by Noah Mann
I lowered the binoculars and glanced behind, seeing Neil reassembling his weapon after checking its internals.
“I think we may need to be,” I said.
“I do, too,” Schiavo said.
She stood next to Acosta and watched night settled down from above, blacking out the world ahead of us. Neil came into the wheelhouse and headed below as I switched to the thermal binoculars and scanned the world beyond the Sandy’s bow.
“How’d you learn to play piano?” I asked, lowering the binoculars.
Schiavo chuckled quietly and took the device from me, taking her own look at the water out there.
“Mrs. Welsh,” Schiavo said. “My third grade teacher.”
She kept the binoculars to her eyes as she explained.
“I was one of those kids who liked to be at school. Not the braniac kind who would stay after to do extra credit. I just didn’t want to go home, and Mrs. Welsh knew that. So, she let me stay, and while other kids were reading extra books or practicing for the spelling bee, she would teach me to play the old piano we had in our room. Room eight. I still remember that, and I remember that piano, and I really remember her.”
“Sounds like a wonderful woman,” I said.
“She had a husband and two kids of her own, and she made time to teach the little poor girl with the drunk father how to make music.”
“From what you’ve said, she taught you well,” I said.
“It just came to me,” Schiavo said. “That was my thing. Even when I wasn’t around a piano to play, the next time I got to sit down at one, it all came back. It was like that was what I was supposed to do.”
She lowered the binoculars and handed them back to me.
“Maybe there’ll be a piano in Skagway,” she said hopefully. “And when everything’s wrapped up there, I can play for you and your friends. I think I’d like that.”
There was a calm about her as she said what she just had. Maybe it was the hope that was beginning to elude me. Or, I wondered, was it a fatalism in her that regarded what lay at the end of our journey as an inevitability? One that would end how it ends.
That was true, I thought. We were but one thing which could influence the outcome, but influence it we could.
Influence it we must.
“I can’t wait to hear you play,” I told Schiavo.
Then she left the wheelhouse, heading below again. I stood watch with Acosta until we were both relieved thirty minutes later, the rotation continuing into the night, the land and the sea quiet, the trip north as peaceful as we’d hoped.
Until it wasn’t.
Twenty Seven
“Something on the water ahead!”
Westin’s announcement drew everyone from below decks. I was next to last into the wheelhouse, Enderson, Lorenzen, and Hart already out on deck, weapons ready. I saw Acosta standing at the front window, thermal binoculars to his eyes, zeroed in on something in the dark distance.
“It’s a boat,” Acosta reported. “About our size. And its hauling ass right for our bow.”
“Westin, clear him to the right,” Schiavo said. “I want any fire off our left.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Westin acknowledged, steering slightly toward the mainland.
Ahead, in the black night, I could see nothing. Not a shape, not a wake. Nothing. But if some craft was barreling toward us with purpose, that meant that they could almost certainly see us, just as we saw them. That also meant they were at least similarly equipped.
Military...
“Russians,” I said.
Schiavo nodded and took the safety off her M4, sliding a window on the left side of the wheelhouse open and resting the barrel of her weapon on its frame.
“Why would they be heading south again?” Neil asked.
“Check on Mary Island,” Schiavo suggested. “Reoccupy Juneau. Doesn’t really matter.”
“I count three warm bodies,” Acosta reported, tuning his focus in a bit more. “Wait. They’re adjusting course again. Collision course with our bow.”
“Distance?” Schiavo asked.
“Eight hundred meters,” Acosta answered. “And—”
He never got the last word out as the dark water ahead lit up with flashes and tracer rounds streaking at us. A half dozen impacts shattered the windows and sent Neil, Elaine and me diving for cover. I heard Schiavo’s shooters opening up outside, the distance still extreme for their M4s.
“MG on their bow!” Acosta shouted out, describing what he was seeing.
“Get us closer, Westin!” Schiavo ordered.
There was no ‘yes ma’am’ reply this time, just firewalling throttles and a slight turn to the right, trying to get the charging vessel fully cleared for the battery of weapons our side could bring to bear.
“Six hundred!” Acosta reported.
Closer, but still on the outside of real world effectiveness for the standard issue rifles. Mine would be no better. Elaine’s Mp5 even worse. Neil’s AK, whose rounds would pack more punch, was no better in the range department.
“We need more fire out there,” Neil said.
He was right. Even if just for suppressing what was being directed at us.
“I’m first,” my friend said as a volley of fire tracked onto the Sandy again, chewing at the side of the wheelhouse.
“Go!” I shouted.
Neil rolled to the door and slipped out of the wheelhouse, shifting to the right side of the boat to reach the bow and not interfere with Schiavo’s shooters.
“Neil’s on the bow!” I told the lieutenant.
She didn’t reply. She didn’t move an inch, and hadn’t since taking her position at the left side window. There she stood, exposed, opening fire now at the muzzle blasts that were our only target, rounds from the Russian machine gun ripping into the wheelhouse all around her.
Despite the gender, she had a pair of brass ones bigger than any man I’d seen take a weapon into battle.
Then I heard Neil fire. Quick bursts from his AK, the sound distinctive, a deeper crack amongst the almost wispy ratta tat tat from the M4s.
Acosta, too, had held his position near the spider webbed windshield, tracking the incoming boat with the thermal binoculars.
“Five hundred!”
“They’re turning!” Westin said.
I slid across the wheelhouse floor to the door, Elaine right behind. We slipped out and onto deck, scrambling across the lurching surface to the port side rail. The stream of fire from the MG was raking the entire side of the boat, low and then high, water sprouting from impacts and the hull ringing like a bell with every penetration.
“If they get us below the waterline we’re gonna have a long swim,” Elaine said.
“Just stay down,” I said.
“What?”
I could plainly hear the confusion in her voice, but I didn’t answer. Instead I poked my head and weapon above the rail and took aim at the boat, squeezing off a series of rounds, trying to make each count, my aim just above the barrel spewing fire at us.
“They’re slowing!”
Acosta’s warning reached out onto the deck. To my right, two of the three shooters were reloading. Without warning Elaine popped up and trained her MP5 on the target, within two hundred meters now, still a Hail Mary shot for her.
“Come on...” she implored the boat closer, wanting to add her own fire to the mix.
Then, after a long burst from Neil’s AK, the MG fire stopped, just a glowing barrel visible across the water.
“Keep the fire up!” Lorenzen said.
We did. A few hundred feet away now, the vessel was no longer charging, its bow hardly pushing through the calm waters. It was coasting.
“Enderson, drop a forty on it!”
The corporal followed his sergeant’s order and stopped firing, lifting his M4 up a bit and loading a 40mm grenade into the fat launcher attached to the underside of the barrel. Elaine began firing now, adding to the covering fire as an almost comical thoop sounded from
Enderson’s weapon.
The results a second later were anything but cartoonish.
The wheelhouse of the approaching boat erupted in a red orange fireball, its structure peeling away like petals of some metallic flower. The craft rocked, tipping severely away from us, flames building from mid ship to bow, secondary explosions popping, grenades and ammo cooking off.
“Cease fire!” Lorenzen ordered. “Cease fire!”
Other than the rumble of the Sandy’s engines and the pop pop pop of mini explosions across the water, a quiet settled over the boat.
“Circle it,” Schiavo told Westin. “Keep it on our left.”
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.
Twenty Eight
The 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.
* * *
An 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.<
br />
“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.
* * *
None 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.