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

luck, he hoped, the blizzard would have eased up enough by then to make the flight possible. If not, some of themore severely injured would be dead before too long.

So time was short, he reminded himself sharply. But he still needed to find out what the hell was going on here. Too manymen had died for him to walk away from here without answers. Not waiting any longer, he slammed the Ka-60’s side door wideopen and dropped out onto the ground—ducking his head against a howling torrent of rotor-blown snow and ice.

Cradling his own captured AKM rifle, Flynn moved out from under the spinning blades . . . and then stopped dead, taken completely by surprise at what he saw ahead of him. They’d landed about fifty yards from the only intact structure left, a very large fabric tent of some kind. It was a faded white that matched the snow-covered terrain, and draped in camouflage netting to break up its silhouette. But the whole front of the tent had just rolled upward, allowing him to see the huge blended-wing aircraft hidden inside.

“Jesus Christ,” Flynn muttered to himself, staggered by the sheer size of this plane. It was as big as a B-2 Spirit stealthbomber and shaped pretty much the same way. But it was just as obviously not an American aircraft design. Which meant it belonged to the Russians. His eyes narrowed in speculation. What kind of wargame was Moscow playing here? Why secretly station a brand-new strategic bomber of some kind—for this could be nothing else—sodeep inside American territory?

He felt a shiver down his spine. Whatever the reason, he was pretty sure it was nothing good, at least not from an Americanperspective. For a split second, Flynn stood frozen in place, remembering the earlier, explicit orders relayed to him fromthe Pentagon: Observe and report any unidentified aircraft on the ground, but under no circumstances take any other action without further instructions. Then he shook his head decisively. Yeah, screw that, he thought with a mental shrug. There was no way he was just goingto sit back and watch the Russians finish whatever they were up to here, because he could hear that stealth bomber’s enginesspooling up right now.

Besides, Flynn asked himself with a sudden grin, what more could the spooks and the Joint Chiefs do to him for disobeyingorders? Exile him to the back end of Alaska again?

He started to trot across the snow toward the hangar. But then he spotted movement under the aircraft’s fuselage. A man inone of those pale blue Russian flight suits—the same kind worn by Mavrichev, the dead general they’d found—was already climbingup a short crew ladder into the bomber.

Without hesitating, Flynn raised the AKM rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. A clump of snow kicked up under thefuselage. Too low. He raised his aim slightly and squeezed off several more shots. This time he saw sparks cascading off themetal ladder. But the crewman he’d been shooting at had already disappeared through the open hatch.

Flynn lowered his weapon and sprinted toward the hangar, acting almost entirely on instinct. He couldn’t tell if he’d scored any hits on that guy, but whether he had or not didn’t seem to matter. Somebody was still inside that Russian stealth aircraft, and unless he wanted to just stand here and watch it fly away, he needed to get a lot closer.

 

Gritting his teeth in pain, Petrov dragged himself up the ladder and flopped over onto the deck. His right arm, torn openby a rifle round, now hung useless at his side. Straining, he struggled back to his feet. But when he tried to turn the manualhatch control, he almost blacked out.

Giving up with a muttered curse, he reeled into the cockpit and dropped into his pilot’s seat. Sickeningly aware of the hotblood soaking the sleeve of his flight suit, Petrov reached out with his left hand and quickly brought up a menu on one ofthe MFDs. Blurry shapes appeared, and he tapped an icon that would retract the ladder and close and seal the belly hatch.With a sigh, he released the brakes and sat back in a daze—feeling the PAK-DA bomber start its programmed takeoff roll.

 

Flynn saw the big aircraft lurch into motion, lumbering forward out of the tentlike hangar, accompanied by a steadily increasingroar from its jet engines. The crew ladder extending from its hatch had started to slide upward and out of sight. “No fuckingway,” he snarled. He threw the rifle aside, lowered his head, and ran even faster, plunging across the snow with rapidly lengtheningstrides.

Moving all out now, he raced under the bomber’s fuselage—heading for the open hatch he’d seen. It was already swinging shut. Frantically, he jumped high, caught hold of the coaming, and hauled himself up through a rapidly narrowing gap. He wriggled away onto a metal deck just as the hatch slammed shut and latched tight behind him. From the vibration and noise all around him, it was clear that the Russian aircraft was still moving . . . bouncing up and down as it trundled onto a rough runway created out of compacted snow and ice.

Oh, smooth move, Flynn thought wryly. He’d just managed to scramble aboard an enemy aircraft that was obviously getting ready to take off.That was all well and good, except that his personal piloting skills had topped somewhere around the model airplane stage.Maybe he should have stopped to think about this whole idea first. Now what was he supposed to do?

Well, when in doubt, improvise like hell, he decided. And, like Teddy Roosevelt said, carry a big stick. Or, in this case,a 9mm Glock 19. He got to his feet and drew his pistol before moving forward into the cockpit.

To Flynn’s surprise, although there were seats for four crewmen, only one, the pilot’s position, was occupied. A Russian AirForce officer, a colonel named Petrov according to the name tag on his flight suit, sat strapped in, bleeding profusely, ashen-faced,and clearly in terrible