Joe Poyer - North Cape

Larkin turned to Bridges, still seated at Folsom’s console. “Well, Mr. Bridges, we are off. Gontact Mr. Folsom and tell him what has happened. Tell him I will call him again at”—he looked at his watch—“0600 with instructions… ah, amend that to suggestions. In the meantime, they are to get all the sleep they can. Also, they are not to call us except in an emergency. No sense in letting their position be pinpointed.”

“Aye, sir.” Bridges turned to the radio operator as Larkin went below for some badly needed rest.

Teleman came slowly awake to the sound of a hushed voice. For several minutes, still drugged with exhaustion, he lay in the sleeping bag, scarcely aware that he was awake. A darkness, half dispersed by a light source that he could not see, drew a curving line directly above his eyes. For a minute he thought he was back in the aircraft, looking down on the earth from two hundred thousand feet, seeing the bisecting dawn line. The lighted portion of whatever it was above/below him, he could not tell which, was a darkish blue color, the same as the earth from altitude at dawn. The other half was dead black and the bisecting line itself was fuzzy, shading through a spectrum of bluish gray from light to dark.

The voice puzzled him, but as yet he was not able to turn his head, for some perverse reason. Gradually he became aware that he was stripped to the skin and covered with some kind of heavy, heated material. Then he remembered the intense cold, the cold and the wind.

He mustered the will to turn his head. For a moment the scene refused to focus and vertigo gripped him, spinning him end over end. Gradually the picture before him steadied and he slowly began to make out details. The first was the fabric line of a sleeping bag. Beyond, the hunched backs of two other men bending over something hidden by their bodies. Various pieces of gear were stacked around the walls of the tent. The lantern casting the dim light was suspended from the center of the tent, a heavy flashlight, giving off a steady light.

Both men were unaware that he was watching and wondering who they were and where he was. Then in a rush the memories came back as that part of his brain cleared with an almost physical jolt. He remembered the aircraft, the long flight across Asia, the desperate running from the Russian interceptors, the ejection over the North Cape. The last thing he remembered was a. hissing flare landing nearby. As the fuzziness evaporated, Teleman began to realize that he had been picked up by somebody. But Russians, Americans, or Norwegians? He turned his head again to see the man whose back was nearest him nod two or three times, then reach out to part the tent flaps. Immediately a gust of wind danced in, bringing whirling snow with it.

“As far as we know right now, they sent only one boatload, maybe twenty men in the landing party.” The voice that came over the radio was almost lost in the sound of the wind battering the tent.

“Any idea how long it will take them to get here?” Teleman felt a flood of relief pour through him. At least they spoke English. They must have come from the rendezvous ship, he thought.

The tiny radio voice came again. “The MTI radar shows the coastal cliffs in that area as quite low and sloping back into what the map indicates as a level plain. I don’t see them waiting until the storm lets up. They are east of you by twenty-two miles.”

“Well, assuming that the terrain isn’t much different from what we’ve seen here, rd say it would take them nearly twenty-four hours to get this far. I’d also guess that they don’t know exactly where the pilot went down, or else they might have tried a landing farther up the coast.”

“That may be. But of course if they had wanted to avoid detection as much as possible they would. have landed in Parsangerfjord. It’s the only sheltered spot along the entire coast all the way to the naval base.”

“Well, unless the weather changes drastically, I’ll go along with your estimate of twenty-four hours. They have an awful lot of searching along the way to do in the meantime.”

“Yeah. I just hope we are reading the situation right and that they somehow did not track our boy by radar or somesuch. I’d look mighty foolish if they came marching in several hours from now, not even winded.”

He glanced around and saw Teleman staring at him. Folsom’s eyes widened in surprise and he waved a hand in greeting. Teleman continued to stare at him, too tired and fuzzy to do more. Folsom finished the report quickly and signed off. Then he crawled back to the sleeping bag in which Teleman lay.

“How do you feel?” he asked as he reached into the sleeping bag for Teleman’s arm to take his pulse. In contrast to the rapid, fluttery 166 beats per minute that he had exhibited several hours ago, his pulse had now slowed to 93, above normal, but probably due to the drug residues remaining in his system.

“Beat,” Teleman said weakly.

“Other than that?”

“Nothing. I think I could… sleep for a week.”

Folsom grinned at him. “Yeah, I bet you could.” He looked around at the sailor still folding up the radio and called him over.

“I want you to meet one of your helpmates. This character has an itchy trigger finger, or at least thinks he does,” Folsom amended, grinning. “He’s our chief gunnery officer — an empty title as we have no guns except for a one-inch popper for salutes. We stole him from the SEALS just for jobs like this. His name, and this you won’t believe, is Beauregard Hubert McPherson, which probably accounts for the majority of his, fierceness,” Folsom added.

McPherson grinned sheepishly and said, “Hello,” his big, warm hand all but engulfing Teleman’s.

Teleman looked up into the large, round face hanging over him like a second moon and smiled feebly, but did not find the strength to reply. Folsom saw that he was still exhausted and he and McPherson backed off.

“Okay, get some more sleep. We’ll make the rest of the introductions later.” Teleman nodded once and then was sound asleep. The two sailors looked down at the sleeping form and both shook their heads at the same time. “I’ll bet that guy has really been though hell,” McPherson murmured. Folsom was silent a moment, then: “Yeah, and I bet he’ll go through more before we are out of this.”

Beauregard Hubert McPherson, Chief Petty Officer, United States Navy, and former member of the SEALS, the naval version of the U. S. Army Special Forces, shifted the AR-18 carbine to his left hand, and with his right eased himself down into the slippery defile leading to the beach. Half sliding, half climbing, he went down through the thick snow from rock to rock until he reached the beach. Once there, he did not hesitate, but turned east and began loping down the beach in an easy, ground-covering jog. The snow, whipped by the wind into swirling curtains, was heavier along the water’s edge than it had been above the cliffs, which was just what he wanted. Not only would the thick snow shield him from anyone approaching, but it would also serve to cover his tracks completely, something he could not depend on the drifting snow to do above the cliffs. He pushed on steadily for two hours, often having to climb over rock piles washed into weird positions by eons of waves and Arctic storms. Once he had to re-climb the cliffs when the beach, often little more than a narrow thread, ran out. As he trotted he kept a sharp lookout toward the sea, even though the snow was so heavy that visibility was zero after fifty feet at best. But McPherson was a careful man. He had fought with the SEALS in Vietnam five years before, raiding into the delta in small parties to perform kidnapings and assassinations of leading Viet Cong terrorists. They brought the same type of terror to the Viet Cong that the V.C. had used so successfully against the South Vietnamese. After Vietnam had come assignments in Thailand and Cambodia, and, finally, the famous raid into China to rescue the crew of a United States Intelligence ship captured on the high seas.