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

in silence. Then Flynn cleared his throat awkwardly. “So, I’ve been meaningto ask—”

“Is this where you make your move, Nick?” she interrupted with a lazy smile.

“Huh? Er, no, that is . . . uh, well, if I did, would you slap me down?”

Her eyes crinkled with amusement. “Maybe. Maybe not. How lucky do you feel right now, Captain Flynn?”

He glanced at his watch and sighed. “Not lucky at all, it turns out. Because I’m due on duty at our outpost line in abouttwenty minutes.”

“Too bad.”

Mentally, Flynn cursed the series of four-hours-on, four-hours-off patrol shifts he’d decreed in response to the Pentagon’s order to go to DEFCON Three. He never could have imagined he’d end up screwing up a date with a beautiful woman.

“But if we’re still stuck here tomorrow, I just might be able to clear my calendar enough to have dinner with you again. Ormaybe lunch, depending on when you’re free,” Van Horn said consolingly. “No promises, mind you.”

“Noted,” Flynn assured her. “But I do have one more quick question.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Shoot.”

“Why is your call sign ‘Skater’?” he asked curiously.

Van Horn sighed. “Because pilots think they’re really clever. My last name is Dutch, see . . . and speed skating is a bigdeal in the Netherlands, so—”

“You got tagged with ‘Skater.’ Well, I guess it could have been worse.”

“Oh, back in the first weeks of flight school, it was worse,” she told him with a twisted grin.

“Worse, how?”

“My last name is Van Horn,” she pointed out. “Think about it.”

Flynn winced. “Ouch.” He looked at her. “So what happened?”

“A certain fellow pilot ‘tripped’ in the ladies’ room and managed to bust her lip and get a black eye,” Laura Van Horn saidwith a certain, deep-seated satisfaction.

“On a wet floor?”

If anything, her smile grew bigger. “Nope. That floor was bone-dry.”

Twenty-Six

Zvyozdny Military Airfield, Wrangel Island, off Russia’s Arctic Coast

The Next Morning

One after another, two twin-tailed Su-35S fighters belonging to Russia’s Twenty-Third Aviation Regiment sped down a snow-coveredrunway and lifted off into the hazy morning sky. Each aircraft was configured for long-range flight, equipped only with twoexternal fuel tanks, a single pair of K-74M short-range heat-seeking missiles, and two KAB-500L laser-guided bombs. Streakinglow over a stark white coastal plain, they flew northeast past a white radar dome sited on the lower slopes of Gora Sovetskaya,Wrangel Island’s tallest mountain. The sleek jet fighters were camouflaged in jagged bands of white, light gray, and darkgray that blended with the bleak, ice-covered ocean ahead.

Aboard the lead Su-35S, Major Vadim Kuryokhin keyed his mike. “Moscow Operations Control, this is Polet Telokhranitelya, Bodyguard Flight. We’re airborne and proceeding immediately to Rendezvous Point Alpha.”

There was a short delay while his signal was relayed to Lieutenant General Rogozin, still deep underground in the Sharapovo command bunker. Then the general’s voice came back through Kuryokhin’s headset. He sounded strained. “Bodyguard, this is Moscow Ops Control. Prospector and Mother Hen are in position at the rendezvous point. Good luck. Remember your mission. And remember your rules of engagement. Under no circumstances, repeat, under no circumstances are you to fire first at any American aircraft. Is that understood?”

“Message clearly understood, Ops Control,” the Russian fighter commander said distinctly. “Bodyguard out.” He glanced outof his cockpit at the other Su-35, flying about a kilometer off his right wing. “Lead to Bodyguard Two,” he radioed, makingsure he was using a lower-powered tactical channel. “You heard the man, right?” he said wryly. “So keep your itchy fingeroff that trigger, Ilya. Or else Daddy Rogozin might give us both a spanking.”

“Two,” his wingman, Captain Ilya Troitsky, acknowledged. “What the hell does the general think we’re going to do? Take on the whole damned American Air Force with a total of four missiles between the two of us?”

“Apparently your aggressive reputation precedes you,” Kuryokhin said with a grin.

Even over the static-laden tactical circuit, he could hear Troitsky’s loud, exasperated sigh. “For God’s sake, Lead, it was one lousy bar fight. Just one. And no one even got killed.”

Kuryokhin shrugged. “I think it was the fact that you were willing to take on four biker gang members by yourself that gotsome attention.”

“I thought there were only two of them,” his wingman said sulkily. “Okay, Lead, I’ll be on my best behavior. But are we still supposed to keep those F-22s off our guys? Or just wave politely at them as they zoom on by?”

“We keep the Americos away,” Kuryokhin confirmed. “We just can’t shoot them in the process.”

Over the circuit, Troitsky sighed again. “Look, Major, you know these rules of engagement are stupid, right? Whoever came up with them must think you can screw a woman through your clothes and still get her pregnant.”

“Stupid they may be, but they’re still the orders we’ve been given,” Kuryokhin said firmly. “Orders that we will both obey to the letter. Copy that?”

“Two copies,” his wingman replied.

The two Su-35s accelerated and raced on to the northeast across the frozen sea—staying at very low altitude to avoid any possibilityof detection by American radar. Flying so low burned fuel fast, cutting their maximum range by more than half. Which was whythe rendezvous they were headed toward was so critical to the success of this mission. Ahead of the two Russian fighters,a band of dark clouds stretched across the sky. They were at the western edge of what seemed to be a never-ending sequenceof snow and ice storms surging down out of the polar region to pummel Alaska and northern Canada.

Rendezvous Point Alpha, High Over the Arctic Ocean

Fifty Minutes Later

One thousand kilometers northeast of Wrangel Island and five hundred kilometers due north of the Alaska coast, two other Russianaircraft flew a fuel-conserving racetrack pattern. One was a very large, swept-wing aircraft with four eight-bladed propellers,a Russian Tu-142 maritime reconnaissance plane. The other, almost as big, was an IL-78M-90A refueling tanker. They were severalthousand meters above the solid cloud layer, orbiting high enough to make out a pale orange glow off to the southeast. Inthese