Depths of Blue Page 18

  “We need to drag this stuff closer to the water,” she said. “The tide should be going out soon, but we need to make sure that we won’t be working anywhere that’s visible to the Orthodoxans.”

  “Makes sense,” Torrin replied and grabbed a large piece of wood by one end and started hauling it toward the water. “You check on the Orthodoxans. I’ll get this moved up.”

  “Sounds good, but leave the big stuff and I’ll help you with it.”

  Torrin stopped dead in her tracks and shot her a look. She batted her eyelashes outrageously. “Oh, would you be so kind as to lend a hand to a poor, helpless woman?” she said in a high falsetto. “I would be ever so grateful if you did!”

  “You’re about as poor and helpless as an aetanberan,” Jak snorted. She laughed out loud when Torrin’s expression wavered back and forth between pleasure and irritation at the backhanded compliment.

  “Thanks, I think,” Torrin finally said. “Don’t praise me with faint damns or anything.” She grabbed hold of the driftwood log and started heaving it toward the waterline. “You can help me with whatever’s left.”

  Left to her own devices, Jak followed the rock wall around toward the beach. They were in a natural bay, but the rock face curved in at a sharper angle than the waterline. When she got to the end of the rocks, she crouched and looked around the point. The rocks curled away from her and formed another half moon on the other side of the bay. The opposite side was bigger than their side and at the far end of the beach she could see one of the Orthodoxan buildings. She trained her binoculars on it and made out men and movement.

  Swinging around, she surveyed the top of the cliff for more men. She saw a couple likely machine gun emplacements, but they didn’t seem to be manned. Apparently the Orthodoxans weren’t worried about attacks from the ocean. It made sense, there hadn’t been any need for those emplacements for decades, but she and Torrin were about to take advantage of their complacence. They really couldn’t have asked for a better setup. Even if the current took the raft out to sea, at night it would be visible for kilometers. If they were really lucky, the current would run the raft right past the Orthodoxan outpost, which would give them more time to get past the men stationed there.

  “We’re good to go,” Jak said when she rejoined Torrin, who carried a large armful of driftwood. She’d made quick work of the pile and was bringing up the last of it.

  Torrin grunted in response and deposited her load on the sand. She stretched, knuckling her back. “That’s good,” she replied absently. The stack of wood looked daunting, but she started sorting it quickly into piles of like sizes. Her face had an intense look that Jak found absolutely enchanting.

  “Are you going to help?” Torrin asked acerbically. Jak blushed, embarrassed to be caught staring.

  She hurried forward. “You looked like you had it handled,” Jak muttered.

  “So here’s the plan.” Torrin was all business. “We create a frame out of large pieces of driftwood and lash it together using ties made of seaweed. If we soak the pieces in the ocean, the ties should shrink when they dry, holding it together better.” She pointed without looking up. “Put that one over there.”

  Jak moved as directed. Torrin had taken the bull by the horns, and she was happy to work at her direction. She only had the barest idea of how to go about constructing a raft and was glad that Torrin seemed to have it figured out.

  “You know it doesn’t have to last forever, right?” Jak needled the other woman.

  “Do you want it falling apart before it does us any good?” Torrin wasn’t the least bit amused. “Because that’s what you’ll get if we don’t do this properly.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “And don’t try to mollify me. I’m not going to screw up our chances to get out of this hellhole.”

  “I get it,” Jak said placatingly. “Don’t worry, we’ll get out of here.” She almost wished they didn’t have to. Going back over the fence meant the mask would go back on. Even though she hadn’t told Torrin her secret, it was a lot easier to be herself around another woman, especially one who didn’t know how she was supposed to act.

  Over the next few hours the raft began to take shape. Jak had to admit that Torrin knew what she was doing, even though she was more than a little officious at times. Bossy even. By sunset the raft was pretty well assembled and the tide was rolling back in. The beach was so long and shallow that it would take some time for the water to be deep enough to carry the raft, but they had to start moving.

