The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (18 page)

The private put the
Sandy
into an orbit around the now drifting boat. Every gun on deck maintained its aim, covering the burning vessel lest some superhuman Russian emerge from the flames with an RPG on his shoulder.

But there was none. There was no sign of anything.

Except for the body in the water.

“Check it,” Schiavo said from her position at the window, coughing hard as acrid smoke from the blazing ship drifted over to the
Sandy
.

Westin slowed the boat and maneuvered it alongside the body floating face down in the water. Hart and Enderson used a hooked pole stowed alongside the wheelhouse to snag and pull the body close. Hart reached down and seized it by the uniform collar and rolled it over.

In the light of the nearby fire we all saw that half the man’s face was peeled back, one eye gone, brain exposed.

“Same uniform as the lighthouse attackers,” Lorenzen said.

“And Lentov,” I added.

Then, what the dead man was wearing became the least of what anyone was concerned with.

“Lieutenant’s hit!”

Acosta’s urgent report from within the wheelhouse drew a rush of help, Hart in the lead. Lorenzen stopped Enderson and pointed to the blazing boat.

“Keep that covered,” the sergeant ordered.

Then Schiavo’s second in command raced into the wheelhouse just ahead of me.

“I’m okay,” the lieutenant said from where she sat on the floor, back against the wall, small pool of blood beneath her. “Ami I hit? I don’t think I’m hit.”

I reached out and took the M4 from her lap, holding it as Hart began checking her.

“My side,” Schiavo said.

Hart ripped her uniform shirt open and saw a soggy red stain on her tan undershirt. He took a scissors from his medical kit and cut the garment open, leaving only the lieutenant’s bra to cover her.

“You all enjoying the show?” Schiavo asked, managing a weak smile, pain and blood loss dragging her down from consciousness.

“Hell, Acosta’s got a bigger chest than you,” Lorenzen fired back, assisting their medic.

“Went through,” Hart said, probing both entrance and exit wounds.

“Internal damage?” Lorenzen asked.

“I don’t know,” Hart said.

“The Russian boat’s going down,” Westin said.

I looked out the window and saw exactly what the private had reported. The burning boat was slipping beneath the surface, fires quenched, a steamy mist left rolling atop the water after it disappeared.

“How you doing, lieutenant?” Lorenzen asked, trying to engage his leader.

Her head bobbed up and down. It might have been a nod. But the next moment when it came down and her chin settled against her chest it became clear that she was fading fast.

“Get her flat,” Hart directed.

Lorenzen helped slide her away from the wheelhouse wall and stretched her out on the floor. Hart rolled her onto her side and applied pressure to the entrance and exit wounds with a pair of trauma bandages.

“She’s still breathing,” Hart said.

The rise and fall of her chest was apparent, even as she lay on her side. That was good. Little else was.

“Is there anywhere we can tie off?” Hart asked. “Working on her while we’re rolling on the water is not what I want to be doing.”

“Westin?”

Lorenzen’s open query to the private hung there, unanswered for a moment, as Westin and Acosta checked the map they’d been using to navigate the coastal waters.

“There’s actually a lodge on here,” Westin said.

“It has a dock,” Acosta added.

“Get us there,” Lorenzen ordered, turning his attention back to Schiavo as the
Sandy
’s engine roared up to speed.

T
he building was rustic and set in what had been a flat meadow nestled close to the sea. We carried Schiavo up from where we’d tied the
Sandy
off to the small dock and headed for the couch in what must have been the gathering room.

“No,” Hart said, pointing to a long, roughhewn dining table in an adjoining space. “There.”

We placed the lieutenant on the flat surface as directed. Hart already had an IV going, clear plasma dripping into her veins as he eased the pressure bandage back and examined her wounds. He turned on his flashlight and hung it from the dark antler chandelier suspended above the table.

“Enderson, Acosta, do a sweep outside,” Lorenzen ordered.

The two soldiers headed out, reluctant to leave their leader, each stealing final glances at her horizontal form as they stepped out.

“How is she?” Neil asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Hart said, checking her blood pressure. “Give me a minute.”

