The top sheet was an instruction page for the five that followed. It held one small paragraph that immediately caught Folsom’s eye. If he accepted the terms of the attached contract and signed, he would be “liable to twenty years in a federal prison or $20,000 fine or both if he revealed to any unauthorized person or persons any material or information given to him in connection with that relayed to him by Captain Henly Larkin, USN, Commanding Officer of the battle cruiser U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy, or in any way violated the provisions of the National Defense Act.” The rest of the forms were standard Department of Defense Top Secret Clearance sheets, already filled out and dated the day he had received his Top Secret clearance. Puzzled, Folsom turned the pages until he came to the last. It was a simple, green-colored sheet with a short list of questions and space for his signature and the date. It was headed “Q” Prime Clearance. He whistled softly. He had heard of the QPC, but never had expected to receive it. Usually, it was a clearance reserved for the President, cabinet officers, and the joint Chiefs of Staff, to whom there were no secrets. Not even the highest-ranking members of Congress got that one. He looked up.
“Rather surprising, isn’t it? But that’s how important this project is. Will you sign the form?”
Folsom nodded, and Larkin handed him a pen.
“Then do so,” he said quietly. Folsom scribbled his name and added the date.
“You are now cleared to receive ‘Q’ Prime information,” Larkin said. “The clearance search was run the day you came aboard, and if something had happened to me while we were on duty you would have found all of the instructions in my safe. The decision as to when to bring you into the project was left up to me. Because I believe that the fewer people who know about this project the safer it will be, I have not done so until now.” He paused to drink slowly.
“Why did you decide now that I should know about it?” Folsom asked much more calmly than he felt.
Larkin waved his hand in a manner to take in the ship and the storm raging outside. “To date there has been no emergency that has warranted it. But now there is what you might call a proper combination of circumstances. As I said, the Russians are onto our most closely guarded secret since the Manhattan Project. Additionally, the sea is running into one of the worst storms on record and our ship could be in very serious danger. In the next few hours you are going to have to have a full understanding as to why we are not going to be able to do anything more than complete our assigned mission at all costs. And, if we survive the storm, we may have trouble of a kind we have never encountered before except in practice” — Larkin hesitated, letting the tension build—“Soviet submarines may be out to sink us.” Folsom stared at him, wondering if the old man had not finally succumbed to the pressures of commanding a ship. As if aware of what he was thinking, Larkin grinned and shook his head. “No, I haven’t gone out of my mind.” He got up and pulled a map from the desk drawer and spread it on the table. It was a map of the northern Eastern hemisphere showing the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Arctic. On it was penciled in red a line paralleling the go° meridian to the Sinkiang border, then swinging north in a long, curving arc across the Soviet Union to their rendezvous position off the Ryabchi Peninsula of Scandinavia.
“This map shows the flight path of one of our three specially equipped reconnaissance aircraft. The aircraft is capable of speeds in excess of Mach 5 and flight times of…” For a long time Folsom listened to the dry matter-of-fact voice explaining one of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. After the first few minutes he recovered quickly from the astonishment accompanying the discovery of the exact depth and extent of the surveillance missions that the United States had conducted over the past two years and the role he, or the RFK to be exact, had played. The deeper Larkin went into the explanation/briefing, the more he understood the almost fanatical secrecy that surrounded the project. Not counting the employees at Lockheed and the Air Force crew at GilIon Advanced Test Site, who never were allowed to know the full story, Larkin told him that there were less than fifty people in the United States who knew about the A-17. Fifty people and possibly the entire Soviet military establishment, Folsom thought ironically. Larkin was the only U.S. military official outside the United States territorial boundaries who knew about the A-17, with the exception of a submarine commander in charge of all relay operations for the entire southern hemisphere.
“And that, Pete, is the whole story, or at least as much as I think it is necessary to tell you at this point.” The old man looked piercingly at him. Folsom met his eyes unwaveringly.
“What are your orders then, sir?”
Larkin rubbed the back of his head and walked over to stand and stare out the porthole. His voice, when he spoke, was low, barely carrying across the ten feet that separated them, hinting all the actual loneliness of command that only the captain of a ship, or perhaps the commander of a Strategic Air Command bomber, could feel. The loneliness in knowing that you had no one to *horn you could turn to for advice. “I wish I knew…”
He let his voice trail off.
But with the next breath he swung quickly around from the porthole and said firmly, “For now, we have no choice but to continue to the turn-around point and rendezvous tonight on-station.” He walked briskly back to the desk and handed Folsom another flimsy.
“This is the last message we received after I made the status report an hour ago. It says, quite simply, “Imperative maintain station — Soviets on.”
“Why couldn’t we continue to the lee side of the Cape and wait for him there. One hundred and fifty miles shouldn’t make that much difference to the pilot,” Folsom continued.
“But it does. We have no way Of contacting the aircraft. The pilot must initiate all such contacts with us. Secondly, the radio transmitter that he uses is a VHF-FM set with a range of less than twenty miles, to reduce the chance that hostile ships or aircraft might pick up the transmission. If we aren’t where we said we will be, then he is done. He can’t contact us and we can’t give him his next set of orders. And that set of orders has his next fueling coordinates. Everything possible has been done to lessen the chance of his being discovered by electronic snooping.”
Folsom nodded. “So if we aren’t there, he’s as good as dead.” He paused and massaged his weary eyes. They felt as if large boulders of jagged rock were slowly working their way up under the lids. He had been on duty, without sleep, „for nearly twenty-four hours, and his mental faculties were beginning to match the syrupy slowness of his body. “That is one job that I certainly do not want under any circumstances.”
“How would you like the job of having to be in the right place at the right time, everytime,” Larkin asked bleakly. “You’ve got it, Pete.”
CHAPTER 8
The well-defined southern edge of the Turfan Depression cut a sable horizon line through the pale gold of the Gobi and the dust-laden sky. To his right, the blue expanse of Bagrach Kol gleamed in the late morning sunlight. The Bagrach Kol had the singular distinction of being the largest and one of two free bodies of water in all the Gobi, and it is salty beyond belief. The other was the almost dry and equally salt-laden Lop Nor Basin. For some minutes now the eastern reaches of the Tien Shan had been in view, and from fifteen thousand feet Teleman could easily make out the dark smudge farther down on the southern horizon that was the Kun Lun range.
He flew steadily due south, leaving the alkaline lake and the pebble desert of the Depression behind. When the Tien Shan were well past his starboard wing, Teleman began the long turn east that would take him down the valleys between the two ranges to cross the Soviet border well south, or so he hoped, of the visual tracking net the Soviets had so hastily thrown up.