Arctic Storm Rising
- Автор: Браун Дейл
- Серия: Nick Flynn #1
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 9780063015050
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Arctic Storm Rising». Краткое содержание книги:
A low warning whistle from the edge of the camouflaged encampment interrupted his thoughts. He looked up in surprise and saw a lone figure with what looked like a hunting rifle slung over one shoulder slowly hiking down a snow-covered slope at the western edge of the valley.
“Ah,” Bondarovich said with a wry grin. “It seems our unwanted guest has decided to show himself at last.”
“What unwanted guest?” Voronin demanded.
“An American. A hermit fur trapper working this part of the refuge,” the ex-Spetsnaz major said calmly. “We’ve been aware that he’s had us under observation for the past couple of days.”
Voronin’s mouth tightened in exasperation. “And you let him do this? Knowing the stakes involved?”
Bondarovich shrugged. “The American knows this territory like the back of his own hand, and he’s wary of strangers. I saw no point in spooking him unnecessarily.”
“Do you have any more information about him?” Voronin snapped.
The other man nodded. “I had Makeviĉ check him out,” he confirmed. Besides being an experienced bush pilot, Felix Makeviĉ had worked as a deep-cover GRU agent in Canada for years before switching his employment and loyalty to Grishin and North Star Capital. “His name is Jensen. Trig Jensen. And his only contact with the outside world is through bush pilots who fly into his isolated camp from time to time. Not more often than every three or four months, if that.”
“Does he have a radio or a satellite phone?” Voronin pressed.
“Only a one-way radio that he uses to listen to gospel music from a religious station outside Fairbanks,” Bondarovich answered. “This fellow Jensen is a throwback, a man trying to live almost entirely on his own, outside the modern world.”
“For that I give thanks,” Voronin answered sardonically. With the ex-Spetsnaz major at his side, he moved out to meet the trapper at the edge of the camp.
Up close, Jensen was a short, broad-shouldered man. His full brown beard was streaked with gray. Hard blue eyes peered out at them from under a fur-lined hood. He certainly didn’t waste any time with meaningless courtesies. “What the hell are you folks doing up here?” he demanded. “With your goddamned, noisy helicopter and all? You’re going to scare away the game for twenty miles or more. Damn it, this is a wildlife refuge. It’s totally off-limits to all of this techno bullshit.”
“I do apologize, Mr. — ?” Voronin said smoothly, in utterly unaccented American English, pretending that he didn’t know the other man’s name.
“Jensen.”
Voronin nodded gratefully. “Mr. Jensen.” He spread his hand. “I sincerely regret any inconvenience or disruption of your work, but I assure you that our efforts here have official status.”
“Exactly what kind of official status?” the trapper growled, somehow managing to make the word “official” sound like profanity.
“We’re here as part of a federal climate change research project,” Voronin answered patiently. “And I can assure you that any unintended degradation of this pristine landscape will be completely repaired once we’re finished here.”
Jensen snorted. “Easy to promise. Tough to do.” He glared at them. “You got any proof of this story of yours?”
“Certainly,” Voronin replied. He unzipped his ski jacket slightly and dug out an ID card from one of its inside pockets. Forged by highly paid experts in Moscow, it identified him as James Henderson, an official with the federal Environmental Protection Agency. While the trapper examined it through skeptical eyes, he went on. “In a way, I’m very glad that we’ve met. My research team here could use your obvious familiarity with the ground and the local wildlife.” He smiled. “And naturally, you would be generously compensated for your time.”
“Uh-huh,” Jensen said cynically. He hawked and then spat off to the side, before tossing Voronin’s forged ID back to him. “Look, Mister Whoever You Really Are, I didn’t come all the way out here on my lonesome to grub for pay. And certainly not from the goddamned government.” His eyes narrowed to slits. “Or from anybody else, for that matter. So, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll just be on my way and leave you fellas in peace.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and stalked off — plodding determinedly back up the nearby slope through snow that was more than a foot deep.
Voronin stood watching the American go. When he was out of earshot, he glanced at Bondarovich. “Do you think he believed me?”
The other man shook his head. “Net shansov v adu. Not a chance in hell.”
“A pity,” Voronin commented dryly. Without taking his eyes off the fur trapper, now more than a hundred meters away, he reached out. Understanding his intent, Bondarovich handed him his scoped rifle. Briefly, Voronin inspected the weapon. It was a C14 Timberwolf, the civilian bolt-action rifle the Canadian military had selected to convert for use by its snipers. He nodded in appreciation.
Then he chambered a round, raised the rifle to his shoulder, and smoothly sighted through the scope. Gently, he squeezed the trigger.
Craack.
Struck squarely between the shoulder blades by a .338 Lapua Magnum round moving at nearly nine hundred meters per second, Jensen went down in a spray of red blood against the snow-white landscape. The American writhed once and lay still, sprawled like a rag doll on the hillside.
Voronin studied the dead man for a moment longer. Slowly, he lowered the rifle. “Make sure the body isn’t found.”
“That won’t be a problem,” Bondarovich assured him. “By the time anyone notices this American is missing, he’ll have vanished forever.”
“You seem very confident of that,” Voronin said.
Bondarovich nodded. “This Arctic wildlife refuge contains nearly eighty thousand square kilometers of wasteland. No search party can cover that kind of ground. For all that anyone will ever know, Jensen might as well have been snatched by the Na’in.”
“The Na’in?” Voronin asked.
“A mythical monster of the local native tribe, the Gwich’in,” the ex-Spetsnaz major explained. “Translated, it means ‘the Brush Man,’ a creature that wanders the woods alone in search of human prey.”
Tupolev’s manta ray — shaped PAK-DA stealth bomber prototype streaked low across a darkened landscape west of the Don River. Occasional pockets of light marked small farming villages, and a string of glowing beads stretching from east to west outlined the path of the A-260 highway between Volgograd and the Ukrainian border near Donetsk. An advanced digital terrain-following system allowed the aircraft to stay as low as one hundred meters off the deck — climbing and diving in tiny increments of a few meters at a time as it raced across the steppe’s low, rolling hills and shallow ravines. Abruptly, it banked sharply to the right and soared higher, gaining altitude fast.
Inside the cockpit, Major Oleg Bunin kept his eyes on his displays. “We are executing an attack program,” he reported. His hands were in his lap, away from any controls.
From the left-hand pilot’s seat, Colonel Alexei Petrov nodded. “Copy that.” The altitude bar on his HUD stabilized at five thousand meters as their aircraft rolled back out of its turn and leveled off. Fighting the instinct to regain active control over the bomber, he locked the fingers of his own hands across his stomach. “Our engines are throttling back,” he announced, seeing the settings change without any input from him.