Target 5 (30 page)

The Russian hit the ice with the back of his head. The
blow was cushioned by the fur hood he wore. Still sprawled
on his back, his own weapon dropped and out of reach, he grasped the Englishman's right boot and the hand was large
enough to encircle the ankle. The fingers locked and prepared to heave sideways. Beaumont ignored the danger,
concentrating on what he had to do. The rifle came down
from high up, hammered down on the Russian's forehead,
and the force of the downstroke was so great that the butt re
bounded. The hand locked round his ankle relaxed, the
head flopped sideways and the man lay still as Beaumont
bent down and heaved him over on to his
stomach. The
impact points - jaw and forehead - were now in contact
with the ice, so when they found him - if they ever found
him - it would look like an accident, an accident caused by
the Russian tripping and smashing his face down on the
iron-hard ground.

He took an even bigger risk now: he started running
again. He had counted about twenty men coming out of the
machine and they had to be spread over a rabbit warren of
ravines, so probably the arrangement was that when one of them located the fugitives they would open fire to bring the
others running. He was still running when he turned a
corner and a sheet of light came into view. He had reached
the exit - the open ice was ahead.

The roar of the waiting machine's rotors blasted his eardrums coming inside the ravine and he saw it barely a hundred yards away, its double fin facing him, the pilot's cabin looking the other way. It was a point he had noted from the
ridge crest and he had been praying the pilot hadn't swung
his machine round. He hadn't. And there was no guard
waiting at the edge of the ice. It didn't surprise Beaumont;
when you have twenty men at your disposal and you go in
to capture a group of four men you'd hardly anticipate that
one of them would be mad enough to head straight for the
machine. Beaumont headed straight for the machine.

He looped his rifle over his shoulder and began walking at
a moderate pace towards the rear of the helicopter. It
seemed a crazy thing to do, to walk slowly, but Beaumont was gambling on elementary psychology in case the pilot inside the cabin did look behind him. Reflexes moved fast
when jerked into action - the sight of an armed man run
ning across the ice towards the machine would provoke one
reaction in the pilot. He would pull the lever, take the
machine vertically off the ice. A five-second job. Beaumont
kept walking slowly, coming closer to the submarine killer.

Beaumont was fairly confident now that he was going to make it; although his fur hood and parka hardly matched the security men's outfit it was similar - similar enough when seen by moonlight through the ice-rimmed dome of a helicopter. As he neared the machine, as the deafening drumbeat increased in decibels, every nerve in his body was screaming at him to run, to cover the last fifty yards before the pilot turned his head. Beaumont kept walking at the same even pace, coming up directly behind the old-fashioned-looking tail, the kind of tail .biplanes had once sported. Unlooping his rifle, he walked past the tail, climbed up and hammered with his gloved fist on the misted dome.

The vibration shuddered him and nothing happened. He beat with his fist a second time and then the window slid
open. The rifle went inside at the same moment as warm air
wafted in his face, the muzzle pointed at a helmeted figure
who had jumped back into his seat behind the controls.
'Get out! Come on! Get out - quick!' Beaumont shouted in
Russian and jerked his head to show the pilot what he
wanted - with the drumbeat going full blast the pilot probably couldn't hear a word. Beaumont leaned in through the
window, jabbed the rifle muzzle hard into the pilot's side.
The Russian had goggles down over his eyes but Beaumont
had the impression he was young, maybe in his late
twenties. Young enough to be a hero. The pilot's right hand
moved towards a lever.

The lever, Beaumont guessed instantly, would elevate the helicopter. Suddenly the machine would be climbing and he would be suspended in mid-air, maybe jerked off to smash
on the ice below. 'Don't try it ...!' To drive the message home he rammed the muzzle harder into the pilot. The
Russian stared sideways and Beaumont read the man's
mind. He had guts: he was checking the weapon, wondering
whether he could survive the bullet. The calibre must have scared him: his hand moved away from the lever. 'Get up!
Up! Up!' Beaumont jerked his head and the pilot dis
connected his headset and slid carefully out of his seat.

Something in the pilot's stance warned Beaumont. The Russian paused halfway out of his seat, crouched like a cat, the lenses of his goggles catching the light from the instrument panel so his eyes were invisible. 'Come on,' Beaumont snapped, 'hurry it up.' The Russian came closer as Beaumont withdrew the rifle, cuddling it under his-arm, his finger still inside the trigger guard as he
used his other hand to press down the door handle, to slide it open. The pilot spread his hands in a slow gesture of surrender.

But the heroics weren't over yet. The pilot came slowly
through the doorway and then he was very close to Beaumont. He turned, as though obeying Beaumont's gesture for
him to drop to the ice; then, still crouched under the whirling rotors, he grabbed for the rifle, a reaction the English
man had anticipated. Beaumont slammed down the butt,
struck the Russian on the shin, and the pilot grabbed for the
door frame to regain his balance. Holding on to the frame
he straightened up on one leg. He came within range of the
steel blades of the lower rotor. They beheaded him.

