LONDON AND SYDNEY

First published 1973 by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd

This edition published 1974 by Pan Books Ltd, Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG

ISBN 0 330 24023 4

2nd Printing 1974 © Colin Forbes 1973

Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, London, Reading and Fakenham

For Jane

Opening Gambit:

THE LOCOMOTIVE

Running Game:

THE FROZEN SEA

Checkmate:

THE KILLING GROUND

=========================

Opening Gambit

Even in the year 1972, a year which will hardly be noted in the calendar of history as a year of peace, it Was not common for an express to be stopped in the middle of the night - in the middle of nowhere - while a passenger was dragged off it by armed men. Especially an American express.

And this traumatic experience was certainly something that Keith Beaumont had no inkling of as he relaxed in bed inside a sleeping-car aboard the Florida Express; for one thing, the thirty-two-car train was roaring through the Carolinas at over ninety miles an hour, while outside the February storm beat at the curtained windows; for another thing, the next scheduled stop was over two hours away.

With the windows sealed tight against the rising storm, with the central heating turned up to God knew how many degrees, it was hot and steamy and airless inside the sleeping-car, so hot that the large Englishman was having trouble sleeping as he eased himself up on one elbow and checked his watch. Close to midnight. Behind the zipped- curtain which shut him off from the corridor, he settled down again on his pillow and wrapped his hands behind his broad neck, dreaming with his eyes open.

By morning he'd be in Miami, thousands of miles away from Greenland - away from guiding frightened dogs through screaming blizzards, away from hauling bucking sleds over tumbled ice, above all away from endless darkness and cold that paralysed the brain. It was also wonderful to be dry again; Beaumont pressed his stockinged feet hard against the end of the bed and revelled in the warmth.

Twenty miles ahead of the express thundering through the storm-swept night three armed men were not so dry as they huddled in the pouring rain. Standing under the canopy of a whistle-stop station in the middle of nowhere, they waited for the oncoming express which wasn't scheduled to stop for another two hours. The signals were already changing against it, the driver of the huge diesel motor hauling the long, long train was already applying his massive brakes. The emergency was imminent.

'I hope to God he's on board,' one of the raincoated men mumbled as he clenched a sodden cigarette between his teeth.,

'He's on board,' the forty-year-old leader of the group assured his companion. 'And we're taking him off it.'

'It could be tricky .. .'

'This says it won't be tricky.' The older man extracted a .45 Colt revolver from his pocket, checked the cylinder, put it away again. 'And don't forget, Jo, we have to make it look good - real good.'

Less than twenty miles up the track the driver of the Florida Express was staring anxiously into the night. The signal he had just passed had ordered a reduction of speed but the next stop was two hours away, so what the hell was happening? He went on cutting the speed, applying the great brakes slowly. Rain hammered his steel cab roof, trails of spume whipped off the roof and vanished in the dark. The next signal flashed by. Red for danger, for stop. What the devil was going on? He applied the brakes more strongly. They were close to Cedar Falls, an unscheduled stop.

Two minutes later the train ground to a halt as a thunderclap burst and rain lashed the sides of the cars. Inside his roomette Beaumont settled down to sleep while the train was still, his large hands clasped outside the sheet. His eyes were closed when the curtains were torn open and a man with a sodden hat brim looked down at him while he checked a photograph in his left hand. 'It's him, Jo,' a quiet voice said.

Beaumont opened his eyes and stared into the muzzle of a Colt .45 revolver.

'Move that thing,' he murmured. 'It might go off - your hand's sticky.'

When he opened his eyes Beaumont registered several swift impressions - the sodden raincoat the man holding the gun wore, the steam rising off the man's sleeves, the scared look on the face of the passenger in the roomette across the corridor, the second raincoated man standing in the background with one hand inside his pocket. The older American, who was feeling the heat - there were sweat beads on his forehead - replied in a flat tone.

'Get dressed - you're getting off the train ...'

'And who the hell might you be?' Beaumont demanded.

Exhausted, tired out by his long trip from Greenland to Washington, he estimated his chances carefully. A hard chopping blow to knock the Colt out of the gunman's hand, a knee in the groin... No, it was too dangerous - with other passengers in the sleeping-car.

'Dixon, FBI,' the man with the sweaty forehead snapped. 'And hurry it up - this train can't wait all night...'

'It doesn't have to - it can get moving now as far as I'm concerned. With me on board. And you've made a very bad mistake - I'm British .. .' Beaumont reached towards his jacket hanging from a hook.

'Watch it...' Dixon warned.

The Englishman stared at him over the width of his very broad shoulders and Dixon felt uncomfortable. 'I'm showing you my passport, for God's sake,' Beaumont rumbled. He took it from the inner jacket pocket carefully, extracted it with his fingertips and handed it to Dixon. The American opened the passport expertly with one hand, studied it for a moment, then showed it to the man behind him. 'It's as phoney as hell, Jo.'

Beaumont made no comment as he pushed back the bedclothes and showed that he was fully dressed except for tie, jacket and shoes. As the Englishman climbed out of bed and stood up Dixon backed away and stared. Keith Beaumont, thirty-two years old, was six foot two tall, broad-shouldered and weighed over fourteen stone. Not that Dixon was too impressed as he watched the Englishman quietly getting dressed; a big ox was slow-moving. After a minute he checked his watch.

'Hurry it up,' Dixon repeated. He had been right: this man was slow in the reflexes.

'Get stuffed.'

The passenger in the roomette opposite was getting over his shock. 'I'm Andrew Phillipson from Minneapolis,' he informed Dixon in a glib voice. 'This guy said he was from Greenland - Greenland where all that ice is. I thought it was funny ...'

'He'll be off the train in a minute,' Dixon broke in, 'then you can get back to sleep.' He looked at Beaumont who had finished dressing. 'That your bag? Good. Now, place both hands on the bed - close together.' There was a faint clink of metal as Dixon's companion took his hand out of his pocket. Beaumont shook his large head which was covered with thick dark hair and smiled grimly.

'So your friend can slip handcuffs on me? I'm not playing, Dixon, so you'd better make up your mind - do I come as I am or do you shoot me?'

They went down the corridor with Beaumont's hands still free, preceded by the man called Jo who carried the Englishman's suitcase while Dixon brought up the rear. Curtains screening the roomettes were pulled aside as passengers peered out at the little procession. Behind Dixon bare feet padded down the corridor as Phillipson hurried to catch him up. 'Who is the guy?' he called out excitedly. 'He talked to me so maybe I can help ...'

'Break-out from Folsom,' Dixon told him tersely.

Beaumont stumbled as he went down the steep steps at the end of the car, his shoulders sagging. Big, sleepy and clumsy, Dixon noted. At the bottom of the steps Beaumont paused on the track to button up his coat and pull his hat down over his ears. Cedar Falls was a small, single-storey building at the edge of a forest with a side exit leading out into a road beyond. Beaumont saw this as lightning flashed, showing a brief, stark view of wind bending trees to the south, then a curtain of rain whooshed down the track and soaked him. A few yards away one of the train crew was watching with a mixture of nervousness and curiosity. A second railroad official stood under the station canopy. Dixon came down the steps behind him, nudged him with the Colt.

'Get moving - through that exit.'

They started walking with the other American still in front, carrying Beaumont's case. Then there was another flash which wasn't lightning at all: the railroad man under the canopy had just taken a picture of Beaumont with his Polaroid camera. 'Jo,' Dixon called out, 'get that picture.'*

Jo cut away from them, heading for the station building as Beaumont plodded towards the exit. A second flash of lightning showed him the car beyond the exit they were moving towards, a big, red, expensive-looking car. Rain was bouncing off its roof. His shoulders sagged a little lower, he was careful not to alter pace, to show any reaction. But he was sure now - these men weren't FBI agents.

They went through the exit into the dark, away from the blurred lights of the train, away from people, their feet tramping through pools of muddy water. Seen at close quarters the car was very big, very expensive-looking, and behind the wheel a third man had his head twisted round to watch them coming. Dixon opened the rear door for the Englishman as Beaumont fumbled inside his coat pocket, a coat Dixon had already checked before letting him put it on. Taking out a pack of cigarettes, Beaumont nodded towards the interior of the car.

'It's all right, Dixon,' he said amiably. 'I've got the message - I'm coming with you.' He cupped a hand to shield the match he had struck, still standing on the far side of the half-open door. The American hesitated, caught off guard by the sudden change of mood. A moment later he revised air his ideas about Beaumont's size and clumsiness, a moment too late. The Englishman rammed his large body hard and brutally against the car door which closed - closed on Dixon's hand and arm.

It was a reasonable risk, Beaumont had calculated - at the worst the gun would be fired harmlessly inside the car, at the best the Colt would drop into the mud in the gap between almost closed door and frame. He stooped so quickly Dixon saw the movement only as a blur, then he came up with the Colt in his hand, pulled the door open and hurled the injured man face down on the back seat. The muzzle of the Colt pointed at the man in the front seat who had had no time to move. 'Take it easy, sonny,' Beaumont warned. 'These things have been known to go bang.'

