The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (11 page)

“Stop,” I said from my position just inside, watching as Schiavo moved through the interior. “Don’t move.”

She froze calmly, her weapon coming up with an easy motion, eyes sweeping the space around her.

“What is it?”

I didn’t answer her. Instead I leaned back through the open front door and spotted Neil and Elaine across the street, about to enter a pizza restaurant.

“Stop!” I shouted. “Don’t go in. Hold right there.”

Neil and Elaine read the urgency in my voice. They spread out, each taking positions across the street to cover approaches from either direction.

“Eric...”

I looked back to Schiavo and pointed to the desk on her right. Its drawers had been ransacked, papers spilled, a small mound of the documents spread across the top, covering something. But not completely.

“Tripwire,” I said.

Schiavo leaned her head to look over the papers and saw a thin blue cord beneath. It ran along the far edge of the desk and dove down to the opposite, unseen side. From there it disappeared from my view, but I suspected that it was running under another mass of strategically placed papers on the floor.

Right where Schiavo would have taken her next, and possibly last, step.

“Just don’t move,” I said.

I shifted to the right and looked to the side of the desk where it nearly butted up against the wall. There was a space there between the piece of furniture and the drywall. Not much. About as wide as my fist. Just large enough to conceal the three grenades duct taped to the hidden side of the desk.

“Grenades,” I said.

“You’ve gotta guide me,” Schiavo said.

“Give me a minute.”

I looked closely, taking out my flashlight to examine the improvised trap. The pins on each grenade were connected to the blue line with an elaborate series of knots, the string already taut. Any further pressure on it, such as Schiavo stepping on the concealed trigger wire, would cause the pins to be pulled. With the safety lever not depressed, a detonation would be imminent. Would we have noticed the sound? And if we had, would we have recognized it in time to avoid being blown to pieces in the confined space?

“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.

*   *   *

S
ergeant 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.”

“T
his 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...”

*  *  *

“H
ow 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.