The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (12 page)

“You what?” Elaine asked.

“I was cold calling,” Schiavo said. “You know, going into every place on the street and filling out applications. The pizza place. The dry cleaners. Places like that. I just walked into the next door and asked if I could apply for a job. I thought maybe they needed a file clerk, or something.”

Lorenzen could hardly contain himself now. Across the room, I was certain I noticed Westin begin to grin with his eyes closed.

“You were just going to apply for a job with the United States Army,” I said.

“I mean, they hire regular people for regular jobs, right?” Schiavo asked. “That’s what I thought.”

“Right,” Neil said. “Lost seventeen year olds looking for work and direction, what other sort of position would they possibly have for you except file clerk?”

“See?” Schiavo joked. “He agrees with me.”

Lorenzen rolled with laughter, grabbing his stomach.

“Oh, man, I love it when she tells this story,” Lorenzen said.

It was our first time, and I had to admit that it was a hell of a tale. One that Schiavo could tell her grandkids one day. If that day ever came.

“Wham, bam, I’m in the army,” Schiavo said, wrapping up the story of her life. “And the army sent me here.”

The jovial moment slowly faded. First into small talk about our individual lives. Then into deeper discussions about the world as it was. About the blight. And about what we’d all lost.

Then, with darkness full and the storm raging, we settled in for the night. Neil and I took first watch. It began at midnight and we expected we’d be relieved and in bed by three in the morning.

We were wrong.

I
worked the western side of the station, including the dock and the southern perimeter of the facility. Neil covered the north and east. Every ten minutes or so as we moved among the buildings, grabbing cover from the rain beneath awnings and overhangs wherever we could, my friend and I would meet up. Never at exactly the same place, nor at the same interval. Routine, in matters of security and patrol, was a weakness, not a strength. It allowed an adversary to make plans against you.

At the moment, though, our nemesis was wet and cold and relentless.

“Remember the game against Bozeman?” Neil asked as we stopped briefly in the rain shadow created by the boat shed’s roof. “That night game?”

He was trolling back through memories. To a moment we’d shared in high school, on the football field, in pouring rain not unlike what we were now experiencing. We’d played the entire game in torrential, almost icy rain. Half the fans in the stadium abandoned the game before the first half was over, but there we were, both teams, cleats chewing at the muddy field, ball slipping through receivers’ grips.

“That was nasty,” I said.

Neil nodded. He even smiled. Something about him had changed. His frustration had dwindled to almost nothing. I knew he still wanted to get to Grace and Krista with haste, but he’d somehow come to terms with the realities of our journey.

“Grace hates the rain,” Neil said. “On our way to your place, whenever it would rain, she’d want to get out of it pronto. She’d practically break down the door of the nearest house to get someplace dry.”

“Walks in the rain are not in your future, I guess.”

“No,” he confirmed.

We said nothing for a moment, the wind blasting water from the boat shed roof into an opaque wall a few yards in front of us.

“They seem okay,” I said to Neil, gesturing toward the station where Elaine was bunked down with the unit.

“Their lieutenant is all right,” Neil said, almost embarrassed after saying that. “I know I’ve been an ass.”

“You have,” I said. “But you have reason to be.”

Neil shook his head. He wasn’t buying into my proffered excuse.

“We’d be dead on that island if they hadn’t shown up,” he said. “No matter how much it burns me to have to wait to get to Skagway, we wouldn’t even have the chance to do that if it wasn’t for Schiavo. If it wasn’t for all of them.”

“I wonder if we would have even made it on our own,” I said.

Neil’s gaze widened with the same wonder.

“We get past Mary Island, what else do we encounter ahead?”

My friend was right. We had no idea what sort of contact with the Russians might lay ahead. We knew they had been here, and were likely somewhere along the route we had to travel. The firepower the three of us had was minimal. But added to that of Schiavo’s unit, now we had at least a formidable force to deal with whatever lay to the north.