In the mirror he saw Jo coming through the exit, holding the suitcase. Still watching the man behind the wheel, he roared out a command which easily reached Jo. 'Stand perfectly still - if you want your partners to live ...'

'We're FBI, for God's sake,' the man behind the wheel said in a strained voice.

'That's right, Beaumont...' Dixon choked out the words as he stayed sprawled on the back seat and hugged his right wrist with the other hand.

'Prove it!' the Englishman snapped. 'And keep holding that bag - with both hands,' he shouted to Jo as he watched the third American in the rear-view mirror. Dixon repeated Beaumont's earlier performance, using his left hand to extract a card with his fingertips. 'Give me some light so I can see this thing,' Beaumont rasped. He watched the man behind the wheel press a switch and glanced quickly at the card. 'As phoney as hell,' he said cynically.

'For this you could go behind bars,' the thirty-year-old man behind the wheel informed him tightly.

'On what charge?' Beaumont inquired.

'Resisting Federal officers ...'

'Federal codswallop!' Beaumont stared bleakly at the man lying on the back seat. 'You come aboard a train and point a gun in my face when I'm asleep. You don't show me a shred of damned identification ...'

'It had to be like that, Beaumont,' Dixon said wearily. 'It had to look good ...'

'I haven't finished yet and I'm not satisfied yet. Since when did the FBI sport Lincoln Continentals - or have you all become millionaires suddenly?'

'Does the name of General Lemuel Quincey Dawes mean something to you?' Dixon asked. 'And can I show you something else?'

'I think I read the name in the paper once,' Beaumont informed him coldly, still holding the Colt pointed at the man behind the wheel, still keeping Jo standing with both hands clutching his suitcase. 'And you can show me something - if you're careful.'

The something was a folded sheet of paper which, unfolded and held by Dixon under the light, showed a brief letter written in a weird scrawl he recognized. Keith - an emergency has come up, a real bad one. I need,you back in Washington fast. As a personal favour. Yours. Lemuel.

'Bugger,' Beaumont said simply. 'I'm not coming - except in here out of the rain.' He climbed inside the car and settled back cautiously against the soft leather as Dixon moved over and seated himself, still holding on to his right hand. 'Is that busted?' the Englishman inquired. He looked at the American behind the wheel, who was still twisted round in his seat, studying Beaumont like a butcher about to carve up a slaughtered animal.

'You're going to get a crick in your neck,' Beaumont remarked,

'I'd like to break yours,' the man behind the wheel replied calmly.

'OK, OK, Fred,' Dixon said irritably. 'But you know, Beaumont, you did a risky thing there ...'

'Risky?' the Englishman exploded 'You wake me up with a gun in my teeth when my reflexes aren't functioning ...'

'Then I just hope I'm not around when they are functioning,' Dixon said ruefully as he rubbed at his wrist. 'And I can see your point about the Lincoln Continental -my car broke down on the way from the airfield and this was the nearest one we could grab.' In the front seat Fred, who had turned his back on Beaumont, started the motor.

'He can switch that off,' Beaumont snapped. 'We're not going anywhere.'

'Switch her off, Fred.' Dixon sounded harassed. 'We're not going anywhere. Yet,' he added. 'Look, Mr Beaumont,' he said very politely, 'this was a bad night for us - even before we met you. We had to fly down from Washington through an electrical storm - no planes are flying tonight...'

'I know,' Beaumont said crisply as he lit a fresh cigarette, 'I was all set to fly down to Miami when they told me everything was grounded - so I had to take the train.'

'We had one hell of a trip to get to an airfield ahead of the train,' Dixon went on. 'Then we had to find a car to get us here in time to stop the express. That's how urgently they want you back in Washington. And another thing - in five years the Florida Express has never made an unscheduled stop before tonight...'

'We all make an unscheduled stop sometime,' Beaumont replied. 'I'm making one now. And what was that business about a break-out from Folsom?'

'It was cover,' Dixon sighed. 'The security on this thing is tighter than a steel trap. The other passengers will think we took a criminal off the train - just in case someone like that gabby Phillipson decides to contact the press. And I'm still holding that train,' Dixon added.

'That's your problem. The security on what is tighter than a steel trap? Dawes tells me less than nothing in his note.'

'I don't know anything about it .. .'

'Goodnight!' Beaumont opened the door, then slammed it shut again as Dixon said something else. 'We know you've spent two years non-stop in the Arctic, that you were going on holiday, but I was told to tell you as a last resort that Sam Grayson and Horst Langer have agreed to help. I gather you know these men?'

Beaumont sat upright in his seat and stared ahead at the rain slashing across the windscreen. Dixon watched him curiously, noting the short nose, the firm mouth, the jawline which expressed energy and great determination. It was the eyes which disturbed him most, he thought, the large brown eyes which looked at a man with an unblinking stare and seemed to look inside him. The Englishman took off his dripping hat, turned his large head and smiled grimly at Dixon. 'You had a rough trip flying down here?' he inquired.

'We were all air-sick,'

'Pity. I'm afraid you're going to be air-sick again. I went through a lot with Grayson and Langer, so I suppose I'll have to go back to Washington. Let the train go - then get me to the airfield fast. It sounds as though Dawes has a little trouble on his hands.' As an afterthought he handed back the Colt.

At three o'clock in the morning of Saturday, 19 February, lights were still burning on the top floor of the National Security Agency building in Washington. The NSA, which is far less well-known to the public than the CIA, is one of the most effective intelligence-gathering organizations in the world, partly because it doesn't capture the limelight like its more notorious counterpart. But it spends more money more effectively.

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 only 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 Beaumont 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.'

* Sosus and Caesar: American term for the cable and sonar buoy underwater network which guides submarines along a predetermined course at great depth below the polar pack.

'With those charts in our hands we could set about ripping up their whole offensive system - it could put them back ten years,' Dawes went on vehemently. 'It means even more than that - if the President goes to Moscow in May with the Catherine charts in his pocket he would be talking from a position of real strength. It's as big as that, Keith. So I need you in Greenland .. .'

'You're going too fast - I haven't agreed to go anywhere yet.' Beaumont stood up and walked across the room to stare at the wall map. For a large man he walked with great economy of movement. 'This ship, the Elroy . . .' He pointed to a marker at the bottom of the map. 'Is she the icebreaker, the twin of the Exodus?7

'Yes. She's heading back for Milwaukee after a year in the Arctic.'

'I may want you to turn her round and send her straight back up to the icefield ...'

Adams's voice rippled with indignation. 'You seem to have forgotten that we're planning this operation, Beaumont.'

The Englishman turned round slowly and stared. Adams found the stare uncomfortable as Beaumont took his time about replying, 'Maybe you'd like to come with me - across the rough ice?' He turned back to Dawes. 'This thing is a mess - and I don't like the sound of that security leak up at Thule. I have to go there first to pick up Grayson and Langer and get equipment before we fly on to Curtis Field.' He stabbed a finger at the nearest airfield to Target-5- 'So that leak is dangerous.'

'The FBI man, Callard, says they may have located Crocodile within hours. Any advance instructions we can radio direct to Tillotson - he's the security chief up there.'

'I still don't like it. Let me see that met report again.' Dawes handed him the faked weather report with a wooden face while Adams studied his fingernails. Beaumont read the report and shook his head. 'It means the three of us have to fly in to the edge of the fog bank from Curtis Field. Then we sled our way to Target-5 - if we can ever find it. We pick up Gorov - assuming he ever makes it across twenty-five miles of broken ice - then we have to sled our way back across one hundred and twenty miles of moving ice, probably with the Russian security people on our tails . . .'

'We could pick you up off the ice once you get clear of the fog and fly you back,' Adams suggested.

'You could,' Beaumont agreed, 'if you ever found us, which you wouldn't. Have you any idea what it's like trying to find four men and two sled-teams from the air at this time of year? No, obviously you haven't...'

'People do get rescued by air,' Adams persisted.

'That's right,' Beaumont growled, 'they do. Something else you obviously don't know is that usually it's by accident - a plane that wasn't looking for them just happens to see them. Another thing I don't like,' he continued, 'is that we don't yet know when he's coming.' He waved the met report in Dawes's direction. 'Send an urgent signal to the Elroy - she's to turn round at once and head back due north for the icefield. This may be a rendezvous point .. .' Beaumont took out a pencil and marked a thick cross on the wall map.

'That's deep inside the ice,' Adams protested.

'So she has to ram her way in. I want to be on a plane for Greenland within two hours,' he told Dawes, 'a fast machine that can get me there non-stop.'

'There's a Boeing waiting for you now,' Dawes said.

Beaumont raised an eyebrow. 'You were confident, weren't you? American organization - sometimes it frightens me. Now, let's go quickly over this dangerous business of when we'll know Michael Gorov is coming.'

Adams began talking in a quick competent voice. 'We're waiting for a man to come back from Leningrad - to Helsinki. He's contacting a relative of Michael Gorov's and he'll bring out the date when Michael Gorov is leaving North Pole 17. We do know that it will be within the next few days - and when our man gets out we'll know the exact day.'

