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

Part 27

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

We were standing in the military motorpool's mechanic's area, waiting for the door to raise. I'd talked to the Major, and he'd approved of the plan I'd come up with. Natchez, Wilkins, Donaldson, Kincaid, and Shads were with me. We were all armed with M-16's and I'd passed the ammunition around, making sure there were two of us with M-203's. I'd given a crash course in how to use the extra gear I'd passed out, and all of us had the same bags clipped to the back of our LBE's.

The door we were waiting to go into through was next to a much larger door, a door big enough to take a vehicle through. The large door had spraypaint over what it was used for, same as the small door we were waiting on, but I had a pretty good clue what it was for.

"You know, this is starting to get kind of cool." Kincaid said to nobody in particular. "How can't it be? You've got lost underground bases, covert operations creepiness, and even the walking dead hunting us, along with cannibals."

"Dude, shut up." Wilkins told him.

"No, seriously." Kincaid said, and we all winced as something was pulled out of the system with a shriek and the clunking noise stopped. I glanced back at Kincaid, and he was grinning. "Sure, I can't tell anyone about it, but come on, when's the next time we're going to have a chance to face off against cannibals and rogue CIA agents?"

"Infrared beams, Sergeant." Shads told me.

I chuckled, ducking down to look under the door.

There was an airlock on the other side.

"You're a fucking nut, Kincaid." Donaldson said. Kincaid just laughed.

"You know most of us might be killed." Wilkins bitched. "We'll be lucky if one or two out of all of us survive."

"Yeah." I glanced back at Kincaid, who was grinning widely. "Sucks for you guys, huh?"

Everyone laughed at that.

It was common thinking, but important. If you told 100 soldiers before a battle that 99 of them will be killed, every one of the soldiers will be thinking the same thing.

Sucks for them.

Captain Bishop had told me that, told me that it made it so that they all fought to the best of their ability, and told me to encourage that kind of thinking. It was good for morale.

"IR beams went off." Shads told me right before the door locked in the upright position with a clunk.

"All right guys, let's check this shit out." I told them, leading the way into the airlock. Once everyone was in, we threw the lever, waited for the door to shut, then opened the near one.

"No IR, Sergeant." Shads told me, and I nodded. The airlock had sprinklers at the top, lockers on each side of the door, but we weren't worried about undergoing decon since there was a small lever to throw if you needed decon.

"This what we were after?" Wilkins asked when the door opened up and the automatic lights kicked on.

In front of us was a large vehicle bay, it was empty, and the room was obviously built for decontamination. It was pretty much empty, but it was the large grate in the middle of the floor surrounded by warning markings that had caught our attention. There were a set of levers on the far side of the room, as well as a small control box hanging from a cable to our right, and finally a small stand with a control board on it on the far side of the grate.

"Yup." I told them, moving in first. The grate echoed when I walked across it. It was over a 100 feet long, thirty feet wide, and my brain ran through the measurements.

It was big enough to park a semi-truck and a trailer on it.

The others followed me, Kincaid paying attention to the corners of the room, as well as both him and Donaldson checking the upper walls and the ceiling.

"Vents look undamaged." Donaldson called out.

"Walls are clear." Kincaid added.

Written on the walls in stencils were warnings to stay clear when lift was in operation, four step procedures to hit the decon, other instructions regarding the steps that had to be taken to put a vehicle back into "deep storage" or that had to be taken when one was removed.

"I don't think anyone's been in here." Natchez said, wandering around the room. "No spraypaint, no markings, not like in any of the other rooms we went through."

"That's why we're using this way." I told them, checking the upright control stand and the area around it with my flashlight. I had a handful of extra batteries in my cargo pocket, wrapped in paper, then in tinfoil. I'd instructed everyone else to do it too. Natchez had acted like I was a nut, the others had just followed my instructions and went along without comment. The paper kept even a trace a conduction from the battery, while the tinfoil worked to somewhat shield it.

Lessons learned in 2/19th.

From what I could tell, the control box matched up with the cable that ran under the floor. If I was right, the controls would work only when the grate was locked in at the top and bottom.

Once we started down, we were committed.

