Target 5 (8 page)

Tor God's sake, why?'

'Because Vandenberg and Callard think Tillotson's
aboard this machine . . .'

To escape the gunfire Beaumont was ascending vertically
as the altimeter needle climbed. In the pale glowing night
there was no sign of another helicopter: Tillotson had
vanished again. Beaumont turned east, the direction he
assumed Crocodile would take. 'And who is Callard?'
Grayson asked.

'The FBI man who came up here to arrest Tillotson.
Everything was beautifully laid on - the alert you men
tioned put into operation just before the Boeing landed -
which sealed off the base. Callard gets off the plane, drives
to the camp with Col Vandenberg, then when Tillotson
arrives they confront him.' Beaumont was maintaining an easterly course as he peered ahead: nothing but the flat
tened-out icecap in view. 'Nice and neat, Mr Callard's
plan,' Beaumont went on. 'It merely failed to take account
of Crocodile.'

'What happened?'

'I imagine Tillotson had a vague notion they might be on to him - he was the security chief, remember. Then he'd
wonder about the alert. Next thing he finds out from the
pilot that Callard came aboard at Washington at the last
minute - without anyone telling Tillotson. So he decides it's
time to catch the first plane out - I don't think anyone else
suspected he knew how to pilot a Sikorsky ...'

'Over there! To the north .. ,' Grayson pointed and
Beaumont looked to his left. More icecap, desolate, cold,
hideously barren. Then he saw it. Tillotson's machine was,
at a guess, ten miles away. A shadow, a swift-moving blip of
darkness scudding over the snow. Seconds later he saw the
machine which was casting the shadow. He began to change
direction.

'Why may our lives depend on stopping Tillotson?'
Grayson asked quietly.

Beaumont grunted as he aimed his machine along the
same course Tillotson was following. 'This could be a savage one, Sam, so you don't have to come. We have to lift a Soviet
scientist out of Target-5. He's coming across the ice from
North Pole 17- that's about twenty-five miles east across the
pack from Target-5 at the moment. We go in if fog closes
Target-5 and they can't send a plane in. It means going by
chopper with sleds aboard to the edge of the fog, then it's sledding the rest of the way.'

'And sledding back - all the way to Greenland?'

'I think so. Dawes doesn't - he hopes to pick us up again when we come out of the fog. I don't think they'll find us -so we'll have to sled all the way back to the coast. At least that's the official version - I've got another idea. And the Russian security forces will be on our tails. A very savage
one, Sam.'

'But there's no fog.'

'So we just sit around eating American Army rations. The
key date could be Sunday - tomorrow. I've arranged for
two Sikorskys to be ready for us at Curtis Field on the Green
land coast.'

'Tillotson's heading due north,' Grayson commented.

The American was using a pair of night-glasses he had
found in the cabin and the shadow of the Soviet agent's
machine was still more visible than the machine itself. With
out that shadow, Grayson reckoned they would have lost him. Beaumont glanced at the compass. Due north as Sam
had said.

'I think he's heading for the Humboldt Glacier,' Beaumont replied. 'I wonder why? If he'd gone due east he'd have made the coast - they keep these machines tanked up when they're on the ground so there'd be enough fuel. What the devil can there be for him on the Humboldt Glacier?' 'Why is he so important?' Grayson asked again. 'Because he knows too much about us,' Beaumont said tersely. 'He doesn't know about Gorov - the man we have to lift out. No one up here knew about him until I arrived. But he does know about the preparations for a trip. He knows Curtis Field is involved - the nearest airfield to Target-5-He had to know that because we needed those machines sending there. I'm just hoping to God he hasn't got a transmitter hidden away up here - that if we don't get to him in time he'll transmit to Leningrad. If that happens, Sam, none of us will qualify as very good insurance risks.'

The awesome sight of the Humboldt Glacier unfolded
itself as they flew closer. From high up on the icecap a
massive river of ice stretched down to a fiord far below, a
half-mile wide river of ice glistening like a sheet of fractured
crystal in the moonlight. It sheered down from the icecap
until it reached an icefall where it plunged over a monstrous cliff down to the fiord hundreds of feet below. As they came
closer they could see, at the bottom of the steep-sided fiord,
great icebergs marooned on the snowbound foreshore. Tillotson's Sikorsky had already landed, was perched on a knoll at the side of the glacier. For the third time Tillotson had vanished.

'He's the bloody invisible man,' Beaumont grumbled as
he circled above the stationary helicopter.

'Maybe he's still inside his machine - he waits for us to
land and then starts shooting before we can get out,'
Grayson suggested shrewdly.

'Maybe ...' Beaumont continued circling at about two
hundred feet. It made him almost dizzy to look down the sheer side of the glacier, and then he banked the machine
slightly. 'He's down there! See that smaller knoll further
down the glacier - look, you can see him moving now.'

'Land on that knoll.'

'Too small - we could go over the edge. I'm bringing us
down alongside Tillotson's machine, then he can't get away.
You stay with it in case he gives me the slip - and keep try
ing to raise Thule.'

