She should have chosen Leavenworth. She'd have had a chance to survive.
"We're being sent to fucking Graf? That goddamn shithole?" Nancy snarled at me. "Who the Hell is going to watch this fucking place?"
...my Nancy...
"We are, frauline, it is in good hands with the pride of the Bundeswehr." Stabshauptmann von Waechter called out, stepping out of the small room where the normal Bundeswehr guards called in the communication checks and hung out when they weren't walking the north, south, and west perimeters. They weren't allowed to be within fifty feet of the east perimeter fence, due to some kind of treaty or something.
Nancy glared at him, the corner of her lip curling, and the GSG-9 officer smiled brightly at her. Waechter looked like a German special forces recruiting poster, short cut blond hair, clear laser focused blue eyes, square lantern jaw, and built like a body-builder under his tailored and pressed uniform.
"Are the bunkers locked down, Waffenbruder?" von Weachter asked me, waving a hand down-range.
"Tighter than a virgin's legs at an orgy." PFC Christen said. I shot him a glare, but he just grinned, immune to the glare via the armor of apathy.
"Locked down." I affirmed.
"Excellent, excellent. We will guard your house while you are gone." The West German special forces officer smiled. "But I think you will be back before you know."
I snorted at that. The West German Senior Captain was always saying cryptic shit like that, claiming his noble blood let him see things that were hidden to the rest of us.
His eyes flicked down to the knife I carried on a boot rig, then back up at my face, his grin disappearing.
"Keep that knife close, Stabsgefreiter Stillwater." He said seriously, using my Corporal rank, something he rarely did. "I think you will be needing it soon, jawhol?"
"You worry too much, Sir." I told him, then turned to my squad. "Let's finish packing this shit up, troops. We got a long drive ahead of us."
Bomber climbed in the driver's seat of CUC-V 15, the Gypsy Wagon, and I waved at PFC McDonald, who was waddling ungainly toward me. She was seven months pregnant, had already been denied pregnancy consideration by the Chief, and kept at a site with a measurable background radiation count. I'd done what I could, keeping her uprange in the heavy cinderblock building handling the phones and paperwork as much as possible, but we hadn't known she was pregnant till she started gaining weight fourth months into her pregnancy. She'd gotten a profile when Darmstadt hospital had confirmed it, but the Chief still hadn't let her go back to Group.
"Get up front." I told her. "I don't want you in the back or in Growler." At the mention of its name, the battered M-809 5-Ton cargo utility truck roared to life as Pv2 Listermon hit the starter. Pvt Klien was next, putting both of my pregnant troops into the heated cab. I slammed the door on the cab and turned back to Stabshauptmann von Waechter, who was standing at the Bundeswehr's version of parade rest, looking perfectly comfortable.
"If the balloon goes up, Senior Captain, have the regular army troops pull back to the War-Fighter tunnels below the site." I told him, digging in my parka pocket and pulling out a thick red plastic square about the size of two dollar bills laid side to side and about a quarter-inch thick. His eyebrows raised at the sight of the Red-card, knowing without being told that it held the access codes to the War-Fighter bunker. "They've moved in a few platoons of infantry over the last few weeks, but I don't think they know that I know about it."
Von Waechter nodded solemnly, accepting the red-card with crisp, professional movements better suited to a parade ground or an inspection than standing in five feet of snow with fat flakes drifting down around us.
"I've stowed heavy weapons in that arms locker, along with a 60mm mortar and a hundred rounds of HE, grenades, and other heavy weapons in The Pit." I told him. He knew what I meant. Where I meant, to be precise. Bunker 42 had exploded in April when unstable TNT that was awaiting destruction had gone off and causing a sympathetic detonation of all the other unstable ammunition held in the massive bunker. Since then we'd called it "The Pit" and used it to detonate unstable ammunition as well as hide things in a small section that hadn't collapsed but wasn't easily visible.
"Good, good. I don't think I will need it, but like your knife, it is good to have." He told me, walking with me to the back of the truck. I tossed my ruck in the back. Nagle held out her hand, her body already wrapped up in a wool blanket, and I let her haul me up onto the bumper. I reached up, grabbed the top of the plasticized bed cover and climbed over the safety strap hung over the tailgate. Once in, I turned around and faced von Waechter.
"Watch yourself out here, Senior Captain." I warned him. He raised one aristocratic eyebrow. "Atlas is a killer. She doesn't like strangers, she barely tolerates us, and she will kill you if she gets the chance." I sat down on the wooden bench-seat as I pulled my weapon off my shoulder. I thumped it twice against the bed of the truck, and the Gypsy Wagon roared to life. Even in the back I could tell the manifold was cracked and the pistons were off timing slightly.
"You worry too much, my American friend." The German told me.
John threw the truck in gear and we pulled out of Atlas. I watched him from the back of the truck as the regular Bundeswehr troops pulled the gate closed. He looked confident, in charge, and fully capable.
Three weeks later his driver lost control of the truck he was riding in, coming around the far corner. The truck flipped.
Stabshauptmann von Waechter and his driver froze to death before anyone found them or they woke up.
Atlas saw the chance and took two more victims.
