North Cape (20 page)

Norwegian North Cape—the first obstacle in two hundred miles. The waves pounded into the rock as if attempting to smash it from their path, as though an entire continent did not lie behind. As the waves recoiled from the shock against the stone, they curled under themselves and swarmed back out into the depths, creating a maze of undertows and crosscurrents that could easily be disastrous to a landing party. This close to land the winds had dropped into the mid-forties, but their velocity, coupled with the roll and pitch of the ship, was far too high to permit the launching of the helicopter the RFK carried. Now, less than a mile off the cliffs, this was as close as Larkin dared bring the great ship. Radar examination of the coastline indicated sheer rock sloping steeply to the sea. The point of land opposite was a fierce line of rock wall. The waves piling up in thirty-foot breakers indicated that little or no beach existed. Larkin was now debating whether to try farther down the coast or attempt the certain suicide of the helicopter. The pilot had volunteered, but Larkin, knowing that it was a measure that could only be tried as a last solution, had rejected the offer.

He sighed deeply and pulled' his hood tighter against the icy wind. "Mr. Folsom, take her down the coast at eight knots until we find a spot to land." Folsom nodded. "How far do you want to go?"

"Not over two miles. If we find nothing we'll try the coast to the west." He shook his head doubtfully. "I don't know though, the charts show nothing but cliffs for the next ten miles in either direction. If we don't get to that pilot soon, we may as well not even bother."

Folsom nodded and picked up the microphone to order the course change and get the lookouts out onto the bridge deck.

The ragged coastline slid by with inexorable slowness. The battle cruiser moved along the line of breakers marking the cliffs while snow fell intermittently but heavily enough to obscure visibility much of the time. The cliffs, sixty to a hundred feet high, were steep columns of rock that seemed to rise directly from the sea, and nowhere along their length could the searching seamen find any trace of beach, however small, that would permit a landing. After fifteen minutes Larkin reluctantly ordered the RFK brought about. The great ship now quickened its pace for the run up to

the west. Time was growing short. Larkin knew Teleman would be on his last reserves of strength. Unless they got to him shortly, he would, in his weakened condition, die in a matter of hours.

The landing place, the only one they found, was a tiny beach less than a hundred yards wide and so shallow that the heavy seas washed perilously close to the base of the cliffs. From what Folsom could see between the crash of each wave, the beach, such as it was, was covered with heavy gravel and sloped upward steeply to the cliffs. A shallow cut led up, to disappear around a chimney of rock, but presumably pointed to the top, ninety feet up. It would be a rugged climb, Folsom knew, and a bad one in the winds which would surely be sweeping up the cut turning it into a wind tunnel. But it was the only feasible landing place they had found so far. And unless they moved farther west, down the coast another twenty miles to where the cliffs began to peter out, it was the only one they were going to find.

"Pete, what do you think? Can a boat be gotten in?" Folsom searched the narrow beach again with his glasses before replying. "I think so, Captain. If the waves are timed right, I think it could be done. Getting back out again will be the trick."

Larkin turned his own glasses on the beach. "If you can get in and find the pilot, you could wait it out in the boat until we can get a helicopter in."

"Me, Captain?"

Larkin lowered the glasses and turned to Folsom, his face completely serious.

"Yep—surprise. I would like you to lead the landing party. You know how important it is that the pilot be gotten out."

Folsom nodded silently, turning his eyes away from Larkin to stare at the distant line of cliffs. Larkin's voice contained all the explanation needed. He was indeed aware of the importance, the vital importance. "In that case, I would like to take an armed party, just to be on the safe side."

"Of course. Anything you need?" Larkin paused, considering his executive officer for a moment "What do you think, Pete?" he asked softly.

