by Noah Mann
“Sitting here is getting people killed!” my friend shouted.
To his credit, Lorenzen didn’t elevate the tension any more than it already had.
“I can’t take wounded personnel on a potential combat mission,” the sergeant said.
“Then don’t,” Elaine told him.
Lorenzen eyed her, piqued at her abrupt suggestion.
“Leave her here,” Elaine said. “With Hart. The rest of us go on to Skagway and do what needs to be done.”
Lorenzen didn’t respond to what was being proposed. He remained silent, looking to where his commander lay on the table.
“How far are we from Skagway?” I asked. “Time, not miles.”
Acosta had studied the route in advance from the time we’d left Mary Island. Besides the obvious brawn the young man possessed, his intellect was top notch. He retained details. Performed quick mental calculations. That he had an answer for me with little time to consider it surprised me not at all.
“Eight hours in good seas,” the private answered.
I thought on that and looked to where Schiavo was resting, bandaged but alive.
“We can be up there and deal with what we find and be back the next day,” I said.
“Just like that,” Lorenzen said, focusing on me now. “Down by two shooters you’re going to take on Kuratov and his men?”
“We do what we have to do,” I said. “They’re our friends up there. You can’t keep us from getting to them when we’re this close. Not for the sake of one person.”
“I sure as hell can,” Lorenzen countered.
“She’d tell you to go,” I told the sergeant.
“And I’m telling you to—”
“No!”
The single word cut the sergeant off, sharp and clean. It was Schiavo, rising from the table where we’d thought she was asleep. Her body unbent slowly as she straightened, jaw clenched. She was hurting.
That didn’t mean she was beaten.
“We leave tonight,” she said.
She let go of the chair back she’d grabbed onto for temporary support and stood tall.
“Those people in Skagway aren’t waiting anymore because of me,” she said. “I’m okay.”
“You’re weak,” Hart said.
“You need to rest,” Lorenzen told her.
To that, and to the collective concern focused on her, Schiavo simply shook her head.
“Need has nothing to do with it,” she said. “We’re leaving. Acosta.”
“Ma’am.”
“You said eight hours,” Schiavo recounted. “You confident with that estimate?”
He thought for a moment.
“If the seas stay like they are, we can make that.”
Schiavo considered Acosta’s certainty, then looked to her sergeant.
“That will put us there about dawn,” Schiavo said.
Her orders given, Lorenzen reined in his resistance. But some doubts still remained.
“I wish we had a full complement of night gear,” Lorenzen said. “Daylight fight against a superior force...”
“Superior in number,” Schiavo said. “Not in everything.”
It was a statement of confidence in her men, and in us. Six plus three equaled just half of what Kuratov had, if the dying Russian in Juneau was to be believed. Even a few less than that would leave us badly outgunned.
“We get close, see what we can see, then choose the best way to get ashore,” Schiavo said. “Let’s move. I want to be on the water in fifteen minutes.”
There was no more discussion. Lieutenant Angela Schiavo, wounded and wise, had stated her plan. She grimaced as she reached for her pack, Westin grabbing it before she could. That she let him carry it out of the lodge and onto the boat was a pointed reminder of just how much she hurt. As much as she needed to be, she wasn’t at one hundred percent, and she wouldn’t be, even when we reached Skagway. If there was a fight to be had there, she would give her all.
I only hoped that, for her, it would be enough.
Twenty Nine
As Acosta had estimated, we sailed up the Taiya Inlet and approached Skagway just before first light, the new day a building mix of blue and yellow along the crests of distant peaks. The Sandy slowed and we scanned what we could see of the port city ahead.
Two vessels were prominent in Skagway’s harbor. Both cruise ships. One, on the north side of the bay, lay mostly on its side, crushing the dock beneath it. The other stood tall and seemingly intact, tied off to the pier on the bay’s southern side as if it had just arrived with a load of tourists from Vancouver.
“Northwest Majesty,” Elaine said, reading the name off the ship’s stern through the binoculars. “She doesn’t look bad off at all.”
“Can’t say the same for the Vensterdam,” Enderson said, making his own assessment through another set of optics. “Scorch and impact marks on the middle of the ship. Probably penetrated at the waterline on the submerged side. There were some explosions, but she didn’t burn.”
The Vensterdam was the vessel we’d seen noted in the logs at the Mary Island lighthouse. According to those it had transported more than a hundred people originally from Yuma, Arizona to Skagway. We could only hope that all those souls were offloaded before the violence which sank the ship occurred.
From a half mile outside the harbor in the dawn’s light, that was what we could make out. But it was not all.
“I see people,” Elaine said.
She passed the binoculars to me, and I handed them off to Neil after a quick look.
“How many are there?” Schiavo asked.
“I see a half dozen,” Enderson answered.
“Any weapons? Uniforms?”
“No, Ma’am,” Enderson reported.
“They’re not looking this way,” Neil said. “They don’t see us.”
Enderson lowered his binoculars and looked to his lieutenant.
“I can’t see any observation post at all,” the corporal said.