'Supposing he never leaves Leningrad alive?' Beaumont demanded.

'He should make it,' Adams said confidently. 'He's never been behind the Iron Curtain before - that's why he was chosen. But he's a very experienced man. When he reaches Helsinki he goes straight to our embassy and they'll signal us.'

'The whole thing depends on one man inside Russia,' Beaumont said grimly.

'A first-class man,' Adams assured him. 'We'll know at the latest by one o'clock Sunday morning, our time. As soon as we hear we'll signal you at Curtis Field.' Adams's optimism was carrying him along on a cloud. 'You don't have to worry. You'll see - it will be a very simple operation.'

'It won't,' Beaumont rumbled.'That's the one and only thing I can predict - it won't be a simple operation.'

A man was killed on Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad at exactly five minutes past three in the afternoon of Friday, 18 February.

At three in the afternoon in Leningrad it is still only 7 am in Washington. Beaumont had not yet even boarded the Florida Express he was to be taken off so unceremoniously seventeen hours later. But it was almost three in the afternoon when an American tourist, Harvey Winthrop, walked carefully down the five icy steps which led from the Hotel Europa to street level.

A tall, serious-faced man of thirty-eight, Winthrop was described in his passport as a writer, but writing can hardly have been on his mind as he checked his watch and walked out of the Hotel Europa. 2.55 pm. Reaching street level, he turned left and began trudging through the snow towards Nevsky Prospekt.

Overhead the sky was swollen with the threat of more snow to come and there were very few people about; in this northern latitude it would be dark within thirty minutes. In fact, the street lamps were already glowing, their light reflecting weirdly off the snow as Winthrop arrived on Nevsky Prospekt and glanced cautiously along the broad avenue in both directions. He gave the impression of a man unsure whether it was safe to cross, but really he was checking three cars parked on the far side of the avenue.

The Intourist guide, Madame Vollin, who had accompanied him on each trip to the Hermitage since he had arrived from Helsinki five days ago was nowhere to be seen - not inside one of the parked cars, not gazing into any of the dimly-lit shop windows behind the vehicles, so she must have accepted his word that he wouldn't be going back to the Hermitage today, that he was too tired to look at any more Rubens. He hesitated, waited until a trolley-bus was close, which gave him another excuse to wait a little longer, to double check.

On the far side of the almost-deserted avenue a youth in a black leather jacket rushed round a corner, rammed a key into a car door, opened it and then waited as a girl followed him round the corner. A red-haired girl, she wore a tight-fitting mini coat, and she began punching the youth as soon as she got close to him. Winthrop smiled dryly as the trolley-bus rumbled past, the traction flashing blue sparks off the ice-coated wire: even the Russians had a juvenile problem, especially when the juveniles were offspring of high-up Party officials. He began to cross the wide street.

Not by chance, Winthrop could easily have been mistaken for a Russian: he was wearing a fur coat, a fur hat and knee-length boots purchased from the GUM store three days after his arrival. 'I didn't realize it would be as cold as this,' he explained to Madame Vollin. As he reached the far side and walked past the young couple who were still arguing, he checked his watch.

2.58 pm. Two minutes to the meeting-place he could see as he walked, the little tree-lined park further down the Nevsky. He trudged along the avenue with his gloved hands thrust deep inside his coat pockets, the art catalogue tucked under his arm, taking the same route to the Hermitage Museum at the Winter Palace lie had followed for five days with Madame Vollin at his side. The little tree-lined park came closer. He could see the statue of Lenin by the path and in the distance a short, stocky figure had turned off the Nevsky, was already inside the park. Was this the seaman? Winthrop entered the park.

Winthrop had never met Peter Gorov, the brother of Michael Gorov, the oceanographer, and he strained his eyes to check three details before the man reached him. The duffle bag - carried under the arm instead of over the shoulder, the normal way Soviet seamen carried it. Check. A red scarf wrapped round his neck. Check. But there was one further detail and the light was fading badly. Winthrop kept his slow, casual pace. The third detail was a button, a single white button at the top of the coat while the other buttons would be dark-coloured. Jesus, he couldn't see that at all. A militiaman - a policeman - trudged into the park from the far end and started walking up behind the seaman.

Winthrop's heart skipped a beat but he maintained the same pace. It had happened - the unforeseen factor which could ruin everything, make the contact impossible. A fresh fear tingled Winthrop's nerves - was the policeman following Gorov? It didn't seem likely: it was too open a tag. Get a grip on yourself, man! Helsinki, Finland - safety - is only a hundred miles away. It wasn't a thought that gave Harvey Winthrop any comfort as he walked steadily towards the seaman approaching him: he might just as well be in Kiev, in the heart of the Ukraine where Gorov had just come from after meeting his brother, Michael.

It was getting darker every minute. The seaman came closer, trailed by the policeman who wore a dark blue greatcoat and kept an even distance of fifty yards behind the seaman. Was this another coincidence - that the policeman was maintaining exactly the same walking pace as Peter Gorov? If this was Gorov - Winthrop still couldn't see the button. He could see the red band on the policeman's peaked cap but he couldn't see Gorov's goddamned button. The seaman, less than thirty years old, was staring straight ahead and Winthrop fancied he saw strain in the stiffened jaw muscles. The poor devil must be close to screaming point: he hadn't been trained for this kind of tension. Then Winthrop saw the lighter-coloured button at the top of the coat.

•Winthrop slipped on the ice in front of the Lenin statue, slipped while the seaman was only feet away with the policeman still fifty yards to his rear. As the American fell the coloured catalogue dropped to the ground and an illustration of a Rubens painting stood out on the darkened snow like a bloodstain. The catalogue was his positive identification. In the most natural way the seaman paused while Winthrop was trying to get back on his feet and spoke swiftly and softly in Russian.

'He is coming out on 20 February ... to the American research base Target Number Five ... 20 February ...' He repeated the date in an even lower tone and Winthrop knew he was terrified about two things - that the American might not have heard the vital date, that the policeman might overhear him.

Winthrop was on his feet now, brushing snow from his coat. The seaman shrugged his shoulders as though people were always slipping in this weather and continued through the park towards the Nevsky Prospekt and the docks beyond. Winthrop picked up his catalogue, tried to walk, limped badly, then leaned against the railings round the statue. The policeman reached Winthrop and asked his question in Russian. 'Can you walk? Have you far to go?'

'I'm OK. I reckon I twisted my ankle a bit - but I'm OK.' Winthrop had carefully replied in English - no one knew that he understood any Russian, no one except Gorov who was already outside the park. The policeman stared at him without understanding as Winthrop smiled painfully -he really had twisted his ankle. 'I'm from the Europa Hotel,' Winthrop went on, anxious to get rid of the man. He waved a hand. 'Not far to go.' He smiled again and began walking slowly back the way he had come.

Winthrop limped painfully through the park, really worried now about slipping. He simply had to make it back to the hotel, and even in his pain the American's brain was working. Maybe this twisted ankle could be used to get him out of Russia.

Winthrop was due to leave for Helsinki the day after tomorrow - on the early Sunday morning flight. But that was the day Michael Gorov was starting his run for Target-5. The Soviet authorities knew his exit date, knew that he was in Leningrad to view the wonderful collection of Rubens paintings in the Hermitage in his capacity as a writer on art, so normally they might think his early departure strange. The genuinely-sprained ankle gave him his reason for catching Saturday's Finnair flight to Helsinki -then the signal could be sent to Dawes in Washington a day before Gorov fled from North Pole 17.

As Winthrop limped out on to the Nevsky Prospekt it began to snow. He observed the situation along the street automatically, noticed that the leather-jacketed youth was still arguing with his red-haired girl. They must be in love, he thought ironically. No traffic was coming. He still hadn't glanced back to see if the policeman was following. He stepped off the kerb.

It was probably the fresh fall of snow which caused it to happen. The leather-jacketed youth must have been frozen and the snow broke up the argument. He climbed in behind the wheel of his car and the red-haired girl got into the front passenger seat beside him. The youth switched on the ignition, gunned the motor, pulled away from the kerb with an exhaust burst like a bomb detonating, accelerated, then remembered to switch on his lights.

Even then Winthrop might have jumped clear had he been faking the limp, but the car was screaming towards him as the lights flashed on, blinding him. In the headlight glare Winthrop's limping figure hurtled towards the car, filled the windscreen, then the radiator lifted him and hurled him a dozen yards. He crashed down on the kerb with the impact of a man falling from a great height. He was dead before the car swept away round a corner as a woman on the sidewalk began screaming.

A hundred yards further down Nevsky Prospekt the seaman, Gorov, had stopped to cross the avenue. He saw Winthrop limping over the highway, saw the car strike him, saw the body curving through the air before it dropped and he knew that the American was dead. He crossed the avenue and went on towards the docks where the trawler Girolog was waiting to depart in three hours.

Gorov walked like a man in a dream, hardly able to grasp what had just happened. It was a total disaster: the message would never get through to Washington and now there was no way of warning his brother. Michael would start out across the ice and the Americans wouldn't know he was coming. Crushed, Gorov walked on through the snow, his feet leading him along the familiar route. God, what could he do?

