North Cape

Joe Poyer North Cape

CHAPTER 1

Fifty-eight degrees of frost. Twenty-six below zero F… From two hundred thousand feet, the surface of the earth below was void of all but the largest geological features. The land was a mixture of browns and grays, overlain with the misty white of a thin ice cover at sixty thousand feet. A barely discernible range of mountains stretched to the northeast beyond the narrow scope of vision allowed by the slit window. From this altitude, the lofty sixteen-thousand-foot peaks of the Urals appeared as softly rounded mounds almost lost in the sere browns of the surrounding plains. A thread of a river snaked down through, these plains from the narrow valleys and snowfields of the mountains and disappeared into the mist and cloud on the horizon. The land below spoke of peace and serenity; but the height obscured the hidden missile sites that could fling their deadly cargoes of thermonuclear death across continents and oceans; hid the military camps and bases scattered across the Asian mainland to meet the threat of enemies on two fronts.

The weather screen shifted focus to the northwest. Here the contrast was startling. Stretching far into the north of the continent and out across the Arctic Ocean, the northwestern swell of the Scandinavian Peninsula was covered with a huge storm that built even as Teleman watched. A hundred-mile-long streamer of cloud twisted around the tiny eye of the cyclonic storm sweeping down across the Great Barrier. All but the foremost edges of the storm were lost below the horizon, but in his imagination Teleman could picture the whole storm, covering five hundred thousand square miles on its leading edge, and God only knew how much in total. On the surface, one-hundred-milean-hour winds would be lashing the ocean into sixty-and seventy-foot waves to send them crashing onto the northern edges of the continental shelf. Salt spray blown off the crests of the waves would be turned instantly to ice and would batter to death all but the strongest ships that had the misfortune to be caught in the storm. This was an Arctic storm at its worst, a gale that could laugh at the puny efforts of the largest of its MidAtlantic and Caribbean cousins, a storm even more powerful and deadly than the coastal typhoons of the China Sea. For the next hour he would watch it grow through the forward observation slits and on his screen as he approached the Barents Sea. Lazily the pilot read the course plot and made a minor correction. He felt the plane bank over, the gulping ramjets running up with a steady murmur. He checked the instrument panels, all 573 dials, verniers, and digital readouts. Airspeed, course fix, engine temperature, fuel, contact point countdown, ambient temperature, internal temperatures in a hundred different locations throughout the aircraft, star fix coordinates, metal flex, accumulators, liquid oxygen generators, batteries, hydraulics, altitude, trim, generators, cameras, blood pressure, acid-base balance, pee; p°s, renal function, EKG… all checked themselves green on the boards.

Teleman — Major Joseph Teleman, USAF Ret — lay back in the acceleration couch and relaxed, suffused with the languid feeling of tranquilizers as the Physiological Control and Monitoring System (PCMS) accomplished its programed tasks and he was fully in control of his body again.

The airspeed indicated was slightly over Mach 1.5, with contact less than one hour away. The on-board computers had decided that he was fully capable of handling the aircraft at this relative crawl and had withdrawn all booster drugs. He settled back, one hand casually resting on the finger controls, and enjoyed the comfortable murmur of the engines and the passing scene below.

For the next twenty minutes the reconnaissance plane would drone on across the roof of Soviet Russia, skirting the Moscow antiaircraft missile defense ring by 250 miles, as it headed for the Barents Sea and rendezvous with the U. S. Navy battle cruiser that would accept the cargo of precious military information.

Above, traveling in overlapping polar orbits at six hundred nautical miles in carefully calculated paths that would circumscribe the earth every thirty minutes, a complex of Advanced SAMOS 3 satellites relayed information between one another and their ground point in Virginia. Shortly, the encoder on board clicked softly to itself and began displaying, in digital shorthand, information on a particularly suspicious ground location. One of the SAMOS 3 satellites had observed a small area of low-level infrared radiation where none had existed before. The location was in the vicinity of Magnitogorsk, the center of the Soviet electronics research.