by Dale Brown
The oligarch had no illusions. Although he had been one of the earliest and strongest supporters of his nation’s authoritarian president, Piotr Zhdanov, he knew the Kremlin leader would not hesitate to sacrifice even his closest allies to save his own skin and position. “Lightening the sleigh”—throwing the weak overboard for the wolves to devour first—was an old and cruel Russian tradition. Under serious threat, Zhdanov would eagerly seize the opportunity to toss the mob a scapegoat or two. And during an economic crisis, blaming the nation’s troubles on “criminal capitalist billionaires” was an obvious play.
Finished with his depressing reading, he signed the last report and sat back with a heavy sigh. The omens all pointed in the same dark direction. His status, his fortune, and even his personal safety and that of his immediate family were all increasingly at risk. He looked up from his desk, noticing that outside his office windows, the morning’s weak sunshine and pale blue skies had yielded to looming gray clouds. Wonderful, he thought dourly. Even the weather matched his mood. From the look of those clouds, Moscow’s first real snowfall of the season was on the way.
Then Grishin laughed harshly. Enough moaning and pissing, Dmitri, he told himself. He had no intention of sitting frozen in fear, like a mouse transfixed by the hungry, burning gleam of a cat’s eyes. His determination to act first against the threats he saw emerging had been the genesis for the audacious, highly risky scheme he had privately code-named Akt Ischeznoveniya, Vanishing Act.
Leaning forward again, he picked up a secure internal phone. Teams of professionals checked and rechecked North Star’s communications and computer networks every day to make sure they were safe from unauthorized access by corporate rivals and snooping government agencies. Like all rich and powerful men in Russia, Grishin had many secrets that were too dangerous to share. “Send in my visitor,” he ordered tersely.
Moments later, his office door buzzed and then swung open to admit a tall, fit man in his early thirties. From the stylishly tailored shoulders of his Savile Row bespoke suit to the narrow tips of his expensive, Italian leather dress shoes, Pavel Voronin appeared to be the consummate, high-level corporate courtier. He had been educated overseas at the best schools in the United Kingdom and the United States, and it showed. Anyone meeting him for the first time would have pegged him as a polished yes-man—more used to crafting bland, inoffensive memos and massaging delicate executive egos than engaging in the rough-and-tumble, red in tooth and claw, real world of Russian business infighting.
The facade the younger man presented to others amused Grishin.
In reality, Voronin was his top troubleshooter—in all senses of the word. Outwardly genial and cultured, he was actually ruthless, driven, and completely amoral, willing to go to any lengths needed to accomplish whatever task he’d been assigned. In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, he would have been snapped up by the KGB or the GRU at a relatively early age and trained in the dark arts of “wet work,” murder and assassination. Fortunately, Grishin’s talent scouts had spotted him before Russia’s revamped intelligence bureaucracies realized the depths of his ambition and skills. And there was no doubt that the younger man found working for his current patron far more interesting and lucrative than government service. To enhance his effectiveness, only a handful of the oligarch’s closest aides knew that Voronin worked for North Star Capital. On his rare visits to the Mercury City Tower, he used Grishin’s own private executive elevator.
Currently, Voronin was responsible for handling the operational details involved in Vanishing Act. That included acting as Grishin’s discreet liaison with Colonel Alexei Petrov. As their plan drew ever nearer to activation, it was no longer safe or sensible for the two of them to meet in person, or even by phone or email.
Grishin nodded brusquely at the single chair in front of his desk. He waited while the younger man sat down and crossed his perfectly creased trouser legs. “I hear there was an unfortunate incident during the most recent PAK-DA prototype flight?”
With a hint of a smile, Voronin nodded. “So there was.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “Apparently, a simple, easily fixed programming error created a very dangerous situation—one that could easily have led to the loss of the aircraft and its crew.” His smile widened. “Fortunately, Colonel Petrov’s flying skill, courage, and dedication to duty saved the entire stealth bomber program from catastrophe.”