“We’ll get there,” Neil said. “I know that n—”

He never finished the statement of certainty. The sharp
BAM
from the far side of the station cut him off. Instantly both of us brought our weapons up.

“That was loud,” Neil said quietly. “I
felt
that.”

I nodded. I’d felt it too, a quick, solid jolt on the soles of my boots.

“I’m going left,” I said.

Neil moved right without even acknowledging my statement. He didn’t need to. We both expected the other would act as we had many times before since coming together after the blight. In some ways we were equally as capable as Schiavo’s unit. Our rhythms were synced in tactical situations. As civilians, this was little more than a practiced survival instinct kicking in. And, as it was now, our sensing of things that weren’t quite right was heightened.

I jogged through the rain to the south side of the main building and skirted the edge. Through a window I glimpsed movement, which I knew would be Elaine and the others gearing up. What Neil and I had heard and felt would have jarred them from sleep.

Passing the window I neared the far corner of the building where I could just make out the channel’s churning water. And I could see something else.

The bow of the
Sandy
was free, swinging against the dock, the source of the sound that had alerted us. Still tied at the stern, she pivoted with each series of waves and slammed again and again into the concrete and wood mooring. I reached the corner and peered around. I saw nothing beyond what I expected, just Neil at the other corner, moving out into the open.

“She came loose!” he shouted.

We both ran for the spot where the
Sandy
was tied off. From behind, Elaine and the others spilled out of the main building, geared up.

“We’ve gotta get that bow secured!” Acosta yelled.

I reached the edge of the dock just as Elaine did, handing her my AR as I judged the movement of the rocking deck six feet below.

“Get a rope ready,” I told the others. “I’ll get aboard and you toss it over.”

Acosta and Westin sprinted down the dock to retrieve an extra line, Lorenzen and Enderson covering everyone, their weapons up and ready, a clear wariness about them. We were all exposed, with only the constant downpour providing some concealment where we stood. Visibility was a hundred feet at best.

I only needed a fraction of that to see my target.

BAM!

The bow smacked into the dock again as I mentally measured the jump I had to make. I counted the cycle of the boat moving with the waves. Picked an opportune instant. Then, I jumped.

Immediately upon hitting the deck my boots slipped from under me and I went down hard on my back.

“Eric!”

I rolled over fast and grabbed hold of the rail, looking up to Elaine, trying to reassure her with a quick glance. Reassuring myself was another matter entirely.

BAM!

Again the bow slammed against the solid pier, the impact breaking my grip on the rail and sending me sliding across the deck toward the wheelhouse. I reached fast for the handrail where it was mounted to the deck at the base of the steps into the wheelhouse. My hand found the stout metal and I seized onto it with a death grip, pulling myself to my knees as the
Sandy
whipped away from the dock.

“Get that line tied off!” Schiavo ordered.

Acosta and Westin lashed the line they’d found to one of the dock supports and readied to heave its coiled length down to me. I waited, riding the boat as it once again was pushed by the storming sea toward its mooring.

“Now!” I shouted.

Acosta already had his massive arms cocked and ready. He spun the beefy loop of line toward me, the length unspooling as it traveled the short distance. I grabbed at it with my free hand and took hold just as the
Sandy
was tossed yet again into the dock. Once more I was ripped from my handhold, rope in my other hand now as the waves sucked the
Sandy
’s rebounding bow back toward the channel. My body rolled against the dockside rail, rope in my hand going taut and pulling me up and almost over the side. A fresh series of waves smashed into the boat and moved her again toward the dock, releasing the tension on the line and saving me from being yanked overboard.

I took the brief chance I was given and scurried along the narrow sliver of deck alongside the wheelhouse until I was on all fours at the forward cleat, the end of the rope that had secured the
Sandy
still attached snugly around it, the other end dragging in the water over the rail. The motion of the storming sea must have caused it to snap, I thought, but there was no time to dwell on any cause. I took the end of the line in my hand and figure-eighted it around the cleat, pulling on it with all my weight to be certain it was secure. Just as the
Sandy
swung once again toward the dock I shouted up to the others above.