"I guess I can only give it a try," Folsom said with a grin that he did not feel. The lifeboat that rested on the aft deck was certainly odd in contrast to the sleekness of the RFK. It was a flattened sphere twelve feet in diameter, its bottom resting on a flaring, truncated cone skirt. Made of fiberglass, it was painted international orange. Folsom had always had cause to shake his head every time he saw the lifeboat above decks; strangelooking as it was, he knew it was the safest possible design that had yet evolved. There were no open-areas to fill with water in heavy seas. You entered the boat through one of three hatches near the top and let yourself down into a roomy interior lined with bunks. In the center was a closed-off electrical heating unit, powered either with a wind-driven generator or a fuel cell. The thing was literally unsinkable. The flaring skirt around the base provided stability in seas running to forty-foot waves or better. Folsom gathered, his two-man party around him to receive their last instructions from Larkin, who shook hands briefly with each man, and then they climbed aboard and sealed the hatches. Larkin stood back as the winches eased the boat off the deck and over the side. As it slid slowly down into the waves, through the upper rim of ports, Folsom and his crew could see the hull of the RFK towering over them. The waves caught at the lifeboat before Folsom got the engine started and slammed them into the side of the battle cruiser with bruising force.

Folsom picked himself up from the deck and started the engine, cursing all the while. Once the engine caught and the boat got underway, he was able to concentrate on keeping the spherical lifeboat, amazingly stable in heavy seas, pointed in the direction of the cliffs that appeared every now and then through the waves. As they neared the breakers, Folsom idled the engines and pressed his face against the tempered glass of the port. He wished mightily that he could open one of the top hatches to steer, but he knew that one heavy wave pushing them under momentarily would swamp the lifeboat. Except for quick glimpses he caught whenever the lifeboat rode up a wave far enough for him to see over the mountainous seas piling up ahead, he was surrounded by ever-moving walls of water.

Folsom felt the boat ride up again, and ahead, through the glass, was the line of cliffs, startlingly close. This was it, he thought, and gunned the engines. The boat paused at the crest of the breaker as the propellers fought to exercise their command over the tumbling masses of water. But it was not enough. As the boat began to slide down the forward edge of the wave, a mean crosscurrent caught the skirt and spun it around. The men inside felt the boat slam hard against the shingle. Folsom glanced back in time to see the following wave towering over them before the boat was engulfed by foaming white water that lifted and tossed it high into the air. The three-ton boat, flung as if it were a child's toy', smashed down hard on the rocks. A second and a third wave kicked, then rolled the lifeboat farther up onto the beach.

It was several minutes before Folsom could extricate himself from the mass of equipment on the deck where he had been thrown. He slumped down onto one of the padded seats lining the interior and rubbed his temples with both hands, then stirred one of the prone figures at his feet.

"Come on, up, up! Do you want to lie there all day?" The answer was somewhat muffled, but very much in the affirmative. Shortly they were all three moving around with nothing more than bruises to show for the wild ride. Folsom was exceedingly grateful that the RFK carried the new Life Sphere lifeboats. The same ride in the old, open whaler type would certainly have drowned them all. He crawled out of the top hatch and slid down to the beach. The boat was canted over at a drunken angle and the flaring skirt around the base had been twisted and torn loose from its welds by the wild careen across the beach. Several deep gashes had been ripped in the outer fiberglass hull, but none penetrated the interior hull. What caused the sinking feeling in the pit of Folsom's stomach was the sight of the snapped and bent propeller shafts and the hopelessly mangled rudders.

Folsom examined the damage while the other two clambered out and joined him on the beach. Both grunted at the damage. "I would say that boat is just about finished." Folsom agreed. "But there's no help for that. Let's get the equipment unloaded and get going. We'll have to wait until later to worry about the boat." While the others went to work, Folsom made a report by radio to Larkin. He did not minimize the importance of the loss of the lifeboat but neither did he dwell on it. Larkin promised to get a second lifeboat in as soon as they were able to return to the beach with the pilot. His report finished, the, three

men began moving out along the coast to the east. A fast but difficult climb brought them to the top of the cliffs. They wasted no time but immediately struck out east. All they had to go on to find the downed pilot was a radio fix that could be off by as much as a quarter of a mile in any direction.

