Arctic Storm Rising

Barter Island sat just off Alaska’s desolate Arctic coast. Roughly four miles long and two miles wide, it was a snow-covered, treeless plain. On a narrow spit just off its northern shore, there was a large mound of heaped-up whale bones. Not far from the mound, the tiny village of Kaktovik occupied the island’s northeastern quarter. Around two hundred people lived in its assortment of cabins and prefab houses, most of them Iñupiat Alaska natives.

A thousand-foot-wide saltwater channel separated the island from the mainland, and there were no roads connecting the island to the nearest inhabited place, Prudhoe Bay. Close by Alaskan standards at least, since Prudhoe Bay was more than 110 miles to the west. The only real way in or out for people and freight was by air. An old military runway, perched right on the edge of the Beaufort Sea and subject to periodic flooding during storms, had been abandoned in favor of a relatively new 4,500-foot-long gravel strip built on slightly higher ground in the center of the island. A converted school bus provided routine transportation into town for arriving passengers.

This afternoon, the bright yellow airport bus had been rented by the U.S. military’s Alaskan Command to bring Captain Nick Flynn and his newly formed security team to the Barter Island Long Range Radar Site, about a third of a mile outside Kaktovik. The twelve men, a mix of Alaska National Guardsmen on active duty and regular U.S. Air Force and Army personnel, had flown in earlier aboard a C-130J transport plane dispatched from Anchorage’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson — now 640 miles away to the south.

Alaska was astoundingly big and empty even by Texas standards, Flynn thought moodily, staring out the windows of the bus as it bumped along a rutted gravel track. Their two-hour flight here had carried them across a vast landscape of dense forests, sheer snow-capped mountains, and wide-open tundra flatlands. All told, there were fewer than seven hundred and fifty thousand people scattered across an enormous expanse more than twice the size of Texas. He frowned, remembering one of his college history classes. Back in the 1700s, Voltaire had famously dismissed Canada as just “a few acres of snow.” Nick wondered what the French philosopher would have thought of Alaska — judging by what he’d seen during the flight up here, it was basically a few hundred million acres of snow.

His breath fogged the bus window. This was only the beginning of October, but winter had already arrived on Barter Island. The highs were in the low twenties, with temperatures plunging below zero after dark. This far north, the sun was currently visible for only about ten hours a day. Toward Halloween, it would be above the horizon for just six and a half hours. And then, by late November, the island would find itself wrapped in the perpetual Arctic night — from which it would not emerge for more than six long weeks.

Just imagining that unending spell of frozen darkness was bad enough. But Flynn had a sinking feeling that reality would be even worse. He looked over his shoulder at the soldiers and airmen he would be commanding under those grim conditions. Bulky in military-issue cold weather parkas, trousers, and boots, they were scattered down the length of the bus. They occupied separate bench seats, as though determined to keep their new comrades at arm’s length for the time being. Most of them looked about as gloomy on the outside as he felt inside.