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

Part 10

Site Kilo-29-Military Section
United States of America
Winter, 1993
Day Two-Morning

I grinned at the threat, written in what I could only assume was blood. Maybe human, maybe animal, but blood still. I'd been threatened before with a hell of a lot more weight behind it than some scrawling on a tile floor. When Kincaid went to ask a question I held up a hand to stop him and went back to staring at the floor.

The wax was almost gone, scuffed away and dull, with black streaks that combat boots make on tile everywhere. In front of the warning was a large blackish stain that was crusted, with spatterers on the walls to either side and a spatter on the ceiling above. More than likely someone had been butchered right there, but that was then, and this was now.

"We follow the blue stripe down the rabbit's hole." I grinned. Kincaid's features were tight, same with his whitened knuckles on the rifle, but he nodded. Donaldson looked at me blandly and popped a piece of MRE gum into his mouth and started chewing. Lord, to be as hard dicked as these two. "We'll check out the living area first in case we have to hang around for awhile, then we'll check out operations and hope that we find a way to get the doors open."

Both men nodded, and I led the way. "Donaldson, keep an eye out for any IR beams, let's not get cocky."

Our boots thudded against the tile and I listened to the echoes as moved deeper into the mountain. For a split second I was aware of the millions of tons of rock above us but shrugged it off after a sweating second.

It was nearly five hundred paces to the first corridor intersection. Fifteen hundred feet, a quarter mile. Five football fields. Every twenty paces I could see rubber all the way around the corridor. If this site kept to the same plan those were blast doors that would drop down. The small steel plate on either side of the rubber seal had a yellow border and yellow lines forming an X. Under that plate would be a hand crank connected to gears that would allow someone to easily and smoothly raise a multi-ton door in only a few minutes. At the intersection I could see the same type of sealing set back about two paces from the intersection itself, which meant that doors could be dropped off to either resist the blast or seal off damaged sections. I stopped at the intersection, looking to the left and then the right while I dug in the thigh pocket opposite of my medications, my fingers looking for the little Crown Royal bag.

The red and brown stripes went down the left, while a black stripe vanished into the darkness of the right side. The crossways was circular and the yellowish light above us flickered and buzzed while I carefully took a deep drag of the cigarette and slowly exhaled above my head.

Smoke swirled for a second and then drifted to my right, away from the left hand corridor, and while I watched it tattered and streamed off to the left, one tendril floating down the corridor that led further into the mountain. I pulled out the Crown Royal bag and opened it up.

"What..." Kincaid started.

"Shhh." Donaldson cut him off.

I set the marble down and watched it. It rolled further into the circular area, slowed, then rolled back and to the side. While I watched it settled into the middle of the room and smiled as I went and got it, putting it back into the bag and stuffing the bag into my pocket with the other gear that bulged out that pocket.

"Probably a shock absorber right here to keep the intersection from collapsing." I told the other two men, waving them forward. "Intersections are a weak point in a structure like this, so they usually make an oval with massive shock absorbers above and below, with huge iron spikes drilled into the rock to hold steel straps to increase the integrity of the room."

"Would it work, Sergeant?" Kincaid asked.

"Oh yeah, in tests in New Mexico and Nevada back in the 50's they collapsed tons of prototype facilities, then dug them back out." I grinned at him. "Did you honestly think all those detonations were just to make sure that they worked?"

"Never thought about it." He admitted as we kept following the lines deeper into the mountain. "Everyone knows they were just doing it to scare the Russians as part of some kind of nuclear dick measuring contest."

"Yeah, I hear that a lot." I told him. "Usually from people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about."

The corridor to the left sported the blue stripe and the logo "LIVING QUARTERS, ENLISTED/LOWER NCO" while the one to the right sported a green stripe and an orange stripe with "SUPPLY" and "SUBSECTORS A THROUGH F" on the walls. They were silent while I repeated the cigarette and marble trick. Air went off to the right and deeper in, the air currents eddying from behind us and the air to the left dead and still. We kept walking. We slowed down at the next intersection, just a single corridor to the left.

I stopped at the edge of the circular intersection and did the marble and cigarette trick. I watched the marble slowly come to rest. The left hand wall read "UPPER NCO/JUNIOR OFFICERS" on it. We were going still deeper in, the size of the place surprising me. I watched as the marble slowly circled and came to rest. I bent and picked up the marble.

"Are we going to check these living quarters?" Kincaid asked.

I caught a wiff of something dead.

"No, we'll follow the blue further in." I told him. The smell began to disappear, if it ever existed.

