into and across the Soviet Union had not been disastrous after all. It appeared that he had lost his tail over Iran, since the last Falcon had dropped down at the end of its ten-minute run and none had come up to take its place.. Perhaps they were figuring that they had scared him badly enough when he fell off into Afghanistan and had decided to opt for the Indian Ocean. He sincerely hoped so: He had flown the tightrope between Tehran and the radar base at Gurgan, and then out over the Caspian Sea without being spotted. East of Baku he almost had heart failure when a blip showed up suddenly on his screen and the readout put it at 15o miles distant. It had turned out to be nothing more than a fragment of the same ice cloud he had used for cover, but even so it was several minutes before the adrenaline stopped playing hockey in his bloodstream. Teleman was sure that he had nearly blown out the PCMS unit.