  “It looks good. We need to get it outfitted,” Jak said when it became clear Torrin would continue to fiddle with the raft.

  “Let me just—”

  “We need to get moving now or we won’t have time to get in place to make a break for it.” Jak cut her off firmly. The knapsack lay neglected to the side of their barely seaworthy vessel. Jak pulled out all the Orthodoxan ammunition and most of the grenades. Between what they’d used and what they’d recovered at the bridge, they had more than she’d anticipated.

  Torrin had ignored Jak’s instructions and was constructing a frame over the top of the raft. She grabbed two handfuls of ammo and started lashing the cartridges to the sides of the frame with strands of wet seaweed.

  “It’ll keep the ammunition up there from going off at the same time as what we put in the bottom,” she explained to Jak’s quizzical look.

  Of course, that made perfect sense. At the moment, the ocean’s waves weren’t raging, but they were high enough that the fire needed to be protected. Jak quickly built up walls around the center of the raft and insulated them with rocks and sand interspersed with seaweed. She laid an intricate network of damp seaweed radiating from the raft’s center, then created the structure for a huge bonfire.

  “So how will we start the fire?” Torrin had the look of someone who’d just poked a large hole in her own plan. It was well past dusk and there was barely enough light to see by naturally. Jak switched over to night vision and pulled the length of rope and the fire starter from one of her pockets and held them up. Torrin squinted at her in the gloom.

  “We’ll throw the firestarter in there in an open position,” Jak said. “If we douse the area in water, it’ll take a while to start the main fire, which will hopefully give us time to get back to the trenches.”

  “Couldn’t the starter get extinguished?”

  “Probably not. They’re designed to be able to set fire to the wettest wood and to work after being submerged. This one went into the river with us and it still works fine. With it being stuck open, there’s the possibility that it will fail completely, which would set everything in the vicinity on fire.” Jak shrugged. “That’ll work too. Now let’s get the rest of the ammo in there and get out of here.”

  Torrin grabbed the rest of the bullets and sprinkled them over and around where the bonfire would be.

  “Great, now let’s go.” Jak tossed in the firestarter and took off at a sprint, trusting that Torrin would be close on her heels.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They crouched behind a low sandbag wall, closer to the border than they’d been yet. A knot the size of an Earth cat had taken up residence in Torrin’s throat. It had taken them far less time to return to the trenches than it had to leave. She’d followed on Jak’s heels, worried that she would lose him in the darkness. It had to have been about fifteen minutes since they’d arrived, and she was growing increasingly nervous as each moment passed.

  Surely the raft should have been visible by now. What if their plan failed? How would they get across without some sort of distraction? There were just too many Orthodoxans.

  She put her mouth to Jak’s ear. The sniper jerked as if he’d been bitten. “Do you hear anything?”

  “No. For the third time.” His reply was testy. He made a good show of being unconcerned, but if he wasn’t at least somewhat nervous, he wouldn’t jump every time she whispered in his ear.

  “It won’t work,” Torrin fretted.

 
“It will work,” he said. She could practically hear his eyes roll. “It’s a good plan. We’ll be fine.”

  “How can you be sure? There’s so much that could go wrong. What if—”

  “Shhhhh, do you hear that?”

  “Don’t shush me and don’t think I’ll fall for that,” Torrin huffed. She couldn’t believe that he would try to shut her down like that. Her eyes bulged and she grew even more indignant when he clamped a rough hand over her mouth. She was about to bite his hand when she heard distant shouts and, beneath that, sharp explosions.

  “It’s working.” Even in the dark, Torrin could see Jak’s eyes gleaming. “Let’s get this done.”

  Jak pushed himself up from his crouch and peered over the low wall. He looked down at her and gestured her to follow, then vaulted over the wall in one smooth motion. She pushed herself up and looked north. The distant horizon was fitfully lit by distant flashes. Searchlight beams sliced through the darkness toward the source of the disturbance.

