Target 5 (23 page)

Beaumont and Conway were at the edge of the airstrip when
they heard the increase in engine sound and realized the
transport was coming in to land. 'Get well back!' Beaumont
shouted. They moved away from the airstrip, went back a
short distance, and when they turned round the lights of the plane were visible, dropping towards them at what seemed
slow-motion speed.

'God! He's going to overshoot . ..' Conway stood quite
still, frozen with fear as well as with cold.

'He'll make it!' Beaumont shouted the words above the roar of the engines. The fog made distance impossible to judge, visibility from above must be better than it seemed at ground level - otherwise the pilot would never have attempted the landing. Beaumont saw the wings which carried the lights, a dark silhouette plunging through fog swirls as it thundered along the airstrip. In the Arctic night the engines were deafening, a thudding roar, then the machine touched down, sent up spurts of snow as the skis sped along
the ice, sent up cloudbursts of snow as the propellers
churned. The plane
seemed enormous bursting through the fog. Then it was past them and Beaumont thought he heard
the hiss of skis above the roar. Their aerial taxi had arrived. The plane went on through the fog. They heard the engine
sound change as the pilot reversed propeller pitch. In a moment the machine would be stationary, its propellers
ticking over as the pilot cut his motors. They could still see it
as a blurred, retreating shape when the silhouette altered. One moment it was horizontal, the next moment it was
swinging up vertically, the tail high in the air, then the tail
smashed down, vanished. The vibration of the impact
travelled through the ice, echoed up their legs. The petrol
tanks detonated, deafened Beaumont. The flare of flame, the
flash which seared right through the fog, blinded him for a moment. Then there was crackling fire, black smoke.

As the echo of the detonation died away Papanin opened the
window and knocked out his pipe. 'You see, Kramer, I said
it would be all right.'

There were no survivors. The heat was so intense that for a brief time it burned a hole in the fog, exposing moonlit sky before the smoke masked it again. The plane was burning itself to cinders on a carpet of ice and the inferno faded
suddenly, leaving only creeping smoke and a nauseous stench
which turned Beaumont's stomach, a stench compounded of
petrol, plane - and people.

He had completed a careful circuit of the disaster when
Conway, breathing heavily, caught up with him. 'There
must be someone alive . . .'

'It's hopeless, Conway. No one could survive that - you
might just as well have shoved them head first into an in
cinerator.'

'Beaumont - look at this . . .' The American's voice
trembled and he was holding something in his hand, some
thing crumpled and smeared with oil. He opened it put,
reassembled it into a caricature of its original shape. 'Beau
mont, it's a nurse's cap.'

'They must have brought her to attend to Gorov ...'

'Why the hell had that plane to crash? It was down - it
was safe, it was stopping when ...'

'Come over here.' Beaumont walked a few paces on to the
airstrip, bent down and heaved at a large object close to a
skid-mark which scarred the snow. 'This is why, Conway.
The plane caught this rock arid somersaulted. One of the machine's skids is over there - it must have ripped away
when it struck the boulder.'

'I swept the airstrip with the snow-plough - swept it two
days ago.' Conway sounded bewildered, in a state of shock.
'I just couldn't have missed a thing that size ...'

'You missed this One, too.' Beaumont moved a few feet further across the airstrip and hammered his boot against a second snow-covered boulder. 'And that one . . .' He had only just seen the third obstruction and he bent down to examine it, telling the American to focus his lamp on it. Conway stared down at the rock in silence as Beaumont heaved it over and scraped at the underside with his gloved fingers.

'You missed all three of them,' Beaumont continued, 'for
the very simple reason they weren't here when you swept the
airstrip. There's very little snow underneath this rock and
not much more on top - what, there is came from the whirling propellers.'

'You mean ...'

'Yes! These boulders are from the hill behind the camp -and boulders don't walk a quarter of a mile. They were carried here in case a plane did try to land. It's sabotage again,
Conway - sabotage of the most brutal kind. God knows
how many poor devils were on that plane besides the
nurse.'

The bastards!'

'Take it easy. We've got to get back to the camp.'

'I'll see this gets into every newspaper in America ...'

'You won't, you know.' Beaumont took a grip on Con
way's arm. and started him moving. 'You haven't got a
shred of evidence to back up that statement...'

'The boulders, for God's sake!'

'The Russians would say the rocks must have been there
all the time, that the wind blew snow away and exposed
them - maybe even that it was your fault for not sweeping the strip properly. Someone has organized a very nasty and very effective accident. I just hope it's not setting a pattern
for the future.'

