Abandoned Airfield
Old 2/19th SWG Secure Area
Task Force 38 Intelligence Area
Secure Area
Alfenwehr, Germany
24 November, 2004
0340 Hours

I leaned against the cinderblock wall, feeling the pain of the broken rib flare up. My side hurt something terrible, but I was doing a damn site better than Lanks and John, both dead back at the vehicle junk yard.

Goddamn you, John Bomber, for leaving me alone when I need you the most.

"We're gonna wait right here for the signal," I told the others, checking my watch. It should be evident any moment that the signal had gone off.

"You're sure about being able to see it?" Captain Blake asked, and I could tell by his eyes that he was frowning behind his cold weather mask.

"They'll be able to see it in Fulda," I told them.

Nancy moved over next to me. "About Johnny," She started.

"Caught a burst on the left side, some went under the vest," I told her, "He was stumbling, leaned forward, when the burst caught him." I shook my head, "I should have had us hold position, not led a rout like that."

She shook her head, "We'd be dead. They were throwing grenades at the end. Panic throws."

The was a low rumbling feeling and snow and icicles fell from the edge of the roof and I saw the tree limbs shake. Two more followed, then a loud crack that made the trees sway as a bright flash lit up the night from the direction of the barracks. A mushroom like cloud rose up from where the barracks had been. Two more rose up, the light of the fire lighting up the explosion, from where the chow hall and the dispensary had been. Another rose up from the motor pool, and a last from the barracks area again as the last of the fuel-air explosives went off.

"Jesus," Captain Blake breathed, staring.

"Doesn't care about this place." I finished for him.

"No going back now," Gunny Beakman said, shaking his head.

There were two secondary explosions, both of them making the ground rumble, as the last fuel-air bombs went off. It had been easy peasy to rearm them and put them back on timers. The explosions lit up the foggy night, the cloud vapor scattering the light and dispersing it. There was a long, shuddering groan, then loud cracks, and we all felt the wall of ice that had calved from the glacier drop onto the airfield, burying it under God only knew how much ice.

I wondered if the three man team responsible for turning them on had gotten away clean or were dead. They would have had to have gone out into the snow and fallen back to Rally Point Foxtrot. Their chances were about as good as any of us for getting out alive, but there wasn't any thing more I could do when it came to that team.

"That's going to cause some panic," Westlin smiled from where she was leaning against the wall next to me. She had her Kevlar vest open, and blood was steadily pulsing from the bullet hole in her abdomen that her torn open shirts revealed. I looked at her and she shook her head. "Nope, they can't see me, Ant, so you might wanna keep quiet."

"This isn't how we planned this," Captain Blake said, shaking his head.

There was a slight shimmer in the air, and I held my breath right before my ears popped as the air pressure plummeted. The clouds seemed to thicken, rush back into the area after the shockwave of the explosions had pushed them back.

Nearly 60 kilotons of explosive weight all together had gone off. all of it subterranian, but still large enough to cause shockwaves all over the mountain. There would be avalanches on the ski resort side and the snowpack would be terribly unstable.

There was only a handful of us left now. Hernandez, Nagle, Stokes, Beakman, Blake, and me. I was wounded, and I suspected that Blake was wounded too just not saying anything about it. We were up against God only knew how many more Red River mercs.

I knew there was three access points blown into the walls of the command and control building, one of them I'd blown open myself. There were also the normal entrances. We needed to get inside, wreck the place up, and kill everyone inside the building.

Agent Taylor was in there, and he was my main goal.

I planned on cutting the life out of him nice and slow.

...TELL ME HOW TO BRING MY COUSIN BACK TO LIFE...

We drew closer to the sound of diesel generators, which answered where they were getting their power from. Captain Blake made the signal and we all stood up, staying in the shadows as we moved along the wall, keeping close and under the eave. Snow had dropped off the eave, making a berm nearly five feet high, even though there was only about eight inches of snow under the eave. Our boots made that weird soft crunch with the slight squeak in it as we walked. We moved along the wall, heading for the hole blown into the wall by the RPG. Visibility was dropping fast, almost as if the FAE's had blown a hole in the weather and now fog and clouds were pouring in around us.

Blake made a hand motion for us to stop and get low after a moment. We were only about ten paces from the room where we'd all holed up before the "Russian" attack. He peeked around again, then motioned that there were two people outside. He dropped back and let Gunny Beakman hold point as he dropped back to talk to me.

"Two guards on the hole in the wall. Any ideas?" He asked.

"They know we're here, we might as well go in hard," I told him. "Frag em, then move in hard and fast, use shock and awe as we push in."

He nodded.

I knew that none of were going to come out of it alive.

"Looks like the generators are in the room, there's fuel cans outside in the snow," Blake said.

I shook my head. It got old enough on Alfenwehr to hit diesel's 'gel point' where it couldn't be pumped through lines by gravity or fuel pumps. Putting the cans in the snow was stupid as shit. Even regular mogas could hit it's gel point if it got bad enough.

"We're going to frag them, then go in hard. I want you to go in the lead," Blake told me, then moved along our short line to let everyone know as I moved up to the corner.

When I peeked around the corner I saw what he meant. The fuel drums were clustered together, two of them with hand pumps that I knew would be completely useless. Even with addatives the diesel would be waxing and there would be heavy thickening in mogas. There were even staked gas cans, the 5 gallon heavy steel military ones.