  “Come on,” Jak hissed at her from below. The walls of the trench went down for a meter and a half and he crouched low at the bottom, waiting for her. She pushed herself over the wall with far less grace than he had and landed with a splash. Mud flew everywhere and splattered all over the two of them. The bottom of the trench was covered by centimeters of wet muck. The trench stretched away into darkness on either side of them. She put her hand out to steady herself on the nearest wall and came back with a handful of mud. It was all over everything. She tried to shake it off and instead succeeded in flinging it all over herself. Giving up on cleanliness, Torrin wiped her hand on the front of her jacket with a grimace.

  Jak tugged at her elbow and started off cautiously, taking care to make as little noise as possible. When she followed, he looked back with reproach at the amount of noise she was making. She forced herself to slow down and consider every step she took. Soon she was almost as noiseless as he was, though she didn’t move as quickly. He was attuned to her progress and held up to wait for her whenever he got too far ahead.

  They followed the trench as it curved gently northward for a couple of hundred meters and then split into a T-junction. Jak held up his hand, stopping her in her tracks. He took her by the elbow and leaned in close.

  “Pull out your pistol, but only shoot if someone sees us,” he whispered in her ear. Shivers skittered down her spine. She tried to ignore the sensation and pulled out her sidearm in response to his directions. Jak stuck his head out into the gap, glanced both ways and pulled it back in.

  “We’re clear,” he breathed. “Follow me.” It was strange, she thought. The sniper rifle that she’d rarely seen out of his hands was slung over one shoulder. In his right hand, he gripped the great big combat knife that she’d seen him handle but rarely.

  He took the right branch at the junction and she crept along in his footsteps. Hopefully, he knew where he was headed. He acted like it. There was no hesitation in his movements. The trench branched again after only a few meters and Jak took the left branch without pausing to consider.

  They followed along the path without seeing a soul for quite some time until they came around a corner and ended up face-to-face with an Orthodoxan sentry. Before the man could do more than gape at them, Jak closed the short distance between them. He slammed his hand over the soldier’s mouth and his momentum sent the two of them back into the trench wall. In a flash, Jak drove his knife up beneath the sentry’s rib cage. He leaned into the thrust, questing with the knife’s tip for the sentry’s lungs. The hapless soldier spasmed as the knife found a lung; dark blood seeped around the knife where it protruded from his chest.

  Jak stepped back, pulling the knife out and letting the Orthodoxan slump to his knees then keel over to one side. He lay in the mud on the trench bottom, twitching. Torrin stood rooted in place, shocked by the swiftness of Jak’s savage attack. The other man hadn’t had a chance and hadn’t realized that he stared death in the face until it was much too late. Her own experiences with this type of combat were from so long ago that her instincts were too rusty to be counted on. Her most recent tussles had been of the nonlethal variety, convincing some meathead that his advances were unwelcome or persuading a would-be thief that another shipment would be less trouble.

  Jak fingered a patch on the upper arm of the downed soldier. He breathed hard through his nose, trying not to pant. He bent quickly and wiped his combat knife on the hem of his fallen foe’s jacket, then started rifling through the bloody uniform. He grunted in triumph when he pulled out a piece of folded paper and unfolded it, perusing it quickly. “He was a lieutenant, and this is a map of the defenses. With this we can avoid the tangle wire emplacements and even better the minefield.” Jak turned the map and traced a finger over it, lips moving as he thought. Satisfied, he folded up the map and slid it into a pants pocket.

  “Time to move on,” Jak whispered hoarsely.“They’ll come looking for him soon. Some poor enlisted bastard wouldn’t be missed, but an officer…It can’t be too much farther now.” He took off down the trench again. His motions were quicker now, and he seemed less concerned with stealth than with speed. Torrin could still hear gunfire to the north. The raft was doing its work well. The diversion had been more successful than she’d imagined possible.

  She followed Jak through another couple of branchings and over another hundred meters before he once again held up his hand. He poked his head around a corner and withdrew it with a muffled curse.

