Teleman’s first thought was of nerve gas. He keyed the telephoto lenses on the visual cameras to the scene and boosted the image up on the scope, closing on the mortar emplacement. While he put the aircraft into a tight orbit at three hundred feet. He swore as he checked the chronometer readout. One more minute and he would have to get out whether he had everything or not. Now he could see the bodies of other soldiers, some in foxholes, some scattered around the meadow as if they had tried to stagger toward the river. The faint footprints in the fresh snow were silhouetted in the dawn sun, indicating unsteady trails. A single trooper lay on his back, arched over the lip of a foxhole, one arm thrown across a pile of mortar shells. His helmet had tumbled back off his head, leaving his face exposed to the dead light of the early sun. Teleman could even see the man’s long blond hair stirring in the vagrant breeze that reinforced the prediction of the impending storm. The image of the hair registered subconsciously. Teleman peered at the face, framed in the scope: it was covered with blood and vomit and the eyes of the man were open, staring directly, it seemed, into the cameras. For a long moment Teleman could not tear his eyes away from the face as the cameras recorded the scene in minute detail. Then he broke the aircraft out of its orbit and dismissed the rest of the flight plan. He had all of the information he needed. judging from the evidence he had seen so far, the Chinese were using either gas or germ warfare. For some reason, with the image of the dead Russian soldier’s face before him, he was betting on bacteriological agents.
CHAPTER 6
Teleman wondered how many shells had been fired’ before the satellite surveillance system had spotted the 210-mm cannon. This one appeared to have been timed for just after dawn; probably so, that the Chinese could gain a quick estimate of its effectiveness as well as initial Soviet reaction.
So far, there did not appear to be any. He checked the atmosphere sampling tanks and the lights glowed green, showing that the covers were sealed. Now it would be up to Washington to extract what they could from the samples.
A quick scan of the radar panels indicated that there had been no unusual air activity recorded in the nine minutes he had been below forty thousand feet. But deep in the valley as he had been, his radar was shadowed by the hills to the east. He considered a moment, then pulled the nose up sharply and cut in afterburners. He came out of the shallow valley, clearing the hills like a rocket. In less than thirty seconds he had passed sixty thousand feet and switched the engines to ramjet. The sudden explosion of thrust kicked him back into the acceleration couch. The pressure suit accommodated itself to the change caused by the sudden acceleration while the PCMS adjusted stimulant flows. Off to the east, the surveillance radar had two Chinese Migs spotted, heading for the broad valley. As he climbed, the Chinese pilots, now far below, pulled up sharply, caught by his surprise exit. They chased him upward for a short while, but by the time they reached_ sixty thousand feet he was leveling off at 120,000. Teleman caught the flicker of air-to-air missiles reaching for him as the Chinese aircraft tried a last frantic measure to bring him down. But there was never a chance. There would be, he knew, some soul-searching at their intelligence headquarters later on — if the pilots were believed. There would certainly be no radar sightings to confirm their story and the Thoughts of Mao would provide no sensible answers. Teleman grinned to himself as the A-17 pulled out of the climb and settled into a search-and-photograph flight mode, then turned to the monitoring console to run through the information the sensors had so far picked up. As the data, reduced to language forms and equations, streamed across the screen, he found more information than he had hoped for. The laser topographical radar had managed to build a thorough map of the war area. Also spotted were several Soviet and Red Chinese missile installations that he suspected were previously unknown to U. S. Intelligence. Near the town of Lepsinsk on the Kazakh SSR side, a cleared site with camouflaged bunkers betrayed a VTOL fighter airdrome. That meant that the Soviets had moved their air operations closer to the border than had been suspected. The vertical takeoff and landing fighters were limited in operating range, but they were Mach 2.1 fighters and could react and be over the selected target or engagement in a lot less time than conventional jet aircraft. By moving them into the area around Lepsinsk, the Soviets could meet the threat of the heavy Chinese airbase at Nordach, located well into the jut of the Sinkiang border, from which they could bring fighter bombers within striking distance of Alma Alta.
The IR sensors had located vehicle weapon parks on both sides of the border, including a number of heavy artillery sites, well dug in and virtually invulnerable to counterartillery attacks. Both sides had prepared well, Teleman thought, and obviously for a number of years. Much of the fighting on the plateau would have to be done by infantry troops supported by aircraft. It, was still short of 0800, local time, only forty minutes after local sunrise. Except for probing patrol actions, the bulk of the day’s fighting was probably still to come.
