Arctic Storm Rising

Thirty-Three

Alexei Petrov stood in the shelter of the trees near their camouflaged encampment. He had his head cocked, listening intently as the sound of a large turboprop faded slowly in the distance. The aircraft, invisible in the clouds and darkness, had made one slow pass over the neighboring valley to the west before turning away to the north. He glanced at Bondarovich, standing next to him looking up at the sky. “You can relax now, Sergei. Whoever that was knocking on our door, they’re leaving now.”

The ex-Spetsnaz soldier scowled. “That was too close, Colonel.” He nodded toward the camouflaged aircraft shelter. “When can the PAK-DA take off? The sooner that bomber’s in the air and flying back to Russia, the sooner the rest of us can get out of here.”

“Not long now,” Petrov assured him. “No more than a few hours, so long as the winds continue to moderate.” He dug his boot into the snow layer, testing it. “Even after this storm, our improvised runway is still solid. So it’s just a question of waiting for the crosswinds to die down a bit.” He looked at Bondarovich. “I suggest you and your men grab some shut-eye while you can. Your prisoner, too. Poor Major Bunin has a long flight ahead, with the prospect of a cold welcome waiting for him at home. And the rest of us face what will certainly be a long, hard trek to Canada through these mountains, correct?”

The other man nodded in agreement. “True enough.” He smiled thinly. “Though at least our welcome will be much warmer than the major’s.” He raised an eyebrow. “What about you, Colonel?”

Petrov shrugged. “I want to refine the bomber’s return flight plan some more. Just to make sure Bunin won’t get picked up by American radar or patrols on his way out. After all, it would be bad business to take President Zhdanov’s money and then fail to return his property.” He waggled his steel hip flask with a knowing grin. “And if I get tired, I’ve always got a little pick-me-up to keep the party going.”

Eyeing the colonel’s vodka flask with barely concealed contempt, Bondarovich shrugged. He’d made no secret that he found Petrov’s drinking habits unprofessional. “It’s your funeral, I guess.” Wearily, he plodded off through the snow toward the large tent he and Grishin’s other mercenaries used as sleeping quarters. They kept Bunin tied up on a cot there, too, except when they let him eat and attend to matters of nature.

Petrov stood watching him go. My funeral? he thought. His grin twisted. That was truer than the other man knew, and in more ways than one. He shoved the hip flask back into his parka and headed out toward the aircraft shelter. His time here was running out fast and he had preparations to make — preparations that would clear any potential obstacles from his path.

Fourteen heavily equipped Spetsnaz commandos assembled outside what would appear from the air to be mounds of snow and ice. In reality, they were cunningly camouflaged shelters, the core of a small military camp established secretly out on the polar ice cap two days before — hundreds of kilometers off the Russian and American coasts and far outside the detection range of NORAD’s air surveillance radars. A satellite dish angled toward the horizon provided direct communication to Moscow.

Just beyond the tents, aircrews had finished stripping away the netting used to conceal two helicopters. One was a twin-turbine Kamov Ka-60 Kosatka (Killer Whale) troop transport. Russia had transport helicopters with more range and payload capacity, but the Ka-60 was designed for stealth, with special coatings to reduce its radar and thermal signatures. The other machine was a massive Mil Mi-26T2 heavy-lift helicopter that had been converted into an air refueling tanker. The extra fuel it provided en route had allowed the smaller, shorter-ranged Ka-60 to reach this distant hidden base in the first place.

Spetsnaz Major Gennady Korenev squinted against the bitter wind keening across the ice. He was glad that Moscow had finally made up its mind to deploy his detachment. Forty-eight hours spent sheltering against brutal temperatures that routinely dropped to more than forty degrees below zero was more than enough to convince any rational man that this vast desolation was best left to the polar bears.

With Korenev in the lead, his group of elite troops marched briskly toward the waiting Ka-60. Its engines were already spooling up. Slowly at first, and then gradually faster, its rotor blades began turning.

Just before they climbed into the helicopter, Korenev’s second-in-command, Captain Primakov, touched his arm and pointed back toward the camp. “We’ve got company coming,” he yelled over the shrill, growing whine of the helicopter’s twin turbines.

Korenev turned and saw one of the Air Force officers who’d flown in to man this temporary camp hurrying toward them across the ice. His mouth twisted in frustration. “Oh, for God’s sake, has Moscow gotten cold feet?”

“Can’t be as cold as mine right now,” Primakov joked. “Maybe one of our guys left his toothbrush behind.”

Unwilling to be amused, Korenev shook his head. “Get the men on board, Captain. It’s too fucking cold to fart around out here. If the mission’s been called off, at least we can warm up a little first.” He moved out from the helicopter to meet the newcomer halfway.

