by Noah Mann
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
His scream was wet and came from a place I doubted he knew existed within him just a few seconds earlier.
“My friend’s little girl is down there,” I said. “And I will do anything to see that she comes out alive and unhurt. Because if that does not come to pass, let me remind you that what I just did to you is not fatal. You’ll still be here, tied up, and I’ll be coming back to you. And I won’t be alone. My friend will be with me. And if you think what I just did to you was unpleasant, let me assure you that what he will inflict upon you will make you wish that I’d just gone ahead and slit your throat. So, tell me now, do you want me to remove one of your eyelids?”
At first, Grishin did not react to my question. He simply stared at me with blackened eyes, the garish hole that was his mouth trembling with stinging agony. Then, before I could say anything more, he shook his head. Just barely. Like a meek mouse.
The next question I asked he answered fully. And the next. And the next.
By the time Grishin finished telling us all that he knew, Elaine and I realized that there was another option to free the children. One whose window of opportunity was rapidly closing.
I reached to the Russian’s wrist and removed his watch, then shoved him to the ground at Perkins’ feet.
“Lock him up somewhere,” I told the angry little man from Yuma. “If he tries anything, end him.”
For the first time, I saw Perkins smile, a disturbing curl arcing his thin lips.
“Gladly,” Perkins said, hauling Grishin to his feet and strong arming him away from the building.
“We have to tell Schiavo,” Elaine said.
I shook my head. That would come, and, if the timing of this was to work, it would have to happen with haste. But something else would have to come first.
“We need to talk to the foreman,” I said.
Thirty Five
Cranston was no longer in his office. It took twenty minutes to find him, Elaine finally tracking him down on the road to the cemetery. She brought him back to the tavern and led him to the pool table where the plans were still spread out.
“We need some information,” I said, Elaine standing with me.
The feeble man looked to me, his gaze distant, a sheen of tears upon it.
“I just wanted to visit Joe,” Cranston said. “We buried him.”
Whatever remained of his faculties was fading quickly. We had to get some straight and precise answers out of him. And fast.
“Earl, look here,” I said. “On the plan. What’s this?”
His eyes tracked slowly to where I was pointing to a section of the plans deeper into the complex. Maybe a hundred feet beyond where the children were thought to be.
“Earl, what is it?” I repeated. “This square marking? Is that ductwork of some kind?”
He looked to me, confused, and shook his head.
“No. No.”
“What is it, Mr. Cranston?” Elaine prodded him with gentle respect.
Cranston leaned forward, closer to the plan, his own bony finger tracing along the paper until it rested next to mine.
“Dump shaft,” he said.
“Dump shaft,” I repeated. “To dispose of garbage? Things like that?”
He nodded.
“Just climb up the ladder in it and pop the hatch and toss out anything you don’t want,” he explained with a momentary flash of lucidity.
I looked to the plans again.
“About two feet square?” I asked him.
“Twenty four by twenty four,” he confirmed.
“And it only opens from the inside?”
“That’s right,” Cranston told me.
His fingers spread out upon the plan, both hands splayed wide, as if trying to hide what he saw before him. What he’d helped create.
“I think his name was Joe,” Cranston said, slipping back into some guilt-ridden fugue state.
Elaine looked to me.
“It can work,” she said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Let’s tell Schiavo.”
Thirty Six
“You want to what?”
Schiavo’s doubting question came just as I began explaining the plan that had coalesced after Grishin’s coerced revelations.
“I go in alone,” I repeated. “Through a dump shaft that only opens from the inside. It’s past the location where the kids are.”
“Where we think they are,” the lieutenant reminded me.
“Right,” I said.
She stood alone, facing me and Elaine in the front room of a souvenir store her unit had taken over to prep for the mission ahead. The rest of her men were out gathering the explosives we’d need, and readying a small group of civilians to provide some armed cover of the main access door.
“The infiltrator told you about this shaft?” Schiavo asked.
“He did,” Elaine answered. “And Cranston confirmed it.”
“It has to be opened from within?” Schiavo asked. “Won’t blasting it alert Kuratov the same as when we breach the skylight?”
I shook my head.
“At six-thirty this evening, one member of Kuratov’s unit will open the hatch,” I said. “He’ll have an MRE to pass up to Grishin, who is supposed to relay any intel on what’s happening above.”
Schiavo began to smile, the warm expression almost stark against her still pale complexion.
“Only Grishin won’t be there,” Schiavo said. “You will.”
“Right,” I said, tapping the suppressor attached to the muzzle of my AR. “I pop the Russian quietly, get inside, and get close to where the children should be. That should take five minutes. Make it six to be safe. At that moment your team breaches a skylight away from the one where the children are shown.”
“You draw Kuratov’s force even further away from the kids,” Elaine said.
“Then I eliminate whoever’s guarding the children, blow that weakened corridor to block any interference, and lead them to the dump shaft.”
