Kilo-29 (Damned of the 2/19th, Book 15)

Part 2

Site Kilo-29-Civil Defense Entry Area
United States of America
Winter, 1993
Day One-Night

I stared at the logos for a moment, then moved into the entryway, keeping the codebook tight in my hand. There was another keypad panel in the entryway and I ignored the flickering lights as the internal systems tried to warm up. The entryway was 20 feet high, 30 feet wide, and twenty paces deep, which translated to around 60-75 feet deep. I'd measured my stride years back, coming in at a meter after I checked again once I'd started limping.

On the right wall there was a stencil that warned everyone to proceed immediately to decon once parked, another one that warned of vehicle decon spray on the other side of the massive door.

The door was huge, OD green, and impressive. I knew from previous experience it would weight nearly 100 tons and moved by hydraulic pistons the size of a fucking Buick. When dealing with nuclear weapons, nothing could be too heavy or too thick or too tough.

Once at the keypad I shuffled through the book, looking for the red bordered pages. I'd learned the Civil Defense standards over the years, so I knew red pages were for either "impact imminent" or "post-impact" conditions. If I tried anything else the doors would either act as an airlock or the inner door would lock the hell up.

After the keypad security charges blew and turned me to fucking mincemeat.

Holding down the "E" key brought it online and I had to cycle through two null-set code prompts to get a good one before it would work. "A" for generic entry, "E" for "impact" entry.

There was a loud clank, and a countdown timer started on the display. I could faintly feel a vibration and knew what it was. On the other side of the door was a huge cylinder with one flat side that was being slowly pulled out of the tunnel. It would be anywhere from 10 to 20 feet long, in 2-4 pieces with huge springs the size of a VW Bug between each piece. Blast absorption plug, designed to keep a direct ground penetrator hit from collapsing the tunnel.

I could blow the charges on the doors, we'd had to do that in West Virginia, but that would trigger a kiloton level blast, blow doors that would weight 100s of tons, and open the site.

BUT, it was a Kilo site, and I didn't want to take the risk of blowing the doors firing some kind of security charges for the whole site. That had happened to another team working in Eastern Washington and it had registered as a 1.4 earthquake and the site imploded.

And that was just a Bravo Site.

"What the fuck?" One of the Meatheads blurted out as the door fully withdrew, exposing a tunnel nearly 20 feet high and thirty feet wide. Several lights flickered on, two of them exploding in sparks.

Sprayers had cut on, filling the hallway with fine droplets that stunk of rust and worse.

"Bunker thinks we've been exposed to fallout." I called out, then turned around and headed back to the Major.

"What now?" The Major asked. "Do we wait for the water to stop?"

I barked a laugh. "Sir, more than likely it's tapped into the aquifier and artesian taps, it'll never run out of water."

"Can you shut it off?" He asked me. I shook my head. "Then what do we do?"

"We either walk through it, or drive through it." I told him. "I saw the motorpool markers, as well as personal decon and a medical bay."

"We'll drive." He said, and started to turn away.

"I'll walk once we get to the other side of decon, sir." I said. "Have one of your Meatheads drive my Humvee."

"They have names, Sergeant." The Major told me.

"So do pets." I answered, walking back into the entrance. He sputtered something behind, but I didn't care. My hand drifted to my pocket and I pulled out the pill bottle, shaking it for a few steps before jamming it back into my pocket.

The smell of rust was fading, and there was steam mixed in, meaning the heaters had come online. Most people thought that you'd need special chemicals for initial decon, but the main thing was to get the fallout and irradiated dirt and debris off of the vehicles. High pressure water would knock it off, and the water would probably be dropped through the steel grates and into the non-potable storage, used for God knew what. I'd seen a complex where the water was used heating and cooling exchangers near the surface to get the air exchangers to release air close to ambient air temperature to avoid thermal scans to find it.

It had taken four days of working with torches, prybars, and hacksaws to pull the system apart.

My battered Humvee was driven in by a Meathead I hadn't bothered numbering and I swung inside, slamming the door shut and motioning him into the water spray.

"What's all this gear?" The Meathead asked me.

"Mind your business." I growled at him.

"How come you have your own vehicle?" He wouldn't get the fucking clue and had to yell over the sound of the water spraying against the vehicle. I'd been right, the weight of the vehicle on the grates had made it go from a heavy spray to a spray that would probably knock a man down.

"Issued." I grunted.

"Where'd you get that patch you were wearing?" Another fucking question as we were leaving the water.

"AAFES." I answered. "Stop here." He followed orders and I got out, grabbing a flashlight off the floor board. When I clicked the light on I could see "PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO MOTORPOOL AND REFUGEE DECON" on the ground, with "ALL CD LDRS PREPARE HEADCOUNT" on the left wall and "CASUALTIES TO CD MEDICAL" on the right with a yellow stripe underneath.

