Arctic Storm Rising

Nine

In a whirling flurry of rotor-blown snow, a large twin-engine helicopter settled heavily onto the tundra. Painted white with red stripes, it was a Boeing Vertol 234 heavy-lift helicopter — the civilian version of a military CH-47 Chinook. As its turboshaft engines spooled down, both rotors gradually slowed and then stopped moving. The rear ramp whined down and thudded into the snow, revealing a compartment crammed full with nearly eleven metric tons of cargo. A couple pieces of small construction equipment — walk-behind, smooth-drum, compaction rollers — were strapped down closest to the opening. Large sections of folded white fabric and long aluminum stringers filled the rest of the fuselage from floor to ceiling.

Kept comfortable despite the cold by his fashionable gray-and-blue Rossignol ski jacket, Gore-Tex pants, and waterproof boots, Pavel Voronin strode down the ramp and around to one side of the big helicopter. As it climbed above one of the neighboring peaks, the morning sun threw his shadow far across a dazzling white field.

Several men were already headed his way from out of a clump of dwarf black spruce and willow trees. Behind them, a handful of carefully camouflaged tents nestled among the trees.

Voronin nodded a greeting to their leader, a lean, wiry man carrying a scoped rifle, who trudged up to join him while the rest moved on to start unloading cargo from the helicopter. “Zdravstvuyte, Sergei Bondarovich.”

“Welcome to Voron’ye Pole, Crow Field,” Bondarovich replied. Like the others on this small, covert operations team, he had served in Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special operations forces. Before he left the military to work for Dmitri Grishin and North Star Capital, he had attained the rank of major.

“Crow Field?”

Bondarovich shrugged. “We had to call this place something.”

“True,” Voronin agreed. Almost none of the hundreds of mountains, ridges, valleys, rivers, and streams inside the enormous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge bore official names. The absence of identified places on maps made the wilderness seem even more alien and inaccessible — a trackless region the size of Scotland that was virtually untouched by humans or any of their works and words. But Bondarovich’s choice made sense since the little icebound stream bordering this concealed camp eventually joined one of the rare exceptions to that rule, the Old Crow River. And, he thought, when one considered how North Star planned to use this remote valley, calling it Crow Field was even more apt.

He moved off to the side, making way for the first drum roller as it trundled down the helicopter ramp and turned toward the camp. A shallow trail of densely compacted snow and ice marked its passage across the tundra. Pleased by this first evidence of the construction equipment’s effectiveness, he knelt and pushed at the trail with his gloves. It felt solid, unyielding to the touch.

Voronin got back to his feet. “That should do the trick,” he commented.

“No doubt,” Bondarovich said. “Once you give us the go-ahead to start full-scale operations, we’ll start clearing the valley floor of any obstructions and compacting the snow layer to the required depth.”

“How long will you need?”

Bondarovich pulled at his chin. “Three days at a minimum,” he said. “But more likely four. Or even possibly five. We’re down to only about seven and a half hours of sunlight already, and we lose more than nine minutes every day. If we rig lights to keep working after it gets dark, we could easily blow our cover here.”

Voronin nodded his understanding. There were no other settled places anywhere near this valley. Lights glowing here at night, in what should otherwise be unbroken darkness, would stand out like a sore thumb to any passing aircraft, triggering any number of inconvenient questions. Currently, the local Canadian authorities in the little town of Fort McPherson believed the heavy-lift Vertol 234 helicopter’s job was ferrying supplies north to an environmental group that was supposed to be studying the effects of climate change on the Beaufort Sea coast. Nothing could be allowed to shake that conviction, especially with Grishin and Petrov’s high-risk, high-reward plan moving rapidly to fruition.

A low warning whistle from the edge of the camouflaged encampment interrupted his thoughts. He looked up in surprise and saw a lone figure with what looked like a hunting rifle slung over one shoulder slowly hiking down a snow-covered slope at the western edge of the valley.

“Ah,” Bondarovich said with a wry grin. “It seems our unwanted guest has decided to show himself at last.”

“What unwanted guest?” Voronin demanded.

“An American. A hermit fur trapper working this part of the refuge,” the ex-Spetsnaz major said calmly. “We’ve been aware that he’s had us under observation for the past couple of days.”

Voronin’s mouth tightened in exasperation. “And you let him do this? Knowing the stakes involved?”

Bondarovich shrugged. “The American knows this territory like the back of his own hand, and he’s wary of strangers. I saw no point in spooking him unnecessarily.”

“Do you have any more information about him?” Voronin snapped.

The other man nodded. “I had Makeviĉ check him out,” he confirmed. Besides being an experienced bush pilot, Felix Makeviĉ had worked as a deep-cover GRU agent in Canada for years before switching his employment and loyalty to Grishin and North Star Capital. “His name is Jensen. Trig Jensen. And his only contact with the outside world is through bush pilots who fly into his isolated camp from time to time. Not more often than every three or four months, if that.”