Our boots thudded as we headed deeper in, the only sound still our breathing. The lights were still on, and I wondered how the system knew where we were. We hadn't passed any IR beams, but that didn't mean that we hadn't passed a motion detector or that the plates didn't track weight shifts. I was thinking about Heather when we started slowing down as another intersection came into sight.

A blue line went left, with "COMMAND OFFICERS" above it. Yellow and green went right, with "ADMINISTRATION" and "SUBSECTOR ACCESS F3 THROUGH J" respectively. Ahead of us was a single white line.

Kincaid waited for me to repeat the smoke and marble trick. The marble was off center by about a foot, and the smoke eddied into the subsector access after a long moment. When I picked up the marble he started toward Officer Country and I grabbed his arm, putting my finger to his lips. I cocked my head down the hallway with the white line.

Without saying a word I broke into run, waving the other two forward, and began keeping a nice steady PT run pace down the corridor. I could tell that the corridor arced slightly to the left and then to the right as I counted off the paces.

Two hundred and fifty to a heavy blast door that had been dropped down. There were paint chips knocked out of the huge logos of the Department of Defense, 548th, and 568th. I spotted the shell casings on the floor, and the blackish stains on the floor and walls.

The small keypad was busted, laying on the floor, and the place where it had been was bent outward, the metal ripped into sharp fangs.

"What happened?" Kincaid asked.

"Security charge went off." I told him, moving up and looking into the hole.

Asbestos had been shredded, the wire leads were missing who knew how far up into the walls, and I found the other side only a steel plate, dented and warped, but not breached.

"The charge didn't destroy the keypad on the other side." I told them, running my hands over the steel door frame.

"We can't get in?" Kincaid asked.

"No, we can, just give me a few minutes." I told them, stopping at the plate that felt different from the others. There were faintly engraved lines surrounding the plate, with a set of diagonal lines connecting the corners.

"Kincaid, I need that duffel." I told him, feeling the edges of the plate. I found the slot, almost hidden but still there. While Kincaid dropped the dufflebag next to me, I reached in my top pocket and pulled out a thin metal strip with a set of teeth on it, like an old key.

"What are you doing?" Kincaid asked.

"Going to fix the door." I told him, sliding the key into the slot and carefully lining up the teeth by feel. You never shoved it in, you just slid it in until you felt a slight resistance then pulled it out one slot. Pushing it in further would either fire a security charge or just cause a wedge to cut the key and drop it down inside the wall. My money was on the wedge.

I pulled once the teeth were set and the panel just swung open, revealing a wheel with a single hole in it set into the wall. "We're golden." I murmured, turning and opening up the duffelbag. Under a few other things were was the box that held the folded handles, and I matched one to the oddly shaped hole in the wheel.

When it was locked in I checked the wheel. It was slightly rusted, but I could still make out the arrows on it, and began moving the wheel counter-clockwise. It was stubborn at first, but then moved easier and easier.

"That'll lift the door?" Donaldson asked. When I glanced at him, he was staring down the corridor. The only part that hadn't gone dark was about a ten foot area we were standing on.

"Yeah, it'll just take awhile." I answered.

"Can we just have someone crawl under and then punch in the code?" Kincaid asked. He was staring at the door.

"No. That isn't the way these work." I told him. "The door won't raise until I finish this and hit that red lever." The lever was embedded in asbestos.

"What does the lever do?" He asked.

"This is normally used in the event of total power failure. The wheel raises the counter-weight into position. Once it's locked into position, I hit that lever and it switches the system from the gears and hydraulics to the counterweight, which then slowly lowers and the pullys and gears raise the door while charging the hydraulic cylinder."

"So the door stays open?" He asked.

"No, it'll stay open for two or three minutes, then slowly lower back down." I could smell something rotting again, the smell getting stronger as I worked. My shoulder was burning and my forearm throbbing, so I leaned back and waved Kincaid at it.

"Get to it." I told him. The system was working, I could feel the resistance, and it was a job for Privates anyway.

"Smell that?" Donaldson asked.

"Yeah. I was hoping to get into Operations before they caught back up with us." I told him.

"They're using the ventilation shafts." He said, and I nodded.

"They must have ripped through the security grates." I told him.

"What do you think they are?" He asked again.

"It doesn't matter." I answered. "They're the enemy, that's all we need to know."

"Do you think they killed the Air Force guys?"

"That's one possibility." I told him.

Around the curve light came on, spilling into the darkness of the corner, and the smell of something dead got thicker. I rattled a pill into my mouth and started chewing on it.

"Kincaid, hurry." I told him. "Something's coming."