Chapter 10 - Command in the Mud
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The interior of the bus was a nightmare of rising brown water, floating backpacks, and terrified screams.
A seven-year-old boy was clinging to the neck of his grandmother, both of them shivering violently in the freezing torrent.
The bus driver, a woman with a bleeding gash across her forehead, was holding a little girl wrapped in a soaked winter coat.
"Listen to me!" I shouted, climbing through the shattered window frame into the flooded aisle.
My voice carried that unmistakable battlefield calm that instantly cuts through panic and hysteria.
The two elderly passengers stopped crying and stared at me in wide-eyed desperation.
"My name is Captain Alexis Kaine," I said firmly, locking eyes with the terrified grandmother.
"I am a United States Navy officer, and I promise you that no one dies on this bus tonight."
"Do you understand me?"
The grandmother swallowed hard and nodded slowly, her trembling hands relaxing their frantic grip on the child.
"You are going to take this safety harness," I said, slipping the nylon webbing over the little boy's small shoulders.
"Close your eyes, hold onto the rope with both hands, and let the Marines on the shore pull you in."
"Will they drop me?" the boy whimpered, his teeth chattering uncontrollably from hypothermia.
"Those Marines would die before they let go of that rope, young man," I told him, looking into his frightened eyes.
"I give you my personal word as a commander."
I secured the locking carabiner and signaled toward the shore through the rear window.
"Haul away, Bull!" I shouted into the storm.
On the road, Bull Crawford's voice boomed over the wind like an artillery barrage.
"Slow and steady, Marines! Walk him in!"
The Marines pulled the line hand-over-hand with surgical discipline, keeping the boy's head well above the foaming current.
Corporal Miller caught the boy in his arms at the water's edge, immediately wrapping him in his own dry service blouse.
"One civilian secure!" Miller yelled back, sending the empty harness flying back across the water.
One by one, the operation moved with terrifying precision.
Next was the little girl, followed immediately by her mother, the bus driver.
Each time the harness returned, the water inside the cabin crept higher up my ribcage.
The bus lurched violently again as another heavy underwater support beam sheared beneath us with a resounding boom.
"Commander! The foundation is completely gone!" Bull bellowed, his voice laced with pure adrenaline.
"The bus is floating on the current! You have sixty seconds before she flips!"
"Grandmother next!" I ordered, ignoring the creaking steel beneath my boots.
The elderly woman looked at the remaining elderly gentleman, an eighty-year-old veteran clutching a wooden cane.
"Take Arthur first," the woman begged, tears streaming down her wrinkled cheeks.
"He can't swim!"
"No arguments, ma'am, you go now!" I said, slipping the straps around her torso and snapping the gate shut.
"Pull!" I screamed.
Bull and his men hauled the elderly woman across the raging canal just as a floating log slammed into the bus's side panels.
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The impact ruptured the fuel tank, filling the air with the sharp, sickening smell of diesel exhaust and gasoline.
Inside, only Arthur and I remained.
