Target 5 Read online

  General Dawes is a short, heavily-built man of fifty-three who looks like a company executive. He wears sober, grey business suits, has a fondness for tropical plants, and he hates cold weather. Which was probably why he was appointed to oversee operations in the Arctic zone. At three in the morning on 19 February he was pacing round his office in his shirt-sleeves, sweating a little from the temperature of eighty-three degrees which was kept constant by a sophisticated system of temperature control. Eighty-three degrees was obligatory to keep the tropical plants which festooned his office alive. It was also why less reverent members of his staff referred to the room as the Jungle Box.

  'Beaumont just came in - they're driving him from the airport now, General. . .'

  Jerry Adams, Dawes's assistant, held a lean hand over the mouthpiece of the phone as he went on talking. 'The plane nearly flipped when it landed, but he's OK. Any special instructions? The car bringing him in is on radio . . .'

  'Just get him here - fast!'

  'He could go to a hotel first, get freshened up,' Adams pressed. 'It would give us time to chew this around . . .'

  'We snatched him off that express,' Dawes growled. 'I know him - he'll be climbing walls already. It won't be easy to persuade him, and it will be a damned sight less easy if we park him - give him time to think. This one I'm rushing him into - so get him here!'

  Adams, a thin, studious-looking man of thirty-five, raised his dark eyebrows in silent disapproval and gave the instruction. He put down the phone and adjusted his rimless glasses. 'I still don't see why we need this Englishman. The way I see this thing developing it's a simple operation and we can do it with our own boys. When we know Gorov is heading for Target-5 we send in a plane, it takes him aboard, it flies him out . . .'

  'Simple?' Dawes completed one more circuit round the room with his bouncy walk and sat down behind his large bare desk. 'Simple?' he repeated softly. 'As simple as falling off the Pan-Am building - and you break your neck that way, too.'

  'Given a little luck it could be a smooth run . ..'

  'A little luck?' Dawes's tone was deceptively quiet. 'You could be right there, Adams,' he went on genially. 'We have an important Russian coming over to us - maybe the most important Russian who ever left the Soviet Union. Agreed?'

  'That's true,' Adams said innocently.

  'He's going to make a run for it,' Dawes continued in the same even tone. 'He's starting from the Soviet ice island North Pole 17,* and he'll run for our nearest research base, Target-5, which at this moment in time happens to be twenty-five miles west of the Soviet island. As of now there are only three professors on Target-5 waiting to be evacuated before the island breaks up. Are you with me?' he inquired.

  'All the way, sir ...'

  'None of those three professors on Target-5 has any idea of what's going to happen - that Gorov will soon be on his way there over the polar pack.' Dawes was speaking faster now, holding Adams's gaze with his cold blue eyes. 'We can't tell them because they haven't got top security clearance . . .'

  'Maybe after all we should radio them,' Adams suggested, 'give them a hint...'

  'Hint hell! It's only recently we knew Gorov was coming. I can't send in a planeload of men too soon because that might alert the Russians. They might seal off their base -which would seal in Gorov. The whole guts of the thing at this stage is that conditions at Target-5 must appear totally normal and damned quiet.'

  'I still don't see where Beaumont comes in.'

  Dawes studied Adams before replying. At thirty-five Jerry Adams had more academic qualifications for his job than Dawes could remember. He was fluent in six languages, including Russian and Serbo-Croat. He was an expert cryptographer, a specialist in radio-communications, and he was reputed to be one of the six best interrogators inside the United States. There was only one Arctic qualification he lacked - the only ice he'd seen had been inside a cocktail shaker.

  'Fog,' Dawes said.

  * All major Soviet floating bases in the Arctic are prefixed by the words 'North Pole', followed by a number. The base so named may, in fact, .be drifting hundreds of miles from the Pole itself.

  'Fog?'