It was the ice camp’s communications specialist. He held out a message folder and map overlay. “This just came in from Moscow, Major,” he panted, trying to catch his breath in the bitter, lung-freezing chill. “Highest priority.”

Korenev read through the message with growing interest. The GRU had just received new intelligence from one of its most reliable agents, a source code-named SIROTA, Orphan. A small force of American troops — an irregular mix of active-duty Army and Air Force personnel and National Guard reservists — had reached the target zone ahead of them. The map overlay showed the U.S. unit’s last reported position. As a consequence, his original orders to deploy for a covert reconnaissance into the region had been altered. Now he was to hunt down these Americans and eliminate them first. He shrugged, taking this ruthless directive in stride. Like his men, Korenev was a hardened veteran of the war against terrorists in Syria, where prisoners were rarely taken by any side. Pocketing the map overlay, the Spetsnaz major moved on toward his waiting helicopter. As soon as he buckled into his seat, the Ka-60 lifted off and darted southeast, skimming just above the polar ice to avoid detection by enemy radar.

Ninety minutes later, the helicopter slowed in its headlong rush and turned toward an eerie black monolith rising starkly above a gleaming mound of ice. A signal lamp blinked repeatedly from the top of the monolith, which was actually the SSBN Podmoskovye’s large sail.

The Ka-60 orbited once around the surfaced nuclear submarine and then settled in to land nearby. Before its rotors stopped turning, sailors bundled up in thick coats and fur caps against the cold dragged hoses across the ice to begin refilling its nearly empty fuel tanks. Soon, fully refueled, the helicopter lifted off again. Now it flew south, carrying Korenev and his Spetsnaz commandos toward the coast of Alaska and the mountainous wilderness beyond.

Scorched and torn pieces of metal and fragments of half-melted composites were strewn for dozens of yards around a fire-blackened crater a couple of meters deep. The dying F-22 must have augered in almost vertically and at very high speed, Flynn judged. One gruesome check of the crumpled mass of fuselage half buried in the bottom of the crater had confirmed that the Raptor’s pilot hadn’t managed to eject before her aircraft slammed nose-first into the frozen tundra. At least her death was quick, he thought sadly.

Now he and his team were probing the debris field for some sign of the fighter’s mission data recorder — which should have captured everything from cockpit voice and video recordings to detailed data from its engines, flight computers, and other avionics. That was exactly the kind of information Air Force investigators needed. With it, they might be able to piece together a reasonably accurate picture of what had happened during the clash between the American F-22s and the three downed Russian aircraft. In the pale glow cast by the low, full moon poking above the eastern hills, flashlight beams darted here and there through the tangled wreckage.

Flynn crouched beside a blackened metal panel wedged into the dirt. Holding his flashlight in one gloved hand, he gently brushed away flakes of carbonized composites with the other. The panel might have a serial number or an identifier code that could help determine which section of the Raptor it came from.

“Sir!” a voice hissed softly through his headset. “Hey, Captain! It’s me, Hynes. I think I got something here. There’s something weird upslope, maybe a few hundred yards out.”

Flynn looked toward where he’d posted the Army PFC as a sentry at the eastern edge of the debris field. The enlisted man had dropped to one knee, sighting along the barrel of his M249 Para light machine gun up at the steep, rocky hillside looming over the crash site.

Quickly, Flynn moved toward Hynes, staying low himself. He went prone next to the shorter man. “What did you spot? Movement?” he asked sharply.

“No, sir,” the other man said. “Just some kind of lumpy shape up there on that slope. And it hasn’t moved an inch since I first noticed it. But whatever it is, it sure as shit isn’t anything natural.”

Takirak dropped prone on the other side of Hynes. “Trouble?” he asked quietly.

Flynn shrugged. “Could be.” He grinned tightly. “Or maybe PFC Hynes here needs an eye exam.”

“Hey, I was twenty-twenty the last time the docs checked me over,” the enlisted man protested.

Flynn readied his own carbine and nodded to Takirak. “Let’s go check it out, Andy.” He glanced at Hynes. “You cover us, PFC.”

“Yes, sir,” the younger man promised, still sighting through his scope. “If whatever that thing is so much as twitches, I’ll blow the shit out of it.”

Cautiously, Flynn led the way uphill, veering wide to stay out of Hynes’s line of fire. By the time they were about a hundred yards out, he could see what the enlisted man was talking about — a darker, oddly shaped mass nestled in among a field of ice- and snow-covered boulders that must have been deposited across the slope by some retreating glacier thousands of years ago. He and Takirak kept going, planting their feet carefully to avoid sliding back down the steep slope.

When they got within twenty yards, Flynn flicked on his flashlight. His eyes widened slightly as the beam illuminated an unsettling sight — a corpse sheathed in ice and slumped over the handlebars of a snow machine that seemed to have wedged itself between two larger rocks.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered in amazement, hearing an equally astonished murmur from Takirak a little behind him. He moved closer and carefully set his M4 down against a boulder.

