The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (7 page)

Information, even in this new age, could be power.

“Don’t want to talk about it,” Schiavo said. “I see.”

“Why Skagway?” Elaine asked.

Schiavo shrugged and slung her M4, some coolness rising. A chill about the subject I’d sensed in her as each morsel about where our friends had been taken was drawn out.

“That information was not part of my briefing.”

“You don’t sound enthused about any of this,” I said.

Schiavo thought for a moment. Maybe weighing the propriety of any reply. Of making any statement of discord to an outsider.

“In my world, you don’t group your assets,” she said. “You spread out as a matter of defense.”

So she spoke her mind. Somewhat. Without being insubordinate or belaboring the issue. She was a thinking soldier. An honest leader. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

“Are you going there?” Elaine asked. “To Skagway?”

Schiavo didn’t answer this time. Maybe doing some withholding of her own.

“Is that your boat tied off at the east dock?” the lieutenant asked.

“It is,” I confirmed.

Schiavo thought for a moment. Studying us. Maybe appraising our wherewithal. Our grit.

“You look like you’ve been through some hard times,” the lieutenant said.

“Do you know anybody who’s had it easy since the blight?” I asked.

She smiled and shook her head.

“Lieutenant...”

It was Enderson. He’d retrieved something else from one of the dead Russians. A small round of metal, a bit larger than a quarter, a dull, rusty sheen upon its surface. He held it up and Schiavo stared at it, her expression darkening.

“Kuratov,” Enderson said.

Schiavo took the small medallion and rolled it over again and again in her fingers like a foul talisman.

“Yeah,” she said, agreeing with the corporal.

“Is that his name?” Elaine asked.

“Him?” Schiavo asked, gesturing to the Russian the medallion had been retrieved from before shaking her head. “No. This little hunk of metal here identifies this soldier as belonging to Forty Fifth Spetsnaz.”

“The same unit that went into Ukraine without insignia,” Enderson added.

Ukraine. It was difficult to remember the time when that dominated the news. It all seemed so small now. So insignificant compared to what had followed. And what was still unfolding.

“Their commander was...is a man named Aleksy Kuratov,” Schiavo said. “There were some reports that he’d gone rogue with his unit after the blight spread across Asia and Europe. When we had later reports of possible Russian incursions in the Aleutians, command just figured it was isolated instances of starving units acting out of desperation.”

“Kuratov doesn’t act out of desperation,” Sergeant Lorenzen said. “He always has a plan.”

“Right,” Schiavo said, that reality seeming to spark some concern in her. “Right.”

Enderson found a second red medallion in another Russian’s pocket and stood, handing it to me. I wiped a splotch of blood from it with the thumb of my glove and examined both sides. There were no markings. None at all. Just a smooth reddish patina upon the circle of metal.

“Kuratov gives every one of his troopers those,” Enderson said. “They treasure it more than any medal they could be given. Now, it’s yours.”

I wondered if what I’d just been given could be considered a war trophy. Something akin to a Samurai sword taken from a Japanese officer during World War Two. Or a Luger off a dead German soldier in the same conflict. Was this to be my memento of this battle?

“Go ahead,” Enderson said, smiling. “Might be worth something someday.”

The thought of just tossing it back amongst the dead Russians was there, but so was the odd desire to retain it, so I slipped the small trinket into my shirt pocket, an uncertain keepsake at best.

“If you’re going to Skagway, I’d recommend against the boat,” Schiavo said. “If Kuratov is in the area, that craft will not absorb much fire. And he will fire at anything that moves.”

“Movement means life,” Enderson said.

“Life means food,” Lorenzen added, completing the train of logic.

I thought on the warning she was giving us. We all did. Neil, though, was the first to utilize it to try and push through the lieutenant’s reluctance to offer certain information.

“So maybe we’ll ask again,” Neil said. “Are you going to Skagway? Because whether we get there by boat or by chopper, I don’t much care. None of us do. We just want to get there ASAP. And by air is sure as hell going to be quicker than by boat, especially since you’re telling us our choice of transport could be very unhealthy.”

Schiavo considered what Neil was asking, and what he was suggesting.

