Teleman had been trudging north for an hour when the wind died abruptly. One minute he had been leaning directly into the forty-mile-an-hour winds, struggling against the solid hand that barred his way, and the next he was standing beneath the trees wrapped in the eerie silence that heavy winds leave when they depart. He glanced up at the swollen cloud cover, lowering over the barely seen tops of the trees. With the disappearance of the wind, the snowfall began to thicken, and in a few moments he could barely see trees less than ten feet away.
He strained forward, listening for the boom of waves against the cliffs, but heard only the peculiar whisper of snow falling through the fir trees. A few moments later Teleman resumed his slow pace. The snow beneath the trees was almost mid-calf deep, but dry and powdery, and he had little trouble plowing through it. What bothered him most was the cold. He knew the temperature must be at least thirty below zero. The emergency kit had not included a face mask and Teleman rubbed his cheeks continually with his gloved hands to maintain circulation. The thin scarf tied across his mouth had crusted with ice from his exhaled breath and was practically useless.
The exertion of walking and fighting the wind was pure torture. Muscles and nerve endings screamed at the agony of movement after so many hours of physical inactivity. Teleman knew he was weak beyond belief, and the deep cold biting into his body was taking a dangerous toll on his already overloaded metabolic system. Earlier, he had briefly considered using the radio and trying to contact the ship to give them an exact position fix. Then he could hole up in the lightweight tent in his pack until they got to him. The only trouble was that it-would give the Russians an exact fix at the same time. A couple of bombers and a saturation bombing run on the area would take care of him once and for all. The fact that the Soviets had tried to shoot him down three times had more than convinced him they were playing for keeps. If they could not have him, they did not want the Americans to get him back either. He had seen too much of their optical tracking system. Since no hint of the system had come out of the Soviet Union from Western intelligence operatives, he surmised that it was one of their most closely guarded secrets. The United States was too far ahead of the Soviets in electronics for radar and other sensor countermeasures for the Russians to compete effectively. The important computer, transistor, and circuitry technologies had been developed to a very high degree in the United States while the Russians were not concerned with the miniaturization and microminiaturization techniques that required advanced circuitry and electronic concepts.
All of this passed through Teleman’s exhausted mind in a very abstracted form. Yet he was well aware of every detail, every ramification. For two years his life had depended on his ECM gear. The optical tracking system was obviously the mainstay of Soviet hopes against an invasion force of supersonic and hypersonic aircraft. Teleman knew enough about the system to enable the American intelligence and scientific communities to analyze and develop optical countermeasures. The race would be evened up again. The Soviets wanted him badly, but would kill him if there was no other way to shut him up — all of this coincidentally with their war on the Sino-Soviet border. Teleman rubbed his ears vigorously with both gloved hands, cap tucked under one arm, and sighed. It was going to be rough on his ears, but there was no hope for it. He had to be able to hear aircraft coming enough in advance to duck under the closest tree. If he did not and was spotted, he could expect the aircraft to make *an immediate pass over the area with rockets, napalm, bombs, cannon, or whatever devilish weaponry it carried, and that would be the end. He shifted the pack to a more comfortable position and started slogging forward once more.
Even though the wind had died, the going was not that much easier. The forest thickened quickly with dense stands of frozen pine. The ground, in spite of the intense cold, had become soggy underfoot, almost on the verge of muskeg, and after nearly an hour more of walking he had covered little more than a mile. Teleman had never seen such forest this far north of the Arctic Circle. He decided that it must be due to the last-gasp effects of the Gulf Stream. Current as it finally dissipated off the North Cape. He recalled that in Alaska, in the foothills of the Brooks Range nearly two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, there were similar fir forests. Then, strangely enough, the pines thinned rapidly, almost in a matter of yards, it seemed. The forest gave way to scattered brush and glacial boulders. Even though the ground was rough, full of snow-covered and treacherous rills, Teleman found it easier walking than the thick forest. But on the verge of exhaustion as he was, it hardly made a difference. Even so, he hesitated on the edge of the last stand of trees. He could see almost a hundred yards ahead now through the driving snow. The compass still showed him to be on course, but the open ground ahead would provide no cover from searching Soviet aircraft. Against that expanse of ice-cold white, on an IR screen he would stand out like a neon sign in a desert. Nor could he hope to burrow far enough into the snow to escape detection.
Finally, after several minutes of almost incoherent self-debate, which to his surprise he found he was conducting aloud with himself, in a weary fit of exasperation, he shook his head and started forward. To hell with it, he thought. If they were going to find him, they were going to find him and that was that. If he did not make the coast shortly he was going to die anyway. Almost imperceptibly at first the ground beneath his feet began to climb. The snow, slowly turning to sleet that drummed down onto him, plastering his hair against his head, which he had forgotten to recover with his hood, obscured his vision — vision that now was almost useless as his brain refused to sort and display images properly. The half snow, half sleet was melting and beginning to trickle down his ebony face and seep beneath his collar.
Teleman stumbled in one of the rills; he had stepped onto what appeared to be a solid surface. His foot had gone through the thin crust of. ice and his leg jarred down stiffly, pitching him forward. For minutes he lay half stunned until some inner instinct lifted him up and sent him stumbling forward again. It was several minutes later that he realized he had fallen.
After that his head seemed to clear a little. Teleman felt the wetness of his scalp and raised the hood. Ahead he could see a fairly large stand of bush, which appeared similar to cottonwoods, Almost without thinking he veered, and a moment later threw himself down beneath the outspread branches and rolled in as close to the base of the bush as he could.
He had never seen such godforsaken country. The sleet and snow swept across the almost barren muskeg with an ululating keening. The gray sky pressed down thickly and the galling snow lent additional oppression to the landscape. The entire scene reminded him of Dante’s description of the tenth circle of hell, so unreal and remote from earth it seemed. The predominate color was gray: gray sky, gray snow, gray rocks, gray trees, and he was the doomed soul, doomed to wander forever in this gray hell searching for the stream of Lethe. Teleman shivered at his morbid thoughts. He could feel what little heat remained in his body quickly dissipating. He knew that he had to get up and keep moving or else he would very quickly freeze to death. But soft tendrils of sleep were curling around his eyes, forcing them closed. With a quivering effort, he forced them open again and struggled to his feet. He faced the snow and rising wind and went on. Now, as the sleet stopped and-the snow fell thicker, blotting away every trace of detail in the barren landscape, he was moving on a treadmill in the middle of white nothingness. For hours it seemed to Teleman, he struggled onward as the wind rose higher, until he was again facing a thirty-knot wind. With vicious suddenness, the wind would quarter, driving him far off course. He no longer knew whether he was moving north. He had dropped the compass sometime back and now had nothing against which to check his direction. Far down in the depths of his conscious mind, he knew that, as long as he kept walking in the direction with which the terrain rose, eventually he would come to the coastal cliffs. Whether or not he would last that long never occurred to him now. Only his survival training was driving him forward, forcing him to plod forward rather than drop in his tracks to freeze to death.