“Does he have a radio or a satellite phone?” Voronin pressed.

“Only a one-way radio that he uses to listen to gospel music from a religious station outside Fairbanks,” Bondarovich answered. “This fellow Jensen is a throwback, a man trying to live almost entirely on his own, outside the modern world.”

“For that I give thanks,” Voronin answered sardonically. With the ex-Spetsnaz major at his side, he moved out to meet the trapper at the edge of the camp.

Up close, Jensen was a short, broad-shouldered man. His full brown beard was streaked with gray. Hard blue eyes peered out at them from under a fur-lined hood. He certainly didn’t waste any time with meaningless courtesies. “What the hell are you folks doing up here?” he demanded. “With your goddamned, noisy helicopter and all? You’re going to scare away the game for twenty miles or more. Damn it, this is a wildlife refuge. It’s totally off-limits to all of this techno bullshit.”

“I do apologize, Mr. — ?” Voronin said smoothly, in utterly unaccented American English, pretending that he didn’t know the other man’s name.

“Jensen.”

Voronin nodded gratefully. “Mr. Jensen.” He spread his hand. “I sincerely regret any inconvenience or disruption of your work, but I assure you that our efforts here have official status.”

“Exactly what kind of official status?” the trapper growled, somehow managing to make the word “official” sound like profanity.

“We’re here as part of a federal climate change research project,” Voronin answered patiently. “And I can assure you that any unintended degradation of this pristine landscape will be completely repaired once we’re finished here.”

Jensen snorted. “Easy to promise. Tough to do.” He glared at them. “You got any proof of this story of yours?”

“Certainly,” Voronin replied. He unzipped his ski jacket slightly and dug out an ID card from one of its inside pockets. Forged by highly paid experts in Moscow, it identified him as James Henderson, an official with the federal Environmental Protection Agency. While the trapper examined it through skeptical eyes, he went on. “In a way, I’m very glad that we’ve met. My research team here could use your obvious familiarity with the ground and the local wildlife.” He smiled. “And naturally, you would be generously compensated for your time.”

“Uh-huh,” Jensen said cynically. He hawked and then spat off to the side, before tossing Voronin’s forged ID back to him. “Look, Mister Whoever You Really Are, I didn’t come all the way out here on my lonesome to grub for pay. And certainly not from the goddamned government.” His eyes narrowed to slits. “Or from anybody else, for that matter. So, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll just be on my way and leave you fellas in peace.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and stalked off — plodding determinedly back up the nearby slope through snow that was more than a foot deep.

Voronin stood watching the American go. When he was out of earshot, he glanced at Bondarovich. “Do you think he believed me?”

The other man shook his head. “Net shansov v adu. Not a chance in hell.”

“A pity,” Voronin commented dryly. Without taking his eyes off the fur trapper, now more than a hundred meters away, he reached out. Understanding his intent, Bondarovich handed him his scoped rifle. Briefly, Voronin inspected the weapon. It was a C14 Timberwolf, the civilian bolt-action rifle the Canadian military had selected to convert for use by its snipers. He nodded in appreciation.

Then he chambered a round, raised the rifle to his shoulder, and smoothly sighted through the scope. Gently, he squeezed the trigger.

Craack.

Struck squarely between the shoulder blades by a .338 Lapua Magnum round moving at nearly nine hundred meters per second, Jensen went down in a spray of red blood against the snow-white landscape. The American writhed once and lay still, sprawled like a rag doll on the hillside.

Voronin studied the dead man for a moment longer. Slowly, he lowered the rifle. “Make sure the body isn’t found.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Bondarovich assured him. “By the time anyone notices this American is missing, he’ll have vanished forever.”

“You seem very confident of that,” Voronin said.

Bondarovich nodded. “This Arctic wildlife refuge contains nearly eighty thousand square kilometers of wasteland. No search party can cover that kind of ground. For all that anyone will ever know, Jensen might as well have been snatched by the Na’in.”

“The Na’in?” Voronin asked.

“A mythical monster of the local native tribe, the Gwich’in,” the ex-Spetsnaz major explained. “Translated, it means ‘the Brush Man,’ a creature that wanders the woods alone in search of human prey.”

Tupolev’s manta ray — shaped PAK-DA stealth bomber prototype streaked low across a darkened landscape west of the Don River. Occasional pockets of light marked small farming villages, and a string of glowing beads stretching from east to west outlined the path of the A-260 highway between Volgograd and the Ukrainian border near Donetsk. An advanced digital terrain-following system allowed the aircraft to stay as low as one hundred meters off the deck — climbing and diving in tiny increments of a few meters at a time as it raced across the steppe’s low, rolling hills and shallow ravines. Abruptly, it banked sharply to the right and soared higher, gaining altitude fast.

