Target 5 (27 page)

'He knew it wouldn't be any picnic when he left North Pole 17,' Beaumont snapped. 'Don't talk to him - I want him running scared. And don't talk to me -I have to watch this sled.'

Langer dropped back: Beaumont was in one of his
foulest moods, you couldn't reason with him any more. They'd just have to keep moving. But Beaumont's temper
was under perfect control: he had simply chosen the simp
lest method of shutting Langer up. And his grim rush
across the ice was based on cold calculation. For three hours
they had seen no sign of a Russian helicopter. Why, he had
no idea, nor did he care, but now the moonlit sky above the pack was clear of the enemy he was determined to make the
most of it, to get as far south as possible while they didn't have to worry about hiding from Papanin's eyes in the sky.

Nor had he thought it wise to reveal to the others that if
humanly possible they were going to keep moving until they
sighted the
Elroy.
For some unknown reason they had been
given a golden opportunity to get clear, an opportunity
which might never recur. Privately he doubted whether they
would sight the
Elroy
that night, but it wasn't an impossible
hope and he was going to drive them until they dropped. An hour later the American plane appeared to the south
east.

'Halt!'

Beaumont jerked up his arm to warn those behind him
and it felt like jerking up a heavy weight. He pulled at the
sled to stop the dogs, handed the whip to Grayson, then
forced himself to start climbing the pressure wall to his left.
His fatigue was so enormous it felt like climbing a mountain
and as he clawed his way up the ice wall the distant murmur of the machine's engine urged him to hurry, hurry. It was a different sound, not the deadly beat-beat of a Soviet
helicopter. Once he slipped but his clawing gloves saved
him as he grabbed at the crest of the ridge and hauled himself over it. The night-glasses slung round his neck struck
his jaw but he was hardly aware of the pain as he sat astride
the crest and raised the glasses.

They were almost out of the pressure ridge maze: just ahead of them the frozen sea stretched away
like a level plain; very much like a frozen sea with ripples congealed on its surface. The plane, two thousand feet up, was flying south-west and would soon pass them at a distance of about half a mile. He fumbled with the focusing mechanism. Russian or American? The silhouette came up as a blur, so he thought he had the focus wrong, then he realized it was his tired eyes. His eyes cleared, the machine crisped in the lenses, a white star painted on its fuselage. American!

'Sam! Get a smoke flare off my sled. It's American .. .'

The exhausted men down in the ravine were galvanized. Grayson tore open the fastenings, Langer grabbed a flare
while Gorov watched the dogs, climbed halfway up the ice wall with the flare which Beaumont took from his extended
hand. His fingers were so frozen he had trouble dealing with
the flare. He tried to set it off, tried again. Nothing hap
pened. 'Give me another,' Beaumont shouted. 'This one's a
dud

There was a frantic scramble as Grayson and Langer
struggled to locate a second flare, and while they searched, the plane with red and green lights at its wingtips began to
turn, moving in an arc which would take it on a fresh course
due south. 'Hurry up, for God's sake!' Beaumont roared.
He saw that Grayson had found a flare, was going to bring
it up to him. 'Set it off down there in the ravine!'

The flare ignited, gushed dark smoke, climbed in the still
air like an Indian signal, billowed, went higher and higher.
And the plane went away, continued south, growing
smaller and smaller by the second. Grayson and Langer
scrambled up on to the crest beside him.

'It hasn't gone .. .'

There was anguish in Grayson's voice, crushing anguish,
and his shoulders sagged. 'Look back, you bloody fool,'
Beaumont said quietly. They watched the plane to vanishing
point. A silver pinhead in the moonlight, it disappeared
suddenly, leaving behind only the fading sound of its engine.
'It was a routine weather flight,' Beaumont observed, 'they
weren't looking for us.'

'I would like to shoot the Goddamned so-called observer in that machine,' Langer said with quiet venom. 'Maybe we
should have used the radio.'

'No!' Beaumont's tone was sharp. 'We're not using that
till we're within range of the
Elroy.
At this very moment
there will be a Soviet monitor crouched over his set waiting
for us to do just that - so he can take a radio-direction fix.
We'll get moving.'

The smoke flare climbed above them as they moved off in
silence. Even the dogs seemed subdued, felt to be pulling the
sleds with less vigour as they emerged from the pressure
ridges and went out on to the plain of ice. Afterwards Beau
mont blamed himself for not thinking of the danger, for
taking them out on to the exposed ice too soon, but the disappointment and the fatigue had dulled his brain. His arms
and wrists were aching with the strain, felt as though they
were on fire, half-pulled out of their sockets after hours of wrestling with the bucking sled. The numbing cold was
weakening his grip on the handlebar, he had to make an
enormous effort to keep tramping forward with an appearance of vigour, to keep the others moving.

'Look out!'