“That has a lot of moving parts,” Schiavo said.
“So does a Lamborghini,” I countered. “But they still work.”
Schiavo thought on the plan for a moment.
“Why you?” she asked. “And why not more than one? I could slip my guys down there just as easily as you.”
“No,” I said. “A good number of those children know me. I’m not some stranger coming for them. That will make getting them out a quicker process. Besides, the more shooters we take down there, the more likely it is that someone makes a sound, and then we’ve got a firefight and all of Kuratov’s men coming down on us. This has to be a stealth operation on that end. You can make as much noise as you want blowing Kuratov to hell.”
“I’ll be there to help you do just that,” Elaine said.
She’d said she was going in. Insisted upon it. When I’d told her that I needed to handle my end alone, to be as quiet as possible, she’d shifted her focus to being part of Schiavo’s entry team.
As she informed the lieutenant of her intention here, I felt that pang of fear stab at my insides. But I had to force it down. I had to.
“What about the main supplies down there?” Schiavo asked. “And the radio?”
“The children come first,” I said, knowing that she would not dispute that.
Schiavo nodded. Then, she shook her head slightly, some realization rising.
“He’s the boogeyman we’ve never seen,” Schiavo said. “Kuratov. Just some legend who leaves a trail of death behind.”
Not unlike Borgier. The American turned rogue French Legionnaire. Some days earlier I’d shared with Schiavo what we’d been told about the man believed to have unleashed the blight. She’d confirmed that tale as fact. Now, we had another rogue. Or a madman. Whichever turned out to be the case, it seemed plain to me that either he would die, or we would.
All of us.
“Lieutenant...”
It was Hart. He was smiling as he entered the store
. An expression incongruous with the moment and what was soon to come.
Or so I thought.
“What is it?” Schiavo asked.
Hart reached into the bag slung over his left shoulder. It was from his med kit. I’d seen him pull bags of plasma from it when he still had those in his inventory. This time, though, when he eased his hand out he held a plasma bag that did not contain that life-saving liquid. Instead the contents were a dark crimson. Identical to what he’d had in a similar bag after tapping Elaine for a transfusion.
“I found another AB Neg,” Hart said. “So we’re going to top you off, ma’am.”
Schiavo reacted blandly. As if annoyed that any consideration for her well-being was even necessary.
“Things have changed, Trey,” Schiavo said to her medic, the informality she was affording him in our presence not surprising after all we’d been through together. “We’re on a clock now to make this op happen.”
Without saying so with any specificity, Schiavo had just blessed the plan that Elaine and I had devised. A plan she would be part of, and for which she needed to be as close to fully capable as possible.
“We have ninety minutes,” I said.
Hart pulled an IV line and needle from his kit.
“I need forty five,” the medic said.
Every second was of the essence, just as her health was, so Schiavo took no time to decide.
“Do it,” she said.
A minute later she was flat on the floor, a needle in her arm, blood dripping into the line that delivered it to her veins. Forty minutes after that the bag went dry.
I wasn’t there to witness the entire process, though. There was one stop I had to make before we ventured into the pit.
Thirty Seven
Grace lay on a couch in a house one block from the main street through Skagway. I found Neil with her, and Doc Allen.
“Fletch,” my friend said when he saw me come through the front door.
He came up to me and pulled me into a hug. When we eased back from each other his smile beamed under glistening eyes.
“We’re going to have a baby,” he said. “Can you believe that?”
“It’s wonderful, Neil.”
I looked past him to Grace. In her eyes I saw wondering and fear.
“Doc says she’ll be okay,” Neil said. “She’s just overwhelmed.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
My friend put a hand to my elbow and ushered me a few steps away, just out of earshot for Grace.
“What’s going to happen?”
“We’re going in to get them,” I said. “There’s a plan. I think we have a good chance.”
Even that phrasing left my friend with a pained look on my face.
“It’s going to be okay,” I assured him. “Look, we made it here. We beat every set of odds we came up against. And we’re going to keep on doing that.”
Neil shifted his gaze for a moment, to a window which looked out toward the harbor, the vessels in it half visible above rooftops.
“Do you know what sank the Vensterdam?” he asked me.
“The Russians did.”
“Doc Allen said that when that ship was pulling in the Russians fired on it from their boat. They weren’t even taking fire.”
“Cranston told us about that,” I said.
“Fletch, if they’ll do that to a shipload of helpless people...”
I knew what my friend meant. You wanted to believe that there was a code that warriors lived by. A code that had, in some small way, nearly pushed Schiavo to interrupt my violent and necessary interaction with Grishin. Not all warriors abided by a code such as that. It was certain that Kuratov did not.
“The plan is good, Neil. It is. I’m the one going in to get the children.”
“You?”
I nodded.
“What about Elaine?”
I hesitated just a breath. A noticeable breath.