“We have to check on garrisons in Ketchikan and Juneau before we continue on to Skagway,” Schiavo said. “And I can’t get authorization to let you tag along for...”

She looked beyond those gathered close to the one who’d separated himself.

“Westin...”

The private looked her way, then, after seeming to take a breath, he jogged back and joined the group.

“How long until our next com opportunity?”

Westin took a small device from his pocket. It was compact and electronic and rugged. I could just make out bits of information on the display—latitude, longitude, altitude, and a timer. Counting down.

“About two hours,” Westin reported.

“Com,” Elaine said. “You have communications?”

Schiavo didn’t answer. A look to Westin suggested he get past the minor conflict and answer the lady’s question.

“We can relay burst transmissions off a satellite that passes over different locations at varying times,” he explained. “And we listen at the same time for any messages from our HQ.”

“Basically a line of sight communication with one bounce,” Neil said, impressed. “And that gets through the White Signal?”

“With the right equipment, yeah,” Westin confirmed.

I thought for a moment then fixed on the lieutenant.

“Look, our people are in Skagway. Everything we found here, and everything you’ve said, points to that as fact. We’d be with them if we’d been in town when this evacuation happened. You’re going to Skagway, and that’s where we’re supposed to be. Wouldn’t you just be transporting civilians to safety? Isn’t that something you’d do in other circumstances?”

She considered the scenario I was laying out, but wasn’t buying it yet.

“The circumstances here are the two stops we have to make before heading to Skagway could very well be hot. Hotter than this. I’m talking combat situations. Ketchikan is twenty miles up the coast from here. Twenty miles. If these Russians came from anywhere, Ketchikan is a logical spot.”

“Which means the garrison there could have suffered the same fate as this one,” Lorenzen said.

“Ma’am,” Westin said, and Schiavo looked to him. “If we transmit a request in two hours, there’s a six hour wait for the next opportunity to receive a reply.”

“Eight hours,” Lorenzen said, clearly not relishing that much time on Mary Island.

Neither, I could see quite plainly, was the lieutenant.

“We’re not going to get in your way,” Neil assured her. “And, just so you know, we know how to fight. We’ve had to fight to stay alive.”

Schiavo considered the three of us for a moment, some decision rising.

“Okay,” she said. “You need anything from your boat?”

I shook my head. We’d left the
Sandy
with all we needed. The supplies in her hold wouldn’t be necessary anymore. What would have been a week or more journey through Alaska’s inside passage might now be completed in eight hours.

Might.

“Do you really think the Russians are in Ketchikan and Juneau?” Elaine asked.

“I don’t know,” Schiavo said, maybe doubting the suggestion she’d made before. “Kuratov had a regiment. But what’s a regiment in this new reality? Fifty men? Sixty? I should have a platoon of thirty, but I’ve got a weakened squad of five. If he’s stretched as thin as we are, he could have lost half his force trying to take this island. The rest could be heading back to Kamchatka for all I know. Or dead.”

She quieted then. Something about her hardening.

“But I know that however low the probability of contact is, I have to be ready to kill every living thing that’s not on our side.”

“Ooo-rah,” Lorenzen said with fierce calm, his concurrence almost timid compared to the sentiment it validated.

“Sergeant,” Schiavo said, looking to her number two. “Police up any food from the cellar. And anything from the boat. Get it aboard the chopper and let’s get out of here. We’ll transmit a status report from Ketchikan.”

Her troops moved quickly on her orders. We assisted lugging cases of MREs up the trail from the dock. In twenty minutes everything was aboard the Sea Stallion.

But there was something still to do. A matter of honor to attend to.

Westin, Hart, and Enderson broke out shovels and began digging. In just ten minutes they had a communal grave dug. A few minutes more and they’d transferred the remains of the fallen Americans from inside the building to their final resting place. The bodies, whole and mangled alike, were covered with ponchos, then with dirt. Schiavo said a few words. Lorenzen recited the Lord’s Prayer.

There was no marker left. The only record that they had fought and died were the dog tags collected from each. Schiavo slipped those into a pocket and that was that.