Schiavo processed what she was being told. I could see her weighing the right approach. With everything we knew and had been told, there should be Russians in Skagway. Along with the people we knew, and some we wouldn’t. Those troops would be combat tested. They would be wary. Wanting to identify any potential threat before it drew near.
That wasn’t what we were seeing here.
“Acosta.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Take us in slow, but be ready to break left for open water,” Schiavo ordered. “I want shooters on deck.”
Lorenzen didn’t have to give any supplemental order. Westin, Hart, and Enderson readied their weapons and gear and headed out onto deck.
“I want that mountainside covered as we pull in,” Schiavo directed, pointing to the eastern slope that rose up from the sea.
“We’ll take forward,” Neil told Schiavo.
She didn’t bless his offer immediately. But she didn’t ask for any explanation, either. After a moment’s reflection, she nodded.
“They’re your people,” she said. “Be sure if you have to fire.”
“We will,” I said.
Elaine was first out of the wheelhouse and to the front of the boat. Neil and I joined her, the three of us crouching behind the solid bow rail as the Sandy crept forward.
* * *
There were no signs of any Russians. No sign of any enemy. No shooting. No resistance of any kind.
But as we neared the end of the south dock and pulled close in the shadow of the Northwest Majesty’s massive stern, we were unseen no more. One person, then two, then three saw us. At first they simply froze where they stood on the dock. Frightened, it seemed.
We tied off and came off of the boat. One person, the closest to us, maybe fifty feet away, began to move toward us. Then another did. And another. And another. Shouts rose from some, summoning more. And more. And more. A chain of cries announcing our presence.
People streamed out of town and up the dock toward us, mov
ing with sluggish quickness, as if their bodies could not match the need to reach us with haste.
“Do you know these people?” Schiavo asked as the first wave neared.
I scanned the faces, making connections quickly. But not in totality.
“Most of them,” I said.
“God, God, thank God,” Lois Probst said as she reached us, planting her palms against my cheeks and coming to her tip toes to kiss my forehead. “Thank God you’re here.”
The woman lived a block over from me in Bandon. She was a blight widow, barely past fifty, her husband lost somewhere in the vast dead country while trying to get home from a meeting in Florida. I remember the mock pies she would bake, making do with canned ingredients and cracker crusts to replace the flour no longer available. In front of me now she bore the thankfulness not of the woman I’d come to know, but of a prisoner released from bondage.
“Lois, what happened?” I asked her.
“Thank God you’re here,” Lois repeated, my query eclipsed by the sudden rush of joy washing over her.
Washing over everyone.
All around, people were throwing their arms around those of us who’d just arrived. Elaine was trapped in a six arm bear hug by neighbors she’d known. Neil, too, was being happily accosted, though I saw him trying to push through the throngs, his gaze searching for those he’d been aching for since our return to Bandon’s deserted streets.
There were strangers, too. They seemed to be congregating around Schiavo and her men even as the lieutenant tried to keep some semblance of a defensive posture. None of us knew what had happened, or what might still happen.
“A mixed military unit took them,” Elaine said, slipping close to me after extricating herself from the eager embrace. “Army, Marines, Navy. They rolled into town from north and south, disarmed everyone, and ferried them from shore onto that cruise ship.”
She pointed up at the hull of the Northwest Majesty looming over us to the left.
“Forced evacuation,” I said.
“Yeah,” Elaine agreed, her quiet anger echoing my own.
More and more people were pushing toward us from town, clogging the way forward and separating me from Elaine. There was no order. It wasn’t panic, but it was something beyond the norm.
“Eric,” Hal Robertson said, coming at me from the side. “It’s great to see you!”
Hal was, of all things, a cobbler. In a world where new shoes no longer rolled off Chinese assembly lines, his nearly forgotten profession had allowed him to provide a useful service to Bandon’s residents.
“Hal, we saw blood back at the meeting hall,” I said to him, wanting to get some information before the building crowd overwhelmed our exchange.
The fast flourish of joy he’d expressed upon seeing me dimmed appreciably and he nodded.
“Jenny Beck,” he said. “She refused to leave.”
Jenny was a single mother. Or had been until she’d arrived in Bandon like many had, as refugees seeking a safe haven from the blighted and violent world. The two year old child she’d carried into town with her was near death, and succumbed to illness and starvation the day after their arrival. This was before I’d reached Bandon with Neil and Grace and Krista, so I’d learned of the sad tale second hand. I was only acquainted with Jenny in passing, as she kept very much to herself, but I knew what all others in town did—that she spent hours every single day, rain or shine, at the town cemetery, sitting at her daughter’s grave, singing softly to her departed child.
I’d feared that Martin might have been the source of the blood stain we’d seen, as I couldn’t imagine him agreeing to leave the place where Micah had been laid to eternal rest. The reason I had been correct about. It was with the individual that I had erred.
“The soldiers tried to talk her into going,” Hal explained. “But she resisted. She fought back.”
A quick flash of rage built within. Had they really shot her down right there? Were the brethren of Schiavo capable of such a thing?
It turns out, they weren’t.
