Target 5 (15 page)

They were alone on the ice, a hundred miles from Greenland, a pinhead on the frozen sea - three men, eighteen dogs
and two sleds. The ice under their feet was possibly twelve
inches deep, except where it had no depth at all, where the
, weight of a single dog could fracture it, casting the living
weight down into the freezing black water they were floating
on. And even though the ice seemed still it was moving all
the time; caught up in the powerful Greenland Current it
was drifting south towards Iceberg Alley at the rate of over
ten miles a day, and under the smear of ice which coated the ocean the water plunged down ten thousand feet. Beaumont
took over the leading team from Grayson. 'Let's get moving,"
he said. 'I shan't be happy until we're inside the fog.'

'It looks extremely inviting,' Langer said with a dry smile.
The twenty-eight-year-old German had spent two years in London and Beaumont often remarked that his English was
more idiomatic than his own. 'In fact, it looks very much like
one of your famous pea-soupers.'

'It won't be so bad when we get inside it,' Beaumont re
plied and they started off. It was always the initial start
which called for an effort - to get the dog teams moving, to
get your own reluctant legs moving in the bitter Arctic
night. And Horst was right he thought as he held the whip
in one hand and gripped the sled's handlebar with the other:
the fog looked damned uninviting.

The fog bank hung over the ice like a threat, a threat of
grey vapour which rose high above the ice and clung to the
ground. It was bitterly cold but there was no wind, so the
fog was almost motionless, like a cloud hovering above an
icy plateau, a cloud which could hide any number of
dangers. The danger Beaumont feared most was movement
- that while they were inside the fog the ice might stir afresh,
opening up leads of water, bringing them together again,
heaving up pressure ridges which could crush a man, even bury a whole dog team in seconds. He cracked his whip, shouted at the team, and the dogs moved faster, hauling the
sled, their legs stretched, their bodies straining at the
harness.

And now the deathly silence of the ice was broken by
man-made sounds - by the creak of harness,
the hiss of
runners coursing over the ice, the crackle of snow-crust
giving way, by the crack of whips and the thump of boots treading harder ice. They were under way, heading for the fog bank, heading towards Target-5 lost somewhere inside the dense pall. Beaumont drove the lead team with Langer
controlling the second team behind, while a few paces
ahead Grayson moved .across the ice staring down at his
compass. 'It's nervous already,' he called out. Which was
another problem - in this part of the world compasses were notoriously unreliable.

Langer easily kept up with Beaumont's hard-driving
pace - his lead dog, Bismarck, was a big, tough-minded animal who kept the other dogs moving, the Beaumont of the dog teams. Horst Langer, five foot ten inches tall, dark-haired and clean-shaven, was a Rhinelander, a cheerful,
easy-going man with a sense of humour which concealed
great resilience. An expert with explosives - essential know
ledge for depth-sounding work - he was also a brilliant dog-
handler. As Beaumont said, 'They'll fly over thin ice with Horst when other dogs would cringe.' Born in Dusseldorf,
still a bachelor - 'With so many attractive women about
how can you choose just one?' - he had spent four years in the Arctic working on American bases. And like the other
two men he had top security clearance from Washington.

'Something wrong, Keith?' he called out.

Beaumont had halted his team, was standing with his
head turned to one side. 'Thought I heard something. Keep
very quiet for a minute.'

They waited. The dogs twisted in their harness to see what
was happening. There seemed to be nothing but the ton-
weight of the Arctic silence pressing down on them. Beau
mont, in his fur parka and fur hood, was huge and still in the
moonlight as he swivelled his head like a radar wing towards
the east. The fog bank was close now, only a few hundred
yards away, a dirty cloud like motionless smoke. Then Beau
mont heard it again, the faint beat-beat of a large helicopter growing louder, coming closer by the second.

'Run for it! Inside the fog before they see us ...'

The urgency in his shout communicated itself to the dogs as the whips cracked, the sled teams surged forward and the
helicopter's motor sped towards them. They were actually racing towards it, expecting at any moment to see it come
over the top of the fog bank. Bismarck exerted all his
strength, his paws flying over the ice at Beaumont's heels as
the sleds lurched over uneven ground and the men behind them fought to keep them upright. A spill now would be
disaster, would anchor them in the open until it was too
late. Grayson ran alongside Beaumont, ready to grab at the
handlebar. The helicopter beat was very close. Rat-tat-tat
. . . Beaumont cracked his whip, urged the dogs to move faster while he struggled with the bucking sled which was taking on a life of its own.

'Thin ice!'

Beaumont was turning the sled as Grayson shouted, turn
ing it away from a depression where something dark showed
below treacherously smooth ice. The helicopter sound had
become a drumbeat which meant it was coming in very
low, only a few hundred feet up. The sled caught an ice rib,
was heeling over to port when Grayson steadied it and
behind them Langer swerved widely to avoid the obstacle^ To keep them moving, Beaumont cracked his whip a third
time over their heads and they went forward in a spurt.
He thought he saw something above him as they plunged
into the fog, then his team was swallowed up, followed by
Langer's sled, and it was like diving into moonless night as
the fog closed round them. It enveloped them, drifted
clammily over their faces, blurred the shapes of the dogs only feet away from their drivers. Beaumont pulled at the
handlebar, called out for the dogs to halt, then turned his
head upwards and stared into the murk. The engine beat
was muffled and sounded to be directly overhead.