My boots thumped faintly on the concrete. The tunnel a cylinder with the bottom flattened. It would keep a nuclear blast from collapsing the tunnel since the vaulted design was immensely strong. The slight curvature would rob the blast of some of its power, and in 500 paces I counted three blast depletion panels that I knew would blow inward and allow some of the force of the blast to exit the tunnel and blow out of small tunnels that led to the outside of the mountain. Explosions were a lot like water, it followed the path of least resistance. The blast crumple panels were outlined in yellow with yellow X's on them.

Every mountainside hard site featured the same thing, even NORAD, Raven Rock, and Black Briar Ridge.

The wash of the headlights behind me showed me the doors almost 200 paces before I reached them. The motor pool door was outlined in blue with a blue X across it. It was marked in such a way that people who were barely hanging onto their sanity after a nuclear exchange could still follow the instructions.

I held up my fist, signalling the Meathead driving my vehicle to stop, then bent down and checked the floor. The floor was in good condition, but I'd thought I'd seen something that now I couldn't find.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I shook my head and walked up to the door, checking it quickly. Almost 15 feet tall, probably fifty feet wide, and only the gods knew how thick. I held up my fist again and walked past my battered Humvee to the next vehicle in line where I saw the Major, crossed to the other side of the vehicle, and waited for him to roll down the window.

"Wait here, sir, I need to check something." I told him.

"I'm in charge of this mission, Sergeant Ant." He told me.

"Sir, I respectfully request that you wait here with the others while I ensure the integrity of the remainder of the blast deflection tunnel and determine if this facility is intact enough to safely explore." I said formally over the echoing rumble of the engines.

"It might collapse?" The Major looked a bit wild eyed at that and I suppressed a laugh.

"No, sir, this tunnel was designed to handle a blast pressure wave of 20psi overpressure, to channel the firestorm of a direct nuclear blast. I need to ensure a couple of things." I reassured him. He nodded at me, his eyes still wild and looking at the top of the tunnel. I shrugged and began jogging down the tunnel, ignoring my knee.

Exactly 275 paces beyond the motorpool was the yellow outline door of the Civil Defense medical bay. I knew that it would be set up as a triage to handle burn victims, blast victims, those who were starting to show radiation sickness, and possibly those injured in fighting if the Soviets jumped the pole.

Four hundred paces beyond that was a huge doorway with the logo of "568th STRAT MSL (ICBM TITAN)" and the logo of the 548th next to it. I knew that this was the military entrance. Fifty paces beyond that was a door simply labeled "NO CIVILIAN ENTRY PERMITTED WITHOUT SPECIFIC AUTH" on it. That would be the main egress for the military personnel.

Another five hundred paces had me slow down. Up ahead I could see what looked like a massive steel plate with four small plates set into them. Blast triggers. If the internal pressure of the tunnel grew to 0.75 psi overpressure, then the door's charges would go off, throwing the door off the side of the mountain and out from under the rock facing that had been carefully replaced after putting the door into place. That would allow the oncoming blast wave to exit the blast deflection corridor without destroying the egress doors.

It fit with the West Virginia and the Alabama sites I'd been to.

Except the distance between the Civil Defense area and the military area. Either there was two separate facilities, which wouldn't be unheard of, but I had a feeling that the two facilities had at least 100 feet of solid stone between them.

Which made my job for shit.

I glanced down at my BDU blouse, checking the top of the pen-shaped radiation detector I had in the pen-pocket of my BDU blouse pocket. Still good, not even a tick, but I'd still need to be careful. The Alabama site had been fine too till we'd made a mistake. It had taken us almost 36 hours to pump the water out and even then we'd had to go back in fully suited.

I jogged back toward where I'd left the Meatheads, Suits, and Major High Speed and had just passed the military motor pool, the curve finally allowing me to see the wash of the headlights, running through the options in my head.

When I'd told the Major that Kilo sites were supposed to be massive he didn't really understand what I was talking about. They were mostly rumors, the data sheets largely hidden behind layer and layer of code names, operations, agencies and departments. But if it was big enough to get Civil Defense, ARMCOM, and MILCOM, and units that probably were little more than a cover involved, they were probably bigger than even a Bravo site, and a Bravo site was big enough that it usually took 200 of us almost 3 months to sweep it, extract and/or destroy confidential material, and then implode the place if that was our orders or just walk off and let the Army Corps of Engineers know that it was all theirs.

So why the hell would they send just me, a bunch of Meatheads, and some Suits to clear a Kilo site?

The Major and the Meatheads had exited the dripping vehicles and were looking at the keypad and the door. The Suits were somewhat apart, and one nodded toward me and the one next to him sneered. I had a brief flash of plucking the toothpick from his mouth and shoving it into his eye.

"Did you find out what you needed to, Sergeant Ant?" The Major asked.

"Yes, sir. It's a hard site for sure." I answered.

"Fine, then open the door." He ordered me. "I'm having Privates Donaldson, Natchez, and Meyers bring up the Hemmits. We'll park them here in the tunnel."

"Why?" I asked. "Nobody's going to sneak up and steal them."

"It's snowing out there and the temperature is dropping fast." The Major said.

fuck...