Atlas Reloaded - Book Five of the Damned of the 2/19th

Time Off and Snakes

Everyone, including Tempest-Nine, were gathered up in Quonset Hut Two, milling around. I noticed that Support Squad mostly stayed separate from Mag Squad and Tempest grouped together and glared at everyone.

They needed to cut the fucking glare out. It took them nearly four hours to get airborne, not arriving until nearly sixteen hundred hours. I'd made them cool their jets in the Quonset Hut instead of even unpacking the speedballs I'd ordered them to bring.

They'd be lucky if I didn't made them all kneel and decimate them.

I was fucking pissed.

I'd gotten the status of the site, the equipment, and the personnel over the last three hours and it was worse than I thought. Most of the vehicles were deadlined to the point we couldn't even get them to move. The various commands had left my people out at Atlas for over sixty days without even a single weekend back. They'd kept hitting my people with busy work, demanding full site inventories less than a week after the previous one, ordering ammo switched around then switched back, all to make it look good in case some brass dropped by.

Now that Henley was back I had his assurances that all that shit would stop so we could carry out our mission.

The condition of my two squads worth the crew, twenty-five soldiers in all (Well, nineteen since I'd released the people other squads had lent me), was one of my top priorities. They were exhausted, bordering on red-lined. It didn't help that apparently Beach, who had busted from E6 after she got five people killed by misdiagnosing goddamn cadium poisoning in a crew working at a nuclear site last year, belonged to the old school of "If you have a pulse you're fit for duty" thought. Which meant that she hadn't taken them off of duty unless there were amputations or fractured bones and even then she'd put them back to duty as quickly as possible.

Yeah, Henley did the same thing, but it was different.

As much as I hated him, I respected Henley.

Beach was a Field Medic. Not a Combat Medic like Cromwell, who was one of the first Combat Medics to graduate the school, but a fucking Field Medic who had spent the last eight years working in hospitals or Troop Medical Clinics in The World, and not even at a Special Weapons posting or a hardship posting, but at the bigger bases.

I'd made the calls, hit up my connections, and prepared for what I was about to lay down.

"All right. Gather up," I shouted. I pointed to my left. "Tempest, right there," I pointed in front of me. "Support, there," Finally I pointed to my right. "Mag, right there."

I waited for everyone to shuffle up.

"For those of you who don't know me, I'm Corporal Anthony Stillwater, known to some as Ant," I started off with. "I am the NCOIC and Crew Leader for this place, FSTS-317/NATO Site 93, and in this place, I am the Arch Angel Michael to Chief Warrant Officer Two Henley's God."

I turned my head to look at each group. "Some of you don't know me, and think that this is just some bullshit speech meant to scare newbies or show I'm a hardass."

That got some smirks from the snakes and a couple of the Support Squad who didn't know me.

"This is merely a warning. Some of you out rank me and might be entertaining of thinking they will assume NCOIC or OIC duties of this site," I said. I looked right at a Major, the ranking member of Tempest.

"I will kill you and any who support you if you try," I warned.

With that I relaxed slightly, digging out my smokes and lighting a cigarette.

"We are about to undertake the largest rearming effort in human history. Not even during World War One or World War Two has this much ammunition been moved. Not into Europe, not into Korea, not into China. We are part of an operation handling literal billions of metric tons of ammunition, all moving from the United States to Europe," I told them. "This operation will be months, taking part all across Europe. Every ASP, every ATP, every FSTS, every Arms Room, every War Fighter Bunker, will all be completely restocked with brand new weaponry courtesy of the United States taxpayer."