“You’d be asking the flight crew to take a hell of a risk,” Neary commented. “Not to mention the troops you’re asking to parachute into the middle of nowhere in the tail end of a blizzard.”

Miranda Reynolds broke in impatiently. “Everything about this mess involves risk. I say we tell them to go.” She looked at Chao. “Who’s in charge of this security team?”

The rear admiral smiled oddly at her. “A U.S. Air Force officer it appears that your agency has had some dealings with in the not-so-distant past, Ms. Reynolds. The officer in question is a certain Captain Nicholas Flynn.”

Reynolds’s mouth fell open in consternation. “You’re kidding me,” she managed to get out at last.

Chao shook her head, still smiling wryly. “No, Ms. Reynolds,” she said. “I most certainly am not.”

Thirty-One

Barter Island Long Range Radar Site, near Kaktovik, Alaska

A Short Time Later

Captain Nick Flynn unzipped his parka and stripped off his thick gloves as he sat down at the dining area table set aside for his unit’s computers and other electronic gear. He’d just been called in from a duty shift outside the radar station, freezing his ass off on outpost duty. Apparently, an encrypted message had just arrived over their link to Alaskan Command—one that only he could read.

After blowing on his hands to restore some semblance of feeling, he entered the necessary codes. Lines of text and embedded maps and images appeared on the screen. It was a task order assigning them a new mission. But any faint hope that he could stand his unit down for some much-needed rest vanished the moment he read the message header. Good news did not carry the immediate precedence designator. That was almost always reserved for situations involving serious military matters.

His mouth tightened as he read further. What the brass wanted them to do now went way beyond ordinary crazy. In fact, it was off-the-charts lunacy. Stripping out all the happy talk about achieving vitally important national security objectives, the operations staff officers cozily forted up at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson expected Flynn and his men to parachute deep into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Then, assuming they survived this hazardous nighttime drop, they were supposed to begin an immediate search-and-rescue operation—hunting for combat aircraft, two American F-22s, a big Russian Tu-142 recon plane, and two more Su-35 fighters, which had crashed somewhere among those jagged peaks and rocky valleys during an air intercept that had gone horribly wrong.

He shook his head angrily. There was no way in hell he would ask his soldiers and airmen to commit suicide chasing some staff weenie’s whim, not without pushing back as hard as he dared first. Without waiting to start second-guessing himself, Flynn stabbed the screen icon that would open a direct, secure video connection to Anchorage.

There was a moment’s delay while his signal was uplinked through a satellite and stabilized, and then a new window opened on-screen. A senior Army noncom looked back out of it at Flynn. “Yes, sir?” the NCO asked.