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

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.
    “This is not the place to make a stand,” I told my friend.
    He didn’t try to counter my statement of logic. Instead, he gestured toward the doorway Elaine had peered through just moments ago.
    “We need information,” Neil reminded us. “If there were transits past this island, it might be them.”
    Them...
    Grace. Krista. Martin. And hundreds more. If they’d cruised past Mary Island on whatever craft had taken them from Bandon, that movement could very well have been recorded here, as ‘Jeremy’ had mentioned. Because this place had to have been maintained as an operational station for a reason.
    “He’s right,” I said, looking to Elaine.
    She wasn’t going to fight the choice we were making. But it was plain on her face that she wasn’t happy about it.
    “We’d better do it fast,” she said.
    I glanced upward, to the light spinning slowly atop the tower, its beam less brilliant than when we’d first spotted it from a distance.
    “Find a way