"He was wounded in an air attack. He'll live."
"Give him this. Perhaps it will speed his recovery." Alekseyev reached into a pocket and came out with a five-pointed gold star attached to a bloodred ribbon. He handed it to the General. That major of engineers was now a Hero of the Soviet Union.
All the boats slowed on reaching the icepack. McCafferty inspected it through his periscope, a thin white line less than two miles away. There was nothing else visible. Few ships lingered so near the ice, and no aircraft were visible.
Sonar reported a gratifying amount of noise. The serrated fringe of the pack was composed of thousands of individual floes, slabs of ice a few feet thick, ranging in size from a few square feet to several acres. Every year they came loose with the spring thaw and drifted at random until the freeze began again. While loose in the brief arctic summer, they drifted at random, grinding against one another in a process that destroyed some of the smaller floes, which added to the never-ending groans and pops of the solid ice that went across the top of the pole all the way to the North Slope of Alaska.
"What's that?" McCafferty adjusted the scope slightly, turning the handle to the twelve-power setting. He'd glimpsed what might have been a periscope for the merest instant. It was gone now and-reappeared: the swordlike dorsal fin of a male killer whale. A puff of spray marked its breath, condensing to vapor in the polar air, then a few more whales appeared. What was it they called a family of orcas? A school-no, a pod. Up here hunting seals, probably. He wondered if the omen was good or bad. Orcinus orca was the scientific name: Bringer of Death.
"Sonar, do you have anything at one-three-nine?"
"Conn, we have eleven killer whales on that bearing. I make it three males, six females, and two adolescents. Pretty close in, I think. Bearing is changing slowly." The sonar chief responded as if insulted. There were standing orders not to report "biologicals" unless specifically ordered otherwise.
"Very well." McCafferty had to grin in spite of himself.
The other submarines of Operation Doolittle were strung out on a line more than ten miles across. One by one they went deep and headed under the pack. An hour later the freight train headed east, five miles inside the nominal edge of the pack. Twelve thousand feet below them was the floor of the Barents Abyssal Plain.
"Haven't seen a chopper all day," Sergeant Smith observed.
Conversation, Edwards noted, made a nice distraction from the fact that they were eating raw fish. He checked his watch. It was time to call in again. It had gotten so that he could assemble the radio antenna in his sleep.
"Doghouse, this is Beagle, and things could be a lot better, over."
"Beagle, we read you. Where are you now?"
"About forty-six kilometers from our objective," Edwards replied. He gave them map coordinates. There was one road yet to cross, and only one more row of hills, according to the map. "Nothing much to report except we have not seen any choppers today. In fact we haven't seen any aircraft at all." Edwards looked up. The sky was pretty clear, too. Usually they spotted fighters once or twice a day as they patrolled overhead.
"Roger that, Beagle. Be advised that the Navy sent some fighters over and beat them up pretty good around dawn."
"All right! We haven't seen any Russians since the chopper looked us over." In Scotland his controller shuddered at that. Edwards went on, "We're down to eating fish we catch, but the fishing's pretty good."
"How's your lady friend?"
Mike had to smile at that one. "She's not holding us back, if that's what you mean. Anything else?"
"Negative."
"Okay, we'll be back if we see anything. Out." Edwards flipped the power switch on the radio pack. "Our friends say the Navy chewed up some Russian fighters today."
"Bout time," Smith said. He was down to his last five cigarettes and stared at one now, deciding whether or not to reduce his supply to four. As Edwards watched, he opened his lighter to poison himself again.
"We go to Hvammsfjordur?" Vigdis asked. "Why?"
"Somebody wants to know what's there," Edwards said. He unfolded the tactical map. It showed the entrance to the bay to be crammed with rocks. It took him a moment to realize that while the land elevations were in meters, the depth curves on the map were in fathoms...
"How many?"
The fighter regiment commander was lowered gently from the helicopter, his arm tied across his chest. Ejecting from his disintegrating aircraft, the colonel had dislocated his shoulder, and then his parachute had landed him on a mountainside, giving him a sprained ankle plus several facial cuts. It had taken eleven hours to find him. On the whole, the colonel considered himself lucky for a fool who had allowed his command to be ambushed by a superior force.
"Five aircraft are mission capable," he was told. "Of the damaged ones, we can repair two."
