FSTS-317/NATO Site 93
Classified Location
Edge of the 1K Zone
Fulda Gap, Western Germany
17 April, 1986
1100 Hours
Despite having an entire night and light rainfall to clear it away, there was still a thick haze of smoke over the site. The M8 chemical alarms on all of our backs chirped a few times then settled down. I checked the radiation pen in my pocket, but the background count was normal for Atlas. I glanced at the two women, noting that both of them were looking up after checking their own. Like me, all three of them had the radiation badges that Stokes had clipped onto our BDU tops before we stepped out.
The whole area smelled of burning fuel and burning flesh. There had been over thirty soldiers on the three Blackhawk helicopters that had exploded above the Upper Helipad, and the smell was still in the air. There were craters in the road, along with a big smear of reddish colored dirt from where I'd tossed a red smoke down to guide the medivac helicopters in the day before.
"Well, this was a good idea," Gilly said, coughing.
I grinned at her, and she looked older as she smiled back. It was a tightness around the mouth and eyes that did it. I suddenly remembered that the two female soldiers had been out here for almost two months, and that all of their friends, almost all of Support Squad, were either dead or badly injured. They were holding together well, but I suspected that they had cried where nobody could see them do it.
Gilly had been dating Fellson, and I knew that the man was dead, killed when the explosion had destroyed the 5-ton truck he had been heading uprange in.
There were no good ways to die at Atlas, you could only hope for fast.
"Someone's gotta do it," I told them. I pulled the mic off the frame and clipped it to my helmet's chinstrap so that it was next to my mouth. I thumbed the button, "Commo check, over."
"Commo check recieved, over," Foster's voice came back strong.
"Recieved. Good signal strength, out."
"Roger, out." Foster replied. I let off the transmit button and started walking downrange. Sawmoth was carrying a big roll of white engineer tape. A two inch wide white cloth that came in rolls of about a thousand feet or so, used to mark off stuff.
"Tag that one," I told her, stopping at the third crater. The artillery round had split open, the Comp B-4 spilling out of the rusted steel case. Sawmoth knelt down, put the end under a rock, then sawed off about six inches with the knife she had taped to the suspender of her LBE.
"We're gonna run the roads, link up the Rangers, make sure they're doing all right," I told them. I coughed slightly from the smoke as a breeze coiled a thick tendril around us. I could taste the burnt flesh in my mouth.
Christ, this was going to suck.
We moved slowly down the road, tagging no less than twenty artillery shells that hadn't exploded. From the looks of it, only about three point five in ten that had slammed into the ground had actually gone off, which meant that Nancy just had bad luck when the artillery shell that had damaged her legs had gone off.
The road looked like the face of the moon.
I led them over to the wreckage of the vehicle cover. It had been blown to literal smithereens. One of the Bradleys was complete junk, and from the look of it I estimated it had been hit by at least six of the artillery rounds, compression having caused them to explode. Another had the entire port side torn open, probably a direct hit on the upper deck. A third was on its side, but the armor looked intact even if the treads were blown off. The fourth was screwed. SPC Jakes had been PMCSing it, and from the looks of it she had dropped the back deck.
"You two stay here," I warned them. They both nodded, their faces tight. Jakes had been in their squad, one of three mechanics. "This might be ugly," The vehicle had not burned, but I could see that the back deck was shattered with a crater underneath it. The meant the artillery shell had either punched through it, since 200+ pounds of case hardened steel falling at terminal velocity carried a lot of kinetic energy and artillery rounds were designed to fall point first. It had probably punched through the deck, then exploded when it hit the ground, the compression causing heat stress in the round, and heat plus pressure equaled an explosion.
I went around and looked into the back.
I could tell by the blood that Jakes had been in there. But that was all that was left of her beyond some scraps of uniform stuck to the interior of the armored fighting vehicle. Shrapnel from either the round itself or when the back deck exploded upwards had bounced around inside the armored vehicle, shattering equipment and destroying everything inside. I could see gobbets of flesh and blood, in some places with tattered pieces of uniform stuck to the dried blood, all over inside of the vehicle.
Graves Registration and 11th ACR must have recovered the larger body parts.
I turned away, walking back over to the others.
"Did she suffer?" Gilly asked.
I shook my head, "I doubt she even knew she was dead," I told the two women. They both nodded. "Let's go."
The next Bradley just had one of its tracks blown off, but I could see one of the roadwheels was missing, so it would require mechanics.
"I can get that fixed in about an hour by myself," Sawmoth said quietly, I could barely hear her and asked her speak up, so she repeated it louder. My hearing was still iffy.
"Leave it," I told her, moving to the next one.
The last one was not only intact, just superficial damage, but the semi-tractor next to it was intact except for the windows being blown in. The door was open, and a helmet was laying next to it.