  'Supposing Target-5* gets fogbound,' Dawes suggested with a grim note in his voice. 'How do we get in then to take out Gorov? We can't fly in - we can't sail in across solid polar pack - so we'll have to walk in, sled across the ice. That's why we could need Beaumont.'

  * Very large ice islands in the Arctic are called Targets by the Americans. T-1 (Target-1), the earliest known ice island, was fast seen by the radar officer of a Superfortress off the Canadian Arctic coast on 14 August 1946.

  'He's a piece of insurance?'

  'Yes.' Dawes looked at the closed door to his office as though Beaumont might fill the doorway at any moment. 'The only trouble is he doesn't know he's just a piece of insurance - and I'm not telling him. Just to put your anxious brain at rest, Adams, I'll list his qualifications . ..'

  'We have no one else who could take a sled across the pack?' Adams asked with a note of incredulity. 'Surely that's a simple enough operation?'

  'Sometimes I wonder why I employ you,' Dawes said with a genuine tone of wonderment. 'Sledding is the roughest, toughest job on the face of God's earth.' He stood up and walked quickly over to a huge wall map. 'Come here and I'll teach you something they forgot to tell you at Harvard.'

  He stared up at the map of the Arctic zone. At the top hovered the coast of Russia with Murmansk and Leningrad to the right. The centre point of the map was the North Pole with Spitsbergen, Greenland and the Canadian and Alaskan coasts below. The marker showing the present position of Target-5 was very low down, pinned just above Iceberg Alley, the dangerous funnel of moving ice between Greenland and Spitsbergen.

  'Target-5 is now drifting a hundred and twenty miles off the Greenland coast,' Dawes said quietly. 'Twenty-five miles further east is the Soviet base, North Pole 17, where Gorov will make his run from. Every day those two slabs of ice supporting those bases are drifting with the pack closer to Iceberg Alley. Beaumont calls it the most dangerous place on earth - and I agree with him.'

  'His qualifications?' Adams pressed.

  'Unusual. His mother was Canadian, his father British -he was killed during the war. They're both dead now. Beaumont was brought to Canada as a child in 1943 and taken to Coppermine at the edge of the Arctic. He grew up among the ice - close to where the ice islands are born when they crack off the Canadian ice shelf. In 1952 he was sent back to Britain to complete his education and he became interested in aviation. He married in 1965 - when he was twenty-five -and three weeks after the marriage a hit-and-run drunk killed his wife.'

  'Traumatic,' Adams murmured.

  Tor the hit-and-run killer, yes. They found him, charged him, and Beaumont was in court when he was sentenced in London. Before they got him out of the witness box Beaumont got to him and half-killed him. He was let off with a suspended sentence and came straight back to Canada.'

  'That would be seven years ago?' Adams estimated.

  'Nice to know you can add up,' Dawes commented. 'Since then he's spent most of his life in the Arctic - working part of the time for the Arctic Research Laboratory people at Point Barrow, part of the time for us. He's the man who brought us all that data on the Soviet submarine killer chopper when it first showed in the Arctic.' Dawes grunted at the memory. 'He's got top security classification and he speaks fluent Russian. If that isn't enough there was the Spitsbergen trip.'

  'What was that, sir?'

  'Our security must be better than I thought,' Dawes observed with a wintry smile. 'But you were in Saigon at the time. Last year three men set out across the pack to prove something we thought was impossible could be done - they crossed all the way from Greenland to Spitsbergen by sled. It didn't get into the papers because that trip has military implications. The three men were Sam Grayson and Horst Langer - now waiting up at Thule - and their leader, Beaumont.'

  'He sounds - promising,' Adams conceded. 'But we o
nly use him if Target-5 becomes fogged in?'

  'Correct! The trouble is Beaumont will only go straight back to Greenland if I tell him he's going there to bring out Michael Gorov ...'

  'But you don't know that,' Adams protested. 'The latest met report shows clear weather over the whole area ...'

