Gas & Blood (Damned of the 2/19th Novella) - Rough Draft Finished

Into Hell Itself

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.