by Noah Mann
I jogged through the rain to the south side of the main building and skirted the edge. Through a window I glimpsed movement, which I knew would be Elaine and the others gearing up. What Neil and I had heard and felt would have jarred them from sleep.
Passing the window I neared the far corner of the building where I could just make out the channel’s churning water. And I could see something else.
The bow of the Sandy was free, swinging against the dock, the source of the sound that had alerted us. Still tied at the stern, she pivoted with each series of waves and slammed again and again into the concrete and wood mooring. I reached the corner and peered around. I saw nothing beyond what I expected, just Neil at the other corner, moving out into the open.
“She came loose!” he shouted.
We both ran for the spot where the Sandy was tied off. From behind, Elaine and the others spilled out of the main building, geared up.
“We’ve gotta get that bow secured!” Acosta yelled.
I reached the edge of the dock just as Elaine did, handing her my AR as I judged the movement of the rocking deck six feet below.
“Get a rope ready,” I told the others. “I’ll get aboard and you toss it over.”
Acosta and Westin sprinted down the dock to retrieve an extra line, Lorenzen and Enderson covering everyone, their weapons up and ready, a clear wariness about them. We were all exposed, with only the constant downpour providing some concealment where we stood. Visibility was a hundred feet at best.
I only needed a fraction of that to see my target.
BAM!
The bow smacked into the dock again as I mentally measured the jump I had to make. I counted the cycle of the boat moving with the waves. Picked an opportune instant. Then, I jumped.
Immediately upon hitting the deck my boots slipped from under me and I went down hard on my back.
“Eric!”
I rolled over fast and grabbed hold of the rail, looking up to Elaine, trying to reassure her with a quick glance. Reassuring myself was another matter entirely.
BAM!
Again the bow slammed against the solid pier, the impact breaking my grip on the rail and sending me sliding across the deck toward the wheelhouse. I reached fast for the handrail where it was mounted to the deck at the base of the steps into the wheelhouse. My hand found the stout metal and I seized onto it with a death grip, pulling myself to my knees as the Sandy whipped away from the dock.
“Get that line tied off!” Schiavo ordered.
Acosta and Westin lashed the line they’d found to one of the dock supports and readied to heave its coiled length down to me. I waited, riding the boat as it once again was pushed by the storming sea toward its mooring.
“Now!” I shouted.
Acosta already had his massive arms cocked and ready. He spun the beefy loop of line toward me, the length unspooling as it traveled the short distance. I grabbed at it with my free hand and took hold just as the Sandy was tossed yet again into the dock. Once more I was ripped from my handhold, rope in my other hand now as the waves sucked the Sandy’s rebounding bow back toward the channel. My body rolled against the dockside rail, rope in my hand going taut and pulling me up and almost over the side. A fresh series of waves smashed into the boat and moved her again toward the dock, releasing the tension on the line and saving me from being yanked overboard.
I took the brief chance I was given and scurried along the narrow sliver of deck alongside the wheelhouse until I was on all fours at the forward cleat, the end of the rope that had secured the Sandy still attached snugly around it, the other end dragging in the water over the rail. The motion of the storming sea must have caused it to snap, I thought, but there was no time to dwell on any cause. I took the end of the line in my hand and figure-eighted it around the cleat, pulling on it with all my weight to be certain it was secure. Just as the Sandy swung once again toward the dock I shouted up to the others above.
“Tie it off!”
I absorbed another jolt as boat met the support pillars. This time, though, it did not swing fully out into the channel. Its bow moved a few yards away, then stopped, Acosta and the others taking slack off the line as they wrapped it around a thick wooden support rising from the dock edge. As the Sandy was pushed again into the dock, with less force this time, they cinched up the line and tied her fully off.
“She’s good!” Acosta reported.
I grabbed hold of the rail along the wheelhouse and pulled myself along until I was at the solid steel ladder mounted to one of the pier supports. With nearly raw hands and slick boots, I climbed up from the still bouncing deck and was hauled onto the dock by Neil and Elaine.
“Are you all right?” Elaine asked, helping me to stand.
I examined my palms, the cool rain feeling good upon the red welts burned into them by the rough line.
“I’m okay.”
“That was a gutsy move,” Schiavo said. “Maybe too gutsy.”
“Someone was going to have to do it,” I said.
“Lieutenant!”
It was Acosta. He’d moved past us to check that the stern line wasn’t in any danger of snapping. We joined him where he knelt at the cleat welded and bolted to the dock.
“What is it?” Schiavo asked.
Acosta pointed to the rope stretching from it over the edge of the dock and down to the Sandy. About a foot from where it was attached a neat slice had cut almost halfway through the line, taking more than half of its strength.
“Christ...” Lorenzen said, then ran to the point where the bow line had been tied off. It was still secured there, to a cleat identical to the bow line, its limp end lying just at the edge of the dock. He picked it up and examined it.
“Cut clean,” he said, looking to us. “Someone took a knife to these lines.”
I took my AR back from Elaine, my gaze instinctively scanning the world beyond the falling rain.
