High Command [antikvár]

Prologue The Arctic Ocean was thick and heavy v^ith a transparent sludge of ice. Driven by cyclone gusts screaming down from the ice plains of the North, the ocean reared up and hurled itself with colossal fury against the black basalt cliffs of the Soviet island. For fifty feet above the ocean, air and water were melded into an ice storm which kept life permanently scoured from the island's bleak, pitted jsurface. Deep below this elemental madness a different kind of madness lit the green eyes of Mihail Alexandrovitch Gorontsyev, supreme commander of Soviet forces, as he concentrated, unblinking, on the red symbols of a situations board which covered most of one wall of the underground chamber. The tall thin figure sat rigidly at the command position in the chamber. He gave no outward sign of the tautness of his nerve endings, except for a persistent twitching of his cheek, which was invisible to others in the dim light of the room. The final moves of the first phase for overt Soviet domination of the oil wealth of the North Sea were on the board, the supreme gamble with the West eight nerve-wracking days old.