The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (17 page)

The blighted world, we had learned many times over now, was full of dark and dangerous surprises.

“Ask him where the others are,” Schiavo instructed.

Enderson spoke again, and listened again, leaning closer to the Russian to catch the response he was offering.

“They left him,” Enderson said. “They’d already raided Ketchikan and Juneau, so they were heading north to the next objective.”

Neil’s face flushed red with fury.

“Skagway?” Schiavo asked, and Enderson nodded.

“He says they had an insider in Ketchikan who’d heard from the soldiers there about a place with plentiful supplies north of there,” Enderson added.

“He just worked his way up the coast,” Lorenzen said.

“How long ago did they leave?” Schiavo asked. “And how did they travel?”

Once more Enderson spoke and listened.

“He thinks he’s been laying here for three days,” Enderson said. “They came by boat, so he thinks that’s how the rest of the unit continued on.”

“How many men?”

Enderson relayed the lieutenant’s question.

“Eighteen without him,” Enderson said.

The Russian muttered something, looking not at the ceiling anymore. His gaze was fixed fully on Schiavo.

“
Pistolet
,” Lentov said, his gaze tracking down to the weapon holstered on the lieutenant’s right thigh. “
Pistolet
.”

One of the hands pressing against the wounds on his abdomen rose a bit, fingers extended, as if reaching toward Schiavo’s sidearm.

The Russian wanted his suffering to end. He wanted to die. By his own hand.

“Let him rot,” Westin said in reaction to the Russian’s implied desire.

Schiavo said nothing. Not to the Russian, and not to her vocal private. She simply stared at Lentov for a moment before turning to Hart.

“How long might he lay here without attention?”

The medic thought. Searching for some exactness in the imprecise situation.

“Hours,” Hart said. “Days. He’s hydrated now. The bleeding is slow. But unless he gets to a trauma center, he’s not going to make it.”

The prognosis since Hart first saw the Russian hadn’t changed, just the timing. Treatment had somewhat stabilized him. The inevitable was being delayed.

“Eric,” Schiavo said, looking to me. “Do you have a throwaway piece?”

A throwaway piece. An extra handgun. Something small, easily hidden, and not important enough to care about if it was lost, or bartered away for something more valuable at the moment. It had never come to that for me, but I had been prepared for the time that it might.

“I have a small nine,” I said.

“Mind if I take that off your hands?” Schiavo asked.

I didn’t answer. I simply reached to the pack I’d set in a nearby booth and retrieved the weapon from within.

“One round,” Schiavo said. “In the chamber. Then gear up.”

I already had one in the chamber, so I dropped the magazine and put it back into my pack before slipping into it.

“Here,” I said, handing the small Glock to Schiavo.

“Sergeant, keep this man covered,” Schiavo said. “Everyone else outside.”

We stepped through the shattered windows and watched Schiavo lay the pistol on Lentov’s chest before backing away, Lorenzen covering her as she, and then he, joined us outside and moved out of any line of fire from within.

“Westin, on point.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the private acknowledged, leading off, the rest of us falling in behind.

The shot sounded when we were halfway down the block. Schiavo never slowed. She kept moving, weapon at the ready, a few yards behind Westin, her point man.

“Sergeant,” she said.

“Ma’am,” Lorenzen answered, speeding up to be nearer his commander.

“We’re not spending the night. Have a detail bury the bodies and mark the location. Then get everyone back to the boat so we can get the hell out of here.”

W
e cruised out of Juneau at sundown, sailing south through the Gastineau Channel until we reached Tantallon Point and swung to the west, then north again, Douglas Island off our starboard side. No more stops lay between us and Skagway.

“Thirteen, maybe fourteen hours,” Acosta said as he steered the boat from the captain’s chair.

I stood with him, glassing the way ahead. Scanning for anything and everything he, or Schiavo, should know about. This was the routine, one on the wheel, and one on lookout duty, switching out with others as we progressed. Some slept. Others ate. Neil sat on the deck near the stern and cleaned his AK while there was still useful daylight.

“Then we’ll know,” I said.

“Know what?”

“If we’re too late,” I answered.

