By now, several members of Flynn’s team already had their own gear on. In ones and twos, they headed toward the equipment pallets—crunching awkwardly through ankle-deep snow. Others were still wrestling with balky parachutes or fitting themselves out with cross-country skis or snowshoes.

It didn’t surprise Flynn to see that Sergeant Andy Takirak was the first man to reach their heavier gear. Despite being older than anyone else in the unit by at least fifteen years, the veteran National Guardsman was one of the most physically fit. And his decades of experience in this kind of terrain and harsh climate showed. Compared to everyone else, he moved over the frozen tundra with surprising speed and grace.

By the time Flynn reached the first pallet himself, Takirak had already stripped off its protective tarpaulin. “How’s everything look?” he asked.

The noncom gave him a thumbs-up. “Good, sir,” he confirmed. “There’s no damage to this snow machine or sled that I can see.”

Flynn nodded. Alaskans always referred to snowmobiles as “snow machines,” since they used them more for work than recreation. He reminded himself to start doing the same. Like Texans, longtime Alaska residents had their own lingo. And if he didn’t want to stand out all the time as what they called a cheechako, a clueless tourist, he needed to remember to use local words and phrases when possible. “After all, when in Nome—” he murmured, privately enjoying the horrible pun.

“Sir?” Takirak asked, sounding puzzled.

“Never mind me, Andy,” Flynn said, glad that his mask hid his reddening face. “Just talking to myself.”

“Might want to go easy on that right now,” the older man said with a faint suggestion of amusement of his own. “Yakking to the walls will come natural enough to all of us by the time the serious winter sets in.”

As more soldiers and airmen arrived, Takirak put them to work offloading the small two-man vehicles, sleds, fuel cans, ammunition boxes, and other supplies and prepping them for use. There was less grousing than usual. Some of that was probably due to the usual adrenaline rush conferred by surviving a jump out of a perfectly good airplane. A bit more might be owed to the vast stretch of empty country in which they now found themselves. As far as the eye could see in all directions, they were the only living human beings. There were no trees or signs of other vegetation. Effectively, their little band was all on its own in a flat, almost featureless plain of snow and ice, broken only by a range of low, rocky hills halfway to the northern horizon. Their voices were instinctively hushed, as though they were awed visitors wandering around inside the echoing interior of a huge cathedral.

In fact, it wasn’t until they were almost finished emptying the two pallets that Senior Airman Mark Mitchell—M-Squared to his friends—finally got up enough nerve to ask the question that had to be on everyone else’s mind. “Say, sir? Uh, where’s everybody else? Did those Herky Bird pilots screw up their navigation and drop us in the wrong place?”