  'So I show him my latest met report.' Dawes went back to his desk and extracted a typed form which he handed to Adams. 'He's just spent two bad years in the Arctic so it's going to be hell's teeth to persuade him to go back. That bit of forgery should help.'

  Adams stared at the sheet of paper. It was an official met report, dated and timed eight hours earlier. Weather conditions vicinity Target-5 deteriorating rapidly. Dense fog. Visibility nil. Temperature forty-five below. Conditions expected to worsen. Adams looked up from the report. 'What happens when he finds out you've fooled him?'

  'He'll blow his top - but by then he'll be at Thule, Greenland, I hope.' Dawes took a short fat cigar out of a box and put it in his mouth without lighting it. He was trying to give up smoking for thirty days and so far he'd lasted out a fortnight. 'You've heard about the security leak at Thule?' he asked casually.

  'No.' Adams straightened up in his chair. 'What leak?'

  'Callard of the FBI warned me two hours ago.' Dawes blew out the match he had absentmindedly lit and his expression was grim. 'It appears a top Soviet agent has been sending out a stream of information for over two years. They know his code-name - Crocodile - and they expect to come up with his real identity soon.'

  'That could jeopardize this whole operation,' Adams said slowly.

  'I don't think so - I'm going to warn Beaumont to deal only with the security chief up there, Tillotson.' Dawes checked his watch. 'And Beaumont should be here soon, so brace yourself, Adams.'

  The moon was high, the night was clear, and the sky glittered with the spread of the Great Bear constellation hovering above the polar pack. In the bitter cold of the long night Target-5 was besieged.

  One hundred and twenty miles east of the Greenland coast, only twenty-five miles west of the Soviet ice island, North Pole 17, Target-5 was besieged by the pack grinding up against it, pressing against its cliff-like fringes, a constantly moving pack of billions of tons of ice which squeaked and gibbered as it tried to smash the island trapped inside its pressure.

  It had been trying to smash the island for thirty years -ever since Target-5 had broken away from the Canadian ice shelf in 1942 when it started its spectacular orbits round the North Pole. But so far the pack had made no impression on the twenty-foot-high cliffs which reared above it because it was salt-water ice - ice formed out of the sea. The massive island, a mile in diameter, was tougher.

  Target-5 was made of freshwater ice, which is harder than its salt-water counterpart. And it had a long pedigree. For hundreds of years the ice shelf at the edge of the Canadian coast had been built up by the slow-moving flow of glaciers debouching into the frozen sea. Layer by layer the shelf had been formed until it was two hundred feet deep. Target-5 was a fragment of this shelf - a mile-wide fragment which had broken loose and drifted with the pack for thirty years.

  It was starting its fourth ten-year orbit round the Pole, was heading once more for the Canadian Arctic coast, when the Greenland Current caught it. The huge slab of ice was dragged further south than it had ever moved before. Soon it was close to the funnel between Greenland and Spitsbergen, and then it reached the point of no return and continued heading south instead of west, south towards Iceberg Alley.

  In faraway Washington Dawes was still waiting for Beaumont when Dr Matthew Conway, the fifty-year-old station leader on Target-5, came out of the headquarters hut to take another star-fix with his sextant. A normally placid man, Conway was edgy as he fiddled with the instrument, and his irritation wasn't helped by the fact that a second man joined him almost as soon as he was outside. Jeff Rickard, the thirty-two-year-old wireless operator shut the door behind him quickly to keep in the warmth. 'Any sign of activity, Matt?' he inquired.

  'Lots of it,' Conway replied with forced humour. 'A Greyhound bus for Omaha just went by.'

  'Jesus, if that were only true! Any sign of the Russians, I meant.'

  'I know what you meant.'

