North Cape

All of this passed through Teleman's exhausted mind in a very abstracted form. Yet he was well aware of every detail, every ramification. For two years his life had depended on his ECM gear. The optical tracking system was obviously the mainstay of Soviet hopes against an invasion force of supersonic and hypersonic aircraft. Teleman knew enough about the system to enable the American intelligence and scientific communities to analyze and develop optical countermeasures. The race would be evened up again. The Soviets wanted him badly, but would kill him if there was no other way to shut him up — all of this coincidentally with their war on the Sino-Soviet border. Teleman rubbed his ears vigorously with both gloved hands, cap tucked under one arm, and sighed. It was going to be rough on his ears, but there was no hope for it. He had to be able to hear aircraft coming enough in advance to duck under the closest tree.. If he did not and was spotted, he could expect the aircraft to make *an immediate pass over the area with rockets, napalm, bombs, cannon, or whatever devilish weaponry it carried, and that would be the end. He shifted the pack to a more comfortable position and started slogging forward once more.

Even though the wind had died, the going was not that much easier. The forest thickened quickly with dense stands of frozen pine. The ground, in spite of the intense cold, had become soggy underfoot, almost on the verge of muskeg, and after nearly an hour more of walking he had covered little more than a mile. Teleman had never seen such forest this far north of the Arctic Circle. He decided that it must be due to the lastgasp effects of the Gulf Stream. Current as it finally dissipated off the North Cape. He recalled that in Alaska, in the foothills of the Brooks Range nearly two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, there were similar fir forests. Then, strangely enough, the pines thinned rapidly, almost in a matter of yards, it seemed. The forest gave way to scattered brush and glacial boulders. Even though the ground was rough, full of snow-covered and treacherous rills, Teleman found it easier walking than the thick forest. But on the verge of exhaustion as he was, it hardly made a difference. Even so, he hesitated on the edge of the last stand of trees. He could see almost a hundred yards ahead now through the driving snow. The compass still showed him to be on course, but the open ground ahead would provide no cover from searching Soviet aircraft. Against that expanse of ice-cold white, on an IR screen he would stand out like a neon sign in a desert. Nor could he hope to burrow far enough into the snow to escape detection.

Finally, after several minutes of almost incoherent self-debate, which to his surprise he found he was conducting aloud with himself, in a weary fit of exasperation, he shook his head and started forward. To hell with it, he thought. If they were going to find him, they were going to find him and that was that. If he did not make the coast shortly he was going to die anyway. Almost imperceptibly at first the ground beneath his feet began to climb. The snow, slowly turning to sleet that drummed down onto him, plastering his hair against his head, which he had forgotten to re-cover with his hood, obscured his vision—

vision that now was almost useless as his brain refused to sort and display images properly. The half snow, half sleet was melting and beginning to trickle down his ebony face and seep beneath his collar.

Teleman stumbled in one of the rills; he had stepped onto what appeared to be a solid surface. His foot had gone through the thin crust of. ice and his leg jarred down stiffly, pitching him forward. For minutes he lay half stunned until some inner instinct lifted him up and sent him stumbling forward again. It was several minutes later that he realized he had fallen.

After that his head seemed to clear a little. Teleman felt the wetness of his scalp and raised the hood. Ahead he could see a fairly large stand of bush, which appeared similar to cottonwoods, Almost without thinking he veered, and a moment later threw himself down beneath the outspread branches and rolled in as close to the base of the bush as he could.