Arctic Storm Rising

Twenty-Five

Captain Nick Flynn glanced around the little hotel’s dining room. It wasn’t exactly fancy, but it was reasonably comfortable, warm, and well lit — though maybe a little too well lit for his present purposes. Meals were ordinarily served buffet style, but since he and Captain Laura Van Horn were the only ones eating here tonight, the cook had made a show of bringing plates of something resembling chicken marsala, rice pilaf, and steamed broccoli directly to their booth, even going so far as to adopt an outrageously fake French waiter’s accent in the process.

That had sparked a strangled laugh from the stranded HC-130J’s attractive brunette copilot. “Gosh, I didn’t expect dinner theater,” she remarked to Flynn once the inn’s grinning cook had sauntered back to his kitchen.

“Kaktovik is a lot more sophisticated than you might first think,” he responded with a smile.

Van Horn nodded. “So I gathered from the perfectly nice, store-bought curtains in my room here. Despite all the dire warnings you gave me on the bus last night, this quaint little inn does not actually use strips of cardboard cut from packing boxes for window coverings.”

“They don’t?” Flynn said, pretending to be surprised. “Well, there you go. Sophistication at its peak. After all, this is the biggest town for more than a hundred miles in any direction.”

She wagged an accusing finger at him. “Uh, Nick, I hate to break it to you this way, but Kaktovik is also the only town for a hundred miles in any direction.”

“Let’s not quibble over the choice of a mere adjective,” he said loftily. “I say biggest, you say only. What matters most is that we’re both totally correct.”

Van Horn laughed. “Fair enough.” Then her expression turned more serious. She looked across her plate at him. “Which makes me wonder just how a regular U.S. Air Force officer, especially one who doesn’t come across like he has his head stuck up his ass, ended up getting posted out here in the back of nowhere.” She cocked her head to one side. “I’m kind of guessing it wasn’t because you made a career-winning move in your last assignment.”

To his surprise, Flynn wasn’t as irritated by her probing question as he would have expected. Maybe it was the way she asked it, which seemed honestly sympathetic rather than judgmental. And maybe it was because she was the best-looking woman in uniform he’d seen for weeks. Well, admittedly, borrowing her own joke, she was also the only woman in uniform he’d seen for weeks. But there was something that made him want to trust her. “You’d guess right,” he told her with a tight shrug.

“Care to fill me in?” Van Horn asked, genuinely curious now.

“I wish I could,” he told her truthfully. “But I really can’t. Let’s just say I ended up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with exactly the wrong people.”

Her bright blue eyes widened a fraction. “Oh, wow. Don’t tell me you got caught dallying with your commanding officer’s wife/girlfriend/daughter?”

“Did you seriously just use ‘dallying’ in a sentence?” Flynn laughed.

Van Horn reddened slightly. “I read a lot of old British mysteries. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody. Your secret is safe with me.” Then he sobered up. “But, no, as it happens, I wasn’t messing around with my senior officer’s wife or daughter. Or his girlfriend.” He raised an eyebrow. “So you think of me as a Don Juan type, huh?”

“‘Don Juan’? Now look who’s the nerd!”

Flynn gave her an abashed smile of his own. “Yeah, I majored in English Language and Literature and took tons of humanities courses in college. Definitely non-STEM.” He tapped his chest. “Hence the lack of pilot’s wings.”

“I can see that I’m not the only one around here with a somewhat dubious background,” she commented archly. “But no, Nick, to answer your sort of desperate question, you don’t come across as a Don Juan.” Then she chuckled. “Or maybe I just haven’t gotten to know you well enough yet.”

Well, that seemed promising, Flynn thought a bit smugly.

“So if you weren’t caught with the wrong woman, what did you do to piss off the powers-that-be enough to get stuck out here? I mean, making sure the polar bears don’t decide to walk off with Barter Island’s nice, rusting radar station doesn’t seem like a good match for your skills.” Van Horn looked at him with a puzzled expression.

“It’s classified.”

“Classified? Classified as in ‘It’s embarrassing and I’d rather not tell you’? Or classified as in ‘Seriously spooky stuff’?”

Flynn tried to adopt a casual attitude of indifference and knew he’d failed miserably. Finally, he said, “The spooky sort.”

“And whatever happened still really pisses you off,” she realized, reading the look on his face.

He made himself shrug. “Well, it has forced me to seriously reevaluate my military career. For example, my whole ‘get promoted to general and live a life of idleness and luxury’ plan might need to be scrapped.”

“You know, civilian life isn’t so bad,” Van Horn said in an obvious bid to help change the subject. “Sometimes I don’t even cry when I head out from Elmendorf-Richardson to go home.”

Flynn couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah, you’ve got a point there. So, uh, Laura… what do you do when you’re not wearing a uniform?” Casually, he took a sip of his coffee.

Van Horn coughed out a laugh. “Is that your way to wrangle an invitation to see me out of my uniform?”

Startled, Flynn said, “No, no, that’s not what I meant! I mean, well… I just meant, um, what do you do in your civilian life?” He focused intently on his coffee.

Pleased at the reaction she’d provoked, Van Horn grinned broadly. “Sorry, but that was an easy setup. Actually, I fly for a company that hauls air freight between here and the Lower Forty-Eight. We handle a little bit of everything — airmail packages, crates of wine, medications… all kinds of stuff. Once we even hauled a red Corvette.”

“A Corvette?” Flynn asked, surprised.

She nodded. “There was this oil company exec who wound up being transferred from Houston to Prudhoe Bay. Seems he couldn’t bear to leave his baby behind. Or even wait for it to be shipped by sea.” She shook her head in regret. “Man, I hate to think about what that beautiful car looked like after its first winter up here.”

