by Dale Brown
A thousand-foot-wide saltwater channel separated the island from the mainland, and there were no roads connecting the island to the nearest inhabited place, Prudhoe Bay. Close by Alaskan standards at least, since Prudhoe Bay was more than 110 miles to the west. The only real way in or out for people and freight was by air. An old military runway, perched right on the edge of the Beaufort Sea and subject to periodic flooding during storms, had been abandoned in favor of a relatively new 4,500-foot-long gravel strip built on slightly higher ground in the center of the island. A converted school bus provided routine transportation into town for arriving passengers.
This afternoon, the bright yellow airport bus had been rented by the U.S. military’s Alaskan Command to bring Captain Nick Flynn and his newly formed security team to the Barter Island Long Range Radar Site, about a third of a mile outside Kaktovik. The twelve men, a mix of Alaska National Guardsmen on active duty and regular U.S. Air Force and Army personnel, had flown in earlier aboard a C-130J transport plane dispatched from Anchorage’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson—now 640 miles away to the south.
Alaska was astoundingly big and empty even by Texas standards, Flynn thought moodily, staring out the windows of the bus as it bumped along a rutted gravel track. Their two-hour flight here had carried them across a vast landscape of dense forests, sheer snow-capped mountains, and wide-open tundra flatlands. All told, there were fewer than seven hundred and fifty thousand people scattered across an enormous expanse more than twice the size of Texas. He frowned, remembering one of his college history classes. Back in the 1700s, Voltaire had famously dismissed Canada as just “a few acres of snow.” Nick wondered what the French philosopher would have thought of Alaska—judging by what he’d seen during the flight up here, it was basically a few hundred million acres of snow.
His breath fogged the bus window. This was only the beginning of October, but winter had already arrived on Barter Island. The highs were in the low twenties, with temperatures plunging below zero after dark. This far north, the sun was currently visible for only about ten hours a day. Toward Halloween, it would be above the horizon for just six and a half hours. And then, by late November, the island would find itself wrapped in the perpetual Arctic night—from which it would not emerge for more than six long weeks.
Just imagining that unending spell of frozen darkness was bad enough. But Flynn had a sinking feeling that reality would be even worse. He looked over his shoulder at the soldiers and airmen he would be commanding under those grim conditions. Bulky in military-issue cold weather parkas, trousers, and boots, they were scattered down the length of the bus. They occupied separate bench seats, as though determined to keep their new comrades at arm’s length for the time being. Most of them looked about as gloomy on the outside as he felt inside.
His frown deepened. These men weren’t a cohesive team yet, just a collection of individuals hurriedly thrown together from a grab bag of other units across Alaska. Boarding the C-130 for the flight here was the first time any of them had ever really met. He shook his head. Everything about this assignment was half-assed. Apart from their names, his only source of information about the soldiers and airmen now under his command were the personnel files he’d downloaded onto his tablet shortly before takeoff. And he hadn’t had any real time to dig into those records yet.
Flynn had a depressing hunch, though, that he wasn’t going to find a lot of glowing adjectives in their personnel evaluations. Most commanding officers, ordered to “volunteer” men for this kind of long-term detached duty, would be very careful to select those who wouldn’t be particularly missed—the oddballs, misfits, and even disciplinary hard cases. One corner of his mouth quirked upward. He might not be looking at his very own Dirty Dozen, but the odds were good that he’d just been saddled with the Dingy Eleven.
Or maybe that should be the Grimy Ten, he thought, after a quick glance at the grizzled noncom seated right across the aisle from him. From the top of his broad, weathered face to the tips of his rugged combat boots, Sergeant First Class Andy Takirak, Alaska Army National Guard, had the look of a tough, thoroughly squared away military professional. Nor would the prospect of spending a winter in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness hold any terrors for the older man, Flynn decided. After all, this was his own native country.
According to his file, Takirak was a member of the Bering Straits Iñupiat tribe, distantly related to the indigenous peoples of the North Slope like those who lived in Kaktovik. In civilian life, he worked as a wildlife guide and hunter around the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. He’d been assigned to the Joint Force security team as its scout and senior NCO. And unlike the rest of them, the sergeant was a genuine volunteer. He’d offered to go back on active service the moment he’d heard the scuttlebutt about an experimental unit forming for duty along the barren Arctic coast.
