North Cape

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Fifty-eight degrees of frost. Twenty-six below zero F… From two hundred thousand feet, the surface of the earth below was void of all but the largest geological features. The land was a mixture of browns and grays, overlain with the misty white of a thin ice cover at sixty thousand feet. A barely discernible range of mountains stretched to the northeast beyond the narrow scope of vision allowed by the slit window. From this altitude, the lofty sixteen-thousand-foot peaks of the Urals appeared as softly rounded mounds almost lost in the sere browns of the surrounding plains. A thread of a river snaked down through, these plains from the narrow valleys and snowfields of the mountains and disappeared into the mist and cloud on the horizon. The land below spoke of peace and serenity; but the height obscured the hidden missile sites that could fling their deadly cargoes of thermonuclear death across continents and oceans; hid the military camps and bases scattered across the Asian mainland to meet the threat of enemies on two fronts.

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