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

by the rest of Wizard One-One’s crew. But there the similaritiesended. Thanks to an ear for languages and a gift for quick study, he’d been quietly recruited into Air Force intelligenceoperations shortly after completing the STO course. He’d come to Egypt with the squadron as one of its combat rescue officers.But that was just a cover story. His real mission was to gather HUMINT, human intelligence, on the Egyptian and other foreignnationals involved in the exercises—focusing on those who might someday be recruited as potential intelligence sources. Or,conversely, on those who might be open to working with terrorists or other groups hostile to U.S. interests.

Ostensibly, his language skills were the reason he’d been assigned to this flight. None of the others in the helicopter crew knew enough Arabic to liaise with locals if that proved necessary. But the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Sixty-Fourth had his own motives in putting Flynn aboard. “You’re a spook, Nick,” he’d said quietly. “And whatever’s actually going on out there is really fucking spooky. Right now, no one higher up the chain of command will tell me what the hell one of our C-130s was doing off on its own so deep in Libya. All I’m getting is static about how I don’t ‘need to know.’ Well, that’s bullshit. So there’s no damn way I’m sending my folks out on a limb without a specially trained pair of eyes and ears along to ride herd on this situation. Which is where you come in.”

Flynn couldn’t disagree with that line of reasoning. More than a decade after the brutal civil war that ended Colonel MuammarGaddafi’s authoritarian rule, Libya was still a cauldron of rival armed factions. There was no real central government, onlyfluctuating coalitions of regional groups, tribal militias, and die-hard Islamists. Chaos and conflict were the stuff of everydaylife throughout most of the fractured country. That was especially true in the sparsely populated far south, hundreds of milesfrom Libya’s more densely inhabited coastal strip along the Mediterranean. All of which made the region the very last placeyou’d expect an unarmed U.S. Air Force cargo plane to be operating.

Reflexively, he patted the M4A1 carbine slung from his tactical body armor. Whatever they found at the crash site, this surewasn’t going to be another boring day spent schmoozing Egyptian, Saudi, Iraqi, and other foreign officers over endless cupsof tea.

A soft ping through his headset signaled an update from the helicopter’s navigation computer. From her position in the cockpit’sleft-hand seat, Kate Kasper relayed the new data as it appeared on one of her big multifunction display panels. “Heads up,whiz kids. We’re about eight minutes out from the estimated crash site. Check your gear and stand by.”

Flynn took a quick pass through the accessory pouches attached to his body armor. Extra magazines for his carbine and Glock19 sidearm. Check. His Panasonic Toughbook tablet field computer was ready to go with a full battery. So were his pocket laserrange finder and multiband tactical radio. He was set.

In the pair of seats behind him, Zalewski and Camarillo were doing the same thing with their personal weapons and trauma kits. Satisfied with those, the PJs went rapidly through the array of compact cutting and lifting tools packed in their individual rucksacks.

“Two minutes,” Kasper called. “Radar’s picking up objects on the ground about six miles out, at our twelve o’clock.”

“I don’t see any smoke,” Dykstra commented matter-of-factly. “Any fires must have burned out by now.”

Flynn leaned back in his seat, craning his head sharply to look through the helicopter’s forward cockpit canopy. With allthe heat haze, it was difficult to make out many details. But there was definitely a blackened scar stretching across theorangish desert sand. At one end of the scar, he could see a big, crumpled gray cylinder partially buried nose-first in alarge dune. A debris field of torn and bent pieces of blackened metal—scorched wing panels, twisted propellers, and shatteredengine mounts—stretched away for hundreds of feet on both sides of the wreck.

Dykstra whistled softly. “Looks like that Herky Bird slammed in almost horizontally. The wings ripped off, but the fuselageseems mostly intact.” He tweaked the cyclic, pedals, and collective to reduce their airspeed as the Jolly Green II swung througha gentle, level turn to come in behind the downed C-130.

Abruptly, as they came out of the turn, Flynn spotted a twin-turbine helicopter, a Russian-manufactured Mi-17 medium transport,sitting parked on the sand not more than a hundred yards from the Super Hercules’s torn fuselage. Oddly, its desert camouflagepaint scheme showed no obvious national markings or other identifiers. Several Western-looking men in civilian clothing werevisible around the helicopter and the C-130 wreckage. Some carried a mix of small arms and wore military-grade body armor.

“Son of a bitch,” Kasper muttered. “We’ve got company.”

A new voice crackled over the helicopter’s ARC-210 communications system. “Wizard One-One, this is Rocking Horse Six. Suggest you land on the other side of the wreck. We’ll confer further once you’re down.”

“Copy that, Rocking Horse,” Kasper acknowledged tightly. Her fingers danced across her multifunction display, inputting the call sign they’d been given. She switched back to the intercom. “The computer confirms that ‘Rocking Horse’ is legit. But that call sign belongs to an OGA.”

Flynn snorted. OGA was military jargon for “Other Government Agency.” In practice, that usually meant the CIA’s clandestineservice and its paramilitary contractors.

“You know anything about these guys or what they’re up to out here, Nick?” Dykstra asked, making small adjustments to thehelicopter controls to veer off and circle back around toward the suggested landing site. “Wearing your other hat, I mean?”That was a not-so-subtle reference to Flynn’s covert status as an Air Force intelligence officer.

“Not a doggone thing, FX,” Flynn said truthfully. His hands moved to the quick-release buckle on his seat straps. A rotor-whippedcloud of swirling sand and dust billowed up as the HH-60 flared in and then settled lightly on its main landing gear. Hiseyes narrowed in concentration. “But I can promise you that’s about to change.”