“Tie it off!”

I absorbed another jolt as boat met the support pillars. This time, though, it did not swing fully out into the channel. Its bow moved a few yards away, then stopped, Acosta and the others taking slack off the line as they wrapped it around a thick wooden support rising from the dock edge. As the
Sandy
was pushed again into the dock, with less force this time, they cinched up the line and tied her fully off.

“She’s good!” Acosta reported.

I grabbed hold of the rail along the wheelhouse and pulled myself along until I was at the solid steel ladder mounted to one of the pier supports. With nearly raw hands and slick boots, I climbed up from the still bouncing deck and was hauled onto the dock by Neil and Elaine.

“Are you all right?” Elaine asked, helping me to stand.

I examined my palms, the cool rain feeling good upon the red welts burned into them by the rough line.

“I’m okay.”

“That was a gutsy move,” Schiavo said. “Maybe too gutsy.”

“Someone was going to have to do it,” I said.

“Lieutenant!”

It was Acosta. He’d moved past us to check that the stern line wasn’t in any danger of snapping. We joined him where he knelt at the cleat welded and bolted to the dock.

“What is it?” Schiavo asked.

Acosta pointed to the rope stretching from it over the edge of the dock and down to the
Sandy
. About a foot from where it was attached a neat slice had cut almost halfway through the line, taking more than half of its strength.

“Christ...” Lorenzen said, then ran to the point where the bow line had been tied off. It was still secured there, to a cleat identical to the bow line, its limp end lying just at the edge of the dock. He picked it up and examined it.

“Cut clean,” he said, looking to us. “Someone took a knife to these lines.”

I took my AR back from Elaine, my gaze instinctively scanning the world beyond the falling rain.

“Get a new line on the stern,” Schiavo ordered.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Westin said, and climbed down to the boat as Acosta retrieved another fresh line.

“We’ve got a problem,” Schiavo said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “We’re not alone.”

Part Three

Invaders

M
orning came with the storm in full force, more wind than rain in the daylight. But it was the wind that worked against us. Wind meant waves. And waves meant a tenuous journey, one with risks that outweighed any benefit of haste at the moment. We were not leaving Ketchikan until the weather broke.

That did not mean we were sitting back, resting and relaxing. The attempt to set the
Sandy
adrift in the night had put us on an extreme state of alert. Schiavo had three of her men, Lorenzen, Enderson, and Westin, stationed outside, with one always near the boat. The rest of us remained inside, waiting for our shift watching over the only transport we had.

It wasn’t certain that that was our best course of action.

“You want to do what?” Schiavo asked after I told her my idea.

“
We
want to go look for our visitor,” I said.

Neil and Elaine had actually hatched the idea and shared it quietly with me. It was likely that Schiavo wouldn’t see our plan as a smart use of personnel. She’d almost certainly already weighed the risk of seeking a confrontation with whoever had slipped into our perimeter during the night and decided against it. I needed to convince her otherwise.

“Visitor,” she repeated, focusing on the singularity of the word. “You assume it’s just one person.”

“I do,” I said. “They were spooked while cutting the stern line. If it was two intruders, both would have cut at the same time.”

“You assume two would come out of whatever hole they crawled into,” Schiavo said. “I don’t. There could be more.”

I had to allow that possibility. But that didn’t negate the reasoning for what we were suggesting.

“I’ve learned,” I began, gesturing to Neil and Elaine next, “we’ve all learned, that hunkering down isn’t always the best plan. If there’s a threat out there, a good offense is what we need.”

She thought for a moment. Once again taking into consideration what we were saying.

“You’re talking textbook tactics,” she said. “Probing the enemy. Attacking into an ambush.”

I wasn’t certain of the military tactics she was basing her estimation on, but I did agree with the plain language. Sitting where we were would not serve us, just as it would not have served me well at my refuge when the threat presented by Major Layton was very real. There I had to take matters into my own hands. I had to act.