North Cape

by Joe Poyer

  While the chase planes took up their stations around him, he tentatively tried the control system and whistled excitedly as the A-17 responded with all the firmness of an F-4

  Phantom. Then test control was on the radio demanding to know if he had started through the check list yet. Regretfully he dropped back into the proper pattern while his two chase pilots, one on either side, grinned at each other from their stations well back and below his tail assembly.

  For the next year, Teleman got to know the A-17 better than he had ever known any other aircraft. Under the supervision of the design engineers, he took apart and reassembled the aircraft. Then he took the A-17 up for hours on end, always flying the same tight pattern at one hundred thousand feet, well above the allowable levels for commercial planes. Gradually, as he came to know exactly what the airplane would do, flight altitudes and speeds were increased until he was flying routinely at Mach 5 and two hundred thousand feet.

  Now he was nearly on his own. He spent so many hours in the aircraft that without the log he would have lost all count. Of the hours spent cramped in the cockpit, sitting in the closely guarded hangar flying computer-devised emergency conditions, he did lose track.

  At the end of the year he came to feel that the A-17 was an extension of himself. And then the medical people moved in to make it so.

  It had been recognized when the A-n cum SR-7i. was completed that man had just about reached his limits in controlling his own aircraft. The A-n was capable of Mach 3 and nearly Mach 4 by

  the time the Pratt & Whitney J-58 engines had been up-rated to their fullest extent. The A-11. was only marginally effective as an interceptor aircraft. At Mach 3, fifty miles was needed to complete a 180° turn. Almost go percent of the aircraft was composed' of fuel tanks and her cruising range was severely limited at speeds above Mach 1.5, allowing little or no loiter time to contact a target. Because of the immense fuel load needed to keep her in the air, her reconnaissance payload, and therefore her cameras and other sensors, were severely limited also. In effect, and compared to the A-17, she was little help to the satellite surveillance system. Some stopgap measure was needed so that aircraft could spend time over enemy territory without being detected and could gather the smallest details necessary until large, manned satellites could be placed in orbit—still four years in the future.

  For nearly ten years the X-15 series of rocket craft had been providing behavior and engineering data on hypersonic aircraft. The X-15 was used as the basic design for the A-17. The X-15 was rocket-powered, and this provided the tremendous speeds necessary—but powered flight time was limited to a few minutes duration. The A-17 needed days of flight time.

  The turbojet engine is the most efficient of all propulsion systems' for speeds between Mach .9 and Mach 2.5, where fuel load, speed, range, and weight are the critical factors.

  Beyond Mach 2.5 and one hundred thousand feet, the ramjet becomes the most efficient Beyond 120,000 feet, where the air is too thin to support even the ramjet, the rocket engine, with its self-contained oxidizer, becomes the most efficient.

  To avoid Soviet antiaircraft missiles, the A-17 needed an altitude greater than 125,000

  feet. Since the late 195os, a combination of the three types of propulsive systems had been the research goal of aeronautical research laboratories all across the world. The approach finally adapted to the A-17 was the U. S. Air Force concept called the TURBO-RAM-ROCKET. Below eighty thousand feet and Mach 2.5, the twin power plants in the A-17 functioned as turbojets—air sucked in through the inlet and forced into a combustion chamber, where it mixed with fuel, burned fiercely and the hot gas was forced past a turbine and expelled from the nozzle. The turbine was in turn coupled to the compressor behind the air inlet to compress air and force it into the combustion chamber.

  An improvement was made on the basic system by adding another stage in front of the compressor assembly called a fan. The fan was just that. Huge blades, coupled to and spun by the turbine, pulled in far more air than the combustion process needed. The excess air was ducted out the side of the engine casing to add as much as 30 percent more thrust.