Still crouched and clinging to the window frame, Beau
mont was stunned with horror. He swallowed bile. The
corpse was below him on the ice. Dark spots flecked the ice
around the huddled heap. The head had been hurled God
knew where by the whipping blades. It was incredible - a
helicopter pilot decapitated by his own rotor - but the
majority of accidents happen in the home, and for the pilot
the machine had been home. Shaking - and not only from
the vibration - Beaumont went inside the cabin and closed
the door on what lay below it. Then he eased himself into
the pilot's seat and stared at the control panel.

It was not entirely unlike the Sikorsky's control panel. And a year earlier Beaumont had visited the Soviet base, North Pole 15, now orbiting the Pole somewhere off the Siberian coast, where a vodka-filled pilot had shown him his submarine killer before the security man had arrived to drag them both out of the machine. Beaumont had sent a report to Washington and London about that machine and now he desperately tried to recall its details.

The altitude readings were in metres, of course. Most of
the dials and levers he understood, but there was one dial
and two switches he couldn't fathom. Cautiously he
touched the lever the pilot had reached for. Nothing hap
pened. He pushed it a shade further and the machine left
the ice. He pulled it towards him and felt the bump as the skids touched down again. The spare helmet he had taken from a hook and put over his head as soon as he sat down
was loose-fitting. He fastened it more tightly, clamping the
ear muffs closer to cut out the hellish row. The instrument
panel was juddering badly but he suspected some of this
was his own fatigue. Fiddling with several other controls, he
sorted out the set-up calmly, knowing that at any moment
the Russians on the ice might reach the sled-teams. But he
had to grasp the mechanism of this thing. He opened the
throttles and the twin jets boomed. He took a deep breath, operated the ascent lever.

Tuesday, 22 February: 11.30PM-Midnight

The machine climbed faster than he'd expected, shot up
vertically with a drumming roar. When the altimeter
registered one hundred metres he hovered, then flew for
ward. He changed direction, flew through the arc of a circle.
Beyond a clear patch in the perspex dome the
Elroy
appeared like a stranded toy, then vanished. The small lever which had puzzled him banked the helicopter. It was re
sponding to his touch now. Reluctantly. He had a feeling of enormous power locked in behind the panel, power itching to break loose, and in flight the cabin vibrated more than a Sikorsky's, vibrated like an old washing machine.

From above the ridges looked weird in the moonlight, levelled down to ribs of ice like the burial ground of pre
historic monsters, their long-dead bones bleached a pale colour. He saw two men moving along an ice corridor. He
ignored them, searching for the assembly point, the
strangely-shaped area they had crossed shortly before they heard the Russian machine coming. He sent the sled teams
back there to wait for him because it was the only place inside the ridges where a helicopter could land - a tiny
amphitheatre of ice, a bowl surrounded with pressure ridge walls. He flew over more Russians who stopped and stared
upwards, flew on some distance, then realized he
had over
shot the amphitheatre and turned.

Beaumont was becoming worried now. If he couldn't find
the amphitheatre first the Russians would reach the sled
teams, might even have reached them already. He saw
other fur-clad figures moving along the ravines, some of
them running, and all of them stopped to stare up at him,
wondering why the hell their machine had taken off from the ice. And conditions inside the large cabin could have
been better: the heaven-sent warmth was counteracted by a
smell which kept intruding on his stomach, a stench of
petrol fumes which was nauseating. Either there was some
thing wrong with the machine or Russian engine tech
nology lagged sadly behind British and American. Then he
saw it - a white circle among the shadows.

He operated the lever and started going down. Three
men, two sleds, the dogs were in the middle of the bowl, and
one of the men was waving frantically. Then five Russians
came over a nearby ridge crest and looked down into the bowl with rifles in their hands. Under the helmet Beau
mont's face was grim: he had arrived too late.

Pressing himself hard against the seat back, he banked the machine, lost altitude, increased the revs, flew straight for the Russians. Beyond the perspex dome he saw them standing on the crest, frozen with astonishment. The helmet and goggles he had put on helped the illusion, heightened the tension - because from the crest the five men saw their own machine, piloted by their own comrade, come screaming down towards them.

The row inside the cabin was deafening. The frame was
vibrating as though soon it would shake every rivet free
from the fuselage. Beaumont increased the revs again and
beyond the dome the five men flew towards him. He moved
the stick and the machine thundered over the crest, rotors
whipping, the skids just clearing the ridge - and the men
were gone, tumbling down the far side of the ridge as they
took desperate evading action. Beaumont climbed again,
turned, saw the Russians on their feet inside a wide ice
corridor. He dived, aimed the machine point-blank along
the corridor, and the security men, seeing what was coming, fled. Beaumont continued his power-dive, took the machine
down dangerously low, levelled out just above the crests,
continued on course along the corridor.

The skids missed the men's heads by feet - down inside the
corridor it must have seemed like inches as they flung them
selves to the ground and the reverberations of the engines pounded their eardrums. When Beaumont looked back they
had started to run again - away from the amphitheatre,
demoralized. His terror campaign was beginning to work. And it must seem terrifying to the security detachment who were bound to assume their own pilot was behind the con
trols, a pilot who had gone berserk. The irony was that no one would fire a single shot at him - the machine he was
flying was their only transport out of the terrible polar
wasteland. He made three more circuits of the amphi
theatre and then went down.