by Noah Mann
“Take one step back, on the carpet only,” I directed the lieutenant.
She followed my instructions. A couple more steps had her fully in the clear. She joined me in examining the grenades.
“Those are ours,” she said. “M Sixty Seven frags.”
Her knowledge on the subject was greater than mine by far. I knew only that the small green globes were fragmentation grenades, potentially lethal out to nearly fifty feet. Where we stood they would have shredded us to bits.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“I don’t have a demo guy,” she said. “So we leave it.”
I didn’t full agree. I’d disarmed traps that major Layton’s people had set around my refuge in Montana. But that had been TNT. Cutting simple wired fuses was different than making safe a tensioned tripwire. That much I was certain of.
“Let’s back out and do visuals from the sidewalk from now on,” Schiavo said.
A few minutes later we were outside in the rain. We briefed Neil and Elaine on what we’d found. An hour later, simply peering through still intact windows and broken front entrance doors, we’d identified five more booby traps inside differing establishments. All set the same. Three grenades connected to a tensioned tripwire. We marked each on our map and started back to the Coast Guard Station.
“I wish we had com,” Schiavo said.
I knew why she was expressing that particular concern. Up the road, in the north of the town, her sergeant and his team could very well be facing the same improvised traps we’d come across. Having a regularly working radio would allow her to inform him of the hazards we’d encountered. Before his team did with possibly tragic results.
“Your sergeant seems sharp,” I said. “He’ll spot anything not right.”
“I didn’t,” Schiavo said.
The rain began to pound, drenching us and the town as we left it behind.
* * *
Sergeant Lorenzen made it back to the station with Westin and Enderson an hour after we’d returned. He reported that they’d found no sign of the garrison, and, after hearing what we’d come across, that no traps had impeded their search.
“Who would lay traps with our own gear?” Enderson wondered.
“The garrison,” Westin said. “They got spooked, boogied out of here, and rigged the town.”
“Then they up and vanish?” Enderson challenged him, shaking his head. “I don’t buy that.”
“They are not here,” Westin said. “But some of their munitions are in town. Add it up.”
Westin left the discussion, heading across the rec room to dry off and tear open an MRE. He sneered at the contents.
“Sarge, you gotta make us up something palatable again soon,” Westin said.
“Damn straight,” Hart agreed.
Lorenzen nodded. But he wasn’t thinking about food.
“What do you think about the traps?” I asked him.
Lorenzen thought for a moment.
“Fox in the henhouse, you set traps for the fox,” he said. “I’m not so sure Private Westin isn’t onto something.”
“You think they were overrun?” Schiavo asked, doubtful. “Look at this place. There was no fight here. There wasn’t any fight in town.”
“There was a fight somewhere,” Lorenzen told his commander. “If we had a weekend pass, I’d bet mine on that.”
The conversation was turning as gloomy as the weather. Everyone was either soaked or drying out. Rain was drumming on the station roof. Through the window I could see waves leaping white in the channel.
I could also see Acosta. Standing in the downpour near the edge of the dock, the top of the Sandy’s wheelhouse bobbing just beyond. He was staring alternately at the water and up to the clouds.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, taking my coat from where I’d hung it to dry and slipping into it again.
“Where are you going?” Elaine asked.
“Outside for a sec,” I said, leaning in to plant a quick kiss on her forehead. “I’ll be right back.”
Seventeen
“This isn’t looking all that promising,” Private Acosta said
He stood at the dock where the Sandy was tied off, wind and wave pushing the boat against the wood and concrete mooring structure as rain hammered everything. Just north of the Coast Guard Station cruise ships had docked when the world was still whole. They would dump their passengers, the town’s population swelling temporarily while wallets were emptied to pay for souvenirs and lumberjack shows. Then they’d board their floating hotels and be off to the next destination along the inside passage.
In this weather, though, some would have been losing their lunch.
“Lieutenant wants to move at night,” he said.
That made sense. The less chance we faced of being seen made it more likely that we’d reach our ultimate destination. Sailing at night was risky in itself. Doing so in this weather, and especially in the seas as they were, made far less sense.
“Coastal Alaska is basically a rainforest,” Acosta said.
That it was. To our sudden detriment.
“Are we stuck?” I asked.
Acosta nodded. He’d come out of the station’s main building to check on our transport and now the both of us stood in rain that had begun to fall vertical, but had shifted to near horizontal.
“It could blow through quick,” Acosta said, looking to me, water gushing off the brim of his hat. “Or...”
“Yeah,” I agreed, annoyed at Mother Nature’s sudden appearance. “Or...”
* * *
“How long?” Neil pressed once the lieutenant finished. “Exactly.”
Schiavo, to her credit, didn’t take my friend’s bait. He was beyond frustrated now.
“I don’t have any access to weather reports,” she said. “I know what you know the same way you know—by looking outside.”
Neil turned away and paced across the rec room, which we’d appropriated as our communal bunk house. After discussing the situation with Acosta, Schiavo had informed her men, and us, that continuing on before the weather broke was out of the question. While my friend reacted with predictable harshness at the delay, the lieutenant’s troops continued drying their gear and found couches and overstuffed chairs in the space, letting their bodies fall into the cushions.
“I’m not sure everyone knows everyone still,” Schiavo said, looking to me.