It was eight o'clock on Saturday morning inside the Leningrad headquarters of the Special Security Service.

'This American, Winthrop, who was killed on the Nevsky yesterday - I smell something funny about him ...'

The Locomotive - this was the nickname they used in Leningrad for Colonel Igor Papanin, chief of Special Security for the Arctic Military Zone. The dictionary definition of the word is'... having power... not stationary ... constantly travelling ...' It is as good a description as any of Col Papanin. For many the word suggests a huge engine dragging hundreds of people behind it at speed - and this also is a good description of the Siberian.

'Get me a full report, Kramer! Bring in that damned Intourist nursemaid, Vollin, or whatever her name is! Bring in the policeman who saw it happen. Find any other witnesses and parade them here by noon. I'll question them myself!'

Strictly speaking, the headquarters of the Special Security Service for the Arctic should have been at the port of Murmansk, but when Leonid Brezhnev, First Secretary, appointed Papanin to the post he ordered that the headquarters must be in Leningrad. And this was a matter of power, too.

Like Hamburg in Germany, like Quebec in Canada, Leningrad is a maverick city. It was in Leningrad that Communism was born when the cruiser Aurora fired the gun which signalled revolution. It was to Leningrad that Stalin, fearing the city's independence, sent his most trusted oppressor, Kirov - and Kirov died from an assassin's bullet. So Brezhnev sent Papanin to Leningrad.

'And, Kramer, contact the airport where Winthrop came in. They will have made a note of this man's arrival. Did he come in alone - that's what I want to know. By noon!'

Unlike Kirov, the bloody-minded citizens of Leningrad didn't try to shoot Papanin - they nicknamed him the Locomotive instead. A familiar figure striding down the Nevsky Prospekt, no Russian could miss him in the densest crowd - Papanin towered above the crowd. Six foot four tall, wide-shouldered, heavily-built, his large Siberian head was shaved almost bald and he had a mouth as wide as a carp's. And when he raised his drill-sergeant's voice they swore you could hear him in Murmansk.

'Get down to police headquarters and fetch me Winthrop's personal possessions, Kramer. Go yourself! An American tourist in Leningrad in February? I tell you, Kramer, I smell stinking fish ...'

Walther Kramer, forty-five years old, a short, stout Communist Bait from Lithuania who moved with the agility and silence of a cat, didn't believe a word of it. As Papanin's assistant he had a certain latitude in talking to his chief, a latitude about as wide as the edge of a razor blade. He voiced his disbelief cautiously.

'There's no evidence that this American was anything but what his passport says ...'

'Haven't you gone yet?'

As the Bait left the second-floor room Papanin stood up and went over to the window, then he took out a pocket chess set from his jacket and stared at it. The window a foot from his smooth-skinned, hard-boned face was rimmed with frost as he studied the tiny board. At eight in the morning it was still dark outside and he could hear below the shuffle of footsteps on the cobbled street as people hurried to work. An ancient green-tiled stove he had recently lit stood in a corner behind him and its warmth hadn't yet penetrated the chilled room. Only one wall away the most modern American teleprinter was chattering non-stop, but Papanin warmed himself with a stove as old as the revolution itself.

It was the Jewish problem which had aroused Papanin's suspicion of Winthrop, and the Jewish problem was another reason why Leonid Brezhnev was glad he had put Papanin inside Leningrad. On top of all his other duties it was now Papanin's responsibility to find out how finance was being smuggled in to help Jews emigrate to Israel.

As he stared at the chess board Papanin grunted to punctuate his thoughts. Winthrop could have been a courier, a contact man with the Jewish underground, so Winthrop -even though he was dead - was going to be investigated up to his eye teeth. Literally. The Siberian had already ordered an intimate examination of the naked corpse. He frowned, decided on his move, shifted a pawn. He was sure he was right: there was something very odd indeed about Mr Harvey J. Winthrop.

At eight o'clock on Saturday morning Papanin still had no idea that he was engaged in a race against time - to solve the Winthrop mystery before Michael Gorov fled from North Pole 17 at midnight on Sunday.

In Washington it was still only midnight, Friday. Beaumont was still inside the sleeping-car aboard the Florida Express. At the Soviet base North Pole 17 it was four in the morning and Michael Gorov had only recently arrived from Murmansk.

Michael Gorov, forty years old, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science and the Soviet Union's most distinguished oceanographer, was almost ill with the strain, sick with the tension of waiting, of counting away the hours to Sunday.

At four in the morning he stood in the moonlight at the edge of the recently-swept airstrip which bisected the ice island, North Pole 17. He was very carefully gazing towards the east, not to the west where the American research base, Target-5, lay twenty-five miles away. Beyond the island the tumbled pack glittered in the moonlight like a vast endless heap of frosted glass, smashed frosted glass. Behind him lay the huts which formed the base, their flat roofs deep with snow. It was from that direction that he heard the footsteps coining, the steps of Nikolai Marov, the security man. Marov came close, stopped and watched the stooped back of the oceanographer. 'Are you feeling all right, Academician Gorov?' he inquired.

'Never felt better.'

'You're up early,' the security man persisted.

'I'm always up early - you should know that by now.'

Gorov deliberately let his irritation show and the stratagem worked. Marov mumbled something and padded back towards the base. Inside his coat pocket Gorov's gloved hands clenched: Marov was going to be a problem - because Marov always came with him when he ventured out on the pack. And there was another reason why Gorov had allowed his irritation to show: he had reached the stage where he couldn't stand the sight of a security man. It was Col Papanin's Security Service which had killed Rachel Levitzer six months ago.

Gorov's eyes filled with tears as he thought of her. They had been unofficially engaged, but because she was Jewish, because he was an eminent Academician, they had kept their relationship secret. Then the news had come through in August 1971: Rachel had died in Leningrad.

The Security Service had come to her flat to arrest her: something to do with the Jewish underground - Gorov had never been clear on the details - but Rachel had attempted to escape, fleeing down a long staircase. A security man had tripped her and Rachel had gone down - down a flight of thirty stone steps. When they had reached her she was dead, her neck broken.

Gorov checked his watch. 4.10 am, local time. Twenty more hours to wait before he started out across the polar pack in his desperate bid to reach Target-5. Timing was everything: he had been warned by the Americans that he must fix his own departure date - and then stick to it. Gorov's plan was to leave North Pole 17 at exactly midnight and he wondered how he was going to get through the next twenty hours while he pretended to be absorbed in his depth-sounding experiments. But at least there was one consolation: his brother, Peter, would by now have passed on the message. The Americans knew already when he was coming.

The Locomotive was building up a head of steam. By eleven o'clock on Saturday morning all witnesses had been interrogated at security headquarters - interrogated by Papanin himself. He had seen the Intourist guide, Madame Vollin -a cow of a woman, Kramer. And she has bad breath. I don't know how Winthrop stood it . ..' He had spent far longer with the policeman who had seen Winthrop die. He had interviewed staff from the Hotel Europa and the airport official who had noted down Winthrop's arrival five days earlier from Helsinki. And he had found nothing remotely suspicious.

'I think we are looking down a large hole with nothing in it,' Kramer remarked as the airport official left. 'There is not one piece of evidence to connect this man Winthrop with the Jews.'

'Someone is bringing in money to them - we know that. And Winthrop still smells.' The Siberian bounded up from behind his desk and started striding round the room. 'For five days he behaves himself- he goes to the Hermitage and stares at the Rubens, always with his nursemaid, the Vollin woman. Then, what happens yesterday?' Papanin bent down, picked up a poker and began to attack the interior of the stove, stirring up the glowing coals the way he stirred up people.

'He dies in a street accident...'

'Before that! He breaks routine, Kramer - he tells the guide he is tired and will not be going out.' He rammed the poker in deep. 'The moment her back is turned he slips out again on his own - when it is nearly dark. Why, Kramer, why?'

'He is feeling better. He is going back to the Hermitage . . .'

'When the museum closes at four? He'd get there just in time to come back. Why did he go out on his own?'

'To meet someone . . .' Kramer made the reply casually, for something to say. The Siberian's grip tightened on the poker. He withdrew the weapon from the stove, straightened up slowly and stared at his assistant. 'I don't really believe that,' Kramer said quickly.

'To meet someone?' Papanin repeated. 'You know, you could be right. But who? He didn't meet anyone - he didn't have time before he was killed.' Papanin prodded the poker in Kramer's direction. 'Let's use our heads - by which I mean let's use my head. The American goes out, walks to the park ...'

'Twists his ankle .. .'

'Appears to twist his ankle, Kramer.' Papanin had his eyes closed as he tried to visualize the scene the policeman had described. 'He slips close to the seaman, then he starts back again. I wonder who that seaman was, Kramer?'

'Could have been anyone.'

