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can narrow it down! The seaman was carrying his duffle bag and was walking towards the docks .. .' Papanin put the poker back on the stove and took a file out of a drawer. Each day he received a report on events in the city, including a police report, but he was looking for the docks report. 'The only ship which sailed yesterday was the Girolog, a trawler, and the icebreaker which took it out. He must have been going to embark on the Girolog.'
    'With a crew of about thirty . . .'
    'True. So now I want you to drive immediately to the docks to get me the list of all personnel who sailed on the Girolog last night. I want it by noon.'
    'There isn't time .. .' Kramer protested.
    'That's your problem!' Papanin sat down behind his desk and waited until Kramer had reached the door. 'Incident ally, while I was away in Moscow this week I see you signed a movement order for Michael Gorov to go back to North Pole 17. I thought he'd finished his work there.'
    'That is correct.' Kramer paused near the door, vaguely worried by this sudden change of topic. 'He wanted to take some final depth-soundings before we evacuate the base. He gave me the impression that you knew about it.'
    'That's all right, Kramer. It just struck me that he hadn't planned to go there again. And get me the Girolog list by noon!'
    Alone in his room, Papanin put one booted leg on top of his desk and stared moodily at the green-tiled stove which was now emanating great waves of heat. Without knowing it, he now had exactly seventeen hours to find out why Winthrop had come to Leningrad before Michael Gorov started his run to Target-5.

    It was a six-hour flight at forty thousand feet from Washing ton to Thule, Greenland, and it was eleven o'clock on Saturday morning when Beaumont woke up and saw the huge runway coming up to meet the Boeing 707. It didn't feel like Saturday - by now Beaumont was so bemused that he had to think to remember the day of the week. And it didn't look like eleven o'clock in the morning as the Boeing dropped out of a, moonlit night towards the wilderness of snow and ice below.
    'Seems like only five minutes since we left Washington,' he called out to Callard, the FBI man who sat across the gang way from him.
    The man in the neat blue suit, freshly shaven, looked back at the big Englishman as though wondering whether to reply. 'Seems more like five years to me,' he said eventually. He turned away and looked out of the window on his side.
    Beaumont smiled to himself. At five in the morning Callard had jumped aboard the plane at Washington minutes before its departure for Greenland; obviously he had been driving the plane every mile of the way while Beaumont had slept. He looked out of his own window, staring down at the desolate snowbound plain of the Green land icecap. In the distance the thousand-foot high radar mast sheered up into the moonlit sky, the warning light at the summit flashing red. The tallest mast in the world, it had a range of three thousand miles over the roof of the world, It was the key station in the Distant Early Warning system.
    'I'll see you in Vandenberg's office,' Callard suddenly called out. 'Sometime this evening, maybe.'
    Beaumont nodded and he thought the suggestion signifi cant. As the Boeing continued its decent he was certain that Callard had cracked the case, that he now knew the identity of Crocodile, that he was on his way to arrest the Soviet agent. They went down below the level of the radar mast tip and the grim panorama of the icecap slid up closer. Beaumont had a tilted view of flat-topped buildings on either side of Main Street, the snow-covered road which ran down the middle of the camp, then they were landing.
    Tillotson was waiting for Beaumont when he dis embarked from the plane, wrapped in a fur parka they had supplied before he left Washington. It was forty below and the still air hit him like a physical blow, taking his breath away as he stood at the foot of the steps. Tillotson, a tall, tough-looking