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

Part 26

Site Kilo-29
Military Area
Winter, 1993
Day Three-Early Morning

Although my eye was closed and it looked like I was sleeping, I never went any further down than just brushing REM sleep. I dreamed of my mother breaking my elbow with a meat tenderizer the last day I lived there, before my twin brother and twin sister went to a foster home.

In the 5th grade.

The worst part of the dream was reliving it all. Every sight, sound, scent, and tactile sensation. From the sickening crunch the meat tenderizer made to when my twin sister had knelt over me protectively in the hospital, taking the kicks meant for me before the police had gotten in there to stop my mother from taking my 'betrayal' of her out on me.

During the dream Martin the Sock Monkey had nuzzled against me, making small noises of comfort as I relived it all. The scrambling out the back door. The walk in the rain to the school cradling my arm against my chest. Sitting in the nurse's office at the elementary school, not speaking, even when the police came to get me and pulled my sister and twin brother out of class to take them too because my mother had told the office workers that she'd be right there to 'pull that lying little bastard out of class and take him home so she could teach him not to tell lies.'

Martin the Sock Monkey's face was wet with tears after reliving the examination by the doctors with the police standing there and the doctor put stitches in my face from where my mother had swung the meat tenderizer and broken my cheekbone before I could get away. I had multiple old breaks, some obviously untreated, while my sister had the same, complete with recent scars on her crotch and the inside of her thighs from where our mother had beaten her with a belt buckle because she was 'sinful and nasty willful little slut' at the age of 10. A well know age for promiscuity, evidently.

Our brother didn't have anything that showed what my sister and I went through.

He was mother's special little angel.

The only one of the triplets born without a caul.

I relived every little bit of it, right down to the fear of the foster home, and the fear of the huge man with the scarred face who took us to live with him a week later. Martin hugged me with his little arms as I remembered sleeping under the bed, convinced our mother was going to pull me out the window and hurt me more.

The man with the scarred face had adopted us into his family, with all the other boys and girls, and had waited patiently for four months for me to speak. When he found me under the bed, he'd take the blankets off the bed and gently tuck me in under the bed. He held me on the nights I woke screaming and crying. Despite his fearsome appearance, his heart was larger than it should have been in a man so big, so battered and scarred up, and there was plenty of room in his heart, not only for my sister and brother, who were good kids, but for the silent and strange little boy he'd taken into his house.

The last time I'd seen my mother and father was in front of the judge, when he granted my Father's adoption request. It had helped that my father had shown up drunk, as usual, and my mother spent more time justifying the beating I had coming with Bible verses than actually giving reasons that any of us should be returned to her care.

Martin ooked to comfort me as my mother turned her burning gaze my way, the hatred in her eyes searing me, as the judge gave custody of us triplets to the very thing she despised the most. A soldier.

When I'd come home on leave with Heather and the baby, my mother had spit on me and called me a murderer before backhanding me and telling me never to come back.

My twin brother had smirked from the porch. Mommy's little angel.

I stopped talking for 3 days. Heather just held me when we weren't driving back to Fort Hood. The first thing I said was to her. Something simple and cliched. I love you.

Heather's face replaced my mother's burning gaze, love and affection in her eyes, on her face, and in her heart.

I love you she mouthed. Now, forever, and always.

The nightmare shattered.

When I pulled myself free of the dream, Natchez and Donaldson were awake, their guard shifts overlapping to make sure there was always two men on duty at a time. They were sitting by the door, BSing about girls from AIT and from before they'd joined the military.

I gently returned Martin to his nest in the inside back pocket of my rucksack, making sure he was curled up comfortably, then pulled on my eyepatch and went to get an MRE, grabbing my rifle on the way to the boxes we'd stacked up. I ate sitting against the wall, staring the doors to the rooms.

"You all right, Sergeant?" Donaldson asked.

"Fine." I told them, breaking up the tinfoil wrapped crackers without opening the vacuum sealed package. "Any screams?"

"No, Sergeant." Donaldson told me.

"Anyone knock on the door and try to get you to open the door?"

"No, Sergeant." Natchez tossed in.

"Good." I grunted, pulling my canteen free then ripping open the crackers. I sat there quietly chewing on crumbs and washing them down with water.

"How long did you know Colonel Killain?" Natchez asked me.

"Agent Killain. She gave up her military title when she murdered a fellow soldier." I growled. Natchez flinched, but I ignored it. "And I met her a little while before I met my wife again."

"Did you seriously titty fuck her?" Natchez asked me. Donaldson rolled his eyes.

"That's between me, my wife, and her." I told him, pouring some more cracker into my mouth.

"Oh." Natchez finally took the hint.

