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

Part 15

Site Kilo-29
Military Area - Living Quarters (Motorpool Entry Hallway)
Winter, 1993
Day Two-Afternoon

"Sergeant?" Kincaid's voice was far away.

Memories tore through me. The cold, the fear, the isolation. Seeing my brother land on his back with a chunk of metal sticking out of his eye socket. Bomber laying on a mattress, pale and sweating, dying of a ruptured appendix. Fighting in the dark and snow with a killer who had been stalking us, unaware that I was blind from repeated head trauma. Stokes moving her hands from her abdomen to reveal blood covered hands, the gunshot reaching us a second later as she crumpled down. Tied to chair while LT Gregors screamed questions and Oakes pounded on my face with her fists and I grinned at her.

Most of all...

Tandy.

"Sergeant?" Kincaid again.

"Don't touch him." Donaldson hissed. "Dude, step back."

The cold. The dark.

I closed my eyes and turned away, reaching up and squeezing the bridge of my nose. "I'm all right, Private."

"Sergeant..."

"I'M ALL RIGHT!" I yelled, then deliberately lowered my voice. "I'm all right." I shook my head then started stomping forward, staring at the tile on the floor.

It was a few seconds before they started following me.

I couldn't blame them.

We passed more pictures before we hit a crossroads in the hallway, but I stared at the tiled floor, refusing to look at them.

"What the fuck was that all about?" Kincaid whispered.

"How the fuck should I know?" Donaldson whispered back.

"The brass on the frame said it was Site Lima-219, think he knows something about it?" Kincaid's voice carried even over the thumping of our boots on the tile.

They both went silent when I stopped at the cross passage, almost running into me.

The passage on the left read "UPPER NCO/JR OFFICERS" with "COMMAND OFFICERS" below it. The passage on the right read "MAIN ACCESS CORRIDOR A" in white. The one in front had the logo "ENLISTED/JR NCO" on it as well as "ELEVATORS A1-A4" underneath that.

"Elevators?" Kincaid asked.

"You don't want to risk elevators in these places, kid." My voice was more of a growl than I'd intended.

"Rusted cable?" He asked.

"Or floor." I added, heading straight.

The hallway still felt freezing cold to me and goosebumps covered my skin.

The first doorway we hit, past more pictures that I refused to look at, was a heavy blast door blocking our way. On our left was another door that simply read "INTERIOR DECON" with a pad, a radiation/contamination detector and/or display, and a shutter-style display that was blue with the words "CLEAR" in white. The door in front of us sported a sign warning us that if there was any possible type of contamination that we may or may not have been exposed to, do the right thing and use the decontamination chambers.

Or be shot.

"Ready, gentlemen?" I asked. They both nodded and I threw the lever. the door thumped for a few moments then slowly rose up.

"Got IR." Kincaid said softly.

I knelt down and looked through the opening of the doorway. The hallway beyond only went for about 20 paces before ending in a cross intersection. One side was marked for JR NCO's, the other for Enlisted. The hallway forward read "MESS AREA", "REC AREAS", "GYM", "ELEVATORS A19-A22" and "MAIN HALLWAY"

Twenty two elevators in the Alpha section? Fuck, this place was going to be massive.

"We'll start on the enlisted" I told them, rolling my shoulders.

When the doors went all the way up, Kincaid told us that the beams had shut off. The hallway went down about fifty feet before we saw the first door. Two nameplates, the top one with simply A and the bottom with simply E.

"Check these, first?" Kincaid asked.

"Which do you think is more likely, the Major making everyone go to their sections, or allowing everyone to decide where to stay?" I asked.

Donaldson thought a minute. "He'd probably make us split up according to section."

"Let's start at the end, then." I told them.

F through J, K to P, Q to U, and U through Z. The hallway ended at a single door reading "ENLISTED NCOIC".

"Camera." Donaldson pointed out. I nodded. I'd spotted them, but they all had been covered with a dust cover. The one at the end of the hallway was uncovered, panning slowly, and the little LED at the bottom glowed a soft green.

