Gorov would never know it, but he had been flown to Leningrad by the two most experienced pilots in the Baltic Command. They were probably the only men who could have handled the plane in such an appalling manner and survived. It was Papanin himself who had phoned the airport controller at Tallinn and given him the instructions. 'I want you to play a little game with your passenger - scare the guts out of him. When he lands he must be a jelly.'

The man in the chair was sweating and the spotlight shining on his face reflected off the sweat globules. Fear - and the green-tiled stove - were responsible. Papanin sat behind his desk in the gloom. The other men were shadows behind the chair, unnerving presences Peter Gorov couldn't see. One of them coughed - to remind Gorov he was there. The watch on Gorov's left wrist registered 3.20 am.

Papanin, who was completely on the wrong track, who still believed he was close to identifying the money courier financing the Jewish underground - whereas Michael Gorov had never had the slightest connection with that shadowy organization - had exactly forty minutes left to break Gorov. In forty minutes it would be 4 am in Leningrad and only midnight at North Pole 17. In forty minutes Michael Gorov would have disappeared on to the polar pack.

'We'll go over it again,5 Papanin said. 'Just to make sure I've got it right. Start with when you went into the park.'

Go over it again ... Gorov's head was reeling. He had been driven from the airport in a battered old Volga. Kramer had made him travel without his coat and with the windows open, so during the drive Gorov had become steadily frozen. It was a detail which Papanin had planned: sudden violent changes of temperature reduce a man's resistance. He had visualized the overheated control cabin in the plane, had frozen Gorov during the journey from the airport, now he was roasting him again. Gorov's stomach was empty, his nerves shattered, and he could hardly think straight as Papanin repeated, 'Go over it again.'

Gorov had lost count of how many times he had explained it. He tried to repeat it as a catechism as the heat of the stove burned his back. 'I went into the park . . .'

'Why?'

'I was on my way to the docks.'

'So you went straight along the Nevsky Prospekt - it's the direct route.'

'I went along the Nevsky Prospekt.. .' The voice was a monotone, like a child repeating its rote.

'You didn't - you went into the park. Why?'

They came to the part where the pedestrian had tripped on the ice, and Papanin went on asking the same questions he had asked ever since Gorov had come in. 'We want to know his name,' the Siberian repeated. 'That's what it's all about. We want to know his name.'

'I don't know the American's name ...'

Gorov stopped speaking. He knew instantly that he had made a fatal blunder. Papanin let him sweat it out for a minute. They hadn't said anything to Gorov about Winthrop being American, and Winthrop had worn clothes which made him look like a Russian. And Winthrop hadn't spoken to the seaman: Gorov had stated this time and again. 'Take him downstairs,' Papanin said, and then waited until he was alone with Kramer. 'Find out what he knows - quickly.'

Because their suspect was a seaman, and because a seaman's nightmare is drowning, they used the water treatment.

In the basement cellar - which was as Gold as Papanin's room had been torrid - they strapped Gorov to an adjustable couch and blindfolded him. He was stretched prone on his back, strapped by his neck and his wrists and his legs to the couch. Somewhere out of sight water slopped in a container. 'What message did the American pass you?' Kramer asked.

'No message ...'

One man gripped Gorov's jaw, another man thrust a huge rubber funnel into Gorov's mouth, the third man started pouring water down the funnel. The choking sensation began immediately, the drowning sensation came later. On a stool beside his patient, a doctor sat with a stethoscope pressed against Gorov's naked chest.

For Gorov, flat on his back, blindfolded and unable to move, the world was water - water flooding into his mouth, water pouring down his throat, water surging into his lungs.

Desperately he tried to lift his arms, his chest, to hold his breath, and then he was spluttering, choking, retching painfully, and his whole body seemed to swell up, to be on the point of bursting. His eyes bulged, his neck muscles tautened, collapsed. He tried to scream and the scream was strangled and he knew he was dying, drowning. They kept on pouring in water until the doctor looked quickly at Kramer. The Bait nodded. A foot pedal under the couch was pressed and hands lifted the rear of the couch swiftly, elevating Gorov to a sitting position. The seaman choked, spewed, gasped for air. Then he lolled, head down, panting irregularly. Kramer pulled up the blindfold, lifted Gorov's head under the chin.

'What message did the American pass to you?' Blurred eyes stared back at Kramer, eyes full of hate. He tried to speak twice, looked down at his left wrist, and twice only a hoarse crackle emerged, a hardly human sound. They had taken away his wristwatch. For Gorov this was the worst ordeal: now he had no idea of the time, nothing to tell him how long he must hold out. The third time he managed to get the words out, glaring at Kramer. 'No message . ..' Eyes full of hate, the Bait noted, so resistance was high. It would take half an hour, he estimated, maybe less. When the hate vanished, was replaced by agony, they would be getting somewhere. He nodded and they renewed the treatment. Gorov guessed that a good twenty minutes had gone. In fact, it was less than five minutes since they had brought him to the cellar.

The Locomotive moved into action, driving people as though he had only got up an hour ago - whereas in fact he had been twenty-two hours without sleep. It was not the information which Kramer burst into his room with which generated this explosive activity, and once again he deflated the fat Bait.

'Michael Gorov is defecting to the Americans . . .'

'It took you two hours, Kramer.' Papanin looked at the clock on the wall which registered 5.30 am. 'That deputy mate is a courageous man - and you're too late with your news - this signal has just come in from North Pole 17.' He handed the signal form to the Bait who was already sweating from the temperature change as he read it. Michael Gorov left North Pole 17 with dog team midnight. Security man Marov found dead on the ice. Search parties have been sent out. Please advise. Minsky.

It took Papanin less than a minute to scribble a reply in his own hand which Petrov rushed to the signals room. Send all available helicopters further west than Gorov can have gone. Then sweep back towards North Pole if. Report immediately any signs of American activity near Target-5. Papanin.

He ordered Kramer to contact Murmansk, to check that the Bison bomber was ready for instant departure, to confirm with Leningrad airport that a plane was standing by, to signal trawler fleet k49 and the Revolution, requesting information on any American activity in the area, to signal the helicopter carrier Gorki asking for an immediate check on the present position of the American icebreaker Elroy.

He phoned General Boris Syrtov, chief of Special Security in Moscow, not caring whether he dragged him from his bed at 5.30 am, but Syrtov had been on the verge of calling the Siberian and the conversation opened with a battle.

'Papanin!' Syrtov's tone was sharp. 'Murmansk tells me you have ordered an Arctic alert. It isn't true, of course?'

'It is true, General ...'

'Without my authority?'

'It was a precaution .. .'

'Brezhnev has heard about it -I have to go to the Kremlin at once.'

'Good...'

'What did you say?' Syrtov roared.

'The precaution was justified,' Papanin snapped. He fired his big gun. 'Michael Gorov has fled across the ice ... He's taking more than his brains to the Americans. I've just found out he spent two hours inside the security room while I was away in Moscow - I think he photographed the Catherine charts. He's taking them a blueprint of our entire underwater system.'

Syrtov's anger collapsed, was replaced by chronic anxiety. He asked what resources Papanin needed - and the answer staggered him.

'Personal control of the carrier Gorki, trawler fleet k49, and the research ship Revolution . ..'

'You know that's unprecedented.'

'It's an unprecedented situation. The First Secretary can sanction it - which is why I'm glad you're going to see him.'

'I'll come back to you,' Syrtov said tersely. 'Meantime continue your preparations.'

'I've made them - including ordering an alert nine hours ago without your authority, which has gained us nine hours of invaluable time ...' Papanin heard the click of the receiver at the Moscow end with satisfaction. He looked up as Kramer came in, eager for news. 'Pack your hot-water bottle, Kramer - we'll be in the Arctic within twenty-four hours.'

At precisely one o'clock on Sunday morning in Washington Lemuel Dawes switched on the light over the camp bed he had set up in his office and checked the time. As usual, his internal alarm clock had woken him punctually. And he had a headache, which was hardly surprising - the heat, the lack of air and the tropical plants banked up against two walls were building an atmosphere which could only be described as nauseous. Ten minutes later Adams knocked on his door and came in.

'No news from Helsinki,' he said grimly. 'But the plane might have been delayed - he may still get through.'

'So we wait?'

'We wait...'

'Which could be a mistake.' Dawes scratched at his rumpled hair. 'But we can't do a damned thing about it. Gorov could be on the ice already, we could fly a plane into Target-5 now, but I daren't do it - if Gorov hasn't left yet any sign of unusual activity at Target-5 could alert the Russians.'

So while Beaumont was climbing the walls at distant Curtis Field at the edge of the Greenland icecap, while Dawes waited for a signal from a man who had died forty hours earlier, Col Papanin's far-reaching preparations were gaining momentum and looked like winning him the game before it had even started.

Leonid Brezhnev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, walked briskly into Col Papanin's office at noon on Sunday accompanied by General Boris Syrtov.

As always, when he removed his fur coat Brezhnev was smartly dressed in a dark business suit, his thick hair was neatly brushed, and in Detroit he could easily have been taken for a Ford executive. No one helped him to disrobe; the First Secretary intensely disliked fuss. And as always he came straight to the point.

'Papanin, you have control of six vessels of the trawler fleet, the helicopter carrier Gorki and the research ship Revolution. None of these will make it look like a military operation - they are civilian vessels, so to speak. You see the point?'

'There must be no international incident.'

'No international incident,' Brezhnev agreed. 'In May the American President is coming to Moscow for a summit meeting and I want him to come - so be careful.'

'But there could be an international accident,' Papanin said bluntly. 'I know that area - anything can happen there. Men can fall into an open lead, they can get lost for ever in a blizzard ...'

Brezhnev held up a well-kept hand. 'No details, please! There is, I agree, a world of difference between an incident and an accident - that is your sphere.' His thick eyebrows lifted as he spoke with great emphasis. 'But you must bring back Gorov - neither he nor the Catherine charts must ever reach Washington. I have flown here personally to stress how vital this thing is.'

'We are three moves ahead of the Americans already,' Papanin replied. 'That's what counts . . .'

'But we must keep ahead of them.' Brezhnev glanced at Syrtov, a small, lean-faced man with irritable eyes who was holding a leather folder. 'The general has the codes and wavelengths for you to communicate with these ships. They have already been ordered to proceed to the area involved.'

'I'd like to leave at once,' Papanin took the folder from Syrtov. 'I think we may just be in time . . .'

Brezhnev grasped the Siberian's arm. 'Igor, you have to be in time. You have to be.'

It was 3 pm in Murmansk when Papanin went aboard the crowded Bison bomber. At 3 pm on Sunday, 20 February, it was night at Murmansk, a clear moonlit night. The four jets were tuning up to screaming pitch as the Siberian settled into an improvised seat near the pilot's cabin while he studied a map and marked the latest position of the American icebreaker, Elroy. Behind him, spread out across the bare deck, a large body of fur-clad men were packed in close as they nursed their rifles. The enormous power of the jets increased, bursts of snow bounced up from the recently-ploughed runway, then the control tower gave the go-ahead and the throbbing machine began to move.

From the control tower they could see the fiery glow from the rear of the jet pods as the machine taxied forward, turned, moved on to the main runway. Then the machine really came alive, the jets ejected the growl peculiar to the Bison, the wheels whipped down the runway, left the earth. As the bomber climbed steeply its jet ejection hit the runway like gunfire, scouring snow from the concrete, hurling up clouds of whiteness. Five minutes later it was only a vapour trail in the night, thirty thousand feet high. Col Igor Papanin was on his way. Destination: North Pole 17.

* * *

'Still no word from Helsinki.' Adams handed Dawes the message form as he sat down. 'That just came in - I'm beginning to think something's happened to Winthrop . . .'

'I guessed that hours ago.' Dawes hardly glanced at the form. 'My bet is you won't have heard from your boy come Christmas.'

