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

Part 44

Site Kilo-29
Master Military Operations Command
Winter-1993
Day Four-Morning
Roughly T Minus 4 Hours

One of the privates licked his lips and stared at Kincaid, who was standing next to me with his back to them. "You... you wouldn't dare." the private said.

"Right now, you're wondering if you can take me since I'm facing away from you." Kincaid said, still keeping pressure on the igniter. "Go ahead, try it. Let's get it over with."

"Everyone at ease that shit." Donaldson snapped. Command came easy to the boy. In the absence of an officer, of an NCO who wasn't suffering from a broken skull and half mad, he stepped up to the plate and took charge, trying to do whatever he could to get the men he felt responsible for through the situation alive.

If we survived I'd put him in for a promotion, see about getting him fast tracked through PLDC, and try to get him a decent posting. I'd probably send Kincaid with him, if he could pass the psych eval.

"Let's just do what we came to do." Donaldson said. "Kincaid, Ant, go stop this shit from happening. Michaels, Hetson, put a pressure dressing on Jacob's stomach wound. The rest of you, stand guard, we've still got the cannibals out there and I don't want any more surprises."

"Yes, Corporal." Everyone chorused, except for me. I was looking at the tiled roof, scanning over the curved steel walls of the room. There were three sets of stairs leading up, with stairs leading down, spiraled stairs that compromised the integrity of the room the least.

"Shads, come here a minute." Donaldson said. He'd let go of my arm and moved a few paces away. Kincaid glanced at me, then moved over to Donaldson while I began lurching from terminal to terminal glancing at the blurry screens. Kincaid followed me, a looming, silent presence in a bulky suit and packing a flamethrower.

A small brown hare was scratching at its ear under a chair when I walked up, and when I got about two feet from it it suddenly bolted around the terrace.

"Keep an eye on Sergeant Ant, Shads." Donaldson said. "He trusts the three of us, but I don't know how he's going to react to the new guys. He's lucid right now, or about as lucid as he's going to get, and I don't know how long we have till he drops back into a psychotic break again."

"Roger, Corporal." Shads said. "I'll just keep him on his feet, keep him moving, if he sits down, he'll probably die."

I was only half paying attention to the two men talking, noting which groups did what, and matching where they were in the circular room according to the colored pipes that stretched vertically up the far wall, appearing at the floor and disappearing at the ceiling. That would let me place where everything was.

The mental image I kept building of the room kept crumbling, I was having a hard time holding my mental layout through the weird numbing feeling I was getting. It was getting harder and harder to hold on to the thoughts I was trying to keep track of.

Normally I could keep track three or four things at once, usually holding a mental image of the layout around me. Now the image kept failing.

I figured I was tired.

"I want you to keep a close eye on him, but don't rile him up. Do you know what the hell he's talking about when he starts talking about that woman?" Donaldson asked.

"Yeah, and trust me, Corporal, you don't want to know." Shads said. "He's repressing it, and I don't fucking blame him." I was still aware of his words, but they weren't really making sense and I couldn't hold onto what they meant. They were all just disconnected individual words. I knew what each individual word meant, maybe even what they meant connected to the one before and after it, but I couldn't make sense of the sentence itself.

"From what Carter told me before he killed himself, I'm surprised Ant hasn't done the same." Shads was saying. "I'll admit, I always thought Carter was exaggerating about him, but look at him and tell me that you'd have believed he was real."

Kincaid stopped and tapped a screen, tapping a city name. "I wish, Sergeant, that this place would take a hit." He turned and looked at me through the face shield. "Those two women were right about one thing, Sergeant."

I waited, and behind me, Shads and Donaldson kept talking.

"If we get out of here, you coming with me and Kincaid?" Donaldson asked. "If Sergeant Ant's putting together a new crew, I want in on it."

"Yeah." He sounded like his sad self. "We've seen too much to go back to our old units, you know?"

"Yeah." Donaldson echoed Shads. "We'll all keep an eye out on each other, make sure that we don't turn out like Sergeant Ant."

Shads chuckled, a depressing sounding noise. In the mental map I was building he was replaced with Droopy the Dog for a moment. "What makes you think that he isn't the best his friends could keep him." He sighed. "I think if I'd been with them on that mountain, I'd have killed myself by now."

"Well, Sergeant, where do we go now?" Kincaid asked.

"Downstairs. I'm pretty sure that what we need is on the lower part of this room." I told him. He nodded behind the helmet, smiling, and we clomped over to the stairs.