'No - we can narrow it down! The seaman was carrying his duffle bag and was walking towards the docks .. .' Papanin put the poker back on the stove and took a file out of a drawer. Each day he received a report on events in the city, including a police report, but he was looking for the docks report. 'The only ship which sailed yesterday was the Girolog, a trawler, and the icebreaker which took it out. He must have been going to embark on the Girolog.'

'With a crew of about thirty . . .'

'True. So now I want you to drive immediately to the docks to get me the list of all personnel who sailed on the Girolog last night. I want it by noon.'

'There isn't time .. .' Kramer protested.

'That's your problem!' Papanin sat down behind his desk and waited until Kramer had reached the door. 'Incidentally, while I was away in Moscow this week I see you signed a movement order for Michael Gorov to go back to North Pole 17. I thought he'd finished his work there.'

'That is correct.' Kramer paused near the door, vaguely worried by this sudden change of topic. 'He wanted to take some final depth-soundings before we evacuate the base. He gave me the impression that you knew about it.'

'That's all right, Kramer. It just struck me that he hadn't planned to go there again. And get me the Girolog list by noon!'

Alone in his room, Papanin put one booted leg on top of his desk and stared moodily at the green-tiled stove which was now emanating great waves of heat. Without knowing it, he now had exactly seventeen hours to find out why Winthrop had come to Leningrad before Michael Gorov started his run to Target-5.

It was a six-hour flight at forty thousand feet from Washington to Thule, Greenland, and it was eleven o'clock on Saturday morning when Beaumont woke up and saw the huge runway coming up to meet the Boeing 707. It didn't feel like Saturday - by now Beaumont was so bemused that he had to think to remember the day of the week. And it didn't look like eleven o'clock in the morning as the Boeing dropped out of a, moonlit night towards the wilderness of snow and ice below.

'Seems like only five minutes since we left Washington,' he called out to Callard, the FBI man who sat across the gangway from him.

The man in the neat blue suit, freshly shaven, looked back at the big Englishman as though wondering whether to reply. 'Seems more like five years to me,' he said eventually. He turned away and looked out of the window on his side.

Beaumont smiled to himself. At five in the morning Callard had jumped aboard the plane at Washington minutes before its departure for Greenland; obviously he had been driving the plane every mile of the way while Beaumont had slept. He looked out of his own window, staring down at the desolate snowbound plain of the Greenland icecap. In the distance the thousand-foot high radar mast sheered up into the moonlit sky, the warning light at the summit flashing red. The tallest mast in the world, it had a range of three thousand miles over the roof of the world, It was the key station in the Distant Early Warning system.

'I'll see you in Vandenberg's office,' Callard suddenly called out. 'Sometime this evening, maybe.'

Beaumont nodded and he thought the suggestion significant. As the Boeing continued its decent he was certain that Callard had cracked the case, that he now knew the identity of Crocodile, that he was on his way to arrest the Soviet agent. They went down below the level of the radar mast tip and the grim panorama of the icecap slid up closer. Beaumont had a tilted view of flat-topped buildings on either side of Main Street, the snow-covered road which ran down the middle of the camp, then they were landing.

Tillotson was waiting for Beaumont when he disembarked from the plane, wrapped in a fur parka they had supplied before he left Washington. It was forty below and the still air hit him like a physical blow, taking his breath away as he stood at the foot of the steps. Tillotson, a tall, tough-looking man with a face like one of the heads carved out of Mount Rushmore, shook Beaumont's gloved hand with his own. 'I have everything ready for this trip of yours . . .'

He stopped speaking and stared at Callard who had come down the steps behind Beaumont, brushed past the two men and walked quickly across to Colonel Vandenberg, the camp commander. 'Who was that?' he asked.

'No idea,' Beaumont said instantly. 'He wasn't very talkative and I slept most of the way. Maybe there's been a complaint about the hamburgers.'

Tillotson looked back at the plane where the chief pilot was coming down the steps. 'Excuse me,' he said and intercepted the pilot. 'That second passenger - who is he? Only Beaumont was reported as coming on this flight.'

The pilot, carrying his flying helmet, pulled the hood of his parka over his head. 'Every time I make this trip it gets colder up here. The guy jumped aboard at the last minute just before we left Washington. He came in a government car

'I'll check him later.5 Tillotson led Beaumont to a covered jeep and started talking as he turned on the ignition. 'As I said, everything is ready for your trip. Two Sikorskys have been sent to Curtis Field on the east Greenland coast, Grayson and Langer are waiting for you at headquarters - Grayson was here but we had to scoop up Langer from Ellesmere Island.' He drove the jeep slowly along a track towards the camp, keeping well behind the car which was taking Col Vandenberg and Callard ahead of them. 'Two Norwegian-type sleds are being sent on to Curtis...'

'They're useless,' Beaumont interjected. 'I specified Eskimo sleds - they're heavier and won't break up on rough ice. Your sleds will.'

Tillotson looked surprised. 'We use Norwegian-type sleds ourselves. We haven't any Eskimo sleds . . .'

'I think you have. When I was last here you had two of them stowed away at the back of the big helicopter hangar.'

'Like to check now? I could turn off and we could go straight over.'

'Now?'

'No time like the present. And I gather that for you everything is hurry-hurry.'

Tillotson changed direction as they came to a fork in the beaten snow-track, heading away from the encampment of huts as he drove towards a large hangar in the distance. A quarter of a mile ahead the wire surrounding the military airfield glittered in the moonlight - it was sheathed in solid ice. Beyond the wire a stationary orange snow-plough stood close to the hangar. Tillotson pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to Beaumont. 'Met reports on the whole area - I don't know which area you're interested in. Rough ice, you said?'

'Rough ice, I said.'

Beaumont hadn't yet acclimatized to the bitter Arctic air which was streaming inside the jeep, freezing his face and making him feel short of breath. The car carrying Vandenberg and Callard was disappearing along the main track, its red light growing smaller as another jeep came tearing in the opposite direction, driving towards the Boeing 707.

'Any fog about?' Beaumont asked casually as he began reading the report.

'No fog anywhere, thank God. According to the latest report - and that's what you're reading - there's clear weather all the way from here to Norway.'

'You mean you've had it and it's cleared recently?' Beaumont pressed. He was thinking of the report Dawes had shown him in Washington concerning weather conditions round Target-5- Dense fog ... visibility nil.

'We just haven't had any fog, period. Not for the past three weeks.'

Tillotson slowed down, glanced at Beaumont who was still reading the report while the anger grew inside him. Dawes had fooled him, had shown him a faked weather report to get him to Greenland. Tillotson pulled up, left the engine ticking over. 'Mitten's slipped inside my glove,' he explained. 'I'll just fix it.' He fiddled with the glove, took it off, put it inside his coat pocket. When he withdrew his hand it was holding a .38 Smith & Wesson. He turned sideways and with one swift movement smashed the barrel against Beaumont's temple. Instinctively Beaumont shifted a second before the gun hit him and the barrel grazed rather than clubbed him, but he was hurt. He grabbed at the ignition key, tore it loose, threw it sideways out of the window into the snow. Tillotson smashed the revolver down a second time. A flash of light exploded inside Beaumont's head, a blinding flash, then a horrible wave of blackness engulfed him.

Saturday, 19 February

Beaumont lay half-conscious in the snow, fighting to get a grip on himself as Sam Grayson's cheerful face bent over him, but there was anxiety in the American's expression as he eased the brandy flask close to Beaumont's lips. 'Take it easy, Keith ...'

Beaumont forced himself up on his elbows, took the flask in one hand, helped himself to a drink. His head was pounding, his vision was blurred, then the strong spirit reached his stomach and he could see clearly. He took a slow, deep breath of the bitter night air. That seemed more potent than the brandy. 'Get me on my feet,' he said between his teeth.

'Better wait a bit .. .'

Beaumont swore, clambered unsteadily to his feet, swayed, nearly fell over as Grayson grabbed for his arm. Tillotson's jeep stood a few yards away and Beaumont remembered he had thrown the ignition key into the snow. Another jeep stood a few yards away, its windscreen shattered, the front right tyre flat. 'Tillotson shot at you?'

'Tillotson...?'

'Yes, Tillotson,' Beaumont rasped impatiently. 'He's Crocodile - the security leak. But you wouldn't know about that. We've got to get after him - where's he gone?' Beaumont looked towards the airfield and there was nothing in sight - only the guard-post by the gate in the wire, the orange snow-plough in the distance and the hangar beyond. Where the hell had Tillotson vanished to? 'Which way did he go?' Beaumont snapped.

Grayson, a short, wiry man of thirty-five with sand-coloured hair, was still recovering from the shock: he had thought Beaumont was dead. 'We've heard rumours about a security leak. I was late coming out to meet you off the plane and the pilot said you'd driven off in a jeep. I couldn't believe it was Tillotson when he started shooting. He ran off towards the airfield . ..' Grayson was talking to himself -Beaumont had started running towards the guard-post.

'He can't get away,' Grayson shouted as he followed Beaumont. 'Vandenberg declared a state of alert just before your plane came in. The base is sealed off...'