It was ironical that Papanin was the man who alerted Dawes. For hours with growing alarm he had received a stream of reports coming in from ships, from weather planes, from satellites orbiting high above the Arctic - and all the reports indicated that something very big was on the move.

First Dawes heard that the Soviet carrier Gorki had changed course, that she was now steaming north at top speed towards the icefield. An hour later the report came through that six vessels of the trawler fleet k49, ships crammed with electronic gear, had also turned due north, abandoning their obvious spying rendezvous with the NATO naval exercise Sea Lion. Finally he had heard that the huge new Soviet research ship Revolution, on its maiden spying exercise from the Nikolayev shipyard on the Black Sea coast, had also changed course. 'She's heading into the gullet of Iceberg Alley,' he had told Adams. Then he had made his urgent phone call.

Only thirty minutes later a quietly dressed man wearing horn-rimmed glasses had arrived at Dawes's office. The President's assistant, his closest confidant, he had listened intently for a quarter of an hour before he spoke.

'Lemuel, this is the position. If the President goes to the Moscow summit with the Catherine charts in his pocket, then he'd be talking from a position of great strength - and we may get the concessions we want from the Russians...'

So Dawes had been given permission to take his own decisions without further reference back to Washington, 'Provided you don't stir up an international incident,' the brilliant, German-born assistant had warned him. 'That might spoil the summit meeting ...'

Dawes was thinking of this proviso when he took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Adams. 'I didn't show you the met report which came in at the last minute. Dense fog has come in out of nowhere - and blanketed Target-5 - Looks like this is going to be Operation Beaumont after all.'

Adams said nothing as he read the report and then fastened his seat-strap. The Boeing they were travelling aboard was descending and in the distance twin chains of landing lights glowed in the whiteness of the night. Dawes had taken the first of his decisions - he was flying to the edge of the chess board to see for himself. Destination: Curtis Field.

Running Game

The meagre airstrip on North Pole 17 rushed towards the Bison, the Soviet pilot pointed its nose between the rows of lights now blurring into continuous bands, throttled back and prayed. The strip was too short for the Bison.

The ice flew up at him, sped away below, the wheels touched down, the bomber lurched. The pilot gritted his teeth, braked. Snow clouds stormed up, splashed over the windows like white fog. Fragmented ice bombarded the undercarriage, struck it like a million machine-gun bullets. The plane hurtled on, running out of airstrip ...

'Exciting, isn't it, Kramer?' Papanin remarked.

In the seat beside him Kramer was rigid with fear, almost in a muscular spasm as his gloved hands grasped the seat arms. The Siberian watched with interest as the Bait stared straight ahead without replying; and this, Papanin thought, is a trained interrogator, the man who goes down into the cellar and screws information out of poor broken-down suspects. Sweat it out, my little Bait, sweat it out. The bomber halted fifteen metres from disaster. 'Now you can relax, Kramer,' Papanin said genially.

He glanced out of the window, stared out for a moment, then tore off his seat-strap. He was at the door before the fifty-odd security men lying on the deck behind him had stirred. He had the door open before the ground staff outside had time to perch a metal ladder against the fuselage, then he was hanging half-out of the machine as he stared up into the moonlit night.

'Has it gone? Bloody hell!'

Papanin asked the question, fired the expletive as he stood at the foot of the ladder propped against the Bison, hands thrust deep inside his parka as he stared down at the base leader, Dr Alexei Minsky. Like Kramer, the base leader was short and stocky and he wore snow-goggles which, because the moonlight reflected off them, gave him a sinister appearance. He immediately infuriated Papanin.

'Has what gone, Colonel?'

'For God's sake! That plane I saw when we were coming in.'

'It has flown off to the west...'

'The radar? You've checked the radar?'

'No, Colonel. One moment - I will be back ...'

'He's shit-scared,' Papanin snapped to Kramer who had come down the ladder behind him. 'He's more dangerous than a polar bear - he's an idiot! From now on Minsky must be kept inside.'* He stood with his hands in his parka looking round, observing everything. The bleakness of the Soviet base impressed him: for a quarter of a mile in every direction the ice was reasonably level, but beyond it lay the frozen maelstrom of the pack, a hellish jumble of heaped-up ice which looked to be on the verge of lapping over the island.

* Soviet security jargon for must not be allowed outside the borders of the Soviet Union under any circumstances. Presumably two hundred million Soviet citizens are members of this exclusive club.

'This place isn't going to last long,' he remarked.

Unlike American research bases - where the airstrip is always well clear of the camp area - the prefabricated huts on North Pole 17, their flat roofs layered with snow, were barely thirty metres from the improvised runway. A radar mast dominated the little colony, spearing one hundred feet up to a wing-like ear which revolved to face any point of the compass. The Siberian gave brief instructions to Kramer and then faced Minsky who had run back over the ice.

'Hardly a pinpoint on the radar,' Minsky panted, his goggles steamed up. 'When the American plane saw you he flew straight back to Greenland!' He made it sound like a triumph. Papanin reached out a. hand, pushed the goggles up over Minsky's forehead.

'You don't need these on a night like this - or did you think you were in a blizzard? Have the helicopters found Gorov? Have you brought him back? Have you sent out the Sno-Cats? Have you done anything worthwhile?'

'Gorov hasn't been found . . .' Minsky sounded nervous. 'They are still searching . . .'

'Disembark!'

Papanin roared the command up to the aircraft exit and strode long-legged across the airstrip towards the camp. Now there was no danger of an American aircraft observing what came out of the Bison he didn't even bother to look back at the armed men filing down the ladder. And now he was outside Russia the Siberian was feeling free again: he had full control, could take instant decisions without Syrtov peering over his shoulder and making damnfool suggestions.

The precise date when the Special Security Service was formed is not known, but sometime in 1968 Brezhnev decided that for overseas work the KGB was a broken reed. Demoralization set in with the death of Stalin - the most repressive organization in the world, the KGB found itself repressed. Physical torture was banned, was replaced by such devices as the Serbsky Institute in Moscow,* and soon top KGB officials were vying with each other to keep within the law. This change of heart fitted in beautifully with Khrushchev's new liberal policy inside Russia, but it didn't work overseas. A terrorist organization without terror is like an impotent man trying to make love. So a new organization was formed.

* The Serbsky Institute specializes in certifying those who don't conform as insane. The threat of a visit to this place is enough to make many people toe the Party line.

The Special Security Service can operate only outside Soviet Russia - it has no power within its own borders. It can use any method to attain its objectives, and because it is confined to overseas operations there is no danger that it may grow into the Frankenstein monster the KGB once became. Brezhnev made only one exception to this rule -because of the Jewish problem Papanin had certain powers inside the city limits of Leningrad. But once he left Murmansk the Siberian controlled the game.

'Those machines - why aren't they in the air?' Papanin snapped. He gestured towards six helicopters standing beyond the airstrip where they had been parked to let the Bison come in. Beside him the short-legged Minsky was dog-trotting to keep up.

'They have just arrived from the Gorki .. .'

'They should be in the air - searching! What about the latest met report?'

'The fog over Target-5 is expected to continue. It is making the search more difficult...'

'That's where you're wrong again! While the fog lasts the Americans can't airlift Gorov back to the States.' They were coming close to the group of huts where metre-long icicles hung from the rooftops, icicles which wouldn't melt again until spring. 'They'll try and get him out over the ice -make for the Greenland coast,' Papanin said, half-thinking aloud. 'We'll scatter a screen of men over the ice west of Target-5. We'll keep a screen of helicopters in the air above them. We'll grab him whoever is there to protect him.'

'Might that not be dangerous?'

'We have the perfect excuse. Gorov is a madman, a murderer - he killed Marov, one of our oceanographers. Gorov has been in the Arctic so long he's gone round the bend.'

'I don't understand,' Minsky began. 'Marov was a security man ...'

'You're so thick it's hardly credible,' Papanin barked. 'Marov has just become an oceanographer - Gorov is a criminal who killed one of his own colleagues and we have to apprehend him. That changes it from a political case into a police affair.' There was a savage, jaunty note in Papanin's voice. Here, out in the open, he was in his element. This was the Siberian who, ten years ago, had been told to speed up the removal of the Russian missiles from Cuba. His method had been characteristically direct: he had threatened to explode the missiles over the island if the Cubans didn't cooperate. Ten years older, he had not lost his quick, savage touch.

'A police affair?' Minsky said thoughtfully as they came up to the huts. 'That makes a difference?'

'Yes! It means that if we want to we are justified in shooting at Gorov and anyone with him - after all, Michael Gorov is a dangerous maniac.' Papanin smashed an icicle from the roof with his gloved hand. 'You see, Minsky, we are starting a manhunt.'

Within minutes of meeting Beaumont at Curtis Field Dawes was in the air again, this time as a passenger aboard a two-man Cessna aircraft which took off along the runway ending at the cliff brink. The pilot, Arnold Schumacher, who hated flying top brass, wheeled the plane away from Greenland and headed out to sea. The icecap below merged with the polar pack glued to the mainland as the plane flew like a dart due east.

'You're not expected to find Target-5,' Dawes growled, 'so just pretend you're looking for it. I'm checking conditions.'

'Terrible.' The pilot paused. 'Sir,' he added. 'I can't see anyone getting to the base over the ice. When the fog clears we'll have to fly in. The usual way.' He transferred his chewing gum to the other cheek, the cheek away from Dawes.

'That's the trouble with you people up here. All you think of is engines and machines. You can't imagine anyone fighting their way in over the pack. We're getting soft, Schumacher - if Pan Am can't take us we don't go.'

'I'm not Pan Am . . .'

'And take that gum out of your mouth when you're talking to me.'

Screw you, chum. But the pilot preferred this type: at least they didn't try to fraternize, kidding you up they were just one of the boys - with their pay ten times your own. The plane flew on through the cold, moonlit night at two thousand feet, a wisp of metal over the Arctic. The altitude flattened out the pressure ridges, made the pack look like a sheet of opaque glass, crazed and splintered glass. Conditions were bloody terrible. Thirty minutes later Dawes was half out of his seat, peering down into the grey murk below, a solid sea of rolling fog which masked the solid ice under it. A squat globular bug with a whizz of rotor-driven air above it was cruising towards them, barely skimming the fog bank. 'See that?' Dawes rapped out.

'Chopper. Russian.' The pilot was thinking about the pad of gum stuck under his seat.

'Submarine killer?'

'Yes,' said Schumacher.

'Must be off that Soviet carrier south of the ice. I want a closer look. Dive!'

Schumacher was irked about his lost chewing gum. Screw all generals: they ought to be abolished. Like state taxes. So he dived, dropped like a bomb. But Dawes, braced in his seat, was ready. The Russian helicopter was no more than half a mile away, floating towards them on the fog sea as the Cessna went down and down and the fog swept up. Schumacher pulled out of the dive with a jerk which could have knocked out Dawes, but again he was ready for the impact. They were now about three hundred feet above the helicopter. Then it vanished, fell into the fog.

'Hell!' Dawes was annoyed. 'I wonder why she's such a shy girl? Seen any of them about here before, Schumacher?'

'Never this far west - not that model. We've passed over Target-5,' the pilot added, 'somewhere down there in the oatmeal.' The edge of the fog bank was in sight and the polar pack loomed as a mellow crystal sheen beyond. 'Coming close to the Russian base, North Pole 17, sir.'

Schumacher's access of politeness intrigued Dawes. 'I want to see what they're up to. Does it Worry you?'

'They buzz us - send a machine up and fly close. I nearly collided with one somewhere about here. They don't like us playing good neighbours with them. So we still keep on, sir? There they are.'

Twinkles of green phosphorescence glowing on the ice showed the landing strip on the ice island, showed that the airstrip was in imminent use. The buildings couldn't be seen yet, but something else could be seen, was just coming into view. Dawes leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. 'Perfect timing! You almost deserve a medal...' A small - at that range - Satanic-looking shadow was drifting down out of the sky, trailing pencil-thin vapour as it pointed its nose down. A Bison bomber was landing at North Pole 17.

