His target was now three hundred miles distant and Teleman assumed control of the aircraft. He throttled back and began losing altitude swiftly. The flight plan called for two long passes, one at a hundred thousand feet to survey the terrain and the other at forty thousand feet for close-ups. He was feeling extremely uneasy about the low-altitude pass, and the closer he approached to the target area the more uncomfortable he became. When the altimeters indicated one hundred thousand feet, he leveled off and cut his speed back still more to Mach 1.2, until he was barely crawling up on the Sinkiang highlands.
Twenty minutes to contact. The twisted, narrow Tarbagatai Mountain range slid behind and he was over the rugged highlands that edged the Gobi Desert. The rugged land of the Sinkiang plateau sped by as he slanted in. He started a long, seventy-five mile turn that would bring him onto a heading of 212° and into position to begin his search pattern along the border. As a safety precaution, Teleman began to crank the radar outward to its full — range of sixteen hundred miles and instructed the computer to keep watch and report anything that rose above eighty thousand feet. Then he turned his attention to the ECM console and began to narrow down the counterdetection radar cover to an area less than five miles across. All down the go° meridian Teleman had maintained a fifty-mile diameter ring, not enough to attract attention at the altitude he had been holding, but enough to prevent accidental detection.
Ten minutes to contact. All detection systems were silent. The low light-level television cameras were showing him apparent one-mile altitude shots along his flight path for ten miles on a side. He could make out no sign of life, no roads or tracks or signs of” human habitation. A few minutes before, he had left the desert and scrublands behind as the terrain climbed to eight thousand feet and became grasslands, depending for their meager water supply on the swift rivers flowing down out of the Tien Shan and its foothills. The winter was fierce, but the scouring winds had kept the sloping hillsides relatively free of snow below seven thousand feet. The plateau would rise another two to three thousand feet before cresting and beginning to flow downward toward the Kazakh border seventy miles west.
Fifty miles due east of his present position lay the Chinese city of Urmachi, probably the staging point for Chinese troops fighting in the hinterlands below. Off to the southeast glinted the frozen surface of the Kara Nor that would mark a rough position from which he would make a sharp turn to the northwest and fly up to the first checkpoint to pick up the star-fix coordinates for the border sweep.
As he made the turn the night-light TV cameras blanked for a moment, shifting resolution and iris assemblies as the sun began to brighten the snow-splotched landscape. He could still discern no sign of troop movements, or of life, period. But he knew he would, soon enough.
Now he was less than ten miles inside the Kazakh border, roughly paralleling the line the Soviets were reported to be holding. A swollen river rushing out of the hills, snow covered now, but green in the spring and early summer, slipped tantalizingly past on the ground surveillance screen. The countryside was deserted because of the winter and the war, but in more peaceful and warmer times, Mongolian and Tartar sheepherders shared the valleys, fresh steppe grass, and frequent small rivers from the mountains. In normal times they drove their flocks into the region for the long summer pasturage, peacefully net interfering with one another. Now, he knew, the valleys below were full of) radar sites, long-range missile and artillery positions, and troop concentrations of both sides. A range of pockmarked hills marched across the land that was beginning to fall away into a long valley stretching westward to the border. Abruptly the scene swam as the aircraft navigational sensors locked onto the proper stars and altered the course of the fleeting shadow until it was solidly on the wire. For the next hour the A-17 tacked back and forth across the irregular border, defined only by the series of star-fix coordinates held in magnetic tape. Teleman had completed the first pass at one hundred thousand. feet over the border city of Tahcheng and negotiated the turn-around point some sixty miles north. In manual control again, he was very carefully edging the aircraft down to forty thousand feet, the lowest he had ever flown over enemy territory. He knew that he could be sighted visually by either side and hoped that the lack of radar fixes would be, thought due to opposition countermeasures. Just in case, he warmed up the decoy rigs and slapped them onto standby. If radar beams came questing after him, their distinctive pulse patterns could be analyzed. The ECM would then broadcast high-frequency radio signals up and down several bandwidths. This would have the effect of presenting to the radar operator a broken, rapidly flickering signal that hopefully would be blamed on freak atmospheric conditions.
As the A-17 came over the Irtysh River where it flowed down through a deep gorge cut through the foothills of the Altai Mountains, Teleman suddenly glimpsed a small patch of heat on the infrared screen some thirty miles west of the Kazakh border into Sinkiang. A feeling of elation coursed through him. The whole operation might turn out to be easier than he thought. Ending the coded message that Larkin had transmitted from the ship containing his countering orders was the message “Imperative you procure visual data of war situation.” He had to come back with actual photographs of the fighting for the mission to be successful. Without photos, the impact of the conflict between Red China and the Soviet Union would be lost on the world. The public would tend to interpret it as another smoke screen or propaganda play. The patch of heat detected by the infrared sensors could very well lead to those photographs. Teleman examined the IR screen carefully. There, in the.center of the blacked-out snowcovered rock and scrub-covered walls of the gorge that led toward the border was a barely discernible shade of gray, only slightly lighter than the surrounding valley. Teleman pulled around in a tight circle, concentrating visual sensors and cameras on the spot. He had earlier cut his speed from Mach 1.2 to sub-sonic when he had dropped below one hundred thousand feet to avoid sonic boom. Now he throttled back even more, running out the variable geometrical wings until they were extended to the fullest to hold his speed at two hundred knots.
The television cameras were displaying’ the deep valley and he carefully began cranking up the image until he could make out a two-wheel track twisting through the rock and paralleling a tiny stream. Shortly a military vehicle came into sight around and from under a shoulder-like overhanging rock. It moved slowly into the open and began to pick up speed along the track. A minute passed and a second vehicle appeared, and then a third.
Teleman brought the aircraft around on the opposite heading and slowed ” still further until the fan assemblies engaged and wound up to thirty thousand RPM to provide extra airflow over the wing surfaces to support the aircraft. He was now down to 105 knots. A check of the radar detectors showed nothing more than a routine search patrol nearly eighty miles south, probably Chinese. No scrambled Chinese fighters were recorded. He turned his full attention back to the vehicles again.
The trucks were now moving along the roadway at about forty-five miles an hour, pretty fast for military vehicles on an almost nonexistent road. He cranked the images up to their highest degree of magnification and identified them as Kirov five-ton troop lorries. Ahead of the trucks Teleman could see that the narrow gorge opened up and climbed steeply to a flattish plain that butted sharply against a series of rocky foothills. The foothills appeared to be their destination. -Now he could also see artillery pieces on limbers bouncing along behind each truck. As the trucks reached the spot where the valley began to widen, they had to pass through a narrow defile several hundred yards long. There was no place to turn off the road and, because it snaked through the gap, it would be all but impossible to back out with the artillery pieces. The Chinese must have been waiting for just that moment.