“Time to go,” she said.

The rotors began to turn as we followed Schiavo and her unit to the Sea Stallion and climbed into the cabin. Hart and Acosta were already on the side miniguns. The loading ramp folded upward and Enderson helped secure us in the simple seats folded out from the fuselage, Elaine and Neil across the cabin from me.

Schiavo stepped past us, slipping into a headset and settling into a seat closest to Acosta on the right side minigun.

“Here we go!” Schiavo shouted, signaling with a twirl of her upraised finger that we were taking off.

The Sea Stallion shook and rumbled, then half of that noise and shuddering seemed to drain away as the craft was enveloped by air. Floating. I felt the sudden lightness as it was transmitted through me. It was a slightly unsettling sensation, different from that one experiences in a plane. For lack of a better description, it was as though I wasn’t being thrust into the sky, but pulled toward the heavens.

A moment later, someone tried to send each and every one of us to that very place.

I
happened to be looking past Hart on the left door gun when a flash bloomed in the dead woods beyond the smoldering lighthouse.

“RPG!”

Someone screamed the warning. I don’t know who it was. Hart let out a burst from his miniguns as the pilots reacted, the modified Sea Stallion jerking hard to the left, turbines screaming overhead as they tried to shift the aircraft clear of the unguided missile streaking toward it.

They were unsuccessful.

The warhead impacted at the extreme front of the helicopter when it was barely thirty feet off the ground, exploding through the cockpit. A shower of flame and shrapnel and body parts sprayed into the cabin, engines suddenly spinning down, controls destroyed, both pilots obviously dead. I grabbed for a handhold as the aircraft rolled to the right, away from the direction it had been turning, nose coming up. I saw Elaine steadying herself across from me as the Sea Stallion tipped slowly forward.

“We’re going down!” Schiavo yelled.

“Brace!” Lorenzen shouted.

I looked away from Elaine for a moment, toward the front of the bird. Most of what had existed forward of the side gunners was gone, just shredded metal and sparking wires remaining.

And the earth. I saw that, too. It was what we were heading for, open ground near the edge of the tree line, not far from where the RPG had been fired. Once more I turned to Elaine. She was fixed on me, forcing a smile. Some gallows humor version of joy on her face. Maybe an acknowledgment that, after all we’d come through, we were going to die in, of all things, an aircraft that had been shot down in battle.

Then, something odd happened. As the engines continued to slow down, rotors above chopping through the air at a reduced rate, the helicopter began to right itself, the nose coming up, as if we’d reached the bottom of some arc and were about to head up again.

“Autorotation!” Hart shouted, his death grip still on the controls of the left side minigun.

Autorotation. I knew vaguely what that was. It was, for helicopters, the equivalent of an airplane’s dead stick landing. A distant cousin of a gliding touch down. The Sea Stallion’s rotor, as I recalled, while without power, was still spinning enough to provide some lift, and as the chopper neared the ground, pulling back on the stick and flaring the bird could, sometimes, allow something approximating a survivable landing. In our case, physics had taken over where the pilots, now gone, would have initiated the maneuver. The balance of the helicopter, heavier aft now with the cockpit and its structure blasted away, equalized, with the nose coming up as we neared the ground.

Which is precisely what happened just before we hit. Hard.

There was no explosion. Not any like we’d experienced recently, in any case. But gears and engines and metal stiffeners in the fuselage came apart with showers of smoke and sparks. The rear of the Sea Stallion buckled, a great gash opening across the top of the fuselage just above the loading ramp.

Then, everything began to tremble. I’d never been in an earthquake larger than a small shaker, but what I felt then was more than I could imagine even tectonic plates unleashing. The rotor spinning above, which had sheared partially as we hit and its blades flexed, was instantly unbalanced, the wobbling motion tearing it apart transmitted to everything within. Like a child’s toy being tossed by an unruly toddler, the Sea Stallion was whipped onto its side by the torqueing test between whipping blades and hulking fuselage, bodies within tumbling, shattered rotors chewing into the earth, spinning slower. And slower. And slower.

Until the mechanical violence ended, just the fading whine of the turbines spinning down left.