'Go back, sir?'

'Not yet!'

A Bison bomber. That was interesting. The Russians didn't use the Bison as an Arctic taxi, but they might in an emergency use it to get here fast from Murmansk, to bring in a man - or a lot of men. The Bison swept down to ground level, swept along between the lights, and Dawes could see the buildings now, a tiny cluster of dark smudges. The moving smudge between the lights came to a stop, the green pinpoints faded, vanished.

"They've hooked us on their radar,' Schumacher warned. 'Now they'll send up a plane.'

'Not with their lights doused. Look below us.'

From seven hundred feet they could see them clearly, tiny turtles crawling over the ice. Sno-Cats, six of them, and they were west of the Soviet ice island - heading direct towards Target-5- They scarcely seemed to move, but behind them their caterpillar tracks left tell-tale furrows in the snow, furrows leading from North Pole 17. That - and the Bison bomber - decided Dawes.

'Home,' he said, and Schumacher reacted instantly, turning at speed as he gained altitude. 'Get through on your radio to Curtis Field ...'

'There's bad static .. .'

'Get through. Go on until you do get through. Send one word time and time again. Nitrogen. Got it? Nitrogen . . .' It was the code-signal Beaumont was waiting for, the signal for him to leave for Target-5.

The two Sikorsky helicopters came down vertically as though suspended from a cable, dropping towards the ice over a hundred miles from the Greenland coast. It was a critical moment - any landing on unknown ice is critical. For one thing you can never be sure from the air that you are coming down on firm ice; it may look quite solid and then the skids land, the ice cracks and you are going down into the ocean. For another thing, if the machine doesn't settle on a flat surface it can keel over, topple, and the whirling rotors hit the ice first. One moment the men inside are preparing to disembark, the next moment steel blades are mincing them to pieces - unless the fuel tanks detonate, in which case they are incinerated.

So it was with a certain tension that Beaumont waited for the bump which would tell them they had touched down on the polar pack. Seated in the observer's position beside the pilot, he watched with professional interest the hand holding the collective pitch stick controlling their descent. The hand seemed steady enough. He glanced at the pilot's face - what he could see of it under helmet, goggles and headset. The face seemed steady, too, but the mouth was tight. Pilot Rainer was, in fact, clenching his teeth while he waited for the bump.

Behind Beaumont Sam Grayson was perched on a flap seat and there were also nine dogs aboard3 nine whimpering dogs who didn't like the sudden descent. A sled completed the congestion. Horst Langer, with a second sled and more dogs, was coming down in the other machine Beaumont could see beyond the perspex dome. Beaumont checked his watch. They would hit the pack in thirty seconds Rainer had said. Twenty seconds to go.

'Would you normally risk a landing here?' Beaumont had asked a few minutes earlier.

'No!' Rainer had been uncomfortably direct in his reply. 'But I have orders to get you down if humanly possible. So we've got to risk it, haven't we?'

Beaumont adjusted his ear-pads. Everything was shuddering - the floor under his feet, the dome, the controls Rainer was handling. Beaumont rested a hand on the dog by his side and felt the vibrations through the poor beast's fur. Transport planes the dogs minded not at all: helicopters they hated. The descent went on. Rainer adjusted the twist-grip throttle on his stick. Ten seconds to go. Maybe only ten seconds left to live.

They were now low enough to see the ice beyond the dome. It was a churned-up mess, like a blurred sea which had frozen suddenly - blurred because the dome was steamed up inside the cabin. And the grim wilderness of tumbled ice was shuddering unpleasantly, dithering giddily because of the cabin's shuddering. When they opened the door the temperature would drop eighty or ninety degrees within seconds, taking their breath away. If the machine landed steady, if it didn't topple. There were skids - skis -under this Sikorsky and that should help stability. Unless one ski skidded while the other sank. Rainer glanced at Beaumont, who winked at him. The wink was not returned and Beaumont saw the blank eyes behind the goggles. Rainer was scared stiff. Then the skids touched the ice.

The machine wobbled. Beaumont felt it going down on his side. Soft ice to port, hard to starboard. Rainer's hand was welded to the stick. Bugger this trip - he should have gone sick. The dogs sensed disaster, began whimpering pathetically. The blades were still whirling, whipping the air as the sinking sensation went on. The tension inside the cabin was a physical presence as the three men sweated out their terror. Then the machine settled, the sinking stopped. Rainer switched off, lifted his goggles and his face was seamed with sweat.

'Nice landing,' Beaumont said as he pulled off his headset and reached for the door.

'Wait...!'

'I am waiting - for the rotors to stop.'

It wasn't necessary - if you kept your head down when you went out - but Rainer didn't know that Beaumont had flown helicopters all over the Arctic. Beaumont opened the door and the Arctic came in like a knife. He dropped to the ice and walked away from the machine stiffly as he looked round for Langer's Sikorsky, then frowned as he saw it was coming down on to pressure ridge terrain. It was going to crash.

Behind him Grayson was sending the dogs out and they came out joyously, barking and scampering round the machine with sheer delight at being free again. A quarter of a mile away to the east the fog bank hovered in the moonlight, a grey curtain like a dirty cloud anchored to the ice. Then Langer's machine dropped out of sight behind a pressure ridge, a twisted wall of ice ten feet high. The machine hit the ice and the blur of the rotor disc steadied above the crest. 'He's O K.' Grayson's voice was husky behind the Englishman. 'For a moment I wondered ...'

'He isn't - he's toppling!'

Beaumont started running across the ice, his boots crunching into soft crust which crumbled under him. The whole area had only recently frozen over, was dangerously unstable. Beaumont ran as fast as he could without slipping and his heart was in his mouth - the rotor disc above the crest was no longer horizontal, it was canting sideways. He ran through a gap in the pressure wall and saw that Langer's quick reflexes had already reacted to the emergency - the door was open, dogs were spilling out on to the soft ice and running towards the gap, their legs smeared with the dark ooze they had plunged into.

The Sikorsky was an extraordinary sight - with its port skid sinking, already below the surface, its strut still going down, the machine was heeling over while its rotors still whirled at speed. The situation couldn't have been more dangerous and as he ran close Beaumont wondered what the hell the pilot was doing, why the hell he hadn't switched off. Langer appeared, heaving one end of the sled close to the aperture, getting ready to push it out. 'Leave it!' Beaumont shouted and his warning was lost in the hideous roar. He jumped up, hauled himself inside the cabin where the pilot, Jacowski, was sitting behind the controls, reached across and cut the motor.

'I'm taking off,' the pilot yelled.

'Start that motor again and I'll brain you,' Beaumont rasped. 'Our lives depend on that sled - give a hand to get it out. The machine's expendable - we're not.' He went back to help Langer. 'Take it easy, Horst - the ground's like a sponge out there ...' He saw Grayson arrive below the aperture. 'Sam, watch it as it comes down - it could sink. . .'

'Hurry it up - I'm sinking,' the American called out. . They wrestled with the heavily-laden sled, balanced it on the brink, and then Beaumont dropped out to help Grayson take its weight. The Sikorsky seemed temporarily stable but was tilted at an acute angle as they lowered the sled carefully and rested it on the ice. It started sinking at once and then Grayson and Langer grabbed hold of the harness and began hauling it away towards firmer ground near the gap. Beaumont looked at Jacowski who was still sitting behind his controls.

'If you stay there that's going to make a nice coffin for you - it's gone in deeper.'

'I'm going to try and take her out.'

'Better have a look first - unless you want someone to collect your insurance.'

Jacowski climbed gingerly to the ground, felt his boots sinking, moved quickly to join Beaumont where the ice was firmer. The helicopter had almost righted itself, was almost horizontal again - because the starboard skid had now sunk to the depth of the port skid. It was knee-deep in black ooze. 'The next problem is how to get rid of it,' Beaumont said roughly. 'It has to go either up or down - it can't stay here as a landmark to show some Russian chopper where we went into the fog. If we start the motor I think the vibration will take it down.'

'That's government property,' the pilot said nastily. 'It belongs to the Arctic Research Laboratory at Point Barrow. We can bring a team to dig it out . . .'

'It goes up or down,5 Beaumont informed him, 'so you'd better get clear before I start her up.'

'Keith, that's damned dangerous,' Grayson protested as he came back to see what was happening. 'If it goes down too quickly while you're inside it . . .'

Beaumont was already climbing up carefully into the cabin, testing it with his weight to see the effect. Nothing happened so he sat down in the pilot's seat and looked out to make sure the others were clear. Jacowski had gone all the way back to the gap but Grayson was waiting just beyond the span of the rotor blades. Starting up the motor in these circumstances wasn't a course of action Beaumont would have recommended to anyone, but the machine had to disappear - either into the sky or under the Arctic.

It was just possible that when he started the motor he'd be able to drag her free, to take her up and land the machine close to the other Sikorsky; it all depended on the strength of the drag of the ooze gripping the skids. The more likely outcome was that the vibration would shiver the skids, open up the ooze and force her down. When that happened he'd have to take rather quick evasive action to avoid being carried down with her. Beaumont started the motor.

For a moment he thought he'd managed it, that he was going to lift her out. The machine wobbled and he could feel the power trying to haul her out, then she started going down and going over to port all at once and quickly. He dived for the doorway, went out, slipped on the ice and sprawled under the toppling, dropping machine. He was caught in a kind of closing press - between the ice under him and the descending whirling blades coming down on top of him. He scrambled to his knees, felt the ooze sucking at his boots, holding him in. The beat of the descending rotors deafened him, the ooze clamped round his boots, his hands clawed at firmer ground to drag himself loose.

Other hands grabbed his own as Grayson tugged ferociously and between them they got him out. He curled his toes upwards to stop his boots sliding off and then, crouched low, they ran. in a shambling trot. The racing blades were only feet above them and Beaumont felt their wind-force beating down on his neck as they ran together, still stooped low when they were yards beyond the reach of the flailing metal. At the gap they turned to look back as the motor coughed, choked and died. The fuselage was sitting on the ooze and the motor had sucked a churning mass of the filth into its innards while the rotors whirled on their own momentum. 'Get ready to get behind the ridge,' Beaumont warned. He was foreseeing the moment when the blades broke free and started flying across the ice, but the warning was unnecessary. As the fuselage sank more slowly the rotors slowed and were hardly moving when they reached the ground. They flicked great gouts of blackness across the ice and then settled. The ooze opened up, the Sikorsky went down with a dreadful sucking sound, the ooze closed over it.

'That was government property,' Jacowski repeated peevishly.

'Tell them to take another gold bar out of Fort Knox,' Beaumont suggested.

* * *

There was a reaction after the crisis, a tendency to move slowly, but Beaumont dispelled it as he urged everyone to move faster, to get the other sled out of the surviving Sikorsky, to harness up the dog teams, to get moving before a Russian plane arrived. 'I want us inside that fog bank in fifteen minutes - there we're invisible ...' And there was another confrontation with the pilots before they left.

'We'll have to report what happened to that helicopter.' Rainer called down from his machine.

'In triplicate,' Grayson shouted back at him. 'Don't forget they like it in triplicate!'

Jacowski slammed the door in his face as Rainer started his machine. Five minutes later the two sled-teams were assembled, the dogs were hitched up, ready to go. The Sikorsky had vanished, fading into the night on its way home. The feeling of isolation descended on the three men the moment the machine had gone, and the terrible silence of the Arctic wilderness was overwhelming.

They were alone on the ice, a hundred miles from Greenland, a pinhead on the frozen sea - three men, eighteen dogs and two sleds. The ice under their feet was possibly twelve inches deep, except where it had no depth at all, where the , weight of a single dog could fracture it, casting the living weight down into the freezing black water they were floating on. And even though the ice seemed still it was moving all the time; caught up in the powerful Greenland Current it was drifting south towards Iceberg Alley at the rate of over ten miles a day, and under the smear of ice which coated the ocean the water plunged down ten thousand feet. Beaumont took over the leading team from Grayson. 'Let's get moving," he said. 'I shan't be happy until we're inside the fog.'

