Cold Hatred (Book 2 & 3 of the Damned of the 2/19th) -Updated and Rewritten

Snake Schooling

"I was just over 18 when I arrived at Alfenwehr. I looked

young, and was as bright as a new penny.

Alfenwehr tainted me, tarnished me, and left

me an old man within a year. I was lucky; I survived."

108th Military Intelligence HQ Building

Wildflicken, West Germany

0930 Hours 12 July, 1985

The room was mostly dark in front of me as I stepped up to the lectern and set down my note cards. In the shadowed chairs in front of me were a few dozen men, all in BDU's, with two men with the bearing of military men in charge standing at parade rest at the back of the room. I picked up the remote to the slide projector and thumbed it to life, putting the ChemCorps logo on the screen to the right of me, on their left.

"Good day," I started. "I am Mr. Anthony, and I'll be your instructor." I paused, but dead silence greeted me. I was wearing just BDU's with US ARMY over my heart - no rank, no unit patches, no name, just the US Army strip and nothing else to distinguish me from tens of thousands of soldiers in EUSERA. The same reason I was using my first name instead of Stillwater, my last name. Same reason I was standing in front of a completely silent "class" with lights shining on me to keep me from seeing those seated.

No biggee. This wasn't a normal class. I'd been grabbed from my unit and sent to the Top of the Rock to instruct "assets" in the realities of certain chemical weapons and chemical weapon production facilities, something that was kind of my specialty.

Not everyone in NBC Warfare had a specialty, but I'd found a certain skill and talent for chemical weapons and learned everything I could about them, even crossing services and nationality lines. I knew about Navy and Air Force weapons, NATO weapons, Warsaw Pact weapons, and even the individual nations' weapons. I could tell you the difference between French and British VX depending on manufacturing site, and could even recognize where they had been manufactured based on a quick examination of the round.

And now I was passing on my information to a group of snake eating head-stompers I wasn't supposed to get a good look at. Months of in-depth and hands on study. In three hours.

In other words: More Cold War Bullshit.

"I will be instructing you on a chemical weapons production facility in Czechoslovakia and its personnel, as well as the kind of weaponry they produce at that facility," I told them. "You will want to take notes, as this is a lot of information that was not available in the recent synopsis and précis of the site. If there are any questions, please raise your hands."

More silence.

Fuck 'em. Stupid, snake-eating bastards.

I launched into my lecture, showing slides of the facility, the rounds, key Soviet personnel, everything anyone would want to know about the site and then some. I was giving them everything they would need to know about the chemicals produced there, what kinds of hazards they could face, and how to identify key components as well as precursor chemicals and the finished product. I hadn't been asked to put together my views on the site itself, or give an analysis on the site itself, and I knew that normally it would be covered by their other briefings.

But nobody had asked me shit, and I'd been spent over a month working with Kill Shop and the MI dwonks doing analysis of the site since we'd spotted it. Hell, I'd seen reports on it that had never left the MI unit or the intel gathering teams.