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:
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.”