'It looks extremely inviting,' Langer said with a dry smile. The twenty-eight-year-old German had spent two years in London and Beaumont often remarked that his English was more idiomatic than his own. 'In fact, it looks very much like one of your famous pea-soupers.'

'It won't be so bad when we get inside it,' Beaumont replied and they started off. It was always the initial start which called for an effort - to get the dog teams moving, to get your own reluctant legs moving in the bitter Arctic night. And Horst was right he thought as he held the whip in one hand and gripped the sled's handlebar with the other: the fog looked damned uninviting.

The fog bank hung over the ice like a threat, a threat of grey vapour which rose high above the ice and clung to the ground. It was bitterly cold but there was no wind, so the fog was almost motionless, like a cloud hovering above an icy plateau, a cloud which could hide any number of dangers. The danger Beaumont feared most was movement - that while they were inside the fog the ice might stir afresh, opening up leads of water, bringing them together again, heaving up pressure ridges which could crush a man, even bury a whole dog team in seconds. He cracked his whip, shouted at the team, and the dogs moved faster, hauling the sled, their legs stretched, their bodies straining at the harness.

And now the deathly silence of the ice was broken by man-made sounds - by the creak of harness, the hiss of runners coursing over the ice, the crackle of snow-crust giving way, by the crack of whips and the thump of boots treading harder ice. They were under way, heading for the fog bank, heading towards Target-5 lost somewhere inside the dense pall. Beaumont drove the lead team with Langer controlling the second team behind, while a few paces ahead Grayson moved .across the ice staring down at his compass. 'It's nervous already,' he called out. Which was another problem - in this part of the world compasses were notoriously unreliable.

Langer easily kept up with Beaumont's hard-driving pace - his lead dog, Bismarck, was a big, tough-minded animal who kept the other dogs moving, the Beaumont of the dog teams. Horst Langer, five foot ten inches tall, dark-haired and clean-shaven, was a Rhinelander, a cheerful, easy-going man with a sense of humour which concealed great resilience. An expert with explosives - essential knowledge for depth-sounding work - he was also a brilliant dog-handler. As Beaumont said, 'They'll fly over thin ice with Horst when other dogs would cringe.' Born in Dusseldorf, still a bachelor - 'With so many attractive women about how can you choose just one?' - he had spent four years in the Arctic working on American bases. And like the other two men he had top security clearance from Washington.

'Something wrong, Keith?' he called out.

Beaumont had halted his team, was standing with his head turned to one side. 'Thought I heard something. Keep very quiet for a minute.'

They waited. The dogs twisted in their harness to see what was happening. There seemed to be nothing but the ton-weight of the Arctic silence pressing down on them. Beaumont, in his fur parka and fur hood, was huge and still in the moonlight as he swivelled his head like a radar wing towards the east. The fog bank was close now, only a few hundred yards away, a dirty cloud like motionless smoke. Then Beaumont heard it again, the faint beat-beat of a large helicopter growing louder, coming closer by the second.

'Run for it! Inside the fog before they see us ...'

The urgency in his shout communicated itself to the dogs as the whips cracked, the sled teams surged forward and the helicopter's motor sped towards them. They were actually racing towards it, expecting at any moment to see it come over the top of the fog bank. Bismarck exerted all his strength, his paws flying over the ice at Beaumont's heels as the sleds lurched over uneven ground and the men behind them fought to keep them upright. A spill now would be disaster, would anchor them in the open until it was too late. Grayson ran alongside Beaumont, ready to grab at the handlebar. The helicopter beat was very close. Rat-tat-tat . . . Beaumont cracked his whip, urged the dogs to move faster while he struggled with the bucking sled which was taking on a life of its own.

'Thin ice!'

Beaumont was turning the sled as Grayson shouted, turning it away from a depression where something dark showed below treacherously smooth ice. The helicopter sound had become a drumbeat which meant it was coming in very low, only a few hundred feet up. The sled caught an ice rib, was heeling over to port when Grayson steadied it and behind them Langer swerved widely to avoid the obstacle^ To keep them moving, Beaumont cracked his whip a third time over their heads and they went forward in a spurt. He thought he saw something above him as they plunged into the fog, then his team was swallowed up, followed by Langer's sled, and it was like diving into moonless night as the fog closed round them. It enveloped them, drifted clammily over their faces, blurred the shapes of the dogs only feet away from their drivers. Beaumont pulled at the handlebar, called out for the dogs to halt, then turned his head upwards and stared into the murk. The engine beat was muffled and sounded to be directly overhead.

'I think it's Russian,' Grayson said breathlessly.

'Could be a routine patrol,' Langer suggested. 'North Pole 17 isn't far away - for a chopper. They're always checking on what we're doing.' The engine beat was still above them and it gave them the eerie feeling it could see the men below it, which was impossible.

'It's circling,' Beaumont snapped.

'So it could still be routine,' Langer insisted. 'Or maybe it's looking for Gorov.'

'Or maybe it's looking for us,' Beaumont replied, 'if Tillotson got through to Leningrad.'

'Fifteen killers ...'

Papanin stood outside the headquarters hut as the last helicopter landed on the moonlit airstrip, its twin rotors spinning giddily as the jet power died. They were lined up in a row - squat, bulbous silhouettes in the moonlight, like big-bellied crows; submarine killers just flown in off the Soviet carrier Gorki. The sonar devices under the domes looked like pus sacs, and each of them sagged on a quadruple support of two-wheel carriages. A jet pod like a bomb was slung to port and starboard of each machine.

'I want them airborne in thirty minutes.' Papanin told Kramer. 'And then they stay up - until they've found Gorov. They can come down to refuel,' he added.

'There's only one pilot per machine,' the Bait pointed out.

'Very economical,' was the Siberian's only comment.

Thirty minutes later the fleet of submarine killers started taking off from the airstrip and Papanin watched them go. It was one of these fifteen machines which Beaumont heard coming when he rushed the sled teams inside the fog bank. And it was one of these machines which photographed them just before they disappeared, photographed them with a telephoto lens of great range and power.

The first few hours inside the fog bank were uneventful hell for the three men and their dog teams - if uneventful is a true description of a time when they constantly expected to lose their lives. For one thing they couldn't see where they were going; under any other circumstance Beaumont would have called a halt, would have pitched camp and waited for the fog to move. Instead they drove themselves on, stumbling through the icy dampness, often only able to see the lead dog beyond their sled, and when it disappeared Grayson went in front to test the ground, walking slowly with the dogs coming up close behind.

If their calculations were correct, if the star-fix Grayson had taken with his sextant soon after he left the Sikorsky was anything like accurate, the ice island Target-5 was only a few miles due east when they landed. But navigation in an Arctic winter is not always an exact science and privately Beaumont had his doubts.

The tension rose as they heard another helicopter corning at the moment the fog was thinning. Suddenly it was lighter, the fog above them drifted away, a faint glow which was the moon began to percolate the mistiness. The machine came closer. 'Halt!' Beaumont tugged at the sled. 'Try and keep the dogs still. Sam, take over here a minute.' Beaumont took his night glasses out of the case strapped to the handlebar and walked a few yards away from the sled teams. Above him a hole was opening up in the fog; he couldn't see the moon but its light was all around him as he raised the glasses. The helicopter drummed in, swept into view, a blurred, huge shape flying very low indeed.

It went over quickly, so quickly he couldn't catch it in his glasses but he was sure it was Russian. Then he heard another one coming. This time he was ready for it as it flew in on the same course as its predecessor. In the lenses he caught a glimpse of a jet pod, the blur of a pilot's helmet, then it swept past out of sight. 'Submarine killer,' he told Grayson when he went back to the sled teams. 'And there's another one up there in the distance. I think they're covering the fringe of the fog bank to see what goes into it.'

'Or what comes out of it,'

'It's promising in a way,' Beaumont pointed out as he took over the sled. 'I think Dawes was right - Gorov is making his run. You don't get that number of Soviet machines down here normally.'

'Promising for us, too - if they're looking for us.'

They moved on again, often with the sound of a helicopter somewhere overhead, but the fog closed in again so they were hidden. Their progress would have been difficult in clear weather - in the fog it was dangerous. The ice was broken up, pitted with gullys, so the sleds constantly lurched from side to side, always on the verge of overturning, and soon Beaumont's arm ached with the strain of holding on to the jerking handlebar. Horst Langer suffered equally and Sam Grayson suffered also, but in a different way. The strain of moving just ahead of the dogs when the fog became really dense was appalling. Every step he took he expected to be his last, to land in icy water where a lead had opened up, exposing the black Arctic ocean.

It would have been uncomfortable in summer - when the temperature hovers at freezing point or a degree or two above. In February with a temperature of forty below it was diabolical. Despite their clothing. They wore long woollen underwear, two pairs of socks apiece inside fur-lined boots, two woollen pullovers, a fur-lined jacket, and over all this a wolfskin parka made by an Alaskan fur trader Beaumont knew in Fairbanks. But they were still frozen, their hands and feet numbed beyond feeling, the small portion of their faces exposed under their fur hoods aching and damp -always damp - with the clinging fog which pressed against them as they struggled forward.

Because they had left Curtis Field so quickly they stopped after five hours for food and drink, thankful that the dogs ate only every forty-eight hours. With the fog creeping around them they sat on the sleds to eat their pemmican, a nourishing form of dried meat which tastes rather like old leather. The nerve-racking beat of a nearby helicopter stayed with them all through the meal and it put their tempers on edge.

'Why doesn't the damn thing break down, run out of fuel, get lost?' Langer demanded.

'Because it tanked up at North Pole 17,' Beaumont snapped.

"That thought had occurred to me.'

'Then why ask the question?'

The horror occurred while they were eating and they didn't know it had happened because of the row the Soviet machine was making. At the end of the meal Beaumont took the compass off Grayson and tried to get the needle to steady. The helicopter stopped circling suddenly, flew away towards the east. He was standing up, holding the compass, when he looked up and stared into the distance. It was very faint even in the sudden quiet after the helicopter's departure, and Beaumont was the only one who heard it, a sound which shouldn't have been there. The lapping of water, a gentle swishing sound.

'I'll be back in a minute,' he said casually. 'Stay exactly where you are and don't move around.'

He was back again in five minutes and the other two men obviously had no inkling that anything was wrong. Langer had interpreted his instruction as a warning not to go wandering around in the fog; he was actually standing behind his sled ready to move off. Beaumont handed the compass back to Grayson. 'You won't need that for a while,' he said quietly. 'There's nowhere to go. We're now drifting on a small floe away from the icefield ...'

'That's impossible,' Langer burst out. 'We'd have heard the ice cracking, making a hell of a row.'

'You've forgotten the din that helicopter was kicking up -and this time when it cracked it didn't make too much row, not enough for us to hear it above the hammering of that Russian's motor.' Beaumont gestured into the fog. 'Walk in any direction, and you'll fall off before you've gone thirty yards. We're marooned on" a slab of ice drifting down a huge lead. We'd better get used to the idea - we're no longer on the polar pack - we're at sea.'

The worst had happened. The icefield had opened up one of its vast leads, an expanding lane of sea which could be many miles wide. Sometimes it is the wind, sometimes the current always flowing under the ice which cracks the ice open, snapping it apart - in this case they may have been close to the brink of the lead when they had stopped to eat and a fragment, the floe they were marooned on, had broken free. Sooner or later the lead comes together again - unless the lane was close to open sea, in which case they would drift on the ocean until they froze to death.

