by Noah Mann
“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.
Eleven
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.
“We’ve gotta cover that tree line!” Lorenzen shouted, unstrapping himself from the canvas bucket seat affixed to what was now the floor of the space.
I hung above him, still buckled in, still dazed by the horrific end to our short flight.
“Eric!”
It was Elaine. She stood below me, a trickle of blood on the side of her face. Other than that minor injury she seemed unhurt.
“I’m okay,” I said, convinced of that a few seconds later as I caught my breath and shook off the impact. “I’m good.”
I undid my belt and lowered myself down. Neil had recovered and was already gearing up. Everyone was, it seemed, no serious injuries or, thank God, fatalities, other than the cockpit crew. To call it a miracle might not be far from accurate, I thought.
“Westin, Enderson, on me,” Lorenzen shouted, his M4 ready as he led his men through the gaping rip in the fuselage. “Hart, give a check on everyone then bring up the rear.”
“You okay?” Hart asked, looking to me and Elaine and Neil.
We all gave him an assuring nod and he headed for the opening, Schiavo and Acosta approaching next.
“You smell that?” Schiavo asked.
We all did. A stark and pungent wave was scenting the air within what was left of the Sea Stallion.
“We have to get some supplies out,” I said, and Schiavo nodded.
“Fast,” Acosta suggested. “Before we all become crispy critters.”
That the helicopter hadn’t been engulfed in flames by the spilled fuel igniting was maybe another miracle. Or a testament to its toughness. In either case, the luck we were having might very well not last. We needed to get as much of what we’d brought onto the Sea Stallion back off, lest starvation be the next obstacle we’d be facing instead of Russians.
“Acosta and I will cover,” Schiavo said. “You three mule everything you can grab away from the chopper. Clear?”
It was. Schiavo and Acosta stepped through the opening and took up positions a few yards away from the capsized helicopter. I carried the first cases out with my pack on and AR slung at my side. Neil and Elaine matched my load. The three of us had almost all of the MREs and water bottles off when we heard a few quick bursts of gunfire from the woods to the west.
“Cover!” Schiavo ordered.
Acosta moved to the Sea Stallion’s shattered cockpit and crouched low there, focusing his attention to the west and south. Schiavo sprinted to the half demolished outbuilding near the lighthouse and covered the west and north. The actions were practiced and precise. We had no such connection with how Schiavo had drilled her troops, but we knew enough that to be useful we should be adding eyes and weaponry to where they were not.
“Lighthouse,” I said.
Neil nodded and took the lead, running to the side of the building with Elaine and me behind. When we reached the battle scarred south wall we positioned ourselves to cover the eastern side of the clearing. Then we waited.
It was likely a minute or two that passed, but the silence was palpable. The not knowing made the time drag.
“Quick boat trip and bring them home,” Neil said quietly, injecting what relief he could into the tense moment.
“What’s this, an added bonus?” Elaine wondered, joining in.
“Go to Alaska and fight Russians,” I said. “New state tourism slogan.”
The brief interlude of humor ended then, not with further violence, but with calm voices and familiar faces emerging from the woods behind us.
“One down,” Lorenzen reported.
Westin, Enderson, and Hart followed him as we all regrouped with Schiavo and Acosta near the stacks of supplies.
“That last burst of minigun fire was dead on,” Enderson said. “We just made sure he was down.”
“I think he was already wounded when he fired at the chopper,” Lorenzen said. “There was a blood trail.”
“He was alone?” Schiavo asked.
Lorenzen nodded.
“Where’s the radio?” Westin asked, eyeing what we’d salvaged.
Schiavo’s gaze widened.
“Get it,” she said, and Westin hurried back into the crashed chopper.
“If it’s...” Lorenzen began, apparently not needing to complete the worry.
“Yeah,” Schiavo said, nodding sharply, some self-directed anger working on her.
A moment later Westin emerged from the Sea Stallion with his rifle slung and his hands empty. He shook his head.
“Wonderful,” Schiavo said, turning away for a moment.
“What is it?” Elaine asked.
“Without the radio we’re deaf,” Lorenzen said. “If something’s happening where we’re heading, the garrison there might have reported it. But we’ll never hear that.”
“We could head right into an ambush,” Enderson said.
“We’re not really heading anywhere,” Neil said, gesturing to the Sea Stallion.
Schiavo turned to face us right then, looking very purposely at me, and Neil, and Elaine.
“Yes we are,” the lieutenant said.
Twelve
The Sandy would carry us north. All of us. That decision was not agreed upon. It was imposed.
“I’m not saying we’d resist,” Neil told Schiavo. “I’m just saying you don’t have to use the terms you are.”
Requisitioning. That was what Schiavo had said. That she and her men were ‘requisitioning’ the fishing boat we’d brought north from Bandon. There was no asking. In essence, they were taking it.
“This isn’t a negotiation,” Schiavo said. “I have the authority to—”
“Don’t,” I interrupted her. “Don’t.”
“What?” she pressed me.
“You’re going to take the boat, fine,” I said. “But please don’t claim authority over it, or us.”
She stared at me for a moment, then that look turned to a glare.
“I let you on the chopper,” she said, her tone verging on anger. “I was going to get you to your people. Was that some kind of authority you were opposed to? Because if it was, and if what I’m doing now is, I also have the authority to leave you right here on this rock with a three day supply of food and water. That authority has been given to me as well when I encounter civilians who may impede my mission. So, if you are dissatisfied with me requisitioning your transport and still allowing you to come along, let’s decide real fast who’s on the boat, and who’s making Mary Island their new home.”
It was a calculated rant. And I suspected Schiavo regretted the tenacity with which she’d given it as soon as she’d finished.
But I had sparked the response from her. And I wanted her to understand the why and where of what might have seemed like defiance on my part
.
“You don’t need to exert authority over us, Lieutenant Schiavo,” I said. “You didn’t come off that chopper and prone us out when you landed. You gave us consideration as civilians. As human beings. All I’m saying is you don’t need to revert to whatever position some bureaucrat with stars on their collar has given you. I’ve seen authority exerted since the blight, and it’s not pretty when all those on the receiving end of it want is that same kind of consideration we already know you’re capable of.”
I didn’t know if my words would stoke the sudden fire that had ignited her response, but I doubted they would, and I was right. She breathed, slow and shallow, absorbing what I’d said to her, and, if anything, a measure of calm seemed to come to her.
“Sergeant, have the men start getting these supplies onto the boat,” Schiavo said while looking directly at me.
Lorenzen knew what she wanted. Shifting the cases of water and MREs was a convenient necessity allowing the lieutenant to get all of her troops clear of the place where she stood with us. A few minutes later that was precisely what happened as her five subordinates carried the first load away from the lighthouse.
“Do you know what I did before this?” Schiavo asked. “Before the damn blight, do you know where I was stationed? What my job was?”
We waited, silent, no need to prompt the answer we knew was coming.
“I was a musician,” Schiavo said, a hint of a grin flashing. “I played piano in DC for get-togethers where Army brass and political types would dress up and dance and eat food I could only dream of where I grew up.”
I hadn’t seen that coming. I doubted Neil or Elaine had, either.
“Musician,” I said.
“Did my time before that in a logistics unit,” Schiavo said. “Before that I had two years of infantry. But somehow I sat down at a piano one day at an off base club, just to fool around, and some colonel heard me. And recognized me. And told his superiors I was being misused in logistics. Next thing I knew I was sitting at the ivories.”
She waited for commentary from us, but, to be honest, I had no idea what to say. Nor did I have any idea why she’d chosen this moment, after what had just transpired, to share this bit of her past. It certainly didn’t seem germane to what had just transpired.