"We can toss a frag, it won't blow the drums," Beakman said. I nodded, "But I don't think they're paying too much attention."

"We go in hard, we blow the drums after we've been inside, to pull them all to the side and cause confusion," Blake said, moving up next to us.

"We can, or we can ignore it and move in as silently as possible," I hefted my rifle, putting emphasis on my bayonet, "Give us as long as possible before they know it's gone hot."

Blake nodded. "Take point."

I body slung my rifle, drawing my knife, and moving up on them slowly. The two faint shapes began to firm up, Two men, one leaning against the wall, the other shivering and standing up, slapping his upper arms to help improve circulation. Neither of them had their weapons ready for combat.

"Pullman's team thinks we've got them all," One of the two men was saying, turning to someone inside the building.

"They haven't found that one eyed fucker yet," Someone from in the building said, "Special Agent Taylor wants him bad."

"Man, fuck that guy. I'm Red River, why the fuck do I have to act like I'm still in the Army and do what some CIA asshole says?" Someone else asked.

That made three. I doubled the number in my head, just in case.

"Those assholes blew up every fucking building but this one," A fourth said, "You guys make sure nobody fucks with that fuel, it's all we've got until we can get a chopper up here to evac us out."

"Taylor's sure they have a hiding place, because blowing those buildings would be a death sentence otherwise," The first one said. "This is the only intact building on this whole side of the mountain."

"Dubious said that the entire barracks collapsed into a hole," The third stated.

I was closer, close enough I could tell that the one shivering had turned to look into the building.

"I wanna know where the fuck they got their hands on that kind of explosive," The one I was creeping up on said. "They must have used like a hundred pounds of Semtex to create that kind of explosion."

Actually, I could pretty much do it with a 50 gallon drum of gasoline and some shit I could buy from a wrecking yard. It might take me a day or two to machine it and mix it, but once you knew the basic theory and the mechanisms, it was frightening easy to manufacture a field expedient fuel air explosive, and if you wanted to be a real dick, you could even add a napalm 'halo' to the whole mix.

"We just have to hold out until they get Chinooks up here to pull us out," One of them were saying. "Red River's not going to leave us up here."

Fuck it. Go time.

Everything slowed down and expanded as I reached forward, grabbing the guy in front of me and yanking him backwards, stabbing him four times in the kidneys before throwing him to the side. The pain was so intense he couldn't even scream at first as I moved in on the second guy, his lack of armor proving a fatal mistake as I grabbed him, pulled him forward on to the knife and stabbed him as fast  as I could piston my arm four times into the bottom of his rib cage.

The three guys inside the room, lit perfectly by the lights even if they were blurred slightly by the heavy fog, were all either frozen in shock or moving so slowly to my senses they might as well have been still.

Even I seemed slowed down as I pivoted, stepping forward, grabbing the next guy and stabbing him as fast as I could all down his right side. One was lunging for his weapon, where he had left it on top of the heavy 5KW generator. The other wasn't bothering going for a weapon, instead starting to move in on me, and I knew he was planning on his combatives training to take me down.

The kick he threw ended up just resulting in me holding his leg tight and stabbing him three times along the inside of his thigh and once deep into his groin. I let go, letting him fall, kneed him in the chin hard enough to send him sprawling onto his back, and moved in on the one going for his rifle.

His hands closed on it and he turned toward me, trying to lift it up to bring it into play to shoot me in the face, but it was too late. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he thought he had won, that he had been fast enough to get a hold on his weapon and put me down.

Right up until I stabbed him in the hollow of his throat and yanked the blade out, stepping back and relaxing, watching him fall to his knees with his hands around his throat, trying to stop the bleeding, shaking his head in denial. I moved over to the one that was holding onto his leg.

The rest of the group moved into the room, Captain Blake shaking his head at the dead men.

"Jesus, Stillwater," Hernandez said as I grabbed the guy's head, pulled it to the side, and slit his throat.

"What?" I asked, pushing the guy face forward.

"Don't even bother," Stokes said, moving in. She started gathering up weapons as Nancy began shutting down the fuel lines on the generators. After each one Gunny Beakman cut away the wires to keep them from being easily repaired. "He wouldn't understand even if you tried to explain it to him."

"Still, Jesus," Hernandez said, then began helping Stokes pull the ammunition out of their pouches.

I started running wire from behind the breaker boxes built into the heavy 5KW generators and out to the makeshift fuel dump. Whoever had dropped the drums of fuel out there had been an idiot. No berm, six to nine barrels in clumps, each clump not even a double arm interval from one another. I began laying down Claymores as well as C-4, working quickly in the cold. Burying the charges and mines under the snow.

"They'll be coming as soon as the power is out," Beackman said. He tucked the wires under the front panel that Blake had opened, then carefully wedged a grenade behind the panel, pulling the pin once the panel was set back in the place.

When I finished I moved back to the others, who had dragged the bodies off into the snow and buried them, hiding the evidence we'd even been there. They had even kicked snow in to hide the frozen patches of blood. Nancy laid a single M-4 in the middle of the room after Stokes broke it over her knee, and everyone pulled back as Captain Blake waited for everyone.

He hit the power on the generator and cut the wires, stuffing them up behind the control panel and under the grenade. I attached the wire quickly.

The light went off in the room as the final generator cut out.

"Move out," Blake said, and led us back into the wind, the dark, the cold, and the snow.

It felt odd to take point without John at my back.

Goddamn you, John Bomber, for leaving me alone.