Gingerly, they eased the dead man off the machine, laid him down, and then rolled him over. His pale blue flight suit was marked by a dark, reddish-brown stain of dried blood around an ugly exit wound high up on his chest. Flynn’s light settled on the name tag fixed below this wound. генерал-майор василий мавричев, дальняя авиация, it read. Slowly, he translated the Cyrillic letters out loud, “Major General Vasily Mavrichev, Long-Range Aviation.” His jaw tightened. “Okay, this is bullshit,” he growled. “Total, absolute, complete bullshit.”

“Sir? What’s the problem?” Takirak asked, sounding puzzled.

Still frowning hugely, Flynn looked across the corpse at the noncom. “Our ice man here just happens to be the commander of Russia’s Long-Range Aviation Force, Sergeant,” he explained. “The head of their whole goddamned strategic bomber force.”

He squatted back on his haunches, thinking fast. How the hell would a senior Russian Air Force commander end up all the way out here in the middle of nowhere in the first place? Let alone dead with a bullet wound in the back? And riding a snow machine manufactured in America or Canada? He shook his head. Nothing about this weird situation jibed with the briefing he’d been given about a downed Tu-142 reconnaissance aircraft and the Su-35 and F-22 fighters. He said as much out loud.

“Maybe this Mavrichev bailed out of that Russian recon plane before it crashed?” Takirak suggested.

“And you think he just happened to land right next to a working snow machine?” Flynn said, not hiding his skepticism. “Dead-smack in the middle of a few million acres of totally uninhabited wilderness?”

“There are a couple of lone-wolf trappers working parts of the refuge. Or at least there used to be,” Takirak said stubbornly. “And those guys can get mighty trigger-happy if they think someone’s stealing from them. If one of ’em saw this Russian general zooming off on his snow machine, he’d shoot him dead in a heartbeat.”

Flynn stared at him in surprise. He’d expected more from the sergeant’s common sense and intelligence. The other man had to know how unlikely his theory sounded. “Pretty thin odds on that, Andy,” he commented dryly. “Somewhere around a billion-to-one against, I’d guess.”

“Well, he had to come from somewhere, didn’t he?” Takirak pointed out, with a shrug. “I mean, it’s not like he just fell out of an empty sky.” He shook his head. “Look, Captain, I agree this is odd. But the guy’s dead. He’s not a threat, and he’s sure not going anywhere. Right now, we’ve got bigger problems on our plate — between Pedersen’s busted leg and finding those other downed aircraft before the weather closes in on us again.”

Flynn frowned. Part of him agreed with the older man. But only part. The other half of his mind was remembering what General Rosenthal had said about maybe coming across an intact aircraft on the ground. He had a sudden conviction that the two things — this mystery plane and their frozen corpse — must be connected somehow. Which made the dead man potentially far more important than Takirak seemed to want to believe. He looked up. “We still need to call this in, Andy. Pronto.”

“If you say so, Captain,” the sergeant said dubiously. He eyed their surroundings. “Could be tough to get a connection around here, though,” he warned. “Got a lot of high ground in the way that might block our link to the satellite.” With obvious and surprising reluctance, he went through the process of setting up the radio and its small dish antenna.

When Takirak finished, Flynn lifted the handset to his ear. “Kodiak Six to Jaybird One.” In answer, a crackling squealing of high-pitched static blasted his eardrum. He winced and held the handset a little farther away before trying again. “Kodiak Six to Jaybird One,” he repeated. More meaningless noise screeched out of the receiver.

Tight-lipped, Takirak tried adjusting the angle of the antenna. He even switched frequencies. Nothing worked to establish a solid satellite link. After repeated failures, he looked apologetically at Flynn. “Sorry, sir. I can try moving to a different spot. Like I said, these hills could be blocking our signal.”

Frustrated, Flynn nodded. “Do what you can, Sergeant.” He got back to his feet. “Meanwhile, I’m going to go round up the rest of the men.” More than ever, he wished Mitchell hadn’t cut and run on them. The young airman had a real gift for electronics, one that the older National Guard noncom, for all his many other military and wilderness survival skills, obviously did not share.

“We’re moving out?” Takirak asked, sounding surprised. “Before we finish looking for that F-22’s flight recorder?”

“Yep,” Flynn said. He prodded the dead Russian general with the toe of his boot. “My bet is that this guy’s the key to a lot of the strange shit that’s been going on. The blizzard probably wiped out most of the tracks from his snow machine. But maybe we can find traces of blood or ski trails across pockets of snow where they were sheltered from the wind.” He retrieved his carbine. “So my plan now is to follow those traces and see just where they lead.”