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

Captain Nick Flynn glanced around the little hotel’s dining room. It wasn’t exactly fancy, but it was reasonably comfortable,warm, and well lit—though maybe a little too well lit for his present purposes. Meals were ordinarily served buffet style,but since he and Captain Laura Van Horn were the only ones eating here tonight, the cook had made a show of bringing platesof something resembling chicken marsala, rice pilaf, and steamed broccoli directly to their booth, even going so far as toadopt an outrageously fake French waiter’s accent in the process.

That had sparked a strangled laugh from the stranded HC-130J’s attractive brunette copilot. “Gosh, I didn’t expect dinnertheater,” she remarked to Flynn once the inn’s grinning cook had sauntered back to his kitchen.

“Kaktovik is a lot more sophisticated than you might first think,” he responded with a smile.

Van Horn nodded. “So I gathered from the perfectly nice, store-bought curtains in my room here. Despite all the dire warningsyou gave me on the bus last night, this quaint little inn does not actually use strips of cardboard cut from packing boxes for window coverings.”

“They don’t?” Flynn said, pretending to be surprised. “Well, there you go. Sophistication at its peak. After all, this is the biggest town for more than a hundred miles in any direction.”

She wagged an accusing finger at him. “Uh, Nick, I hate to break it to you this way, but Kaktovik is also the only town for a hundred miles in any direction.”

“Let’s not quibble over the choice of a mere adjective,” he said loftily. “I say biggest, you say only. What matters most is that we’re both totally correct.”

Van Horn laughed. “Fair enough.” Then her expression turned more serious. She looked across her plate at him. “Which makesme wonder just how a regular U.S. Air Force officer, especially one who doesn’t come across like he has his head stuck uphis ass, ended up getting posted out here in the back of nowhere.” She cocked her head to one side. “I’m kind of guessingit wasn’t because you made a career-winning move in your last assignment.”

To his surprise, Flynn wasn’t as irritated by her probing question as he would have expected. Maybe it was the way she askedit, which seemed honestly sympathetic rather than judgmental. And maybe it was because she was the best-looking woman in uniformhe’d seen for weeks. Well, admittedly, borrowing her own joke, she was also the only woman in uniform he’d seen for weeks. But there was something that made him want to trust her. “You’d guess right,” he toldher with a tight shrug.

“Care to fill me in?” Van Horn asked, genuinely curious now.

“I wish I could,” he told her truthfully. “But I really can’t. Let’s just say I ended up in the wrong place, at the wrongtime, with exactly the wrong people.”

Her bright blue eyes widened a fraction. “Oh, wow. Don’t tell me you got caught dallying with your commanding officer’s wife/girlfriend/daughter?”

“Did you seriously just use ‘dallying’ in a sentence?” Flynn laughed.

Van Horn reddened slightly. “I read a lot of old British mysteries. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody. Your secret is safe with me.” Then he sobered up. “But, no, as it happens, I wasn’t messing around with my senior officer’s wife or daughter. Or his girlfriend.” He raised an eyebrow. “So you think of me as a Don Juan type, huh?”

“‘Don Juan’? Now look who’s the nerd!”

Flynn gave her an abashed smile of his own. “Yeah, I majored in English Language and Literature and took tons of humanitiescourses in college. Definitely non-STEM.” He tapped his chest. “Hence the lack of pilot’s wings.”

“I can see that I’m not the only one around here with a somewhat dubious background,” she commented archly. “But no, Nick,to answer your sort of desperate question, you don’t come across as a Don Juan.” Then she chuckled. “Or maybe I just haven’tgotten to know you well enough yet.”

Well, that seemed promising, Flynn thought a bit smugly.

“So if you weren’t caught with the wrong woman, what did you do to piss off the powers-that-be enough to get stuck out here?I mean, making sure the polar bears don’t decide to walk off with Barter Island’s nice, rusting radar station doesn’t seemlike a good match for your skills.” Van Horn looked at him with a puzzled expression.

“It’s classified.”

“Classified? Classified as in ‘It’s embarrassing and I’d rather not tell you’? Or classified as in ‘Seriously spooky stuff’?”

Flynn tried to adopt a casual attitude of indifference and knew he’d failed miserably. Finally, he said, “The spooky sort.”

“And whatever happened still really pisses you off,” she realized, reading the look on his face.

He made himself shrug. “Well, it has forced me to seriously reevaluate my military career. For example, my whole ‘get promotedto general and live a life of idleness and luxury’ plan might need to be scrapped.”

“You know, civilian life isn’t so bad,” Van Horn said in an obvious bid to help change the subject. “Sometimes I don’t even cry when I head out from Elmendorf-Richardsonto go home.”

Flynn couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah, you’ve got a point there. So, uh, Laura . . . what do you do when you’re not wearing a uniform?” Casually, he took a sip of his coffee.

Van Horn coughed out a laugh. “Is that your way to wrangle an invitation to see me out of my uniform?”

Startled, Flynn said, “No, no, that’s not what I meant! I mean, well . . . I just meant, um, what do you do in your civilianlife?” He focused intently on his coffee.

Pleased at the reaction she’d provoked, Van Horn grinned broadly. “Sorry, but that was an easy setup. Actually, I fly fora company that hauls air freight between here and the Lower Forty-Eight. We handle a little bit of everything—airmail packages,crates of wine, medications . . . all kinds of stuff. Once we even hauled a red Corvette.”

“A Corvette?” Flynn asked, surprised.

She nodded. “There was this oil company exec who wound up being transferred from Houston to Prudhoe Bay. Seems he couldn’tbear to leave his baby behind. Or even