Teleman groaned inwardly. He was certain that one of them would try to kill him, but which one. He could not watch all three at once. McPherson had the training and the skill, that he knew. He had also been very solicitous of him all day, almost carrying him since noon. But Gadsen — he had not learned very much about the man at all. Except for a few wise comments on their predicament during the day, he had not spoken much…. In the middle of his self-created maze of danger, Teleman’s brain blanked and he was deeply asleep.
“Well, we can only wait and see what the new day brings,” Gadsen sighed. Folsom pulled on his face mask and gloves. “Yeah, I guess so.” What else was there to say? he thought.
He slammed a new clip into his carbine and shoved extras into a pocket. “Night-night.” He grinned and pulled the face mask tight, then pushed through the tent flaps and crawled outside.
The cold air hit him with the force of a truck, sucking the warm air from his body. Still on his knees, he curled into a tight ball, coughing into his fur-lined mittens, breathing slowly to avoid frosting his lungs. In a few moments the spasm passed and he straightened out, face still buried in his gloves while he breathed carefully to regain his breath. Even through the fur and nylon parka, the touch of the air was like hot iron. He stood up and began beating his arms together. We have to walk nine more miles through this, he thought, and he knew that they would never be able to make it, no matter what the circumstances were, no matter what the prize, up to and including life itself. It was an impossible task. But deep inside he knew that they would do it or die trying. Just as the Russians would catch them or die And he also knew that the Russians would not be waiting out the night in a tent — they would be using the night.
The harsh moon was a quarter of the way up in the sky. Its light falling on the freshly snow-covered ground gave him visibility almost to the horizon in every direction. The wind had died away completely, and in the frigid, still air his breath froze instantly, wreathing his head in a clammy fog if he stopped too long in one spot. The moon highlighted the tundra, with the hummocks of grass standing out in bold relief. Folsom had never dreamed it could be so cold. He had never experienced anything like this before.
The stars burned in the sky in spite of the moonlight, and the air was so cold and dry that he could detect no trace of ring around the moon. As if to form a backdrop for the unearthly beauty of the moon, the aurora had sprung into the northern sky, shimmering curtains of color that fluctuated and flowed in the gentle breeze of the electron stream arising eight minutes away in the sun’s corona. At any other time he would have been entranced with the shifting tapestry of color and form, but not tonight He moved slowly away from the tent, walking carefully around the tufts of frozen grass as they had been doing since entering the tundra. Not one of them could afford a twisted ankle now. Folsom stopped to peer around. He could see nothing on the waste of frozen terrain in any direction. At this point he knew that they were about seven miles from the sea. But in the crystal air the fury of the sea against the cliffs was faintly audible. At a thousand yards distance from the tent Folsom turned and began to move in a circle, with the tent as the center point. He would leave tracks in the snow, tracks that the Russians could not miss, but it didn’t matter. Tomorrow the Russians would find the campsite anyway.
There were two directions from which the Soviets could approach: east or west. The main party would come from the west
Although Folsom did not make the mistake of discounting them, he was fairly certain that this group, after traveling for almost a day longer than themselves, would be as exhausted. It was the group from the east, the expected second landing party, that he was worried about. They would be fresh.
Folsom concentrated his attention then on the east and the west. After forty minutes of plodding around the mile-long circle, it became a question of whether he could last the remaining hour and twenty minutes. Even with the most intense concentration and violent shivering and the continual plodding, he had to fight desperately the sleep that would steal quietly into his mind. Sleep that made him the same promises of warmth that it had made to Teleman all day, sleep and the warmth that his body craved now more than anything in life.
Folsom strove to shake off the exhaustion that was wearing him down, reaching at his eyelids with sandpapery fingers, and forced himself to keep plodding. Somewhere in the back of his mind, as he trudged through the endless circle under the erratic northern lights filling the sky with trembling curtains of fire, somewhere deep, almost below the conscious level, something was wrong, but his mind was too hazy, too sticky and numb, to pinpoint the sense of wrongness. Vaguely he realized that the missing factor was important, but the longer he walked, the more time that passed, the farther away the vagrant thought slipped. Now it was beyond his capability to muster the necessary energy to concentrate, and soon it had slipped completely from him.
On a sweep to the north,’ half asleep and mumbling to himself, McPherson came up behind and laid a hand on his shoulder. Folsom felt the big man’s hand grasp at his parka and automatically swung around, the butt of his carbine whipping through a vicious arc at the other’s unseen midsection. Orly Folsom’s tired reflexes saved McPherson from a solid clout in the belly. McPherson caught the rifle in one huge paw and stopped it, then gave Folsom a gentle shove toward the tent and watched him stumble away before he too began the chase around the endless circle.
Teleman was at the bottom of a long shaft. Above, the velvet-black sides of the hole spiraled up to an undefined blob of half light, a formless nothing. His mind refused to work, refused to coordinate sensory impressions, was mired in a haze of quicksand. He fell sharply… Teleman sat up in the darkened tent and waited for the shapeless blurs of darkness to form into patterns that represented walls of the tent and pieces of gear scattered about. The hoarfrost from their breathing was growing thick on the nylon walls. The suddenness of awakening had disoriented him for several panicky minutes before he realized that huddled next to him in sleeping bags were both McPherson and Folsom, and Gadsen’s sleeping bag was empty. That told him that it was the last watch before they would move on again. After the few hours of sleep, his mind and senses were preternaturally sharp. He did not realize that this was due to almost complete exhaustion and that it would melt away after the smallest exertion, leaving him again a semiconscious drone. He got quietly out of his sleeping bag and fished out the chemical heating pads. Of the three that Folsom had put in with him, only one retained any heat at all. He tucked it underneath his parka against his chest and picked up his carbine, a ration pack, and face mask and moved quietly to the tent flap.
When he poked his head out through the tent flaps, the mask, still heated from the tiny stove, warmed the air passing into his lungs to a breathable temperature. The combination of aurora borealis and moonlight illuminated the surrounding tundra with mid-evening intensity. After a moment he caught sight of Gadsen coming up from far to the east. The sailor was walking slowly, stopping every now and then to search the horizon carefully through the field glasses.