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.