North Cape

Only then did Teleman cut back his speed to match that of the KB-58. The boom was out of the tanker and he maneuvered carefully, bringing the aircraft up and just off the boom. Teleman watched it waver in the nebulous slipstream and, judging the right moment, increased power slowly to slip the nozzle into the housing aft of the cockpit. The maneuver was all performed by Teleman. The KB-58 pilot merely brought his straining aircraft up to the one-hundred-thousand-foot altitude for which it had been specially modified with TF-3o fanjets and outboard ramjet wing-tip engines and held her steady. The juggling for position, too precise even for the most advanced computercontrolled instrumentation, was performed by Teleman, who depended upon the extended reach that the controlling drugs provided his body.

When he felt the sharp bang of the nozzle slamming home and saw the safety light go on, he signaled the KB-58 and high-pressure pumps forced the two-hundred-thousandpound cargo of liquid hydrogen into the — cryogenic tanks. Eight minutes later the refueling process was complete, and he broke away. Speed was of the essence during these midair refuelings, as both aircraft were_ totally helpless. Due to the advanced electronic detection and countermeasure equipment carried by Teleman, it was not likely that hostile aircraft would have the capability to track and ambush the two planes, but then in this operation nothing had been left to chance. Once, nearly twelve years before, it had been, and the one in a million gamble had occurred — with disastrous results. The United States Government was determined that it would not happen again. The KB-58, gleaming and sharply defined in the reddish light, dropped down and pulled ahead. Teleman answered the cocky, rocking wings and watched as the KB-58 pulled into a wide turn to the south that would take it back to its base at Thule. Then he settled into an orbiting pattern and keyed in the contents of the taped orders that Larkin had transmitted from the ship. For long minutes, Teleman sat silently, waiting for his next command and absorbing the message encoded on the tape while the aircraft described a vast orbit nearly fifty miles in diameter. When he finished, he sat for a few,moments thinking that his orders amounted to international blackmail on a grand scale.

From all outward appearances, the Soviet Union and the tTnited States had been moving toward a rapprochement ever since the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when both nations, and indeed the world, had teetered on the brink of the nuclear abyss. Teleman knew that, although the outward hostilities bad been submerged fairly well from public view, they bad not disappeared. Now it was a much more subtle thrust and counterthrust. The Cold War had become economic war; carefully conducted war in which both great nations vied for the largest slice of world trade and world influence. Espionage had increased to such an-extent that dose to — one-percent of the national budget of both countries went to support their numerious "spy" establishments. Overt hostilities were engi-. neered and "carried out through third and fourth parties as insurgency-counterinsurgency wars in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa testified. But lately the world had tired of playing patsy for these two giants.'

Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact had all but died in the past two years. The Southeast Asian nations had subtly declared that neither Western nor Eastern influences were welcome any longer, only trade. To reinforce their new demands, they had formed the Southeast Asian Common Market, in effect a revival of the old Southeast Asian Sphere of Greater Co-Prosperity dominated and led by, naturally enough, japan. What could not be achieved by war was finally won by the ancient oriental traits of patience and discipline. Since the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution had elevated Mao Tse-tung to the status of a semidivinity — a new Confucius — the flagging Chinese resolve had been stiffened by the infusion of a new spirituality into a people that had always existed in its soul. This newly revived and expansionist character, foiled by the SACM, had turned on the Soviet Union for the fuel of hatred to replenish the Communist Revolution. The Soviets had been challenged in fact as well as word for the leadership of the Communist world and for the "uncommitted nations." Fortunately enough for the world, the smaller developing nations had tired of the empty promises of Communism, found the exhortations and money of the United States to be quite unapplicable to their own problems, and discovered that on a planet where the farthest neighbor was no more than eight hours away by supersonic transport and milliseconds by communication satellites, that even nationalism no longer held the key. Suddenly the wave of nationalist sentiment of the 1960s was dead.