The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) Read Online Free

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.

Five
    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