“She’s going in with Schiavo,” I told my friend.
To that he said nothing. He’d said all he could before this moment ever came.
“I’ve gotta go,” I said, glancing past to Grace and Doc Allen. “Tell her—”
But Neil shook his head, cutting off my assurance.
“When it’s done, and Krista is back in our arms, we’ll know.”
I understood. Anything promised now was only a collection of words. They needed fact. They needed flesh and blood to embrace so they could know, so they could believe, that the horror was over.
Thirty Eight
“You’re staying,” I said.
Elaine almost didn’t react to what I’d said. She continued transferring unnecessary gear from her pack to the table just as Schiavo and her men were doing. Then, she froze, her gaze rising to see that I was standing right where I’d been, and that there was no hint about me that what I’d just told her was a joke.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” I said. “You’re not going.”
Just across the table I glimpsed Schiavo glancing our way as she readied her equipment. She didn’t try to intervene, and she wouldn’t. This was between Elaine and me.
“You’re covering the entrance with the others,” I said.
Elaine dialed her gaze in hard on me.
“I thought we talked about this,” she said.
“We did,” I said. “But I can’t let you go in. I need to be focused on what has to be done. If you’re there, half of me will be wondering if you’re all right. Every distant shot I hear will be one that could have your name on it.”
“I can handle myself,” she said.
I shook my head.
“That’s not the point. If it’s that macho gene thing, I’m sorry. But from the deepest part of my being, I know that I would give my life for you. Except I won’t be with you if that becomes necessary. And that says nothing about how capable you are. It’s just the reality of what I feel for you.”
Elaine took in what I’d just shared with her, seething silently. But not countering what I’d said.
“I need a good shooter at the entrance,” Schiavo said, and Elaine looked sharply toward her. “All I have covering that location are weak people with scrounged weapons. I could use you there, Elaine.”
There was logic to what Schiavo had just explained. And logic to what I’d said. But neither mattered to Elaine, I sensed, as she gathered up her gear and her weapon and looked between the lieutenant and me.
“Sounds like a plan,” she said sharply, then left the room.
“That went well,” Schiavo said.
“Thank you for giving me an out,” I said.
“I didn’t give you anything,” Schiavo said. “The civilians covering that entrance could end up facing elite troops on the off chance the Russians decide to make a break to the outside. I sure as hell can use her there.”
Schiavo continued readying her gear and checking the makeshift breaching charge with Lorenzen. This was going to be a full on assault in a confined space. And it had to be choreographed to the second. Even then, there was no guarantee of success. Or that we’d get the children out alive.
Or that any of us would live through it.
I looked to my pack. I wouldn’t be lugging it with me into the pit. All I’d need would fit in pockets and the tactical vest I scrounged from the garrison’s old quarters.
“You clear on the use of that charge?” Lorenzen asked.
No one was a demolitions expert. But there was enough collective knowledge to allow me some confidence in using the slender block of plastic explosive. I had a twenty second fuse with it, all that could be found among the construction supplies left when Cranston’s workers had pulled out. A third of a minute. That wasn’t much time to get clear of any blast that would seal off the chamber near where we believed the children were being held. But it was all that I had.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
But the margin worried me. A lot of what was going to happen worried me. Not returning,
in particular, scared me. But not only for reasons that were obvious and personal.
Once more I looked to my pack. This time, though, I lifted it from where it sat and turned to Schiavo.
“Lieutenant...”
She paused her preparations and looked to me.
“Can I have a minute? In private?”
The interruption, so soon before we were about to set out on the mission into the pit, puzzled her.
“It’s important,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, and followed me outside.
* * *
We stood behind the store with daylight beginning to fade. I reached to my pack and retrieved the book and two vials of seeds. Elaine and Neil each held more vials in their packs.
“What is that?” Schiavo asked.
“I never told you why we went to Wyoming,” I said.
Then, I did tell her. I shared our journey, and the reason for it. The purpose. Then, I handed her the prize.
“That is the cure for the blight,” I said.
Schiavo took the notebook from me, handling it gingerly. Then a single vial of seeds.
“These grow,” she said, half asking.
“We’ve seen what grew from those seeds,” I told her.
“Neil and Elaine, too?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Trees? Vegetables? Everything?”
So simple, and yet so fantastical. What had once been ordinary was considered extraordinary.
“Everything,” I said.
She thought for a moment, then handed the items back to me.
“You trust Martin,” she said, stating a plain conclusion she’d come to.
“Completely.”
“Give those to him for safe keeping. If anything...”
She didn’t need to finish.
“When we’re done,” Schiavo began, taking a more hopeful tone, “and we have the radio, I’ll report what you’ve got there.”
That was exactly what I wanted to hear. I headed for the store’s back door to finish readying my gear.
“You could have told me earlier,” Schiavo said, her words stopping me. “But I understand. You keep your cards close until you have to play them.”
