Folsom picked himself up from the deck and started the engine, cursing all the while. Once the engine caught and the boat got underway, he was able to concentrate on keeping the spherical lifeboat, amazingly stable in heavy seas, pointed in the direction of the cliffs that appeared every now and then through the waves. As they neared the breakers, Folsom idled the engines and pressed his face against the tempered glass of the port. He wished mightily that he could open one of the top hatches to steer, but he knew that one heavy wave pushing them under momentarily would swamp the lifeboat. Except for quick glimpses he caught whenever the lifeboat rode up a wave far enough for him to see over the mountainous seas piling up ahead, he was surrounded by ever-moving walls of water.
Folsom felt the boat ride up again, and ahead, through the glass, was the line of cliffs, startlingly close. This was it, he thought, and gunned the engines. The boat paused at the crest of the breaker as the propellers fought to exercise their command over the tumbling masses of water. But it was not enough. As the boat began to slide down the forward edge of the wave, a mean crosscurrent caught the skirt and spun it around. The men inside felt the boat slam hard against the shingle. Folsom glanced back in time to see the following wave towering over them before the boat was engulfed by foaming white water that lifted and tossed it high into the air. The three-ton boat, flung as if it were a child’s toy’, smashed down hard on the rocks. A second and a third wave kicked, then rolled the lifeboat farther up onto the beach.
It was several minutes before Folsom could extricate himself from the mass of equipment on the deck where he had been thrown. He slumped down onto one of the padded seats lining the interior and rubbed his temples with both hands, then stirred one of the prone figures at his feet.
“Come on, up, up! Do you want to lie there all day?” The answer was somewhat muffled, but very much in the affirmative. Shortly they were all three moving around with nothing more than bruises to show for the wild ride. Folsom was exceedingly grateful that the RFK carried the new Life Sphere lifeboats. The same ride in the old, open whaler type would certainly have drowned them all. He crawled out of the top hatch and slid down to the beach. The boat was canted over at a drunken angle and the flaring skirt around the base had been twisted and torn loose from its welds by the wild careen across the beach. Several deep gashes had been ripped in the outer fiberglass hull, but none penetrated the interior hull. What caused the sinking feeling in the pit of Folsom’s stomach was the sight of the snapped and bent propeller shafts and the hopelessly mangled rudders.
Folsom examined the damage while the other two clambered out and joined him on the beach. Both grunted at the damage. “I would say that boat is just about finished.” Folsom agreed. “But there’s no help for that. Let’s get the equipment unloaded and get going. We’ll have to wait until later to worry about the boat.” While the others went to work, Folsom made a report by radio to Larkin. He did not minimize the importance of the loss of the lifeboat but neither did he dwell on it. Larkin promised to get a second lifeboat in as soon as they were able to return to the beach with the pilot. His report finished, the, three men began moving out along the coast to the east. A fast but difficult climb brought them to the top of the cliffs. They wasted no time but immediately struck out east. All they had to go on to find the downed pilot was a radio fix that could be off by as much as a quarter of a mile in any direction.
In the long hours daring which the U.S.S. Robert F. Kennedy maneuvered off the Norwegian North Cape; the storm passed on to the northeast where it would gradually lose force as it began to curl north toward the polar icecap once more. As the storm center moved deeper into the Barents Sea toward Novaya Zemlya, the high winds in the vicinity of the Cape began to lose strength, until, an hour after Folsom and his party had landed, they were blowing at a steady forty knots. As the winds died, however, the snow fell thicker and thicker and the temperature dropped rapidly, bringing what Larkin had most feared — intense cold. The waves, still roused by the passage of the fierce winds across two hundred miles of ocean from the southern edge of the Arctic ice pack, continued to run high, beating themselves to death in a final rush of breakers and white water, smashing away at the same cliffs that had defied them for millions of years. Folsom, marching along the top of the cliffs, could see the tremendous breakers rushing onto the thread of beach through the swirling snow. The cold had already deepened to twenty below zero and he had ordered the others to don face masks for protection from frostbite. In spite of their Navy-issue Arctic gear, all three were numb to the bone. Fortunately, Folsom thought to himself, the cliffs above the narrow beach were fairly smooth. There were no deep crevices or caves into which the pilot could have crawled that would take them hours to search out.
The landing party stumbled across Teleman almost by accident thirty minutes later. Chief Petty Officer Beauregard McPherson found him still half crouched in a kneeling position facing the frozen radio. Folsom went to his knees beside the still figure, — ripping off one of his gloves to check for pulse. He found one, slow and fluttery, but a pulse. Another half hour, or even less, would have done it, he knew. Folsom stood up and looked around. Half a mile away he could make out the thin first line of trees through which Teleman had struggled to reach the cliffs. With the pilot half carried, half dragged between them they trotted toward the dubious shelter of the trees. They pushed their way deep into the snow-laden firs until the wind was hardly more than a fitful breeze eddying the falling snow into swirls of white. Even above the soft, steady roar of the, wind through the pine tops, they could hear the crash of the breakers against the cliffs. In less than five minutes they had the nylon mountain tent rigged and the heater going. Folsom quickly stripped the sodden flying clothes from Teleman and got him zipped into a chemically heated sleeping bag. Over this, be pulled still another sleeping bag. As the tent warmed quickly from the primus stove, Folsom anxiously watched the face of the unconscious pilot. The features had the pinched, waxy look that comes from the first stages of frostbite — or from death by freezing. Even though he had been sheltered by the rocks from the wind and if Larkin had been correct in his interpretation of the pilot’s physical condition after a six-day mission, then the man was close to exhaustion. Hiking through these trees would only have worsened that condition, badly. Larkin had cautioned him about using any drugs on the pilot. There was no way for — them to know how his system would react to further drugs if he was deep into exhaustion. Folsom was helpless, then. There was nothing he could do except keep him warm and wait until he regained consciousness, and then get as much solid food into him as the pilot could take. His own body would. have to do all the work. Folsom was amazed that the human body could take such abuse and still manage to function.