'I think Tillotson can fly a helicopter,' Beaumont shouted back. He was getting into his stride now, his legs carrying him over the snow with surprising speed for so large a man. It was willpower which kept him going; his head was aching horribly, the blood at the side of his face had congealed in the bitter cold, his stomach was on the verge of nausea. The bitter air helped his recovery as he ran and took in great gulps of it. Close to the strangely deserted guard-post he stopped and waited for Grayson to catch him up.

'Sam, have you a gun? Good - give it to me and keep back.'

He took the Colt .45 from, the American and approached the guard-post. Something was lying in the snow just outside the concrete blockhouse. An American soldier still clutching his carbine, swathed in his parka, lay on his back staring up at the Arctic sky. Beaumont bent down, checked the man's pulse, then heaved him over on his stomach. He was dead and the blood patch which surrounded a rip high up in the back of the parka was already frozen. It couldn't have been difficult; after all, Tillotson was the security chief. The alert meant that no one could get on to the airfield, so Tillotson had removed the obstacle in his escape route. 'He's already on the airfield,' he told Grayson grimly as the American reached him.

'I've never heard that Tillotson can fly,' Grayson objected.

'I think he can fly a helicopter - and there are helicopters inside that hangar.' Beaumont stared beyond the wire where there was no sign of movement. 'I once saw him inside a machine. That's how he's going to try and get out - by helicopter. Come on!'

'There are two guards inside that hangar,' Grayson said quickly. 'There's a phone inside the guard-post - we must warn the men inside the hangar ...'

Beaumont was halfway inside the guard-post doorway when he saw the phone-cord slashed and dangling. 'It's no use, Sam - he thought of that. But where the hell is he?' Beaumont ran to the open gateway and stared across the white desert of the airfield. The snow-plough.

It was smaller now, like an orange bug as it crept up to the hangar where the helicopters were housed. Tillotson had grabbed the nearest available transport to get him inside the hangar fast. Beaumont would have shouted - anything to warn the men guarding the machines - but he was too far away. He took a deep breath and began running again while Grayson followed. Unlike the American, who wore boots, Beaumont was still wearing the rubber-soled shoes he had come in from Washington, but the snow was a hard crust and again he was covering the ground with astonishing speed. He had run for several minutes, was near the hangar when he stumbled and sprawled head first in the snow. He clambered to his feet, his head aching, his face stinging, and had to search for the revolver which had jumped out of his hand. He found it half-buried in the snow and at that moment heard a sound which chilled his mind: the throbbing beat of a helicopter's motor. With the gun in his hand he ran the last two hundred yards.

'Keep back!' he shouted to Grayson.

The orange plough was parked close to the hangar entrance and the huge, power-operated doors were open now. The mouth of the hangar was a dark cave as his tired legs carried him forward on sheer willpower, and he was within ten yards of the entrance when the machine appeared, an H-19 Sikorsky, its blades whirling at speed as it emerged from the dark shadow. Snow was whipped from the ground, thrown across the airfield, and the machine came forward through the disturbed show, advancing towards Beaumont, its size enormous in the moonlight.

Beaumont stood quite still, braced himself, hoisted the revolver, gripping the butt with both hands to steady his aim as the machine came on. In ten seconds it would grind over him. The gunsight was aimed for the cockpit, for the blurred helmeted head-and-shoulders behind the ice-rimmed perspex. He took a deep breath, aimed carefully, squeezed. The hammer clicked. He felt rather than heard the click as the helicopter roar hammered at his eardrums. The firing mechanism was choked. The gun wouldn't fire.

'Look Out!' Grayson shouted, his warning lost in the roar.

Tillotson drove the machine straight at him and Beaumont dived sideways and downwards. As he hit the snow he rolled, took the impact on his shoulders, kept rolling over and over while the hideous roar enveloped him. The motor coughed, changed, the roar became a steady, purposeful beat, and when Beaumont looked up the machine was ascending, was already the height of the hangar roof. He climbed to his knees, wiped snow scuffed up by the rotating blades off his face as Grayson reached him.

'We've got to get after him,' Beaumont snapped. 'He mustn't get clear - our lives depend on it. . .'

He hardly glanced at the crumpled form lying half under the terrible blades of the snow-plough. One of the guards. It had been so easy, so coldly brutal. The snow-plough was a familiar sight on the airfield - the soldier had come out to meet it - Tillotson had driven straight over him. Inside the hangar entrance Beaumont stumbled again, nearly fell over the body of the second guard. He grasped instantly how this had happened. Tillotson had simply shouted for his victim. 'There's been a horrible accident. . .' The knife had gone in before the youngster recovered from the shock, the knife showing in Beaumont's torch beam where a handle protruded from the dead man's back.

Beaumont dropped the useless Colt, picked up the carbine the soldier had never had a chance to use and ran inside the hangar. A second Sikorsky was standing at the rear of the hangar under a hooded lamp. An electric cable plugged in to keep the motor from freezing ran from the machine to the wall. Beaumont unplugged the cable, climbed up to the machine, opened the door and went inside the cabin as Grayson came up behind him. 'He's gone,' the American warned. 'We'll never find him .. .'

'We'll find him ...' Beaumont was fixing on the pilot's helmet and headset which was always left in the pilot's seat. Stripping off his parka, he settled himself behind the controls. 'Shut the door, Sam - we're going up.' The instrument panel faced him - radar-altimeter, fuel gauge, rev counter, other instruments. The collective stick - controlling ascent -was on his left. The cyclic control stick - which changed flight direction - was on his right. A twist-grip throttle, rather like a motorcycle's throttle, was ringed round the collective stick. Beaumont started the motor.

The whole cabin shuddered. Sound blasted across the inside of the hangar. The rotor blades above swivelled sluggishly, start-stop-start. Then the machine burst into power. In the ghostly light from the instrument panel Beaumont's expression was grim as he built up more power. The helicopter edged forward, drummed across the concrete, emerged from the hangar. The radar mast which reached almost to the stars came into view and Beaumont used the throttle. The fifty-foot rotor blades tore through their ellipse, whipped through the Arctic air, sounded as though at any second they would rip loose from the machine. The rev counter climbed on the dial. The machine quivered like a great bird, tethered and desperate to leave the ground, then they were going up.

Beyond the perspex dome which vaulted above them they saw the hangar wall descending like a lift. The snow-covered roof appeared, disappeared as a glow-worm of vehicle lights drove close to the guard-post at the airfield entrance. 'They've tumbled to it!' Beaumont spoke the words into the mike hanging from the headset under his chin. Grayson heard him through the earphones of his own headset as he sat alongside Beaumont in the observer's seat. The helicopter gained altitude as the vehicles rushed across the snow below and Beaumont swore as he heard reports above the muffled roar of the motor. 'They're shooting at us,' he said.

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 mentioned 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 flattened-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 Greenland 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. Without 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 trying 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 Spitsbergen 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 himself. 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 Tillotson'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 moonlight, 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. Tentatively, 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 inclined 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 Beaumont 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 embedded in the glacier.

It was pure reflex - his arm crooked, got a hold on the rock. The brief anchor point merely served as a fulcrum to shoot him over the drop. His prone body swivelled to the left, went over the brink. His left hand felt a projection on the rock, his gloved fingers closed, held on. The weight of his body, the momentum, nearly tore his arm off, or so it felt. Then he was still, hanging over the drop, held by only one hand, one curved arm, his body suspended in space.

Below he caught a brief glimpse of nothing, of the sheer ice cliff going down and down, at the bottom the splay of the glacier, huge spiked ice pinnacles. He made himself look up, concentrated his remaining energy on holding on, on levering himself back up over the brink. He wrapped his right arm round the boulder, felt his exploring fingers contact his other hand. He clamped one hand over the other. Only then did he look up the glacier past the boulder. Tillotson was coming down the glacier.

It was terribly silent - except for the crunch of spiked boots driving into the ice. Beaumont's face twisted: Tillotson was wearing crampon boots, which made his descent much safer. Where the devil had he got hold of them? He must have had the boots ready in the jeep, must have planned his departure from Thule even before the Boeing 707 had landed. And it was going to take the American less than half a minute to reach him. Too late to try and clamber back over the edge. Beaumont was having trouble with his vision now - the oncoming Tillotson looked like two men. Beaumont blinked. The vision dissolved into one man, a man with a knife in his right hand. Tillotson was very close when Beaumont's head flopped, when his right hand lost its grip.

Beaumont's right arm went limp, flopped out of sight behind the boulder. The strain on his left arm was appalling, almost unbearable, and under the parka his clothes were clammy with sweat. Tillotson paused about three feet from the boulder, decided he couldn't reach with the knife. Taking two more careful paces, he lowered himself to a sitting position behind the rock, raised his right foot, aimed the crampon spikes at the Englishman's left hand. The spikes were half an inch long, rimmed with ice from the glacier. He lunged to spike the gloved hand.

