The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (13 page)

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.

W
e 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 wake.

“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.

“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.