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

Grishin nodded. Inwardly, he felt a momentary chill. There were times when the younger man’s casual willingness tokill unnerved even him. Then again, he reminded himself, Voronin’s cold-blooded efficiency was a survival trait—and one thatprofited his employer as well. After all, there were no prizes for second place in the high-stakes game they were currentlyplaying, only disgrace, humiliation, and, in all probability, execution for treason.

Eight

South of Deadhorse, near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

Several Days Later

With his face and eyes protected from subzero temperatures by a thermal mask and ski goggles, Captain Nick Flynn looked downand saw an expanse of tundra rushing up at him. Although the gray light filtering through a layer of thick clouds made itdifficult to judge distances with any precision, that ground sure looked like it was getting closer fast. Really fast. Hereleased his attached weapons case and rucksack so that they fell away into the freezing air and swung loose below his feet,still connected to him by a long strap. Then he forced himself to relax, bent his knees slightly, tucked his chin in, andgripped the risers.

A small puff of white billowed up when his equipment packs hit the ground. Thousand-one, thousand-two, he counted silently.

Thump.

His boots thudded into the snow. Instantly he let himself buckle and rolled sideways to absorb the landing shock. At thatsame moment, a gust of wind caught his collapsing parachute canopy and snapped it back open wide. Dragged behind the chute,he slid across the tundra in a glittering spray of fine ice crystals and powder snow.

Great, Flynn thought with a mental grin. Now he got an impromptu sleigh ride across the frozen ground. Unbidden, that old song “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we go” began playing in his head. But his grandmother’s house was about three thousand miles south of here, and there wasn’t any snow in Central Texas, especially not in October. Hurriedly, he hit one of the two release assemblies on his harness to spill air out of the parachute. That brought his wind-driven skid to a halt.

Overhead, the C-130 turboprop he’d just jumped from was already a diminishing dot in the distance, with the roar of its fourengines fading fast. And across the wide-open, white landscape, eleven more men came drifting down out of the cloud-coveredsky. One by one, they thumped to the ground, raising little spurts of snow of their own. Counting them off, he breathed outin relief. Although he’d been the first one out of the plane, everyone else in his small unit had followed him off the aircraft’srear ramp.

Having someone refuse a jump wasn’t usual, but it could happen, and Flynn knew he hadn’t yet gotten to know these men wellenough to judge the odds of anyone pulling that kind of boneheaded stunt at the last second. As it was, he’d had to practicallybeg to get permission for his unit to participate in this practice airborne drop and field exercise. Only the fact that allof them, whether Army, National Guard, or Air Force, had already earned their jump wings earlier in their military servicemade it even thinkable. But having an aircraft head back to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson with one of his stray sheep stillaboard would have given the Pentagon and CIA assholes still gunning for him even more ammunition.

Getting back to his knees, Flynn reeled in his fluttering canopy arm over arm. Quickly, he bundled up the material before stuffing it into a bag clipped to his parachute harness. It took seconds more to struggle out of the harness itself and retrieve his weapons case and rucksack. Pulling out a pair of snowshoes and strapping them on took even more time. Finished at last, he stood up with a grunt and heaved the heavy rucksack onto his back. As a final measure, he slung his M4 carbine over the white camouflage smock he wore on top of his parka.

He brushed snow off his goggles and mask and scanned his wider surroundings. Right before they jumped, the C-130’s crewmenhad rolled a pair of large cargo pallets out the open rear ramp. The pallets were loaded with a couple of snowmobiles andtowable sleds, plus additional supplies of food, fuel, and ammunition. They’d come down under multiple parachutes, and itlooked as though they’d landed intact about three hundred yards from his position.

By now, several members of Flynn’s team already had their own gear on. In ones and twos, they headed toward the equipmentpallets—crunching awkwardly through ankle-deep snow. Others were still wrestling with balky parachutes or fitting themselvesout with cross-country skis or snowshoes.

It didn’t surprise Flynn to see that Sergeant Andy Takirak was the first man to reach their heavier gear. Despite being olderthan anyone else in the unit by at least fifteen years, the veteran National Guardsman was one of the most physically fit.And his decades of experience in this kind of terrain and harsh climate showed. Compared to everyone else, he moved over thefrozen tundra with surprising speed and grace.

By the time Flynn reached the first pallet himself, Takirak had already stripped off its protective tarpaulin. “How’s everythinglook?” he asked.

The noncom gave him a thumbs-up. “Good, sir,” he confirmed. “There’s no damage to this snow machine or sled that I can see.”

Flynn nodded. Alaskans always referred to snowmobiles as “snow machines,” since they used them more for work than recreation.He reminded himself to start doing the same. Like Texans, longtime Alaska residents had their own lingo. And if he didn’twant to stand out all the time as what they called a cheechako, a clueless tourist, he needed to remember to use local wordsand phrases when possible. “After all, when in Nome—” he murmured, privately enjoying the horrible pun.

“Sir?” Takirak asked, sounding puzzled.

“Never mind me, Andy,” Flynn said, glad that his mask hid his reddening face. “Just talking to myself.”

“Might want to go easy on that right now,” the older man said with a faint suggestion of amusement of his own. “Yakking tothe walls will come natural enough to all