Grishin nodded. “That is excellent news.” He raised an eyebrow. “I hope the colonel’s merits are appreciated by his superiors?”
Voronin nodded. “My sources inside the Kremlin assure me that the powers-that-be fully understand the bullet they just dodged. Losing the PAK-DA prototype would have been an utter political and strategic disaster. In fact, I hear that President Zhdanov himself phoned Petrov to offer his thanks and congratulations.” His pale gray eyes gleamed with amusement. “As of this moment, our illustrious national leader is convinced that the colonel is someone who can do no wrong.”
“And this computer glitch?” Grishin pressed. “The one that caused all this trouble?”
“Investigators are already digging into its origin,” Voronin said calmly.
“Will that be a problem?”
“No,” Voronin said simply.
Grishin eyed him. “You seem very confident of that, Pavel.”
“Tragically, the Tupolev software engineer responsible for that piece of flawed code is no longer available for interrogation,” Voronin explained. “Apparently, he accidentally fell out of a window last month. According to the police report, he was heavily intoxicated.”
“How . . . unfortunate,” Grishin commented dryly.
Voronin shrugged again. “Alcoholism is the sad national curse of our beloved Motherland, is it not? Certainly, it serves as a useful explanation for a multitude of sins.”
Slowly, Grishin nodded. Inwardly, he felt a momentary chill. There were times when the younger man’s casual willingness to kill unnerved even him. Then again, he reminded himself, Voronin’s cold-blooded efficiency was a survival trait—and one that profited his employer as well. After all, there were no prizes for second place in the high-stakes game they were currently playing, only disgrace, humiliation, and, in all probability, execution for treason.
Eight
South of Deadhorse, near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska
Several Days Later
With his face and eyes protected from subzero temperatures by a thermal mask and ski goggles, Captain Nick Flynn looked down and saw an expanse of tundra rushing up at him. Although the gray light filtering through a layer of thick clouds made it difficult to judge distances with any precision, that ground sure looked like it was getting closer fast. Really fast. He released his attached weapons case and rucksack so that they fell away into the freezing air and swung loose below his feet, still connected to him by a long strap. Then he forced himself to relax, bent his knees slightly, tucked his chin in, and gripped the risers.
A small puff of white billowed up when his equipment packs hit the ground. Thousand-one, thousand-two, he counted silently.
Thump.
His boots thudded into the snow. Instantly he let himself buckle and rolled sideways to absorb the landing shock. At that same moment, a gust of wind caught his collapsing parachute canopy and snapped it back open wide. Dragged behind the chute, he slid across the tundra in a glittering spray of fine ice crystals and powder snow.
Great, Flynn thought with a mental grin. Now he got an impromptu sleigh ride across the frozen ground. Unbidden, that old song “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we go” began playing in his head. But his grandmother’s house was about three thousand miles south of here, and there wasn’t any snow in Central Texas, especially not in October. Hurriedly, he hit one of the two release assemblies on his harness to spill air out of the parachute. That brought his wind-driven skid to a halt.
Overhead, the C-130 turboprop he’d just jumped from was already a diminishing dot in the distance, w
ith the roar of its four engines fading fast. And across the wide-open, white landscape, eleven more men came drifting down out of the cloud-covered sky. One by one, they thumped to the ground, raising little spurts of snow of their own. Counting them off, he breathed out in relief. Although he’d been the first one out of the plane, everyone else in his small unit had followed him off the aircraft’s rear ramp.
Having someone refuse a jump wasn’t usual, but it could happen, and Flynn knew he hadn’t yet gotten to know these men well enough to judge the odds of anyone pulling that kind of boneheaded stunt at the last second. As it was, he’d had to practically beg to get permission for his unit to participate in this practice airborne drop and field exercise. Only the fact that all of them, whether Army, National Guard, or Air Force, had already earned their jump wings earlier in their military service made it even thinkable. But having an aircraft head back to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson with one of his stray sheep still aboard would have given the Pentagon and CIA assholes still gunning for him even more ammunition.