The action earlier in which the two Soviet troop carriers had been knocked out would furnish ample evidence that a shooting war was actually going on. That revelation would make quite a stir in the United Nations, particularly to certain neighboring and nervous countries. The more sophisticated nonvisual sensor data would be pored over eagerly by the attaches of many nations. But the dangerous information, the data that really counted, lay safely in the atmosphere-sampling tanks. Either gas or bacteriological agents, it would make no difference. Either would be enough to bring world condemnation of the Red Chinese, even by nations friendly to her. It was doubtful if their usual pattern of denial would avail them in this instance. The doubt would be there, and there would be calls for an international monitoring team. And the evidence could not be hidden. Teleman was well pleased with the morning’s work. And so would Washington be.
Teleman was completing the final leg of the search pattern preparatory to shaping a course northeast for rendezvous. He was flying at eight thousand feet in the vicinity of Lach Rom on the Chu River. The aircraft was on automatic, following the irregular border by star-fix coordinates when Telemen caught a tiny flicker on the trailing edge of the surveillance radar screen. The blip showed at sixty thousand feet near Pezhevalsk, on the Soviet side of the border. As he watched, the blip was read out as an Ilyushin Falcon, closing the four-hundred-mile gap at Mach 2.5. For long seconds he continued to watch, wondering where the Soviet aircraft was going in such a hurry. The Falcon was the latest Soviet interceptor, capable of Mach 3.2 and carrying an armament consisting of four Mach 4.8 air-to-air missiles that could be armed with small nuclear warheads. The aircraft was only recently being distributed to the Soviet Tactical Air Command as a high-speed, high-altitude interceptor with a ceiling of a little less than 180,000 feet. Its major task was to act as defense against the new, high/low-level Mach 3 penetration bombers of the USAF Strategic Air Command. Teleman had spotted flights several times before over the Soviet Union, but always either on training jaunts or border patrols. None had heretofore been aware of his presence.
This one, though, seemed to be-another matter. The Falcon was holding its course on a direct line that would cross his less than a minute after he passed over the border into Soviet territory. Experimentally, he made a small course correction that lengthened his’ stay in Red Chinese territory. The Falcon changed to match. For the first time Teleman felt the cold chill of fear that not even the PCMS could cope with. That damned aircraft was waiting for him, he thought. How in the name of all the gods… frantically, Teleman lifted the A-17, ramjets flaming, and scrambled to two hundred thousand feet. The Russian pilot pulled his aircraft up sharply and cut in his afterburners. The long, thousand-foot cone of hot gases showed as a thin ghost image on the radar screen. Teleman began to increase his speed, shoving the throttle control up past Mach 2.5. The intruder was still closing. He checked the ECM unit. It put him at the center of a three-hundred-mile-diameter circle, but still the flickering image came on to meet him at the interception point, now less than two hundred miles ahead. And the Falcon had the advantage of being down-course. That damned ECM unit was working, but still the Soviet aircraft came on. Somehow, the Russian had him visually, Teleman knew. That left Teleman with only one other move. He switched the surveillance radar to scan to the east — nothing more than scattered Mig patrols on both sides of the border and occasional cargo craft on the Chinese side, all well below forty thousand feet. He quickly checked the Falcon. It was still there and in another few seconds would be in range to fire a salvo of twin missiles. He did not want to chance those. The PCMS, anticipating his decision from the combined inputs of his body setting itself for action and the information coming to it from the surveillance radar, began to increase the flow of amphetamine stimulants. Teleman’s actions became a blur as he pulled the A-17 around in a narrow curve to the northeast. The gap between the two aircraft opened as though a knife had slashed through an invisible cord, and the Falcon fell rapidly behind as Teleman streaked for the deserted reaches of Sinkiang. Watching the surveillance radar, he felt a small measure of relief as the Soviet aircraft disappeared from the scope. At least they were not going to take a chance on trying to shoot him down over Chinese territory. They wanted the A-17, or what would be left of it, badly. As he streaked deeper into Sinkiang, Teleman watched the Falcon. The Soviet aircraft pulled around to the west in a tight turn that was almost a match for his, then straightened out and ran, presumably for its base at Alma Alta. Teleman found himself very interested in that final maneuver. A number of questions were suddenly occurring to him. Number one: Why did they send only one aircraft? And number two: Why did it return to base so quickly instead of loitering in the vicinity to see if Teleman would try and cross the border again? There was only one way to find out, he decided. Swinging back again toward the border, he increased his speed to Mach 4. Seconds later, as he approached the spot where he had first sighted the Falcon, a second Russian aircraft showed up from the southwest quadrant, the same quadrant from which the first had come barreling in. Somehow, they were tracking him, Teleman thought. They must have aircraft stacked up low down on the deck where his surveillance radar could not pick them out of the background scatter. He did not wait this time to see how close he could push on to the border, but swung to the east again in the same tight turn. Again the Falcon turned and headed after the first one to base. A third time he tried it, streaking for the border at less than a thousand feet and Mach 2. The sonic boom below would be enough to cause concussion-and alert everyone within fifty miles. But in this deserted desert country he was not concerned about being sighted.