"Shit," I said, moving toward the helmet.
"I'll get it," Sawmoth said. I looked at Gilly and saw she was scanning the area, her hand wrapped around the pistol grip of the M-60 but her finger off the trigger.
Sawmoth moved over and grabbed the helmet while I looked over the Bradley AFV. It looked good, just the paint sandblasted off and the headlight on the port side shattered. She came back up, holding up the helmet and smiling.
The band read "NAGLE" on the front and had Specialist rank sewn on it.
"Thank God," Sawmoth said.
"She shouldn't be alive," Gilly said softly, pointing over at the craters on the ground. The semi-truck on the other side of the intact one was busted, to put it lightly. Shocks and springs blown out so the passenger side was a good foot above the driver's side, the windows missing, and most of the cab destroyed by the blast.
"Well, she is," I answered lamely. "Sawmoth, can you drive a Bradley?"
The female soldier nodded, "Stillwater made sure all the mechanics could drive all the vehicles on the site," She answered.
"Later I might need you to drive it, right now, we need to go on foot," I said.
We walked away from the vehicle area and toward the first Ready & Rearming Point. The smell of fuel was stronger, and I could see where the asphalt was buckled up from where at least one of the underground tanks had exploded. Probably the mogas (military version of unleaded) because the diesel was supposedly resistant.
Gilly started walking toward the massive crater and I grabbed the back of her ruck. When she turned to look at me I shook my head.
"Don't. We don't know if the other tanks brewed up, and your weight could cause it to collapse and dump you into a big lake of fuel," I told her.
We were still a half mile from the berm, which separated 'uprange' from 'downrange' where the bunkers were.
We kept moving, heading downrange, marking off the unexploded rounds. There was no way I was going to have anyone hammer stakes into the ground near those rounds, I didn't want to take the slightest chance. Those artillery shells had been unstable, their cases rusted and the Comp B-4 crystallized, before they had been caught in an explosion that had thrown them all over the site to come down at terminal velocity and slam into the ground. For all I knew the slight vibration of hammering the stakes in would cause the rounds to explode.
When we topped the berm all three of us stopped.
Smoke was still pouring from Bunkers 42 and 45. Worse yet, Bunker 78 had smoke pouring out of the top of it and a huge hole in it. Bunker 82 looked like it had collapsed and had smoke coming from the front of it. They must have suffered an internal detonation while we'd been at the hospital and nobody had reported it.
Bunker 78 had been full of engineer munitions. Everything from C-4 to mine-clearing charges to dynamite and engineer demo kits. Bunker 82 was nothing but fuzes, everything from impact fuzes to proximity fuzes to variable mission fuzes. Enough to arm four or five bunkers of artillery rounds.
"Holy Mary, Mother of God," Sawmoth said softly, looking over the site. She turned and looked at me, "How are you, Foster, and Stillwater still alive?" I just shook my head, staring down at the site I'd worked at for over a year.
There was still smoke coming off the upper and lower helipads. Who knew why, but we'd have to check it out. If the tanks were on fire under the asphalt there wasn't shit I could do about it, but I could let 54th Combat Engineers know and maybe they could handle it.
If worse came to worse I'd put on one of the armored J-Suits, waddle out there, and plant C-4 to blow out the fire with explosives. I know, it sounds stupid, but my family dealt with oil rigs, uranium, and cattle. Once in awhile you'd have a well catch on fire, and the best way to put them out was with explosives. I'd learned that before I was ten years old. I wasn't one of the best, but I learned how to do it well enough and had assisted on a couple before.
I could see the four humvees that the Rangers had driven out. All four were on the lower road, across from the 1K Zone, and three of the four had M2A2 .50 caliber machineguns on the ringmount while the fourth was a TOW-II wagon. Those were pretty much experimental, and I'd heard some nasty things about the vehicle exploding when you launched the TOW-II's, but then, it wasn't my problem.
"It ain't gonna get better standing here," I said. We started walking down the hill when there was a sudden explosion around us. I recognized it for what it was, a sonic boom, but Sawmoth went down on the ground while Gilly froze up. The jet whipped by us, already past when the sonic boom hit. I knew they were hitting the afterburners and blowing the sound barrier over the site deliberately.
"Umm..." Gilly said.
"It's OK, I about wet myself, you can change when you get uprange," I said, shaking my head. "It happens."
"Ever happen to you?" Gilly didn't sound so humiliated.
"A few times," I told her, "I had a bull throw me in 8th grade and it stomped me right in the bladder. Pissed all over myself." I chuckled, "It happens." I stopped for a moment, staring at the wreckage of the site I'd called home for over a year. "Cut the two of us a bunch of strips, we'll mark the ones here," I pointed at her damp crotch, "If that starts bugging your cunny, let me know, and we'll wait for you to take off your panties so you can run commando."
