Arctic Storm Rising by Dale Brown (android based ebook reader .TXT) 📕

saw, he nodded to Flynn. Then he moved around to the side of the equipment pallet loaded with their two snow machines, sleds, and other heavy gear. The jumpmaster clipped his own safety line to a bracket. “We’re opening the rear ramp now! Get set!”

Flynn and the others shuffled carefully into position several feet behind the pallet.

The tail section of the HC-130J split in two, with the top half elevating out of the way as the big rear ramp whirred downand locked in position. The whole process took just twenty seconds. Immediately, the noise level ratcheted up to an almostunimaginable level. Between the suddenly magnified roar of the huge Rolls-Royce turboprops and the howling ice-cold wind gustswhipping down the length of the compartment, it was now virtually impossible to hear anything.

Crouched beside the equipment pallet, Wahl signaled the waiting men to stand by. They were ten seconds out from the drop zone.Abruptly, he yanked a restraining cord away. Freed, the pallet rolled smoothly down the ramp, tipped over, and vanished intothin air.

Given the “go” signal by Wahl the moment the ramp was clear, Flynn didn’t hesitate. He moved forward down the ramp and steppedoff into space.

Instantly hurled away from the HC-130J by its freezing prop blast, Flynn tumbled through the night sky like a gale-borne leaf . . .until his parachute snapped open with a tooth-rattling jolt. Jesus, he thought dazedly, that hurt. Dangling under the chute’s billowing canopy, he slid downwind at a dizzying pace. Looking down past his boots, he saw adarkened landscape lit silver in places by moonlight spilling through fissures in the cloud layer overhead. Steep-sided hillsand ridges rose on all sides of the snow-covered valley below. And the boulder-strewn slopes lining its southern edge weregrowing ever-larger with alarming speed.

Flynn held tight to his risers and twisted around, trying to find the rest of his team as they jumped behind him. He had timeto catch only a brief glimpse of other moonlit parachutes scattering across the sky on the wind.

Everything after that happened very fast. The silvery snowpack below him took on shape and definition with horrifying swiftness. Hurriedly, he released his rucksack and weapons case, bent his knees, tucked his chin, and—

Whummp.

Flynn thumped down with a bone-jarring thud and rolled sideways. Despite the hard landing, this time he was able to uncliphis left-side riser attach and spill the wind from his fluttering canopy before it could drag him very far across the snow.Moving quickly, he stowed his used parachute, shrugged out of his jump harness, and then checked over his weapons and othergear—pausing only to spit blood from a cut lip into the snow.

Clambering to his feet, Flynn turned through a complete circle to get his bearings. As best he could judge, he’d come downabout two-thirds of the way across the valley. He strapped on a pair of snowshoes and set off back to the north, plowing determinedlythrough foot-deep snow toward where he judged their equipment pallet should have come down. Since the pallet held their onlymotorized vehicles and additional supplies, he’d told his team that would be their rally point. Gusts of wind whipped up glitteringwaves of snow and ice crystals that stung every exposed bit of skin on his face. Hurriedly, he pulled up his face mask, duckedhis head down, and kept moving.

He found the pallet about 250 yards away, lying canted over at a forty-five-degree angle under its collapsed parachutes. Driftingdown out of the sky, it had smacked straight into a little clump of dwarf willow trees with disastrous results. Both snowmachines had broken loose on impact. Slammed against tree trunks with tremendous force, they were little more than crumpledmasses of metal and fractured fiberglass. One of the two towed sleds was probably salvageable. The other was a complete wreck,with both its runners torn off and twisted out of recognition. Bags and boxes of medical and other supplies were strewn acrossthe snow, most of them ripped open.

“Well, shit,” Flynn muttered with feeling, staring at the mess. The emergency search-and-rescue effort he’d been ordered to mount had just been knocked back to a nineteenth-century technological level. He was now entirely dependent on men on foot using snowshoes and cross-country skis to traverse difficult terrain.

Over the next several minutes, in ones and twos, more of his men straggled in, bowed down under the weight of their own weaponsand gear. They all stopped dead when they saw the shattered pallet and its wrecked cargo. Growled profanity blistered thefreezing air, most of it directed at the “goddamn Air Force” for “managing to score a bull’s-eye on the one fucking clumpof trees in a couple hundred fucking miles.”

“Now what?” Hynes asked bluntly. “Sir.”

Flynn forced himself to smile back at the square-shouldered, Army enlisted man. Boosting morale with stupid jokes and determinedoptimism was one of the most important tasks for any military officer, even when everyone knew it was total bullshit. “Nowwe all hoof it, PFC. Just like in the good old days. You joined the infantry first, didn’t you? Trekking through the wildernesson your own two feet ought to be right up your alley.”

“Yeah, cheer up, Cole,” one of the others said with a crooked smile of his own. “Sure, it’s fricking cold out. And it’s dark.And we’re all gonna have to drag our sorry asses through the snow for miles and miles—”

“I’m waiting for the ‘but’ here, Boyd,” Hynes said darkly.

“Well, I mean, how much worse could it get?” the other man finished.

“A lot worse,” another soldier said suddenly, looking off to the south.

Flynn turned and saw a little party trudging slowly toward them out of the darkness. Wade Vucovich was staggering along underthe weight not only of his own equipment, but also that of Sanchez and Torvald Pedersen. The big New Mexican had Pedersenslung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. In a rush, everyone moved to join them.

With a grunt, Sanchez stopped and kneeled down. Then, gently, he rolled the dark-haired sniper off his shoulder and set him carefully on the snow.

“What happened?” Flynn asked, squatting next