"CIA pull shit like this on you before?" Donaldson asked.

"They were worse during the Cold War." I told him. "Bastards figured they could get away with whatever they wanted to as long as they waved national security, the Soviet Union, and patriotism in front of politicians." I was still angry from the dream, from reliving the memory of my mother spitting at Heather and instead hitting our infant daughter. The tone of my voice made Natchez look worried.

"Vietnam they really pushed their limits." I shook my head. "They started seeing the military as deniable and expendable assets that they didn't have to pay or train, that could be killed off and pressure could be brought to bear to list them as 'training accidents' or 'death by misadventure' or even 'AWOL' if worse came to worse."

"The same CIA who couldn't keep Watergate quiet?" Natchez sounded like he believed the public image of the incompetent CIA that they'd worked so hard to promote.

I smiled at that. "Take a look at what the CIA was up to, what the public attention was pulled away from, and think if you were in charge of the CIA. Which would you rather have come up before Congress and the press, the Watergate scandal, or evidence of experimentation of un-witting American citizens." Natchez went to say something and I held up my hand. "Oh, I'm not saying the military is blameless, that all the fuckups and immoral shit we've done isn't our fault, I'm just saying that the CIA is used to doing whatever they damn well please and getting away with it."

"You think they're going to try to kill us, Sergeant?" Donaldson asked.

"Bet your ass." I told them, finishing off my crackers and pulling out the Chicken ala King packet. "They figure they'll kill some of us, promise the others anything they can to get them to surrender, then shoot those poor bastards in the back of the head, and then list us all dead as a horrible accident, probably caused by either the Major or me."

"Yeah, they've probably all ready got their cover story, boys." I laughed, and the bitterness and self-mocking tone of it making someone toss and turn fitfully.

"Then we're fucked." Natchez sounded like he was ready to give up right there.

"No, Private, we aren't." I told him. "Number one, I refuse to just lay down and die for them. Number two, I won't stand there and let them kill my troops. And third, I've got goddamn good reasons to get home."

"What?" Donaldson asked.

"You don't talk about it till the mission's over." I grinned. "And the mission ain't over..."

"Till you're sitting in the NCO club with two fingers in a blonde and brunette sucking your dick." Donaldson and I finished together.

Natchez grinned at that, and I finished my MRE in silence, tossing it into the trash can in the kitchen after pouring the kool-aid into my thermos. I refilled my thermos then flipped on the light above the bar table separating the kitchen from the dining room. The lights didn't really light up the suite, so I sat down and started making lists.

PROS: I had ammo, weapons, food, and trained men at my back, and a plan to bust out if worse came to worse. I was still combat effective, and had experience fighting multiple enemies in close quarters with bad lighting.

CONS: 1 agent in custody, 3 on the loose that may or may not be injured. Three men injured, two seriously. (Not counting me) A facility of unknown purpose that was beginning to look like the largest site I'd ever even heard of.

And Tandy/Bishop

ASSETS: Whatever we could recover from the facility. Maybe Wilkins and Natchez, probably Shads. Kincaid. Donaldson. Me. The Major and the other men were unknowns.

PROBLEMS: Tandy/Bishop was loose for some reason. Probably through the picture, but how and why? Three agents, maybe on the loose. Agent Killain, locked up. The facility would be locked down for about 48 hours more.

I leaned back in the chair and looked at the lists, trying to figure out where I could eke out any advantage out of our situation. That was one thing 2/19th and hanging out with the Rangers had taught me. Find any advantage and use it. When the guard shift changed Donaldson asked me if I needed something while Shads stood at the door. I shook my head and went back to sketching what I knew of the facility, remembering how many paces each section was, and then tried making some guesses via dashed lines instead of steady ones.

There was a plan. Not a good one, but it used advantages that we had and that the others didn't have. First the men would need sleep, then we'd have to gear up and I'd have to check with the Major about whether or not it was all right with him.

If it wasn't, I'd do it anyway. An insubordination charge beat death any day of the week.

Sitting there in the dimness of the dining room/kitchen, at the bar counter, I unwrapped the bandage from my forearm and took a hard look at the wound. A simple through and through, with a thick scab on it. It had closed to a narrow slit, not the dime shaped circle I'd expected. The muscles hurt when I clenched my fist, but I didn't think my grip was compromised. I shucked off my BDU pants and checked the scabs on my legs for infection. They looked clean, and I decided to risk a shower.

The hot water sluiced off the dream and the memory of my mother's hatred. Heather had made one simple rule for when we raised our children. We do not hit them. A simple rule, but the cycle of abuse is tough to break. At least I had the example of my Father to follow, Heather didn't even have that, having been in and out of foster care most of her teenage years.