Getting back to his knees, Flynn reeled in his fluttering canopy arm over arm. Quickly, he bundled up the material before stuffing it into a bag clipped to his parachute harness. It took seconds more to struggle out of the harness itself and retrieve his weapons case and rucksack. Pulling out a pair of snowshoes and strapping them on took even more time. Finished at last, he stood up with a grunt and heaved the heavy rucksack onto his back. As a final measure, he slung his M4 carbine over the white camouflage smock he wore on top of his parka.
He brushed snow off his goggles and mask and scanned his wider surroundings. Right before they jumped, the C-130’s crewmen had rolled a pair of large cargo pallets out the open rear ramp. The pallets were loaded with a couple of snowmobiles and towable sleds, plus additional supplies of food, fuel, and ammunition. They’d come down under multiple parachutes, and it looked as though they’d landed intact about three hundred yards from his position.
By now, several members of Flynn’s team already had their own gear on. In ones and twos, they headed toward the equipment pallets—crunching awkwardly through ankle-deep snow. Others were still wrestling with balky parachutes or fitting themselves out with cross-country skis or snowshoes.
It didn’t surprise Flynn to see that Sergeant Andy Takirak was the first man to reach their heavier gear. Despite being older than anyone else in the unit by at least fifteen years, the veteran National Guardsman was one of the most physically fit. And his decades of experience in this kind of terrain and harsh climate showed. Compared to everyone else, he moved over the frozen tundra with surprising speed and grace.
By the time Flynn reached the first pallet himself, Takirak had already stripped off its protective tarpaulin. “How’s everything look?” he asked.
The noncom gave him a thumbs-up. “Good, sir,” he confirmed. “There’s no damage to this snow machine or sled that I can see.”
Flynn nodded. Alaskans always referred to snowmobiles as “snow machines,” since they used them more for work than recreation. He reminded himself to start doing the same. Like Texans, longtime Alaska residents had their own lingo. And if he didn’t want to stand out all the time as what they called a cheechako, a clueless tourist, he needed to remember to use local words and phrases when possible. “After all, when in Nome—” he murmured, privately enjoying the horrible pun.
“Sir?” Takirak asked, sounding puzzled.
“Never mind me, Andy,” Flynn said, glad that his mask hid his reddening face. “Just talking to myself.”
“Might want to go easy on that right now,” the older man said with a faint suggestion of amusement of his own. “Yakking to the walls will come natural enough to all of us by the time the serious winter sets in.”
As more soldiers and airmen arrived, Takirak put them to work offloading the small two-man vehicles, sleds, fuel cans, ammunition boxes, and other supplies and prepping them for use. There was less grousing than usual. Some of that was probably due to the usual adrenaline rush conferred by surviving a jump out of a perfectly good airplane. A bit more might be owed to the vast stretch of empty country in which they now found themselves. As far as the eye could see in all directions, they were the only living human beings. There were no trees or signs of other vegetation. Effectively, their little band was all on its own in a flat, almost featureless plain of snow and ice, broken only by a range of low, rocky hills halfway to the northern horizon. Their voices were instinctively hushed, as though they were awed visitors wandering around inside the echoing interior of a huge cathedral.
In fact, it wasn’t until they were almost finished emptying the two pallets that Senior Airman Mark Mitchell—M-Squared to his friends—finally got up enough nerve to ask the question that had to be on everyone else’s mind. “Say, sir? Uh, where’s everybody else? Did those Herky Bird pilots screw up their navigation and drop us in the wrong place?”
Flynn put down the boxes of MREs he’d carried over to one of the sleds and turned his head to meet the red-haired airman’s mildly worried gaze. Mitchell had earned his jump wings during a stab at the Air Force’s pararescue course. He’d been bounced for what his personnel file dryly called “attitude adjustment issues.” Based on Flynn’s personal observation over the past several days, that probably meant the airman had pulled one prank too many on his instructors. After a succession of other scrapes in various units, he’d been “volunteered” to serve as the new Joint Force team’s communications specialist. In the field, that meant carting around the team’s AN/PRC-162 manpack radio and sticking close to his new commander’s side at all times.
