It is now four hours since the – UFO? – was first sighted over Novaya Zemlya, and so far it has covered a little more than nine hundred miles, having passed west of Franz Josef Land on what now seems a beeline for Ellesmere Island. Which is where the Migs draw level with it, except that doesn’t quite show the whole picture. Geographically they’ve caught up with it, but they’re at max. headroom and the UFO is two miles higher! Then . . . apparently they see it – and at the same time it sees them.
What happens then isn’t known for a certainty, for the Kirovsk base has ordered radio silence, but on the basis of what will be seen to happen later we can take a broad stab at it. The object descends, puts on speed, attacks! The Migs probably open fire on it in the seconds before they are reduced to so much confetti. Their debris is lost in snow and ice some six hundred miles from the Pole and a like distance short of Ellesmere . . .
And now the intruder really is intruding! Its speed has accelerated to around three hundred and fifty miles per hour and its course is straight as an arrow. The AWACS has reported the Migs lost from its screens, presumed down, but a hotline call from Washington to Moscow fails to produce anything but the usual ambiguities: ‘What Migs? What intruder?’
The USA is a little peeved: This aircraft came out of your airspace into ours. It has no right being there. If it sticks to its present course it will be intercepted, forced to land. If it fails to comply or acts in any way hostile, there’s a chance it will be shot down, destroyed . . .’
And unexpectedly: ‘Good!’ from the Russians. ‘Whatever it is you have on your screens, it is nothing of ours. We renounce it utterly. Do with it as you see fit!’
Far more detailed Norwegian reports are now in from the Hammerfest listening station: the object is believed to originate from a region in the Urals near Labytnangi right on the Arctic Circle, give or take a hundred miles or so. If they had given or taken three hundred miles south, then the reports would have been more nearly correct; for the Perchorsk Pass was just that far away from the source they’d quoted. Alas, in the other direction, north of Labytnangi, lay Vorkuta, the USSR’s most northerly missile site, supplied by rail from Ukhta. And now the Americans go from mildly irritated to extremely narrow-eyed. Just what in hell are the Reds up to? Have they loosed some sort of experimental missile from Vorkuta and lost it? If so, does it have a warhead?
How many warheads?
Alert classifications go up two notches and Moscow comes under fire in some very heated hotline exchanges. Still the Soviets deny all knowledge, however nervously.
Better, clearer reports are coming in. We now have the thing on satellite, on ground radar, on AWACS. No physical, human sightings as yet but everything else. The spysats say it could be a dense flock of birds – but what sort of birds fly in excess of three hundred mph five miles high across the Arctic Circle? Collision with birds could have taken out the Migs, of course, but . . . The top-secret high-tech radar sites along the older DEW-line say it’s either a large airplane or … a space-platform fallen out of orbit? Also that it’s impossibly low on metal content – namely, it doesn’t have any! But intelligence won’t admit of any aircraft (not to mention space-stations) two hundred and some feet long and constructed of canvas. AWACS says that the thing is flying in a series of spurts or jets, like some vast aerial octopus. And AWACS is more or less right.
It is now one hour since the American interceptors scrambled. Flying at close to Mach II, they have crossed the Hudson Bay from the Belcher Islands to a point about two hundred miles north of Churchill. In so doing they’ve just overtaken the AWACS and left it a few minutes behind. The AWACS has told them that their target is dead ahead, and that he’s come down to 10,000 feet. And now, finally, just like the Migs before them, they spot the intruder.