  The turbofan, as it was properly called, was capable of pushing the A-17 to speeds above Mach 2.5. Depending upon the altitude and various atmospheric conditions that necessitated the change—somewhere above Mach 2.5 to 3—the engine switched from the turbojet mode to ramjet. It was in this versatility that the twin engines differed radically from earlier jet aircraft engines. These assemblies are composed of a thick disk of high-strength steel alloy upon which are mounted cambered blades. The blades are twisted to assume an airfoil shape. In the usual turbojet engine, these blades are mounted rigidly. The turbine assembly is constructed the same way and the blades are made of various materials, selected to withstand temperatures in excess of i600° F as the hot gases exit from the burner chamber. As a rule of thumb, Teleman had been taught, the hotter the temperature of the gases leaving the burner—the Turbine Inlet Temperature (

  TIT)—the greater the thrust developed by the engine. The A-17 's TIT was in excess of 3200 degrees.

  To allow the power plant to enter the ramjet mode, the blades were mounted upon variable stator disks and could be turned edge-on to the airstream. In addition, the air inlet plug, a large rounded cone of metal mounted in front of the air inlet, could be moved forward to increase the air compression.

  A ramjet engine works by ramming air into its combustion chamber at high speeds, where it is mixed with fuel and ignited by a glow plug. Because the ramjet must have a certain flow velocity of air before it will begin to operate, it usually must be carried aloft by another engine to the proper speed and altitude. But once in the thin reaches above eighty thousand feet, the two engines, now operating as ramjets, far surpass the potential and efficiency of the turbojet or turbofan.

  A ramjet of this efficiency has a rather narrow operating "en. velope." When the air inlet plug is rammed forward to compress the air while the compressor blades are turned edge-on to -the airstream, a carefully designed tolerance between plug and inlet must be maintained to provide the maximum flow of air to the

  combustion chamber for the altitude and speed. This tolerance mechanically limits the altitudes and speed beyond which the ramjet may be operated in direct proportion to the growing lack of atmosphere. Beyond 170,000 feet, Teleman could elect, if the extra speed and altitude were needed, to go to the rocket mode.

  Now, clamshell doors closed down the area ahead of the combustion chamber—or burner ring in the case of the A-17 engines—and liquid oxygen was fed directly into the burner ring to mix with the fuel—liquid hydrogen—thereby providing a rocket engine that was capable of taking the A-17 to Mach 5.9, only two thousand miles per hour less than would be needed to achieve sub-orbit. Teleman had never had occasion to use the rocket mode except on practice missions. It' was a last-ditch stand when all else failed: The rocket mode could use six hours worth of carefully metered fuel in two minutes of burning time.

  Most experienced military pilots who had received their training during the Vietnamese War were now edging toward the age where their efficiency was slowly being whittled away by the heavy demands placed upon them by their aircraft. Many had gone into the Vietnam War well past the age that a World War II flight surgeon would have considered them capable of controlling even the relatively slower and much less technically complicated fighter aircraft of that period. The younger pilots who had received their baptism of combat flying in the mid-196os had left the service in droves at the end of the war to answer the lure of high salaries and lifetime sinecure in commercial airlines, which were expanding tremendously in the wake of the giant airliners, supersonic transports, and rapidly growing travel markets.

  The human organism is still the most reliable of all mechanisms in spite of the strides that had been made in automation. Rather than load the aircraft down with servo-mechanisms and complicated gear to perform many of the tasks that the pilot could do, the designers had opted for
the human factor.

  The A-17 had been on the threshold of man's ability to control under the difficult and microsecond decision points that had to be reached and gated properly when the aircraft was closing on its target at nearly four thousand miles an hour. The elapsed time from the moment a ground target—often less than a hundred feet across—came into sight until the A-17 had left it behind was

  often no more than four seconds. During this time, the information displayed on the screens had to be accepted, interpreted, a decision for action made, and the decision implemented; all with enough time remaining to allow the cameras and other recording devices to do their job.

  Even in those instances where circumstances dictated that Teleman could loiter the aircraft over the target and select his objectives, someone had to decide what should be recorded, what must be searched for to make the picture complete, and handle the volumes of data that poured in, constantly interpreting, re-deciding and shifting objectives—and often targets. No computer could handle this job.

