His men nodded. Maybe the idea that someone could have broken into their tactical net was crazy, but it felt like a hell of a weird coincidence for that helicopter to have landed so close to them. It was almost as though it had been guided straight to this particular spot, which was otherwise just one of thousands of square miles of virtually identical wilderness. One thing was for sure, Flynn knew. All of his instincts were screaming danger warnings right now. And he didn’t plan to ignore them.

Quickly, he issued new orders. They would backtrack along this spur toward where that helicopter had landed—deployed and ready to conduct a hasty ambush against anyone who might be following their trail. He half expected Andy Takirak to bitch some more, but instead the noncom merely nodded. “Good plan, Captain.” Takirak unslung his own weapon and started to move out ahead of the rest of the unit. “I’ll go scout,” he said, with a quick, unreadable glance over his shoulder. “I can reach a decent observation point faster on my own.”

“Hold on, Andy!” Flynn said sharply.

Almost unwillingly, the older man halted in his tracks. “Sir?”

“Leave the radio,” Flynn ordered, nodding at the bulky PRC-162 still slung over Takirak’s other shoulder. “You don’t need the weight. And that antenna sticking up might give you away.” For a moment, he had the strangest sense that the sergeant might disobey him.

But then, with a fleeting half smile, Takirak pulled the radio off his shoulder and set it down on the snowy slope. Without another word, he turned and loped away over a low rise, swiftly vanishing from sight.

Watching him go, Flynn felt the hairs go up on the back of his neck. Takirak’s native name, Amaruq, Gray Wolf, had never before seemed so apt. He had the sudden, eerie impression that the older man had just revealed himself as a complete stranger—someone he’d never actually known. And as though that revelation was a sort of key to unlock his intuition, Flynn abruptly saw an answer for many of the odd events that had worried him over the past several hours.

Seconds passed while he stood frozen in place, feeling sick at heart and trying to make the pieces to this puzzle fit in some other way. Flynn couldn’t fight down the sudden, terrible certainty that he’d never see M-Squared, his red-haired radioman, again . . . at least not alive. But then he breathed out. There was only one way to be sure, and in the meantime, he wasn’t going to gamble with the lives of his men in the hope that he was wrong.

Flynn turned quickly to the half-dozen soldiers and airmen still with him. “Change of plan,” he told them quietly. He pointed at the top of the spur, a couple of hundred feet above where they were now. A tumbled mass of rocks and larger boulders marked the crest and continued on down the far side. “We’ll set up there instead,” he ordered. “Now, drop your packs here and follow me!”