"Gather up, men." I said, flipping the lever to hit the board with power. Top level was green lit, bottom level the little lights were yellow, which was fine. Power, check, and the rubber covered thumb button for test was yellow lit, while the rubber covered button for engage was red lit.

While the others got onto the grate I pressed the rubber nipple and heard the the system grind. The whole grate shivered, and Donaldson grumbled something that I couldn't hear over the shivering of the grate. After a few seconds the test lights turned green and the engage button lit up green.

"Ready, gentlemen?" I asked. They were, so I hit the rubber button and the grate shivered. The grate started vibrating hard enough to make my eye water, then started moving down with the screech of ungreased metal on metal.

It was slow, and we couldn't talk over the noise, but the room dropped away, becoming nothing more than a lit square above us that got smaller and smaller and angled away from us. There were channels in the shaft that held steel and electrical cables, with lights every twenty feet or so. Still, the darkness seemed to press in on us as the elevator shivered and groaned.

"How far down?" Natchez yelled.

"A long ways." I yelled back. "Probably the lower levels."

They all nodded.

The vibration from the grate moving down made me feel like I had to piss, the whole thing shivering so bad that it felt like my internal organs were bouncing around in there. I clamped my false teeth together to keep them from bouncing out of my mouth. The last thing I wanted was to lose my dentures and have them fall to the bottom of the shaft and shatter, leaving me to do nothing but gum my food, if I survived.

It was a small and petty worry, but it was better than dwelling on what might be waiting for us at the bottom of the shaft.

There was a horrible screeching noise, and I felt the pressure in my bad knee as the platform's breaks slowed it down.

The lights on the control panel were dark, the control runs not connected. Sure, they could have had cables draped through the shaft to keep the controls connected at all times, but those would have been subject to the possibility of failure, could have gotten caught in the gear teeth of the massive I-beams that the elevator was supported on.

Brute force all the way.

In front of us the shaft vanished suddenly in the sharp edge of a ceiling, and I breathed a sigh of relief as the platform settled into the floor of the lower bay with a loud thunk. The control panel lit up, one of the bit possible flaws in my plan, and I reached out and turned it off.

The bay we'd dropped into was virtually identical to the one we'd left, except the doors out were labelled "To Deep Storage" on them, one for vehicles, one for personnel.

"What are we going to find down here?" Wilkins' asked.

"Don't know." I reminded him. "We're looking for external access points."

"As long as it isn't something like 500 cannibals, I'm happy." Kincaid said.

"Let's go." I told them, moving over to the door and throwing the bar. The door went up nice and smooth after a few moments delay. no thumping, no clunking, no damaged sections. Either it was built better, or it had had better maintenance, or it hadn't been used as often.

On the other side of the airlock the door led directly to the tunnel that would be used to bring vehicles to Deep Storage. The tunnel was made of six inch wide strips of concrete about five feet long, with heavy bolts about every foot on the strips. Fluorescent lights hung down from the arched ceiling, with thick cabling hanging in loops from the ceiling, held every ten feet or so by big iron rings that hung from inch thick bolts. A yellow line was stenciled "EVENT STORAGE" beneath the blue line that read "DEEP STORAGE" on the wall.

"That's what we're after." I said, jerking my thumb at the "Event Storage" label. "That's where Agent Killain hid out, and I'm beginning to wonder if she was hiding there for a reason."

"What do you think might be down here?" Natchez asked.

"Backups for that level we found?" Donaldson wondered.

"Maybe." I told them. "But that's not what we're here for." I reminded them.

They were silent for awhile as we walked through the tunnel, which curved slightly back and forth.

"You know what would be cool?" Kincaid broke the silence.

"What?" Natchez asked.

"Getting a look at some of that stuff in those CIA files." Kincaid said. "Just think, unredacted files, complete and everything. How cool would that be?"

"About as cool as a bullet to the back of the head." I broke in. "You think you'd be allowed to live after going through those files."

"Killjoy." Kincaid said and I chuckled.

We finally hit an intersection, one direction heading for Deep Storage, the other heading toward the Event Storage, and a smaller corridor that led "Event Facility". We headed toward the "Event Facility", stopping about a hundred feet later at a heavy blast door that had no keypad, just the familiar throw bar. The door just had the Continuity of Government seal on it with "EVENT LOCKER 29K" under the seal.