Flynn wasn’t quite sure if that made Takirak crazy, or incredibly dedicated . . . or a bit of both. But he was sure that he was going to have to rely heavily on the National Guard sergeant’s expertise and survival skills to help whip the rest of this raw collection of individuals into a cohesive and efficient unit. He strongly suspected the Pentagon higher-ups who’d exiled him to Alaska expected him to fail in that task. He planned to prove them wrong—even if he privately thought the whole concept of creating special security units like this was a waste of manpower and resources. Any serious Russian attack on the North Warning System’s radars would probably be carried out by bombers and long-range cruise missiles—not up close and personal by Spetsnaz commandos or saboteurs.
“There’s the station, sir,” Takirak said quietly, pointing ahead through the bus’s salt-streaked windshield. Flynn leaned forward, studying the complex of buildings that was slated to be their duty post for at least the next six months.
The Barter Island Long Range Radar Site sat on a low coastal bluff, overlooking the cold, gray Beaufort Sea. A faint glimmer of dazzling white along the distant northern horizon hinted at the pack ice beginning to creep down from the Arctic Ocean. At the west end of the station, a raised platform held a white protective dome for the AN/FPS-117 active electronically scanned array air search radar. From a distance, it looked oddly like two-thirds of a golf ball resting on a flat-topped tee. As they got closer, its true size became more apparent. The top of that large dome rose nearly fifty feet above the flat, snow-covered tundra. And from the briefing he’d been given, Flynn knew that powerful motors inside the dome could rotate the entire fifteen-ton radar array through a complete circle in as little as ten seconds.
A string of connected, prefabricated buildings ran east from the radar platform. Rust streaked their metal roofs and siding. When the station was first built in 1953 as part of the old Distant Early Warning Line, it had been much larger, with barracks housing more than 150 U.S. Air Force officers and enlisted men. Now, those barracks and other outbuildings were gone, torn down when the Barter Island site had been modernized to become part of the U.S. and Canada’s new, largely automated North Warning System. The structures that were left contained generators, equipment and vehicle storage, and working quarters that were still far too big for a handful of resident civilian contractors.
With a high-pitched squeal of brakes, the bus pulled up in front of the ramshackle building closest to the elevated radar platform and stopped. A rusty white sign over a door identified it as the grand five-star beaufort sea vista inn.
“Jeezus,” one of the soldiers sitting behind him muttered. “Welcome to Barter Island LRR, boys. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Flynn tamped down on a grin, recognizing the classic Star Wars quote.
“I prefer the outtakes version, myself,” another said with a sardonic edge to his voice. “The one where Alec Guinness just says, ‘It’s a fucking shithole. A fucking shithole.’”
“Yeah, well, he must have been thinking about this goddamned place, all right,” a third soldier growled. “Christ, I need a drink.”
&n
bsp; “Then you’re out of luck, pal,” the first man told him. “’Cause Kaktovik is a dry town. No alcohol allowed. Not even beer.”
That triggered a chorus of subdued groans, which ended abruptly when Sergeant Takirak casually turned around in his seat and gave them the “look” so beloved of veteran noncoms. When delivered by a skilled professional, the “look” was said to be capable of putting the fear of God, eternal damnation, and thirty days in the stockade into the heart of even the most hardened reprobate. From the sudden, absolute silence that descended across the bus, Flynn judged that Andy Takirak was just such a professional.
He studiously ignored the byplay. His ROTC instructors had spent a lot of time and energy drumming into their students’ heads the proposition that half the job of figuring out how to be an effective officer was in learning what not to hear and what not to see. Besides, griping about their quarters, meals, and pay was a time-honored privilege of enlisted personnel. He didn’t mind bitching, so long as it didn’t exceed the traditional bounds.
As soon as the driver opened the bus door, Flynn was the first one outside. His breath steamed in the ice-cold air and his boots crunched across a layer of snow mixed with gravel. A light, freezing wind tugged at his scarlet beret. It carried the mingled smells of salt, fuel oil, and rusting metal.
