Answering smiles spread along the line of weary, unshaven faces. Bringing up the rear, with his light machine gun draped over his shoulder, Hynes pulled down his thermal mask. “Hey, Captain,” he asked. “Is that it? Aren’t you going to make some long, inspiring speech?”

Flynn shook his head. “Hell no, PFC.” He nodded toward the runway, now visible just a few hundred yards ahead of them. The Super Hercules had landed and was taxiing down the strip. “Hear those propellers?”

“Yeah?” Hynes said curiously.

“Well, that’s my speech,” Flynn told him with a laugh. “Know what they sound like to me?”

“Victory?”

“Yep,” Flynn agreed. “Victory . . . and hot food, showers, and clean sheets.”

That drew whoops and cheers. Hynes and the others grinned even wider. “Roger that, sir!”

Nine

Deep in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Some Days Later

In a whirling flurry of rotor-blown snow, a large twin-engine helicopter settled heavily onto the tundra. Painted white with red stripes, it was a Boeing Vertol 234 heavy-lift helicopter—the civilian version of a military CH-47 Chinook. As its turboshaft engines spooled down, both rotors gradually slowed and then stopped moving. The rear ramp whined down and thudded into the snow, revealing a compartment crammed full with nearly eleven metric tons of cargo. A couple pieces of small construction equipment—walk-behind, smooth-drum, compaction rollers—were strapped down closest to the opening. Large sections of folded white fabric and long aluminum stringers filled the rest of the fuselage from floor to ceiling.

Kept comfortable despite the cold by his fashionable gray-and-blue Rossignol ski jacket, Gore-Tex pants, and waterproof boots, Pavel Voronin strode down the ramp and around to one side of the big helicopter. As it climbed above one of the neighboring peaks, the morning sun threw his shadow far across a dazzling white field.

Several men were already headed his way from out of a clump of dwarf black spruce and willow trees. Behind them, a handful of carefully camouflaged tents nestled among the trees.

Voronin nodded a greeting to their leader, a lean, wiry man carrying a scoped rifle, who trudged up to join him while the rest moved on to start unloading cargo from the helicopter. “Zdravstvuyte, Sergei Bondarovich.”

“Welcome to Voron’ye Pole, Crow Field,” Bondarovich replied. Like the others on this small, covert operations team, he had served in Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special operations forces. Before he left the military to work for Dmitri Grishin and North Star Capital, he had attained the rank of major.

“Crow Field?”

Bondarovich shrugged. “We had to call this place something.”

“True,” Voronin agreed. Almost none of the hundreds of mountains, ridges, valleys, rivers, and streams inside the enormous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge bore official names. The absence of identified places on maps made the wilderness seem even more alien and inaccessible—a trackless region the size of Scotland that was virtually untouched by humans or any of their works and words. But Bondarovich’s choice made sense since the little icebound stream bordering this concealed camp eventually joined one of the rare exceptions to that rule, the Old Crow River. And, he thought, when one considered how North Star planned to use this remote valley, calling it Crow Field was even more apt.