Free Target 5 by Colin Forbes Page B

experts off balance, the vast filling depression gathering over northern Greenland in late February 1972. This was the depression which affected the whole of north America and western Europe later in the year, which turned summer into something like winter, which sent icebergs further south than they had ever reached before, which invaded transatlantic shipping lanes and caused great liners to change course. And this was the depression which brought the fog.
    The Soviet met people on Novaya Zemlya didn't see it coining. The U S weather plane which flies daily across the roof of the world from Mildenhall in East Anglia to Alaska missed it. The U S Weather Bureau failed to foresee it. But as Beaumont prowled restlessly round the ice-cold hangar at Curtis Field a great bank of fog, half a mile high, many miles wide, a bank of freezing black fog appeared north of Target-5 and began to drift steadily south.

    Sunday, 20 February

    You can only die once, but sometimes it seems you are dying a hundred times over.
    For Peter Gorov the flight from Tallinn to Leningrad was a nightmare. No one would give him a reason for his recall, no one would tell him who he was going to see in Leningrad, but he was treated like royalty when he disembarked from the Girolog at one in the morning.
    A black Zil limousine with chains on the wheels took him through a snowstorm to the airport. When he went aboard the waiting plane the two pilots shook hands with him. He was invited to travel in the control cabin and was given a seat behind the co-pilot. The nightmare started from the moment the plane moved off down the runway.
    It almost crashed as it was taking off- they were heading direct for the airport control tower, still on the ground, when the co-pilot shouted, 'You'll never make it!' He threw up a hand as though to ward off the collision when metal struck steel, then the pilot lifted the machine and it cleared the tower by feet, so it seemed to the petrified Gorov.
    But this was only the beginning. As the plane gained altitude and turned east away from the ice-laden Baltic, a fierce, long-drawn argument broke out between the two pilots, each accusing the other. 'You fool, Serge, there was not enough power ...'
    'Idiot! There was too much power! Would you sooner take over yourself?'
    The argument raged on, the technical terms beyond Gorov. The plane suddenly side-slipped, started to drop at an alarming rate. With an oath the pilot regained control, then continued arguing at the top of his voice. Gorov watched from behind fearfully: it seemed they were more intent on their quarrel than on flying the plane. His fear was intensified when the machine climbed abruptly, heading up at an acute angle. Pressed back against his seat, Gorov was terrified. It was his first experience of flying. Halfway to Leningrad they began drinking.
    The quarrel subsided suddenly and the pilots made it up with each other with a bottle of vodka. But their considera tion for their honoured guest stopped short of offering him a drink; instead they emptied the bottle themselves. Gorov watched with growing horror as the effect of the vodka made itself felt in their flying performance. The machine was thrown all over the sky as they fell like a lift into air pockets, then shot upwards at an almost vertical angle. 'The met report was terrible,' Serge explained in .a slurred voice. 'If you hadn't been so important we wouldn't have flown.'
    'Important to who?' asked the bewildered seaman.
    'Maybe the First Secretary. How the hell would I know?'
    Twice Gorov had to move swiftly to the small, cramped toilet where he was violently ill, but when he returned to his seat after the second visit his head was clearer for a few minutes. He calculated roughly that wherever they were taking him to in Leningrad he would arrive about three in the morning. It would then be eleven in the evening at North Pole 17, which was four hours behind Leningrad time. He was sure now that they had found out