Gilly blushed and nodded. "Mind turning around?" I shrugged, she handed me the engineer tape roll and her knife. I turned to stare across the 1K Zone, my hands moving of their own accord to cut off six inch long strips of the white cloth. I saw an arm come up out of the flattened grass and wave, so I waved back. The Soviet sniper out there knew we were on edge, and figured he'd be a little friendly.
Hopefully those half-witted Rangers didn't shoot him.
Sawmoth stood next to me, staring off into the 1K Zone with me. "You aren't scared?"
I shrugged. "Yeah," I admitted, "Atlas is a killer. It killed my original squad leader and everyone but me, Foster, and Stillwater the day we found it. It killed a Fritz officer this winter. Atlas will kill you at the slightest mistake, of course I'm scared."
She waved a hand at the blast ditch next to the road and the grass beyond, where we could see craters. "I mean this."
That made me laugh. "This? Hell yes, Atlas now has a thousand ways to kill us. I'm gonna be cautious, I'm gonna minimize risks to all of it, and hopefully we can get through this."
"I'm terrified," Sawmoth said quietly. I handed her about 20 pieces of the white cloth.
"It's OK," I told her honestly, "You're down here when you could have just stayed up at The Fort."
"I pissed myself," Gilly said.
"So did I," I told her honestly, "I dove into the blast ditch, the blast wave grabbed me and slammed me into the concrete side, and I pissed myself." I shook off my mind's attempt at reliving it, "The explosion wasn't even a sound, and I was sure I was dead and just didn't know it."
"OK, I'm ready," Gilly said, stepping up next to us. I saw a glimpse of the panties she was jamming in her pocket. Pink, with lace edges, looked like those French string panties a lot of the girls had fallen in love with over the last few months.
"Then let's get back to it," I said. They nodded, and we kept going down the road, heading toward the Rangers.
We kept marking off unexploded munitions, walking in the tire tracks of the humvees that the Rangers had driven. We counted over a hundred of them, some cracked open, but most just buried most the way into the ground with the reenforced rear of the round sticking out of the dirt.
The smell of burnt fuel, burnt flesh, and the unique smell of scorched metal filled our lungs. A couple of times we had to stop and mask for awhile to catch our breath. The chemical detectors chirped once or twice, but other than that stayed silent. Radiation levels were solid, and our badges were still in the first green square, so we were safe there.
"Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death," Sawmoth said softly as we passed Bunker sixteen, where smoke was pouring out of the seams of the massive door, which had obviously jumped the tracks and jammed up exactly like it was designed.
"Yeah," I grunted, squatting down, placing another piece of the cloth. Four hundred thirty eight so far. We slowly moved up to the TOW-II wagon, where we paused to chat with the Rangers. They leered at Sawmoth and Gilly, the two females told them to pound sand, everyone laughed, and we moved on.
At each vehicle I checked to see if there were any problems. Mostly they were hot, tired of the smell, and gagging on the smoke. I suggested throwing their masks on for awhile to clear their lungs and let them get some air and was told to pound that idea up my ass with a hammer. I checked their chemical alarms and was satisfied that they were working, although on one of the vehicles I cranked it up, since it was set to bare minimum detector levels.
We kept going, walking right by the blown bunkers. Two of them were nothing more than massive craters in the ground, the bunkers on either side of those craters were exposed on the side facing the craters, the explosion having stripped away all the dirt and foliage covering them. There wasn't many craters near the the exploded bunkers, parabolic arcs throwing them away, but there were a few who had followed the freakish laws governing explosive and had somehow ended up going straight up and then almost straight back down. Most of those craters were empty, the impacts having cooked off the rounds when they hit the ground.
Past the corner and down toward the lower helipad. The amount of craters was increasing, and we were starting to see damaged munitions again. I paused for a second at the fork in the road. The left corner led deeper into Atlas, straight ahead led to the Lower Helipad. The smoke was black, thick, and reeked of tar and fuel.
"Mask up," I told them, following my own orders. Both female troops were masked in under 10 seconds, something I greatly approved of. Meant they'd been practicing, and that practice might save their lives someday.
The smoke was thick and black, and I held out my arm to stop them as soon as I saw the helipad. It had collapsed into a big hole that black smoke was wafting out of. I knew what had happened. One of the artillery shells had caught the pump-lines on fire, the fire had followed the lines into the tanks, which had started building. The safety measures had cut in, venting the heating gas, and then the ground had collapsed into the tanks.
Except now the asphalt was burning, and would probably burn for a day or two unless we dumped dirt into the crater.
"Let's go," I told the other two soldiers, and they followed me as we plodded back to the road. We followed the corner up, and began walking down the road.