"Think someone's watching us?" Kincaid asked, moving under the camera.

"Maybe." I admitted. I reached out and threw the bar, opening the door.

It slid straight up, smoothly and in under a second. The lights came on, all of them recessed, and none of them exploding. The inside was an office with light blue carpeting, cream walls, a desk with an old computer sitting on it with a pair of chairs facing it, a set of five filing cabinets behind the desk, and a chair. A door to the right had the symbol for male and female bathroom, a door on the left was blank, and the door behind the desk read "PRIVATE" on it. The doors were standard knobbed doors, just set in steel frames. I walked around the desk, each footstep thudding up little puffs of dust. The computer was off, the keyboard thick with dust and the monitor off.

"This is fucking creepy." Kincaid said, stopping in the room and looking around. "This must have cost a fucking fortune."

"From what I've seen, comparing it to other sites? Probably about as much as a couple of aircraft carriers." I told them. "Probably built over about five to ten years, hidden in the FEMA budgets." I shrugged. "Maybe more, depending on how big this place is."

I flicked the computer on and sat down, coughing at the dust I raised from seat.

Donaldson opened the door while I sat there, looking at the small bathroom, then moved to the un-marked door. Kincaid opened the door marked "PRIVATE" and disappeared inside, leaving the door open.

"Holy shit, Sergeant, you gotta see this." Donaldson said.

"What is it?" The computer was done booting up and loading up something. I'd spotted the size RAM, clocking in at 1,024 KB, and the size of the hard drive. Sixty megs, pretty goddamn big even in 1993. The BIOS had been dated 1983, and a network connection had been found. The size of the network storage it was hooked up to boggled me. Over a thousand goddamn megs. That had to impossible, a 1 GB Hard had cost me almost a half month's pay earlier that year.

"Multiple monitors, and what looks like some kind of control banks." He told me.

"Barracks surveillance." I told him. The system wanted me to give it my name and access code. Normally, it might have caused problems, but I'd logged myself into the system when we were at operations as the site commander.

My code-name and password worked just fine.

I recognized the program almost immediately. It was the same one that my unit used on those monstrous computers we had. No mouse input, but pretty easy to navigate. No data had been entered beyond place holders.

No hints. No messages from anyone who had come before.

Dammit.

...See what kind of network access it has, Ant...

Heather was sitting in the chair, a tie-dye T-shirt and a pair of cutoff on, the bottom of her feet were dirty. She had her shirt hiked up and was feeding our daughter.

I nodded at her, and searched the menus for the network access. While I could access old archives of the placeholder files, I couldn't find anything else.

...check the file sizes...

I grinned at her and she smiled for me. Donaldson came out from the side room, and she stood up, holding the baby close, and walked out the door of the room.

Without opening it.

"Donaldson, come check this out." Kincaid yelled. I nodded at Donaldson, and watched Bomber walk out of the security room. He sat down in the chair.

"There's something off about this place, Ant." He told me, leaning back and lighting a cigarette. I followed his example, raising an eyebrow for him to go on.

Something didn't feel right, but I wasn't sure what.

"Check the inventories, Ant. That's how the Russians figured out about FSTS-317, our inventory sheets were off by the size of the site and they found that we had explosive weight waivers." He told me.

"They tallied up the conventional inventories, checked the bunker types, sizes, and number, and figured out what was really going on and that we were a hot site." I mumbled.

"Right in one, brother." Bomber told me, winking and making a shooting motion with his left hand. He blew out a cloud of smoke when I turned to the inventory list, punching up the ammunition and then an inventory for the small arms storage.

SMALL ARMS AMMUNITION INVENTORIES
1. Live Storage
2. Secure Storage
3. Cold Storage
4. Deep Storage
5.
WARNING-STOCK OVERDUE FOR ROTATION. CHECK LOT NUMBERS.

I hit 5 and then waited.

UNSECURE TERMINAL flashed at me.