  Teleman was trained in the use of certain psychic energizer drugs of the amphetamine and lysergic acid families that could boost his body system output to fantastic heights in relation to normal physiological response. The LSD derivatives extended his powers of concentration and, through their hallucinogenic effect, made him feel that he was actually part of the aircraft. They also increased his comprehension and ability to deal with a multitude of facts in a very short time.

  The amphetamines provided the same effect for his bodily responses, increasing his reaction time and slowing his time sense to compensate for the demands of the aircraft's speed.

  Teleman's physiological and biochemical status was monitored constantly during the mission through a specially tailored system of instruments blended together to form the Physiological Control and Monitoring System. At the start of the mission, an intravenous catheter was inserted into the superior vena cava vein through a plug implanted surgically in his shoulder. A glass electrode was brought into intimate contact with his bloodstream at this nearest acceptable point to the heart. Through the electrode a series of minute pulses, set up by an electrochemical reaction with his blood, informed the computer continually of his body status. The computer was programed to receive inputs directly from various parts of the aircraft's controlling instrumentation that, coupled with The in vivo status reports, determined the time and dosage of the drugs he received. If the instrumentation, directed by the flight plan or by instructions from Teleman, called for a state of physiologically alert and expanded consciousness, proper drugs were fed into his bloodstream through the catheter and his body

  responded accordingly. Because of the duration of the flights, often lasting six to seven days, when Teleman was not needed to respond to specific tasks, the computer instructed the PCMS to feed in barbiturate derivatives and he slept. Teleman had once calculated that at least 65 percent of all of his missions were spent sleeping.

  Although great pains had been taken to develop a high tolerance in Teleman to the drugs he was constantly being infused with, he was thoroughly poisoned by the end of a mission.

  In short, Teleman was carefully tailored to the aircraft and its missions. The reach the drugs allowed was marginal, yet enough to provide the control needed to handle his craft as no other airplane had ever been flown. Drugs kept him awake, or put him to sleep, instantly. Others kept him at the peak of alertness for as long as required and his mind focused on his Mission, his instruments, and his aircraft

  CHAPTER 5

  The great bend in the Oh River, one hundred miles east of the Siberian city of Tomsk, lay 180,000 feet below when the PCMS nudged Teleman out of sleep. Within three seconds he was awake and scanning the information displayed on the screen. The Electronics Countermeasures (ECM) bank had detected a series of searching radar beams within the past few minutes. Teleman got busy with the source detectors, concentrating closely on the sweep of the searching finger on the ECM screen. So far the radar beams were searching below eighty thousand feet, well below his present altitude.

  After a few minutes of concentrated work, he tracked the radar signals to their Iocation—about where he had suspected. Four hundred miles farther down the Ob was the ancient city of Novosibirsk, one of the oldest of the tsarist Siberian exile camps. Now it was a booming industrial and mining center, containing one of the largest Soviet air bases. Novosibirsk was located a800 miles north of the Soviet-Chinese border, and he suspected that the local commander of this tempting target was feeling just a bit jumpy this close to a hot war.

  At the moment it appeared to be nothing more than routine searching by omni-radar. But the closer he approached to Novosibirsk, the more intense the weaving net of radar became and the greater the search altitude. For a minute his feeling of apprehension tightened, and Teleman wondered if they were on to him.

  Fifteen minutes later he was approaching the northern rim of the Altai Mountain chain that ringed the western rim of the

  Mongolian Plateau. Beneath, the ground was still shrouded in darkness, sparsely broken by patches of light signifying inhabited communities. As he flew farther across the mountain range the lights became more and more scattered, until finally they ceased altogether. Now, far on the eastern horizon, he could make out the darker band of horizon that in less than an hour would be touched by the first tinges of dawn.

