As Teleman reached for the ECM gear panel, he caught a flicker of light on the radar screen as one of the Falcons changed course.
The digital readout chattered quickly. Too late, he groaned inwardly. Either one of the aircraft or the ground stations had picked him up. The Falcon was heading directly for him. Working quickly, he extended the counterdetection range to its full sixteen-hundred-mile range. It seemed to have no effect on the approaching Falcon. He could not spot a single indication of wavering or uncertainty. Swearing softly, Teleman checked the fuel-load readouts. Mach +5 was the limit unless he wanted to crash somewhere in Poland or France, out of fuel. The contact-point readout.now gave him six minutes before the Falcon reached missile range. He checked his location quickly and found that he was south of the ancient capital of the Mongolian Khan Timur-i-leng, the city of Samarkand, less than three hundred miles from the Afghan border. Would the Soviets hesitate to cross the border, as they had north over Sinkiang? There was only one way to find out, he thought grimly, and dropped into a steep turn south, sliding down in a long glide that would bring him across the border at 140,000 feet. It was a desperate gamble, but one that had to be taken.
The next six minutes passed slowly. Teleman fled south for the border pursued by the Falcons, slowly gaining ground by their relay tactics. As the chase lengthened, Teleman began to observe the flight characteristics of the other pursuing aircraft. His radar showed two other bandits wheeling into the flight line from the north. He could imagine them strung out in a long line, in both directions, all the way to the air base at Alma Alta. Of the two on his radar beside the immediate pursuer, one was heading back. The sudden flurry of activity involving the four Falcons when they thought they had lost him obviously had not exhausted them. Then on the horizon Teleman spotted the Amu Dar Ya, the river that formed the northeastern border, separating the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.
The radar screen showed the second following Falcon almost within range, and indicated that Teleman would cross the border with seconds to spare. As if realizing that he was losing his prey, the Soviet pilot fired a salvo of missiles. Teleman watched the two rockets spurt ahead of the aircraft and begin to close in on him with deadly silence. As soon as the missiles were away, the Falcon throttled back and dropped swiftly down in a sharp turn, trying desperately to conserve fuel for the impossible run back to the Alma Alta base eight hundred miles north.
The missiles fell far short, not a serious hazard after all. Teleman bent wearily forward and programed the ECM to respread the sixteen-hundred-mile safety net around the A17. The remaining three Soviet Falcons had pulled around to the north as he crossed the border, and climbing swiftly up to his altitude was a single replacement with which the Soviets would probably try and keep him in sight. But it would be a hopeless task, Teleman knew. He now had a pretty good idea of the effective range of their visual tracking gear. Five hundred miles seemed to be the ultimate, limit and accurate tracking could be performed properly only at less than four hundred miles. Accordingly, Teleman pulled into a long arc to the southwest that would bring him out of range in less than twelve minutes, and throttled back to Mach 1.9.
Two problems, both serious, still faced him. One was how to repenetrate the Soviet Union in order to make the rendezvous point on time; the second was his dwindling fuel load. Both problems were interdependent.
After fifteen minutes of intense work with the computer, Teleman sat back and studied the results. Keeping him company the entire while was the lone Falcon, six hundred miles north and safely inside his own border. Teleman was sure he was out of sight of the Soviet aircraft. He had to be in order for this new course to work. The computers, taking all the variables into account, including the fact that it was very possible for the Soviets to again pick him up deeper into the Soviet Union, had drawn a flight path that would keep him outside the boundaries of the Soviet Union until he reached the vicinity of the Caspian Sea. He would re-enter the Soviet Union from northern Iran, skirting the southern edge of the Caspian at two hundred thousand feet. He would use a full ECM range of sixteen hundred miles, as the Soviet border radar net would he on alert and it would be impossible to escape their notice anyway. It was very likely that, if they could have visual tracking systems for aircraft, then they could also have ground stations to perform the same job over a wider range and with greater accuracy. But radar disruption of sixteen-hundred-mile diameter should make it impossible for the radar net to provide enough of a course approximation to the visual tracking stations to aid in spotting him in the three minutes or so that he would be within range. Telcman fell off slowly, deeper into Afghan territory, always paralleling his original line of flight, keeping the Russian plane on the edges of his radar screen while slowly leaving him behind. The one-sided chase continued due west now, until he had left the torn earth of the Hindu Kush far behind and below lay the rugged Plateau of Iran. Every ten minutes, regular as clockwork, he watched another Falcon spiral up to take his station on the other side of the border. The A-17 was on full automatic now and Teleman was merely a passenger. At a certain point the aircraft banked steeply to the south, then steadied in response to a small correction in the flight plan. After half an hour of this blind run and chase, his, companion, now six hundred miles behind him, overstayed his ten-minute pattern. Teleman bent to the radar screen, watching to see what would happen. A minute passed, then a second and a third. In the fourth minute the Falcon slid off one wing and dropped quickly into a long glide northwest. Teleman checked his maps. The air base at Ashkhabad on the Soviet side of the Turkman SSR-Afghanistan border was now within range. Operations had probably been shifted accordingly, Teleman thought.
He turned his attention to the ground control map rolling out on the screen. His flight path was marked by a triangular bar reaching to the black horizon line. The flight path was superimposed on an actual view of the terrain below. Off his starboard wing was the Iranian city of Meshed and he knew that the Iranians had a large radar complex north of the city, watching the Russian border. His crossing point would be almost directly over the city of Babol, two hundred miles northeast of Tehran.