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

Jensen snorted. “Easy to promise. Tough to do.” He glared at them. “You got any proof of this story of yours?”

“Certainly,” Voronin replied. He unzipped his ski jacket slightly and dug out an ID card from one of its inside pockets. Forgedby highly paid experts in Moscow, it identified him as James Henderson, an official with the federal Environmental ProtectionAgency. While the trapper examined it through skeptical eyes, he went on. “In a way, I’m very glad that we’ve met. My researchteam here could use your obvious familiarity with the ground and the local wildlife.” He smiled. “And naturally, you wouldbe generously compensated for your time.”

“Uh-huh,” Jensen said cynically. He hawked and then spat off to the side, before tossing Voronin’s forged ID back to him.“Look, Mister Whoever You Really Are, I didn’t come all the way out here on my lonesome to grub for pay. And certainly notfrom the goddamned government.” His eyes narrowed to slits. “Or from anybody else, for that matter. So, if it’s all the sameto you, I’ll just be on my way and leave you fellas in peace.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and stalked off—ploddingdeterminedly back up the nearby slope through snow that was more than a foot deep.

Voronin stood watching the American go. When he was out of earshot, he glanced at Bondarovich. “Do you think he believed me?”

The other man shook his head. “Net shansov v adu. Not a chance in hell.”

“A pity,” Voronin commented dryly. Without taking his eyes off the fur trapper, now more than a hundred meters away, he reached out. Understanding his intent, Bondarovich handed him his scoped rifle. Briefly, Voronin inspected the weapon. It was a C14 Timberwolf, the civilian bolt-action rifle the Canadian military had selected to convert for use by its snipers. He nodded in appreciation.

Then he chambered a round, raised the rifle to his shoulder, and smoothly sighted through the scope. Gently, he squeezed thetrigger.

Craack.

Struck squarely between the shoulder blades by a .338 Lapua Magnum round moving at nearly nine hundred meters per second,Jensen went down in a spray of red blood against the snow-white landscape. The American writhed once and lay still, sprawledlike a rag doll on the hillside.

Voronin studied the dead man for a moment longer. Slowly, he lowered the rifle. “Make sure the body isn’t found.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Bondarovich assured him. “By the time anyone notices this American is missing, he’ll have vanishedforever.”

“You seem very confident of that,” Voronin said.

Bondarovich nodded. “This Arctic wildlife refuge contains nearly eighty thousand square kilometers of wasteland. No searchparty can cover that kind of ground. For all that anyone will ever know, Jensen might as well have been snatched by the Na’in.”

“The Na’in?” Voronin asked.

“A mythical monster of the local native tribe, the Gwich’in,” the ex-Spetsnaz major explained. “Translated, it means ‘theBrush Man,’ a creature that wanders the woods alone in search of human prey.”

Over Southern Russia

That Same Time

Tupolev’s manta ray–shaped PAK-DA stealth bomber prototype streaked low across a darkened landscape west of the Don River.Occasional pockets of light marked small farming villages, and a string of glowing beads stretching from east to west outlinedthe path of the A-260 highway between Volgograd and the Ukrainian border near Donetsk. An advanced digital terrain-followingsystem allowed the aircraft to stay as low as one hundred meters off the deck—climbing and diving in tiny increments of afew meters at a time as it raced across the steppe’s low, rolling hills and shallow ravines. Abruptly, it banked sharply tothe right and soared higher, gaining altitude fast.

Inside the cockpit, Major Oleg Bunin kept his eyes on his displays. “We are executing an attack program,” he reported. Hishands were in his lap, away from any controls.

From the left-hand pilot’s seat, Colonel Alexei Petrov nodded. “Copy that.” The altitude bar on his HUD stabilized at fivethousand meters as their aircraft rolled back out of its turn and leveled off. Fighting the instinct to regain active controlover the bomber, he locked the fingers of his own hands across his stomach. “Our engines are throttling back,” he announced,seeing the settings change without any input from him.

“Target selection,” Bunin said quietly, watching his own screens shift yet again. “Range one thousand kilometers.” He glanced across the cockpit. “That’s the dummy missile complex south of Ryazan.”

A blinking green icon flashed into existence in Petrov’s vision. It turned solid a second later. “The target’s coordinatesare downloaded to our practice missile.”

With a high-pitched whine, the doors of a weapons bay in the fuselage behind them slid open. And then the stealth bomber shudderedslightly as a single Kh-102 cruise missile weighing 2,400 kilograms released and fell away into the air. Seconds later, aseven-and-a-half-meter-long finned shape zoomed away to the north-northwest.

“Good engine start on the missile,” Petrov confirmed. Right on schedule, the Kh-102’s turbofan engine had ignited as it droppedtoward the ground. He breathed out in relief, as did Bunin. A failure would have created an embarrassing impact crater somewhereon the grassy steppe below them, but nothing worse, since the practice cruise missile was armed only with a mock payload.In wartime, that Kh-102 would have been armed with a 250-kiloton thermonuclear warhead—twelve and a half times more powerfulthan the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

New menus flickered onto Bunin’s multifunction displays. “Attack judged complete,” he murmured. “We are returning to base.”

In confirmation, the PAK-DA banked hard again, turning back toward the airfield at Akhtubinsk. From the start of this mission,the aircraft had been operating entirely under computer control, relying on its autonomous systems to handle every detailfrom takeoff to its precise flight path to target designation and weapons launch. Essentially, its human pilot and copilotwere along on this particular test flight only in case something went wrong with the computers or their operating systems.

Throughout the flight home, Petrov kept his attention resolutely focused on his HUD indicators, ready to take back over at the slightest sign of trouble. In one sense, he welcomed the success of this first