She waited, signaling that the formal introductions should begin with those of us her unit had risked their lives to save. We’d only had the most basic sharing of information since leaving Mary Island. Hearing another use a name. Reading last names on uniforms. We were mostly unknowns to Schiavo and her men, and they to us.
“Eric Fletcher,” I said, pointing to those who’d come so far with me. “Elaine Morales. Neil Moore.”
Schiavo nodded, then offered the particulars of those she commanded.
“Sergeant Paul Lorenzen,” she said. “Does wonders with MREs.”
“Chef du cuisine of meals rarely edible,” the sergeant said.
“Private Ed Westin,” Schiavo continued.
The trooper she’d just named, who we’d gotten off to a rocky start with on Mary Island, offered half a wave and let his head loll back against the back of a pillowy lounge chair he’d claimed, eyes closed.
“Specialist Trey Hart, our medic,” she said, looking very deliberately to Neil next. “How’s that shoulder?”
Neil let the question hang for a moment, then nodded to both Schiavo and Hart.
“It’s good,” he answered. “Thank you for what you did.”
“He does chin lifts on the side,” Schiavo joked, reaching up to stretch her own neck skin.
Hart smiled at the ribbing and brought his feet up to rest on a coffee table, boots on cheap government issue wood.
“My two on watch are Corporal Morris Enderson...”
“Just stick with Enderson,” Lorenzen interjected, sharing that bit of advice with us. “Or Mo.”
Schiavo nodded, chuckling lightly.
“For such a sweet young warrior he sure hates that name,” she said, moving quickly on. “Mr. Universe is Fernando Acosta. Makes me wish we had a SAW or an M60 every time I see those pythons covered with sleeves.”
Both weapons she’d mentioned, the Squad Automatic Weapon and the Vietnam vintage M60, were machineguns that increased a small unit’s firepower almost immeasurably. That she would want one was not a surprise. That they did not have one actually was.
“Why don’t you have one?” I asked.
“I suspect Acosta found one back in Hawaii and threw it into the ocean so he wouldn’t have to carry it,” Lorenzen said.
Their banter and demeanor was both fresh and refreshing. To borrow a cliché, they were letting their hair down. The momentary break in the stress that had filled the first leg of our joint journey north seemed to lift the weight that each of us had borne. Even Neil.
“Lieutenant, where are you from?”
Schiavo seemed more pleased than surprised at my friend’s very normal question.
“Lone Pine, California,” she said.
“Gateway to Mount Whitney,” Elaine said.
“You know it,” Schiavo said.
“I was there with a Bureau group doing a run and climb,” Elaine explained. “That route was brutal.”
“Bureau?” Schiavo asked. “FBI?”
Elaine nodded.
“A Hoover gal,” Schiavo said, almost chuckling. “I wanted to be you a lifetime ago. That was my dream to get out of Lone Pine. To be a fed. Not some local cop, but an honest to God agent of the FBI.”
“Movies made it look fun?” I asked.
“Of course,” Schiavo admitted. “But I also saw something in a book once that said one of the first female FBI agents was a former nun.”
“That’s true,” Elaine said.
“I thought, hey, if a nun can make it, then maybe I had a shot.”
“Why didn’t you?” Neil asked.
“Well, first you have to have a plan to achieve that goal, and my only plan was dreaming about it,” Schiavo admitted.
“You coulda done it, lieutenant,” Lorenzen told her.
She nodded politely at his expression of belief.
“It turns out the plan I should have had was college and all that really responsible stuff,” Schiavo said, the thin grin she wore seeming to turn inward now, as if she was mocking her own younger self. “So that didn’t work out.”
“You said something back on Mary Island about not even being able to dream about some of the food you saw in DC,” I said. “You were poor.”
She nodded almost emphatically at my reasoned supposition.
“Not a lot of high paying careers in Lone Pine,” she said. “I mean, there were people there who did well. My father was not one of them.”
“What did he do?” Elaine asked.
“Drank, mostly,” Schiavo said, the first hint of embarrassment rising. “Then meth when the booze bored him.”
“Your mother?” Elaine asked.
“Cancer when I was still a baby,” Schiavo said. “She had it when she was pregnant. My grandmother told me later that my mother refused treatment because it could have harmed me while she was carrying me.”
She said nothing for a moment. Neither did anyone else. Westin slept where he sat. Hart let his gaze dip away. Lorenzen, though, he looked straight at his leader, admiration in his eyes.
“Military got you out,” Neil said.
Schiavo shook her head.
“No, I got me out. I ran away when I was seventeen. The day after I graduated high school.”
“Why then?” Elaine asked.
Schiavo thought for a moment. It turned out to be a question she’d never really considered herself.
“I’m not sure. I think, maybe, I just saw where I was as an end, and I wasn’t ready for that. I wanted to find something more.”
“What did you find?” Neil asked.
“First,” Schiavo began, “I found out that living on your own is hard, especially when you’re still a month shy of eighteen. Second, I found that that was still better than what I was living with back in Lone Pine. And then...”
Lorenzen smiled. He’d heard this all before, and it still tickled him.
“And then...”
“And then I walked into a recruiting office to apply for a job,” Schiavo said.
Lorenzen started to laugh now.
“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.
Eighteen
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 se
em 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.