It was the coming together of the ice which worried Beaumont, which made him issue the warning to stay constantly alert. It is not a gentle process, this coming together. The ice closes like a vice, like the impact of two steel-plated vessels steaming towards each other on collision course. When two ice edges meet the sound is like the thunder of a thousand artillery salvoes, a terrifying crash which can be heard many miles away, and like the steel plates of a ship the ice buckles in collision. It buckles and it heaves up huge pressure ridges to displace the smashed ice, moving ridges which can climb as high as thirty feet above the ice while over their crests shiver massive chunks of ice which topple down, flattening everything in their path. And when the ice edges met the floating raft would be caught between them, would be cracked open like a nut. This was why they had to stay alert.

In an attempt to see the danger in time Beaumont posted both Grayson and Langer at opposite ends of the little island. A rope was attached to one of the sleds and extended to both lookout points - so that the moment they saw the icefield coming back at them they could find their way through the fog quickly. While the two men took up position, posted like lookouts aboard a ship, Beaumont fed the dogs. He cut up walrus meat at a distance from the animals and then threw the meat to them; they devoured it with their usual lack of table manners. They weren't due for a meal but he wanted to keep them quiet.

The floe continued its eerie drift into nothingness. There was no sensation of movement - the floe was large, it was a windless night - but the current was carrying it steadily further south, away from Target-5. Perched at the edge of the ice, squatting on his haunches, Langer strained to see through the fog. It was a bloody hopeless task he was thinking : he could barely see six feet before the grey pall blocked his view. But it wasn't quite as hopeless as it seemed. The advance of the ice edge, which would come through the fog like a moving platform, a platform of hard, solid ice, might well be preceded by a disturbance, a small wave being pushed in front of it. The first warning should be when water lapped over the ice beyond his boots.

In front of the fog the black water was like oil, oil covered here and there with a dirty sheen as thin patches of ice formed on its surface. The temperature was almost fifty below and the water was trying to freeze all the time, to form a fresh layer of ice. Only the movement of the current prevented it succeeding. He was out of sight of the sleds and the dogs; when he glanced over his shoulder all he could see was dirty vapour. A terrible sense of isolation descended on him - he couldn't get rid of the feeling that he was on his own, that he was floating on a fragment which had split off from the main floe, a fragment hardly larger than a tabletop.

Fear tingled his nerve ends. He listened with all his ears. If the ice he was crouched on split off from the floe he should hear a warning crack. It might be very slight - they had no way of knowing the thickness of the raft they were floating on - but there should be a sharp crack when the ice splintered. With his hood pulled well down, crouching at the brink of the ice, Langer looked like a furry animal in the fog, and despite the layers of clothing, the two mittens under his heavy gloves, his body felt like the block of ice he floated on. His hands were numb, his feet ached with the pain, his face was cruelly frozen - but fear kept him alert. Then he heard a cracking sound.

Trembling, he forced himself upright, his leg muscles taut with tension. He was alone. His piece of ice had broken off from the floe. If he took two steps in any direction he would go down into the freezing water which would kill him inside three minutes. In a panic he swung round. The fog pall came up to his face. He was absolutely alone, he had lost his two companions, he would never see anyone again. Blind, horrible panic welled up. He shivered, clenched his teeth. Get a grip on yourself for Christ's sake! He stood quite still, shivering, forcing the panic down. Then he felt the rope he had forgotten, the rope end he was still holding hi his right glove. He was still attached to the floe: he had imagined the horror. Wearily he sank down on his haunches and his ice-coated boots creaked again, made the same cracking sound he had heard before; He felt weak with relief and very foolish. The strain was already telling and they had been adrift for less than an hour. Twenty-four hours later the lead closed.

* * *

Beaumont's watch registered 10.30 pm. The floe was wobbling, turning slowly, caught up in a cross-current. And to the east the fog was thinning. 'It's clearing over there,' Langer said, standing up and pointing. 'Dear God, it's clearing. We may see something . ..'

'I can see something now,' Beaumont said grimly. 'It looks like land.3

He used the word land automatically, although the blurred line he was staring at could only be more ice - if he was seeing anything at all. When you stared into the fog for a long time your eyes played you tricks, showed you trees and mountains and other impossible things where you knew there was only fog. He closed his eyes, opened them again. The fog was thinning out rapidly as moonlight percolated through and globules of moisture caught its reflection. Yes, he could still see the blurred line, but was the damned thing stationary? Were they - he hoped to God they were - being carried by a change in the current gently towards static ice?

'I think it's coming this way,' Horst said tersely.

It was less than a quarter of a mile away across the water, a white platform like the edge of a continent. In front of it was a shadowed ripple as the sea was thrust back by the immense icefield moving westward, westward towards the fragment of ice floating in its path. 'Horst, stay here and keep an eye on it. I'll warn Sam.'

Beaumont moved across the floe, looping up the rope which was no longer needed - the fog had dispersed enough for him to see Grayson who was staring in the opposite direction. And it was continuing to thin out, so he could see across several hundred yards of calm water beyond the western brink of the ice raft. Beyond that the fog was as thick as ever. 'The icefield's coming up behind you, Sam, coming up fast from the east.'

'That means trouble.'

'It means trouble. The dogs are ready and it looks as though we'll have to jump for it. You'd better stay here - just in case something else happens. When I call you, come like a bat out of hell.5

Just in case ... There was no need to elaborate. Beaumont's great fear now was that the whole lead was closing up - with jaws of ice closing on them from both east and west. It was the fresh movement of the floe he didn't like - it was revolving slowly, which indicated more than one current was on the move. He spent a moment with the dogs and then went back to where Langer was staring fixedly to the east.

'Look at the wave,3 the German said.

The ripple of black water had become a wave, only a small wave but it was a warning of the tremendous force pushing up behind it as the icefield cruised towards them with the power of millions of tons of polar pack behind it. The fog had thinned even more, although further back on the icefield it was as dense as ever, and the platform was like a whole coast advancing, a low coast of tumbled ice and frozen pressure ridges.

'Keith...!'

Beaumont swung round at Grayson's shout, and for seconds his mind froze with his body. A wave was almost on top of the floe, a wave from the other direction. Behind it the second jaw of the ice was sliding towards them, shooting the wave ahead of its slide. He shouted to Grayson and the American was running towards him as Beaumont swung round again to check the position to the east. It was going to be disaster - he saw this instantly. The western jaw was going to catch them just before the eastern jaw reached them - and they had to go east. 'Get to the dogs, Horst!' He heard a noise behind him and looked back. The wave was breaking against the floe, sending black water skidding over the floe. The water caught up with Grayson and washed over his boots. The dogs, water swirling round their legs, were going mad as they reached the animals and grabbed the harness.

'It may push us - the ice behind us . ..' Beaumont shouted.

While Horst wrestled with his team Beaumont fought for control of his own, one hand on the sled's handlebar, the other holding the whip. Water swirled round them; for seconds the floe disappeared and they seemed to be standing on the sea. The dogs were terrified, thought they were on the verge of drowning. They might all be drowning within seconds - it depended on the strength and depth of the invisible ice they were standing on. If the massive blow of the ice sheet coming up behind them caught a weak point, fractured the floe, they would be in the sea with nothing under them, struggling in icy water until the two jaws met and pulverized them to thin layers of flesh.

The eastern jaw was still a hundred yards away, its wave hadn't reached them, when the impact came, a shattering blow which quivered the ice under them. The dogs stopped going berserk, stood quite still in sheer terror. The sea had flowed off the raft, leaving pools behind in depressions, but it was still intact. And now they could feel the raft moving, being carried forward towards the advancing sheet heading towards it for collision. Beaumont glanced back, saw the ice sheet behind, a foot higher than the floe, like a giant step. 'Get to the other edge,' he shouted.

They used the whips, drove the demoralized dogs forward the short distance until they were almost at the brink. Really, they hadn't a chance in hell. Beaumont wished now that he had turned round, taken the teams back on to the jaw behind them, but it was too late. The wave from the east splashed down on the floe, threw water round their legs, and the dogs tried to go berserk a second time. Beaumont tightened his grip, held the whip ready for one sharp crack. The water was still around their feet when the gap closed. The sleds were alongside each other when the whips cracked, the men shouted, the dogs leapt forward seconds before the point of impact. Under them the sea flooded the raft, surged knee-high, submerged it totally.

The dogs leapt forward, took the sleds with them over the gap before the ice met in thunderous collision. Something reared up under Beaumont's right leg but the momentum of the sled took him forward with the boom of the ice in his ears. The icefield was smooth near its brink and the sleds scudded forward, the friction breaking off the newly-formed ice on the runners where the sea had frozen. They were deafened by the boom, deafened so they hardly heard the monstrous smashing sound as both jaws of the ice sheets broke off and heaved up a pressure ridge, heaved it up twenty feet high, shot up a wall of jostling ice with great blocks wobbling on its crest. Then Grayson, dog-trotting beside Beaumont, slipped and went down. Behind him the pressure ridge came forward like a lava wall, toppling the blocks in front of it.

Beaumont saw him falling, held on to whip and sled with one hand while he grabbed. Grayson was on his knees when Beaumont grasped one arm, jerked it up savagely. The American's gloved hand locked on the handlebar and he was dragged forward on his knees some distance before he scrambled up. Behind them a massive block of ice weighing many tons thudded down where Grayson had fallen. Still shaken, still gripping the handlebar, he stumbled forward as the sled kept moving, a little way behind Langer's team. To their rear the pack, caught up in the gigantic collision, was a chaos of movement.

Fissures shivered the weak points. A dark gash knifed past Beaumont's sled and ahead of it. He swerved to avoid it and swerved again to escape a second opening. The noise was tremendous, like a bombardment as the erupting icefield roared and hammered. They kept moving, driving the dogs, running for their lives away from the chopping hell behind them, and when they had covered half a mile, when they were close to the edge of the fog, Beaumont called a halt. Panting for breath like the dogs, the clothes under their parkas clammy with sweat, they looked back. In the distance the icefield was still heaving and writhing. It could be hours before the turmoil ended, before the icefield sealed over once more, locking down the sea while an Arctic silence you could almost hear descended.

'Who the devil were they?'

The nickering image of three fur-clad figures seen from the air hovered in the smoke, then vanished and there was fog and more smoke. The projection screen inside the headquarters hut went blank. Papanin stirred in his seat beside Kramer as the projectionist removed the film reel and someone switched on the light. The smoke came from the little curved pipe he was puffing away at steadily, the smoke which filled the overheated hut, which obscured the 'No Smoking' sign hanging from a wall. The atmosphere was torrid, glowing with warmth.

'It was interesting,' Kramer ventured.

'That film doesn't tell me a damned thing,' the Siberian replied. 'Just three men and two dog teams at the edge of the fog. Where is the Beaumont force? We're looking for a large body of men - for an expedition. Those thick-skulled pilots aren't looking in the right place.'

Swivelling round in his chair, his little pipe clenched in his teeth, Papanin stared at a map of the lower Arctic spread out on a table. The latest positions of all vessels in the area were marked - the six vessels of trawler fleet k4g, the carrier Gorki, the huge research ship Revolution, and the American icebreaker Elroy which was steaming steadily closer to the icefield.

Alongside the map was a blown-up aerial photograph of Target-5- The picture had been taken four weeks earlier, a routine act to keep up to date their file on all American Arctic bases. 'The ramp at Target-5,' Papanin said, 'that place where they take their Sno-Cats down on to the pack. The sabotage team should be there by now.'

Kramer checked his watch. 10.30 pm. He didn't know it but the lead was closing on Beaumont at this moment twenty-five miles away to the west. 'Our men arrived there an hour ago,' the Bait replied. 'With their radar they'll have found the American base even in the fog.'

'And the airstrip - that must be sabotaged as well.'

'The same team deals with both - ramp and airstrip. They'll do it the way you suggested ...'

'No international incident, remember,5 Papanin warned.

'If anything happens it will look like an accident - or a series of accidents. Within thirty minutes Target-5 will be sealed off from the outside world ...'

'Not if their wireless hut is still in action!'

'It won't be. The same sabotage team is dealing with that, too.'

