“Yeah, we could do that,” Dave had said. “Or, we could just cozy on down here until the US Navy comes steaming into Gambell harbor with one of its big missile destroyers and a few hundred Navy Seals and starts killing them for us.”
“You think America gives a shit about a couple thousand dumb Yup’ik in the Bering Strait?” He pointed east. “They’ll be lining up their tanks and fighters, for sure, but over there in Nome, to protect Alaska. I’ve got news for you — the cavalry isn’t coming, Dave.”
“OK, but what’s the plan here?” the boy asked. “You kill one of them, ten come after us. Maybe they don’t catch us, we kill another one. A hundred come after us. Maybe they get mad, start executing the people in the school. None of this gets our families out of that school.”
Perri knew that, but he was too angry to care. “It’s called ‘asymmetrical warfare’ man. A smaller force can keep a bigger force unbalanced, distract them, tie up their troops so they can’t do whatever they came here to do.”
“You read that in one of your Army recruiting books?” Dave asked. “We aren’t a ‘smaller force’, Perri. We’re just two kids hiding in a hole in the ground.”
“You aren’t a kid anymore Dave,” Perri said, gesturing around him. “Look at this place. You already moved out of home, you just didn’t tell anyone yet.”
The young boy had seemed to straighten his back when Perri said that. After a bit more talk, he’d decided to help, but they’d agreed just killing Russian troops was pointless and just as likely to force the Russians to start killing their hostages in retaliation. So they’d spent their second night creeping through the town, raiding people’s larders and dragging bags of canned or dried food back to the gas station and stashing it in the tank. There had been a couple of near misses and the most dangerous was about three a.m. when they’d broken into the rear of the general store. They’d wanted more ammunition, camping gear, water bladders for storing drinking and cooking water, stuff like that. They’d hoped to find guns there too, but while they had left plenty of ammo behind, the Russians had cleaned out the gun lockers. Anyway Dave and Perri were in there filling big shopping bags with whatever looked useful when there were flashlights and voices outside. Dave ducked down behind the store counter, but Perri was stuck right near the window, reaching for a rainproof jacket on a dummy. Anyone looking in would have seen him. He’d frozen behind the dummy as two soldiers walked past, swinging flashlights from side to side. But they weren’t really searching for anything. They walked past the window without a glance and in a few seconds were gone. It freaked Dave and Perri so much though they decided they’d pushed their luck far enough for the night and humped their loot back to the tank.
Perri had no idea what had happened to his father and brothers. They’d been out at sea when the Russians arrived. He had to assume they’d come back to the harbor to find themselves hostages like everyone else, but he hadn’t seen them being walked to the toilets while he and Dave were watching, so he couldn’t be sure.
Now it was the night of the third day, and Dave and Perri had crept out of the gas station and climbed up the slope that led up to Sivuqaq Mountain. Only 600 feet high, it was more like a bluff than a mountain, but it towered over Gambell like a stone guardian. It had been a pain in the ass getting to a position where they could look down over the town, within range of Perri’s rifle, but not down amongst the nests of the Crested Auklets which infested the slopes of the bluff this time of year. Their alarmed chattering would have given the two boys away in moments, so they’d stayed above the nests and then moved downslope when they saw a clear space without too many of the little red-beaked birds sitting on their eggs.
They’d found a perfect spot between and behind some rocks, looking straight over the school, down the road that went through town and out to the airstrip. Their plan was just to try to identify some static targets on this trip, and maybe pick a few good hides they could shoot from.
“Stop moaning and tell me what you see,” Perri said, looking through his scope. They had a thick grey tarpaulin pulled over them, the same color as the gritty dirt and sand around them.
“OK, well, I see a bunch of guys pulling nets over some boxes, and there are two jeeps there.”
“Where?” Perri moved his scope around, but couldn’t see anything in the small circle of glass, and could see even less with his bare eyes.
“To the left, this side of the school.”
“I told you man, you have to use the clock,” Perri said patiently. “Straight ahead is 12. Left is 11, 10, 9, right is 1, 2, 3, OK? And tell me high, or low.”
“Ok ok. Say 10 o’clock. And it’s all low from here,” Dave said.
Perri swiveled his sight and picked up movement. His .300 Winchester had a long barrel which he had resting on a rock to keep it steady. He had grabbed a new scope in the general store, one he’d had his eyes on ever since it came in, but would never have been able to afford. It was by a company called Precision Scopes, and overlaid on the glass viewer was a small ‘heads up’ display showing Perri the range to the target once he had it framed, the direction and strength of the wind, the degree of bullet drop and a bunch of other stuff Perri wasn’t sure about, like ‘incline’ and ‘cant’. Having read about it in a hunting magazine, what Perri was sure about was how it worked. You put a red pip on your target and with your thumb, pressed a button you mounted down back of the trigger of your rifle. Then the sight calculated a firing solution and a crosshair appeared, showing where your bullet would go if you fired it. You put the crosshair over your target and… boom.
That was the theory anyway. Perri couldn’t risk test firing to zero the sight, which he’d normally want to do. He’d just entered the make of the rifle and its ammo into the scope’s settings, and had to hope it would do. He knew his rifle though, and he knew it shot pretty true.
Now he saw what Dave had been talking about. At the edge of town, under an old carport, Russian troops were piling up cases. They were wooden, and looked to be about the size of a 36 pack beer case. The writing on the outside was Cyrillic, and Perri couldn’t read it so he had no idea what might be in them. Besides those though there were some crates already stacked up three deep and he had no trouble guessing what was in them. The top one on the leftmost stack was open, and he saw what looked like missiles. While a couple of the soldiers were piling up the ammunition, another group of about four were building walls of sandbags up around the carport. At the rate they were going, Perri figured it would take maybe another day, and they would have created a nice little ammo bunker well away from any other building.
“You seeing what I see?” Dave said, looking through his binos.
“Missiles,” Perri replied. “Maybe the ones we saw them firing on that first day? So the other stuff is probably ammo for guns, maybe grenades, wire-guided bazookas, that kind of thing.”
“No, I mean, they’re piling all those sandbags around it. You’re never going to get a shot, once they’re done.”
Their plan, for what it was worth, was not to try to kill Russians, not directly anyway. They wanted to find fat, soft targets and take them out, making life on the island a real pain for the invaders. So far, they’d identified a few good ones: an electricity generator, the electricity junction that connected the town to the big pumped hydro plant, not to mention the pump itself, up on the bluff above them, and a vehicle park full of jeeps and small trucks. There was also a choice target in the hydrogen fuel tanks down by the harborside catalytic processor, but Perri figured he would need more than his little .300 Winchester to set them off and he knew if he did, the town would really suffer, with winter approaching.