Skyprobe (16 page)

Klaber said steadily, “Mr. President, we have not stopped thinking along those lines. The only suggestion is that we jam all we can when the capsule re-enters, but frankly I doubt if that can be effective in the absence of any information as to the kind of signal. . . there’s just one man who might be able to help and he’s right up there in the capsule—and I guess you know I’m not referring to Schuster or Morris.”

There was a pause, then the President said quietly, “All right, Klaber, I know you’ve done your best. I’ll call you again if anything comes through.”

The line went dead. Klaber sat on at his desk, his head in his hands. His mind was spinning with fatigue and worry and an angry impotence—and concern, as ever, for his men in space. Everyone was going mad, he felt . . . the world’s Press was in a state of uproar and he was right at the storm centre. The newspapers in the States were demanding immediate action by the government; the scare stories about a foreign power being involved had had their due effect—the State Department had been forced to admit the possible existence of some unspecified threat and this admission had been seized upon by the extremists, by the emotional-reactors, and they were dynamite in the current situation. Skyprobe and its possible horrific fate if anything went wrong were on every man’s Ups. If the astronauts couldn’t be brought down, public opinion insisted, extreme pressure should be brought to bear on the Eastern Powers, in whose territories the threat, if it existed at all, must obviously lie. There should be counter-threats of massive retaliation to be put into effect at once if anything should actually happen to the capsule and its crew.

The Communist reaction to all this was to be seen in the newspapers from the East—in
Pravda
, in
Izvestia
, in the Press of Peking, the satellite countries and the Afro-Asian Bloc. Official spokesmen utterly rejected, as the Russian Ambassador to the United States had done, any suggestion of Eastern interference. War, they said, was being fomented by the West—the excuse was being prepared in the usual wicked, cynical way of the capitalist societies—perhaps the West was even preparing to sacrifice its own astronauts so as to provide a valid excuse for attacking Communism. War, if it came, would be in all senses of the term upon the capitalists’ own heads. There was most decidedly nothing in the way of a threat from the East, they said, but Communism was ready and waiting for any intrusion upon the sovereignty of its member-states, and any display of force would be met instantly with all the nuclear weapons the East could muster.

* * *

Ewan MacAllister met Shaw and Ingrid at Sapporo as Dahl had promised, driving up in a battered Land Rover. MacAllister was tough. His fist, as he took Shaw’s hand, was like a ham. He was dressed like a bushman, in a faded khaki shirt with rolled up sleeves and creased slacks stained with oil. His gaze swept over the two of them as, without comment at first, he took Dahl’s letter. He read it, then nodded.

“Right,” he said briefly. “This is dinkum. I’m considering myself under your orders from now, Commander.” His eyes narrowed. “Can you tell me what this is all about, or not?”

Shaw said, “I’m sorry. I can’t. I hope you’ll accept that, Mr. MacAllister.”

“Most people call me just plain Mac. Right, I’ll accept that. Reckon I wouldn’t be too far off the beam, though, if I said it had to do with all the trouble going on around that spacecraft!”

“Mac,” Shaw said, grinning at the Australian, “you’re entitled to all the theories you want so long as you get us airborne fast. Once we’re up, I’ll tell you what to look out for . . . as near as I can, that is. Frankly I’m not too sure myself.”

MacAllister nodded. “What about the lady? She coming?”

“Yes,” Ingrid said promptly. MacAllister glanced at Shaw, who confirmed what the girl had said. He’d half intended to leave her at Sapporo if he could find someone to take charge of her, but she’d talked him out of that. She was capable enough, she said, to look after herself and she wanted to see this business right through to the end. In any case, they were only going on a reconnaissance mission. . . . MacAllister waved a hand towards the Land Rover.

“Let’s get going,” he said. He climbed in behind the wheel and was already moving off before Shaw and Ingrid had settled themselves. He drove at breakneck speed, raising clouds of dust, and within an hour of reaching Sapporo they were airborne in Dahl’s helicopter and heading out on a course for the Sea of Okhotsk. Before they had gone aboard MacAllister had brought a pile of warm clothing out from a hangar on the private airfield.