My chest was nicely bruised up around my right shoulder, but the advantage to a chronically dislocating shoulder is that it bounces back pretty fast. I needed another round of surgery on it, I was supposed to have surgery instead of coming out to this shit hole, but instead I been pulled off of convalescent leave and sent out on what I'd been assured would be a milk run. It was the only option with the cluster fuck going on North Dakota. That run had the prospects of turning into something that couldn't even be hidden behind all the rest of the bullshit going on if it got loose.

Standing under the hot water I wondered if they had deployed a hard option bioweapon team yet. Grim eyed men and women in semi-armored biohazard suits, armed with flamethrowers with authorization to call in air strikes of napalm or fuel air bombs. They're the ones who killed every living thing within a biohazard zone if the agent turned out to be too virulent to risk it getting to a major population zone, be it natural or lab born. An entire town would be erased over night if need be and an excuse of a tornado or earthquake killing everyone but a few pitiful survivors.

It wouldn't be the first time, and it definitely wouldn't be the last.

My knee was swollen, light bruising on the inside of it. The scars had faded nicely over the last 2 years, only faint white patches. Heather said I was lucky I didn't scar, I kept trying to get her to understand that it robbed me of tangible proof that things happened. She told me that proof didn't matter to her, it didn't matter what I had done, it was what I did with her and the baby that mattered.

Another wave of rage and pain went through me at remembering her hugging me on what I thought was just another day of work, and I wondered how worried she was when I didn't come home that night, just called her and told her that I'd pulled a mission. She'd needed me home, needed me to hold onto.

She was pregnant again.

Her belly softly rounded, the baby squirming inside of her, at the stage where a woman likes having her husband around to show his devotion by finding the things she's craving as well as the emotional and moral support she had due.

The water would stay warm forever, but the damn bathroom had a 10 minute timer on the shower, so the water cut off and I stood there dripping in the shower, leaning my head against the wall.

Two years before my life would have been an acceptable price to get everyone else out.

Now, I was more important to other people than I was to myself.

My daughter already cried when she couldn't find me while I was at work. She seemed to know when I was going to get home, climbing out of her playpen or crib or running on chubby little infant/toddler legs, happy as only a baby can be.

I'd give my left hand to have Bomber, Nancy, Dana and/or Taggart at my back again.

Kincaid had prospects, but needed watching. He'd locked up the first time, then I'd threatened him, and I wasn't sure if he was overcompensating for that first lockup or if he had found that piece of steel inside of him. If it was he found the metal in his soul, he'd need to temper it, not run around flailing at everything with it.

Donaldson was a quick study, not making the same mistake twice, and listening to the 'voice of experience' as he'd called me when he thought I was fully asleep. He'd shown the natural leadership ability that the Army used to value and nurture, but with the New Army, I wasn't sure how far he'd get.

Shads was quiet. The kid had something in his background that made him potentially dangerous. I doubted he was keeping too many secrets, or a danger to everyone else, but I couldn't predict what he was going to do in a given situation, and that made him potentially dangerous.

I needed to be able to predict what each man would do given certain stimulus. It was why operator teams stayed together for years at a time. It made it so you instinctively knew what your other team-mates would do.

For example, when I went prone, I usually went to the left, so my firing arc covered the left forward. John Bomber went right for some reason, Nancy went full 90 degrees to the left, and Taggart went a full 90 degrees right. We'd just meshed that way. Dana always went straight and flat. We knew what the others would do, and it showed in how well we worked together.

The problem was, is you only discovered how you instinctively moved when the shit hit the fan.

The heatlamps was still on while I went over what had happened in the ambushes we'd gone through, my skin drying under the IR from the bulb.

Kincaid dropped to one knee, and used semi-automatic. He had a tendency to cover the right, part of it because he was a right handed shooter. Donaldson had a tendency to stand upright.

Good. That meant I'd go prone, Kincaid would kneel, and Donaldson would stand, giving us three weapons clear arcs of fire.

The light clicked off and I stood there in the darkness for a long moment.

Something about Agent Killain's story bugged me. I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

...we'd killed each other in the dark and snow, our war cries and howls of blood lust filling the dark tunnels and freezing hallways...

I went back over what she had told me. Something bothered me about the whole thing.

FACT: She'd been lairing in an Event Locker area.
FACT: Bishop was there, on a Tandy-like spree
FACT: She had been an Air Force Colonel with SAC over 15 years.
FACT: She was now a CIA agent who had... insufficient data
FACT: She had taught computer use and maintenance in the Air Force for 5 years
FACT: She had supervised the drawdown of hard sites before.
FACT: She thought she was now Super-Agent Killain
And just for spite:
FACT: She liked to lick it clean after it had been up her ass.

