“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.”

“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.