North Cape (27 page)

"I feel sure," he continued, "that even if they think some Americans have gotten ashore to find Teleman here—especially after Mac shot the hell out of them—they are not going to be scared off by the possibility of a pitched battle. In fact, I would even be willing to bet that they are figuring just as we are—that we don't dare get the Norwegians involved at this point. So, if anything, the Russians are going to move faster and harder.*

Folsom stopped to examine the three haggard faces peering at him in the dim light of the stove. Bone-breaking fatigue was on their faces, Teleman's especially. The hike under normal circumstances would have been nothing to these men, but the intense cold, Teleman's deteriorating condition, the wind, deep snow, and exceedingly dry cold all combined to sap strength at a magnified rate. His own legs and feet were screaming with returning circulation and fatigue. It was only with the greatest difficulty that he was able to still his shaking hands,

Earlier in the afternoon a thought had occurred to him, a possibility that should have been amply clear to him earlier. He was extremely angry with himself for not having thought of it before. The only excuse he could make was the cold, the cold that sapped every last bit of strength, that required the utmost concentration just to place one foot in front of the other, the cold that required of you that no outside considerations interfere with this concentration because, if they did, you would find yourself slowly freezing to death, prone in the snow, without any awareness of having stopped moving minutes before. He was apprehensive about releas-ing this bombshell. Not only was endurance at the bottommost point for the three men facing him, but so was morale. It would not take much at this point for them to give up and climb into their sleeping bags. If this happened the Russians would certainly find them in a few hours at the most.

"Whether or not the Soviets will travel all night," he said slowly, choosing his words carefully at first . . . then Folsom realized that he need not he careful, that these were not men to give up so easily after having come so far. If that had been the case they would have done so hours before. . . . He began again. "I did not think of this until a few hours ago, but the submarine . . . there will be no need for it to stay in the Porsangerfjord. In fact, it will probably put out to sea to keep pace with the search party." The other three continued to watch him, flickers of apprehension growing in their faces.

"When the search party finds that we left without waiting for them, they will probably inform the submarine, which will then break all speed records moving down the coast to drop off another party, well ahead of us. It will be quite plain to them where we are heading. They can read a map as well as we, and they will know that we sure as hell are not going to head inland to Kistrand. If they do drop another party, then they've got us in a vise."

The other three reacted with varying degrees of anger or disgust, mostly directed at themselves for not having seen this possibility before. Teleman was awake now, the pain and fatigue of his screaming muscles forgotten for the moment.

"Okay, what do we do then?" Gadsen asked.

Folsom rubbed both hands across his face, massaging his weary eyes and wishing to God he had never left the Pentagon. "Well, first

we all need sleep. So we take four hours out. That means we stop six hours and everyone but Teleman will stand a two-hour watch. Teleman is out, he needs all the sleep he can get."

He ignored Teleman's angry but feeble protest and continued. "Two hours each on watch will give us four hours of sleep. I'll take the first watch, Mac, you take the second and Julie the last." They nodded in agreement.

"What about tomorrow?" McPherson asked. "If we stop tonight, the Russians are going to be breathing down our necks."

"I agree," Folsom replied. "But I don't see what else we can do, We all need rest too badly to move on any farther tonight. I don't think it will do us any good to turn inland and try and approach the Norwegian base from the south. They will probably be watching for just such a move. I would guess the submarine will drop the second party as close to the base as they dare and work them back toward the first group. So about the only option left us is to make tracks for the base as fast as possible and hope to God that somehow we will miss the second party."

"How about letting the RFK know?"

"No good. If we use the radio they'll pick us up and pinpoint our location right down to the last meter. I can't conceive of them not keeping a watch on the possible frequencies that we might use. All we can do is wait until they find us before calling for help.. The captain should be able to figure some way to give us covering fire . . . if not, then he can contact the Norwegians for help."

The four sat in silence for several minutes before Gadsen commented, "I sure as hell wouldn't give a plug nickel for our chances."