It was Langer who shouted the warning. 'Keep still!' Beaumont shouted his own warning as he brought the dogs to a sudden halt. Behind them the night was shattered with a beating roar. Rat-tat-tat throbs echoed across the ice. The nose of the shadow was bulbous with a second, smaller bulb below it. Twin rotors whipped the air, one above the other. A double-finned tail. Like an evil metal bird it swept over their heads at fifty feet, the ground shadow slicing over the ice.
A twin-jet submarine killer. The latest Soviet helicopter.

'Don't move!'

Beaumont reinforced his warning as the machine flew away from them, climbing now and beginning to turn. There was a chance that the men inside the Russian machine hadn't seen them. Moving at fifty miles an hour -Beaumont's estimate of the helicopter's speed - flashing over the ice where it had suddenly burst upon them from behind the pressure ridges, a Soviet observer would need sharp eyes to spot them. Seconds later he knew that sharp eyes had looked down on them from the machine. It was coming back. It was the smoke flare which had caused the disaster: the flare the American plane had never seen had guided a nearby Russian machine to them.

'What the hell is he going to do?' Langer asked.

'Depends how many men he has aboard,' Beaumont re
plied tersely.

It was travelling slower - and higher - coming in at least two hundred feet above them. So they had not only spotted
the sled teams, they had also seen the rifles looped over the men's shoulders. Beaumont handed over his restless team to
Grayson and stood a few yards away, his rifle in his hands. The oncoming submarine killer was a menacing shape, all bulges and rotors, and when it was almost above them it
began hovering while its drumbeat hammered the ice.
Beaumont hoisted his rifle.

The helicopter ceased hovering, banked and began
swinging in a wide circle, trailing a gauze of vapour in the
cold atmosphere. They had to swing on their heels to follow
the helicopter as it went round them, its engines drumming away. Then Langer grunted, hoisted his weapon. 'They've got a telescopic sight on us . . .' Looping his rifle over his
shoulder, Beaumont snatched up his night-glasses,

'Drop that rifle!' Beaumont spoke quickly as he continued
watching the machine through his glasses, pivoting on his
boots. A window had been lowered in the dome and the
moonlight reflected off something with a cylindrical muzzle.
'It's a cine-camera,' Beaumont warned. 'They're taking pictures of us - a nice peaceful occupation. With a tele
photo lens.' he added.

As he spoke the helicopter turned away, presented its
double tail-fins towards them and flew off to the north-east.
The beat of its twin rotors was fading rapidly as Beaumont ran back to his sled and took over from Grayson. 'I can't
figure why it didn't land,' the American said.

'My guess would be they hadn't enough men aboard.'
Beaumont stared across the belt of level ice into the distance
where more ridges reared up like hill ranges. 'And now we really have to get moving before they catch us in the open
again. Because when the Russians do come back they'll
have more than enough men.'

'Hold that frame!'

The Siberian's voice roared in the silence of the smoke-filled hut, a silence broken only by the whirring of the film projector. The operator stopped the machine, the image on the screen froze, the image of four men staring up at the camera, one man with a rifle, another man aiming a pair of glasses. A bloated shadow crossed the screen as Papanin
stood up and pointed, his shadow fingertip touching a
man holding the handlebar of a sled.

'That's him,' Papanin rumbled. 'That's Gorov. I'll bet
my pension on it.'

'You can't see his face,' Kramer objected from the dark
ness. 'You can't see any of the faces . . .'

'Bugger the faces! I watched the way this man moved, the
way he cocks his head to one side. That's Gorov, that's our
target.' The enormous fingertip shadow moved, touched the
fur-clad figure with glasses. 'And I think that's Beaumont. The other two must be Samuel Grayson and Horst Langer.'

'We recall all the planes from the north and west?' the Bait asked, anxious to anticipate the next order.

'You switch on the damned lights in this hut first,'

Papanin said softly. He looked round at one of the men sitting behind him. 'Vronsky, you can find them again?'

The twenty-eight-year-old Russian who had led the
security detachment brought from Murmansk stood up and went over to a wall map. Small, lean and mournful-faced,
Andrei Vronsky had lost both his parents a month earlier
when they had tried to drive over the frozen Volga near
Stalingrad: the river had cracked and swallowed them up. 'Here, Colonel,' he pointed to the cross he had drawn. 'We
took a star-fix ...'

'So you are confident?'

'We did find them . . .' Vronsky stopped speaking when
he noticed the Siberian's expression.

'You found their bloody smoke flare!' Papanin roared.
'You saw it from five miles away and changed course - you said so when I questioned you. God knows why they let off
that flare - maybe it went off by accident.'

'I suppose we were lucky ...'

'So I'll show you how to be lucky again!' Papanin took
the pencil off Vronsky and stared at the map. 'They are
heading for a rendezvous with the American icebreaker
Elroy
which is here. Draw a line down from Target-5 and
you see they are moving down the tenth meridian.'

'So we fly down that...'

'You shut up or listen! They will change direction for a while to throw us off the scent - they'll go either south-
south-east or south-south-west.' Papanin drew two slant
ing lines from the south to the point where Beaumont had been seen. 'Later they will resume their course due south.
Allowing for star-fix error, for ice-drift, you will find them
inside this triangle. Understand?'