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

Crew Expendable

FSTS-317/NATO Site 93
Classified Location
Edge of the 1K Zone
Fulda Gap, Western Germany
26 April, 1986
1800 Hours

Stillwater led us to the road, where we stood there for a long second. I knelt down, taking out one of the small detectors out of my pocket, and stuck it in the mud at the bottom of a shallow puddle. It immediately started rising.

It was already dangerous. Long term exposure would start the risk of cancer, and if it kept rising we ran the very real danger of the radiation rising to the point where if we spent longer than a few hours in it we'd be shitting out our intestinal linings. It was a singularly unpleasant activity that I'd happen to me more than once.

Goddamn it, Stillwater, you're gonna be the death of me, I thought to myself, watching the radiation level plateau out. Judging by the fact it was from rainfall, high altitude, it was probably spread over a large front. It was measurable, and since it was in the rain, it was concentrating in our sensors and driving them crazy, making our sensors show higher readings that we were getting from out portable devices. I checked the open air sensor at my hip, noting that the levels weren't as bad as the ground sensors were reporting.

"How it look, Bomber?" Stillwater asked me.

"Levels aren't too bad, they could be worse," I told him.

Timmons was watching us closely, and I reminded myself again that he was one of the few people that understood the kind of brain that was locked in my thick Texas skull and what kind of analytic engine was hidden behind Stillwater's face.

"Gimme a analysis," Stillwater growled, looking around the site.

A bullet went between, the spiteful vweep sound followed by the supersonic crack and a second later the sound of the Soviet SVD sniper rifle. Timmons flinched while I kept looking at the readouts and Stillwater lit a cigarette.

Their side needed a little ego boost, and I noticed that the round didn't hit the door of the bunker in front of us and had missed all of us. If he wanted to kill one of us, he would have.

"There's a serious nuclear event somewhere deeper in the Soviet Unions," I said. I closed my eyes, bringing up the weather reports I'd read. Keeping track of the high altitude jetstreams was part of our job, mainly for computing fallout patterns. "If I had a better look of the fallout detection waves, of where and what levels and when they were detected I could narrow it down effectively. Problem is, I don't know how long this has been up there or the strength of the initial event."

Stillwater nodded. "Give me some WAGs then."

I closed my eyes, visualizing the weather patterns. Well, first bring up a globe, then zoom in on Europe. Overlay that with the maps of the weather patterns, specifically jet streams at this level. Add in rain fall, projected and existing. Adjust for humidity and air temperature gradients.

When I opened my eyes and looked at Stillwater he nodded.

"It's deep. This is coming out of high altitude jet streams, any traditional fallout probably already dropped to earth, so this is high altitude contamination. Heavy particles have already dropped," I stared at him.

"Nuclear test?" Timmons tried.

Stillwater shook his head. "For this kind of level, either the cap would have to be destroyed or damaged, or it would have to be an airburst, maybe a ground effect burst, but even then, it would have registered on seismic sensors ."

"Then what?" Timmons asked.

I watched Stillwater's brain go through the permutations. That was one of the big fears that Nancy and I had. Stillwater's grey matter had taken repeated trauma, repeated damage, over the last year, causing vision damage, migraines, psychotic episodes, hallucinations, and more. Nancy and I had been worried about his mental faculties since we weren't quite sure how to really stress them.