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

Part 48

2/19th Special Weapons Group
Restricted Area, Western Germany
Late Winter-1988, January
Day 9 of Repairs
Day 1 of the Incident

Plywood covered the window that we had broken, just like we'd put up in every other room in the massive barracks. The heater was pinging softly, heat radiating from it to bring the room up to sweltering 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The only thing on the shelves were the AD&D books I'd bought from the PX in Frieburg and a crystal Porsche that Nagle had bought me for Christmas. There were some posters I'd pulled out of a Fangoria magazine and a cloth wall hanging of Eddie from The Trooper hanging over the desk.

It was home.

I paused at the entry of the main room, wet and dripping from a 10 minute hot shower, my new glasses feeling weird on my nose, wrapped in a towel and steaming despite the warmth of the room. I looked at my two best friends and smiled.

Bomber leaned back in the chair, tilting just to the point where gravity would snatch his ass and drop him flat on his back on the tile and holding it, lifting the bottle and drinking deeply from it. In his other hand, dropped down beside the chair with a lit cigarette in it.

Nancy was laying on the bed, her feet up on the headboard, dressed in PT shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that showed her breasts when she moved wrong. She was reading a hard core German porn mag, holding it up with one hand with the other hand tucked into the waistband of her pants.

It was a slice of normality.

"Christ, Ant, I can't believe we're stuck in here again." Nancy bitched, tilting her head back to look at me and letting the magazine fall on her chest. "Two weeks of convalescent leave and they drag us back to this shit-hole. Get him up, drag him if you have to, we aren't leaving him."

"The Army pays us to be here, not to hang out on Bomber's farm." I said, moving into the room, leaving wet footprints behind. Both of my friends snorted.

"Amen, brother." Bomber said, holding up the bottle and then taking another long swig out of it.

"Whatever." Nancy grumbled, returning her attention to the magazine. She turned the page then licked her lips, her eyes bright, as the magazine showed her a plump redhead catching semen with her tongue. "This place sucks."

I shrugged and moved over to the dresser. Bomber looked out the window as I grabbed a pair of shorts out of the dresser and a T-shirt and started to dress.

I could feel Nancy's eyes on me as I changed.

Outside the door came the crashing of boots on tile, followed by a little girl's giggle. The plywood shuddered and groaned as the wind pushed against it, but held.

We'd put insulation where the windows had been, layered plastic on both sides of the window, then put plywood on each side of the window, creating a nice little sandwich that kept out the worst of the cold. Most of the first floor windows had been replaced, as had the far side of the second floor, but we were still a day or three away from replacing my window. Twenty people sounded like a lot until you realized the full scope of the repairs we had to do. The window replacements were taking the longest, each room needing the windows fixed and the doors rehung. The windows kept out the weather, so they were first.

I liked the plywood better.

I pulled on the shorts and T-shirt, then tapped Bomber's shoulder. I motioned at the bottle when he looked up and he handed it to me. I took a long pull off the Ausbach, feeling the warmth in my stomach, then handed it back.

"The rest of the unit is pissed about all their shit getting destroyed." Bomber said when I leaned against the desk and lit a cigarette.

"Fuck 'em, they weren't here." I said, dropping the match in the empty beer can we were using for ashes and butts.

"Still, good thing we blamed it on Lewis and Jacobs." Nancy said, then gave a long sigh. "Oh, that's so good."

Bomber laughed and shook his head, and we grinned at each other.

Nancy had pretty much lost her inhibitions around us. She refused to sleep in her own room, preferring to bunk with us most of the time. It caused rumors, but the only time someone had made a snide remark about it she'd knocked out three of the dude's teeth.

Nobody had said shit else about it.

"Hear the news?" Bomber asked me. "It getting colder. We need to change the batteries in the flashlights while we have some light, before it goes out."

"The CO's going to have us sodomized in public?" I asked, hopping up on the top of the dresser and reaching for an AD&D book.

"No. They're sending up Lieutenant James to supervise us."

My hand froze less than in inch from the books.

"Yeah." Bomber said, noting my reaction. "He's promised to have the barracks livable in less than a week so the unit can move back in as soon as the snow clears enough."

Even though I'd never personally met the man, his reputation preceded him. Lieutenant James was a sadist and a control freak. His section of First Platoon lived in fear of the man, but no charges had ever stuck. He was known as Teflon-James, and there were some very unsavory rumors about the man. His section had the highest casualty rate out of the entire unit, which was saying a lot.

The most injuries. The most mental health injuries.

The most deaths.

Female soldiers refused to be in his section, either chaptering out or signing into another unit or just switching to another section.

That was fine with James, he believed that the only way women belonged in the Army was on their knees or on their backs.

Major Blanchard, a female office I knew, refused to even talk about the man. Before she had gone to Bremerhaven to supervise the unloading of a bunch of our nuke rounds, she had always said she wasn't afraid of him.

When they returned, she wouldn't even be in the same room with him, and if forced to be, positioned herself as far away from him as possible.

"Oh, shit." I said, turning away from the books. "Why?"

Bomber shrugged and took another drink off his bottle. "The CO's getting tired of the delays. He's worried that it'll look bad if we haven't gotten the barracks back up to speed by spring."

"Which CO is that?" I asked.

We'd gone through three of them since we'd been attacked by an axe-wielding maniac. We hadn't had one during those days, the new one had committed suicide, the one who replaced him had stumbled into the concertina wire surrounding the field site our unit called home, severed his femoral artery struggling, and bled out before anyone found him, and the third one had wrecked his car trying to come up to the barracks at night, in the snow. While his car had been found, he hadn't.

"Some Colonel by the name of Reed." Bomber said, shrugging.

It was an oddity about our unit. Despite being thought of as a company, apparently a 'Group' was led by a Colonel. Weirdly enough the office of 'First Sergeant' was filled by a Sergeant Major. Platoon Sergeants were either Master Sergeants or Sergeant First Class Promotable.

It could have had something to do with the fact that 2/19th had over 200 people in it.

Or it could have just been more Cold War Bullshit.

"What's he like?" I asked. Bomber had been to the field site where the unit was wintering twice, I'd stayed in the barracks working.

"He's a dick who talks about making Brigadier and how we're going to do things like the Big Red One." Bomber said, handing me the bottle so I could take another slug.