"You seem nicer than Stillwater," Gilly said. Probably more to make conversation than anything else.
"What makes you say that?" I asked, kneeling down and marking a statistical anomaly. Two shells in the same crate.
"You smile more than he does. It seems like the only people he likes are you, Foster, and Nagle," She amplified. I nodded and motioned at her to go on. "He's always sneering at everyone, growling at everyone, and that stare of his, it's like he's looking into my soul and judging me."
"Wasn't always like that," I told her, pulling off my mask and taking a deep breath. After a couple of breaths I waved at them, "Go ahead and unmask."
"What do you mean?" Gilly asked, her face all sweaty.
"He used to write poetry about Nagle all the damn time, draw shit like fairies, sing to her while they were in the shower, and shit like that," I told them, "He used to be a lot different of a person."
"No way," Sawmoth said. She pointed at a rabbit running down the road, "Rabbits are still alive, that's good for us, right?" I nodded. "Did someone tell you that he used to be like that?"
I shook my head, "I've known him since before even Basic Training, we met in Reception," I chuckled, "He was like five and a half feet tall, hardly talked, but was a really nice guy. Didn't even swear, just quietly buckled down and got to work. It's how he ended up running that place as an E-2 and had just turned 18. It's how he took a bunch of fuckups and ate up motherfuckers and got this place up and running before anyone else got their sites running."
Gilly whistled, pausing to look around at Atlas.
Sawmoth bent down and put a piece of white cloth under a rock. Six hundred forty-two. "What happened?"
"He got his growth spurt late, last summer, guess his balls dropped," I chuckled.
They both laughed, well, Gilly giggled.
"No, seriously," Gilly asked. "What happened?"
The breeze wound smoke around us while I considered how to answer. Well, they were Atlas, they were survivors, so they deserved to know. "A serial killer broke open his skull, gave him brain damage." I shrugged. "Got his skull popped again when he took a couple rounds in the helmet during that dust-up with the Spetz about a month later. It changed something in him, made him darker." I shuddered, "This winter was particularly brutal, and my boy soaked up a lot of damage."
"Oh," Gilly answered, and I could tell that she felt like she was suddenly an asshole.
"No, it's OK," I told them, waiting while Gilly tagged three craters all next to each other. "The sneer is nerve damage in his face, the growling is damage to his throat and vocal cords, and that stare, well, he's always had that." I shrugged.
We kept walking, and I could tell they wanted to ask more questions. I had a personal bet what the next one was, and who would ask, and I won when Gilly finally spoke after straightening up.
"How long have you known Specialist Nagle?"
The sound of the snaps on my canteen cover were loud as I thought about the answer. "She was the first of the replacements we got after Atlas killed our first squad." I saw them looking and decided to answer the question they'd been dying to ask, "Chemical weapon leak, killed everyone but Stillwater, Foster, and me. It was bad. Nagle came to pick us up at the hospital, told us she in the squad now."
The other two soldiers took swigs of their canteens, making faces at what was probably tepid water. I shook mine, "Concentrated lemon juice, buy some at the shopette, it cuts the taste. Remind me, I got a bottle in my ruck up at The Fort. Have a swig," I held it out to them and let them take a swallow.
"Thanks," Gilly said. I chuckled.
"You guys know she was one of the first women to graduate Special Weapons training when they opened the MOS to women about five years ago, right?" I asked. Both of them shook their heads, "Yeah, her and Stokes graduated together, only two women in their class to pass."
"That why she is... umm..." Sawmoth asked.
"The way she is?" I laughed, bending down and putting another flag down. "Yeah, she's a tough bitch, but she was with us all the way this winter." I grinned, "She's a hell of a person to have as a friend. Not very many people I'd want next to me when it hits the fan than her."
"She as tough as she seems?" Gilly asked.
I grinned, "That scar on her face? Got it fighting with the same killer that busted open Stillwater's skull. He couldn't finish her off, though, and she hacked his ass apart with an axe. She's tough, strong, mean as a rattler with a sore tooth, and I wouldn't want her to be any other way."
"Really?" Sawmoth asked.
"Yup, really," I said, "Don't underestimate her either. She's got a degree in Ancient History, I think it's a Master's." I moved over to the edge of the road to tag a crater. "She's probably one of the smarter people I've met in my life, definitely one of the ones I respect the most."
"Johnny..." I heard.
"Did you guys?" I started.
"Johnny..." The voice was small, feminine, and I recognized it instantly.
"Who's saying that?" Sawmoth asked, looking around.
We all looked around, and I spotted it just as I heard my name again.
The rabbit was brown with white spots, sitting just at the edge of the road, its ears flicking and its eyes slightly wild looking.
"Johnny, help," the rabbit said.
It's voice was Aine's.