irritated the West's intelligence and security services almost unendurably. As usual, the 
Soviets were making life very difficult. Whatever they were up to, they were doing it in 
an almost inaccessible, steep-sided ravine nine hundred feet deep, which meant that a 
satellite had to be almost directly overhead to get anything at all.
  Conjecture in the West had gone on unabated. The alternatives were many. Perhaps the 
Russians were attempting to carry out a covert mining operation? It could be that they'd 
discovered large deposits of high-grade uranium ore in the Urals. On the other hand, 
maybe they were concerned with the construction of experimental nuclear installations 
under the very mountains themselves. Or could it be that they were building and making 
ready to test something quite new and radically different? As it happened-when it 
happened, at that time just two years ago-advocates of the third alternative were seen to 
have guessed correctly.
  Once again Mikhail Simonov was drawn back to the present, this time by the low rumble 
of diesel-engined transports that echoed up hollowly from the gorge to drown out the 
wind's thin keening. Just as the moon slipped back behind the clouds, so the headlight 
beams of a convoy of lumbering trucks cut a swath of white light in the darkness where 
they stabbed out from the gash of the pass in the deep "V of the western saddle. The 
huge, square-looking trucks were just under a mile away across the ravine and some five 
hundred feet below the level of Simonov's vantage point, but still he flattened himself 
more yet and squirmed back a little into his nest of gaunt boulders. It was a controlled, 
automatic, almost instinctive reaction to possible danger, in no way a panicked retreat. 
Simonov had been very well trained, with no expense spared.
  As the convoy came through the pass and turned its nose down the steeply descending 
ramp of a road cut from the face of the ravine, so a battery of spotlights burst into 
brilliant life, shining down from the sheer wall and lending the well-gritted road 
excellent illumination. Fascinated, Simonov listened to the great diesels snarling into 
low gear, watched the routine of a well-organized reception.
  Without taking the nite-lites from his eyes, he reached into a pocket and drew out a 
tiny camera, snapping it into position in the lower casing of the binoculars. Then he 
pressed a button on the camera and continued watching. Whatever he saw would now be 
recorded automatically, one frame every six seconds for a total of four and a half 
minutes, forty-five tiny stills of near-crystal clarity. Not that he expected to see 
anything of any real importance: he already knew what the trucks contained and the camera 
shots were simply to certify that this was indeed their destination-for the satisfaction 
of others back in the West.
  Four trucks: one of them containing all the makings of a ten-foot electrified fence, 
two more carrying the component parts and ammo for three twin-mounted, armour-piercing, 
13mm Katushev cannons, and the fourth and last loaded with a battery of diesel-powered 
generators. No, what was being hauled wasn't the question. The question was this: if the 
Russians were going to defend the Perchorsk Projekt, who were they defending it against?
  Who ... or what?
  Simonov's camera clicked away almost inaudibly; his eyes took in all that was happening 
below; he was aware that he mustn't stay here more than another ten or fifteen minutes at 
the most, because of the high radiation count, but part of his mind was already somewhere 
else. It was back in London just two months short of two years ago. Shooting the arrival 
of the trucks had done it, set Simonov's mind working on that other film he'd been shown 
by M16 and the Americans in London. A real film, however short, and not just stills. He 
relaxed just a traction. He was doing all that was expected of him, could afford a little 
mental meandering. And actually, once you'd seen that film, it was difficult not to keep 
going back to it.
  The film was of something that had happened just seven weeks after the Perchorsk 
Incident (called "pi') and had earned itself the acronym "pi II" or "Pill". But it had 
been one hell of a pill to swallow. It had come about like this.
  . . . Early morning of a bright mid-October day along the eastern seaboard of the USA; 
but along the "obsolete" Canadian DEW-line things have been stirring for some three 
hours, since a pair of spysats with overlapping windows on the Barents and Kara seas, and 
from Arkhan-gel'sk across the Urals to Igarka, flashed intruder reports down across the 
Pole to listeners in Canada and the USAF bases in Maine and New Hampshire. Washington has 
been informed, and low-key alert status has already been notified to the missile bases in 
Greenland and the Foxe Peninsula base on Baffin Island. Other DEW-line subscribers have 
been notified; Great Britain has shown mild interest and asked for updates, Denmark is 
typically nervous (because of Greenland), Iceland has shrugged and France has failed to 
acknowledge.
  But now things begin to speed up a little. The original spies-in-the-sky have lost the 
intruder (an "intruder" being any aerial object passing east to west across the Arctic 
Ocean) out of their windows, but at the same time it's been picked up by DEW-line proper 
crossing the Arctic Circle on a somewhat irregular course but generally in the direction 
of Queen Elizabeth Island. What's more, the Russians have scrambled a pair of Mig 
interceptors from their military airfield in Kirovsk south of Murmansk. Norway and Sweden 
join Denmark in an attack of the jitters. The USA is hugely curious but not yet 
narrow-eyed (the object is too slow to be a serious threat) but nevertheless an AWACS 
reconnaissance aircraft has been diverted from routine duties to a line of interception 
and two fighters are scrambled up from a strip near Fort Fairfield, Maine.
  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