The Sno-Cat ground its way through the fog, the two pairs of heavy tracks kicking up the devil of a row as they revolved over the ice. One headlight beam poked at the fog
beyond the cab, the second light mounted outside the cab
window was angled downwards. Inside the cab Conway leaned well over to check the angled light: he was going to depend on that lamp soon, depend on it to stop him plung
ing twenty feet over a sheer drop down on to the polar pack,

Muffled inside his fur parka and fur hood, he checked his watch. 5
am
exactly. So he had got the timing right; in a few
minutes he should see one of the airstrip landing lights he
had switched on. He moved the gear lever, moved the big
lever which turned the tracks, checked the milometer as he changed direction. Conway, a peaceable man, had a loaded
rifle on the seat beside him as he drove on into nothing with
the memory of the nurse's cap vivid in his mind. Screwing
up his eyes, he frowned: the windscreen was messed up
and the wipers were spreading dirt over the glass. He
stopped the Cat, left the engine ticking over and climbed
out with a cleaning rag.

Fog rolled over the Sno-Cat, blotted out the rear of the
vehicle, and Conway looked round nervously as he rubbed at the glass. Fog everywhere, fog which could conceal an
army of Russians. He cleaned the glass quickly, got back up
into the cab, and the closing of the door was a relief, made him feel a little safer because he was high up and enclosed.

He checked the milometer, moved the big lever and the
cumbersome machine ground slowly forward. The dan
gerous part was coming.

Crouched over his levers, the American leaned close to
the windscreen where the wipers kept a fan-shaped segment
clear of moisture. He must be close to the cliff now - if he
had any idea of where he was going - and now he was
staring at the ground below the angled headlight. Entirely
on his own, Conway was extending Beaumont's deception
plan - he was going to drive the Sno-Cat to the ramp, take
it down on to the pack and drive it a quarter of the way
round the island. With the aid of the angled headlight he
could keep the cliff in view and avoid any risk of losing him
self out on the pack.

Then he was going to abandon the Sno-Cat, walk back to
the ramp and return to camp. He would leave the Sno-Cat
with its nose pointed north, its steering mechanism jammed.
When the Russians found it they would assume that someone
had escaped from the island - panicked by the plane crash -
and that they were heading north instead of west.

With one hand he lit a cigarette, and that made him feel a
little better. Then he changed course suddenly. The angled
light had projected its beam into a vacuum, into nothing.
He was moving along the edge of the cliff-top. For safety's
sake he took the vehicle back a dozen yards, then he
watched for the lamp on top of the wooden post which would
tell him he had made it. In a few minutes he would be going
down the ramp.

'East... east... east. The ramp.'

Kramer switched off the microphone which linked him with the men on the pack surrounding the island, the men equipped with the Soviet version of the American walkie-
talkie transmitter. They would all now be converging,
hurrying towards the Sno-Cat - and the ramp.

The Bait was sitting next to Papanin inside the Sno-Cat
which was stationary in the fog. In the compartment behind
them the radar operator gazed at his scanner, tracking the
slow approach of Conway's vehicle across the island. Above him on the roof the radar wing revolved, turning through the
fog. It was very quiet out on the pack as Papanin clenched
his pipe and stared towards Target-5-

'Do you think Gorov will go with them?' Kramer asked.

'How the hell do I know? There are two possibilities - he
is with them, or he isn't. If he is, the problem will be solved. If he isn't, we can go and take possession of an empty camp
and wait for him. Can't you work out anything for your
self?'

The Siberian looked through the window to his left.
When the fog drifted he could just see the outline of a second
Sno-Cat, also stationary and with its engine silent. It carried
eight more men, four of them armed with automatic
weapons. He looked at his watch. 8.5
am.
By 8.15 another
piece would have been removed from the board.

Conway was on top of the ramp. He manoeuvred the Cat
with great care as he felt the front tracks dropping. Three
years ago they had built up the ramp with supporting rocks
taken from the hill, they had curved it to follow the cliff wall
with a drop to the right so he had to turn the vehicle to the
left slowly, keeping very close to the cliff wall.

He braked, kept the engine running, peered out of the window. The angled light shone on no firm surface: it
dropped into the fog, gave you the feeling you were looking
down a mountainside. Conway's hands were sticky inside
his gloves as he went on peering down. Normally he would
never have attempted the descent in conditions like these -he was wondering whether to reverse, to go back on to the
island.

'To hell with that!'

He spoke the words aloud, a habit he had developed be
cause he was so often alone, carrying out experiments on the
pack. The fog obscured everything on the dangerous side; on the other side the light showed a blur of cliff wall. He'd
have to concentrate on keeping close to the blur, resisting
the temptation to look towards the drop.

Releasing the brake, he started the vehicle turning down the curve, a tricky operation because the huge rear tracks had to haul themselves round after the front caterpillars. He stared at the blurred wall barely a foot away and his seat tilted him forward as the Sno-Cat slanted downwards, its right-hand tracks less than a foot from the brink where the fog hid the pack below. The tracks crawled down the ramp, Conway's hand gripped the lever tightly, sweat dripped off his forehead. Thank God the Cat was responding, was going down nicely. Without warning the vehicle keeled and Conway felt it turning, dropping.