GrafenwöhrUS Army Training Area
Training Site 22
2/19th Company Area
West Germany
29 October, 1987
2145 Hours

A quick check in with Range Control out in Wildflicken told me that nobody had tried to contact us through that messed up band. Another call to the Pentagon told me that nobody had cracked the War-Fighter Tunnels again, even though someone was trying different codes to get in. My contact at the Pentagon told me that they had rescinded all the external codes, so anyone with a code brick wasn't getting in.

I also called Blackbriar and let them know just how completely they had failed by sending that incompetent cooze out to my AO with a head full of stupidity and an ego driven desire to give orders her brain wasn't sufficiently evolved to handle.

The map still hadn't changed. Whatever Stillwater was doing, he was doing it without oversight, and that fact made my balls shrivel up and try to climb up into my guts. He was bad enough, and barely tolerable, when he had clear cut orders out at that shit-hole site of his, surrounded by that pack of dick sucking morons. The Ranger's mission control had taken one look at the weather report, another look from halfway up the mountain, one last look at the weather report, and called the mission off. Saving his men's life, yeah, but leaving Stillwater without backup. There were no air assets, and no sats in position to get a look at what he was doing. He was running without commo, and I had no data on what he was facing.

Which meant he was on his own.

One of the hammerhead retards from Motorpool poked his head into the tent, fresh snow on his helmet, "Sir, Major Dryer and Lieutenant Colonel Harmon are here to see you."

Oh fucking joy, Humping Harmon and  Dryer the Kid Diddler, what a great top-off to this cluster fucker, I thought to myself, but waved at the private anyway.

The two men came into my tent. Both of them slim, and to my eyes, weaklings. Dryer was a chinless wonder with a face like a child molester, a perfect fit from what my contacts told me. Harmon was little better. He looked fine at first glance, but the petulant crybaby look of someone who was denied things he wanted out of life hid beneath that wad of playdough flesh he called a face.

They both stopped in front of the table I was sitting at, with the schematics of the Group Area in front of me. That Texas retard was on his was from that shit-hole Atlas, and I knew that he and that goddamn idiot Nagle knew the Group Area better than they had any right too. Bomber would probably show up first, driving like a bat out of hell from that shit-hole Stillwater had left him in charge of, but goddamn Nagle.

Christ, I should have but the kibosh on that stupid fucking teenage romance as soon as I found out about it. She was fucking 27 and fucking a 17 year old rock headed retard from backwoods Washington, and worse yet he was her direct superior.

But no, I figured that maybe it would temper that goddamn killer I could see lurking behind his eyes that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time I looked in his eyes.

I'd seen that before. In Vietnam, when I'd been drafted when I'd only been a year older than him, in 1966. Men who were good at killing, who deep down enjoyed the carnage of combat. Some had retained their humanity.

Many didn't.

I'd hoped that his little puppy-love affair with Nagle would stabilize him, but then she had to run off and marry some fucking REMF shitbag out of 11th ACR while he off facing off against whatever had happened on that god-forsaken island. From what little birdies and my snitch had told me, she was careless and self centered as all hell, constantly gushing over her new husband and how great he was.

I should have put a stop to their...

"Chief Henley," Dryer said, and I had to resist an urge to pull out my pistol and shoot him in his child-fucking face. I made a mental note to make sure that one of the rabid animals under my control found out about his sexual predilections and then got a few moments alone with him where there were no cameras or witnesses. I knew one of them would beat him to death and the world would be a safer place for all those little girls he'd never touch.

"What?" I asked him. I didn't bother to waste words on people who used their rank to cover up the fact that they deserved to be hung by the neck and then fed to wild dogs. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet.

"In this man's Army, men usually stand and salute superior officers," Dryer said.

"Tell me when someone superior to me comes in, child fucker," I snapped, still looking at the map. Cromwell had told me where that pack of lunatics had hidden supply caches, and from what I'd been able to tell Stillwater had hit one up for the supplies he'd need for protracted guerrilla warfare.

They both looked angry, but neither one said anything.

Good, they'd actually bothered to read the unit commander files on the soldiers in this god forsaken rat fuck the military had jammed together on the advice of brain dead retards.

"What are you doing?" Harmon asked. The disgusting little rodent was in charge of the little creepy cabal of unhung serial killers and brain dead sociopaths everyone called Kill Shop instead of the self aggrandizing Planning and Strategy Section.

"I'm cranking my fucking cock to inter-racial nigger versus wop chicks with dicks porn. Why, what does it fucking look like to two of the dumbest fucking officers to ever fellatio their way through that gaggle of fuckups everyone calls West Point," I snapped.

Harmon colored, being a mulatto or quadroon or whatever the fuck they were calling themselves nowadays. Personally, I had no use for someone who excused every single bad officer evaluation report with "they're just racist against black men trying rise above their place" like I'd seen in his file when I'd picked the lock on the CO's safe. I looked up from my map. "Since you two seem to be making it your business to check up on people actually doing work instead of bothering the box-heads about the trucks of ammo they got stuck in the mud, I'm trying to make sure my only mobile assets survives the night," I told them.

"Don't call me a..." Harmon started.

"Then don't act like a nigger that found a white-man's uniform hanging on a clothes line and decided to steal it and try it on to avoid a parole board," I told him.

There was jack and shit he could say to me, and he knew it.