But Papanin was hardly listening as he slumped with his arms folded across the back of the chair. 'Beaumont,' he muttered. 'Beaumont,' he repeated. 'That name rings a bell somewhere. Kramer, get me a message pad. I want to send an urgent signal to Petrov at Records in Leningrad.'

'I think you're dead wrong .. .'

'We go due east,' Beaumont told Grayson for the third time, 'and sooner or later we'll hit Target-5-' He lit a cigarette and it tasted bad because of the fog which had got into everything - including their lungs. The argument had been raging for ten minutes - which was the right way to

go?

'We drifted a long way south on that floe,' Grayson insisted. 'Since I'm the navigator I should have some say . ..'

'You've had your say - and I don't agree with you. Everything is drifting south - and too quickly for my liking. The icefield, Target-5, the Russian base, the floe we nearly got killed on - it's all drifting south at the same speed, so you discount the floe drift.'

'Up to a point you're right .. .'

'I'm dead right. And this isn't the House of Commons -where they talk to save themselves doing anything - so we'll get moving.'

'Due east?'

'Where else?'

They started moving through the smothering fog. Over rough ice. So once again they had to keep a tight grip on the handlebar of each sled in an endless struggle to stop them keeling over. And soon after they had moved off they came up against a static pressure ridge they couldn't get round. They had to use ice-axes to chop a gateway in the wall, and it was back-breaking work, work which delayed them and used too much energy. The only bonus on the credit side was that they hadn't recently heard a single helicopter.

'It looks as though the Russians have given up,' Langer said hopefully as they passed through the gap in the ice wall. 'Or else they've run out of fuel.'

'Maybe,' Beaumont replied noncommittally. He was wondering whether they ought to pitch camp for the night. It was 11.30 pm and everyone was moving lethargically -even the dogs. The tension of the past few hours and the bitter cold was wearing them down - especially the cold. He glanced at the man walking beside him. For a while they had travelled with their snow-goggles over their eyes, but soon the fog had smeared them and they couldn't see where they were going, so now each man wore his goggles pushed back over his hood. The goggles above Grayson's hood were lenses of solid ice. His breath had frozen on the glass.

'We'll stop soon when we find a place to bed down,' Beaumont said.

'Thank God for that!' The American decided he had been a bit too eager to accept the suggestion. 'I could try one more radio-fix,' he suggested.

Among the equipment they were carrying on the sleds was a Redifon GR 345 transceiver and direction-finder, a portable high-frequency set with a peak power of only fifteen watts. But with this set they could communicate with Thule, let alone Curtis Field. They had stopped and listened in on the set three times since the Sikorskys had dropped them on the ice, hoping to hear a transmission from Target-5- They heard nothing - the island seemed to have gone off the air.

Had they heard only one transmission they could have used the direction-finder to locate Target-5's radio hut - to take a rough bearing they could have moved along. The absence of any transmission worried Beaumont, but he kept the worry to himself. 'Probably a lot of static - they know they can't get through so they don't try,' he said airily to Langer when he had queried the air-wave silence.

Ahead of them the fog began to thin out at ground level, but not higher up. They came to a more even area of ice, the best surface for pitching camp on they had come across so far, and Beaumont decided they had better stop. The dogs were slipping on the ice frequently now, a sure sign that they were feeling the strain, and a moment earlier Langer had called out a warning. 'Bismarck's lagging. The whole lot will pack up soon if we try to keep going.'

'I don't think we'll find a motel at this hour,' Beaumont called out, 'so we'll kip down here . ..'

He broke off, still holding the handlebar, staring straight in front of him. In the thinning fog something flared redly, vanished, flared up more fiercely. He couldn't believe it. He blinked, sure that he was seeing things, stared again. The fog drifted, rolled a curtain across the sight, a transparent curtain. The red flare burst out again, penetrated the curtain, climbed higher and billowed and wavered. There was a faint stench in his nostrils, a stench of smoke, and now the dogs caught the scent and became restless, sensing fire.

'What the hell is it?' Grayson croaked.

Beaumont didn't reply. Taking the compass from the American, he bent over, staring at the luminous dial carefully as he took a bearing. When he looked up the flare had become a dull, dangerous-looking glow, the kind of glow he had once seen from four miles away across the ice when an American research base off Alaska was burning.

'What is it?' Grayson repeated. 'It looks God-awful.'

'Forget about your kip,' Beaumont said grimly. 'We're moving again - as fast as we can drive the dogs. That's Target-5 going up in flames.'

'Some maniac has done this crazy thing deliberately - it's sabotage ...'

Matthew Conway, the fifty-year-old station leader, was blazing, blazing almost as furiously as his radio hut had blazed when it became a flaming beacon in the night. Beside him in the drifting fog Beaumont studied the wreckage as Dr Conway played a powerful lamp over what had recently been a large hut. Charred stumps showed where the walls had stood, a twisted hunk of metal lay half-buried under a pile of ash, and an acrid smell of burning was still present in the windless night. The hut had burned down to its foundations and smoke wisps eddied and mingled with the fog.

'Why sabotage?' Beaumont asked as he hitched up the rifle looped over his shoulder.

'When I got here the place was well alight but it wasn't like this,' Conway said savagely. 'Rickard, the wireless operator you met when you arrived, found it on fire. When I got here it was becoming an inferno - but the door hadn't gone. I noticed fresh wood splinters round the lock - it looked as if it had been forced open.'

'Could have been the fire,' Beaumont said casually. He was trying to calm everyone down; since they had arrived ten minutes ago he had detected an air of tension in the three men waiting to be evacuated from the doomed base, a tension which had been there before the hut went up in flames.

'It didn't look like it,' Conway protested. 'Then there was the Coleman space heater - that twisted bit of metal. I could see through the open door and it was lying on its side. It was upright when Rickard left the hut earlier.'

'Maybe the fire caused it to keel over ...'

'For God's sake, do you think I'm going out of my mind? I may have been on this island for three years but I've still kept my sanity! Those space heaters are heavy - you'd have to kick one hard to send it on its side.'

'All right, Matt, take it easy.' Beaumont walked round the smouldering ruin. He had known Conway for three years off and on, and twice he had visited Target-5 when it was drifting many hundred miles north of its present dangerous position. But in the fog it had all seemed different. When they saw the fire they had rushed across the ice and made their way up on to the island without trying to find the Sno-Cat ramp. They had dragged the sleds up a gully in the twenty foot high cliffs which reared above the pack and headed for the orange glow in the fog.

'That chunk of metal you can hardly see in the corner is our transmitter,' Conway called out. 'Was our transmitter,' he amended. 'Now there's no way of getting through to the mainland - we're cut off until our plane comes in.'

'Which is in ten days' time,' Beaumont said as he stood next to the American. 'Why did they leave it so late?'

'It was my crazy idea.' Conway sounded disgusted. 'We've never had the chance to carry out depth-sounding and salinity tests this far south so I thought it was a heaven-sent opportunity. But I didn't count on the fog coming. And now this ...'

'Who could have sabotaged the hut anyway?' Beaumont asked.

'There are only the three of us here - so no one. I don't know, the strain must be telling on me as well.' He changed the subject. 'What about this Russian that's supposed to be coming here?'

'He's a man called Gorov, Michael Gorov.' Beaumont's tone was off-hand and vague: Conway hadn't got top security clearance for his work. 'I don't know a lot about him, but I gather Washington thinks he could tell them something about the political set-up in Russia. He's supposed to be on his way here from North Pole 17.'

'And that's why you're here?'

'I have to pick him up and take him back to Curtis Field. It's as simple as that.'

'Simple - going back across the pack?' Conway stared at the Englishman. 'I wouldn't make that trip for sixty thousand dollars.' Conway grinned as he rubbed globules of ice off his eyebrows. 'And I could do with sixty thousand dollars. Do we get back to the others now?'

'Is there somewhere we can talk first - on our own?'

'The research hut's just across here.' Conway led the way along a beaten snow-track between the surviving huts and Beaumont was pretty sure that the fog was thickening again. He was also sure that Conway was dead right: the radio hut had been sabotaged. But there was no point in increasing the tension on the island and he had a grimmer reason for keeping quiet. If Gorov did get through and they took him out they would be leaving the three men behind on Target-5. Conway he had no doubts about, but Rickard he didn't know and Sondeborg he didn't have to know: one look at the gravity specialist had told him he was on the verge of a crack-up. If the Russians arrived after they had left with Gorov and started putting on the pressure the men staying behind couldn't tell them anything - if they didn't know anything.

'You'll thaw out in here,' Conway said as he unlocked the door of a hut at the end of the line. 'We've left the heater on.'

The hut was about the same size as the headquarters building they had gone inside when Beaumont arrived, one large room measuring about fifteen feet by twenty. Packing crates ready for the evacuation were pushed against the walls, but at one end a huge iron tripod reared up and supported a large winch mechanism. Conway pointed at the tripod. 'That's where we sling the underwater camera we send down to take a look at the seabed. We've sent the drilling core down through the same hole. Care to take a look?'

Conway bent down and levered up a section of the floorboards under the tripod. It came up as a large trap and Beaumont stared down a square hole about four feet across. Six feet below there were more floorboards. 'That's where we could hide Gorov in an emergency,' Conway suggested. 'He'd be damn cold but it's the best I can do.'

Beaumont stared at Conway across the deep well. 'What are you talking about?'

'Look, Keith, I told you I was still holding on to my sanity. And I can still work things out for myself. You bring two men over the pack from the edge of the fog - and all of you were flown there by chopper, you said. So this Gorov character, who must be pretty important, has taken off from the Russian base to come here - which means the Russian security people will be after him now. Correct?'

'I told you that.'

'Yes, but you didn't tell me that's why my radio hut has been sabotaged! They've done that to cut us off-,so we can't signal Curtis Field when your Russian arrives. I worked that out while we were walking here from that mess up the street. Correct?'

'What's under that next lot of floorboards?' Beaumont asked. 'And you're correct - but don't spill any of it to Rickard or Sondeborg.'

'Soul of discretion!' Conway bent down again, took hold of a rope attached to a hook, pulled it. The lower boards opened up as a hinged trap and below there was darkness. Conway switched on his lamp, shone the powerful beam down the hole and the beam lost itself in a blackness which didn't end. A sour tang of salt drifted up into Beaumont's nostrils. At the edge of the beam walls of ice glistened.

'That's the Arctic down there,' Conway said. 'Two hundred feet down through the ice. Make a good place to hide a body.'

'Let's hope it doesn't come to that,' Beaumont replied tersely.

'It was a joke - helps to release the tension.' Conway lowered the trap on the sinister hole. 'You've probably noticed I'm a bit jumpy - maybe you'll understand why when I tell you I've got Michael Gorov in the next hut.'

The Russian fugitive, the Soviet Union's chief oceanographer, the architect of the Catherine system, lay unconscious in the single bunk which stood against one wall of the hut. Blankets pulled up to his chin still showed the hideously scarred face, the thick lips which were half-open as Gorov breathed noisily, the mass of straight dark hair pushed back over his forehead. Like Leonid Brezhnev he had thick eyebrows, but his cheeks were pinched and sallow.

'He arrived half an hour before you came in,' Conway explained. 'I was alone by the burning radio hut when he came staggering through the fog. I brought him in here to start with because it was the nearest place.'

It was ironical, Beaumont thought - someone had made a very bad mistake when they set fire to the hut. Because it was the blazing beacon of the burning hut which had shown him how to locate the ice island - and Gorov had undoubtedly used the same flaming landmark to find his way to Target-5. The Russian stirred restlessly in his sleep, murmured something which could have been a girl's name - Rachel - then he subsided again.

'Is he very bad?' Beaumont asked. 'You practised medicine once, so you should know.'

'The frostbite isn't as bad as it looks. Some of it is old scars and the fresh wounds I've treated. He couldn't stop talking and he was a bit hysterical, so I gave him a mild sedative to help him rest. He talked as though I should know he was coming so I let him - I thought that was part of the hysteria.'

