It shouldn’t be long now, he thought calmly. That radar jamming had to be a trigger for some other enemy action.

Sure enough, only moments later, he spotted four figures as they slid cautiously around the corner of a small hotel about a hundred yards from his position. All four wore bulky equipment packs and carried weapons in their hands. “Hostiles in view,” he whispered into his mike. “They’re moving into Sector Bravo. Stand by.”

Again, quiet responses ghosted through his radio earpiece.

Flynn crouched lower, watching closely while the four armed men drew nearer to his hiding place. They were moving along a bearing that would take them directly to the radar station, only a few hundred yards away across the tundra.

Sixty yards. Forty. Twenty.

Close enough, he decided, taking a deep breath. Letting it out in a whoosh, he reared up from behind the oil drums and leveled his weapon, sighting on the lead figure. “Now, Comanches! Hit ’em!” he shouted.

Flynn squeezed the trigger. As his weapon bucked backward with a muffled cough, he heard the same sound repeated from other scattered points around the iced-over junkyard, mixed in with excited whoops and yells.

Caught by surprise and completely out in the open, the four hostiles rocked under sudden, splattering impacts and went down in the snow. All around them, more rounds kicked up snow in brief spurts.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Flynn ordered. Smiling now, he flipped up his night vision goggles. “Y’all okay out there?” he called to the prone figures.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” a disgusted voice replied. “Pink paint? You hit us with fucking pink paint?”

Flynn hefted his paintball gun. “Sorry, guys,” he said with an even bigger grin. “MILES gear freezes up in this climate.” Like all battery-powered devices, the laser weapons and target sensors that were used in the U.S. military’s Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System drained fast in subzero temperatures. “So we had to improvise a little.”

Later, back in the warmth of the radar station’s rec room, Flynn apologized again to their disgruntled would-be attackers. They were U.S. Army Green Berets, part of the First Special Forces Group based at Fort Lewis in Washington State. Their parkas, ski masks, and snow pants were now stained bright pink by multiple paintball hits.

“I really wanted blue or even red ammunition,” he told them. “But all the store down at Fairbanks had in stock was pink.”

“Neon pink,” the senior Green Beret noncom pointed out, still sounding aggrieved.

Flynn nodded, firmly controlling his own urge to laugh. “Yeah, but you’ve got to admit, it sure stands out in the dark.”

The Special Forces sergeant looked down at himself for a moment. A wry smile twitched at the side of his hard-bitten face. “I can’t deny that, sir.” He shrugged. “What I don’t quite get is how you tumbled to us so fast.”

Flynn could understand the other man’s dismay. Tonight’s readiness exercise had been cooked up by overly eager staff officers down at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. He’d been given a heads-up to get ready for a training drill, but nothing more. He certainly hadn’t been warned about the possibility of a surprise attack on Barter Island by “Spetsnaz” commandos infiltrating the area disguised as American civilians. That “jamming” attack reported against the radar was a piece of misdirection intended to draw his security team out of position by suggesting the Russians planned an airborne drop from the north, from across the frozen Arctic Ocean. Instead, the highly trained Green Beret raiding party had run head-on into the buzz saw of Flynn’s carefully planned ambush . . . winding up “dead” in the snow in seconds.