Three civilians in winter coats and boots emerged from the building and strolled over to join him. Two were men, one of them tall and heavyset, the other short and wiry. The last was an older woman with short-cropped gray hair and a round, friendly face.
“Captain Flynn?” the tallest man said. “My name’s Johansson, Pete Johansson. I’m the maintenance supervisor here.” He nodded to the shorter man. “And this here is Smitty Walz. He’s my electronics whiz. But he doesn’t say much, do you, Smitty?”
“Nope,” the short man agreed.
“And I’m Marta McIntyre,” the gray-haired woman told him with a pleasant smile. “Mrs. Marta McIntyre. I’m the general gofer around the station—the cook, supply officer, and housekeeper all in one.” Her smile widened. “Plus, I keep Smitty and Pete from killing each other on the rare occasions our satellite TV dish goes on the blink.”
Flynn grinned appreciatively at her. “How do you do that, Mrs. McIntyre? Tranquilizer gun? Martial arts expertise?”
She sniffed. “Not me. I just climb up on the roof and fix the darned thing.”
“Marta’s a piddler,” Johansson said. Then, seeing Flynn’s look of incomprehension, he explained. “That’s station lingo, Captain. A piddler is someone who sees stuff that needs doing and just goes right ahead and does it.” He shrugged. “This is a big place and with just the three of us to keep it running, we’re all pretty much self-motivated.”
Mrs. McIntyre nodded. “And now that you and your troops are here, I guess I’ll be cooking for you, too. At least, that’s what those high muckety-mucks down at Elmendorf are hoping.” She turned to watch Sergeant Takirak and the others filing out of the bus. Under the noncom’s soft-spoken orders, they immediately began unloading their personal gear, equipment, and weapons from the vehicle’s luggage compartment. “Unless, you’d prefer living on those MREs I hear so much about.”
Flynn shook his head quickly. “No, ma’am. We’d be thrilled to eat whatever you put in front of us.” The armed forces’ Meals Ready to Eat were fine. In the field. If you didn’t have anything else. And if you were seriously hungry. But in his opinion, anyone who’d choose MREs over home-cooked food had either lost all sense of taste or had some other serious psychological problems. Besides, from the look of Johansson’s waistline the odds were good that Marta McIntyre was a decent cook.
“I’ll have Smitty show your guys where to stow their personal gear,” the station superintendent told him. “The rest of your equipment arrived a couple of days ago. We’ve stashed it in the vehicle maintenance bay for now.”
Flynn nodded. The orders creating his Joint Force security team specified that it was expected to actively patrol the area around the radar site. That included the mainland as soon as the surrounding lagoons iced over. To make that possible, the supply sections at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, or JBER, had provided a mix of snowmobiles, cross-country skis, and snowshoes. Teaching his men and himself how to use them was going to be one of his top priorities.
“And while they’re doing that, I’ll give you a tour of your quarters,” Mrs. McIntyre said. She jerked a thumb at the rusty sign over the station door. “That bit about it being five-star accommodations may be baloney, but really this place isn’t so bad.” She swept her gaze across the barren, snow-covered landscape around them and then shrugged. “Well, on the inside, anyhow.”
A couple of hours later, Flynn stepped outside. The sun was a distant bright dot on the western horizon. The wind had picked up, and high gray clouds were moving in from the north. It already felt much colder among the lengthening shadows. Shivering, he pulled the hood of his cold weather parka over his scarlet beret and tightened the coat’s Velcro wrist straps down around his gloves.
Then he crunched across the frozen tundra to the edge of the bluff where Andy Takirak stood alone, looking out to sea. The National Guard noncom had a pair of binoculars around his neck.
“See anything, Sergeant?” Flynn asked as he drew up beside the other man.
Takirak grinned. “Miles and miles of nothing, sir.” He took a deep breath and let it out in a cloud of steam. He waved a hand at the low gray-green waves rolling toward a gravel beach only a few feet below them. Chunks of drift ice floated in among the waves. “All the way from here to the North Pole and beyond. No people. No roads. No cars. No houses. Just the seals and the polar bears hunting them out there on the ice cap, living and dying the same way they have for hundreds of thousands of years.”