My father was so black that if he was sleeping in the front room I wouldn't see him when I came sneaking back into the tar-paper house in Louisiana I'd grown up in. When he'd had a heart attack out in the field chopping cotton, my hard luck haggis  cooking mother was already dead from a cough that had gone around, so I'd been relieved to find my draft notice in the mailbox when I got back from burying him. I'd burned down that tar-paper shack as a fuck you to the field foreman and the rich bastard who took half my father's crops every year and never looked back, preferring the swamps and jungles of Vietnam. It hadn't even bothered me to gun down gooks in their rice fields. I was doing them a fucking favor before they ended up like my old man, dying with a cotton chopper in his hand, or my mother, coughing blood into a handkerchief in the kitchen because he lungs couldn't handle the mugginess.

His little rich-boy Hamptons ass couldn't say shit and he knew it, and I gave him a grin to let him know that I knew it too.

Besides, there was another reason neither one of them would have the guts to say jack and shit to me, but from the sound of it, they didn't know it.

"Do you two baldy chasing queers have something you want to fucking say to me, or can I get back to work?" I asked them.

Throwing it in their face was making them mad, but I couldn't give a shit less.

Stillwater's buttstroke to the side of my head a few years back had snapped me out of my nervous breakdown and reminded me just how things ran in this man's Army.

"The Blackbriar representative asked us to encourage you to..."

"Tell that carpet chewing Blackbriar dyke to come here and say her shit to my face, not jam her hand up your gaped open assholes and use you like two moronic muppets made out of dog cum and old menstrual pads," I told them coldly.

God, I hated them.

Every goddamn human being on Earth.

"Look, Henley, just because you fucked up and left a bunch of nukes at the Group Area, don't think you can just..." Harmon started.

That got my blood pressure up. I knew my face was going a purplish color and my ears burned hot as I stared at them, slapping my wallet on the table. It was still closed, but oh how I wanted to open it.

"Whoever left it behind signed for it and failed to alert either QASI or myself, and when I get a look at the shipment receipts I'm going to know who did it," I growled, "And when I find out, I'm going to send them out to Atlas to personally explain to that band of thugs why the ammunition they worked tirelessly to prepare for shipment might have gotten their squad leader killed."

That made both of them step back. Harmon's eyes flickered toward Dryer and I had to resist and urge to pull out my service pistol and shoot them both in the stomach.

The rage poured acid into my guts and I could feel it eating my stomach lining.

"Someone signed for those nukes. The paperwork was not delivered to me, QASI, S-2, or anyone else, which means," I stared at them both, "That I can make a goddamn good case, according to the UCMJ and national security, for some serious charges," I tilted my head slightly to make my point, "The kind of charges they hang a motherfucker for."

Harmon opened his mouth, probably to say something stupid, when the tent flaps were pushed apart and a big meatwad of Texas stupidity pushed his way into the tent.

"You needed me, Chief Warrant Officer Henley?" Bomber's accent was thick, and I knew that meant he was angry, confused, or horny. More than likely some weird Texas combination of all three.

Both men turned around to say something till they got a good look at the younger man. He was six foot two of powerfully built Texan, snow dusted all over his uniform, and an M-3 grease gun held tight in his fist. His M-16 was slung across his back, and NVG's were clipped in stowage mode onto his Kevlar.

"Excuse me, Specialist," Dryer said.

"It's about goddamn time you showed up, you walking cattle abortion," I snapped, pointing at the chair beside me. "Sit your stupid ass down and help me try to figure out a way to get that rabid chimpanzee you call a squad leader out his latest goddamn jam."

"My boy's in trouble?" Bomber asked, moving around the two men.

"EXCUSE ME, SPECIALIST!" Harmon yelled.

"Want me to throw these two assholes out, Chief?" Bomber asked. I doubted he recognized either of them, with as little time as he had spent at the unit since spring. Sure, they'd come back for weekends, but that didn't mean he knew who either of the two retarded gibbons standing in front of my table were.

"Got something more important for you," I told him, unbuttoning my top pocket. Both of the officers were making choking noises, their rage actually keeping them from saying anything as I tossed the rank in front of the big Texas lunkhead.

"Put that shit on. I don't want any questions about the chain of command out at that rotting turd in Satan's asshole that you call Atlas," I told him.

Bomber looked startled but picked up the Corporal rank anyway.

The Colonel's face flushed, but I didn't give a shit. "Chief Warrant Officer Henley, who authorized you to," he started to say.

"Get the fuck out, I'm too busy to deal with you two retards," I said, reaching out and grabbing my wallet with two fingers, opening it but not showing what was inside.

"You better make time," Dryer said. He started to lean forward and I knew he was about to do something stupid that would result in the big cow punching idiot next to me doing something typically stupid.

His attitude suddenly changed when I slapped my open wallet on the table. Both men looked at the wallet, and Bomber gave a low whistle when he saw what was inside of it.

The Medal of Honor pinned inside of it gleamed in the light.

"Now shut the fuck up, both of you," I told them as they both came to attention and saluted me. "I can't believe you made me show that to you in front of this brain damaged Texas retard, you pair of child molesting degenerates. Now get the fuck out of my command center."

They got.

Bomber at least had the sense not to ask questions as I put the medal Lydon B. Johnson had pinned on my Dress Blues away.