Target 5 Read Online Free

North Pole. But so far the pack had made no impression on the twenty-foot-high cliffs which reared above it because it was salt-water ice - ice formed out of the sea. The massive island, a mile in diameter, was tougher.
    Target-5 was made of freshwater ice, which is harder than its salt-water counterpart. And it had a long pedigree. For hundreds of years the ice shelf at the edge of the Canadian coast had been built up by the slow-moving flow of glaciers debouching into the frozen sea. Layer by layer the shelf had been formed until it was two hundred feet deep. Target-5 was a fragment of this shelf - a mile-wide fragment which had broken loose and drifted with the pack for thirty years.
    It was starting its fourth ten-year orbit round the Pole, was heading once more for the Canadian Arctic coast, when the Greenland Current caught it. The huge slab of ice was dragged further south than it had ever moved before. Soon it was close to the funnel between Greenland and Spits bergen, and then it reached the point of no return and con tinued heading south instead of west, south towards Iceberg Alley.
    In faraway Washington Dawes was still waiting for Beau mont when Dr Matthew Conway, the fifty-year-old station leader on Target-5, came out of the headquarters hut to take another star-fix with his sextant. A normally placid man, Conway was edgy as he fiddled with the instrument, and his irritation wasn't helped by the fact that a second man joined him almost as soon as he was outside. Jeff Rickard, the thirty-two-year-old wireless operator shut the door behind him quickly to keep in the warmth. 'Any sign of activity, Matt?' he inquired.
    'Lots of it,' Conway replied with forced humour. 'A Grey hound bus for Omaha just went by.'
    'Jesus, if that were only true! Any sign of the Russians, I meant.'
    'I know what you meant.'
    They stood in the middle of the twelve flat-roofed huts which formed the research base in the centre of the island. Across a narrow avenue of beaten snow six huts faced six more, and from a hut further down the avenue a wireless mast speared up into the moonlit night. In the distance all around them, at no point more than half a mile away, the enemy - the polar pack - was squeaking and gibbering like some huge beast in pain. It reminded them that the pack was alive, was moving and grinding up against the small cliffs which still held it back. A fresh sound came, a sharp report like a rifle crack.
    'What the hell was that?' Rickard whispered.
    'A piece of ice breaking off,' Conway said wearily. 'Get back inside with Sondeborg, would you, Jeff. I want to finish this job.'
    'He's in one of his moods. I think he's getting worse, Matt.'
    Conway, his face turned away from Rickard, tightened his mouth as he tried to concentrate on the star-fix. Sonde borg, twenty-six years old and the youngest of the three men, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, whatever that might be. It was the isolation, of course, and it was near the end of their time on the island. In twelve days the plane would come to evacuate them from the doomed island and now the hours - even the minutes - were like years.
    There search base was surrounded on all sides by a smooth snowbound plateau running away to the cliffs - on all sides except to the south where a small hill rose, its summit forty feet above the plateau. Here, over a hundred miles from the nearest coast, was a hill littered with giant, snow-covered boulders, real rocks, some of them the size of small bungalows. Ages ago they had been carried down inside a glacier and deposited on the Canadian ice shelf- and when the huge slab of ice had torn itself loose it had carried the hill with it.
    The door behind Conway opened again and he felt his self-control going. Sondeborg was joining them. It was get ting very difficult: no man wanted to be left on his own in this terrible solitude, even inside a warm hut, but when they were together they ground up against each other like the ice grinding