Kilo-61 (Damned of the 2/19th Book 19)- Ongoing

Smarter than I Thought

"Stay here," I told them.

"You should have someone escort you," The LT said.

"Nobody's cleared," I said, staring at the hallway.

She was right, dammit.

"Take one of the privates," She told me.

I didn't bother looking, just pointed. "You," I said. "But if you follow me, your life's about to change."

I glanced over as I stepped into the hallway. It was the female private, and she moved up next to me and waited while I hit the door controls.

"You locked and loaded?" I asked her, nodding toward the rifle in her hands.

"Yes, Sergeant," She answered, tapping the thirty-round magazine. I turned and began walking and she followed me.

"We've got two objectives, the software section so I can get the software we need to load on the laptop to make sure it can access the server, and the hardware section so I can grab the laptop and any hardware I might need," I told her.

"And this is more secret than the fact that this place exists?" She asked me. She had long legs, which let her keep up with me. "I mean, I was at Fort Hood before I got assigned to this detail and computer equipment wasn't that secret."

I rolled my shoulders before answering. "This bunker, according to last records, was stocked in 1997, with no SLEP since then," I told her.

"SLEP?"

"Service Life Extension Program. Anyway, everything you see in here was put in place at 1997 at the very latest, so a lot of information can be gathered about the state of cutting edge military equipment by what is put in place in here," I told her. I took a right at the first intersection.

She was silent for a little while. "These places were beyond top secret, weren't they?"

"Yup."

"And the contents were loaded up," She said. "Um, I'm not going to get in trouble for what I've figured out by watching, am I?"

"What did you figure out, Private," I asked her.

She was quiet for a long moment, during which we took another right. The temperature was a nice even 73 degrees and the air felt dry. When we passed one of the vents I stopped and sniffed. Dry air, heated.

"I'm not going to get shot in the face, am I?" she asked softly.

"Nope," I told her. "Not by me. So tell me what you figured out."

We kept walking for a long moment before she spoke. "The American public didn't know that these places existed, and the government didn't want the Soviet Union to know about. The War-Fighter sections are probably full of weapons, vehicles, barracks, and from the size of what I saw on the screen, can probably house a division. It took me a few minutes to figure that Event Recovery was all about rebuilding after a nuclear war, so it's probably full of seeds, fertilized ovum, fertilizer, temporary buildings, construction equipment, stuff like that to reclaim land and rebuild society."

I nodded, slowing down. We were coming up on the software section. "Pretty much."

"The Applied Advanced Research refers to taking DARPA science and probably taking it a step further or actually putting it into practice," She said. "I figured that this bunker is the command and control bunker for the War-Fighter bunkers, and this is all about finding the command and control bunker for either the Event bunkers or something else I don't know about."

"You're sharp," I said, glancing over at her. She shrugged.

"I've got a Bachelor's degree," She told me.