The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (3 page)

But all there was was him. This scrawny stranger in something that had once vaguely looked like a military uniform. Now it hung threadbare from his frame, shirt and pants mismatched, boots nearly worn through and stained with something dark.

I activated the weapon light attached to my AR and shone it at his feet, his soiled boots shining with splotches of wet red.

Blood.

My AR came up again, harsh light aimed right between his eyes.

“Can you ease off, pal?” the man requested.

But I didn’t. I kept the light where it would nearly blind him. Where it would keep him off balance. At a disadvantage.

“Who are you and why did you turn on the light?” I pressed him.

“I’m Jeremy.”

I glanced to Neil. He nodded and moved past Jeremy, off the dock, to the path the man had come down, moving a dozen yards or so up the rocky trail, to a position of better cover.

“Are you military?” I asked Jeremy.

He nodded lightly. A half confirmation at best.

“I was,” he said. “I might still be. Who the hell knows anymore?”

That answer didn’t suffice. The look on my face spoke plainly to that.

“Private Jeremy Ebersol,” he said. “Okay? Now what the hell are you doing here?”

Again I waited. Another question hadn’t yet been answered.

“I saw you on radar, okay? I turned on the light because I thought you were stragglers.”

Elaine stepped close. Standing next to me, her MP5 aimed at the dock beneath our feet.

“Stragglers?” she asked.

Jeremy reached up and combed his fingers through his wispy hair, shaking his head at the mild interrogation he was being subjected to.

“Everyone’s already come through,” Jeremy tried to explain. “At least I thought they had. When I saw you...”

“People have come through here?” I pressed him. “People from down south?”

He puzzled at that question, as if the answer would have been self-evident to even the least intelligent of our species.

“You got the signal, right?” he asked.

“The White Signal,” Elaine said.

He nodded, still confused that we were failing to grasp what he was trying to get across.

“You got the signal,” he repeated. “You had your directions to here, so...”

I shook my head at the young enlisted man. He’d probably joined up just before the blight took hold, planning on four years, some G.I. benefits, and maybe a free beer or two over the years to thank him for his service. Instead he got this, whatever
this
was.

“We don’t have any directions,” I told him. “No one sent us here.”

His gaze narrowed down, then began to swell, worry rising. His gaze shifted to our weapons and he took a step back.

“Look, I’m just supposed to log the channel transits,” Jeremy explained, a pleading in his tone and manner. “I’m a nobody.”

“No,” I said, reaching out with one hand and grabbing him by the collar. “You’re the somebody who’s going to give us answers.”

I spun him around and began walking him off the dock, Elaine just behind. We only made it to the transition from rickety wood to solid land. That was where Neil stopped us as he jogged down the path he’d moved up.

“There are bodies up there,” my friend said.

I glanced to Jeremy’s stained boots, then looked to my friends.

“We have our first answer,” I said.

Elaine grabbed the young soldier’s arm and pulled him from my hold, shoving him past Neil with the butt of her weapon.

“Get moving,” she said.

Jeremy turned toward us, hands held in front, palms open in some sign of surrender.

“Move,” Elaine repeated.

Finally the young man nodded and led us up the path.

T
hey lay in a neat row outside the blockish base of the old lighthouse. Five of them, in full camouflage, the pattern vaguely familiar without allowing me to know, with any specificity, from where it originated.

Neil was not so limited.

“Russians,” my friend said, staring down at the bodies, each mangled by bullet holes and signs of explosive trauma. “Elite troops.”

Elite, possibly, if my friend was correct. But the wasting frames beneath their uniforms belied the harsh truth that, wherever they’d come from, they were poorly supplied.

“I saw a demonstration they put on while I was on assignment in St. Petersburg,” Neil said. “A lot of door blowing and dummy shooting. House clearing stuff.”

It was easy to forget sometimes what we’d all done and experienced in the old world. Working for the State Department, my friend had trotted the globe, sampling locale fare, experiencing whatever his hosts decided to present. Things such as what he described were not out of the ordinary, I imagined. Blowing things up with some precision gunfire added for good measure was an easy, and impressive, show to put on.