"What happened to the woman he keeps referring to?" Donaldson asked.

...I brushed the snow wake from the window, smiling as the dark room was revealed. The snow tunnel we'd drug from the motorpool snaked behind me, with the rest of our tiny group behind me...

...the room was cold, but warmer than outside. The dark inside the room was much friendlier than the dark outside. The others were quietly crawling out of the tunnel and into the room through the broken window...

..."Once we open this door, we go in hard, and we kill every one of them." Stokes said. "We let Ant lead the way."...

..."Are we sure that's wise?" Carter asked...

..."You want to keep him from the guys that butchered...

The memory shattered before Nancy could say her name. I sneezed, blood and pinkish fluid coated my hand from my nose. Not thickly, just a light coating that was mostly tiny droplets.

"It's getting worse, Fifty, you need to hurry." Nagle said, leaning against the wall my the stairs we were heading for.

"Is there anything that might give me a chance?" I asked her. "I don't care about going down, I've had a good run, and we all knew that sooner or later I was going to die doing something stupid."

Nancy bit her lip as we approached, her eyes going distant, when we were about ten paces away, she snapped out of it, looking at me. "There's something that might give you chance, but it has a chance to kill you quicker."

"What is it? It might be worth the risk." I told her. "I just need to stay on my feet long enough to finish the mission. Stop the launches, check what kind of disease it is, and make sure everyone's in quarantine. If it'll give me a couple days, it might be worth it."

Kincaid had stopped at the same time I did, looking back and forth between where Nagle was standing and me.

Nagle sighed, reaching up to rub her eyes briefly. She looked exhausted. "Get a surgical drill, see if the trauma ward has the right kind of bit, and do a trepanning on you."

"Drill a fucking hole in my head? Are you fucking crazy?" I asked her. "I'm not walking around with a goddamn hole in my head!"

She glared at me, and I stopped talking. "There's two things that might save your life. Have one of these idiots cut a hole in your head with a drill, or have one of them slice open your scalp over the fracture you more than likely have, remove any bone fragments, and drill the hole through the fracture to directly relieve the blood pooling under the fracture." She said.

"There's no fucking way I'm trusting any of these guys to lay me down and slice open my head to fuck with my skull." I told her. "Just forget it. Isn't there anything else? My only choices are let them slice open my scalp and pick out any bone fragments, drill a hole through the fracture, or fucking die? There's got to be something else."

"No, Ant, there isn't. Other than those options, it's all up to you." She told me.

"So this time I'm on my own? It's all up to me and Martin?" I squeezed Martin and he ooked softly, stroking my arm.

"No, Ant, it isn't. Think about it." She laughed.

Kincaid stepped over to me, setting his hand on my shoulder and squeezing gently. He didn't know how bad it hurt when he did so, the way something shifted in the socket hurt.

"Sergeant, I know you're old crew isn't here with us." Kincaid said gently. "Look at it like this, Sergeant, your old crew was Cold War, we're not. The Cold War is over, so maybe it's time for a new crew."

I stared at him for a moment, wanting to yell at him that it didn't matter that the Cold War was over, nothing had changed, but I stopped.

He was right. Nancy and Bomber were running their own crews, Taggart had reclassified as an analyst. Heather was into her own thing, spending about half of her time in a unit that despised her, the rest of the time 'tasked' or training. Nagle had hooked her up with people to get her the training she needed.

I needed to build a new crew. Bomber, Nagle, Taggart and I would never run together again, not like we used to. The last time we'd worked together, they'd been in charge of their own teams, and the OIC had put me in charge of team coordination, and that was about as close as it had come after 2/19th had shut down.

It was time to build a new crew.

"You realize, K-Bar, what you are getting into?" I asked him.

"No, I don't." Kincaid said. He stepped slightly closer and lowered his voice. "I know what I might have to do. I've come to realize what makes someone like you." He grinned inside the suit. "At first I couldn't understand you, I figured you were one of those hooah assholes that belonged in the past, didn't belong in the Army and was everything that was wrong with it. Then you threatened me, and I hated you." The grin grew broader. "Then I realized that you're probably a decent guy outside of the mission. I wanted to beat some sense into Wilkins, then I wanted to flat out shoot him. We didn't have time to hold his hand, I suddenly understood all of it."

He clicked the igniter.

"I'm a good soldier, Sergeant. I'm not worth a shit beyond being a soldier." He shrugged. "Dee's my only friend, Sergeant, and the Army is the only family I really have." We clomped down the steps, my boots ringing on the steel, the armored and swaddled feet of Kincaid's suit thumping. "I know now what made you the way you are."

