by Noah Mann
“You’re outgunned,” Neil said, stating more than the obvious. “Put it down.”
‘Jeremy’ made no move to acquiesce, his gaze sampling the three muzzles directed squarely at him.
“It’s over,” I said.
“All we want to do is talk,” Elaine said.
Our journey north was mostly in the blind. We’d stopped at Mary Island hoping that the light which had called us to shore might mark a place where answers would be found. Guidance. Now more than ever I believed that to be a distinct probability. That belief was borne of the concocted tale Jeremy had told. A lie sprinkled with truths.
He’d spoken of people ‘from down south’. And of logging ‘channel transits’. Whether the remainder of his story, including the Russians advancing down the coast, held any basis in fact, I didn’t know. It might. But what he’d shared about people from south of here heading north fit almost perfectly with what we’d believed had happened to those who’d disappeared from Bandon. The symmetry was undeniable. And Jeremy’s knowing that, particularly if he was some part of this unit of Russians who’d assaulted the island, made perfect sense. For one simple reason.
Intelligence.
You wanted to know as much about a target before attacking it. That was a concept easy to grasp even for one without extensive knowledge of military operations. If possible, you’d want to infiltrate it. Learn its weaknesses. Its strengths.
“Drop the knife,” Neil commanded the young man again.
He did nothing. He said nothing.
But he had said things. In perfect English. Just how an infiltrator would be expected to speak. To not draw suspicions.
“You snuck in here,” I said to him, my AR slightly lowered. “You got inside the perimeter. Probed the defenses.”
It was all metaphorical, what I was suggesting. There was no perimeter but the meeting of land and sea. No obvious defenses other than the sheer bulk of the lighthouse and its base structure. But he knew what I meant. He knew that I knew. That we knew. And, in a way, what I’d just said to him was the impetus for what happened next.
For what he chose to do next.
With a swift, clean motion he brought the knife up. None of us fired because the blade did not shift toward us. It moved toward him. Its sharp, stained edge came to the far left side of his neck and carved deep into the flesh as the committed young soldier drew it quickly around his neck, slicing a bloody smile a few inches beneath the real one.
“Christ!”
Elaine’s exclamation sounded at almost exactly the same instant that the young soldier crumpled before us, the sudden, rapid loss of blood sapping his consciousness. His ability to control any motor function whatsoever ceased as the wet red tide spilled out of him through the hideous wound.
“Why the hell would he do that?” Elaine asked, almost shaken by the grotesque end unfolding before us.
Neil stared down at Jeremy’s still body. A slowing flow of blood bubbled from his severed jugular. His heart was barely going through the motions now, no longer able to sustain the gush that had erupted in the first seconds after the blade sliced into and through the vein.
“He didn’t want to talk,” Neil said, confused as he looked to us. “Why?”
“Training?” I half suggested. “Not supposed to be taken alive?”
It was a thin possibility. I knew that.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Neil said.
“That and more,” Elaine added.
We focused on her now.
“He turns on the light and draws us to shore,” she recounted. “Then he meets us at the dock with nothing but a knife tucked in his belt? There are Kalashnikovs scattered all over here.”
She was right. Next to the carefully arranged row of bodies were two distinct piles of weapons. AK-47s that had seen battle, here and elsewhere by the look of them. Yet ‘Jeremy’ hadn’t armed himself with any of them. Where he could have met our approach with devastating gunfire from cover along the shore, he instead welcomed us. As if he’d been expecting us.
Or someone else.
My heartbeat quickened at that realization.
“He was expecting friendlies,” I said. “His friendlies.”
Neil understood now, too.
“A follow on force,” he said.
I nodded.
“To occupy after the assault force has neutralized the enemy,” I said.
“That’s why he turned on the light,” Neil said. “And why he offed himself. He couldn’t take the chance that we’d get that out of him.”
Elaine, too, was coming up to speed on the situation we were now facing.
“If that’s true,” she began, “then they’re still coming.”
They...
How many that represented we had no idea. In the world as it was, certainly no large units existed to maraud the coast of Alaska and its myriad of islands. Then again, it wouldn’t take mass numbers of troops to do so. They’d taken this hunk of rock and its lighthouse at the cost of a half dozen dead. A price had been paid, to be certain, but they’d captured their objective. For a while.
It now belonged to us. And that scared the hell out of me.
“We’ve gotta get back to the boat,” I said.
“And far away from this place,” Elaine added.
Elaine and I were turning away from the collection of bodies and toward the path to the dock when we noticed that Neil was not. He looked to us and slowly shook his head.
“We can’t,” he said.
“This is not the place to make a stand,” I told my friend.
He didn’t try to counter my statement of logic. Instead, he gestured toward the doorway Elaine had peered through just moments ago.
“We need information,” Neil reminded us. “If there were transits past this island, it might be them.”
Them...