What had I come to know about her, aside from sexual proclivities. Knowing the enemy was the first step to defeating them.

She thought she could take me in a knife fight. That was a sign of someone who had done well in training, and maybe taken one untrained and probably panic driven target. Which led to...

She was overconfident. That comes from being told constantly you're the best and smartest of everyone out there. Her overconfidence had led to...

She underestimated everyone and everything. A sure sign of 'just out of training' that you saw in raw recruits, and newbie NCO's. You saw it for sure in ROTC butterbars all the time. Her underestimation had led to...

Her team getting wiped. By Tandy and the things that lived here. She'd maybe sacrificed her team to keep from dying, another 'ends justifies the means' that I'd come to associate with CIA agents. Still, they got wiped by the things that lived here. Those things led to...

...we killed each other in the dark and cold...

I jerked suddenly, realizing what had bothered me about Agent Killain's story.

I got out, used my shitty little brown towel to finish drying off, and dressed in a clean uniform quickly, my mind racing through the things she'd said, the things we'd seen, and where my train of logic had led me.

Shads and Donaldson sat in the frontroom in the dark and quiet, both of them just staring at the doors in the suite.

I walked by them and turned on the television where it sat in the huge cabinet. Nothing happened at first.

"Is it broken?" Shads asked.

"Give it a minute, the vacuum tubes are warming up." I told them. A second later a little white dot appeared in the middle of the TV. "There she goes."

I carefully turned up the volume until we could all hear it.

A woman's voice.

"Excursion teams returned today with radiation and acid levels after a quick reconnoiter of the conditions outside. After careful analysis military command has determined that it is still unsafe to leave the shelter." The woman was saying. The dot expanded to a line. "Food stocks remain within tolerance, as do medicine and water levels." The line expanded to show a woman, dressed in her Air Force dress uniform sitting behind a desk. "This upcoming week Red Shift will be taking inventory of the recovery equipment. Blue Shift will be taking over facility maintenance. Green Shift and Yellow Shift will undergo physical examinations. Contamination of the lower levels has restricted levels four through nine off limits. Anyone seeing any of the refugees who obtained access to the facility should alert the nearest military personnel. Do not attempt to subdue them yourself, as they are to be considered armed and..."

I slapped the off switch.

"Goddamn it." I growled.

"Why was she on television?" Shads asked.

"Because we aren't supposed to be here." I told them.

"Then why did they send us out here?" Shads asked.

"Because the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing." Donaldson said. I nodded.

"But what about the CIA agents?" Shads asked.

"I think that the records to this place might have been lost during the Iran/Contra Hearings, hidden then destroyed in the shuffle." I told them both. "Agent Killain was sent to check it out for the CIA, while the Air Force and the Army was sent to do their missions afterwards once they got the teams together. More than likely when they didn't return, we got sent, and the CIA probably leaned on the military to send someone proficient in urban combat and fighting in a situation like this."

"They fucked up there." Donaldson laughed. "I don't know shit about it."

"But I do." I told them. "I've fought in tunnels and bunkers before."

"Desert Storm?" Shads asked.

"Kind of." I half-lied.

..."Fuck you then, we'll just kill you both and throw you into the snow!" Nagle yelled after another flurry of bullets tore through the air. She handed me my weapon, the buttstock cracked, and I racked the charging handle to make sure it operated smoothly. "Lock bayonets!" she bellowed. "Two nineteenth!"

"Finish the fight!" All four of us answered, our shouts drowning out the gunfire...

"You have a plan." Donaldson didn't ask. Something about the way I stood told him that I did.

"I have a plan." I assured him. "When Kincaid is done with guard duty, we'll put my plan in motion."

"Hopefully I'll get to shoot that smarmy motherfucker with the toothpick." Donaldson said. "Bastard shot me."

"That's part of it." I told him, then walked over to my rucksack and dug around till I found my old white Sony Walkman. It was scratched, battered, and the lid had cracked around a cratered divot in the plastic.

I pulled out the tape of Achy Breaky Heart.

Colonel Killain had hated country music.

I popped in the tape, rewound it all the way, and listened closely.

Fast forwarding it halfway through the first song, I found what was so important about it.

Top level access codes to the site.

The other side was nothing more than strange sounds after about 30 seconds of song.

Computer data.

I recognized it from the days I'd worked on my Vic-20 and Commodore-64.

In the darkness I smiled.

Once Kincaid finished guard duty and everyone was rested, I was done playing defense, done reacting to the situation and the actions of the CIA.

It was time to go offense.

If worse came to worse, I'd leave Site Kilo-29 nothing more than a smoking empty spot inside the mountain.