We stepped back, leaving the medic to do his job.

“Can we talk?” Elaine said, her question directed very definitely to me.

“Sure.”

I followed her out onto the lodge’s wide porch. Adirondack chairs sat unused, the view they had once offered of the ocean and islands certainly stunning.

“What was that?” Elaine asked.

In the chaos in the wake of Schiavo being hit, I had forgotten what I’d said to Elaine, and her very obvious reaction to my expression of more than concern. I’d tried to manage her actions.

“On the boat, what was that about?”

I tried to think of a good way to share the fear that Neil had implanted in me. But there was none. At least none that she would accept without possibly decking me.

“I was just...worried.”

She eyed me as if I’d just said I was from a planet two galaxies past the Milky Way.

“What do you think I am? Some fragile flower?”

“No. Can’t I just feel worry? It was a crazy situation.”

“Of course you can feel worry,” she told me. “You just can’t let that switch on the macho gene, okay? I’m in this fight, too? You do remember that?”

“I do,” I said.

Then she stared at me. The verbal dressing down complete. I hoped.

“I worry about you, too,” she said. “Okay?”

“I know.”

She gave me a final, long look, then went back inside. I stood there for a moment wondering if what had just happened was proof that what my friend had warned me of was wrong, or that he was right. Whether it was one, or the other, Elaine had made it clear that there was a line not to cross. She was a big girl and very willing, and ready, to do her part. I’d have to learn to live with that.

If I could.

*  *  *

A
n hour after reaching the lodge, Hart had done all he could to stabilize Schiavo.

“I don’t think anything vital was damaged,” the medic said. “But she lost a good deal of blood. Plasma only goes so far. And I’m down to my last bag after the one I just hung for her.”

“You’re saying she needs a transfusion,” Lorenzen said.

“Exactly,” Hart confirmed. “One problem—she’s AB neg.”

AB negative was the rarest type. I’d read somewhere that something around one percent of the population had that type. I was O positive, just about the most common of the blood types.

“And we don’t have anybody in the unit to take a tap from,” Lorenzen said, again getting confirmation from the medic in the form of a nod.

“Can you rig something up to do a transfusion?” Elaine asked.

Hart thought, then half shrugged, and half nodded.

“I have all we need except a donor,” Hart told Elaine.

She handed me her MP5 and started removing her jacket.

“You have one now,” Elaine said.

“You’re AB negative?” Hart asked.

She tossed her jacket over the back of a chair and rolled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

“I am,” Elaine said, curious that we all seemed surprised. “I’m not kidding. I’ve donated before. I mean, back when there were blood drives and all that stuff.”

Hart looked to me, then to his sergeant. The decision was his, it seemed. And it was easy.

“Hook her up,” Lorenzen said.

*  *  *

N
one of it was by the book. The usual standards of sterilization could not be fully followed. But in two hours Hart had taken roughly a pint out of Elaine, captured in an empty plasma bag, and was transfusing it into Schiavo, drip by drip, the precious red liquid slowly replenishing some of what the lieutenant had lost. She slept through the rest of the night, and the next day, unconscious still as darkness came, full and deep.

For the moment we were stuck. But that could not continue.

“How long until she’s able to be up and out of here?” I asked.

Hart had no clear answer. No satisfyingly clear answer, that was.

“Wound like this gets you laid up in the hospital for three or four days,” he explained. “Then light duty for a couple, maybe three weeks. And that’s if no infection sets in.”

“We can’t move her?” Neil asked.

Lorenzen reacted harshly to my friend’s question.

“And if we could, what good would that do?” the sergeant asked. “We drag her up north to fight a fight she can’t be part of?”

“Every day we sit here is a day the Russians can do whatever they want up in Skagway,” Neil said, maintaining his composure. “We have to get up there.”

Lorenzen absorbed that and looked to their medic.

“Can she be moved?”

“I wouldn’t advise it,” Hart told Lorenzen.

“That’s it, then,” Lorenzen said.

Now, though, Neil couldn’t hold back. Not this close to where he could reunite with Grace and Krista.

“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.

A
s 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.”