Arctic Storm Rising by Dale Brown (readera ebook reader .TXT) 📗

few scuffed footprintsaround the front of the sedan and faint smears of dried blood that would match that of the victim, not him.

Finished, Petrov turned away and headed back through the darkened forest to where he’d parked his nondescript rental car. Part of him regretted killing Obolensky. But he knew the act had been necessary. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with the project he had undertaken. That was true now more than ever. Dmitri Grishin, the oligarch who was backing his plan, believed he was primarily motivated by money. This was not the time to disabuse him of that notion.

Five

Barter Island Long Range Radar Site, near Kaktovik, Alaska

The Next Day

Barter Island sat just off Alaska’s desolate Arctic coast. Roughly four miles long and two miles wide, it was a snow-covered,treeless plain. On a narrow spit just off its northern shore, there was a large mound of heaped-up whale bones. Not far fromthe mound, the tiny village of Kaktovik occupied the island’s northeastern quarter. Around two hundred people lived in itsassortment of cabins and prefab houses, most of them Iñupiat Alaska natives.

A thousand-foot-wide saltwater channel separated the island from the mainland, and there were no roads connecting the islandto the nearest inhabited place, Prudhoe Bay. Close by Alaskan standards at least, since Prudhoe Bay was more than 110 milesto the west. The only real way in or out for people and freight was by air. An old military runway, perched right on the edgeof the Beaufort Sea and subject to periodic flooding during storms, had been abandoned in favor of a relatively new 4,500-foot-longgravel strip built on slightly higher ground in the center of the island. A converted school bus provided routine transportationinto town for arriving passengers.

This afternoon, the bright yellow airport bus had been rented by the U.S. military’s Alaskan Command to bring Captain Nick Flynn and his newly formed security team to the Barter Island Long Range Radar Site, about a third of a mile outside Kaktovik. The twelve men, a mix of Alaska National Guardsmen on active duty and regular U.S. Air Force and Army personnel, had flown in earlier aboard a C-130J transport plane dispatched from Anchorage’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson—now 640 miles away to the south.

Alaska was astoundingly big and empty even by Texas standards, Flynn thought moodily, staring out the windows of the bus asit bumped along a rutted gravel track. Their two-hour flight here had carried them across a vast landscape of dense forests,sheer snow-capped mountains, and wide-open tundra flatlands. All told, there were fewer than seven hundred and fifty thousandpeople scattered across an enormous expanse more than twice the size of Texas. He frowned, remembering one of his collegehistory classes. Back in the 1700s, Voltaire had famously dismissed Canada as just “a few acres of snow.” Nick wondered whatthe French philosopher would have thought of Alaska—judging by what he’d seen during the flight up here, it was basicallya few hundred million acres of snow.

His breath fogged the bus window. This was only the beginning of October, but winter had already arrived on Barter Island.The highs were in the low twenties, with temperatures plunging below zero after dark. This far north, the sun was currentlyvisible for only about ten hours a day. Toward Halloween, it would be above the horizon for just six and a half hours. Andthen, by late November, the island would find itself wrapped in the perpetual Arctic night—from which it would not emergefor more than six long weeks.

Just imagining that unending spell of frozen darkness was bad enough. But Flynn had a sinking feeling that reality would be even worse. He looked over his shoulder at the soldiers and airmen he would be commanding under those grim conditions. Bulky in military-issue cold weather parkas, trousers, and boots, they were scattered down the length of the bus. They occupied separate bench seats, as though determined to keep their new comrades at arm’s length for the time being. Most of them looked about as gloomy on the outside as he felt inside.

His frown deepened. These men weren’t a cohesive team yet, just a collection of individuals hurriedly thrown together froma grab bag of other units across Alaska. Boarding the C-130 for the flight here was the first time any of them had ever reallymet. He shook his head. Everything about this assignment was half-assed. Apart from their names, his only source of informationabout the soldiers and airmen now under his command were the personnel files he’d downloaded onto his tablet shortly beforetakeoff. And he hadn’t had any real time to dig into those records yet.

Flynn had a depressing hunch, though, that he wasn’t going to find a lot of glowing adjectives in their personnel evaluations.Most commanding officers, ordered to “volunteer” men for this kind of long-term detached duty, would be very careful to selectthose who wouldn’t be particularly missed—the oddballs, misfits, and even disciplinary hard cases. One corner of his mouthquirked upward. He might not be looking at his very own Dirty Dozen, but the odds were good that he’d just been saddled withthe Dingy Eleven.

Or maybe that should be the Grimy Ten, he thought, after a quick glance at the grizzled noncom seated right across the aislefrom him. From the top of his broad, weathered face to the tips of his rugged combat boots, Sergeant First Class Andy Takirak,Alaska Army National Guard, had the look of a tough, thoroughly squared away military professional. Nor would the prospectof spending a winter in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness hold any terrors for the older man, Flynn decided. After all,this was his own native country.

According to his file, Takirak was a member of the Bering Straits Iñupiat tribe, distantly related to the indigenous peoples of the North Slope like those who lived in Kaktovik. In civilian life, he worked as a wildlife guide and hunter around the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. He’d been assigned to the Joint Force security team as its scout and senior NCO. And