by Noah Mann
“I swear I heard a sniffle,” she said.
In another time I might have thought she’d been fooled by the sounds of squirrels, or birds. But there were no more of those.
“How far?” Neil asked.
Elaine shrugged. There was only so much one could tell in these conditions. Any sound at all was filtered through and muffled by the thick, damp air.
I nodded and adjusted our direction toward the sound. I only made it five steps before I knew we’d made a mistake.
Dammit...
I swore within and fixed hard on what lay ahead.
Nothing. Not a single thing. The forest had been cut clear here, long before the blight had arrived, some logging operation leaving a vast swath of open space where the slope leveled out. A perfect killing field.
The moment I realized that the first burst of automatic fire split the calm day.
Rounds raked across the open ground before us and sliced into the trees at the clearing’s border. No one needed to shout a warning. We all grabbed what cover we could, me behind a low mound of earth, Elaine and Neil behind a pair of toppled trees to my right.
“Stay away!”
The warning was accompanied by another burst of fire, the muzzle flashes I could glimpse revealing what appeared to be a cavern entrance some distance through the mist. It was fortified, the pulses made plain, the fire coming through slits between stacks of thick logs.
“We’re pinned,” Neil said, looking behind. “If we backtrack there’s no cover.”
Even with the ground leveling out, the apparent bunker across the clearing still rested a good ten feet higher than our position. It was shooting down upon us. Without the cover we’d been fortunate to find, we’d already be dead.
“I’ll kill you all!”
More fire. Long bursts with some control. The shooter wasn’t just praying and spraying. He was trying to suppress any advance on his position.
I looked to Elaine where she lay behind the toppled log a few yards to my right. Neil had crawled to a position even more to her right, seeking a position that would allow both cover and a place to return fire.
“That’s not Russian,” Elaine said, stating the obvious thing we all were thinking. “What the hell is going on?”
I didn’t know. But if that was truly an American up the slope, or more than one, it raised some questions we couldn’t answer by just hugging cover until the shooter ran out of ammunition.
“We’re Americans!” Neil shouted toward the cavern entrance.
More bursts of fire were the reply. The sound of the weapon was familiar. And maybe telling.
“That’s an AR or an M4,” I said.
“Definitely not an AK,” Neil added.
“Are you from Ketchikan?!” Elaine called out. “Did you survive the blight here?!”
“Get away!”
It was a man’s voice. A young man, though the voice was edged with grit. With certainty.
“Did you try to cut our boat loose?!” I challenged the young man.
No fire came in reply to that question. And no verbal retort, either. There was just silence for a moment.
“We came up with a unit of American soldiers,” I told the mystery man through the silence. “Mary Island was overrun by Russians while we were there. The soldiers took them out.”
More silence. Long and lasting. I looked to Elaine.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“You’ve got that right!”
The warning came in advance of more gunfire, pinning us where we were, the young man entertaining only so much discussion from us.
“You’re not soldiers!” he shouted between bursts. “I saw you last night! You weren’t in uniform!”
“We’re civilians!” I told him. “You’ve got to believe us!”
“Like hell I do.”
And more fire. Rounds chewed high and low into the dead trees that surrounded us. What had been a sapling when the blight took hold snapped and toppled next to Elaine, its inch thick trunk threatening a nasty hit if it had made contact.
“Were you part of the garrison here?!” Neil asked.
No answer. Just gunfire in Neil’s direction.
“We don’t have too many options here,” Elaine said.
I looked to the opposite side of the cover I’d found, a low mound of dirt and rock, just a quick glance around it without exposing myself for too long. The stream of fire was creating a clear zone. Punching a wide hole through the fog. I saw more clearly now the fortification he’d constructed, logs and more logs surrounding and covering the cavern entrance. It looked hastily built, but was fully serving its purpose.
“Neil,” I said, sliding back behind my cover.
“What?”
“Cover fire,” I said. “But aim to his right.”
Neil nodded. I looked to Elaine.
“You fire dead straight at that bunker, but low.”
“You’re going left,” she said, reading my intention.
If we could both shift his attention to incoming fire, and get his head down for even a few seconds, I might be able to get close. Maybe close enough to put an end to this.
“Give me ten seconds, then cease fire,” I said.
We didn’t need any friendly fire incidents once I got close to his fortification. If I got close.
“Ready?”
My friends looked to me and nodded. A second later, in between incoming bursts from the cavern, they opened up.
I moved as quickly as I could, my AR in hand and low as I swept left in an arcing path to the cavern, trying to come in on its flank. About halfway there the young man began firing again. But not in my direction. He was trying to suppress what was coming his way.
He hadn’t seen me, and where I moved now, a good ten yards to the left, the mist was thick, swallowing me whole. I could just see the ends of the logs he’d arranged as one might sandbags. They were his cover. They would also be mine.
“You’re not getting me!”
