Whummp.

Flynn thumped down with a bone-jarring thud and rolled sideways. Despite the hard landing, this time he was able to unclip his left-side riser attach and spill the wind from his fluttering canopy before it could drag him very far across the snow. Moving quickly, he stowed his used parachute, shrugged out of his jump harness, and then checked over his weapons and other gear—pausing only to spit blood from a cut lip into the snow.

Clambering to his feet, Flynn turned through a complete circle to get his bearings. As best he could judge, he’d come down about two-thirds of the way across the valley. He strapped on a pair of snowshoes and set off back to the north, plowing determinedly through foot-deep snow toward where he judged their equipment pallet should have come down. Since the pallet held their only motorized vehicles and additional supplies, he’d told his team that would be their rally point. Gusts of wind whipped up glittering waves of snow and ice crystals that stung every exposed bit of skin on his face. Hurriedly, he pulled up his face mask, ducked his head down, and kept moving.

He found the pallet about 250 yards away, lying canted over at a forty-five-degree angle under its collapsed parachutes. Drifting down out of the sky, it had smacked straight into a little clump of dwarf willow trees with disastrous results. Both snow machines had broken loose on impact. Slammed against tree trunks with tremendous force, they were little more than crumpled masses of metal and fractured fiberglass. One of the two towed sleds was probably salvageable. The other was a complete wreck, with both its runners torn off and twisted out of recognition. Bags and boxes of medical and other supplies were strewn across the snow, most of them ripped open.

“Well, shit,” Flynn muttered with feeling, staring at the mess. The emergency search-and-rescue effort he’d been ordered to mount had just been knocked back to a nineteenth-century technological level. He was now entirely dependent on men on foot using snowshoes and cross-country skis to traverse difficult terrain.

Over the next several minutes, in ones and twos, more of his men straggled in, bowed down under the weight of their own weapons and gear. They all stopped dead when they saw the shattered pallet and its wrecked cargo. Growled profanity blistered the freezing air, most of it directed at the “goddamn Air Force” for “managing to score a bull’s-eye on the one fucking clump of trees in a couple hundred fucking miles.”

“Now what?” Hynes asked bluntly. “Sir.”

Flynn forced himself to smile back at the square-shouldered, Army enlisted man. Boosting morale with stupid jokes and determined optimism was one of the most important tasks for any military officer, even when everyone knew it was total bullshit. “Now we all hoof it, PFC. Just like in the good old days. You joined the infantry first, didn’t you? Trekking through the wilderness on your own two feet ought to be right up your alley.”