Five times Grayson had used the radio to try and get
through and five times he had failed. 'Damned thing never
works when you need it,' Beaumont had commented. He hovered the machine, dropped it slowly and landed on the
knoll fifty yards away from the stationary machine. It had a
dead look, as though Tillotson never expected to return to
it. He switched off his motor. 'I should be back in an hour,
Sam,' he said casually as he put on his parka with difficulty.

Grayson nodded, knowing that if Tillotson was armed
with a rifle the Englishman could be dead in a good deal
less than an hour. But in the long dangerous trip to Spits
bergen the three men - Beaumont, Grayson and Horst
Langer - had learned never to waste words or energy. You just got on with the next job. And Beaumont's next job was
capturing or eliminating Tillotson.

The atmosphere inside the cabin was very warm and he tensed himself as he opened the door and picked up the
carbine. The temperature dropped - from forty above to
forty below. 'Get on with it,' Beaumont muttered to him
self. He dropped out of the machine and the iron-hard
ground hit his feet like a blow from a hammer. The paralysing cold choked him. He fastened the parka up to his
neck, pulled the hood over his head. Behind him Grayson
slammed the door shut quickly without so much as a word of
farewell. Again no wasted words. Above him the blades had
stopped whirling and an incredible silence descended, the
silence of the Arctic night.

He tried to take short breaths as he trudged past Tillot
son's Sikorsky to the edge of the knoll, then he stood looking
down the vast sweep of the glacier slope. The second knoll
further down the glacier was clearly visible in the moon
light, a small cap of rock surmounted by a crude wooden
cross. Tillotson was stooping over something perched on an
Eskimo grave, a sacred place in Greenland which couldn't
be disturbed under any circumstances by edict of the
Danish authorities. The something was a box-like object
with a small mast protruding above it. Beaumont's face
tightened: Tillotson did have a transmitter.

The rock side above the glacier was too steep to make his
way down, so he was forced on to the glacier itself. Ten
tatively, he began moving down the ice with the carbine
trailed in his hand: the light was too difficult to try a shot at
this range. He found the surface horribly treacherous and it was rather like climbing down the side of a skating rink in
clined at an angle, a skating rink corrugated with ridges and gullies. His rubber-soled shoes were not ideal footwear and
he was worried that if he started to slide he might never stop
before he reached the brink of the icefall. Grimly, he kept
moving as fast as he dared because Tillotson might already
be transmitting. And the Soviet agent, hidden behind the
knoll, was completely out of sight now.

Lower down it became much more dangerous because
frequently the glacier was split open, exposing crevasses of
unknown depth, dark gashes which disappeared in the
shadows. He had to move more slowly, using the carbine as
an improvised support, treading from one rib of ice to
another, crossing the narrow crevasses between. And all the
time he was waiting for the first slither. The intense cold didn't help: Beaumont, whose resistance to low temperatures was phenomenal, probably because of his boyhood
spent at Coppermine, wasn't properly clothed for Arctic
work. The cold was penetrating his gloves, infiltrating his parka, creeping up his legs.

He was very close to the knoll, no longer using the carbine
as a support, holding the weapon ready for instant use, when
he looked up for the third time in a minute. Tillotson had
appeared from the far
side of the knoll, a tall fur-clad figure
holding something in his right hand. Perched about twenty
feet above the Englishman, Tillotson whipped back his hand
in a throwing position. For one terrible, drawn-out moment Beaumont thought he was hurling a grenade. He jerked up
the carbine and then the missile was hurtling towards him.
It hit the ice, bounced, ricocheted. A rock. The realization
flashed through Beaumont's mind that Tillotson no longer
had a gun.

The aim was astonishingly good - or damned lucky. The
rock ricocheted off the ice, flew towards Beaumont's right
leg. He jumped sideways, the rock missed him, then he was
off-balance, falling, sliding down the glacier like a toboggan,
rushing towards the icefall brink.

The carbine was gone, slithering away under its own
momentum, preceding him over the icefall brink as Beau
mont tobogganning on his stomach, desperately tried to
halt the slide, to grab for any projection, to ram his foot in a
gully. And all the time as the bitter air hit his face and the
glacier whipped past under him he was expecting to halt, to
go down instead of forward, to drop inside a crevasse. The slide went on, he was shooting over the ice down a smooth
slope of polished surface tilted at an angle of thirty degrees. The parka saved his body from the friction and the grazing,
but he was still plunging downwards at increasing speed.
His gloves hammered at the ice, the toes of his shoes pressed
in hard, but he couldn't stop the diabolical momentum.

The brink of the icefall, a hard line with nothing beyond
it - nothing but a sheer drop of hundreds of feet - rushed
towards him, and he still couldn't slow down, let alone stop. He was in a perfect position to swallow-dive over the abyss.
He rammed his forearms down hard, reached the brink, was
going over. Endless space, depth, yawned below him and something spiky. His left arm felt the boulder, a rock em
bedded in the glacier.