  “There’s a bunker ahead and it has men in it.” He sounded frustrated. “We need to take it out with a grenade. There’s no way we can risk them coming out on top of us. Once we do that, we’re going to have to haul ass. The noise’ll bring everyone in the area down on top of us.”

  “Got it,” Torrin replied and tightened her grip on the pistol.

  “You need to keep heading west if something happens to me. If you keep going in that direction you’ll get to the end of the trenches, then it’s up and over. Once there, you run until you hit the barbed wire barricades. Your best bet there is to flatten yourself and squeeze under them.” He stopped and regarded her. “The minefield is right behind that. There’s a clear path two-thirds of the way between the barbed wire clusters. It’s only about a couple of meters wide, so you need to be careful to stay on a straight course.”

  “Why are you telling me all of this?” Torrin demanded.

  “If I get taken out, you need to know how to get out of here. What we’re about to do now is more dangerous than anything we’ve had to do since we hooked up. I want you taken care of best I can.” Jak lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “I owe you at least that much for getting you into this mess.”

  “It’s a better mess than the one I was in. At least here we still have a chance.” Torrin wondered what had gotten into him. Jak looked her right in the eye and then raised a hand to caress her cheek. The touch sent sparks dancing across her skin, even here when they were moments from death, dismemberment or worse.

  “Just do your best to get away if something happens to me,” he said, cupping her chin and drawing his thumb over her lower lip.

  Mute with surprise over the blatant display of affection, all Torrin could do was nod. He smiled and set his shoulders.

  “Let’s do this.” He pulled two grenades out of a capacious pocket and pulled the pins, arming them. In no particular hurry, he walked around the corner. Torrin flanked him, pistol raised. In front of them, light spilled from the doorway of the bunker. She could see the men inside, men who even now stared in frozen horror or scrambled for weapons as they noticed two figures descending on them from the gloom.

  Jak tossed first the one and then the other grenade into the bunker with the soldiers. The grenades followed a slow, lazy arc through the air, then bounced off the wooden floor. Chaos erupted as men scrambled after the rolling, bouncing grenades. Jak continued on past the rectangle of light, pulling Torrin after him. The grenades went off as they cleared the doorway.

 
Even though they were clear of the door, the double shockwave hit Torrin in the chest with a pair of staggered thumps and she exhaled explosively. A gout of fire and earth shot through the bunker’s door with a roar and Torrin threw up an arm to protect her face from the rain of mud and dirt. Through it all, Jak kept moving, pulling her away from the scene of carnage.

  “Come on!” Torrin could barely hear him; her ears rang from the blast. She turned, feeling like she was underwater. He yelled something else she couldn’t quite make out and pulled on her hard. The air was heavy with the acrid tang of explosives and burning flesh. He was running, pulling her along, stumbling behind him. Off balance, she snatched her hand out of his and sprinted along in his wake. They ran full tilt for the last fifty meters before stopping at a dead end. Jak pointed up frantically, and she jumped, grabbing the top of the trench wall and pulling herself up. Reaching back, she grasped his hand and hauled him up to the top of the trench wall.

  Bullets whined past her ear. Even though the searchlights were still pointed out to sea, at least some of the Orthodoxans were aware of their presence.

  “Over there,” Jak yelled, adrenaline raising the pitch of his voice. He pointed out into the darkness and sprinted toward the line of barbed wire barely visible in the darkness. Torrin followed at his heels as he squeezed himself between two strands of the tangled wire. He was small enough to get through without any damage, but by the time she’d made her way between the strands she bled from half a dozen scratches and punctures. She didn’t slow down, though. Yells and shots rose behind them as they tried to make good their escape.

  Torrin stumbled as a line of fire blazed over her left bicep. “Shit,” she cried and clapped her hand over the arm. Her fingers came back bloody and her arm throbbed.

  “You all right?” Jak yelled over his shoulder. He was ahead of her once again, throwing himself into a slide at the base of a tangle of wire.