Arctic Storm Rising Dale Brown (literature books to read TXT) 📖

him to head back to camp for a short rest.He straightened up to his full height to stretch aching muscles . . . and then he stopped dead, staring off to the west.

A bright white glow lit the sky there, slowly falling through the darkness and thick clouds. Then, suddenly, it vanished witha blinding flash, followed by a dull red gleam in the distance that slowly faded away.

“What was that?” one of the exhausted mercenaries who’d followed him out of the shelter asked in astonishment. “Some sortof weird lightning from the storm?”

Petrov shook his head in dismay. “No,” he ground out slowly. “I think that was trouble for us. Very serious trouble.”

Twenty-Nine

611th Air Operations Center, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska

A Short Time Later

For several seconds, a shocked silence pervaded the crowded operations center. One moment, they’d been observing five aircraft—twoAmerican and three Russian—on the radar feed relayed from the E-3 Sentry AWACS plane over Fairbanks. And the next, all fiveaircraft were gone, wiped off the display as quickly as if some unseen giant’s hand had swatted them out of the sky with onemighty stroke.

Colonel Leonard Huber, Third Wing’s commander, shook his head in disbelief and then turned to his assembled officers. “Cananyone tell me what the hell just happened up there?”

Helplessly, they all shrugged. “Whatever it was, it went down awfully fast,” one of them said at last. “The RC-135 ELINT planepicked up a few fragmentary transmissions from the two Russian Su-35s, but they’re encrypted and unreadable. We didn’t getanything from our own aircraft.”

Huber nodded gloomily. That was not a good sign. At least one of the F-22 pilots, McFadden or Parilla, should have been able to call out a warning, even if their mock dogfight with the Su-35s had suddenly turned hot for some weird reason. He sighed. “Well, one thing’s clear, anyway. A bunch of different aircraft, ours and theirs, just crashed in the middle of a god-awful wilderness.”

“And during a blizzard,” his operations officer pointed out quietly. “One of the worst in years.”

“Yeah, that, too,” Huber agreed tersely. A screen depicting the most recent meteorology reports for the Brooks Range showedthe entire area socked in, with strong winds, near-zero visibility thanks to blowing snow, and subzero temperatures. “Mountinga combat search-and-rescue operation up there is going to be a bitch,” he said thoughtfully.

“Yes, sir.”

Huber’s eyes sought out his liaison with the Alaska Air National Guard. The ANG’s 176th Wing ran the ARCC, the Alaska RescueCoordination Center, which managed all the various military and civil aviation resources needed for search-and-rescue operations.“Major King, what kind of CSAR assets can your people rustle up fast?”

The major looked up from the computer link she’d been intently studying. “Colonel, the ARCC says we can have a pararescueteam and a pair of HH-60G Pave Hawks from the 210th Rescue Squadron ready for takeoff in ninety minutes.”

“But your helicopters can’t make it out that far unrefueled, can they?”

“No, sir,” King agreed. “The area where those planes went down is more than a hundred miles beyond our birds’ maximum range.Ordinarily, they’d tank on the way, but the blizzard is moving south fast across the whole state. Midair refueling would befar too hazardous in these conditions. So our helicopters will have to stage through Fairbanks and then Fort Yukon, stoppingto refuel on the ground at both places.”

Huber nodded again. Those refueling stops would make slow going, further adding to the time it would take the pararescue team to reach any crash sites. On the other hand, recent forecasts predicted some minor improvement in the weather over the mountains later on today. So, assuming ANG’s Pave Hawk helicopters could somehow fight their way through the storm in the first place, those hoped-for lower winds and better visibility should significantly aid any recovery operations. “All right, Major,” he said to King. “Activate your search-and-rescue units and get them in the air as quickly as possible.”

One of the airmen manning their secure communications board turned toward him. “Sir? The Pentagon is on the line asking foryou.”

Huber hid a grimace. Both NORAD headquarters and the Pentagon were receiving live feeds from the operations center here—whichwas normal, especially considering the extraordinarily high level of Russian air activity around Alaska’s perimeter. It hadbeen a coin toss to guess which group of senior brass would be faster off the mark to horn in on this crisis situation. Hetook the phone. “Third Wing, Colonel Huber speaking.”

“Colonel?” a woman’s voice said in reply. “We’ve never met, but my name is Miranda Reynolds. I’m in charge of the CIA’s operationsdirectorate.”

Huber felt his eyebrows go up. Of all the people he’d expected to be speaking to today, the chief of the CIA’s clandestineservice definitely had not been on his list. “What can I do for you, Ms. Reynolds?” he asked cautiously, strongly suspecting that whatever it was, hewasn’t going to like it much. And the more he listened, the more he knew just how right he’d been.

The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

That Same Time

Miranda Reynolds hung up the secure phone and looked around the table at the others present—who included Jonas Murphy, BillTaylor, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Well, the colonel bought it,” she said with a shrug. “He certainly wasn’t thrilledby the idea, but he’s okayed including members of our specialist go team in the search-and-rescue mission force. He thinkswe want them along so they can comb through the wreckage of those Russian fighters and their reconnaissance plane.”

“Those downed aircraft might be all your people find,” General Frank Neary told her.

“That’s certainly possible,” Reynolds agreed coolly. “On the other hand, that Russian reconnaissance probe was pushed a lotharder than any of the others we’ve seen so far, wasn’t it?”

Neary and the others nodded somberly. Not only had the presence of Su-35s so far from the Russian mainland come as a veryunwelcome surprise, but so had the willingness of those fighter pilots to mix it up so aggressively with the American aircraftsent to intercept them—aggression that had clearly led to disaster for both sides.

“My