Target 5 (14 page)

So it was with a certain tension that Beaumont waited for
the bump which would tell them they had touched down on the polar pack. Seated in the observer's position beside the
pilot, he watched with professional interest the hand holding
the collective pitch stick controlling their descent. The hand
seemed steady enough. He glanced at the pilot's face - what he could see of it under helmet, goggles and headset. The
face seemed steady, too, but the mouth was tight. Pilot
Rainer was, in fact, clenching his teeth while he waited for
the bump.

Behind Beaumont Sam Grayson was perched on a flap
seat and there were also nine dogs aboard
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nine whimpering
dogs who didn't like the sudden descent. A sled completed the congestion. Horst Langer, with a second sled and more
dogs, was coming down in the other machine Beaumont
could see beyond the perspex dome. Beaumont checked his
watch. They would hit the pack in thirty seconds Rainer had
said. Twenty seconds to go.

'Would you normally risk a landing here?' Beaumont had asked a few minutes earlier.

'No!' Rainer had been uncomfortably direct in his reply. 'But I have orders to get you down if humanly possible. So
we've got to risk it, haven't we?'

Beaumont adjusted his ear-pads. Everything was shuddering - the floor under his feet, the dome, the controls
Rainer was handling. Beaumont rested a hand on the dog
by his side and felt the vibrations through the poor beast's
fur. Transport planes the dogs minded not at all: heli
copters they hated. The descent went on. Rainer adjusted
the twist-grip throttle on his stick. Ten seconds to go. Maybe
only ten seconds left to live.

They were now low enough to see the ice beyond the
dome. It was a churned-up mess, like a blurred sea which
had frozen suddenly - blurred because the dome was
steamed up inside the cabin. And the grim wilderness of tumbled ice was shuddering unpleasantly, dithering giddily
because of
the cabin's shuddering. When they opened the door the temperature would drop eighty or ninety degrees within seconds, taking their breath away. If the machine landed steady, if it didn't topple. There were skids - skis -under this Sikorsky and that should help stability. Unless one ski skidded while the other sank. Rainer glanced at
Beaumont, who winked at him. The wink was not returned
and Beaumont saw the blank eyes behind the goggles.
Rainer was scared stiff. Then the skids touched the ice.

The machine wobbled. Beaumont felt it going down on
his side. Soft ice to port, hard to starboard. Rainer's hand
was welded to the stick. Bugger this trip - he should have gone sick. The dogs sensed disaster, began whimpering
pathetically. The blades were still whirling, whipping the
air as the sinking sensation went on. The tension inside the cabin was a physical presence as the three men sweated out their terror. Then the machine settled, the sinking stopped. Rainer switched off, lifted his goggles and his face was seamed with sweat.

'Nice landing,' Beaumont said as he pulled off his head
set and reached for the door.

'Wait...!'

'I am waiting - for the rotors to stop.'

It wasn't necessary - if you kept your head down when you went out - but Rainer didn't know that Beaumont had
flown helicopters all over the Arctic. Beaumont opened the
door and the Arctic came in like a knife. He dropped to the
ice and walked away from the machine stiffly as he looked round for Langer's Sikorsky, then frowned as he saw it was
coming down on to pressure ridge terrain. It was going to
crash.

Behind him Grayson was sending the dogs out and they
came out joyously, barking and scampering round the
machine with sheer delight at being free again. A quarter of a mile away to the east the fog bank hovered in the moonlight, a grey curtain like a dirty cloud anchored to the ice.
Then Langer's machine dropped out of sight behind a
pressure ridge, a twisted wall of ice ten feet high. The
machine hit the ice and the blur of the rotor disc steadied
above the crest. 'He's O K.' Grayson's voice was husky
behind the Englishman. 'For a moment I wondered ...'

'He isn't - he's toppling!'

Beaumont started running across the ice, his boots crunch
ing into soft crust which crumbled under him. The whole area had only recently frozen over, was dangerously unstable. Beaumont ran as fast as he could without slipping
and his heart was in his mouth - the rotor disc above the
crest was no longer horizontal, it was canting sideways. He
ran through a gap in the pressure wall and saw that
Langer's quick reflexes had already reacted to the emer
gency - the door was open, dogs were spilling out on to the
soft ice and running towards the gap, their legs smeared
with the dark ooze they had plunged into.

The Sikorsky was an extraordinary sight - with its port
skid sinking, already below the surface, its strut still going down, the machine was heeling over while its rotors still
whirled at speed. The situation couldn't have been more
dangerous and as he ran close Beaumont wondered what the
hell the pilot was doing, why the hell he hadn't switched off.
Langer appeared, heaving one end of the sled close to the
aperture, getting ready to push it out. 'Leave it!' Beaumont
shouted and his warning was lost in the hideous roar. He
jumped up, hauled himself inside the cabin where the pilot,
Jacowski, was sitting behind the controls, reached across and
cut the motor.

'I'm taking off,' the pilot yelled.

