Carefully, Teleman eased the power up, keeping the nose pointed down as sharply as he dared. The wings were fully retracted against the fuselage and he was little more than a powered dart, struggling to keep the A-17 from entering a spin mode that would finish him against some mountainside in Finland. The Russian, clawing into a shallower dive, began rapidly catching up again. In agony, Teleman watched the digital readout on the radar panel as the margin narrowed. It was clear that within seconds the Russian would make it to the cloud cover ahead of Teleman, there to use the three-or four-second lead to unleash the two deadly missiles nestling in the fuselage. Teleman ground his teeth in frustration and shoved the throttle forward to its stop. At the same time he slammed the wings forward for maximum lift and lit off the ramjets with a bang. The A-17 shuddered under the giant hand of acceleration, but the magnificent aircraft rose to the challenge. Through the red acceleration haze Teleman saw the altitude indicator strain upward. The PCMS audio and visual alarms clattered and clanked wildly as they fought to keep Teleman from blacking out. The acceleration indicator read out 12 G’s as the A-17 started into a climb.
Teleman ignored everything except the altitude indicator and the throttle. Gradually he was pulling up short in relation to the Soviet. He had caught him by surprise again. At sixty thousand feet Teleman leveled out. The Russian was still well behind, nearly eight miles, and still climbing for altitude. With the A-17 leveled out and the engines in the turbojet mode with afterburners, Teleman streaked for the North Cape at Mach 4.
But the Soviet Falcon was not through. This was the last chance and both pilots knew it. Neither had anything to lose. Teleman judged the Soviet pilot had passed his point-of-no-return when he went into the dive after him. Now he was rapidly closing the gap in one last desperate try. And there was nothing remaining that Teleman could do about it. He now had barely enough fuel to make the rendezvous point. Even if the tanker was waiting, he doubted whether enough flying time remained to complete refueling. The Soviet pilot was pulling out all stops. He closed on Teleman at Mach 4.5, boring straight in, then lifting abruptly to pounce from above. As he neared, his guns opened up. He kept his thumb down on the firing button and walked a stream of tracers across the A-17. Where were the missiles? Teleman screamed silently. Twisting his head to glance back through the rear observation slit, Teleman could see the sheet of tracers marching toward him. The aircraft rocked violently as at least one cannon shell smashed through his starboard wing without exploding. Then the Falcon slipped below to come streaking up from beneath. Teleman sheered away but the Russian remained locked on. He slammed the A-17 from side to side, nursing every last bit of speed he could from the engines. For seconds both aircraft twisted and wrenched through the frozen air with tracers from the. Falcon’s cannon probing around the A-17. Like a wounded snake, they thrashed through the Finnish skies. A second burst chewed into the tail structure. The A-17 fluttered like a wounded bird and went out of control. The Falcon edged up, cannons waiting for the optimum moment, the Russian pilot waiting hungrily, with the patience of death, for the A-17 to line up crosswise in his gun-sights, waiting to place the last burst. Then Teleman knew why there had been no missile. Because of their bulk and weight the missiles had been removed and replaced with electric cannons, to save fuel and add speed. Now both pilots were waiting for the inexorable closing of their flight paths. The milliseconds turned into minutes for both as they approached the invisible spot in the sky that would nebulously mark Teleman’s grave.
The Falcon fluttered, arced up slightly, and fell off, arrowing down until lost in the clouds below. The Soviet pilot had waited perhaps a second too long.
CHAPTER 11
Teleman watched the black dot of the Falcon on his radar screen disappearing into the black night until the Russian aircraft vanished into the carpet of cloud. Beneath were the heavily forested northern reaches of the Kjolen Mountains and the empty taiga surrounding the Ounas River, an area inhabited only by Lapps who still followed the migrations of their reindeer herds. Unless the Finns had picked up the final moments of the Falcon on their own radar, it could be years before the wreckage was found. Teleman stared at the screen, sick with exhaustion,and despair. The Russian crew’s suicide had been for nothing. The gamble, their fuel load, against his, coupled with their ability to knock him out of the sky, had been lost. Now both were dead. Teleman knew that, if they had managed to eject, they could never have survived the buffeting of the gale and its sub-zero fury. He examined the fuel gauge. There were eight hundred pounds of the liquid hydrogen fuel remaining in the reserve tanks, another fifteen minutes flying time. If the commanding officer of the battle cruiser was as intelligent and resourceful as he had shown himself to be in the past, there would be a tanker waiting at the rendezvous point. He might be able to make it after all… unless more trouble showed up.
Teleman extended his radar fully and waited. The silver-green screen was empty — so far. But it was doubtful if the Soviets would depend only upon one aircraft to complete the job. They rarely played gambles or depended on half measures, and the depth of the system they had erected against him in Asia was more than proof of that. All of a sudden the A-17 rolled out of control and pitched,over into a dive. Teleman’s head snapped back hard against the headrest. The A-17 began to spin wildly. A tremendous banging sounded aft in the fuselage and, twisting around, Teleman saw the starboard rudder assembly through the rear observation slit flap madly. Terrified, he slammed the throttle forward and ran out the landing flaps for the second time. The A-17 was still rolling, down through seventy, sixty-five, sixty, fifty-five, fifty thousand feet before she began to slow. Carefully, his body now under full control of the PCMS, he began to increase power, running the wings forward again. Abruptly the pounding ceased and the A-17 began to bring its nose up into a level attitude. For the next ten minutes Teleman fought furiously with the controls to maintain the damaged A-17 in some semblance of level flight. He had cut the speed back to sub-sonic and managed to fight his way to eighty thousand feet where, hopefully, the thinner, air would lessen the drag on the twisted metal of the tail section. The aircraft still had a tendency to twist into an uncontrollable wingover that would drag him down into the roiling clouds of the storm-filled night below. The computer-controlled linkages aft through the fuselage had been damaged beyond the ability of the alternate circuitry to compensate. The rudder controls were next to useless and he was forced to depend on ailerons and landing flaps for lateral control.
In spite of all he could do, Teleman was slowly losing altitude. The altimeter was circling down through seventy thousand feet with a steadiness that was almost terrifying in its deadliness. The encounter with the Falcon had taken place over the Finnish coast of the Baltic Sea and stretched into the wide margin of mountain separating Sweden from the Norwegian Sea. The Russian had crashed somewhere in Finland, and Teleman hoped to God that the Russians would have a mighty hard time explaining what an advanced Soviet interceptor with empty cannons was doing in Finland — if the Finns ever found it. And if he wasn’t careful, he thought humorlessly, the Americans would be doing the same kind of explaining about him, only in spades when the Finns got a look at his equipment.