But here, it appeared, they’d met their match.

In this guy?

I wondered that to myself as I focused on the young private.

“They hit us just before first light yesterday,” Jeremy said, looking over the fallen soldiers with a mix of sadness and dread. “They got inside before we got the upper hand.”

Conical impact craters from bullet strikes and scorch marks from explosions marred the thick walls of the base structure, evidence of the fight he’d described. Or some fight.

“Who’s we?” Neil asked.

Jeremy tipped his head toward the lighthouse door. Elaine stepped that way, careful, and nudged the door open with the muzzle of her MP5. A quick flick of her flashlight revealed the interior for an instant. Just long enough to see what she then reported to us.

“Bodies in here,” she said. “Crappy uniforms like his.”

“We hit some of them from the tower,” Jeremy said. “The rest my buddies nailed with grenades as they got through the door. Some of them caught the blast, too.”

Elaine glanced back into the interior of the lighthouse, then looked to me.
Really
looked to me. Trying to share some understanding with her eyes. A warning maybe.

“Private Ebersol,” Elaine said, joining us again around the young soldier. “Where did the Russians come from?”

He shrugged and shook his head, just a kid beaten down by circumstance and what the new world served up to every survivor each and every day they still drew breath.

“We heard rumors from command that they’d hit the Aleutians a while back and were working their way down the coast,” Jeremy told us. “Someone said they were trying to get to the lower forty-eight.”

Elaine soaked in what the young man was sharing. Eyeing him with some practiced analysis. Drawing on the requirements of her old self. The one where the FBI credentials she still hung onto put her in situations just like this. Questioning someone.

As she would a suspect.

That she was doing so registered quietly with me. I made no overt moves, simply letting my finger slide closer to the trigger of my AR. At the ready. For what I didn’t know. At the moment, she was in control.

To my left, Neil hadn’t yet picked up on what Elaine was doing. On the doubt she was expressing with subtle shifts in her manner. He was focused very intently on the mangled bodies at our feet.

“Your buddies in there saved your ass,” Elaine said.

Jeremy nodded, grateful, almost teary.

Elaine, too, nodded. An understanding rising. I saw her fingers flex tight around the MP5’s grip.

“They meant a lot to you,” Elaine continued. “You were stationed here together. You get to know people pretty good when you’re isolated like this.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy confirmed, emotion ready to well.

“You guys were all close,” Elaine said. “You were friends.”

“We were.”

Jeremy’s gaze settled toward the ground. Elaine glanced to me, just a quick look, some intensity in the brief connection. Some wariness.

Then she fixed hard on the soldier trying to sell the tale.

“Jeremy...”

He looked up from the ground to Elaine.

“If they were such a good friends, why are they lying inside in a bloody heap while these invaders are arranged out here like heroes?”

For an instant he puzzled at the question. An instant in which Neil finally caught the gist of Elaine’s doubt and brought his AK slowly up.

It was in the next instant when all hell broke loose.

Jeremy, whose real name was most likely something akin to Yevgeny or Igor or Vladimir, reached fast behind his back and drew a long, dark knife from beneath his shirt. A combat blade meant to be as intimidating as it was deadly. Elaine stepped back first, Neil and I following suit, putting a few yards distance between us and the now obvious imposter. He swiveled his body, tracking each of our movements, shifting the blade between us, keeping us at bay.

“You’re outgunned,” Neil said, stating more than the obvious. “Put it down.”

‘Jeremy’ made no move to acquiesce, his gaze sampling the three muzzles directed squarely at him.

“It’s over,” I said.

“All we want to do is talk,” Elaine said.

Our journey north was mostly in the blind. We’d stopped at Mary Island hoping that the light which had called us to shore might mark a place where answers would be found. Guidance. Now more than ever I believed that to be a distinct probability. That belief was borne of the concocted tale Jeremy had told. A lie sprinkled with truths.