Grace. Krista. Martin. And hundreds more. If they’d cruised past Mary Island on whatever craft had taken them from Bandon, that movement could very well have been recorded here, as ‘Jeremy’ had mentioned. Because this place had to have been maintained as an operational station for a reason.
“He’s right,” I said, looking to Elaine.
She wasn’t going to fight the choice we were making. But it was plain on her face that she wasn’t happy about it.
“We’d better do it fast,” she said.
I glanced upward, to the light spinning slowly atop the tower, its beam less brilliant than when we’d first spotted it from a distance.
“Find a way to shut that off,” I told Elaine. “Then see if you can get to the top.”
“Observation post,” Elaine said, understanding. “I’m on it.”
We moved toward the door together. Then through, weapons ready. We didn’t expect any firefight. That action seemed certain to have preceded our arrival. But we’d faced our share of surprises on our journeys together, and being prepared to face any of them had never served us poorly.
And now, once again, we were ready to fight, but hoped that we could get done what needed to be done, and depart this treacherous rock, before that fight came to us.
Six
A single light, its enclosure shattered but bulb miraculously still burning, shone in the large room at the base of the lighthouse tower. Just enough to reveal the blackened and bloody mess left from the battle for Mary Island.
The sight slowed us for just an instant. One couldn’t look upon fallen soldiers, young and brave, crumpled near windows, limbs severed, charred from blasts in the confined space, without pausing, if only to take a breath and say a silent prayer.
“I’m heading up,” Elaine said, aiming herself for the stairs off to the right.
Above, a motor groaned, struggling, the mechanism that turned the light at the top of the tower sounding as though it was on its last legs. Or drawing some final surge of power from whatever source fed it.
“Over there,” Neil said as Elaine disappeared up the stairs.
I looked to whe
re my friend was pointing, our weapons now slung. A pair of old metal file cabinets on the far side of the room, toppled and dented, had caught his attention. And now mine. Particularly with several drawers open, the contents of each spilled, pages and pages of forms and documents mounded close and scattered by the blasts which had decimated the space.
Neil hurried to the cabinets, stepping around and over the remains strewn about.
“We’re back in the age of paper,” he said, crouching near the literal data dump.
I joined him, the both of us sifting through the documents. Some were pristine, as if they’d just been dropped by a clumsy courier. Most were not. Splatters of blood dotted many of the handwritten sheets. Some were perforated by shrapnel.
“Here,” Neil said, holding a single sheet out to me. “Look at the date.”
I did. At the top of the page a date was noted in pen.
“That’s six days ago,” he said. “And look below.”
Again, I followed his direction. There was a name. The name of a ship.
“The Vensterdam,” I read aloud.
Neil pointed to the description and notations further down the page.
“A cruise ship,” he said.
I struggled to read what came next. The skim of crimson spray had mostly obliterated the words.
“Hey!”
The shout came from above.
“The tower light is on a battery bank!” Elaine reported, her voice ping-ponging down the switchback staircase. “When I pull this I think you’re gonna lose lights, too!”
Neil and I both took our flashlights out.
“Go for it!” I shouted toward the stairs.
A few seconds later the already dim light went black, and the grinding sound from above spun quickly down to silence.
“We’re dark!” Neil told her. “You see anything from up there?”
“Nothing!”
It was the only reply we wanted to hear. And we hoped the situation it represented wouldn’t change.
“Put your light on here, too,” I told my friend.
Neil shifted the beam of his flashlight to join mine on the obscured portion on the page, the angle and convergence of illumination revealing enough detail that I was able to make what I believed was a fairly precise guess at what it said. I looked up to my friend before I gave voice to what I’d seen.
“One hundred and fifty from Yuma colony,” I said.
Neil processed that for a moment.
“Yuma?”
That he was perplexed was clear. So was I.
“A hundred and fifty miles from the west coast,” I said.
“Colony,” my friend parroted. “That sounds a lot like—”
“Like Bandon,” I finished for him.
That was exactly what our seaside Oregon village had become. A colony of survivors. Now, apparently, we had confirmation that there were others.
We weren’t alone.
“If they came through here...”
Neil had barely finished the statement when he was, again, digging through the papers. Looking almost madly for the same kind of document that would tell him, that would tell us all that our friends and loved ones had actually passed by here.
The ‘where’ of the larger question still lingered. A place of destination. But only until I scanned the rest of the page and saw a final notation near the bottom.
“Neil...”
My friend looked as I pointed to a single word prominent in the narrow beam of my flashlight.
“Skagway,” he said, reading it, some fast mental math following. “That’s three or four hundred miles north of here. Way past Ketchikan.”
Probably closer to three hundred and fifty miles, I knew. Hours and hours studying the maps of our planned route along the Alaskan coast allowed me to narrow down his estimate. Still, whatever it said, that was where the Yuma group had been headed. Not necessarily where our friends had been taken.
Taken...