"Don't quit yet," Folsom warned. "We still have a couple of things in our favor. Number one, they have to move a lot more carefully than we do. They never know when Mac is going to open on them again, or even the Norwegians for that matter. They are in unfriendly territory. We, at least, can be assured of asylum in Norway. They can't.

"Number two, they don't know where we are, at least exactly where we are. And they don't know that the ship is standing off the coast . . . at least I hope they don't." The silence descended again, unbroken even by the roaring wind that had been their constant companion for so long. The silence

was thick, thick and heavy with the threat of their total exhaustion and potential capture. Teleman settled down into the sleeping bag and pushed his thawing feet against the chemical warming pad. In spite of his utter exhaustion, his mind was churning with the implications of Folsom words. They did not have much chance. That much was clear to a blind idiot. There was still nine miles to go to the Norwegian base, nine more miles that would take them all day tomorrow in their steadily degenerating condition. He knew that he could not make it and he doubted very much if the others would be able to either. The temperature was dropping fast, and six miles over the frozen, knee-high tufts of tundra grass in forty-below weather was too much to expect of any man. His mind began turning insidiously back to the thoughts that had nagged at him during the endless day. Which of the three men had the orders to kill him?

Teleman groaned inwardly. He was certain that one of them would try to kill him, but which one. He could not watch all three at once. McPherson had the training and the skill, that he knew. He had also been very solicitous of him all day, almost carrying him since noon. But Gadsen—he had not learned very much about the man at all. Except for a few wise comments on their predicament during the day, he had not spoken much.. . . In the middle of his self-created maze of danger, Teleman's brain blanked and he was deeply asleep.

'Well, we can only wait and see what the new day brings,' Gadsen sighed. Folsom pulled on his face mask and gloves. "Yeah, I guess so." What else was there to say? he thought.

He slammed a new clip into his carbine and shoved extras into a pocket. "Night-night." He grinned and pulled the face mask tight, then pushed through the tent flaps and crawled outside.

The cold air hit him with the force of a truck, sucking the warm air from his body. Still on his knees, he curled into a tight ball, coughing into his fur-lined mittens, breathing slowly to avoid frosting his lungs. In a few moments the spasm passed and he straightened out, face still buried in his gloves while he breathed carefully to regain his breath. Even through the fur and nylon parka, the touch of the air was like hot iron. He stood up and began

beating his arms together. We have to walk nine more miles through this, he thought, and he knew that they would never be able to make it, no matter what the circumstances were, no matter what the prize, up to and including life itself. It was an impossible task. But deep inside he knew that they would do it or die trying. Just as the Russians would catch them or die And he also knew that the Russians would not be waiting out the night in a tent—they would be using the night.

The harsh moon was a quarter of the way up in the sky. Its light falling on the freshly snow-covered ground gave him visibility almost to the horizon in every direction. The wind had died away completely, and in the frigid, still air his breath froze instantly, wreathing his head in a clammy fog if he stopped too long in one spot. The moon highlighted the tundra, with the hummocks of grass standing out in bold relief. Folsom had never dreamed it could be so cold. He had never experienced anything like this before.

The stars burned in the sky in spite of the moonlight, and the air was so cold and dry that he could detect no trace of ring around the moon. As if to form a backdrop for the unearthly beauty of the moon, the aurora had sprung into the northern sky, shimmering curtains of color that fluctuated and flowed in the gentle breeze of the electron stream arising eight minutes away in the sun's corona. At any other time he would have been entranced with the shifting tapestry of color and form, but not tonight He moved slowly away from the tent, walking carefully around the tufts of frozen grass as they had been doing since entering the tundra. Not one of them could afford a twisted ankle now. Folsom stopped to peer around. He could see nothing on the waste of frozen terrain in any direction. At this point he knew that they were about seven miles from the sea. But in the crystal air the fury of the sea against the cliffs was faintly audible. At a thousand yards distance from the tent Folsom turned and began to move in a circle, with the tent as the center point. He would leave tracks in the snow, tracks that the Russians could not miss, but it didn't matter. Tomorrow the Russians would find the campsite anyway.