We stepped on one of the diamond steel plates and the lights kicked on, revealing huge servers with quietly blinking lights. The old tape reels were still sitting there, with their standby lights on, but in the middle of the room were over two dozen huge computer banks. One of lights exploded over the banks, showering them in shattered glass and sparks.

"That's starting to feel comforting." Kincaid chuckled as we kept moving down the spiral steps. "If we get through this, if you put together a team, I want in on it."

We paused for a second on the bottom of the stairs, and Kincaid kept talking. "This is both the coolest and the most important thing I've ever been involved with. The thought that they built this using 1950's technology amazes me." We headed toward the row of terminals on the left side of the group of servers. "The little things, light the lights, might fail, but the place is fucking impressive."

I grunted, pulling the chair out on the first terminal and sitting down. My head swum and I almost fell out of the chair, almost dropping Martin, but Kincaid steadied me. I set Martin on my lap so he could watch me work while Kincaid kept talking.

"The massive amount of effort put into this place gets to me. I usually look at shit that was built or happened before I was born with scorn. You know, they couldn't have built anything as cool as we do, they were barely better than medieval, we're so much better." He took a deep breath and sighed. "Then I realized that not only had men built this with technology from the 1950's, using dynamite and jackhammers, that the minds behind the atomic bomb and so much else had figured out how to do all this, how not only to create it, but do it entirely in secret."

It took a little while for the computer to start getting me information. It was updated hardware, but the back pages of my little green notebook had all the instructions I needed because the software was pretty much the same. While I called up what processes this server was performing, Kincaid still kept talking, more to himself than me, I guessed.

"Just this is amazing enough." He said, then chuckled again. "The thought that there are more, like dozens from what you said, scattered all over the U.S., all built in secret just boggles my mind." He paused for a moment. "It doesn't matter, if you're putting together a new crew, I want in."

I stopped what I was doing at that, swiveling in the chair and looking at him. "You realize, Kincaid, that it's only going to end one of two ways if everyone is infected." I told him. "We're going to have scorch and burn this place, and then the last person will either have to die in the implosion, or will be forced to kill themselves. Can you live with that?"

He stared at me, new lines carved into his face by the knowledge making him look a hell of a lot older than the twenty odd years he was. "Yeah, I can. Suicide isn't something I'm too interested in, but if that's the way it has to be, then that's what we've got to do."

The computer beeped and I held up my hand for Kincaid to pause. I hit the server with a couple requests and then turned back to Kincaid, staring at him for a long time.

"I'll make it quick. I've done a lot of bad shit, but I won't condemn your everlasting soul to Hell." I told him. He grinned and nodded. "Pistol or knife?"

He thought for a second. "Don't care, as long as you don't try to do me with a rifle."

We both laughed at that as Donaldson came down the stairs, and the computer beeped at me, demanding my attention.

I had bypassed the main servers and logic crunching systems, looking for any connections to secondary systems. The connections to the main system had closed sometime between the shootout with the agents and when I'd done what I'd done. I could see where the computers were dumping file backups, and the system even tossed me the room identifier codes.

"What are we talking about?" Donaldson asked.

"I'm trying to convince Sergeant Ant to put together a new squad if we get out of here alive." Kincaid said honestly. "You want in too, Dee?"

"Hand me the maps, will you?" I asked. Donaldson handed me the thick leather folder of them, and I pulled them out, paging through the corners until I found the page where the map key had the map section identifiers that matched the header of the location where the dump was taking place.

Donaldson was quiet a moment, then answered. "Might as well. What am I gonna do, go back to a normal Engineer unit after this shit? Who the hell am I gonna talk to? Who the fuck is going to understand why I sleep with the lights on and won't go outside when it starts fucking snowing?"

"How about Shads?" Kincaid asked.

"Fine with me, but that one's up to the Sergeant. How do you feel about him?" Donaldson asked.

According to the map, the backups were on a level below this one, only connected to the section we were in. Better yet, the system I was sitting in front of had connected to the backup for this system, and someone had left it with the security holes that the Air Force Tech had shown me. A few quick keystrokes and the file I wanted was opening in local editing mode, which meant that I could access the file without it making a backup copy to check for changes thanks to the trick the Air Force Tech had written down for me.

"Pretty good. He keeps his cool, but there's something about him, man." Kincaid said. I could feel him glance at me. "Plus, sounds like he knows more than Sergeant Ant wants him to."