As he drove the boot down hard Beaumont's right hand whipped up over the boulder, locked round Tillotson's ankle, heaved savagely sideways. The spikes grazed Beaumont's other hand as Tillotson lost his balance. He started sliding. His body skidded round the far side of the boulder, his hands flailed desperately for something to grip on. His fingers clutched the boulder, gained a hold, and he thought he had saved himself. Beaumont's right hand struck again, struck this time as a clubbed fist, smashing down with brutal force on the bridge of the American's nose. Tillotson yelped, lost his grip, went over. The scream travelled back up the icefall, a long-drawn-out scream which ended abruptly. Beaumont began hauling himself back over the edge.

He collapsed when he reached the far side of the boulder, still conscious but hardly able to move as he propped himself against the rock and massaged his left arm slowly. Clambering to his knees, he peered over the boulder into the depths. Tillotson had died in a macabre way - his body was perched at the summit of one of the numerous ice pinnacles, speared through his middle.

'You can fly us back, Sam.'

Beaumont sagged in the observer's seat as Grayson watched him. 'He did have a radio transmitter,' he went on, 'a pretty powerful one. Made by Radio Corporation of America, of course, in case anyone found it. Not that it was likely - he had it hidden in an Eskimo grave and no one goes poking about in that. We'd better get started,' he added. 'Vandenberg can send someone to collect the transmitter.'

'Had he transmitted?' Grayson asked.

'He transmitted something, I'm sure. He may not have had all that much time, the message could have been garbled - he must have encoded it before he left Thule.'

'Probably we'll never know.'

Beaumont looked at Grayson. 'Probably we will know -when the Russian security people are waiting,to meet us out on the ice.'

'I know why Winthrop came to Leningrad. I can see clear down to the bottom of your large empty hole, Kramer!'

At eight o'clock on Saturday night - eight hours before Michael Gorov planned to escape from North Pole 17 -Papanin was still in his office. The room was like an inferno, the green-tiled stove was roasting the office - and its occupants. The Siberian loved extremes of temperature, had loved them since his childhood in Omsk when the terrible winter cold stimulated him while it obliterated everyone else, but then he had also luxuriated in the warmth of Siberian stoves when he came indoors. Kramer, on the other hand, was gasping for air.

'I don't see why you're suddenly interested in Michael Gorov,' he said hoarsely. 'Why should he be mixed up in this Jewish business?'

'Like the rest of them, you'll see it next year. That's why I'm sitting in this chair - because I can see things before they happen.' Papanin leaned back in the chair, put his hands behind his neck. 'It was the shipping list which tipped me off.'

'You mean the deputy mate, Peter Gorov?'

'You'll see down this hole yet.' Papanin regarded the Bait with an unblinking stare. 'If you don't fall head first into it. Do you remember the case of Rachel Levitzer, that Jewish girl who made a run for it last August and fell down a staircase?'

'She broke her neck ...'

'She also broke Michael Gorov's heart. Did you know that?'

'I heard a rumour . . .'

'It was hushed up - their relationship - because of the position Michael Gorov occupies. We've been looking for a grubby little courier bringing in large sums from America -someone who might at any time be searched at the airport when he comes in. I think they've been cleverer than that . . .' Papanin paused to give his bombshell maximum impact. 'I think Michael Gorov, our eminent oceanographer, is bringing in the money.'

Kramer was astounded, appalled. He stared back at Papanin, trying to guess what he was up to, always an impossible task. 'You can't mean it,' he said eventually. 'Where would he get the money from?'

'That's the clever part! He spent three years in the Arctic planning and laying the Catherine system of cables and sonar buoys along the seabed. He often visited American ice islands to see what they were up to.' Papanin hammered his huge fist down on the desk. 'And that's when they gave him the money to bring in - during those visits to American bases! He's never been searched when he came back - no one would dream of it.'

'But why?' Kramer was bewildered. 'Why would he do it?'

'That damned Jewish mistress of his persuaded him. He was going with her for three years before she died - and he's still doing it, for the sake of her memory or some such lunatic sentiment!'

'It's fantastic . . .'

'It's logical!' Papanin shouted. 'He met his brother, the deputy mate, Peter, in Kiev this month while they were both on leave. Peter comes back here to board his ship - and on the way he meets this American, Winthrop, in the park. He was passing a verbal message to Winthrop - from his brother, Michael.'

'We'll have to be careful.' Kramer warned. 'Michael Gorov is a friend of Marshal Grechko.'*

'Grechko is an arrogant hog. If I'm right about Gorov you'll find that Grechko hardly knew him.'

* Soviet Minister of Defence.

'It's still dangerous . . .'

'Maybe, but there's someone else we can get at - Peter Gorov, a mere seaman. You found out the present position of the Girolog?'

'She's five hours' sailing time from Tallinn . . .'

'Send a plane immediately to Tallinn airport to wait for Gorov, Radio the ship's master to sail straight for Tallinn. Five hours to port, half an hour to and from airports at either end, one's hour's flight to here. Peter Gorov should be in ray office in seven hours' time - by three o'clock Sunday morning! What are you hanging about for, Kramer?'

Alone again in his overheated office, Papanin took out his little pocket chess set and stared at the board. The Siberian, a man of many talents, was a Soviet grandmaster of chess. In July he would be in Iceland for the coming Spassky-Fischer chess match. Officially he would attend as one of Spassky's advisers; unofficially he would be chief Soviet representative to keep an eye on security.

Outwardly a flamboyant and extrovert personality, Igor Papanin had a cold, detached brain which regarded the whole Arctic as a gigantic chess board. There were Soviet pieces and American pieces on the board and in any contest of wills you had to get the opening gambit right. Curiously enough, considering the role Keith Beaumont was to play in the coming battle of wills, the Siberian was studying the English Opening.

'A message has just come through from Crocodile.'

Kramer reported the news casually when he came back into the Siberian's office half an hour later, as though it were of no great importance. 'They are just decoding it,' he added. He paused as Papanin went on reading the personal file on Michael Gorov.

'Anything else?' Papanin grunted without looking up.

'Who is Crocodile?'

'A person. Identity known only to General Syrtov and myself.' Having delivered the snub, Papanin looked up. 'I want to see that message the moment it's decoded.'

It was 9 pm before Kramer returned with the message. The Girolog had already changed course and was heading slowly south through the ice for the port of Tallinn. The plane Kramer had sent was due to land at Tallinn airport within ten minutes.

In Washington, where they were eight hours behind Leningrad, Dawes and Adams were waiting with growing impatience for a signal from a man who was dead. In Greenland, also eight hours behind Leningrad, Beaumont and Grayson were flying back to Thule from the Humboldt Glacier. One message - from Winthrop - would never arrive. Another signal - from Tillotson - was just being handed to Papanin.

'They had trouble with it,' Kramer explained. 'It's rather garbled. The operator says it was transmitted very erratically and he's sure it isn't complete.'

Papanin read the message. 'What a brilliant deduction,' he commented. He stroked the top of his close-shaven head while he read the message a second time. Americans preparing . . . over polar pack . .. general area Target-5 . .. Beaumont going in over ice to meet target . . . American planes Curtis Field . . . Beaumont force ...

Without a word the Siberian stood up, strode out of his room into the office next door where the American teleprinter was still chattering away, spewing out a stream of reports from Soviet bases spread out across the Arctic. Behind chromium-leg desks four men were working away on reports and answering telephones. Papanin took a small curved pipe from his tunic pocket and started filling it from an old pouch as he stared up at the wall map.

It was not unlike the huge wall map in Gen Dawes's office, but here the Arctic was seen from a different angle: the Russian coast low down, near the floor, the distant coasts of Greenland and Canada and Alaska high up near the ceiling. 'There is Curtis Field,' he said to Kramer, pointing with his pipe-stem to the airfield on the Greenland coast nearest to Target-5- He called to one of the men behind the desks. 'Petrov, fill me in on the position of the ships in this area ...'

'The trawler fleet k49, sir?'

'That will do for a start.'

'As you see, it's a long way north of Iceland at the moment, but it's heading south now - to watch the NATO sea exercise Sea Lion, There are twelve ships - all equipped with the normal electronic gear ...'

'Including wireless-jamming apparatus?'

'Yes, sir. The helicopter carrier Gorki west of Spitsbergen has also turned south with the same mission ..,'

'What about the Revolution? It's the closest vessel to Iceberg Alley.'

'She'll be there for several weeks - she's tracking American satellites.'

'This American vessel . .,' Papanin's pipe-stem stabbed at a marker higher up.

'The American icebreaker Elroy, sir. We've just moved her
position, less than an hour ago. She was heading south and
now she's turned due north again - a helicopter from the
Gorki saw her.'

'Thank you.' Papanin was always polite to junior members of his staff: the more senior men like Kramer could look after themselves. He marched straight back inside his office and went behind his desk. His normally explosive manner had gone and when he issued the dramatic order to the Bait his voice was quiet and calm.

'Order a state of alert throughout the entire Arctic Zone. Every coastal base, every airfield, every ice island - including those off the Alaska coast. Radio Murmansk that I want a Bison bomber standing by night and day, fully tanked up. Warn Leningrad airport to have a plane ready to fly me to Murmansk at one hour's notice ...'

'I clear this with Moscow first, of course . ..'