Throwing the bar caused the door to slowly rise up with the hiss of hydraulics. Shads called out that the door didn't have any IR beams, and the first thing I noticed was that the door was at least a foot and a half thick. The hallway beyond was about 10 feet wide and had hanging standard white bulbs that hung down about a foot from the ceiling. On the walls were pictures of farms, small towns, school, with the American flag being prominent. The pictures had bloodstains underneath them, there were paint spatters and worse on the walls, and at the most only one out of five lightbulbs were working.

The stench of rotting meat rolled over us.

"Bingo." I said.

Kincaid growled, moving up next to me, and Wilkins was coughing.

"Goddamn, it stinks." Shads coughed.

"It's gonna get worse." Donaldson told them.

We moved down the corridor, only getting about ten paces before the equipment hanging on Shads LBE started beeping.

Without even conscious thought my hands moved as I stopped breathing and closed my eyes.

Left hand coming up, hooking my glasses and the string for my eyepatch, pulling them off and dropping them on the ground as my hand kept moving up and brushing off my Kevlar. Right hand letting go of my rifle before darting across my waist. Cover popping open, hand dipping inside. Left hand moving down to meet the right one as I pulled the object from the carrier. Right and left hand spread it open, bringing it up to envelope my face. Use my ring and pinky fingers to drag the harness over my head, then three quick pulls with each hand to snug it up. Both hands to the filters, press, then sharply exhale before pulling the hood over my head.

Less than 10 seconds.

"MASK! GAS GAS GAS!" I shouted, muffled by the mask. Only Shads had his almost on, the others were still either staring in shock at me, looking confuse, or fumbling at their masks. Kincaids wasn't stored properly, the hood down the back and folded. His eyes were bulging in horror as he fumbled at the mask.

I was lifting up the detector from my waist, staring down at it.

One bar was flickering slightly.

The older detector on Shads' LBE was chirping steadily.

"Piece of shit." I snarled, dropping the newer detector.

Shads had his mask on, glancing at the detector tape I'd put on everyone's wrists, but it was still the same brownish gray it had been when I'd put it on them. Donaldson was pulling his hood over, Natchez was pulling his straps tight, Wilkins was blowing the mask out, and Kincaid was still unwrapping his.

"MOPP Four." I snapped.

My hand when to my back and I pulled the bag out with my left hand. With my right I popped the plastic buckle on my LBE, shrugging out of it and letting it and my rifle drop to the floor in a clatter. I tore the packaging open, pulled out the suit, and started pulling it on. I was buttoning it up by the time Kincaid started pulling his on.

Thirty seconds.

I popped the tight plastic bands on the wet weather boots, snatching up one of them and pulling them on as quickly as possible, then buttoning them up and pulling the elastic cuffs of the pants over the tops before moving to the gloves.

I bent down and checked the detector on the back of Shads discarded LBE. It wasn't built to tell me much, but I shut it off then turned it back on.

It started giving out the alarm tone, then cut off and went back to chirping again.

"Make sure you seal up, gentlemen." I told them.

The older detector could be set off by diesel fumes, too close to the latrines, or just because it decided it wanted to scare the living shit out of everyone, but the newer one was a lot more sensitive. I'd fucked up the alarm threshhold, or it hadn't decided to cut loose with the audible tone yet.

I pulled the tape from where I'd hung it on one of my LBE straps, and wrapped it around my wrists, being careful to make sure it wasn't tight, then putting a strip on each of my thighs and finishing it up with a strip on my helmet.

By the time I'd shrugged back into my Kevlar and my LBE, leaving them loose hanging instead of tightening it up and running the risk of fucking up my chemical suit, everyone was masked and starting to pull on their gear.

"Stay here." I told them, heading further down the hallway. There was a sharp corner, ending in an airlock.

The door was starting to open.

The other alarm started letting me know that it was hitting threshhold, beeping steadily.

My balls were trying to climb up into my abdomen.

According to the newer chemical detector, there were low levels of blister agent vapor present.

shit

The door was rising slowly, and I knew that there was an invisible cloud rolling toward me as the door opened further and further.

The lights in the airlock were flickering, and I could see legs through the gap in the door.

The alarm went off, a steady tone.

I turned and ran.