  They stood in the middle of the twelve flat-roofed huts which formed the research base in the centre of the island. Across a narrow avenue of beaten snow six huts faced six more, and from a hut further down the avenue a wireless mast speared up into the moonlit night. In the distance all around them, at no point more than half a mile away, the enemy - the polar pack - was squeaking and gibbering like some huge beast in pain. It reminded them that the pack was alive, was moving and grinding up against the small cliffs which still held it back. A fresh sound came, a sharp report like a rifle crack.

  'What the hell was that?' Rickard whispered.

  'A piece of ice breaking off,' Conway said wearily. 'Get back inside with Sondeborg, would you, Jeff. I want to finish this job.'

  'He's in one of his moods. I think he's getting worse, Matt.'

  Conway, his face turned away from Rickard, tightened his mouth as he tried to concentrate on the star-fix. Sondeborg, twenty-six years old and the youngest of the three men, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, whatever that might be. It was the isolation, of course, and it was near the end of their time on the island. In twelve days the plane would come to evacuate them from the doomed island and now the hours - even the minutes - were like years.

  There search base was surrounded on all sides by a smooth snowbound plateau running away to the cliffs - on all sides except to the south where a small hill rose, its summit forty feet above the plateau. Here, over a hundred miles from the nearest coast, was a hill littered with giant, snow-covered boulders, real rocks, some of them the size of small bungalows. Ages ago they had been carried down inside a glacier and deposited on the Canadian ice shelf- and when the huge slab of ice had torn itself loose it had carried the hill with it.

  The door behind Conway opened again and he felt his self-control going. Sondeborg was joining them. It was getting very difficult: no man wanted to be left on his own in this terrible solitude, even inside a warm hut, but when they were together they ground up against each other like the ice grinding against the nearby cliffs. 'Shut that door, Harvey,' Conway said as he pressed his eye to the instrument. The door slammed behind him.

  'Those Russians have gone!' Sondeborg's voice was unsteady, close to hysteria. 'They've got more sense than we have - they've evacuated their bloody base while there was still time. Why the hell don't we wireless for our plane? Everything's packed ...'

  'That's enough!' Conway lowered his sextant and swung round to face Sondeborg. 'Everything isn't packed yet - and you still have experiments to complete ...'

  'Damn the experiments!' Sondeborg blazed. "There's a queer feeling about this place ...'

  'You've been on Target-5 eleven months,' Conway interjected. 'It's still the same place.'

  'It isn't in the same place,' Sondeborg rapped back. 'We're oft. the edge of Iceberg Alley ...'

  'Get back inside and make some coffee,' Conway snapped. 'We could all do with something hot to drink.' The door slammed again as Sondeborg stormed back inside the hut.

  'Better go with him, Jeff,' Conway advised, 'you know what he's like on his own. Then you can try and get through to Thule again - I want them to know our new position.'

  'I'll try.' Rickard sounded doubtful. 'There's very bad static building up. I think we're cut off. It could be a weather change coming.'

  Conway was frowning as he finished taking his star-fix. The reference to bad radio communication - or no communication at all - worried him more than he cared to show. He finished taking his star-fix and paused before going inside while he scanned the familiar wilderness of frozen sea and endless ice. For a reason he couldn't fathom Conway felt afraid.

  There was sub-tropical heat and tension inside Dawes's office, a heat and a tension which made the three men sweat. It was Bea
umont who had introduced the tension. He sat in his shirt-sleeves, his hands clasped over his large knees as he stared up at Dawes. 'All right, you've given me the picture. Now - what makes this Russian, Michael Gorov, so damned important?'

  'All you need to know is that he's important,' Adams intervened. 'The specifics are top secret.'

  Beaumont swivelled his head briefly to give the assistant a hard bleak look, then he turned back to Dawes who answered quickly. 'Michael Gorov is the Soviet Union's number one oceanographer. He personally supervised the laying of their entire Sosus and Caesar* system along the Arctic seabed. And he's bringing with him the Catherine charts - the complete blueprint of that system which guides their subs under the Arctic ice to our shores. Does that tell you anything?'

  'It suggests that Gorov is - important.'