North Cape

"All right, Mr. Folsom," he said finally, "let's play it that way." The Robert F. Kennedy came to the rendezvous position hike an icy ghost. Every external fitting that faced the sea and wind was covered to a depth of three feet with gray, rock-hard ice. Long rills ran along the length of the weather deck, covering every shroud and stay and the lower reaches of the single antenna mast protruding from the superstructure. Only the upper, working portion of each antenna was clear due to its own independent electric heater. The RFK was streamlined like no other ship had ever needed to be. Instead of the block-like superstructure characteristic of modem destroyers and cruisers, the RFK's bridge was built in a V and sloped aft. Her fore and after decks were free of the usual cannon turrets and other protuberances and the weather deck ran smooth from bow to stem in a gentle line except for the superstructure. At the same time, the sides of the deck curved, from a center line formed by a ten-foot walkway, downward to meet the hull. But now the ship resembled nothing as much as a child's plastic toy boat covered with ice.

Larkin ordered the ship into a station-keeping pattern and re-.. duced speed to eight knots, only enough to maintain steerageway in the heavy seas. The RFK came about to fight the seas around a four-mile rectangle, with the legs into and running from the waves.

On the bridge, Folsom glanced warily at Larkin, standing before his console, his eyes glued to the radio operator's hunched back as he sat ears straining under the earphones to catch the slightest whisper of sound over the VHF-FM frequency. Folsom knew Larkin was extremely worried. Knowing the full story and the knife-edge schedules the reconnaissance aircraft had to keep to, he was worried as well. Minutes before they had received a transmission from the refueling tanker, maintaining his assigned rendezvous position two hundred miles to the west. Everything was waiting, the stage set for the final scene. But where was the leading actor? Larkin shifted his weight from one foot to another., Imperceptibly at first, the motion of the ship was becoming rougher as she turned into a crosswind run. Larkin noted it with a sharp glance at the gyroscopic-driven indicator and immediately turned back to face the radio operator. Teleman was less than four hundred miles from the North Cape when he decided that perhaps he had pushed his luck as far as it would go. His fuel readouts were showing barely enough left to reach rendezvous, but the single, remaining engine was certainly not acting like there was. Twice, within the space of two minutes, the engine had coughed like, an old man on a cold winter morning and then resumed its steady drone. Teleman had never experienced a fuel shortage in the A-17 and he was at a loss as to how to diagnose the malady.

He was still maintaining a steady twenty-two thousand feet deep in the top layers of the Arctic storm. So far he had not been spotted by the searching Russian aircraft, but the radar screen was showing them strung out like pickets in a fence. They were putting out quite a bit of effort to greet him, he thought, but it was one honor that he would be happy to do without.

Teleman ran a correction bug-hunter program through the computer directed at the fuel readouts. Nothing showed up and he tried to relax; telling himself that if anything had been wrong the computers would have spotted it. He had almost convinced himself when the engine shuddered again. This time the unevenness persisted, the engine's RPM's dropping quickly until he thought he was going into a flame-out condition. At twenty-one thousand RPM, they caught again and the compressor came back up to the proper rev level. If he was running low on fuel, he figured, it was probably due to the increased drag from the damaged tail section. He had been checking on it steadily for the past hour, watching larger and larger chunks peel lose. Added to the fuel problem, he was now worrying about how much longer the entire aft fuselage was going to hold together. Of all places he did not want to eject, he could think of few that ran second to the top of Norway in the middle of an Arctic storm. If he was lucky, a wandering Lap might find his body, perfectly preserved in its thick coat of ice, several years hence. Leaning back as comfortably in the acceleration couch as he could after six straight days he stared at the instrument panel and the various displays trying to decide how soon to raise RFK to transmit his information. He was so tired that the various displays and panels full of readout dials and verniers refused to focus into concrete entities. Instead they were all running together into a fuzzy, jumbled mass of softly glowing colors. He was so tired that he knew if he 'closed his eyes not even the last trumpet would be loud enough to wake him.