“She pulled out a pistol and put it to her head,” Hal said. “The soldiers tried to talk her down. We tried. But she wasn’t leaving her daughter. She just wasn’t.”
So she’d killed herself to make sure of that. It was a gut wrenching act to imagine, but one I could plainly see Jenny Beck choosing.
“We buried her next to her daughter,” Hal said. “Then we were all put on this ship and brought up here.”
We hadn’t noticed a fresh grave in the cemetery when planting the seeds, but we wouldn’t have, considering where Jenny’s daughter had been laid to rest on the far side away from the paths.
So hers was the blood we’d seen. Not Martin’s. That realization, though, brought another instant wondering to the surface.
Where was Martin?
I hadn’t seen him among the throngs flowing at and past us.
“Hal, can you tell me where—”
The question hung there, unfinished, as Elaine’s voice rose above the collective chattering.
“Grace!”
I saw Elaine pointing over the crowd, toward the dock nearest the bow of the Northwest Majesty. That was where I saw her face, at the same instant Neil did. He took off running, pushing his way through people we knew, and past strangers none of us had ever seen before.
“Go with him,” Elaine said.
I looked to her and nodded, then sprinted after my friend, leaving Elaine, Schiavo, Hal, and the others behind. Ahead I could see Neil, and I could hear him, calling out to Grace. And I could see her face, pale but beaming, both arms waving above the mass of humanity between them.
“Grace!”
“Neil! Neil!”
I was trying my best to keep up, but no one was going to catch my friend. Or stop him. People coming the opposite way bounced off him like pinballs. He ran, and ran, and I could see that he had broken into a bit of a clearing ahead, the mass of people thinning after already streaming past. The way to Grace was clear.
But he stopped. Just stopped a few yards from her, staring.
I pushed through the last of the wave of people and realized immediately why he’d not covered the final ten feet or so to Grace and pulled her into an embrace. It was what he was seeing that prevented that. What he was seeing about her.
The small bump arcing out from her belly, open jacket allowing the loose shirt she wore to define it.
“Grace...”
My friend could only say that as he looked to her, eyes wide and wondrous. She nodded, trying to smile, and reached out to him, her body swaying. Neil rushed forward and caught her. I ran to my friend and took his pack and weapon as he picked Grace up and carried her in his arms toward town.
Thirty
Neil carried Grace through the front door of a building which had once been a small restaurant. I followed and helped him ease her into a chair, setting his weapon and gear aside.
“Is Doc Allen anywhere?”
I’d asked the question to the small group that had trailed us inside, but a familiar face, Penny Jessup, was the one who answered.
“I’ll get him, Fletch,” she said, and disappeared through the door just before Elaine and Schiavo came in.
“Grace,” Neil said, one hand caressing her cheek, and the other planted gently atop her swelling belly. “Grace, come on. Come back, baby.”
Baby...
My friend was referring to his wife. But I was thinking of the life she now carried within. The fear I’d harbored after seeing Doc Allen’s note in his appointment book about ‘testing’ was washed away. It had been another kind of testing. One with joyous results.
“Grace,” Neil said gently, urging her back to consciousness.
Westin came through the door, wide eyed and worried. Schiavo noted his presence and leaned toward him.
“Get Hart in here,” she said, making a quiet but firm request for the unit’s medic to get there.
“The Doc is coming,” I told her, and she nodd
ed.
“People out there are saying they haven’t eaten in four days,” Elaine told me.
Grace stirred, her eyes snapping open, some terror in them.
“Krista!” she screamed her daughter’s name. “Krista!”
“It’s all right,” Neil said, trying to calm her. “You’re okay.”
Grace’s wide gaze found Neil, locking with his. He smiled, but she didn’t. Instead, tears welled, spilling silently down her cheeks.
“Where’s Krista?” my friend asked his wife.
Grace fixed her glistening gaze on him, apology all about her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to.”
I could see in Neil’s face that his heart was sinking. A grim chill washed over him, reaching across the small space that separated us to turn my insides to ice.
No...
“Otherwise she’d die like the rest of us,” Grace said. “There’s no food out here.”
Neil puzzled visibly at what the woman he loved was saying.
“What do you mean?” Neil asked her.
She began to sob just as Doc Allen entered, slipping past the crowd gathering outside.
“Grace, what are you feeling?” the doctor asked her.
“Doc, where’s Krista?” Neil asked with plain urgency.
“Let me see how Grace is first,” the doctor said, putting two fingers to her wrist to check her pulse. “Grace, are you having any pain?”
She focused on Doc Allen, seizing on his question.
“No,” Grace said. “No pain. I’m just...”
Doc Allen nodded and checked her pupils.
“I know, Grace,” he said. “I know.”
“Grace,” Neil said.
She looked to him again, tears threatening.
“Where’s Krista?”
For a moment she did not answer. Could not answer. Then, summoning what remained of some inner strength, she did.
“She’s in the pit,” Grace said, almost whimpering, then collapsed into Neil’s embrace.
Doc Allen stood and my friend looked up to him from where he held his wife, confused and hurting.
“The pit?” Neil asked. “What the hell is the pit?”