I looked back to the waters ahead. Neil had told me that there was always hope. Those words had kept me going after being shot near my refuge, and the fullness of that belief had held all the way to my friend’s arrival with Grace and Krista. They had saved me, nursing me back to health. That would have never happened, though, if I hadn’t had hope.

Here, now, I needed that more than ever, because everything we’d come across on our journey north pointed to an outcome that was almost impossible to fathom. Hundreds of innocents were likely in Skagway. And a unit of foreign troops, willing to kill, was almost certainly already there. They’d beaten us.

That was my worry. That was the reality that quelled the hope I wanted to have. We might reach our destination and find that the trip had been for naught. What evidence we might find there to confirm that fear I did not want to even imagine.

“Your friend wants to be ready,” Schiavo commented as she came up from below.

I lowered the binoculars and glanced behind, seeing Neil reassembling his weapon after checking its internals.

“I think we may need to be,” I said.

“I do, too,” Schiavo said.

She stood next to Acosta and watched night settled down from above, blacking out the world ahead of us. Neil came into the wheelhouse and headed below as I switched to the thermal binoculars and scanned the world beyond the
Sandy
’s bow.

“How’d you learn to play piano?” I asked, lowering the binoculars.

Schiavo chuckled quietly and took the device from me, taking her own look at the water out there.

“Mrs. Welsh,” Schiavo said. “My third grade teacher.”

She kept the binoculars to her eyes as she explained.

“I was one of those kids who liked to be at school. Not the braniac kind who would stay after to do extra credit. I just didn’t want to go home, and Mrs. Welsh knew that. So, she let me stay, and while other kids were reading extra books or practicing for the spelling bee, she would teach me to play the old piano we had in our room. Room eight. I still remember that, and I remember that piano, and I really remember her.”

“Sounds like a wonderful woman,” I said.

“She had a husband and two kids of her own, and she made time to teach the little poor girl with the drunk father how to make music.”

“From what you’ve said, she taught you well,” I said.

“It just came to me,” Schiavo said. “That was my thing. Even when I wasn’t around a piano to play, the next time I got to sit down at one, it all came back. It was like that was what I was supposed to do.”

She lowered the binoculars and handed them back to me.

“Maybe there’ll be a piano in Skagway,” she said hopefully. “And when everything’s wrapped up there, I can play for you and your friends. I think I’d like that.”

There was a calm about her as she said what she just had. Maybe it was the hope that was beginning to elude me. Or, I wondered, was it a fatalism in her that regarded what lay at the end of our journey as an inevitability? One that would end how it ends.

That was true, I thought. We were but one thing which could influence the outcome, but influence it we could.

Influence it we must.

“I can’t wait to hear you play,” I told Schiavo.

Then she left the wheelhouse, heading below again. I stood watch with Acosta until we were both relieved thirty minutes later, the rotation continuing into the night, the land and the sea quiet, the trip north as peaceful as we’d hoped.

Until it wasn’t.

“S
omething on the water ahead!”

Westin’s announcement drew everyone from below decks. I was next to last into the wheelhouse, Enderson, Lorenzen, and Hart already out on deck, weapons ready. I saw Acosta standing at the front window, thermal binoculars to his eyes, zeroed in on something in the dark distance.

“It’s a boat,” Acosta reported. “About our size. And its hauling ass right for our bow.”

“Westin, clear him to the right,” Schiavo said. “I want any fire off our left.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Westin acknowledged, steering slightly toward the mainland.

Ahead, in the black night, I could see nothing. Not a shape, not a wake. Nothing. But if some craft was barreling toward us with purpose, that meant that they could almost certainly see us, just as we saw them. That also meant they were at least similarly equipped.

Military...

“Russians,” I said.

Schiavo nodded and took the safety off her M4, sliding a window on the left side of the wheelhouse open and resting the barrel of her weapon on its frame.

“Why would they be heading south again?” Neil asked.

“Check on Mary Island,” Schiavo suggested. “Reoccupy Juneau. Doesn’t really matter.”