That word, that term, and its inherent nefariousness, rang sour in my thoughts. None of this had been voluntary. I didn’t want to let my mind conjure what might have awaited them there.
“Got it,” Neil said, something below a shout, but not by much.
He showed me the page, energized by what he’d found. It was ripped in half, torn and shredded by an impact almost perfectly down the middle, just a small sliver of paper at the bottom keeping the halves together.
“Four hundred and six from...”
I could read no more. The rest was gone. Obliterated by whatever hunk of metal had gouged its way through the file cabinet and the documents it once held.
“There were four hundred and twelve before we left for Cheyenne,” Neil said, and I knew where his train of thought was going.
“Four hundred and eleven,” I corrected him, adding a single name to identify his mistake. “Micah.”
The child had died shortly before our departure. One soul erased before salvation could be found.
“Right,” Neil said. “Minus four.”
Neil. Elaine. Me. And Burke.
Burke...
Another who would never know a better world. The hope of a world turned green again. He’d fallen so soon in our quest that any hint of what we had ultimately found dwarfed what he, or any of us, might have expected. He was caustic and distant. He drank. He reeked of superiority at times. But he was a good man. A damaged man. And, whether he knew it or not, at the end he was my friend.
“Four hundred and seven,” Neil said, narrowing our math down to a confirmation we’d rather have been wrong about. “Minus the blood stain.”
A dried pool of dark crimson staining the floor of Bandon’s meeting hall. That was the mark which had convinced us that violence had erupted as our friends and neighbors were taken away. One had fallen there. Another who would had no chance of witnessing new and better days.
“Four hundred and six,” I said, matching the number that had likely disappeared from Bandon with the number marked on the crude and battered form my friend had found.
“What are the odds, Fletch?” he wondered aloud, no answer necessary to confirm what we both knew.
This document was proof that the town’s population had been taken along this route. To where we still did not know.
“I can’t make anything else out on here,” Neil said, frustrated. “It’s torn all to pieces.”
He dropped the document and began pulling small pieces from what remained piled where he crouched.
“It could be Skagway,” I said.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Neil countered. “Just because it said that on one piece of—”
“I see something!”
Elaine’s report from above stopped us both cold. For an instant. Then Neil was back digging through the pages scattered about.
“Go see,” he said. “We’ve gotta know where they went.”
I could have pressed the issue with him. I could have reminded him that we were likely in the crosshairs of some Russian excursion upon American soil. But I doubted any prodding would work to penetrate his focus. Instead I rose and moved quickly to the stairwell.
“What is it?” I asked Elaine.
Fifty feet above her face appeared over a railing in the dim glow of starlight bleeding through the tower’s glass enclosure.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
“Maybe isn’t reassuring,” I told her.
“There was something in the strait,” she said. “Like something solid blocking reflections on the water.”
Just like a boat would, I knew. She did as well.
“How far out?” I asked.
“Close to shore,” she said.
Nothing of what she was reporting was comforting. But that paled in comparison to the reality which hit like a thunderbolt as the wall of the lighthouse tower above exploded inward.
Seven
In an instant Elaine was gone. Gone from my sight. And, I feared, gone from this world, as the west fa
cing wall of the lighthouse tower burst inward with a shower of jagged stone and orange flame.
“Elaine!”
I screamed her name upward, then ducked back against the wall as debris from the obvious impact of some explosive weapon rained down. Blocks of stone bounced off the stairs and tore the old steel railings from their mounts. Twisted lengths of metal snapped and rocketed across the narrow width of the tower staircase, ricocheting like shrapnel spears, one missing my head by inches as it planted itself in the concrete wall behind.
“Elaine!” I shouted again.
But she didn’t respond. Either she was dead, or hurt. Or, quite possibly, my words had been drowned out by the sudden and ear shattering chorus of gunfire rising from outside.
“We’ve got company!”
Neil’s warning from the main room was followed immediately by the sound of his own weapon opening up, quick bursts, ejected shell casings tinging off the solid walls and floor that surrounded him. I looked back up the stairs, the smoke and dust clearing just enough that I could see all the way to the top between the switchbacking stairs.
“Elaine!”
“I’m here!” she finally replied, coughing. “Two groups! One from the west and another from the south!”
Then I heard glass break, and her own weapon open up, the crack of her MP5 almost dainty compared to the sound of what was incoming. For an instant I debated whether I should head up, to provide cover from above with Elaine, or move to where Neil was to repel the obvious attack at ground level.
The sound my friend let out next made the decision for me.
It was a piercing cry, followed by a brief spurt of invectives.
“I’m hit!”
I ran back into the main room and caught a glimpse of Neil across the darkened space, muzzle flashes from outside illuminating his writhing form in harsh, agonizing pulses of hot light. He leaned against the wall near the window he’d been using as a gun port, AK slung, hanging loose, one hand grabbing at the opposite shoulder.