'How did he get here?'

'He came over the pack by sled apparently ...'

'Don't you know, Matt?' Beaumont demanded.

'There's no need to blow your top . . .'

'It's important! If that sled is lying out in the open and the Russians find it they'll know he's here.'

'I'm sorry, I see what you mean. He told me he lost his dogs somewhere close to here - he was taking a catnap and he hadn't tethered them properly. He had to manhaul the sled the rest of the way and it nearly killed him. Then he saw the hut blazing in the distance, so he took a quick compass bearing, abandoned the sled and made it here on foot.' Conway took the cigarette Beaumont offered him and the Russian stirred again as a match was struck. 'My guess would be he left the sled maybe half a mile beyond the cliffs. Is that bad?'

'Not too bad. How do you know he's Michael Gorov?'

'He said so . . .'

'Is this his jacket?' Beaumont picked up the jacket off a table and started going through the pockets. 'I don't remember you having a bunk here when I was last on the island.'

'I didn't.' Conway smiled grimly. 'The official reason is I do a lot of calculations in here and when I'm finished I can just tumble into bed. The real reason is it gets me away from the others for a few hours.'

'From Sondeborg in particular?' Beaumont was examining the contents of a wallet carefully, laying out items on the table.

'From Sondeborg especially - he's cracking up fast. And it's going to affect Rickard soon - panic is the most infectious of all human ailments. Is it necessary to go through his personal things?' Conway inquired with an edge hi his voice.

'Yes! This card says he's Michael Gorov,' Beaumont replied sceptically. 'The trouble is we've got no picture of him. Did he say the security people were after him?'

'No, he clammed up just before I put him to bed. I think he was suspicious I didn't know anything about him. There was another reason I put him in this hut - kept him here, that is.' Beaumont stared at him without speaking as he picked up the Russian's damp parka. Close to the space heater which Conway had lit, snow had melted on the fur. 'The others don't know he's here,' Conway went on. 'He said enough for me to grasp he was a fugitive and I guessed Russian security might be on his tail - I don't want more panic than I've got on my hands already.' Conway paused. 'And if I had to hide him I didn't trust Sondeborg to keep his mouth shut.'

Beaumont looked at the American with fresh respect. 'That was clever of you, Matt, very clever. And it may be helpful - if the Russians do come. We may have to hide Gorov down that nasty hole of yours yet. ..'

'I didn't mean a live body,' Conway protested. 'I told you - it was a joke. My God, if you put him down there he'd freeze to death.'

'Not if we wrap him up well- cocoon him - and put a small heater down there with him. It would only be for a short time - while the Russians searched the base.'

'Searched the base!' Conway was outraged. 'They can't run a search here - this place has the American flag flying over it . . .'

Beaumont fetched up a long tube out of one of the parka's deep pockets, a tube measuring about a foot in length and heavy to hold. 'Matt, you haven't quite grasped it - and this is something else not to tell the other two. We're marooned on this base, cut off. No plane can fly in because of the fog, the radio transmitter has been eliminated. If every man on the island at this moment vanished into thin air no one could ever prove what had happened.'

Conway sank down on a hard, wooden chair slowly and stared up at Beaumont. 'Who's panicking now?' he asked with a forced smile. 'You can't really believe that - they wouldn't dare . ..'

'Get this very clear,' Beaumont said coldly. 'It wouldn't involve much daring, only a touch of ruthlessness. Supposing one of your Sno-Cats was found abandoned on the pack only a few miles away from here - out of fuel. When the fog lifts and someone flies in from Curtis they'd find the base empty, the radio hut burned down, the Sno-Cat out on the ice. What conclusion would they draw? That you'd all panicked when the fog closed the place in, when you lost your only means of communicating with the mainland, that you'd tried to get out on your own. You run out of fuel and start back towards the island - on the way something happens to you. A lead opens up, a moving pressure ridge buries all of you ...'

'This is horrible,' Conway protested. 'You're talking about a blueprint for mass murder . . .'

'I want you to know the score, Matt,' Beaumont said quietly. 'I'm talking about the Russian Special Security Service.'

'When are we moving out?'

Langer asked the question as he settled the dogs inside the hut opposite the headquarters building. The preparations for evacuating the base were well advanced and half the huts on the ice island were now unoccupied. The walls of the hut chosen for the dogs were lined with packing crates filled with equipment and waiting for the plane due in ten days' time.

'As soon as Gorov is fit to travel - sooner if there's an emergency, which there may well be,' Beaumont replied.

Langer adjusted the space heater he had carried to the hut and looked up wryly. 'We're expecting company? The wrong sort of company?'

'They've been here once - when they fired that radio hut. I think they're still very close. Horst, when you've sorted things out here I want you to unpack the transmitter and send a message in clear to Curtis Field. This is the message -Target-5 radio hut out of action. Sabotaged. Go on repeating the word sabotaged a few times, then sign off and pack the set up again.5

Langer patted the sleeping Bismarck who opened one bleary eye and closed it again. 'You mean I don't wait for confirmation on message received?'

'The message isn't for Curtis Field - it's for the Russian monitoring set at North Pole 17.'

'You wouldn't care to explain the mystery, would you?' Langer asked humorously. 'Just so I know what I'm doing, what's going on?'

'Later. And when you've done that I want you to take turns with Sam guarding that hut where Gorov is. If you run into trouble and there's no time left, fire one shot from your rifle into the air. When you're not guarding the hut, try and get some sleep.'

'You could do with some yourself,' Langer observed. 'We had the lion's share when we were drifting on that floe. And I'll forget about sleep if it means moving out of here faster. This place gives me the creeps - you know those three characters waiting for evacuation are on the edge of cracking up?'

'So we tread gently,' Beaumont warned.

He went out of the hut into the icy night and his expression tightened as he shut the door. He could just about see the headquarters hut which was only six feet across the beaten snow-track running between the two rows of buildings. The fog had thickened again, seemed to be intensifying as he stood for a moment and listened. Nearby he heard it, the quiet chugging of the generator which provided Target-5's lighting; and a long way off he heard something else - the muffled creaking and groaning of the polar pack surrounding the island.

When Target-5 cracked under that terrible weight the catastrophe would be very sudden. Fissures would appear out of nowhere, would widen into crevasses, which in turn would open up bottomless chasms as the whole island finally gave up after thirty years' resistance to the ceaseless squeeze of the polar pack.

But it wasn't the island Beaumont was worried about at this moment - it was what might be moving on it out of sight inside the dense rolling fog drifting all around him. He looked towards the hill he couldn't see, that strange forty-foot high eminence with its embedded boulders, floating in the sea a hundred miles from the nearest coast. His eyes prickled with the cold; Horst was right, he was damned tired. He crossed the track, opened the door in the headquarters hut and called out to Grayson to join him. Then he waited outside while the American put on his parka.

Typically, the American asked not a single question while Beaumont explained about Gorov. He only made one comment as he hoisted his rifle over his shoulder before going up the track. 'Trouble in there. I'd like to drop that Sondeborg into the nearest open lead.'

Beaumont stiffened as he went inside and shut the door. He had heard raised voices from the outside but now Sondeborg was shouting as he argued with Conway. 'We can't get through to the mainland with the transmitter busted,' Sondeborg raved. 'Supposing the island starts breaking up before that plane gets here? We're trapped. . .'

The lean-faced gravity specialist stopped shouting as Beaumont closed the door. Along the facing wall stood a couple of two-tier bunks and Jeff Rickard, the wireless operator, sat on one of the lower bunks, chewing a match-stick as he watched Sondeborg. Conway was leaning against a table in the middle of the room with his arms folded and the flush on his pale face had nothing to do with the heat of the room.

'Get some sleep, Harv, for God's sake,' Rickard snapped. 'We've got company, so stop spilling your guts out.' The wireless operator, a cheerful thirty-two-year-old with curly black hair, reached out a hand to grasp the other man's arm.

Sondeborg snatched it out of reach and glared at Beaumont. 'Why have you come here?' he demanded.

'I told you before,5 Beaumont explained patiently. 'Our helicopter crashed on the ice and we were lucky to make it . . .'

'I don't believe a damn word!'

'Sorry to hear that.' There was an edge in Beaumont's voice as he propped his rifle in a corner. He took off his parka and laid it on the table. 'You've been drinking, haven't you?' It wasn't a brilliant deduction: he could smell the liquor on the gravity specialist's breath six feet away from him.

'He's got a bottle stashed away somewhere,' Conway informed Beaumont. 'I haven't been able to locate it yet. And this is his last Arctic trip.'

'Brother, are you telling me!' Sondeborg sneered. 'When I get on that plane the only ice I'll want to see is in a bar.'

'Which is where you'll take up your living quarters, no doubt,' Beaumont observed nastily.

Something snapped inside Sondeborg. He bent down, grasped an ice pick from under the table, a small-handled pick, stood up again slowly, staring at Beaumont with a blank expression.

'Put that down!' Conway said sharply.

'This big Limey takes up too much room,' Sondeborg said slowly and his right foot moved forward.

'Stay where you are, Rickard,' Beaumont warned. 'It doesn't look as though I'm too popular round here,' he went on as he picked up his parka from the table. 'I don't want to cause trouble, Conway,' he added. 'I'll move to one of the other huts . . .' He held the parka as though about to put it on while Sondeborg watched him uncertainly, then with a swift throwing movement like a matador wielding a cape he brought the coat down over Sondeborg's right arm. Sondeborg flailed with his arm to get the ice pick free and then Beaumont hit him. He hit him very hard with a powerful, short-armed jab which knocked Sondeborg back against the bunks. The gravity specialist sagged, fell half inside a bunk, then collapsed unconscious on the floor.

'Check him,' Beaumont snapped. 'How long before he comes round?'

Conway bent over the man and examined him quickly, then spoke over his shoulder. 'He's out cold. With the drink inside him he could be this way for several hours .. .'

'Can we get him out of here - into another hut?'

'The one next door has two bunks . . .'

'I'd like him shifted there,5 Beaumont said crisply. 'I'd like him tied up, too.'

'Tied up?' Conway sounded surprised and uneasy.

'Tied up.' Beaumont lifted the ice pick off the floor. 'Any man who would threaten someone with this thing needs restraining. Restrain him - and padlock the door.' Conway opened his mouth to say something as Rickard was lifting Sondeborg over his shoulder. 'I've got a reason,' Beaumont said firmly, 'so padlock the door.' He went over to a tall cupboard standing by the wall, reached up over the top and brought something down in his hand. Conway stared at the object Beaumont put on the table.

'So that's where he kept it.'

'I'm taller than you are,' Beaumont pointed out, 'so I saw it when I came in this time. And there are two more of them up there.'

'Where the hell did he get this?' Conway picked up the bottle from the table and gazed at it as though he could hardly believe his eyes. He was holding a large bottle of Russian vodka. 'He couldn't have got it from Minsky, he's harmless - that's the man in charge at North Pole 17. But he has been here from time to time to see how we're getting on.'

'To get information,' Beaumont replied. 'The Russians keep a detailed file on every American base in the Arctic - that's common knowledge. Minsky got his information from Sondeborg in exchange for the liquor you wouldn't let him have. Now maybe you'll agree to lock him up.'

* * *

'That signal worries me,' Dawes said. 'I think a crisis is building up - so I'm sending a plane in to Target-5.'

'But it's still fogged in.' Adams protested. 'How can anyone land?'

'That signal said the radio hut had been burned down - sabotage is the word they used. I'm sending in the transport we have standing by in case the fog clears - I'm sending in Ridgeway.'

'But how can it land?'

'I don't know,' Dawes admitted. 'But if anyone can land it's Ridgeway. He's made five landings on Target-5 in different parts of the Arctic and he's the finest civilian pilot within a thousand miles. Give Fuller the order.'

'I don't like it,' Adams said as he picked up the phone to talk to the airfield controller.

'Ridgeway won't like it either,' Dawes replied.