“I count three warm bodies,” Acosta reported, tuning his focus in a bit more. “Wait. They’re adjusting course again. Collision course with our bow.”

“Distance?” Schiavo asked.

“Eight hundred meters,” Acosta answered. “And—”

He never got the last word out as the dark water ahead lit up with flashes and tracer rounds streaking at us. A half dozen impacts shattered the windows and sent Neil, Elaine and me diving for cover. I heard Schiavo’s shooters opening up outside, the distance still extreme for their M4s.

“MG on their bow!” Acosta shouted out, describing what he was seeing.

“Get us closer, Westin!” Schiavo ordered.

There was no ‘yes ma’am’ reply this time, just firewalling throttles and a slight turn to the right, trying to get the charging vessel fully cleared for the battery of weapons our side could bring to bear.

“Six hundred!” Acosta reported.

Closer, but still on the outside of real world effectiveness for the standard issue rifles. Mine would be no better. Elaine’s Mp5 even worse. Neil’s AK, whose rounds would pack more punch, was no better in the range department.

“We need more fire out there,” Neil said.

He was right. Even if just for suppressing what was being directed at us.

“I’m first,” my friend said as a volley of fire tracked onto the
Sandy
again, chewing at the side of the wheelhouse.

“Go!” I shouted.

Neil rolled to the door and slipped out of the wheelhouse, shifting to the right side of the boat to reach the bow and not interfere with Schiavo’s shooters.

“Neil’s on the bow!” I told the lieutenant.

She didn’t reply. She didn’t move an inch, and hadn’t since taking her position at the left side window. There she stood, exposed, opening fire now at the muzzle blasts that were our only target, rounds from the Russian machine gun ripping into the wheelhouse all around her.

Despite the gender, she had a pair of brass ones bigger than any man I’d seen take a weapon into battle.

Then I heard Neil fire. Quick bursts from his AK, the sound distinctive, a deeper crack amongst the almost wispy
ratta tat tat
from the M4s.

Acosta, too, had held his position near the spider webbed windshield, tracking the incoming boat with the thermal binoculars.

“Five hundred!”

“They’re turning!” Westin said.

I slid across the wheelhouse floor to the door, Elaine right behind. We slipped out and onto deck, scrambling across the lurching surface to the port side rail. The stream of fire from the MG was raking the entire side of the boat, low and then high, water sprouting from impacts and the hull ringing like a bell with every penetration.

“If they get us below the waterline we’re gonna have a long swim,” Elaine said.

“Just stay down,” I said.

“What?”

I could plainly hear the confusion in her voice, but I didn’t answer. Instead I poked my head and weapon above the rail and took aim at the boat, squeezing off a series of rounds, trying to make each count, my aim just above the barrel spewing fire at us.

“They’re slowing!”

Acosta’s warning reached out onto the deck. To my right, two of the three shooters were reloading. Without warning Elaine popped up and trained her MP5 on the target, within two hundred meters now, still a Hail Mary shot for her.

“Come on...” she implored the boat closer, wanting to add her own fire to the mix.

Then, after a long burst from Neil’s AK, the MG fire stopped, just a glowing barrel visible across the water.

“Keep the fire up!” Lorenzen said.

We did. A few hundred feet away now, the vessel was no longer charging, its bow hardly pushing through the calm waters. It was coasting.

“Enderson, drop a forty on it!”

The corporal followed his sergeant’s order and stopped firing, lifting his M4 up a bit and loading a 40mm grenade into the fat launcher attached to the underside of the barrel. Elaine began firing now, adding to the covering fire as an almost comical
thoop
sounded from Enderson’s weapon.

The results a second later were anything but cartoonish.

The wheelhouse of the approaching boat erupted in a red orange fireball, its structure peeling away like petals of some metallic flower. The craft rocked, tipping severely away from us, flames building from mid ship to bow, secondary explosions popping, grenades and ammo cooking off.

“Cease fire!” Lorenzen ordered. “Cease fire!”

Other than the rumble of the
Sandy
’s engines and the
pop pop pop
of mini explosions across the water, a quiet settled over the boat.

“Circle it,” Schiavo told Westin. “Keep it on our left.”