Arctic Storm Rising

Epilogue

Captain Nick Flynn resisted looking at the wall clock for what seemed the thousandth time in just the past couple of hours. Frantically, he wriggled his back against the pillows, trying again to scratch an itch somewhere inside the bulky upper body cast they’d put him in while his badly broken shoulder healed. No joy. He sighed.

He’d gone far beyond being ordinarily bored at being stuck alone in this hospital room. In fact, Flynn had now moved on to the next stage of boredom, a stage he privately referred to as the “So help me God, the first chance I get I’m going to grab someone’s weapon and shoot my way out of this fricking place” phase. Although that was mostly a joke, he couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that no one planned to let him out of this isolated wing any time soon.

The only people Flynn saw regularly were doctors and nurses… and the armed guards posted outside his door. He’d had to do a lot of arguing even to get a rundown on what had happened after he’d ejected from the Russian aircraft. Fortunately for him, PFC Hynes, who should have his sergeant’s stripes back now as a reward, had reacted instantly to the sight of his commander vanishing into an enemy bomber by ordering the Ka-60 helicopter crew to “follow that plane!” And while falling farther and farther behind the speeding PAK-DA, they’d still been close enough to see Flynn’s ejection seat parachute open, and retrieve him before he froze to death. After that, the helicopter had returned to the battlefield at the spur hill, picked up the wounded and other survivors, and then made it safely through the tail end of the blizzard to Fairbanks. Thankfully, Floyd Leffert, Rafe Sanchez, and Tor Pedersen were expected to recover fully from their injuries. One of the four badly wounded Spetsnaz commandos hadn’t been so lucky, but the other three were still alive — and apparently the subject of a lot of heated diplomatic negotiations between Moscow and Washington, D.C. The same thing went for the two captured Russian pilots and their Ka-60 helicopter.

In the meantime, here he was, Flynn thought gloomily, stuck in isolation — unable to communicate with anyone, not the surviving members of his team and not even his own family. At least the food was decent, for hospital food. Then again, that might only be an omen that they were fattening him up for the bureaucratic kill. What felt like endless hours of debriefings since he’d been flown here from the trauma center in Fairbanks had made a couple of things painfully clear: First, the U.S. intelligence community had desperately wanted to get its grubby hands on that Russian stealth bomber in an intact condition. And second, the spooks were really pissed that the superadvanced aircraft was now scattered in highly radioactive pieces across some desolate slope in the Alaskan Never-Never instead.

Flynn wasn’t sure anyone believed what he’d told them about the Russian colonel’s real plans to blow the hell out of strategic targets from Washington, D.C., to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. One of the CIA debriefers had even snidely wondered why Flynn hadn’t had the foresight to record Petrov’s demented ramblings on his smartphone as evidence. His quick, smart-ass rejoinder that he’d been kind of too busy “doing all that running and shooting and not dying shit” hadn’t gone over very well. His mouth quirked upward in a wry grin. It might be time he reread that book on how to make friends and influence people. Its lessons obviously hadn’t stuck.

There was a soft knock on his door. Flynn looked up warily. It wasn’t anywhere near lunchtime yet, which left only a series of unpleasant alternatives ranging from the next round of painful physical therapy for the injuries he’d sustained while ejecting… to another mind-numbing debriefing session where intelligence officers asked him the same damned questions over and over and over again, obviously hoping they could trip him up somehow. For just a moment, he was tempted to call out “Go away!” just to see what would happen. But then he shrugged. Anything, painful or not, was probably better than just lying here. And not, not, not thinking about the itch between his shoulder blades that he could not scratch.

The door opened.

And Captain Laura Van Horn came in. The attractive, dark-haired National Guard pilot grinned cheerfully at the surprised expression on his face. “Wow, Nick. I heard you’d had a tough time, but I have to say that you really do look like hell.”

With an effort, Flynn closed his mouth. “It’s camouflage,” he told her, smiling back. “I’m only lulling the sentries out there by looking helpless like this. That way I can catch them off guard when I make my move to break out of this joint.”

Van Horn came over and gently tapped the solid plaster cast encasing his chest and arms. “Pretty good camouflage,” she commented dryly.

“I may have gone a bit overboard,” Flynn admitted. He raised an eyebrow. “Which leads me to wonder just how you got in here. From what I can tell, I’m sort of off-limits to just about everyone.”

She nodded. “That you are.” She shrugged. “But I told you I was a woman of many talents, remember?”

“Yeah,” Flynn said tightly, trying very hard not to summon up the mental image he’d created the last time she said that. Stuck in a hospital bed with twenty pounds of plaster immobilizing his arms was definitely not the right moment to imagine Laura Van Horn in a sexy outfit.

“Plus, I have some friends in high places,” she said as the door opened behind her. A thin, middle-aged man in a dark jacket and tie quietly entered. He had graying hair and pale eyes that peered out knowingly behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

Flynn looked him over with a skeptical eye. “You don’t strike me as being a doctor. And you’re sure as hell not a nurse. Which makes you—”

“My boss,” Van Horn finished for him. “Mr. Fox.”

“Fox? Seriously?” Flynn said. “And now you’re going to tell me that Mr. Fox here heads up a civilian air freight company in Alaska? Flying people’s mail orders and gift boxes between there and Seattle?”

She had the grace to redden slightly. “That may not have been completely accurate.” She folded her arms. “Our range of operations is actually a little more… global.”