The Deafening Sound of Silence
It May Be Hell...
...But it's Our Hell.
2/19th Group Area
Alfenwehr
Restricted Area, Fulda Gap
Western Germany, Europe
24 October, 1984
I sat in the cab of the Gypsy Wagon, staring at the motor-pool. Over a hundred heavy military vehicles, all of them winterized by draining the fuel and oil from them, pulling the batteries out, draining the radiations, and putting them up on blocks so that the tires were off the ground. It would supposedly keep the vehicles from being damaged by the extreme cold of Alfehnwehr.
And extreme was a bit of an understatement.
According to the big circular thermometer on the side of the main motor-pool bay building, it was already the outside temperature was sitting at twenty below zero, Fahrenheit, without even accounting for the windchill of the stiff wind sweeping down on me from the North. Still, the 2/19th area sat at over 12,000 feet above sea level, so that didn't help. The air was too thin to hold onto heat for long and the heat that objects absorbed boiled off pretty quickly. Top it off with the eight feet of snow that had already been dropped on the area before the last time the motor-pool and the roads were clear and I could tell this winter was just going to be a lot of fun.
Hopefully, not as fun as the prior year. The barracks had burned down, a guy named Tandy had come up missing, and I'd taken a bad burn across my shoulders escaping the barracks.
It sounds more exciting than it was.
I shivered and rubbed my hands together, looking at the fact they were already red across the palms, pale and waxy across the back, and chapped. The heater on the CUC-V was doing its best, but it was pulling in near-Arctic air, trying to warm it, but it wasn't helping much.
I could still see my breath plume out in front of me.
Finally. I saw Foster leaving the motor-pool bay building with another man. A big man already, made bigger and more bulky by his extreme cold weather gear, that I knew was the motor-pool NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge).
I pulled on my trigger mitten liners, then the gloves, yanking the fitting straps with my teeth, and got out of the pickup truck to meet the other two men.
Specialist Foster was a short, lanky guy with brown hair and brown eyes that were usually empty of emotion. He and I were the same age, and while we wer
e the same enlisted grade (E-4), I was a Corporal in a leadership position and he was my radioman. He was slogging through the knee-deep snow, his expression hidden by the extreme cold weather mask he was wearing. The bigger guy I knew was Master Sergeant (MSG) Johnson, a big black guy from Texas who was in charge of everything in the motor-pool and pretty much ran the place, his face hidden the same as Foster's.
I climbed out of the truck, grinning at them at as they moved up to me.
"Put on your mask, you grinning retard," MSG Johnson growled at me.
I turned my face upwards, letting the tiny little snowflakes, well, proto-snowflakes, land on my face.
"I love snow," I told them. I pulled my mask out of my pocket at the same time as I pulled my helmet off.
"You're a fucking moron," MSG Johnson told me, heading around to the passenger side.
"See ya in a few weeks, Corporal," Foster said, bumping my shoulder with his. He pulled my rifle out of the truck, handing it to me. "Don't lose this, they might actually give you a weapon you can actually hit something with."
"Man, fuck you," I laughed.
"Don't freeze your dick off," Foster told me. "'Cause you ain't shootin' it off."
"Try not to choke on any dicks," I grinned back at him, then pulled on my mask. Foster just shrugged, getting into the driver's seat and pulling down the sun visor to drop the keys into his glove.
"So long, suckers," MSG Johnson said as Foster fired up the Gypsy Wagon. He slammed the door and Foster put it into gear, the chains clanking as they drove out of the motor-pool.
I stood there for a moment, watching them head out. They were heading to Graf, leaving only a skeleton crew for Rear Detachment, meaning what few of us remained had to run security checks on the motor-pool, the airfield, the medical dispensary, the chow hall, and of course, the main barracks where most of the data was.
The military knew it was going to end up with snow measured in the tens of meters, so they'd repurposed some old Nazi tunnels for us to use to move between buildings. Of course, the military had taken that tunnel complex and run with it, putting in everything we needed to fight World War 3 even if the surface was an irradiated hellscape.
I sighed, shaking my head, and walked over to the motor-pool main building. The motor pool had three buildings. The main, where the tools were stored, where showers were, where there were six grease pits and lifts, the office, some lockers, and a bunk bay with like twelve bunks in it. There was also two other buildings, both of which were POL, which basically held oil, grease, hydraulic fluid.
I only had to check the main building.
The door squeaked when I pulled it open, heading in and checking the seals on all the doors. I dug inside my parka, reaching in to get my little green notebook. It was basic issue, and most people really didn't put much in them, but I carried two. One for out at Atlas, which I used to keep running ammo totals, write down incoming and outcoming shipments of ammo, who had to pull patrol, stuff like that. The second on for other stuff.
Like the seal numbers on all the doors.
When I was done I moved to the breaker box, shutting off everything but the big overhead heaters that kept the bays warm and the power to the outlets that the ready vehicles were plugged into. Military winterization added heaters and pumps to circulated the oil and the antifreeze to keep them from freezing.
Once that was done, I moved out the north side door on the long bay, locking it behind me and threading a thin metal seal through the hasp. I wrote down the number, tucked away my green notebook, and put my gloves and mask back on.