“Get a new line on the stern,” Schiavo ordered.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Westin said, and climbed down to the boat as Acosta retrieved another fresh line.
“We’ve got a problem,” Schiavo said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We’re not alone.”
Part Three
Invaders
Nineteen
Morning came with the storm in full force, more wind than rain in the daylight. But it was the wind that worked against us. Wind meant waves. And waves meant a tenuous journey, one with risks that outweighed any benefit of haste at the moment. We were not leaving Ketchikan until the weather broke.
That did not mean we were sitting back, resting and relaxing. The attempt to set the Sandy adrift in the night had put us on an extreme state of alert. Schiavo had three of her men, Lorenzen, Enderson, and Westin, stationed outside, with one always near the boat. The rest of us remained inside, waiting for our shift watching over the only transport we had.
It wasn’t certain that that was our best course of action.
“You want to do what?” Schiavo asked after I told her my idea.
“We want to go look for our visitor,” I said.
Neil and Elaine had actually hatched the idea and shared it quietly with me. It was likely that Schiavo wouldn’t see our plan as a smart use of personnel. She’d almost certainly already weighed the risk of seeking a confrontation with whoever had slipped into our perimeter during the night and decided against it. I needed to convince her otherwise.
“Visitor,” she repeated, focusing on the singularity of the word. “You assume it’s just one person.”
“I do,” I said. “They were spooked while cutting the stern line. If it was two intruders, both would have cut at the same time.”
“You assume two would come out of whatever hole they crawled into,” Schiavo said. “I don’t. There could be more.”
I had to allow that possibility. But that didn’t negate the reasoning for what we were suggesting.
“I’ve learned,” I began, gesturing to Neil and Elaine next, “we’ve all learned, tha
t hunkering down isn’t always the best plan. If there’s a threat out there, a good offense is what we need.”
She thought for a moment. Once again taking into consideration what we were saying.
“You’re talking textbook tactics,” she said. “Probing the enemy. Attacking into an ambush.”
I wasn’t certain of the military tactics she was basing her estimation on, but I did agree with the plain language. Sitting where we were would not serve us, just as it would not have served me well at my refuge when the threat presented by Major Layton was very real. There I had to take matters into my own hands. I had to act.
I had to attack.
Whether we would have to mount any major assault here, I didn’t know. None of us did. We couldn’t, because we were lacking information and intelligence as to just what, and who, we were up against. That was the point. We needed to get out there and locate the threat before it manifested again.
“The town is booby-trapped,” Schiavo said. “Any step you take could be your last.”
“And every second the weather keeps us holed up in here could be our last,” Elaine pointed out. “We’re sitting ducks.”
Once more the lieutenant retreated into her own head. Thinking. Considering. Calculating. Deciding.
“I can’t send anyone with you,” she said. “I need my men to secure this station and the boat.”
“We know that,” I said. “We’ve been on our own before.”
“In some hairy situations,” Neil told her.
“I don’t doubt it,” Schiavo said.
She looked from us to where Hart and Acosta had spread themselves out on a pair of the rec room’s couches, gear and weapons on the floor at their sides. Within easy reach. Everyone was ready for whatever fight came, if it did.
We wanted to take that fight to the enemy and ensure our safe departure from Ketchikan when the weather made that possible.
“When do you want to go?” Schiavo asked.
“Now,” I said.
“Where?”
Elaine spread a map out on the pool table. The same map we’d marked with the locations of the booby traps.
“Through here,” Elaine said, pointing to the streets where the improvised devices had been placed. “If I was trying to protect my base of operations, I’d place devices along the approach. No different than drug dealers posting lookouts.”
“You think they might be in town?” Schiavo asked.
“We know they’ve been there to set those traps,” I said. “That gives us a starting point.”
For a moment Schiavo eyed the map. The town. The mountains beyond. Then she looked to us.
“If things go bad, it will take us time to get to you,” she said. “And that’s if we hear something to make us come.”
Gunshots. Explosions. Either could signal that we needed help. Or that we were beyond it.
“Understood,” I said.
Then Schiavo gave a quick nod. She was blessing our mission. We didn’t have to seek it, but having her on board showed consideration to the role she’d been thrust into. It also bound us to her unit. To our common purpose.
To get out of Ketchikan alive.
Twenty
We moved through lighter rain into town and past the buildings we knew to be booby-trapped, continuing on, moving up inclined streets. Finally out of town. Into the mountains where houses were nestled close to the once green slope.
“Are you part bloodhound?” Elaine asked me.
I smiled and kept walking, focused on the way ahead. And on the asphalt roadway we were traveling along.
“Wouldn’t you want the best vantage point to observe?” I replied with my own question.
“You know where we’re going,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“I believe so,” I said.
“You mind sharing what mystical power is guiding you?”
It was gentle ribbing from her. With a pinch of doubt.
“Did you notice anything on the street when we passed the last rigged building?”
I glanced back, waiting for either of my friends to chime in. Neither did.
“Mud,” I told them.
“It’s raining,” Elaine said. “There’s mud everywhere.”