  The night-light television cameras displayed a scene of hellish grandeur in the uninhabited recesses of this most desolate of mountain ranges. The Altai range sprawled to three hundred miles wide on, its north-south axis, with peaks of thirteen thousand feet and higher thrusting jaggedly into the black sky. On either side of the range, deep, forbidding stretches of badland had been strewn about as if by a giant's hand. The southern reach of

  bad-

  land and foothill was Teleman's immediate destination, the stretch of land between the Altai and the smaller, but no less lofty, Tarbagatai range. More out of curiosity than anything else, he cranked the image up, increasing the magnification and resolution on the electronic telescopes until he was watching a strip of land less than three hundred yards wide slipping past. He was still on the northern face of the range, the gentler side, if that term could be applied to this waste of rock and ice. A few stunted trees, in miniature, appeared here and there. But nowhere could he find a trace of human habitation. This range of mountains was so barren that it was shunned even by the nomadic tribes of Mongolian sheepherders who drew a living from the wastes of the Gobi.

  For the next half hour the A-17 passed over the mountains thirty-six miles below, until, on the eastern horizon, Teleman could make out the first indications of the approaching dawn. It would still be another hour and a half before the sun would reach into the valleys and canyons of the Tien Shan ahead, but the aircraft, reacting to the carefully prepared flight plan, began to throttle back and lose altitude.

  For long minutes Teleman watched the far-off ground sliding past; he was too slept out to sleep any longer and loath to request a barbiturate from the PCMS. As he sat debating with himself, the radar panel blipped for attention and projected a stream of swiftly flowing data that told Teleman that a flight of Soviet fighters was patrolling at thirty thousand feet. Teleman flipped a number of

  switches and got the radar tracking to trace their flight patterns. They were ahead and below nearly 13o miles south when first spotted. He was less than two hundred from the confluence of the Soviet, Mongolian, and Chinese borders and, as he guessed, the planes were merely another border patrol on a dawn sweep. Shortly, he was over the border into Red China, still at 14o,000 feet and watching the Tarbagatai Mountains rounding on the horizon.

  His target was now three hundred miles distant and Teleman assumed control of the aircraft. He throttled back and began losing altitude swiftly. The flight plan called for two long passes, one at a hundred thousand feet to survey the terrain and the other at forty thousand feet for close-ups. He was feeling extremely uneasy about the low-altitude pass
, and the closer he approached to the target area the more uncomfortable he became. When the altimeters indicated one hundred thousand feet, he leveled off and cut his speed back still more to Mach 1.z, until he was barely crawling up on the Sinkiang highlands.

  Twenty minutes to contact. The twisted, narrow Tarbagatai Mountain range slid behind and he was over the rugged highlands that edged the Gobi Desert. The rugged land of the Sinkiang plateau sped by as he slanted in. He started a long, seventy-five mile turn that would bring him onto a heading of 212° and into position to begin his search pattern along the border. As a safety precaution, Teleman began to crank the radar outward to its full -range of sixteen hundred miles and instructed the computer to keep watch and report anything that rose above eighty thousand feet. Then he turned his attention to the ECM console and began to narrow down the counterdetection radar cover to an area less than five miles across. All down the go° meridian Teleman had maintained a fifty-mile diameter ring, not enough to attract attention at the altitude he had been holding, but enough to prevent accidental detection.

  Ten minutes to contact. All detection systems were silent. The low light-level television cameras were showing him apparent one-mile altitude shots along his flight path for ten miles on a side. He could make out no sign of life, no roads or tracks or signs of" human habitation. A few minutes before, he had left the desert and scrublands behind as the terrain climbed to eight thousand feet and became grasslands, depending for their meager water supply on the swift rivers flowing down out of the Tien Shan and its foothills. The winter was fierce, but the scouring winds had kept the sloping hillsides relatively free of snow below seven thousand feet. The plateau would rise another two to three thousand feet before cresting and beginning to flow downward toward the Kazakh border seventy miles west.

  Fifty miles due east of his present position lay the Chinese city of Urmachi, probably the staging point for Chinese troops fighting in the hinterlands below. Off to the southeast glinted the frozen surface of the Kara Nor that would mark a rough position from which he would make a sharp turn to the northwest and fly up to the first checkpoint to pick up the star-fix coordinates for the border sweep.