'I think it's Russian,' Grayson said breathlessly.

'Could be a routine patrol,' Langer suggested. 'North
Pole 17 isn't far away - for a chopper. They're always
checking on what we're doing.' The engine beat was still above them and it gave them the eerie feeling it could see the men below it, which was impossible.

'It's circling,' Beaumont snapped.

'So it could still be routine,' Langer insisted. 'Or maybe it's looking for Gorov.'

'Or maybe it's looking for us,' Beaumont replied, 'if
Tillotson got through to Leningrad.'

'Fifteen killers ...'

Papanin stood outside the headquarters hut as the last
helicopter landed on the moonlit airstrip, its twin rotors spinning giddily as the jet power died. They were lined up in a row - squat, bulbous silhouettes in the moonlight, like big-bellied crows; submarine killers just flown in off the
Soviet carrier
Gorki.
The sonar devices under the domes
looked like pus sacs, and each of them sagged on a quadruple
support of two-wheel carriages. A jet pod like a bomb was
slung to port and starboard of each machine.

'I want them airborne in thirty minutes.' Papanin told
Kramer. 'And then they stay up - until they've found
Gorov. They can come down to refuel,' he added.

'There's only one pilot per machine,' the Bait pointed out.

'Very economical,' was the Siberian's only comment.

Thirty minutes later the fleet of submarine killers started taking off from the airstrip and Papanin watched them go.
It was one of these fifteen machines which Beaumont heard
coming when he rushed the sled teams inside the fog bank.
And it was one of these machines which photographed them
just before they disappeared, photographed them with a telephoto lens of great range and power.

The first few hours inside the fog bank were uneventful hell
for the three men and their dog teams - if uneventful is a
true description of a time when they constantly expected to lose their lives. For one thing they couldn't see where they
were going; under any other circumstance Beaumont would
have called a halt, would have pitched camp and waited for the fog to move. Instead they drove themselves on, stumb
ling through the icy dampness, often only able to see the lead
dog beyond their sled, and when it disappeared Grayson went in front to test the ground, walking slowly with the
dogs coming up close behind.

If their calculations were correct, if the star-fix Grayson
had taken with his sextant soon after he left the Sikorsky
was anything like accurate, the ice island Target-5 was only
a few miles due east when they landed. But navigation in an
Arctic winter is not always an exact science and privately Beaumont had his doubts.

The tension rose as they heard another helicopter corning
at the moment the fog was thinning. Suddenly it was lighter, the fog above them drifted away, a faint glow which was the
moon began to percolate the mistiness. The machine came
closer. 'Halt!' Beaumont tugged at the sled. 'Try and keep
the dogs still. Sam, take over here a minute.' Beaumont took
his night glasses out of the case strapped to the handlebar and walked a few yards away from the sled teams. Above
him a hole was opening up in the fog; he couldn't see the
moon but its light was all around him as he raised the
glasses. The helicopter drummed in, swept into view, a
blurred, huge shape flying very low indeed.

It went over quickly, so quickly he couldn't catch it in his
glasses but he was sure it was Russian. Then he heard
another one coming. This time he was ready for it as it flew
in on the same course as its predecessor. In the lenses he
caught a glimpse of a jet pod, the blur of a pilot's helmet,
then it
swept past out of sight. 'Submarine killer,' he told
Grayson when he went back to the sled teams. 'And there's
another one up there in the distance. I think they're cover
ing the fringe of the fog bank to see what goes into it.'

'Or what comes out of it,'

'It's promising in a way,' Beaumont pointed out as he
took over the sled. 'I think Dawes was right - Gorov is
making his run. You don't get that number of Soviet
machines down here normally.'

'Promising for us, too - if they're looking for us.'

They moved on again, often with the sound of a heli
copter somewhere overhead, but the fog closed in again so
they were hidden. Their progress would have been difficult
in clear weather - in the fog it was dangerous. The ice was
broken up, pitted with gullys, so the sleds constantly
lurched from side to side, always on the verge of overturning,
and soon Beaumont's arm ached with the strain of holding
on to the jerking handlebar. Horst Langer suffered equally and Sam Grayson suffered also, but in a different way. The
strain of moving just ahead of the dogs when the fog became
really dense was appalling. Every step he took he expected to be his last, to land in icy water where a lead had opened
up, exposing the black Arctic ocean.

It would have been uncomfortable in summer - when the
temperature hovers at freezing point or a degree or two
above. In February with a temperature of forty below it was
diabolical. Despite their clothing. They wore long woollen
underwear, two pairs of socks apiece inside fur-lined boots, two woollen pullovers, a fur-lined jacket, and over all this a
wolfskin parka made by an Alaskan fur trader Beaumont knew in Fairbanks. But they were still frozen, their hands and feet numbed beyond feeling, the small portion of their
faces exposed under their fur hoods aching and damp -
always damp - with the clinging fog which pressed against
them as they struggled forward.