In the long hours daring which the U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy maneuvered off the Norwegian North Cape; the storm passed on to the northeast where it would gradually lose force as it began to curl north toward the polar icecap once more. As the storm center moved deeper into the Barents Sea toward Novaya Zemlya, the high winds in the vicinity of the Cape began to lose strength, until, an hour after Folsom and his party had landed, they were blowing at a steady forty knots. As the winds died, however, the snow fell thicker and thicker and the temperature dropped rapidly, bringing what Larkin had most feared—intense cold.. The waves, still roused by the passage of the fierce winds across two hundred miles of ocean from the southern edge of the Arctic ice pack, continued to run high, beating themselves to death in a final rush of breakers and white water, smashing away at the same cliffs that had defied them for millions of years. Folsom, marching along the top of the cliffs, could see the tremendous breakers rushing onto the thread of beach through the swirling snow. The cold had already deepened to twenty below zero and he had ordered the others to don face masks for pro-tection from frostbite. In spite of their Navy-issue Arctic gear, all three were numb to the bone. Fortunately, Folsom thought to himself, the cliffs above the narrow beach were fairly smooth. There were no deep crevices or caves into which the pilot could have crawled that would take them hours to search out.

The landing party stumbled across Teleman almost by accident thirty minutes later. Chief Petty Officer Beauregard McPherson found him still half crouched in a kneeling position facing the frozen radio. Folsom went to his knees beside the still figure,-ripping off one of his gloves to check for pulse. He found one, slow and fluttery, but a pulse. Another half hour, or even less, would have done it, he knew. Folsom stood up and looked around. Half a mile away he could make out the thin first line of trees through which Teleman had

struggled to reach the cliffs. With the pilot half carried, half dragged between them they trotted toward the dubious shelter of the trees. They pushed their way deep into the snow-laden firs until the wind was hardly more than a fitful breeze eddying the falling snow into swirls of white. Even above the soft, steady roar of the, wind through the pine tops, they could hear the crash of the breakers against the cliffs. In less than five minutes they had the nylon mountain tent rigged and the heater going. Folsom quickly stripped the sodden flying clothes from Teleman and got him zipped into a chemically heated sleeping bag. Over this, be pulled still another sleeping bag. As the tent warmed quickly from the primus stove, Folsom anxiously watched the face of the unconscious pilot. The features had the pinched, waxy look that comes from the first stages of frostbite—or from death by freezing. Even though he had been sheltered by the rocks from the wind and if Larkin had been correct in his interpretation of the pilot's physical condition after a six-day mission, then the man was close to exhaustion. Hiking through these trees would only have worsened that condition, badly. Larkin had cautioned him about using any drugs on the pilot. There was no way for -them to know how his system would react to further drugs if he was deep into exhaustion. Folsom was helpless, then. There was nothing he could do except keep him warm and wait until he regained consciousness, and then get as much solid food into him as the pilot could take. His own body would. have to do all the work. Folsom was amazed that the human body could take such abuse and still manage to function.

After the self-supported tent was securely rigged and their gear squared away, Folsom dug the radio out of his pack and extended the aerial. When he threw the transmit switch, he heard a weird rumble of static and hissing that overpowered any transmissions for a moment. Then, suddenly it cleared.

Larkin was on the other end moments later and Folsom made his report, forgetting quickly about the unusual static.

He described the desperate state that Teleman was in and his fears that he might not regain consciousness even in the warmth of the tent. "Besides," he finished, "right now, I think that if we tried to move our man the trek back to the beach would, probably kill him. The temperature is dropping very fast up here."

Larkin's voice contained undertones of worry. "I agree that you ought to stay put until you see how he is. I should have known that the false rise in temperature would lead to an even deeper drop. Katabatic storms often end this way. You can probably expect the temperature to drop at, least another twenty degrees in the next twenty-four hours."

"Ye gods, another twenty degrees!" Folsom exclaimed.

"That's right . . . but at least it will bring an end to the winds." "Yeah, thanks for small favors," Folsom murmured.

"I'm afraid we are going to have to stand farther out to sea until these waves let up."