Texas Nights - Book 13 of the Damned of the 2/19th

Ignorance is Bliss

Logbase-Tango
(Decomissioned Urban Warfare Center)
Jackingtonville, Abanstan
(North Fort Hood, Texas)
Eastern Europe
(CONUS)
18 February, 1992
1900 Hours - Tuesday
Day Two of Operation Copperhead

The three men who had been rescued from the forklift and then cleared by the graders to rejoin everyone looked angry as they came into the briefing room. I'd checked them all out and was standing by the door, Donovan beside me, my M-3 hanging from the strap down by my hip.

Technically I thought that the three men should have been held in a confinement tent, but the Graders had ruled that we could simulate putting the three men into isolation and carry on with the day.

There were only a handful of officers and NCO's still missing, as well as a half-dozen privates from the entire battalion. People were breathing easier now that 2/67 had arrived with a dozen tanks that they'd parked on the perimeter.

Colonel Legget was in charge of 2/67 and his face was stormy when he stomped in with two other men. One I figured was his XO, the other was probably his Sergeant Major.

The Sergeant Major had a split lip, a black eye, and his nose was red.

Someone had kicked him in the face.

"I want to know who the fuck is in charge of OP4 out there," Colonel Legget raged.

"We're not allowed to know. III Corps Training Office set up OP4," Colonel Krait half-lied.

"I want whoever it is up on goddamn charges!" The Colonel shouted. He waved at the guy with the busted face.

"They drug my man out of his tank after kicking in his face and threw a CS grenade inside," The Colonel shouted.

"That sounds about right," Colonel Krait mused.

"If his crew hadn't evac'd the tank and rescued him, they'd have pulled him away," The Colonel was yelling. "Then those maniacs covered the whole area with CS gas! We had to ride in here buttoned up."

"It appears the ALF laid their hands on a good sized stockpile of weaponry left behind by the former Soviet Union," Colonel Krait shrugged. He waved at the chairs. "Have a seat."

The three men sat down, obviously still infuriated, glaring at the dumpy little Lieutenant Colonel as if he was the one who had run roughshod over the tanker convoy.

"This whole thing is bullshit," Colonel Legget groused.

Finally everyone but me had taken their seats and Colonel Krait launched into the briefing.

We'd suffered serious casualties getting in and in the opening phases. We'd lost 'air superiority' and lost 'offshore support' due to the pullout of UN assets and the cloud cover/weather. Twice the fuel dump had been "blown up" due to rocket attacks. The ALF were dragging away their dead or leaving them behind booby trapped. Two checkpoints had been hit by suicide bombers. The Evac hospital had a simulated truck bomb blow them up at fourteen hundred hours. OP4 was divided into three sections that attacked each other as often as they attacked us.

Since yesterday attacks had mainly been probing in nature, although the passwords had to be changed and a new codebook had to used as the ALF was discovered to not only had our passwords but our radio channels and cryptography codes.

I pointed out that nobody had bothered to switch after Lieutenant Johnson had been captured with all of her codes.

"How did they get our passwords?" Captain Hiddle asked. "How did they find out which section of the codebooks we were using."

Everyone went silent. After a few seconds Colonel Krait looked at the III Corps grader.

"Did they get the codes through valid means?" He asked.