'Start that motor again and I'll brain you,' Beaumont
rasped. 'Our lives depend on that sled - give a hand to get it
out. The machine's expendable - we're not.' He went back to help Langer. 'Take it easy, Horst - the ground's like a
sponge out there ...' He saw Grayson arrive below the
aperture. 'Sam, watch it as it comes down - it could sink. . .'

'Hurry it up - I'm sinking,' the American called out.
. They wrestled with the heavily-laden sled, balanced it on the brink, and then Beaumont dropped out to help Grayson
take its weight. The Sikorsky seemed temporarily stable but
was tilted at an acute angle as they lowered the sled care
fully and rested it on the ice. It started sinking at once and
then Grayson and Langer grabbed hold of the harness and
began hauling it away towards firmer ground near the
gap. Beaumont looked at Jacowski who was still sitting behind his controls.

'If you stay there that's going to make a nice coffin for you -
it's gone in deeper.'

'I'm going to try and take her out.'

'Better have a look first - unless you want someone to collect your insurance.'

Jacowski climbed gingerly to the ground, felt his boots
sinking, moved quickly to join Beaumont where the ice was
firmer. The helicopter had almost righted itself, was almost horizontal again - because the starboard skid had now sunk
to the depth of the port skid. It was knee-deep in black ooze.
'The next problem is how to get rid of it,' Beaumont said
roughly. 'It has to go either up or down - it can't stay here
as a landmark to show some Russian chopper where we went
into the fog. If we start the motor I think the vibration will
take it down.'

'That's government property,' the pilot said nastily. 'It
belongs to the Arctic Research Laboratory at Point Barrow.
We can bring a team to dig it out . . .'

'It goes up or down,
5
Beaumont informed him, 'so you'd
better get clear before I start her up.'

'Keith, that's damned dangerous,' Grayson protested as
he came back to see what was happening. 'If it goes down
too quickly while you're inside it . . .'

Beaumont was already climbing up carefully into the
cabin, testing it with his weight to see the effect. Nothing happened so he sat down in the pilot's seat and looked out
to make sure the others were clear. Jacowski had gone all the
way back to the gap but Grayson was waiting just beyond the span of the rotor blades. Starting up the motor in these circumstances wasn't a course of action Beaumont would
have recommended to anyone, but the machine had to disappear - either into the sky or under the Arctic.

It was just possible that when he started the motor he'd be
able to drag her free, to take her up and land the machine
close to the other Sikorsky; it all depended on the strength of the drag of the ooze gripping the skids. The more likely
outcome was that the vibration would shiver the skids, open
up the ooze and force her down. When that happened he'd
have to take rather quick evasive action to avoid being carried down with her. Beaumont started the motor.

For a moment he thought he'd managed it, that he was going to lift her out. The machine wobbled and he could
feel the power trying to haul her out, then she started going
down and going over to port all at once and quickly. He
dived for the doorway, went out, slipped on the ice and sprawled under the toppling, dropping machine. He was
caught in a kind of closing press - between the ice under him
and the descending whirling blades coming down on top of him. He scrambled to his knees, felt the ooze sucking at his
boots, holding him in. The beat of the descending rotors
deafened him, the ooze clamped round his boots, his hands
clawed at firmer ground to drag himself loose.

Other hands grabbed his own as Grayson tugged ferociously and between them they got him out. He curled his toes upwards to stop his boots sliding off and then, crouched low, they ran. in a shambling trot. The racing blades were only feet above them and Beaumont felt their wind-force beating down on his neck as they ran together, still stooped low when they were yards beyond the reach of the flailing metal. At the gap they turned to look back as the motor coughed, choked and died. The fuselage was sitting on the ooze and the motor had sucked a churning mass of the filth into its innards while the rotors whirled on their own momentum. 'Get ready to get behind the ridge,' Beaumont warned. He was foreseeing the moment when the blades broke free and started
flying across the ice, but the warning was unnecessary. As the fuselage sank more slowly the rotors slowed and were hardly moving when they reached the ground. They flicked great gouts of blackness across the ice and then settled. The ooze opened up, the Sikorsky went down with a dreadful sucking sound, the ooze closed over it.

'That was government property,' Jacowski repeated
peevishly.

'Tell them to take another gold bar out of Fort Knox,'
Beaumont suggested.

* *
*

There was a reaction after the crisis, a tendency to move
slowly, but Beaumont dispelled it as he urged everyone to
move faster, to get the other sled out of the surviving
Sikorsky, to harness up the dog teams, to get moving before
a Russian plane arrived. 'I want us inside that fog bank in
fifteen minutes - there we're invisible ...' And there was
another confrontation with the pilots before they left.

'We'll have to report what happened to that helicopter.'
Rainer called down from his machine.

'In triplicate,' Grayson shouted back at him. 'Don't for
get they like it in triplicate!'

Jacowski slammed the door in his face as Rainer started his machine. Five minutes later the two sled-teams were
assembled, the dogs were hitched up, ready to go. The
Sikorsky had vanished, fading into the night on its way
home. The feeling of isolation descended on the three men the moment the machine had gone, and the terrible silence of the Arctic wilderness was overwhelming.