“Which you don’t mind?” Flynn wondered, hearing the unmistakable happiness in the other man’s voice.
“No, sir,” Takirak admitted. “Up here above the Arctic Circle is where I feel the most alive.” His grin turned sheepish. “I read in a magazine somewhere about some famous writer who said hell was other people. May not be that way for most folks. But it kind of is for me. Which makes being out in the wilderness like this a little bit of heaven.”
Flynn couldn’t think of much to say to that. He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess that’s a natural attitude for anyone raised up here.”
“Maybe so. But I wasn’t brought up in Alaska, Captain,” Takirak told him. He looked out to the sea again. “My parents died when I was real little. Some kind of accident, I guess. All I got from them was my native name, Amaruq . . . Gray Wolf.” He pointed at his short, gray-flecked hair. “Suits me better now.”
Flynn laughed.
“Anyway, my other relatives must have been too poor to keep me, because I got shipped off to a foster home down in the Lower Forty-Eight.” Takirak turned his head toward Flynn. “I didn’t make it back to Alaska until I turned eighteen and hitchhiked in across Canada.” His smile returned. “Then I joined the Guard the next year and haven’t looked back since. I figured getting Uncle Sam to pay me to tote a rifle and spend a lot of time outdoors was a sweet deal.”
Flynn nodded with a grin of his own. “Guess so, Sergeant.” He burrowed deeper into his jacket. “Speaking of spending time outdoors, I think the sooner we start getting the men used to operating in this climate, the better.”
“Yes, sir. You’ve got that right.” Takirak looked over his shoulder at the radar station behind them. “It’s real easy for guys to huddle up inside once there’s snow on the ground. Gets even easier as the dark comes on and everything ices up,” he warned.
Flynn grimaced just thinking about it. He wasn’t immune from that same natural urge to hibernate. Their quarters inside the station were surprisingly comfortable. Besides an industrial-sized kitchen and dining area, there was even a rec room with a TV, a pool table, and a popcorn machine. And he’d already overheard some of the enlisted men hoping their new CO wasn’t really a gung-ho t
ype, despite his Special Operations Command beret. “Suggestions?” he asked.
“That we start off with an hour of PT at zero-seven-hundred hours, tomorrow morning,” Takirak said.
“Which is more than an hour before the sun even comes up,” Flynn pointed out.
“Yes, sir, but we can’t let the position of the sun dictate anything from here on out. Working days have to start and end when we say they do, not when there’s sunlight outside,” the other man said patiently. “Anyway, we can use the vehicle maintenance bay. It’s got decent overhead light.”
“But no heat.”
Takirak’s eyes crinkled with laughter. “Trust me, sir. We’ll all be sweating plenty by the time PT’s done.”
Flynn thought about that and matched the older man’s smile. “I take your point. And after PT?”
“Breakfast to replace the calories we just burned off,” the sergeant said. “And after that some kind of working detail or maybe a route march across the tundra to acclimate.”
“We need a firing range,” Flynn said slowly, thinking it through. The team was equipped with a variety of small arms and heavier weapons, including one of the new, very lightweight M3E1 Carl Gustaf 84mm recoilless rifles and an M249 light machine gun. Issued fresh from stores, all of their weapons would need to be zeroed in to be effective in combat conditions. “Somewhere out on the western end of the island, where there’s no chance of any stray rounds hitting anything or anyone by accident.”
Considering that there was nothing between here and Prudhoe Bay except the occasional rock, that wouldn’t be much of a challenge.
Takirak nodded. “Yes, sir. We can put a range together out that way without much trouble.” He cocked an eyebrow. “If I may ask, exactly how much time are you planning to spend on weapons training?”
“As much time as it takes to qualify every man in this unit as a marksman or above,” Flynn said simply. “We both know the odds are probably about a million to one that we’re ever going to come face-to-face with any Russian Spetsnaz commandos up here. But if we do draw that short straw, I want to make damned sure our guys come out the other end alive. And that our enemies end up dead.” Aware that he sounded a little overzealous, he shrugged. “Plus, shooting live ammo is a hell of a lot of fun. And a really good way to break up the monotony.”