Inside the cockpit, Major Oleg Bunin kept his eyes on his displays. “We are executing an attack program,” he reported. His hands were in his lap, away from any controls.

From the left-hand pilot’s seat, Colonel Alexei Petrov nodded. “Copy that.” The altitude bar on his HUD stabilized at five thousand meters as their aircraft rolled back out of its turn and leveled off. Fighting the instinct to regain active control over the bomber, he locked the fingers of his own hands across his stomach. “Our engines are throttling back,” he announced, seeing the settings change without any input from him.

“Target selection,” Bunin said quietly, watching his own screens shift yet again. “Range one thousand kilometers.” He glanced across the cockpit. “That’s the dummy missile complex south of Ryazan.”

A blinking green icon flashed into existence in Petrov’s vision. It turned solid a second later. “The target’s coordinates are downloaded to our practice missile.”

With a high-pitched whine, the doors of a weapons bay in the fuselage behind them slid open. And then the stealth bomber shuddered slightly as a single Kh-102 cruise missile weighing 2,400 kilograms released and fell away into the air. Seconds later, a seven-and-a-half-meter-long finned shape zoomed away to the north-northwest.

“Good engine start on the missile,” Petrov confirmed. Right on schedule, the Kh-102’s turbofan engine had ignited as it dropped toward the ground. He breathed out in relief, as did Bunin. A failure would have created an embarrassing impact crater somewhere on the grassy steppe below them, but nothing worse, since the practice cruise missile was armed only with a mock payload. In wartime, that Kh-102 would have been armed with a 250-kiloton thermonuclear warhead — twelve and a half times more powerful than the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

New menus flickered onto Bunin’s multifunction displays. “Attack judged complete,” he murmured. “We are returning to base.”

In confirmation, the PAK-DA banked hard again, turning back toward the airfield at Akhtubinsk. From the start of this mission, the aircraft had been operating entirely under computer control, relying on its autonomous systems to handle every detail from takeoff to its precise flight path to target designation and weapons launch. Essentially, its human pilot and copilot were along on this particular test flight only in case something went wrong with the computers or their operating systems.

Throughout the flight home, Petrov kept his attention resolutely focused on his HUD indicators, ready to take back over at the slightest sign of trouble. In one sense, he welcomed the success of this first real test of the prototype’s autonomous systems. It would allow him to push his proposal for a full-scale combat exercise. But he still found the experience of being reduced to a mere spectator aboard the bomber unpleasant, even a bit unnerving. After all, by training and inclination, he was first and foremost a pilot, not a nursemaid for some incomprehensible blur of digital ones and zeroes inside the circuits of a highly advanced thinking machine.

Suddenly, a sharp pain stabbed through his left temple. It felt as though someone had punctured his skull with an ice pick. The glowing numbers and icons on his HUD blurred in his vision, becoming unreadable. Damn it, he thought desperately. Not now. His teeth ground together as a second wave of agony flared through his head. Trying hard not to groan out loud, he unzipped a pocket on his flight suit and grabbed a couple of the powerful pain pills he’d stashed there before takeoff. Aware that he was sweating, he popped them into his mouth and swallowed them whole. He coughed dryly as they scraped down his throat.

“Are you all right, Colonel?” Bunin asked. The bomber copilot looked concerned.

Petrov forced himself to grin. “No problem, Oleg,” he lied. “Just a slight headache.” He shrugged. “I had a little trouble sleeping last night, that’s all.”

“So what was her name?” Bunin asked, grinning back. The worry faded from his friendly, open face.

“A gentleman never tells,” Petrov retorted. His headache dialed back a bit as the fast-acting drugs took effect. Now it was more a sensation of steady, unrelenting pressure than of pulsing, stabbing torture. The indicators on his HUD swam back into focus.

“Just so long as it wasn’t that hot blonde,” Bunin laughed. “You know, the curvy captain in Operations?” His hands sketched out what he considered the officer in question’s most obvious assets. “Because I’ve already got my eyes on her.”

Half closing his eyes against the dull pain still squeezing his head in a vise grip, Petrov settled back against his seat. Beside him, his copilot droned on and on, outlining an elaborate scheme to woo and seduce the young woman. Although he nodded encouragement from time to time, inside he was far, far removed from any real interest in Bunin’s sex life. Unfortunately, he thought coldly, the late and unlamented Dr. Viktor Obolensky had been right. His headaches were definitely increasing in both their frequency and severity. With that in mind, perhaps he should be more grateful that the PAK-DA bomber’s autonomous systems had just demonstrated their operational readiness. The time could be coming, and much sooner than he hoped, when he might be forced to rely very heavily on the prototype’s soulless computer programs to carry out his secret plans.