Mitchell’s curiosity and concern were natural. The training and readiness exercise they’d piggybacked onto involved four other C-130s carrying more than three hundred paratroopers belonging to the Army’s Fourth Brigade Combat Team (Airborne). By rights, this snow-covered plain should be filled with other soldiers assembling into platoons and sorting out their own gear.
“We’re on the right drop zone,” Flynn assured the airman, raising his voice slightly so that everyone could hear him. “The rest of the troops are jumping onto a DZ closer to Deadhorse. Their COs have their own training exercise plans for their units. But I’ve got something different in mind for us.”
Another soldier, Private First Class Cole Hynes, pushed forward. Short and square shouldered, Hynes had a temper that had cost him his sergeant’s stripes a few months back. Apart from his pugnacity, his soldier skills were first-rate. On the team’s improvised firing range at Kaktovik, he’d proved able to rapidly put rounds on target at six hundred yards with their M249 Para light machine gun. “Just how far from Deadhorse are we, sir?” he asked with a frown, eyeing the miles and miles of untouched snow in all directions.
It was time to pull the pin on his unwelcome surprise, Flynn realized. Except for Takirak, he’d kept the details of this planned field exercise close to his chest. He’d done so precisely because he didn’t want any of his troops to duck out before climbing aboard the C-130 by “accidentally on purpose” twisting an ankle or coming down with some mystery illness. The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés had motivated his men to conquer or die by burning the ships that had carried them to Mexico. His task today was considerably simpler, which was probably just as well because it would be damned hard to set anything ablaze on this frozen, treeless plain. Instead of defeating a hostile empire whose fighting forces outnumbered his by a hundred to one, all he wanted to accomplish was toughen up his men physically and teach them to make the best use of their winter gear, snowshoes, and skis before the harsh Arctic winter fully set in and made this type of training too hazardous.
“We’re roughly fifty-nine miles from the airport at Deadhorse,” he announced calmly. “That’s as the crow flies.” He paused to make sure they were all focused on him. “Or, in our case, as the man marches.” He checked his watch. “In approximately seventy-two hours, a plane will land there to ferry us back to Kaktovik. It will take off again sixty m
inutes later, whether we’re on board or not. So that’s how long we’ve got to finish this little jaunt.”
Hynes, Mitchell, and the others stared at him in consternation. “You’re shitting me,” someone muttered from the back of the little knot of soldiers.
“Nope,” Flynn assured him. He glanced at Takirak. “I’m dead serious, aren’t I, Sergeant?”
The noncom nodded stoically. “Yes, sir.” A dry smile darted across his weathered face and then disappeared. “Only fifty-nine miles in three days? With clear weather in the forecast?” He shook his head. “Heck, that’s practically a stroll in the park.”
“Yeah, but it’s a pretty fricking cold park, Sarge,” Mitchell pointed out.
“Which is why you’re wearing all of that fancy winter gear provided by Uncle Sam, courtesy of the generous taxpayers of these United States,” Takirak reminded him. He looked around the circle of dubious faces. “So quit your bitching and get organized, ladies. I want both pallets unloaded and all of this extra gear stowed on the sleds in ten minutes. Because whether you’re happy about it or not, we’re hiking north to Deadhorse. So there’s no sense in wasting more daylight.” He glanced at Flynn. “With your permission, sir?”
“Carry on, Sergeant,” Flynn agreed. He stepped back out of the way as the knot of soldiers and airmen broke up and went to work again. Thank God for an experienced NCO, he thought for what had to be the hundredth time over just the past week. Loner himself or not, the National Guard sergeant had the right touch when it came to handling what was still more a prickly bunch of individuals than a solid military unit.