I shifted my direction of travel, walking along the sloppy shoulder for a moment, then tracked back onto the hard roadway. My boots left a trail of evenly spaced prints on the wet surface, the softening rain dragging the transferred mud slowly away, erasing the markings bit by bit.
“That’s what I saw,” I said, motioning almost covertly to the fading tracks I’d just made.
“You saw tracks?” Neil asked, quietly incredulous. “In town?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t think pointing it out too openly was a good idea,” I said.
Elaine and Neil both understood now. Completely.
“We’re being watched,” Elaine said for both of them.
“Yep,” I said, trying to remain nonchalant. “I suggest we just keep following those tracks up ahead.”
I saw Elaine focus ahead to precisely what I had been zeroed in on. Muddy spots on the asphalt being dissolved by the weather. Bits of embedded dirt had been trailing off the boots of the man, or woman, we’d been pursuing, leaving the equivalent of a breadcrumb trail.
“They’re not doing a great job of hiding their tracks,” Elaine said.
“This is not some Russian super soldier we’re dealing with,” I said.
“Then who?” Neil wondered.
For a few moments we walked in full silence. Listening past the drip drip drip of rain trickling from our hats and our gear onto the puddled roadway. Sampling the hush for anything other than the wet rustle of the weather.
“Do you think the lieutenant could be right?” Elaine asked. “About there being more than one out here?”
“It’s possible,” I answered.
“But you don’t think so,” Elaine said.
“I don’t.”
“I don’t either,” Neil added.
“That makes three of us,” Elaine said.
“Good,” I said. “We now have a three to one advantage and we haven’t even put eyes on our target yet.”
Elaine chuckled lightly. We moved in a line, leaving the residential neighborhood behind and reaching a gravel road that appeared to wind its way into a mining or quarry operation of some kind. No signage marked it, and the only building visible from where that wide trail left the paved road was, uncharacteristically, burned to its foundation.
“Interesting,” Neil said.
I scanned the area, noticing a water tank just to the south. I’d glimpsed the structure from the waterfront before the clouds thickened and the rain came. A ladder hung on its side, providing easy access to its wide, flat top.
“That would give a clear view of almost everything below,” I said, pointing to the tower.
Elaine nodded, then looked up the gravel road to the mountains rising beyond.
“And from up there you could see where we’re standing right now,” she said.
“Exactly,” I said.
“There’s always that chance that they were leaving that trail on purpose,” Neil said.
“Either way,” I said, looking up the muddy road leading past the charred building, “we know we’re close.”
I started moving again, staying left, close to the edge of a hill where it leveled out and blended with the road. A low wave of my hand directed Neil to the right side. Elaine, without needing any prompting, slowed a bit, bringing up the rear, glancing behind every dozen yards or so.
The open area of the mine or quarry site ended, muddy road narrowing as it snaked into the woods. No lush canopy shielded us from the rain. The weather ran down the dead trunks of what had once been living, breathing spruce and birch trees, scouring more of the grey skim that coated every blighted bit of flora. With enough time, like mountains eroded to plains, I imagined that nature would erase what the hellish microbe had left in its wak
e.
“I don’t see any tracks,” Neil said.
There was no way one could on this ground. We were walking through a layer of thin muck that swallowed all traces of who was passing. Or who had already passed. We were pursuing with blinders on now.
Until we came upon the trail.
Hardly wider than the space between two trees, it split unmistakably off from the muddy road, winding its way upward along the slope. And upon it the boot prints were unmistakable. They ran up the trail and into the grey forest, the path well worn, like a game trail.
“Rain would have obliterated those in twenty minutes,” Neil said.
“They just came through here,” Elaine added, tucking her MP5 high and tight against her shoulder. “Ahead of us.”
Just as we’d thought, we’d been watched. It was a near perfect position to observe any approach through the old mining site. And a virtually textbook place to set even more traps. Just as a woodsman would lay snares along where his prey would travel between burrow and watering hole in the forest, our intruder had presented us with a trail that could be just as easily marked with mines. Or trip-wired grenades. Or any manner of dangerous and deadly implements.
This was where they wanted us to go. Which was precisely why we were not.
“We shift right about fifty yards and head upslope from there,” I said.
Both Neil and Elaine agreed. We moved along the old dirt road, keeping quiet. Stepping over the deepest puddles so as to not splash loudly. Avoiding fallen twigs lest they snap underfoot. We needed to be ghosts in the dead woods.
Finally we started up the slope. Soggy earth slid beneath us with each step. We kept our weapons high and clear in one hand, and groped for handholds on the dead trees with the other.
A hundred yards we climbed, the rain turning to a foggy mist that masked what lay beyond twenty feet. We were in the clouds now. Cold, wet, and wary. Spread out line abreast, ten feet between each other.
“Stop,” Elaine said, just above a whisper.
We halted, crouching low, everyone aware where the nearest tree or fallen log was that could be reached for cover.
“What?” I asked quietly.
Elaine squinted into the opaque world before us. Then she pointed. To a spot slightly off our direction of travel.
