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:
“It’s your call, sir,” Takirak allowed stiffly. But the disapproving set of his shoulders and the undercurrent of skepticism in his voice both left no doubt that he believed his commander was making a mistake.
Flynn ignored that. Trying to argue the sergeant into agreement would only waste time. And making it even more obvious that their two leaders weren’t seeing eye to eye would only unnerve the rest of his soldiers and airmen. Instead, he pulled his own night vision goggles out of an insulated pouch attached to his body armor and slid them on over his helmet. He powered them up. Instantly, the darkness brightened into a monochrome semblance of daylight. The men around him did the same, though Takirak donned his own vision gear with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.
“Okay,” Flynn said. “We’re going to tighten up our skirmish line from here on out. I want two-man fighting pairs, with a twenty-yard separation between pairs. We’ll follow this spur around back to the northeast and continue on along the main ridge. Keep your eyes peeled and move as quietly as you can. Once we’re back on the main ridge, pay attention to our right flank. That’s the most likely threat axis. If anybody is camped up ahead, they’re probably down there on the valley floor — somewhere close to one of those iced-over streams for water and shelter.”
Hynes held up a hand. “What do we do if we spot someone, sir?”
“You take cover and report the contact, PFC,” Flynn told him. “But nobody opens fire unless I give a direct order. Is that clear?” They nodded.
Flynn swung his M4 carbine off his shoulder. “Right. Let’s move out—” And then he broke off suddenly, holding up a hand for quiet. He thought he’d heard something behind them, off in the north — a faint, rhythmic whirring sound. In the abrupt hush, he heard the noise more clearly as it grew louder. It was the fast, thudding noise made by a helicopter’s rotors and turbines.
“Down!” he hissed. Everybody on the hillside dropped flat and froze in place. In their white camouflage smocks and heavy rucksacks, they looked more like snow-covered rocks than anything else. He glanced downslope. The two men pulling the sled had stopped and were staring up at the sky back the way they’d come. He tapped the push on his tactical radio. “Sanchez and Boyd. Grab Pedersen and find some cover. Now!”
That kicked them into gear. With the injured man’s arms slung over their shoulders, the two soldiers hurried into a small depression lined with snow-covered bushes and went to ground.
“Friendlies?” Kim whispered.
“Not likely,” Flynn replied. That helicopter sounded like it was coming from the north, and there weren’t any U.S. military helicopters closer than Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson — which was hundreds of miles to the south and currently socked in by that big blizzard.
Takirak wriggled around to face him. “You could be wrong about that, Captain,” he said pointedly. “There are a lot of civilian helicopter operators working out of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. I used to fly with them a lot when I worked as a guide up around Deadhorse. Maybe our guys at JBER hired one of those birds to bring in reinforcements for us.”
“Reinforcements from where exactly, Andy?” Flynn asked, working to hide his irritation. For some reason, Takirak seemed to be trying very hard to sow doubts about every decision he made. What the hell was the noncom’s problem? “In case you forgot, there aren’t other U.S. troops stationed this far north.” That hit home. He saw the older man’s eyes flash angrily.
The thwapping sound of spinning rotors slowed suddenly and then faded away. It was replaced by a low, shrill whine of engines spooling down.
Flynn raised his head. The helicopter had landed behind them, somewhere out of sight around the curve of this rocky spur. Reacting quickly, he waved his men back up onto their feet. Pushing on ahead the way he’d originally planned would be foolhardy now. The last thing he wanted was to be surprised by a potentially hostile force closing in from the rear. He clicked his mike. “Sanchez and Boyd, stick tight where you are. And stay off the radio. Six out,” he murmured. He looked at the others. “The same goes for everybody else. Voice commands and hand signals only from here on out. We don’t know who else might be listening to our net.”
His men nodded. Maybe the idea that someone could have broken into their tactical net was crazy, but it felt like a hell of a weird coincidence for that helicopter to have landed so close to them. It was almost as though it had been guided straight to this particular spot, which was otherwise just one of thousands of square miles of virtually identical wilderness. One thing was for sure, Flynn knew. All of his instincts were screaming danger warnings right now. And he didn’t plan to ignore them.
Quickly, he issued new orders. They would backtrack along this spur toward where that helicopter had landed — deployed and ready to conduct a hasty ambush against anyone who might be following their trail. He half expected Andy Takirak to bitch some more, but instead the noncom merely nodded. “Good plan, Captain.” Takirak unslung his own weapon and started to move out ahead of the rest of the unit. “I’ll go scout,” he said, with a quick, unreadable glance over his shoulder. “I can reach a decent observation point faster on my own.”
“Hold on, Andy!” Flynn said sharply.
Almost unwillingly, the older man halted in his tracks. “Sir?”
“Leave the radio,” Flynn ordered, nodding at the bulky PRC-162 still slung over Takirak’s other shoulder. “You don’t need the weight. And that antenna sticking up might give you away.” For a moment, he had the strangest sense that the sergeant might disobey him.
But then, with a fleeting half smile, Takirak pulled the radio off his shoulder and set it down on the snowy slope. Without another word, he turned and loped away over a low rise, swiftly vanishing from sight.
Watching him go, Flynn felt the hairs go up on the back of his neck. Takirak’s native name, Amaruq, Gray Wolf, had never before seemed so apt. He had the sudden, eerie impression that the older man had just revealed himself as a complete stranger — someone he’d never actually known. And as though that revelation was a sort of key to unlock his intuition, Flynn abruptly saw an answer for many of the odd events that had worried him over the past several hours.
Seconds passed while he stood frozen in place, feeling sick at heart and trying to make the pieces to this puzzle fit in some other way. Flynn couldn’t fight down the sudden, terrible certainty that he’d never see M-Squared, his red-haired radioman, again… at least not alive. But then he breathed out. There was only one way to be sure, and in the meantime, he wasn’t going to gamble with the lives of his men in the hope that he was wrong.
Flynn turned quickly to the half-dozen soldiers and airmen still with him. “Change of plan,” he told them quietly. He pointed at the top of the spur, a couple of hundred feet above where they were now. A tumbled mass of rocks and larger boulders marked the crest and continued on down the far side. “We’ll set up there instead,” he ordered. “Now, drop your packs here and follow me!”
Obeying, they shrugged out of their rucksacks and then hurried after him as he plowed upward through the snow and ice.
Thirty-Six
As soon as the Ka-60 touched down, Spetsnaz troops slammed both side doors open and poured out in a rush. Bent low, the fourteen Russian commandos fanned out around the helicopter and then dropped flat in the snow with their weapons ready. Camouflage smocks and white helmet covers helped them blend with their surroundings.
Major Gennady Korenev carefully scanned the steep, treeless hill rising several hundred meters away. A narrow saddle of bare rock tied it to a larger ridge running off to the northeast. He couldn’t make out any movement on that southern spur, but trampled patches in the snow roughly halfway up its slope showed that several men at least had moved across that flank and then around to the other side. He lowered his night vision binoculars and nodded. The Americans, as he’d expected, were somewhere ahead of them.