“The weather’s not so bad here,” he said, “but it can be a bastard up that way. Like as not the islands’ll be covered with fog anyhow and we won’t see a flaming thing.”

“I know that,” Shaw agreed. They would have to take a chance on it. He was quite familiar with the reputation of the Kuriles. The temperature dropped sharply as the helicopter went northwards from Hokkaido, cutting across an icy wind coming down from the Bering Sea. Beside Shaw Ingrid was shivering, despite her Scandinavian blood. Soon they began to come over the southernmost of the Kurile islands, and MacAllister brought the machine lower. He and Shaw stared down from the windows. Shouting over the engine sounds Shaw said, “I’m looking out for anything that looks like a camp, or any improvised habitation really . . . huts, that sort of thing. Probably a radio mast. Sorry I can’t be more precise!”

“What if we do spot anything?”

“It depends on what we spot, Mac. I’m keeping an open mind in the meantime.”

“Just as you say, Commander.” The machine roared on, both the men and Ingrid keeping a sharp watch on the islands and the bitter seas between them. Nowhere was there the least indication of any human activity. The

Kuriles were bare, windswept, icy—inimical to human life. Currently there was no fog, but Shaw knew that it could come down very suddenly. They went on, crossing island, after island, skimming over the bare, desolate earth, still seeing nothing. MacAllister said, “Reckon we might take a look farther in, right? If what you’re after is meant to be hidden right away, then maybe it’ll be in one of the remoter islands—there’s a number of ’em detached from the main group, farther inside the Sea of Okhotsk. Okay?”

“Okay,” Shaw yelled back. They would be going deeper into Russian airspace, but that couldn’t be helped now. It was better that he should do it on his own personal initiative than that the Air Forces should go in fighting. . . .

* * *

Still nothing.

Nothing but a complete blank, and they were tired and cramped now, fingers almost numb, faces blue with the cold that crept into their very bones. They passed over the ice-bound sea, over upwards of a dozen tiny islands without seeing the smallest sign of man. And after a while, MacAllister began to worry about the fuel. “We’ll have to head back for base any time now,” he shouted in Shaw’s ear. “We can fuel up and come out again and head direct for any places we haven’t reached this leg. All right, Commander?”

“If we have to, that’s it,” Shaw told him. This wasn’t the area for a forced landing. MacAllister turned for home and it was as they were passing over the last of the islands well west of the main and larger group that the incredible thing happened.

MacAllister said, “Something’s up.” His voice was sharp and high, edgy with alarm, and his sunburned face had gone suddenly yellowish. He was fighting the controls.

“What is it, Mac?”

“For Chrissake . . . I don’t know! She’s just not responding. Can’t you feel it?”

Shaw said, “Yes, I’m beginning to.” There was a curious drag on the helicopter, a totally alarming feeling. Shaw glanced at Ingrid and slid his hand into hers. Her face was pale, her Ups sUghtly parted as she stared at MacAllister. MacAlHster shouted, “She’s losing height and I can’t get her back. It’s like someone else has taken over . . . a car with dual control.” A moment later he said, “Speed’s coming off . . . for Chrissake, mate, we’re going to do a flaming belly-flop any minute!”

He was still fighting the controls but there was nothing he could do; the machine was completely helpless, as if in the grip of some force stronger by far than herself. Shaw, his heart thumping hard, watched the landscape reel past as the helicopter side-slipped, lurching downward fast. He took Ingrid in his arms, braced both himself and her for the crunch of the impact that was now inevitable. He looked ahead at the instrument panel in front of MacAlUster. The needles of the dials were moving, again as though they were under some kind of control from outside, and now the helicopter had steadied and was going down straight, fast and flat like a dropped stone. Once again Shaw looked down through the windows and this time he made out a small group of men, men who were staring up at the machine and making no move for cover. Then, suddenly, the fast descent slowed, slowed as if they had met a cushion of air, and a moment after that they hit the ground flat, in the belly-flop that MacAlUster had predicted. In spite of that last-minute cushioning effect they landed hard. Shaw hit his head on the metal-work of the cabin and passed out cold.