I looked back up, and Bomber was gone. I shrugged and figured he'd left.

Cold storage I'd seen in Bravo and Delta sites. It was usually large underground bunkers usually packing only a few tens of thousands of rounds. But Deep Storage was new to me.

And new meant dangerous.

"Sergeant, come here and check this out!" Donaldson yelled. he sounded excited, not scared.

I turned off the computer, got up and headed into the area marked private.

It was a picture perfect front room. A couch, a recliner, two pictures (one of ship, the other of a meadow), a large television in a massive wooden cabinet, and two exits. Donaldson was holding the door on one, showing me a small kitchen and dining room, Kincaid was holding the door on a bedroom. The walls had wood paneling on them, carpet, and easy lighting.

"This place is fucking nice." Kincaid said.

"Yeah, the barracks in the later models are pretty nice." I told them. "Let's go check the other sections."

They nodded and followed me out.

"I figured they'd be bays, like we had in Basic." Donaldson said.

"Not if the VIP's and politicians had nice living quarters." Kincaid said.

"What makes you say that?" I asked. We were coming up on the last doorway.

"If I had a weapon, and they put me in shitty bays, while the rich and powerful had nice suites and the world was over?" I looked at him, and he grinned. "They'd be outside in the radiation with the mutants, and I'd be living in their suites."

"That's what the sociologists told them in the 1960's, so older places were retrofit and newer sites were constructed to have two or three man rooms." I told them, throwing the lever. "No single man rooms, too high of a chance for suicide once the balloon went up and the bombs started flying."

The doorway showed a hallway that had emergency lights that reminded me of the ones at 2/19th. Nancy was standing underneath the nearest one, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. While I watched, she walked down the hallway, swaying her hips, and went into one of the doors.

"You OK, Sergeant?" Donaldson asked.

"Fine." I lied, wiping my mouth and walking down the hallway. "Let's check the rooms."

Each room in all the hallways was the same. Three small bedrooms, no wall lockers, a small kitchenette, a small living room. Individual bedrooms to prevent the "I'm going to kill him if he keeps staring at me while he sleeps." Individual closets and dressers to keep down the fighting.

"Check out the sprinkler heads." I told them, pointing out how each room had them.

"So?" Kincaid asked.

"Look at the base." I told him. Kincaid squinted, then pulled over a chair.

"What the fuck?" He poked his finger in a small hole. "Is this a tube?"

"Might be for incapacitating agents, might be for VX." I told him. "Maximum security, maximum precautions for all situations." I shrugged. "It was a different time."

"Jesus." Donaldson said.

"Let's check the NCO and Officers sections." I told them.

They were laid out the same way, only the junior officer and NCO rooms were 2 bedroom rooms, and the Command level officers, broken down by rank, two, three, or four bedrooms. Kincaid looked a little sick at the cribs and childrens stuff in the rooms that held them.

"Is it going to be like this in the civilian area?" Kincaid asked as we tromped down the hallway on our way back.

"We're going to ignore the civilian area for now. Nothing important will be there, anything of any importance will be over here." I told them. "They'll be some cool stuff, but it'll mostly be to keep the civilians busy while the war is fought here."

I glanced at the picture of 2/19th on the wall as I walked by, half expecting to see Tandy standing there. Or worse yet, Bomber, Nagle, and myself.

When we stopped at the door I turned to face the other two men.

"We'll bunk in the enlisted area, and I'll advise the Major that staying in the NCO or Officer areas, with all the kid's stuff in there, might not be the best thing at this time." I told them. They all nodded. "Once they bunk down, we're going to check some shit out."

"What kind of shit, Sergeant?" Kincaid asked.

"I don't know. Nobody has ever managed to get into a Kilo bunker intact." I told him.

"You keep saying that." Donaldson said. "What exactly does that mean? Did someone try to open one before?"

I stared at him for a long time.

"They did something wrong." I told him.

"It registered at as an earthquake."

They both stared at me.

"Let's go move into our new home." I told them, and threw the bar.