I went out of the small gate next to the big double-gate, locking it and not bothering to seal it again. I could feel the wind blowing against me, the cold making me blink. I pulled out my goggles from my pocket and pulled off my helmet, hanging it from my canteen so I could put on my canteen before putting back on my helmet.
That made it so my eyes weren't watering.
When I got down to the T-intersection I looked both ways. From the chain marks the airfield crew had already left, and I could see where Foster had slewed the ass end around. As I watched a snowplow slowed down in front of me and came to a stop. The guy in the driver's seat was a German national who waved at me to move up.
He opened the window when I climbed up on the snowplow.
"Sprechen sie Deutch?" he asked.
"Jawhol," I answered.
"That corner is getting dangerous," he told me. "We will no longer be plowing the road."
I nodded. "All right. I'll log it. Thank you for letting us know."
"The snow will get deep here," he warned me. "The ski resort is expecting nearly ten meters."
"Danke," I said.
He shut the window and I climbed down, waving him on. He went by, leaving behind the stench of diesel fuel that the wind whipped away. I watched it head toward the Dispensary then turned and headed toward the barracks.
It was a massive cinderblock building, built to withstand a near nuclear hit. Over two city blocks long, built on a slope so there was a ground floor out back, where the parking lot was, and a first floor on the road side. Four more stories above that and an attic. The place was massive. It was originally designed to handle more than just 2/19th Special Weapons Group but somewhere along the way they cut all the other units from the Secure Area and just left us.
Guess they didn't want to consign anyone else the icy hellscape of Alfenwehr.
The wind was picking up and the proto-snowflakes, little crystals of ice that were basically snowseeds, were starting to hiss against my parka. The sun was going down behind the mountain already. I was in shadow, feeling the temperature dropping.
I reached out and let my mittened hand bang against the top of the white picket fence as I walked along the front of the barracks, my eyes finding my room pretty easy. Second floor, far hallway, road side, in the middle.
The snow started falling thicker by the time I was almost to the door. The sun had dropped far enough the automatic lights at the end of the sidewalk had kicked on and I paused for a moment to glance up at the bottom half of the motor-pool.
Sighing, I headed inside, stopping inside the first set of double-doors after I pulled them open to stomp off the snow from my boots. Inside was Spec-6 Jakes, who was staring at me as I pulled open the door and moved inside.
The warmth was like a glove wrapping around me.
"Motor pool secure?" He asked me.
I nodded. "Yeah. Got bad news though," I started pulling off my cold weather gear.
"What?" He sounded suspicious.
"Boxhead driving the plow told me that they aren't going to do any more plowing and that the ski resort is expecting ten meters of snow," I told him.
"Dammit," He shook his head.
"Yeah, and it's dropping snow on us," I told him. "Saw the airfield crew go by, they're evacing. We going to stay?"
He nodded at that. "No choice. That's what command wants out of us."
"Fuck this place," I growled.
Jakes held out the log book. "Sign in, man."
I sighed, throwing my parka onto the counter, then signed in. Nagle and John had signed in.
"By the way, Specialist Bomber had to move out of your room," Jakes told me.
"What? Why?" I asked him.
"Brigade's worried about two men in a room going crazy," Jakes shrugged. "They figure there's a higher chance of two guys in the same room killing each other than if you guys are separate."
"Ugh," I set down the pen and grabbed my gear. "Gonna go up and help him."
"You got CQ tomorrow," He told me as I headed for the doorway that opened up into the near stairwell.
I groaned loudly right before I pulled open the door.
"And leave your cold weather down here so you've got it in case there's an emergency," He yelled as I went through the door and let the heavy limestone core door slam behind me.
The stairwell was cold as I headed up it. I moved carefully, watching for ice or frost on the st
eps. Last thing I wanted to do was fall down the damn steps and bust my skull.
That'd be just my luck, you know?
When I pushed into near Hammerhead Hall, so nicknamed because the Second Magazine Platoon Leader called all of us lower enlisted hammerheads and not in a good way like a shark, I noticed that it was warmer in the hallway.
My boots echoed weirdly and it felt a little creepy as I headed down the hall. The floor was highly buffed, nice and shiny, with tile halfway up the wall and yellow paint for the upper half. White suspended ceiling with florescent lights every five feet. It was brightly lit, but silent.
No stereos. No TV's blaring. No faint sound of talking.
Just my boots thudding on the polished tile.
I pushed through the middle doors, heading down to my room. When I went inside I saw that John Bomber, my best friend, had moved out already. I unlocked the door and went inside, hitting the lights with my elbow.
The note he'd left me, telling me which room he had moved to, gave me a weird twinge in my chest. Something I didn't really understand.
I stripped off my cold weather gear, putting it over the end of the single bed so it could dry off, and sat at the chair at my desk. I dug out my pack of cigarettes and lit one, leaning back in the chair.
The room felt empty without John in it.
I guess I'd just have to get used to it.
I sat in my room, alone, and listened to the silence as I smoked my cigarette.
Short
There's no place like home
Even if it's Hell.
2/19th Group Area
Three Little Snowmen (Damned of the 2/19th) Page 2