His battle cry was followed by more fire. His fire. My friends had silenced their weapons to clear the way for me. But this was no charging an enemy position with bayonet fixed. This was not Iwo Jima and I certainly wasn’t a battle hardened Marine. The truth be told, I was scared to my core. My heart pounded, so loud I feared the sound of it thrumming in my chest would announce my approach. What moisture there had been in my mouth was gone, leaving my tongue, my lips, and everything in the vicinity as dry as the blighted desert. If this was bravery, I found it utterly indistinguishable from terror.
But what I was doing had to be done. We were pinned down. Retreating with haste might allow one of us to escape. Maybe two under the best circumstances. But not all of us. The only way for Elaine, and Neil, and me to get off this mountain alive was to get up close and neutralize the threat. To kill it...if necessary.
I didn’t want to do that. Any person in their right mind would think me crazy for harboring such thoughts. For allowing such consideration toward the man trying to kill us.
The young man.
The young man who just might be a scared American kid.
He fired. In groups of three bursts, I counted. Each one three rounds. He was doing three groups and final quick spray before reloading with a fresh thirty round mag. As close as I was I could distinctly hear the click of the magazine release. And the wet thud of the empty slapping against the sloppy earth.
“You’ve got to trust us!”
It was Elaine, keeping him focused. He reloaded and unleashed another round of measured fire. I crouched and crept forward. Hugging the edge of a rock outcropping into which nature, or man, had gouged the cavern.
Nine rounds...
The close edge of the log barricade was before me. I could smell the gunpowder. Spent shells ejected from his rifle rattled against the barricade logs on the side of the cavern.
Eighteen rounds...
I brought my AR slowly into position.
/>
“Just stop!” Elaine implored him. “We can talk this out!”
Twenty seven rounds...
“No talk!” the young man shouted and fired until he was empty.
Thirty rounds...
Go, I told myself silently.
I rose from behind the log barricade just as the expended magazine fell into the muddy ground. My focus was fully on the end of my suppressor. On what came into view just beyond it. Within two yards of me.
“Don’t move!”
The order I shouted had an immediate effect on the young man. The uniformed young man. Uniformed as an American soldier. A drenched and terrified American fighting man.
“Drop the weapon,” I said.
To my right I heard the slap of boots on the sloppy ground as Elaine and Neil raced toward the cavern. From the corner of my eye I could see them approach, spread out, their weapons up and ready, fingers laying just alongside the trigger guards.
The soldier looked up at me, his gaze angling next to my friends as they reached the barricade and trained their weapons over it.
“Just put it down,” Elaine said.
The soldier hesitated. Frozen. The fear in his eyes more palpable than I’d seen in a very long time. This man, this boy, thought he was going to die.
“If we wanted you dead, you’d already be dead,” I said. “Now put the weapon down.”
He drew a breath and let the M4 slip easily from his grip.
“Stand up,” I said.
He did as I’d told him. Neil and Elaine seized his arms and pulled him over the log barricade.
“We’re going for a walk,” I told him, lowering my AR just a little. “You first.”
Our prisoner walked ahead of us as we moved back into the fog and down the mountain.
Twenty One
His name was Kenneth Avery. Private Kenneth Avery. I was inclined to believe that. Not everyone was.
“I’m not lying,” Avery said, his hands shaking atop the table he sat at.
We’d hauled him back to the Coast Guard Station and presented him to Schiavo just as she was about to send a patrol out toward the sound of the firefight we’d been engaged in.
“I’m not the infiltrator!”
“But you admit there was one,” Lorenzen said.
The lieutenant stood behind her sergeant, letting him conduct the interrogation as the rest of us watched. Because that’s what this was—an interrogation of a prisoner.
“Yes,” Avery said, near tears. “How the hell do you think they got us all?”
“They didn’t get you all,” Lorenzen said. “You’re still here.”
Avery nodded, shame washing over him.
“I ran,” he said. “Okay. I ran. I hid. And if I hadn’t, I’d be dead like the rest.”
“Where are the bodies?” Lorenzen asked.
“I don’t know,” Avery answered, seeming ready to weep. “I just don’t know.”
Then, he leaned forward, face pressed to his palms as he sobbed. And sobbed. The emotion flowing without restraint.
If it was emotion at all.
He’d said that a person claiming to be a refugee came down from the mountains, and that he had a wife and child up there in a cabin. They were sick, the man had supposedly told the garrison’s commander, a Lieutenant Williamson. Wanting to offer what assistance he could, Williamson sent two men with the refugee to retrieve his sick family from the cabin.
Neither they nor the two soldiers returned.
As Avery told it, Williamson then took a soldier with him to search for the missing men and the family, leaving him alone to watch over the garrison’s base. Alone for nearly a full day, Avery became worried, and was about to send a message over the burst transmitter reporting the situation when he heard gunfire. He geared up and headed for where he’d thought the sound originated, but spotted movement and took cover. From that position he said he’d watched at least fifteen soldiers in strange uniforms move along the road from town to the station. A while later, as the troops searched the facility, presumably for him, a boat approached and docked. After raiding the supplies at the station and loading them onto the boat, the troops lowered the flag and boarded the boat, sailing off as the sun set.