'I sent the signal,' Langer informed Beaumont as he shut the door. He looked round the hut. 'Where is everyone?'

'Putting Sondeborg to bed - after I'd put him to sleep.' He told Langer what had happened. 'I don't think anyone spotted it, but I tempted Sondeborg into a fight. I'm clearing the decks.'

'You're worried the Russians will come?' Langer dropped his parka on top of Beaumont's on the table. 'God, it's cold out there - I'd better go and relieve Sam in a few minutes.'

'I'm not worried the Russians will come - I'm sure they're coming,' Beaumont replied emphatically. 'The big question is whether they come before or after we've left. If it's before, I don't want a weak sister like Sondeborg available for them to question.' He pointed at the vodka bottle. 'Especially when he's already given them information to get drink. He told them about the radio hut.'

'They needed telling - with the mast sticking up above it?'

Beaumont leaned across the table and poured coffee out of the flask Conway had prepared for them. 'Get some of this inside you. Yes, they needed telling - that no one slept there. In some Arctic huts the operator has a bunk so he can stay on the job. Here it isn't necessary - Rickard only visited the hut when he was using the transmitter.' Beaumont poked at two foot-long metal tubes lying on the table. 'Recognize them?'

'Twenty-five thousand years of history inside one of these.' Langer picked up a tube and examined it casually. 'Amazing the way they send one of these down at the end of a drill, drive it into the seabed ten thousand feet down, and come up with a core. And the hollow tube they drive in comes back with a sample out of the seabed. Over thousands of years the geological layers at the bottom of the ocean are enormously compressed under the sea's weight, so we end up with this. Twenty-five thousand years and you can carry it about in your coat pocket.'

'Gorov did. See any difference between them?'

Langer examined the two tubes. Both were corroded and abraded by their long vertical journey through the sea, by the frictional drive of the drill forcing them into the far-down seabed, and both were filled with core material. 'They're just cores,' Langer replied, 'like those over there.' He nodded towards a collection of tubes Conway had arranged on top of a crate.

'This one is Gorov's.' Beaumont took the core and levered at its extremity with the tip of his penknife. A solid piece of core about three inches long dropped into his hand when he up-ended the tube. The piece of core at the other end remained in place as he shook the tube, and then something shiny and tightly rolled fell into his palm. He winked at Langer as he held a section of the 35-mm film up to the light. 'And this, unless I'm very much mistaken, is a microfilm of the Catherine charts.'

'My God . . .'

'Exactly. I'm holding in my hand a record of Russia's entire underwater system in the Arctic.' Beaumont re-oiled the film, slipped it back inside the tube, replaced the piece of core. 'So if we do lose Gorov we've still got this.'

'When he wakes up he'll notice it's gone,' Langer warned. 'In his place it \would be the first thing I'd check the moment I did wake up.'

'So we'll keep him happy - by putting this one back in his parka.' Beaumont held up ^the second core tube, then checked his watch, 1am, local time. 'You might do that for me when you relieve Sam. And now I'm going to get some kip before I fall asleep in this chair.'

He had just taken his boots off and climbed into one of the lower bunks when the door was thrown open and Langer came back. 'I think the Russians are here - Sam heard their engines ...'

The Siberian came across the ice from North Pole 17 by helicopter which landed at the eastern edge of the fog bank. Here he transferred to a waiting Sno-Cat, the curious tracked vehicle used for short-distance journeys in the Arctic. It has four caterpillar tracks - two at the front which support the driver's cab, and two more at the rear which carry the truck-like part of the vehicle.

'We should reach the American base at about one o'clock,' Kramer said as he settled himself beside Papanin who had elected to drive the Sno-Cat.

'Which is the approximate time we estimated Gorov might arrive - if he was very lucky.'

Despite the fog they had no trouble locating the ice island. The security detachment which had made its way to Target-5 earlier had planted an electronic device at the summit of the hill behind Conway's encampment, a device which the box Kramer was holding locked on to, guiding them straight to their objective. But it was a hideously cold journey and Kramer was shivering when they arrived - as were the ten armed men huddled close together in the compartment behind the cab.

They avoided the snow ramp which would have allowed them to drive up on to the island; instead they left the Sno-Cat on the pack and went the rest of the way on foot. As in a chess game played by a grandmaster, everything was foreseen. When they came to the cliffs they used climbing equipment to haul themselves up the twenty-foot-high obstacle. When they had scaled the cliffs Kramer used his little box to guide them through the fog to the top of the boulder-strewn hill. And from the summit an erratic compass bearing showed them which was north - the side where the group of huts lay.

'Something's gone wrong,' Papanin whispered when they had gone down the slope and found nothing.

Something had gone wrong; since the last aerial shot of Target-5 had been taken, since the fog had descended, the island had turned a few degrees, so it was only by good luck that the Siberian crashed into one of the empty huts before he knew it was there. A few minutes later, stumbling round like a blind man, he found the headquarters hut which now had a light burning outside it. He hammered on the door with his gloved fist, shouted in English, then opened the door and walked inside.

The Siberian's command of English was fluent; trained in a language laboratory at Kharkov in the Ukraine; perfected during long conversations with Guy Burgess in Moscow - when the English defector was sober enough to enunciate clearly - the Siberian had spent most of 1967 attached to one of the Soviet consulates in the south-western United States, consulates which have only one purpose to justify their expense: espionage.

Coming out of the fog the light dazzled Papanin. He lifted his hand to cut down the glare and saw three men inside the hut - the number Minsky had reported as still on Target-5 waiting to be evacuated. A very large man in his thirties was sitting on a bunk while he cleaned a rifle - and the muzzle was aimed at the doorway. A shorter man, fair-haired and also in his thirties, stood nearer the door with a rifle crooked in his arm while he held an oily rag in the other hand. The oldest man, in his fifties, was leaning against a table with his arms folded and a tense look.

'Come inside and shut the damned door,' the big man snapped. The rifle elevated. 'No! Just you - the others can stay outside.'

Behind Papanin more fur-clad figures, all of them at least a foot shorter than the huge Siberian, stirred in the fog as he stepped inside the hut and stared at the man on the bunk. 'I am from North Pole 17...'

'I said shut the door,' the big man said very quietly.

'Dr Kramer should be present,' Papanin insisted stiffly, 'he has something important to warn you about.'

'All right, Kramer comes in, too - the rest of them stay outside ...'

'It is very cold ...'

'No one invited you here.'

Papanin's expression was grim and he felt his temper rising as Kramer pushed in behind him. The fair-haired man with the rifle slammed the door in the faces of the men outside, bolted it with a savage, grating sound. Papanin glanced quickly round the hut for any sign of Gorov's presence on the base. He saw drilling cores laid out on a crate, an ice pick beside them, more packed crates, a flask and cups on the table the oldest man was still leaning against. Papanin was tall enough to have seen the two remaining bottles of vodka on top of the cupboard - except that they had been removed. The Siberian took off his damp parka and dropped it over the back of a chair.

'My name is Vassily,' he explained, his eyes still wandering round the hut. 'I am the administrative officer for various Soviet research bases, including your neighbour, North Pole 17. Dr Kramer is the medical officer there. Is everything all fight here?' he inquired.

'Shouldn't it be?' Beaumont asked.

'I smelled something when we came through the fog, something burning .. .'

'Our wireless hut burned down,' Conway burst out. 'It was burned down deliberately. Is that the sort of trouble you had in mind?'

Beaumont inwardly congratulated Conway; the American had reacted exactly as he had suggested, which gave him his opening to throw the Siberian off-balance. 'It's a pretty serious business this, Vassily - we've sent a signal to Greenland reporting the sabotage and someone's going to have to answer a lot of awkward questions.'

'You sent a signal about the fire?' There was a mocking tone of disbelief in Papanin's voice. These people must be wood from the neck upwards. 'Can you tell me how it is possible to use a transmitter when it was destroyed in the fire?'

'Spare transmitter,' Beaumont informed him laconically. 'We always keep a spare - do they only let you have one on Russian bases? I suppose we'll have to put it down to the extravagances of the capitalist system. Incidentally,' he went on, 'your monitoring unit at North Pole 17 will tell you about the signal when you get back.'

Beaumont waited, wondering whether his insurance policy was going to pay a dividend. The Siberian clearly hadn't yet been told about the signal, but it was vital: so long as he grasped the fact that a signal had been sent, that it had already been reported to Greenland that something very strange was going on at Target-5, he would hesitate to take extreme action. And this was all that Beaumont hoped for - hesitation, delay to give them time to get Gorov away from the ice island.

'Monitoring unit?' Papanin asked blankly.

'Oh, come off it!' Beaumont stood up. and the two men seemed to fill the hut as they faced each other. 'Monitoring unit! Everyone knows you've got monitoring units all over the Arctic checking up on our signals. It's normal procedure, Vassily, so why make a big secret of it?'

Conway quietly put both hands inside his trouser pockets to hide the fact that he was sweating profusely. Beaumont was walking a high wire he could so easily fall off; there were armed men, a lot of them, just outside the hut, and no one might ever know what had really happened on Target-5 inside the fog. He was still doubtful whether the Englishman could out-manoeuvre the Russian, still horribly conscious of the fact that Gorov was hidden only yards away from where he stood.

'This is not what I came here to talk about,' Papanin snapped. 'I am afraid that one of our people may be responsible for burning down your hut,' he went on in a tone which was hardly apologetic.

'So there'll be a big inquiry,' Beaumont said bluntly. 'By now Washington will have heard about it - you can imagine how they're going to react to the word sabotage!'

'If you will let me continue ...'

'It could be hitting the world's headlines tomorrow - Russians attack US base ...'

'That's ridiculous . . .'

'Buy tomorrow's paper and see.'

For the first time in many years Papanin was rattled. In case a signal had been sent he was going to have to tread carefully here. 'No international incident...' He could hear Comrade Brezhnev's instructions repeating in his brain as he tried to regain command of the situation.

'I am talking about Nikolai Marov, a junior oceanographer,' he explained. 'He has gone mad and murdered another man called Gorov. Then he escaped in this direction with a sled team. Marov has taken his victim's papers and may try to pass himself off as Michael Gorov ...'

'Why should he do that?' Beaumont demanded.

'Because he left his own papers in his hut,' Papanin said smoothly. 'He would know that you might ask to see proof of his identity ...'

'What makes you think he's mad?' Beaumont interjected.

Papanin glared at him, his patience wearing thin with the constant interruptions. He tried a new tactic, raising his voice. 'For God's sake, he burned down your hut! He committed a brutal crime! It was not a pleasant murder ...'

He took a step closer to Beaumont, trying to break him down by the force of his personality. 'He killed poor Gorov with an ice pick and then hacked him about the face! Don't you understand? He has spent three years in the Arctic and his mind has gone - he is like a wild animal roaming round somewhere out there on the ice .. .'

"Then you'd better stop wasting time and get out there and find him.'

Papanin calmed down suddenly, gestured towards Kramer. 'This thing is a great worry to us. When you have heard what it is all about you may wish us to stay. I think Dr Kramer had better explain - then you will understand how serious it is. I may sit down?' He pulled out a chair and sat down before anyone could agree, smiling amiably round the hut. 'Get on with it, Kramer.'

'Marov is a psychopath ...' Kramer began in careful English.

'We don't want his medical history,' Beaumont said unpleasantly, determined to get the Siberian on his feet again. 'We've got quite enough on our plate without you people settling in for the night.'

Papanin stood up slowly, flexing his fingers to release some of the tension building up inside him. He had to be very careful; somehow the whole thing had turned round - instead of frightening these Americans Papanin himself felt dangerously off balance. 'We came here to warn you,' he began as he collected his parka off the table, 'to ask for your cooperation . . .'

'We've been warned, we cooperated, we listened. Thank you. And now we've got a lot of work to do,' Beaumont broke in crisply.

'I was going to suggest we searched your huts - one of you could accompany us - in case Marov is hiding here.'