'Send Vronsky and his special security detachment to Murmansk - they must be in the air in thirty minutes ...'

'Surely we must refer this to Moscow?'

'The detachment will wear civilian clothes and will be fully armed with personal weapons. Bring me the latest met reports of the Target-5 area ...'

'Without reference to Moscow, sir? Operations on this scale need General Syrtov's approval.'

Papanin removed the pipe he had just placed in his wide mouth. 'You don't understand any of this, do you, Comrade? You can't stand the pressure of having two large holes to look into at the same time, can you?'

'Crocodile's message doesn't make sense ...'

'It does, if you know Crocodile. The Americans are planning some big operation near their floating base, Target-5-They are using the code-word Beaumont for the operation. We have to get in our opening gambit first.'

'You still want Peter Gorov brought here from Tallinn?'

'Of course.' Papanin relit his pipe, watching Kramer. 'That is a separate problem. And now,' he went on without any change of tone, 'get the bloody lead out of your boots.'

Curtis Field stands on top of a three hundred foot high cliff rising sheer from the east Greenland coast. It is debatable whether flying in or out is the more chilling experience - but probably the latter is worse. The plane takes off along a runway which ends at the brink of a cliff; as Beaumont put it, 'When you see nothing ahead you'll go either up or down ...'

At nine in the evening of Saturday, Washington time, Beaumont was ready to go, a feat of organization which was little short of miraculous. In the past sixteen hours he had flown from Washington to Thule; in pursuit of Tillotson he had flown to the Humboldt Glacier and back again; since then he had flown the breadth of Greenland to Curtis Field. And by nine in the evening' everything was ready - and Curtis Field knew that a whirlwind had hit them.

'I need those two Sikorskys fully serviced, fully tanked up within two hours . . .'

'Not possible,' Fuller, the airfield controller had snapped.

'Put more men on the job! Do I have to phone Dawes in Washington? It's your damned emergency ...'

The helicopters were ready to fly by 9.5 pm. A plane had flown out to check weather conditions near Target-5 - and came back to report no sign of fog. The two Eskimo-type sleds had been brought from Camp Century, had been packed with food, a powerful radio transceiver, rifles, ammunition - and an Elliott homing beacon.

'What's that for?' Fuller had asked.

'Insurance.'

Beaumont's reply had been abrupt and totally non-informative. Restlessly, he had prowled round the hangar where icicles hung from the girders, poking his nose into everything, checking the controls of a Sikorsky, giving a hand with packing the sleds, frequently striding into the radio room to ask whether a message had come in from Washington. His energy, which seemed boundless, injected Urgency into the airfield staff, made them work twice as fast as normal: Had Col Igor Papanin been able to witness the performance it would have made him thoughtful.

But Beaumont would never have achieved the impossible without the aid of the short, wiry, thirty-five-year-old American, Sam Grayson. It was Grayson who spent nerve-racking hours on the phone calling Thule, the huge American air base at the top of Baffin Bay. 'I want those dogs sent here now. No plane available? Only a Hercules just taking off for Point Barrow? Then drag yourself out of that armchair and stop it. Listen! If it takes off I'll get on to Dawes and have it turned round in mid-air ...'

'Those dogs were due here one hour ago,' Beaumont rumbled behind him.

Grayson twisted round in his seat. 'Keith, do you want them now or when they arrive?' he demanded.

Beaumont grinned bleakly. 'Both - and sooner!'

Most Arctic teams function in one of two ways. A British team has a leader and the rest do what he tells them to; other nationalities work differently - Americans and Norwegians work democratically, they exchange opinions. Beaumont's three-man team was unique. As he put it with a dry smile, 'They do what I tell them because they know I'm right.' Grayson's version was different. 'In a crisis we follow Beaumont, then argue it afterwards.' Horst Langer's version was different again. 'We have three bosses - and it works. Don't ask me how!'

Sam Grayson, brilliant navigator, marine biologist, and a first-rate marksman, came from Minneapolis. Before going with Beaumont and Langer on the epic Spitsbergen crossing he worked for the U S Geological Survey and the Lament Geological Observatory of Columbia University. An old Arctic hand, he assured his wife before each trip, 'Maybe this will be my last crack at the ice - could be I'm getting sick of it . . .' That was until the next trip came up.

"The dogs just came in,' he informed Beaumont two hours after calling Thule.

'Horst had better check them right away ..."

Beaumont swung round as the third member of the team, Horst Langer, came into the tiny room Grayson was using as his headquarters. 'The dogs are here - and what's that sinister bit of paper you're waving about?'

'An urgent signal just came through from Dawes - we're to stand by ready for instant departure.'

Because it was unprecedented the depression caught all the met experts off balance, the vast filling depression gathering over northern Greenland in late February 1972. This was the depression which affected the whole of north America and western Europe later in the year, which turned summer into something like winter, which sent icebergs further south than they had ever reached before, which invaded transatlantic shipping lanes and caused great liners to change course. And this was the depression which brought the fog.

The Soviet met people on Novaya Zemlya didn't see it coining. The U S weather plane which flies daily across the roof of the world from Mildenhall in East Anglia to Alaska missed it. The U S Weather Bureau failed to foresee it. But as Beaumont prowled restlessly round the ice-cold hangar at Curtis Field a great bank of fog, half a mile high, many miles wide, a bank of freezing black fog appeared north of Target-5 and began to drift steadily south.

You can only die once, but sometimes it seems you are dying a hundred times over.

For Peter Gorov the flight from Tallinn to Leningrad was a nightmare. No one would give him a reason for his recall, no one would tell him who he was going to see in Leningrad, but he was treated like royalty when he disembarked from the Girolog at one in the morning.

A black Zil limousine with chains on the wheels took him through a snowstorm to the airport. When he went aboard the waiting plane the two pilots shook hands with him. He was invited to travel in the control cabin and was given a seat behind the co-pilot. The nightmare started from the moment the plane moved off down the runway.

It almost crashed as it was taking off- they were heading direct for the airport control tower, still on the ground, when the co-pilot shouted, 'You'll never make it!' He threw up a hand as though to ward off the collision when metal struck steel, then the pilot lifted the machine and it cleared the tower by feet, so it seemed to the petrified Gorov.

But this was only the beginning. As the plane gained altitude and turned east away from the ice-laden Baltic, a fierce, long-drawn argument broke out between the two pilots, each accusing the other. 'You fool, Serge, there was not enough power ...'

'Idiot! There was too much power! Would you sooner take over yourself?'

The argument raged on, the technical terms beyond Gorov. The plane suddenly side-slipped, started to drop at an alarming rate. With an oath the pilot regained control, then continued arguing at the top of his voice. Gorov watched from behind fearfully: it seemed they were more intent on their quarrel than on flying the plane. His fear was intensified when the machine climbed abruptly, heading up at an acute angle. Pressed back against his seat, Gorov was terrified. It was his first experience of flying. Halfway to Leningrad they began drinking.

The quarrel subsided suddenly and the pilots made it up with each other with a bottle of vodka. But their consideration for their honoured guest stopped short of offering him a drink; instead they emptied the bottle themselves. Gorov watched with growing horror as the effect of the vodka made itself felt in their flying performance. The machine was thrown all over the sky as they fell like a lift into air pockets, then shot upwards at an almost vertical angle. 'The met report was terrible,' Serge explained in .a slurred voice. 'If you hadn't been so important we wouldn't have flown.'

'Important to who?' asked the bewildered seaman.

'Maybe the First Secretary. How the hell would I know?'

Twice Gorov had to move swiftly to the small, cramped toilet where he was violently ill, but when he returned to his seat after the second visit his head was clearer for a few minutes. He calculated roughly that wherever they were taking him to in Leningrad he would arrive about three in the morning. It would then be eleven in the evening at North Pole 17, which was four hours behind Leningrad time. He was sure now that they had found out about the American, that they were going to question him. He had to hold out until after midnight, North Pole 17 time, which was four in the morning in Leningrad. He would have to hold out for over an hour.

As they came in to land at Leningrad his stomach muscles felt tighter than the strap which Serge ordered him to fasten. They were gliding down through the snow when the first motor cut out. Seconds later the second engine failed. Could they land on only two engines? Gorov had no idea. The pilot spoke to airport control with a note of hysteria. 'Emergency situation, emergency situation ...'

Gorov closed his eyes, felt his head starting to spin, opened them and saw the glare of the landing lights coming up. The plane wobbled badly. The co-pilot cursed, waved the empty vodka bottle at Serge. 'You're coming in too fast .. . you're going to kill us...' Gorov sat in his seat bathed in sweat, unable to take his eyes off the incoming lights which tilted as the plane wobbled. His clothes were soaked but his mouth was parched, his throat constricted. They were drunk, both of them, the criminals. He was going to burn to death, horribly.

At the last moment the two dead motors burst into action, the wheels bumped the runway, the machine cruised between the lights, made a perfect landing. The pilots waited until Gorov had disembarked without speaking to them, then Serge burst into laughter as he waved the empty bottle. 'I don't like mineral water - next time ask them to put the real stuff in it . . .'