He’d spoken of people ‘from down south’. And of logging ‘channel transits’. Whether the remainder of his story, including the Russians advancing down the coast, held any basis in fact, I didn’t know. It might. But what he’d shared about people from south of here heading north fit almost perfectly with what we’d believed had happened to those who’d disappeared from Bandon. The symmetry was undeniable. And Jeremy’s knowing that, particularly if he was some part of this unit of Russians who’d assaulted the island, made perfect sense. For one simple reason.

Intelligence.

You wanted to know as much about a target before attacking it. That was a concept easy to grasp even for one without extensive knowledge of military operations. If possible, you’d want to infiltrate it. Learn its weaknesses. Its strengths.

“Drop the knife,” Neil commanded the young man again.

He did nothing. He said nothing.

But he
had
said things. In perfect English. Just how an infiltrator would be expected to speak. To not draw suspicions.

“You snuck in here,” I said to him, my AR slightly lowered. “You got inside the perimeter. Probed the defenses.”

It was all metaphorical, what I was suggesting. There was no perimeter but the meeting of land and sea. No obvious defenses other than the sheer bulk of the lighthouse and its base structure. But he knew what I meant. He knew that I knew. That
we
knew. And, in a way, what I’d just said to him was the impetus for what happened next.

For what he chose to do next.

With a swift, clean motion he brought the knife up. None of us fired because the blade did not shift toward us. It moved toward
him
. Its sharp, stained edge came to the far left side of his neck and carved deep into the flesh as the committed young soldier drew it quickly around his neck, slicing a bloody smile a few inches beneath the real one.

“Christ!”

Elaine’s exclamation sounded at almost exactly the same instant that the young soldier crumpled before us, the sudden, rapid loss of blood sapping his consciousness. His ability to control any motor function whatsoever ceased as the wet red tide spilled out of him through the hideous wound.

“Why the hell would he do that?” Elaine asked, almost shaken by the grotesque end unfolding before us.

Neil stared down at Jeremy’s still body. A slowing flow of blood bubbled from his severed jugular. His heart was barely going through the motions now, no longer able to sustain the gush that had erupted in the first seconds after the blade sliced into and through the vein.

“He didn’t want to talk,” Neil said, confused as he looked to us. “Why?”

“Training?” I half suggested. “Not supposed to be taken alive?”

It was a thin possibility. I knew that.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Neil said.

“That and more,” Elaine added.

We focused on her now.

“He turns on the light and draws us to shore,” she recounted. “Then he meets us at the dock with nothing but a knife tucked in his belt? There are Kalashnikovs scattered all over here.”

She was right. Next to the carefully arranged row of bodies were two distinct piles of weapons. AK-47s that had seen battle, here and elsewhere by the look of them. Yet ‘Jeremy’ hadn’t armed himself with any of them. Where he could have met our approach with devastating gunfire from cover along the shore, he instead welcomed us. As if he’d been expecting us.

Or someone else.

My heartbeat quickened at that realization.

“He was expecting friendlies,” I said. “His friendlies.”

Neil understood now, too.

“A follow on force,” he said.

I nodded.

“To occupy after the assault force has neutralized the enemy,” I said.

“That’s why he turned on the light,” Neil said. “And why he offed himself. He couldn’t take the chance that we’d get that out of him.”

Elaine, too, was coming up to speed on the situation we were now facing.

“If that’s true,” she began, “then they’re still coming.”

They...

How many that represented we had no idea. In the world as it was, certainly no large units existed to maraud the coast of Alaska and its myriad of islands. Then again, it wouldn’t take mass numbers of troops to do so. They’d taken this hunk of rock and its lighthouse at the cost of a half dozen dead. A price had been paid, to be certain, but they’d captured their objective. For a while.

It now belonged to us. And that scared the hell out of me.

“We’ve gotta get back to the boat,” I said.

“And far away from this place,” Elaine added.

Elaine and I were turning away from the collection of bodies and toward the path to the dock when we noticed that Neil was not. He looked to us and slowly shook his head.

“We can’t,” he said.