It was a hell of a story. One not unlike what ‘Jeremy’ had told us at Mary Island. It was a distinct possibility that they were birds of a feather. Each a member of Kuratov’s elite unit. Men schooled in the ways of the west so as to slip in and exist, undetected, until they were tasked with acting. Yes, that was possible.
But I didn’t think this man was that at all.
“Kenneth,” I said.
Lorenzen looked to me. As did Schiavo. She’d made it clear that her sergeant was going to be the point of contact with this man we’d found. And we’d agreed to it. But they weren’t seeing what I was. What I had.
Avery eased his hands away from his face and looked up at me.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Boulder, Colorado.”
I smiled and took the knife from my belt, then a length of paracord from where it was lashed to the outside of my pack.
“What are you going to do?” Kenneth asked, nervous and afraid.
I cut a length of line and tossed it to him. He stared at where it lay on the table, then looked to me again.
“Boulder has a big climbing community,” I said, recalling what a friend had told me years ago. “Isn’t that true?”
The soldier looked at me, puzzled. Maybe by the normalcy of the question.
“Yeah,” he confirmed.
“A friend of mine was big into climbing,” I said. “Rock, mostly. A little alpine. We would play this game where he’d get drunk and have me time him tying knots. When he couldn’t do a one-handed bowline in under five seconds, he’d decide it was time to put the bottle away.”
Kenneth stared at me blankly. Schiavo did not.
“This is all very interesting,” the lieutenant said. “But—”
“Tie me a lineman’s loop,” I instructed Kenneth, cutting the lieutenant off.
He looked between me and the length of cord, then fixed on Schiavo. She eyed me for a moment, and I sensed she might understand where I was going with this.
“Do what he says,” Schiavo told the soldier. “If you can.”
He hesitated, just briefly, then picked up the paracord and twisted it, fashioning a secure loop halfway between the ends. Finished, he looked to me, to all of us, and I reached out and took the length of paracord from him.
“This is what connected those grenades,” I said, showing the piece of cordage out to Schiavo.
The lieutenant eyed the very specific loop in the line and looked to Private Avery.
“You rigged the town,” she said.
“In case they came back.”
“The Russians,” she said.
“If that’s who they were.”
The lieutenant and sergeant fixed hard, critical gazes on the prisoner.
“Look, I didn’t know who you were,” Avery said, with emotion that wasn’t yet pleading. “I still don’t know. That’s why I tried to cut your boat loose. I figured if I had you trapped here, I could pick you off a couple at a time just like you...like they did to my unit.”
“You would have done that?” Lorenzen pressed the young man.
“In a heartbeat,” Avery answered with obvious fire.
As Avery finished speaking, Westin, Enderson, and Hart returned. The corporal approached the table where the prisoner sat and dumped something from his hand upon it. Dog tags.
“Kenneth Avery,” Enderson said, looking to Schiavo. “We checked his hooch. He has a good cache of arms there. Limited food. Maybe a day or two more.”
“Grenades?” Schiavo asked.
“M Sixty Sevens,” Enderson reported.
Exactly what had been used to set traps in the town.
“If he’s a Russian infiltrator, why set traps?” I asked Schiavo. “The only people he’d expect to see are his
buddies. Just like the guy on Mary Island.”
Schiavo considered that, and all we’d heard from the prisoner.
“You’re with my unit now, private,” Schiavo said.
To that, Private Kenneth Avery shook his head.
“This is my post,” Avery said. “I’m assigned here. And I’ll stay here until my commander returns, or I’m relieved by authority that I know and trust.”
Outside, Neil and Elaine were covering the perimeter with Acosta. Inside, Lieutenant Angela Schiavo was contending with what might be termed a small mutiny. She looked to Enderson.
“Any sign of the radio?”
“None,” Enderson said.
Schiavo fixed on Avery again.
“You have any idea where your garrison’s burst radio is?”
Avery shook his head.
“It was in here,” he said, pointing across the room to an empty table against the wall. “Right over there. I assume they took it along with the food when they pulled out.”
Lorenzen shook his head.
“If they got the scramble code out of one of the guys they grabbed...”
Schiavo knew exactly what Lorenzen was suggesting would mean.
“Kuratov could listen in on our com,” she said. “And headquarters wouldn’t even know it. Because I have no way to tell them!”
The sudden flourish of anger echoed sharp within the station’s rec room. No one said anything. It would be Schiavo who would have to break the tension she’d just created.
“You can stay with us here until the weather clears,” Schiavo told Avery. “Then we’ll be out of here.”
“You’ll let me stay?” Avery asked, only half expecting that his insistence on such would be not just tolerated, but accepted.
“You’re right,” Schiavo told him. “It’s your post. Your mission. I can’t abandon what I’ve been ordered to do unless my superiors tell me to.”
Avery rose slowly from the chair he’d been made to sit in. He stood at attention and brought his hand up in a sharp salute directed at Schiavo.
“There’s no requirement to salute me indoors, private. Not in this situation.”
Avery lowered his hand and brought it to his side, still at attention.
