'Three miles — a little over eleven thousand feet, sir!' the radar-operator sang out.
'Is he still on the same bearing?'
'Sir.'
'Can he see the floe?'
'Yes, sir. Cloudbase is thirteen-and-one-half thousand.'
'Then let's surprise him, gentlemen,' Seerbacker said with a grim smile. 'Blow all tanks — hit it!'
The floe was the only thing down there that Gant really saw. He had dropped out of the cloud at thirteen thousand feet, only three minutes or a little more away from the target — and there it was. Big, perhaps two miles north-south, and almost the same across. It lay directly in his path. On the radar-screen, there was no craft of any kind. Yet the target lay less than six miles ahead of him. That floe was the right distance away. Only its distance from him had made him regard it at all.
He knew it had to be the floe. For a long time he had suspected that he had never been intended to reach the polar-pack, nor had he ever been intended to rendezvous with a tanker-aircraft — that would have been too risky, too dangerous by half. It had to be the floe — and a landing. His eyes searched ahead, saw nothing. For a moment, then, he felt close to panic. A flat floe, like a dirty white water-lily on the surface of the bitter Arctic water. It was surrounded by others, smaller for the most part. There was no sign of life! He felt the bile of fear at the back of his throat, and his mind refused to function, analyse the information — then it happened. The signal changed, the homing-signal began to emit a broken, bleeping call, two to the second. He recognised its similarity to a sonar- contact, instantaneous echo. Even as the seconds passed, the bleep became more and more insistent, urgent. He
When it came, it came with the sudden shock of freezing water, or a physical blow. At the western edge of the floe, away to port, and still ahead of him, the ice buckled, curled at the edge before cracking. The reinforced sail of a nuclear submarine came into view, and Gant saw the bulk of the ship beneath; ice spun away from it, sliding from its hull.
A bright orange balloon was released from the sail, and then an orange streamer of smoke which spurted vertically before the wind tugged it flat downwind of the submarine. Gant knew as soon as he saw the emerging sail that he was looking at an American submarine.
Automatically, he checked the radar. Negative. He eased on power, felt the aircraft shove forward, and dropped the nose. As he touched on the air-brakes, and stabilised his speed at 260 knots, the smoke was passing beneath his wingtip. He noticed, with almost idle curiosity, that the sonar-like pinging of the homing device had changed to a continuous signal — instantaneous echo. The target was below him, a submarine of paraffin; it would be a matter of less than an hour before he was refuelled, and ready to take off. He hauled the aircraft to the left, in a rate one turn that would line him up in the direction of the wind-flattened smoke from the sail.
The wind direction was such that he would land along the north-south axis of the floe, which gave him almost two miles of snow-covered ice in which to stop. He knew the snow, unless it was utterly frozen, would act as an efficient braking-sytsem — it would be, he told himself with a grim smile, the relief at finding the sub still warming him, like landing on a carrier — something else he had learned to do in Vietnam.
He dropped the undercarriage, and the lights glowed, registered the wheels 'locked'. He slowed his speed to 220 knots, and levelled the wings. The floe was ahead, with the dark cigar of the submarine embedded in it, a lizard half-emerged from its shell, its streamer of orange smoke in line with his course.
He checked back on the stick, and read his altitude as one thousand feet. He dropped his speed to 180 knots, and stabilised there. His rate of descent was now 350 feet per minute. The grey, wrinkled waves, seemed to speed up, to reach up at him hungrily. He eased back the throttles, and the speed dropped to 175 knots. He was almost dazzled now by the glare of the ice-floe, yet through the dazzle, the surface still looked good.
He chopped the throttles, and the Firefox suddenly seemed to sag tiredly in the air, began to sink. He checked back on the stick into the flare-out position. On full flap, the Firefox seemed to drop for a moment, then the plane jolted viciously as the wheels bit into the surface snow, and the nose-wheel slammed down. Visibility disappeared for a moment as the snow spewed around the nose, and it was a second or more before the de-mister coped. The forward screen cleared. Even as Gant wondered whether the engine would flame out because of snow in the air-intakes, he saw that his visibility had disappeared. He was rushing across a surface of ice and snow, enveloped in a thick, rolling grey fog.
Nine
PRESSURE
Gant understood what had happened — dewpoint; the formation of a thick, rolling blanket of fog along his rushing track had been almost instantaneous. The knowledge did not lessen the rising unease he felt, could not counteract the explosion of adrenalin in his system. The engines had not flamed out, and the snow flung up around the cockpit by the nose-wheel had slid from the screen — yet he could see nothing. He was helpless — the snow on the surface of the floe was slowing the aircraft as swiftly as any reverse thrust from the engines and yet he was slipping across an ice surface, down the north-south axis of a floe, towards the icy grey waters of the Barents Sea. If the size of the floe were too small, inadequate, if he had miscalculated.
The Firefox slowed to walking pace, trundling more unevenly now, jolted by the indentations and scabs of the surface ice beneath the thin blanket of snow. And the fog was already thinning, as the turbulence of his passage became less; it was spreading, thinning to a grey, damp mist. He looked over his shoulder, shifting in the couch for perhaps the first time in an hour. He could not see the orange balloon, nor could he see the line of the streamer of smoke, which would give him some indication of the direction of the sub. He turned the aircraft to port, through one hundred and eighty degrees, and taxied back up the line of his landing, crawling forward, his eyes searching for figures moving in the mist, lights or signals which might direct him. He felt the unease and the adrenalin drain from him. He was down.
He thought he saw a lumping, shapeless figure moving to port of him, but could not be sure. The mist seemed to have thickened again. The figure had not been carrying a light. He pressed the button, and raised the cockpit cover. The sudden change of temperature as the heated air of the cabin rushed out and was replaced by the Arctic air above the floe seemed to knife through the protection of the anti-G suit as if it had been made of thin summerweight cotton. He was chilled to the bone in a moment, his teeth chattering uncontrollably behind the tinted facemask of his flying helmet. His hands on the controls seemed to tremble, as if registering the groundshock of an explosion. He unlocked the helmet and tugged it up and away from his head. His cropped head seemed to prickle with a cold fire. Ignoring the noise of his teeth, he craned his head, listening and looking in the direction from which he had glimpsed the figure in the mist.
He thought, twice, in swift succession, that he heard voices away to his left, that he was paralleling the path of men searching for him — but he couldn't be certain. The voices, like the cries of alien birds, seemed to distort in the thick mist, and he couldn't be sure of the direction from which they came. Then he realised that the men would be heading to what they would have assumed was the point of his halt, behind him now — they would not, perhaps, have expected him automatically to make a 180 degree turn, and cover his tracks.
Then he saw a dull glow, lighting a misshapen, lumbering figure, a lamp held low in a swinging hand. He heard his own name being called, loudly, yet seeming faint, unsubstantial. He did not reply, and the figure called again. Gant felt a curious reluctance to speak, despite the cold, despite the sudden, rushing sense of loneliness, of the interminable time of his journey from Bilyarsk — and before that, from London. The voice was American. He smiled, in spite of his detachment — that was it, he recognised, it was detachment he felt, a sense of