There were two directions from which the Soviets could approach: east or west. The main party would come from the west

Although Folsom did not make the mistake of discounting them, he was fairly certain that this group, after traveling for almost a day longer than themselves, would be as exhausted. It was the group from the east, the expected second landing party, that he was worried about. They would be fresh.

Folsom concentrated his attention then on the east and the west. After forty minutes of plodding around the mile-long circle, it became a question of whether he could last the remaining hour and twenty minutes. Even with the most intense concentration and violent shivering and the continual plodding, he had to fight desperately the sleep that would steal quietly into his mind. Sleep that made him the same promises of warmth that it had made to Teleman all day, sleep and the warmth that his body craved now more than anything in life.

Folsom strove to shake off the exhaustion that was wearing him down, reaching at his eyelids with sandpapery fingers, and forced himself to keep plodding. Somewhere in the back of his mind, as he trudged through the endless circle under the erratic northern lights filling the sky with trembling curtains of fire, somewhere deep, almost below the conscious level, something was wrong, but his mind was too hazy, too sticky and numb, to pinpoint the sense of wrongness. Vaguely he realized that the missing factor was important, but the longer he walked, the more time that passed, the farther away the vagrant thought slipped. Now it was beyond his capability to muster the necessary energy to concentrate, and soon it had slipped completely from him.

On a sweep to the north,' half asleep and mumbling to himself, McPherson came up behind and laid a hand on his shoulder. Folsom felt the big man's hand grasp at his parka and automatically swung around, the butt of his carbine whipping through a vicious arc at the other's unseen midsection. Orly Folsom's tired reflexes saved McPherson from a solid clout in the belly. McPherson caught the rifle in one huge paw and stopped it, then gave Folsom a gentle shove toward the tent and watched him stumble away before he too began the chase around the endless circle.

Teleman was at 'the bottom of a long shaft. Above, the velvet-black sides of the hole spiraled up to an undefined blob of half light, a formless nothing. His mind refused to work, refused to

coordinate sensory impressions, was mired in a haze of quicksand. He fell sharply .. . Teleman sat up in the darkened tent and waited for the shapeless blurs of darkness to form into patterns that represented walls of the tent and pieces of gear scattered about. The hoarfrost from their breathing was growing thick on the nylon walls. The suddenness of awakening had disoriented him for several panicky minutes before he realized that huddled next to him in sleeping bags were both McPherson and Folsom, and Gadsen's sleeping bag was empty. That told him that it was the last watch before they would move on again. After the few hours of sleep, his mind and senses were preternaturally sharp. He did not realize that this was due to almost complete exhaustion and that it would melt away after the smallest exertion, leaving him again a semiconscious drone. He got quietly out of his sleeping bag and fished out the chemical heating pads. Of the three that Folsom had put in with him, only one retained any heat at all. He tucked it underneath his parka against his chest and picked up his carbine, a ration pack, and face mask and moved quietly to the tent flap.

When he poked his head out through the tent flaps, the mask, still heated from the tiny stove, warmed the air passing into his lungs to a breathable temperature. The combination of aurora borealis and moonlight illuminated the surrounding tundra with midevening intensity. After a moment he caught sight of Gadsen coming up from far to the east. The sailor was walking slowly, stopping every now and then to search the horizon carefully through the field glasses.

Teleman squirmed through the flaps and in a crouching run started south. After two hundred yards he flung himself flat in the snow and wriggled around to see if Gadsen had spotted him running from the tent. Gadsen had not and was now coming around the far side of the tent, almost a mile away from where he lay. Teleman decided to stay put until Gadsen had completed that part of the circle and started around again to the east. In his white parka he would be invisible at half the distance. So he lay unmoving in the snow, watching as the distant figure traveled farther around in his wide orbit. What chain of reasoning had prompted him to leave his companions and strike out on his own he did not quite understand.