“Weren’t you tempted to ‘lose it’ in transit?” he asked mischievously. “Just to save such a nice sports car from getting all banged-up and rusty, I mean.”

“Oh hell yes!” Van Horn smiled to show she wasn’t serious. “The only trouble was I couldn’t quite figure out how to pull the Corvette off our plane without anyone noticing.”

Flynn nodded slowly. “I see. So essentially you’re telling me that you’re a wannabe air pirate.”

Van Horn leaned back in the booth and stared at Flynn appraisingly. “I’m a woman with many talents.”

For just a moment, he envisioned the curvy Laura Van Horn in skintight leather leaning against a red Corvette. His pants suddenly felt too tight and he realized he really had been stuck out here in the icy boonies for way too long. “Uh, yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Sure.” He was grateful that there was a table between them as he tried to change the image in his mind.

Van Horn took pity on him and changed the subject again. “So what’s the deal with the guys in this security unit of yours? I know the military’s gone all gung-ho on ‘jointness’ these days, but that’s a pretty wild grab-bag assortment you’ve got there — Army, Air Force, and Army National Guard, right?”

Glad to be able to focus on work, he nodded. “I keep hoping to snag a Marine, a Coastie, and someone from the Space Force so I can make a full set.” He shrugged. “No joy there, yet.”

“And are they as good at causing trouble as you are?” she asked curiously, smiling slightly to take the sting away.

Flynn laughed. “Like you wouldn’t believe!” And then, before he knew it, he found himself telling her funny stories about the assortment of military-grade-A oddballs, misfits, and overall “square peg in a round hole” types he’d found himself saddled with the day they all flew into Barter Island. Everything from M-Squared’s elaborate pranks that almost always backfired on him to Private Vucovich’s failed effort to set up an illicit moonshine still in one of the radar station’s unused storage sheds. “Fortunately, no one was hurt when it exploded,” he finished. “But Vucovich did find himself spending a couple of very cold and very lonely hours picking half-fermented potato slices out of the snow.”

“Oh, holy crap,” Van Horn choked. She dabbed at the tears of laughter in her eyes. “I sure wish I’d been there to see his face when that contraption blew sky-high!”

“It was truly a sight to behold,” Flynn admitted. “It was all there, everything from the agony of defeat to the thrill of seeing a ten-foot high ball of flame billow above the tundra, and knowing it was all his doing.”

She shook her head helplessly, fighting down another wave of uncontrolled laughter. Then she looked straight across the table at him. “And despite all of this stuff, you’re really proud of your team, aren’t you, Nick? Or, at least proud of what you’ve made of them.”

Caught off guard, Flynn thought about it for a long moment. Then he nodded. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I guess I am. They’ve come a long way.”

Over the past weeks, under the pressure of hard work and rigorous training, they’d gone from a bunch of discontented, doggedly separate individuals to a cohesive, effective military unit. It would be going too far to say that any of them were really happy about being stationed at Barter Island. In fact, if he ever heard someone singing the praises of the radar station, he’d probably be tempted to arrange an immediate psych eval. But his men had definitely come together as a group. And despite all the hardships, they appeared determined to do the job they’d been sent here to do and to do it well — no matter how crazy the Pentagon’s idea of guarding the radar station against a physical attack still seemed.

“But that’s mostly Andy Takirak’s doing, I think,” Flynn heard himself saying. “I really lucked out there. He’s probably one of the best NCOs I’ve ever run into.”

Van Horn smiled at him. “From your description of him earlier, he does sound like a true paragon of all the military virtues, combined with the wilderness survival skills of an Alaskan Inuit,” she teased.

“He’s not perfect,” Flynn protested. “In fact, I just found out that he’s got some personality quirks of his own.” He looked sideways as if to make sure they were still alone and lowered his voice. “Horrible ones.”

“Do tell,” she said, with a wicked gleam in her eyes.

“Well, it turns out that one of M-Squared’s most recent projects has been figuring out how to hack into everyone else’s internet accounts,” Flynn said.

“Which is a federal crime,” Van Horn noted.

He nodded. “As I pointed out to Senior Airman Mitchell when I caught him red-handed. At great length. Along with a reminder that the military prison at Leavenworth might actually be one of the few places less appealing than Barter Island.”

“And then you got him to spill what he’d learned?”

“I had to,” Flynn said virtuously. “Just to make sure our unit’s operational secrets were safe.”

“Okay, so what’s your NCO’s terrible secret vice?” Van Horn wondered. “Porn?”

“Worse,” Flynn said darkly. “Much, much worse.” He lowered his voice even further and leaned across the table to whisper in her ear, noticing at the same time that it was a particularly beautiful, eminently kissable ear. “He’s part of an online writing group.”

Van Horn laughed, then her eyes widened again, this time in simulated dread. “Not… not… Star Trek fan fiction?”

“Oh, this goes way beyond a simple court-martial offense like that, I’m afraid,” Flynn told her grimly. “No, they write poetry. Modern, nonrhyming poetry. All about the wonders of the Alaskan wilderness. And sunsets. And the ocean.”

“You’re kidding me,” she said in disbelief.

He shook his head with a grin. “Nope. I swear it’s the God’s honest truth. And I kind of wish I hadn’t looked at what M-Squared showed me. Some things should stay private.”

“Definitely!”

For another long moment, they looked at each other in silence. Then Flynn cleared his throat awkwardly. “So, I’ve been meaning to 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 about twenty 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. Or maybe 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 big deal 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 said with a certain, deep-seated satisfaction.

“On a wet floor?”

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