North Cape

Teleman sat thinking while the encoder clicked out the receipt of the transmission from the ship. He too understood only too.well what Larkin's verbal instructions meant. And he was rather puzzled. This certainly did not sound like a routine patrol, the last of this watch before returning to base. Never before had he flown a mission pattern that in any way brought him in range of enemy rockets or aircraft. Heretofore all missions over hostile territory — which was anywhere in the world, including the United States — had been flown at altitudes above eighty thousand feet. He glanced out the slit beside his head and banked the aircraft a few degrees to see the storm below. Darkness was only an hour away, but the setting sun shed enough light on the cloud cover to highlight the intensity of the storm, even from twenty thousand feet. The storm, seen from above, resembled a devilish badlands: long, twisting canyons and arroyos of saw-edged cloud. The depths of the canyons were filled with hell's own blackness, contrasting sharply with the evil red of the peaks and ridges. The late afternoon sunlight filtered suddenly as he passed beneath a thick blanket of high-flying ice crystals. The sun dipped below the rim of the storm and immediately its light turned a somber gray, deathly solid in its low intensity. In spite of himself, Teleman shivered involuntarily.

"Looks… awfully rough… down there… you be able to hold… through that stuff?"

"I don't anticipate any real trouble," Larkin replied. "So far it's nothing we can't handle." Inwardly though, Larkin was worried. Although the RFK was new and built to more exacting specifications than any other ship m history, she had been damaged' a week previously. Steaming slowly out of Newport, Rhode Island, Naval Base she had collided with a destroyer in a freak accident. In the heavy fog the destroyer had come off second best, but her sharply raked bow had gashed a hole in the RFK's port bow, slashing through several structural. members. An emergency patch had been rigged at the almost deserted Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Naval Yards by a skeleton crew and the bow section shored up with temporary braces. This mission was too important to delay and there had been no other ship with the required equipment anywhere-within steaming range.

Now, the weather satellite information and photographs that had come in just prior to contact had shown the entire Arctic region as far east as Novaya Zemlya and west to Iceland in for the worst Arctic gale in years — worse in all appearances than the Great Storm of 1942. And now, the RFK, less than 170 miles from the Soviet coast and forty miles off Norway's North Cape, was also directly in the storm's track.

"We'll be here," he said: with considerably more confidence than he felt at the moment. The seas were increasing and the stabilizers were just about useless in the heavy waters. He noted that Folsom, bent over the console, had just ordered the RPM's on the engines stepped up to furnish stabilizing air around the hull.

"We are going to start quartering a fifty-mile circuit in fifteen minutes." Out of the corner of his eye he saw the white flicker of another wave break mast-high and come crashing down against the forward ports. "So we'll be here."

"Good…" The transmission garbled and quickly cleared. "Say again," Larkin requested.

"Good… take it… easy… down there… see you tomorrow."

"Right, clear." Larkin stubbed his cigarette out and got up from the console. He waved to the marine and ordered Folsom to stand down from security. He thought for a moment, leaning against the console, feeling again the crushing weight of responsibility come down over him just as it had the night the destroyer sheared through the bow, or that afternoon off the North Vietnamese coast. He took a deep breath and shook his head reluctantly, then beckoned Folsom to join him at the plotting table, and quickly explained that they would stay on station for another twenty-four hours. For the next ten minutes they discussed the advantages and disadvantages of various courses that would allow them to take the brunt of the storm in the easiest manner possible. Finally, they settled on a straight run to the northeast that would bring them abreast of the North Cape, some one hundred miles north by 1100 hours. Both were convinced that it would be better to ride directly into the teeth of the gale now, before it unleashed its better than one-hundred-mile-an-hour winds, as it was expected to do late tomorrow. They Would then be able to run before the storm, arriving back on station at 1700 hours. This allowed a onehour lead time for any unexpected delays or heavier seas than Folsom picked up the maps and spread them out on the chart amble. He drew a fine line in red between their present position and the expected turn-around point north of the Cape.