* * *

When Shaw came round he had been Ufted out of the helicopter and was lying on the bare ground and standing over him with a gun was Rudolf Rencke. The gun was smoking and MacAlUster was lying in a heap, blood pouring from his shattered chest, dead as mutton. The helicopter was resting, apparently undamaged, on a vast round metal plate that was slightly raised from the ground and seemed to be protruding on a thick stalk from a silo. As Shaw watched dazedly, there was the sound of electrically-operated machinery and the metal plate, with the helicopter still on it, descended into the earth. After it had vanished, a heavy, stressed-concrete cover slid slowly out from just below the surface of the ground to seal the silo. After this Rencke snapped an order and the men with him began rolling a camouflage net across the concrete slab.

Rencke grinned down at Shaw. “Welcome, my dear Commander,” he said, sounding happy. “I congratulate you on finding your objective, even if the finding of it was somewhat involuntary. Now—get up!”

Shaw’s head felt as though it had been hit by a ton of lead, but he wasn’t damaged otherwise. He climbed to his feet and saw Ingrid being held by one of the men behind him; this man was a Chinese, as were two other men, both armed, with their guns covering the girl and himself. He asked, “I assume you brought us down, Rencke. D’you mind telling me how?”

Rencke said, “This you will find out later. For now, you will follow me.” He called out to the Chinese to bring the girl and then he pushed his gun into Shaw’s stomach. “Turn around,” he ordered brusquely. When Shaw had done so Rencke went on, “Walk straight ahead where you are facing now and you will come to some steps. You will go down these. Move.”

Shaw shrugged and moved. Rencke kept the gun hard in his spine. The cold was intense now; it was like walking through a refrigeration chamber. Shaw’s breath condensed into a frozen film in front of him. Ingrid Lange was alongside him now, her teeth chattering. She looked blue and pinched already. As they moved on Rencke said, “You know, of course, where you are, Commander. You will know how remote the inner Kuriles are—you will know that your searching forces will never find us here, even if they are bold enough to violate Russian airspace and pass over this very island!”

Shaw said, “I wouldn’t be too confident. My pilot sent out a signal before we landed, and by now—”

Rencke’s sneering laugh cut him short. Rencke said, “Do not waste your breath, Commander! Your pilot sent no such signal. Our monitoring equipment would have told us instantly—besides which, the device that brought down the helicopter also inhibited your radio so that no transmission whatever could be made from the moment you came within the beam field.”

“Beam field, Rencke?”

“You will find out,” the Swiss said impatiently. Shaw walked on, crossing the perimeter of what appeared to be a large circle of round holes in the ground, holes lined with metal and roughly a foot in diameter. Outside this circle they passed other holes of varying sizes, all of them now covered with concrete slabs and more camouflage netting. Under yet more netting they saw what looked like heavy earth-moving equipment—excavators and bulldozers, all well screened from the air. It was complete anonymity. The general aspect was that of total desolation and Shaw felt as if they had arrived at some other planet, some nightmare world derived from the imagination of a film script-writer. An icy wind was howling over all, and, again in the distance, the surrounding sea was grim and grey and motionless in its ice; this was the bleakest thing Shaw had seen since his days on the Kola Peninsula some while before. He knew that all the Kurile group were of volcanic origin and as barren as a fiddler’s bitch. Ahead of him a group of Chinese came out from what seemed to be another hole in the ground and began stripping the camouflage netting from a number of the sealed pits, and then, after the stressed-concrete lids had been moved aside, a network of radar scanners and tall radio masts, plus two television cameras, began to ascend slowly from the silos. This, no doubt, would be part of the monitoring system, the means whereby the Communists would be watching out for the searching forces of the West. Around the whole area was set a perimeter fence—a high, treble-banked barricade of thick wire, heavily barbed, which Shaw didn’t recall seeing during their descent. Since this God-forsaken island seemed the most unlikely place in all the world to have intruders, the fence was most probably there to contain any of the workers who might have become disillusioned with their lot.

And currently, of course, to contain other kinds of escapees.

They went down the hole in the ground up which the Chinese workers had come. This underground entry was lined with stressed-concrete and lead, and steps twisted down into the earth. The masts and radar scanners remained in position as Shaw went down the steps; no doubt they would be lowered into their silos for safety once they had picked up anything heading towards the island base.