“I bet,” Flynn said, starting to feel a little angry at having been played for a sucker when they first met. “I guess what you really do is more like delivering weapons and explosives to a bunch of rebels or terrorists or freedom fighters in faraway, godforsaken places — depending on what they’re calling themselves on any particular day of the week.”

“Not at all, Captain Flynn,” the older man said with a dry laugh. “We leave idiocy along those lines to the amateurs, like the CIA.”

“So who are you?” Flynn challenged him. “Defense Intelligence Agency? Homeland Security? FBI?”

“None of those,” Fox said with some amusement. “I run a little outfit of my own.”

Flynn looked at him. “Called what?”

The older man shrugged. “Many different names, depending on the task in hand.” Casually, he seated himself in one of the chairs next to the bed. “What matters is that I’m always on the lookout for people who might be useful.”

Flynn glanced up at Laura Van Horn. “So, our whole dinner date? What was that, just an artfully managed job interview? Complete with a carefully arranged dud aircraft engine?”

Reddening a bit more, she shook her head.

“That, Captain Flynn,” Fox said calmly, “was serendipity.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Oh, given time, I would have asked Laura here to find a way to talk to you… to size you up, one could say. You’ve been on my radar as a possible recruit to our little band of brothers and sisters for quite a while.”

Flynn stared at him. “Why me?”

“You have language skills, high intelligence, intuition, tenacity, and daring,” Fox told him frankly. He smiled. “Those aren’t common anywhere, and certainly not in our government’s more… established… intelligence bureaucracies.” Behind his lenses, his pale eyes gleamed. “Besides, you’ve demonstrated a remarkable talent for pissing off all the wrong people by doing exactly the right thing. A talent like that should be put to even wider use.”

Flynn looked across at Van Horn. “You work for this guy,” he said quietly. “What does it really involve?”

“No bullshit this time?” she asked, with the faint echo of a laugh.

“No bullshit,” he confirmed.

Van Horn nodded, looking relieved at his change in tone. “Well, Nick, basically the job involves travel to a variety of unsavory, exotic places, frequent danger, and the occasional risk of getting killed. All for relatively low pay and uncertain benefits.”

“So, pretty much the same as serving in the armed forces, then,” Flynn pointed out with a quick, sidelong grin.

Fox nodded. “True enough,” he allowed, with a fleeting smile of his own. “But with one rather significant exception… especially to someone like you.”

“And what’s that?” Flynn wondered.

“The opportunity for truly independent action, without being held back or second-guessed by superiors who are more interested in protecting their careers than in accomplishing the mission,” Fox said bluntly.

For a time, Flynn considered that, looking back and forth between Laura Van Horn and Fox. How far could he trust them? Maybe not far, he thought. At least not yet. Then again, if even half of what they said was accurate, it could turn out to be one hell of a ride. He nodded. “Okay, count me in.”

Dmitri Grishin’s huge luxury yacht was anchored off a small, cliff-circled harbor on the French coast. One of the hundred-meter-long vessel’s auxiliary craft, a beautiful teak motorboat, rumbled softly across the azure waters of the Mediterranean, swung through a graceful curve, and glided in alongside a centuries-old stone quay. Quickly, crewmen tied the motorboat up and then turned to help their only passenger, the oligarch himself, up a short ladder.

At the top, Grishin paused to thank them. “Your service during this vacation has been superb, and will be amply rewarded,” he said cheerfully. “I only wish the press of business didn’t require me to return so soon to Moscow.”

They bobbed their heads in gratitude. Their employer, though demanding, paid well — and tipped even better when he was pleased. And everyone aboard the yacht had noticed the sea change in his mood over the last few days. With a final, genial wave, Grishin turned toward the limousine that would take him back to the airport in Nice.

And then his head exploded — blown apart by a subsonic 9mm round. Without a sound, his corpse toppled off the quay and splashed into the Mediterranean.

Three hundred meters away, high up on the rocky cliff overlooking the little village, the man who’d shot him began methodically disassembling his scoped VSS Vintorez sniper rifle. This silenced weapon had been specially developed for use by Spetsnaz-trained assassins.

Two other men stood nearby, watching impassively while the murderer quietly and efficiently stowed the tools of his trade in a carrying case. One of them was a senior officer in Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. He turned to the tall, elegantly dressed younger man at his side. “Moscow is grateful for your cooperation and patriotism, Mr. Voronin,” he said. “Without your information, this traitor might have managed to escape detection. And only your inside knowledge enabled us to retrieve the two hundred billion rubles he had been paid as ransom.”

Pavel Voronin smiled modestly. “What else could I have done, once I learned the true extent of Grishin’s crimes?” he said. He sighed. “The old man betrayed us all in the end, every single one of those who trusted him.”

Somberly, the SVR officer nodded. “A nasty business, indeed. President Zhdanov took the news of this treachery on Grishin’s part very badly.”

“Please assure the president that both he and Mother Russia can always count on my loyal service,” Voronin assured him earnestly.

Later, watching the two other Russians depart, Pavel Voronin smiled more genuinely. With a single, simple act, he had freed himself from his unnecessary apprenticeship to Grishin. The oligarch had always been too cautious, too narrow in his thinking. Soon, Voronin thought coldly, he would be able to realize the full extent of his own personal ambitions — a task that would be made considerably easier by the billions of dollars the Americans had so generously and foolishly paid into secret accounts that were now his… and his alone. Whistling softly, Voronin turned and walked away from the cliff.

Behind him, in the gathering darkness, Dmitri Grishin’s body floated slowly out to sea.