The Arctic Event

Chapter Forty-six

Over the Arctic Ocean

The patterns of pack ice below and boiling cumulus clouds above were frost white, while the sea and sky shone a steely blue. Intermittently the MV-22 Osprey VTOL bucked and shuddered like a heavily laden truck on a potholed road. The storm front had passed, but the turbulence of its passage lingered.

With the Combat Talon tanker holding its course ahead and above the Osprey, Major Saunders stalked the refueling drogue streaming from the larger aircraft’s wingtip. It was an exceptionally precise piece of flying machinery. With its wingtip engine pods rotated into horizontal flight mode, the danger of putting the shuttlecock-shaped drogue through the arc of one of the Osprey’s huge prop-rotors was very real. The result, to say the least, would be spectacular.

The intermittent jolts of clear-air turbulence and the fuel gauge bars dipping toward empty only compounded the challenge. Saunders had given his wingman first pass at the tanker, and it had taken the number two VTOL over twenty minutes to make the hookup, burning through most of Saunders’s meager fuel reserve.

The long refueling probe extended from above the cockpit of the Osprey like the horn of a techno-unicorn. For the dozenth time, the Air Commando leader aligned it with the bobbing, weaving mouth of the drogue as a Stone Age hunter might aim a spear. With his knuckles white on the joystick and throttles, he waited for the instant his target might hold steady. It came, and he nudged the throttles forward.

This time, the probe slipped smoothly into the drogue and locked, linking the fuel-starved VTOL with its tanker. Beneath the wing of the big MC-130, command lights shifted pattern to green. “We have locks, pressure, and transfer,” Saunders’s copilot announced.

Saunders exhaled luxuriously. With the drogue secured and kerosene cascading into his fuel tanks, he could relax by a minute increment.

“Nav, how are we doing?” he called over his shoulder to the officer crouching before the GPS console.

“In the groove, sir,” the navigator replied. “We’re clearing the tail of that front now and we’ll be angling east at our next waypoint.”

“ETA to objective?”

“Maybe another three hours to touchdown, sir, depending on the winds.”

“Three hours it is.”

“I touched base with the cutter a few minutes ago, Major,” Saunders’s copilot commented. “The Coasties report clear air, but they aren’t hearing anything from the island yet. I wonder what we’re gonna find.”

“Maybe not a damn thing, Bart. That’s what’s worrying me.”