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

more clearly as it grew louder. It was the fast, thudding noise made by a helicopter’s rotors and turbines.

“Down!” he hissed. Everybody on the hillside dropped flat and froze in place. In their white camouflage smocks and heavy rucksacks,they looked more like snow-covered rocks than anything else. He glanced downslope. The two men pulling the sled had stoppedand were staring up at the sky back the way they’d come. He tapped the push on his tactical radio. “Sanchez and Boyd. GrabPedersen and find some cover. Now!”

That kicked them into gear. With the injured man’s arms slung over their shoulders, the two soldiers hurried into a smalldepression lined with snow-covered bushes and went to ground.

“Friendlies?” Kim whispered.

“Not likely,” Flynn replied. That helicopter sounded like it was coming from the north, and there weren’t any U.S. militaryhelicopters closer than Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson—which was hundreds of miles to the south and currently socked in bythat big blizzard.

Takirak wriggled around to face him. “You could be wrong about that, Captain,” he said pointedly. “There are a lot of civilianhelicopter operators working out of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. I used to fly with them a lot when I worked as a guide uparound Deadhorse. Maybe our guys at JBER hired one of those birds to bring in reinforcements for us.”

“Reinforcements from where exactly, Andy?” Flynn asked, working to hide his irritation. For some reason, Takirak seemed tobe trying very hard to sow doubts about every decision he made. What the hell was the noncom’s problem? “In case you forgot,there aren’t other U.S. troops stationed this far north.” That hit home. He saw the older man’s eyes flash angrily.

The thwapping sound of spinning rotors slowed suddenly and then faded away. It was replaced by a low, shrill whine of engines spoolingdown.

Flynn raised his head. The helicopter had landed behind them, somewhere out of sight around the curve of this rocky spur. Reacting quickly, he waved his men back up onto their feet. Pushing on ahead the way he’d originally planned would be foolhardy now. The last thing he wanted was to be surprised by a potentially hostile force closing in from the rear. He clicked his mike. “Sanchez and Boyd, stick tight where you are. And stay off the radio. Six out,” he murmured. He looked at the others. “The same goes for everybody else. Voice commands and hand signals only from here on out. We don’t know who else might be listening to our net.”

His men nodded. Maybe the idea that someone could have broken into their tactical net was crazy, but it felt like a hell ofa weird coincidence for that helicopter to have landed so close to them. It was almost as though it had been guided straightto this particular spot, which was otherwise just one of thousands of square miles of virtually identical wilderness. Onething was for sure, Flynn knew. All of his instincts were screaming danger warnings right now. And he didn’t plan to ignorethem.

Quickly, he issued new orders. They would backtrack along this spur toward where that helicopter had landed—deployed and readyto conduct a hasty ambush against anyone who might be following their trail. He half expected Andy Takirak to bitch some more,but instead the noncom merely nodded. “Good plan, Captain.” Takirak unslung his own weapon and started to move out ahead ofthe rest of the unit. “I’ll go scout,” he said, with a quick, unreadable glance over his shoulder. “I can reach a decent observationpoint faster on my own.”

“Hold on, Andy!” Flynn said sharply.

Almost unwillingly, the older man halted in his tracks. “Sir?”

“Leave the radio,” Flynn ordered, nodding at the bulky PRC-162 still slung over Takirak’s other shoulder. “You don’t needthe weight. And that antenna sticking up might give you away.” For a moment, he had the strangest sense that the sergeantmight disobey him.

But then, with a fleeting half smile, Takirak pulled the radio off his shoulder and set it down on the snowy slope. Withoutanother word, he turned and loped away over a low rise, swiftly vanishing from sight.

Watching him go, Flynn felt the hairs go up on the back of his neck. Takirak’s native name, Amaruq, Gray Wolf, had never before seemed so apt. He had the sudden, eerie impression that the older man had just revealed himselfas a complete stranger—someone he’d never actually known. And as though that revelation was a sort of key to unlock his intuition,Flynn abruptly saw an answer for many of the odd events that had worried him over the past several hours.

Seconds passed while he stood frozen in place, feeling sick at heart and trying to make the pieces to this puzzle fit in someother way. Flynn couldn’t fight down the sudden, terrible certainty that he’d never see M-Squared, his red-haired radioman,again . . . at least not alive. But then he breathed out. There was only one way to be sure, and in the meantime, he wasn’tgoing to gamble with the lives of his men in the hope that he was wrong.

Flynn turned quickly to the half-dozen soldiers and airmen still with him. “Change of plan,” he told them quietly. He pointedat the top of the spur, a couple of hundred feet above where they were now. A tumbled mass of rocks and larger boulders markedthe crest and continued on down the far side. “We’ll set up there instead,” he ordered. “Now, drop your packs here and followme!”

Obeying, they shrugged out of their rucksacks and then hurried after him as he plowed upward through the snow and ice.

Thirty-Six

Northwest of the Spur Hill

That Same Time

As soon as the Ka-60 touched down, Spetsnaz troops slammed both side doors open and poured out in a rush. Bent low, the fourteenRussian commandos fanned out around the helicopter and then dropped flat in the snow with their weapons ready. Camouflagesmocks and white helmet covers helped them blend with their surroundings.

Major Gennady Korenev carefully scanned the steep, treeless hill rising several hundred meters away. A narrow saddle of barerock tied it to