Isolation & Fear (Damned of the 2/19th Book Seven)

Dead Eyes

War Fighter Tunnels
Secure Area
Alfenwehr, Western Germany
06 January, 1988
1930 Hours

All the tunnels would need to be checked. I'd already checked the Dispensary one, and thinking about that tunnel made my hands shake. That left the barracks, motor pool, chow hall, and the emergency egress point tunnels. Four tunnels, all four flashing error codes on the terminals in the egg. Motor pool was showing radiation and fire, which had made me worried that Stillwater had fired off a nuclear weapon, but the chow hall was reading chemical danger readings, which pushed that to the side. Either Stillwater had popped a nuke over by the motor pool and then used chemical weapons on the chow hall. The barracks were still saying sealed, although there had been a chemical weapon and a thermal bloom detected, but sensors were now reporting all clear. That reading I believed, and I figured Stillwater had brewed up something really nasty to clear out the barracks and then finished up with a flamethrower.

It was something he'd do. I'd see him do it before.

I took another drink, shoving the whiskey back into my pocket, and headed toward the chow hall tunnel. I'd need to check it, check the door seals. I had chemical detection strips and the smaller, less precise gear in my pocket, including my handy-dandy radiation detector that I'd become so familiar with out at Atlas.

The lights buzzed above me and my boots thudded against the steel floor as I kept walked further and further down the hallway. The barracks and the motor pool were across the street from one another, so their tunnels were only a few hundred feet deep. The chow hall was a half mile from the barracks, so the tunnel ran almost a half mile. The dispensary was nearly a mile of tunnel. The egress was two miles, cutting through the mountain, to let out at the egress point, which was three miles by road to main post, dropping nearly a two-thousand vertical feet. The tunnel itself was forced to drop nearly another two thousand feet. The egress was designed to drop the person down below the narrow band of "potentially lethal oxygen levels/atmospheric pressure" zone that wobbled across our secure area. Plus,  to knock that tunnel out, they'd have to use a separate nuclear hit, which would boost the entire post to requiring four, and you couldn't use a MiRV since our post was on the opposite side of the mountain from main post, the tunnel was on the other quadrant.

Christ, this place was terrible.

I was thinking to myself, trying to distract myself from the fact it was getting colder and colder. My breath was steaming out in front of me and the frost was starting to show on the walls. The tunnels were inverted-U shape on the other side of the metal plates that made up the walls, floor, and ceiling. In between the plates and the living stone of the mountain were shock dampeners, heavy springs and in some cases hydraulic shock absorbers. The stone was often reinforced with metal strips about six inches wide, two inches thick, affixed with 24-36 inch long one inch thick rods. The plates were standard eight by ten squares, two inches thick.

Where the plates met, frost was spreading, more and more of the plate toward the end of the tunnel was covered by frost.

It was subtle, but noticeable. I was trying to distract myself as the frost slowly but surely coated more and more of each successive plate I passed by. Thinking about how the tunnel was constructed, how it was designed to sustain a direct nuclear ground/near earth hit, how the kinks and leveling helped the defenders hold off attackers.

I shuddered when I passed by a set of plates that had frozen pink frost tendrils with bare steel between the tendrils.

This was going to be ugly.

When I went through the S-Curve I could smell it. The faint taste of cordite, the bitter tang of CS gas, the bite of white phosphorus melted steel, and the stomach turning wiff of rotted blood.